Five years ago today we fought to liberate Portland from a mass of fascists who had converged from throughout the nation to occupy the city; a force which included organized deniable assets of white supremacist terror like the Proud Boys who are a terror bro group of white male grievance, the Oathkeepers who are an organization of fascist infiltration and subversion agents of highly trained professionals within or allied with police forces and other military and security services, the Gideonite theocratic-fundamentalist Christian Identity cult Patriot Prayer, lunatic QAnon cult adherents, and others which may have included Homeland Security agents in operational command, for several hours throughout the day in front of the courthouse and police station, the Multnomah County Justice Center.
Every time the Fourth Reich and its agents within the Trump regime tried to seize and occupy our cities, we took them back. The people were victorious in this long and terrible struggle for liberty throughout 2020’s Summer of Fire, which played out in over fifty American cities during sustained Black Lives Matter protests, the founding of Autonomous Zones, and direct actions between Antifa and those who would enslave us, a struggle marked by brutal repression of dissent by police including random shootings of Black citizens and other hate crimes, a Homeland Security campaign of provocation using undercover police officers and their deniable assets among white supremacist terrorists to disrupt and delegitimize the protests for racial justice through arson, looting, and violence, and the random abduction and torture of protestors by Homeland Security in attempts at provocation to capture the narrative and manufacture a pretext for the federal occupation of democratic led cities under martial law.
Portland was the principal theatre of war between the people of America and a fascist cabal which had seized our government, but it was a struggle waged throughout our nation to define ourselves and choose between futures of liberty or tyranny; a struggle for the soul of America and the freedom of the world.
In this the Fourth Reich failed, but we came very near to the Fall of America as a free society of equals, and to fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of August 22 2020, Spectacle and Theatre in Portland: Police Sanction Street Fighting Between Fascists and Antifascists; A staged confrontation was enacted today in Portland as spectacle and guerilla theatre when fascists and antifascists, several hundred to each side, fought in the streets for several hours as the police handled the betting of the onlookers, having beforehand declared presence at the event to constitute consent to mutual fight. In Vegas this is the legal form signed by boxers; I now envision a televised series of sporting events wherein gladiatorial combat and duels of vendetta may be displayed. Just imagine the prize purses for the victorious survivors.
How thrilling it was for the citizens of Portland to observe Spartacus command a shield wall against the howling barbarians of the white supremacist terrorists and police collaborators and drive them from our streets like a pack of mad dogs. As in the arena of the Roman Empire, the restoration of balance which occurs when the people witness the triumph of good over evil serves to unite us against threatening others, authorize and reenforce versions of history and identity, and to affirm and elevate the virtue of our community, or so the apologists of imperialism once argued.
Such partisan conflict has a long and interesting history which is recapitulated in the protests for equality and racial justice which have engulfed every major city in America and many foreign ones now for over eighty days; modern political parties emerged during the reign of Justinian from the fandom of the Greens and Blues, rival factions of the chariot races which were the Roman Empire’s pre-eminent sport. Just as the football hooligans of the ancient world became the conservatives and liberals who claim our rulership now, so will those who have seized our cities in the name of fascism and antifascism seize our political parties and one day govern our nations.
Before us now unfolds a vision of our political future, and though I celebrate the victory of Antifa and the people over state and fascist terror this reversion of throwing words to throwing stones bodes ill for the long term future of civilization.
But our choices are defined and limited by the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle.
Spectacle is good for business if your goal is to seize governments and influence public opinion and ideology in order to shape the future. We must market our cause if we are to recruit and promote our ideas, and from my perspective as the founder of Lilac City Antifa and a partisan of international solidarity and direct action we must always confront fascism.
We must resist, beyond hope of victory or even survival, because resistance confers freedom; in resistance we become Unconquered. Each of us who are Unconquered is a Living Autonomous Zone and a seed of change, reimagination, transformation, and rebirth of our democracy, our civilization, and humankind, and thereby we achieve the highest form of human political evolution; a free society of equals wherein the use of force is abandoned and inequalities of power are unknown.
Our duty of care toward others also compels us to confront injustice as a moral imperative; in the words of a proverb derived from John Stuart Mill’s inaugural speech of 1867 to the University of St. Andrews; “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.
Both liberty and equality require us to confront and challenge evil in whatever form it may arise, and to protect and defend our universal human rights and all those who are powerless and vulnerable to predation and the use of force.
Our mission of revolutionary struggle also calls us to question, mock, expose, and confront authority and other inherent evils as acts of transformation and liberation. These four actions, the Primary Duties of a Citizen, are necessary and fundamental to our humanity and to our membership in the community of humankind.
Yet there are no rules of engagement for the strategies of revolution which make confrontation anything other than the choice of last resort, when all meaningful dialog and negotiation have failed. First because our goal is to abandon the use of force in the realization of a nonviolent society; second because force and violence are seductive and corruptive. We are the good guys, on the side of justice, truth, and mercy, you will say; but everyone thinks that, including our enemies.
In the balance with this is another truth; all human societies are constructed through violence, all liberation struggle is seizure of power, and all states are embodied violence.
Remember always the warning of Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who hunts monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the Abyss gazes also into you.” Every time I plan an action, I test its merit against this maxim.
And the consequences of liberty are written in my flesh and in my dreams, for after decades of revolutionary struggle the Abyss has begun to look back at me, and I no longer trust myself to know when I can pull a punch and walk away.
In the case of theatrical performances such as today’s street fight or in any conflict, we must ask ourselves, whose power is served? As a strategy of authoritarian regimes designed to protect the hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege of elites, divide and conquer has a winning streak as old as civilization, and it is very useful to the service of tyranny for the police to give permission to disempowered and angry young men to fight each other rather than join together to seize the power which has been stolen from them by the state.
Conflict is often a symptom of the failure to find common interest. Yet if we are to transform ourselves into a society free of coercion and violence, we must build solidarity and obliterate categories of exclusionary otherness, especially with those with whom we disagree.
To paraphrase Sigmund Freud’s famous quote of 1893; “Civilization begins when we throw words instead of stones.”
And when the imposed conditions of struggle offer no choice but subjugation or resistance, how then do we seize our power?
Here again are the Eight Principles of the Art of War.
The first lesson of the art of war is Diversion and Surprise. This involves a cornucopia of misdirection, illusion, concealment, and the arts of ambush and improvising channels, traps, and arenas to escape pursuit.
The second lesson is to Be Unpredictable, and use your enemy’s routines against him to create windows of opportunity. Change your patterns and routines, your playbook, rules, strategies and tactics. Surprise yourself, and the enemy too will be surprised.
The third lesson is to Seize the Rules; never play someone else’s game, on their terms or by their rules, but on ground and at a time of your choosing. If you become trapped in such a game, change the rules and make it yours.
The fourth lesson is to Seize Initiative and Control through continuous attack and patterns of action; make the enemy react to you and you will tie up his resources in defense which may otherwise be free to threaten and attack you. Plan ahead of the enemy’s moves, and use patterns and expectations to create dilemmas, openings, ambushes, and traps.
The fifth lesson is to Seize the Timing, or wrongfooting the enemy. No one can be everywhere at once with equal force, and one must gather maximum force and strike where least expected and where the enemy is weakest. This means luring the enemy into being where you want him to be, such as massing forces where they are useless while exposing strategic targets.
The sixth lesson is to Seize the Momentum and point of balance when attacked; defend nothing, but neutralize greater force and power through evasion and redirection. The principles of simultaneous counterattack to seize control as momentum, and of continuous attack as conservation of momentum, work together in this as a Doctrine of No Defense or pure counterattack and ambush.
The seventh lesson is to Embrace Your Fear and use your pain. Why defend when you can counterattack and teach the enemy to fear you? As my father said; “Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?”
The eighth lesson is to Seize the Narrative of the conflict, for all conflict is theatre. Who holds the moral high ground wins, as Gandhi taught us when he liberated India through the Salt Tax protest and the newsreels of British soldiers beating an endless column of silent and dignified Indians with sticks which shocked the world and delegitimized colonial authority.
The last lesson is the same as the first; diversion and surprise.
All else is timing.
These Eight Principles of War which I first learned as a boy from my teacher of martial arts whom I called Teacher Dragon, and have tested since the day I was sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by the great Jean Genet in Beirut 1982, I recommend to all of you now, for all time and where ever men hunger to be free.
And remember always, when faced with overwhelming force and impossible odds, Genet’s advice to me on that day which changed the course of my life; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
Today many atrocities and crimes against humanity were committed by those who would enslave and dehumanize us; the Republicans have violated Texas once again in acts of white supremacist terror, vote suppression, and theft of citizenship, ICE and other factions of Homeland Security are attempting to subjugate our military as Fourth Reich governors send their National Guard troops to occupy New York as a terror force of political control and repression,
Trump is gleefully trying to help Putin conquer Ukraine and Netanyahu conquer Palestine, and though a federal judge has declared Alligator Alcatraz to be illegal and must be abandoned there are plenty of other concentration camps, secret prisons, torture programs and forces of white supremacist terror enacting the Fourth Reich’s plan of ethnic cleansing in America.
None of this is new or unusual, and so I’ve chosen to write about something else. Herein I interrogate and problematize how we construct identity through our material environment as instruments of our stories, histories, memories; in the case of the archeology of my writing space. Dolly has also asked me to tell the story of her and I, and I do so now in the context of this mimetic shell we have constructed for ourselves, our cottage Dollhouse Park.
A Face Book post by the Booker Prize in which longlisted authors have shared images of their writing space has provoked me into memorializing and questioning my own, where I have written my political journal Torch of Liberty every day when not writing while traveling since October 2018 though my first political and current events essays date to January of that year, as well as my literary journal Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium, celebrations of my favorite authors on their birthdays wherein each year I read something they wrote and write about it, as well as book reviews and my own writing, poetry which I think of as spells, conjurations, rituals of becoming, visions, dreams, the arcanum of mimesis.
We humans extend ourselves into our environment and acquire objects which like spirit fetishes anchor our histories and the power of authentic experiences as informing, motivating, and shaping forces whereby we construct ourselves, and things we choose to represent us and to use as instruments to control our own evolution are important and bear liminal potentials of reimagination and transformation.
This maker space I have called my Imaginarium, where the Conservatory in Dollhouse Park Imaginarium and Conservatory refers to Dolly’s music, and I believe we must cultivate our imaginaria with great care as sacred spaces, like the dream incubation chambers of the Greco-Egyptian cult of Asclepius and those of the Kagyu order of Tibetan Buddhism where once I was a monk and a Dream Navigator exploring the constellations of universes among the Labyrinth of the Gates of Dreams.
My first version of dream gates was constructed while I was in sixth and seventh grade, an entire wall of my bedroom made a collage from prints of Hieronymus Bosch and Surrealist art, worlds into which I practiced projecting my consciousness using methods from Taoist and Buddhist meditation I was formally studying, and later Jungian lucid dreaming and astral travel from European magical arts.
My Imaginarium in which I write to you now is similarly constructed of images and items which for myself open gateways into other realms; dreams, memories, visions. Herein I will walk you through some of the things to be found in it which I have chosen as instruments with which to inform, motivate, and shape myself in becoming human, the true and primary artifact of any art being the artist and his audience, as constructed through words, music, and images.
My comment on the original Booker Prize post was; This is fascinating. My writing desk could be an archeology site. I’ve layered it and the whole room with artifacts of intention, and many bear stories. Id prefer the whole upper floor of the house as interconnected spaces for this activity, but the Library is down two flights of stairs through the Cat Tower, the fireplace and cozy sofa on which we fall asleep at night watching television and conversing is nearby in the daytime bird watching room with its three floor to ceiling bay windows, we removed the daybed from the Imaginarium which I did sleep on now and then as the room is quite dark with the blinds drawn and replaced it, when Dolly bought a new red leather wing chair in which to hold court in the front room, with a massive club chair draped in the comforter and pillows of the old bed because I love the Charter Club burgundy and gold embroidered floral pattern, and both music rooms are in Dolly oriented spaces, each of which has two keyboards set up and the one in an alcove of the front room also has one of two pianos, the second piano being in the shop room in the garage.
As Dolly has phrased it, it’s a “fancy” shop; there’s an Oriental carpet in red and black under a dining table from the late 1800’s with nicely turned legs and high Victorian chairs, a wood moulded fireplace and television on top with a reclining leather chair and a footstool in front, a wicker cart with Dolly’s beading supplies, oak tool cabinets and worktables along the north and east walls and curios atop them, Morticia’s wicker throne chair like that in the original Addam’s Family series as we wanted to grow up to be Gomez and Morticia when we were children and their house influenced our ideas of the home we decades later built together, and her aunt’s piano built in 1896 which is being restored. The garage itself is a three car with one single and one double vehicle door, of 1280 square feet with a 10×15 storage room and another through the shop, insulated and finished inside and lined with chrome steel five shelf storage on rollers, and everything on them very tidy. The morning we put the trusses up for the garage I was surprised by all the cars arriving, women setting up tables with food and men with tool boxes; her whole family came, like an Amish barn raising, and framed the roof in a day.
I think I have found a new subject to write about.
I connect and relate to Jonathan Buckley’s writing space most of all these; because he has a piano by his desk, classical literature including Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Field Anthology of Irish Writing, and Dante’s Divine Comedy on his bookshelf which is the mantle of a gorgeous colonial fireplace, and Tarkovsky’s “Nostalghia” on his viewscreen.
One thing I find striking about the pictures these great and world famous authors have posted of their desks is how utterly impoverished, barren, and starveling some of them seem, without comfort or nesting spaces, and desks looted from abandoned institutions where grim inmates once sullenly ate their gruel.
In contrast every part of my own space is full of things; currently I have a half dozen items of framed art stacked in corners that I need to find places for, and our art storage spaces are always full. Art is a special category for us; all of it is original except for one of hers, a copy of Le Couloir De L’Opera by Jean Beraud which hangs in the front entry alcove to recall her glory days living near the Paris Opera, and a few reproductions of mine which I find significant, including the Typhoeous and His Daughters detail from Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze which functions as a shadow pantheon, a miniature Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa which reminds me of the stakes for which I write, Matthias Grunewald’s The Temptation Of St Anthony in which I find reflection of myself, a detail of Waterhouse’s Pandora which reminds me of the ambiguity of hope as both gift and curse. An enormous gulf exists between art which is personally meaningful to me and part of my identity and story, and things that are pretty on our walls as décor.
In that last category Dolly has a very fine collection of Maxfield Parrish original lithographs, and I like Alphonse Mucha, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Morris designs. My next acquisition will be a copy of The Mirror by Frank Dicksee for Dolly’s dressing room; her closets are organized as Evening Velvets, Day Velvets, and Other.
Then there are the lamps; Dolly once made stained glass as a hobby and collects Tiffany and other lamps; like art, we trade off lamps to display because every available space for a lamp has one. We also collect glass, Fenton carnival glass especially, and all of these colorful sources of light and reflection adorn our home like jewelry.
My desk is a rolltop designed for computers, with lamps and photos of the two of us atop, a photo of the grand flower urn in Victoria Park in her most beloved place on earth, Bath England, and art on the wall behind. A very comfy leather desk chair beckons, and for the summer we’ve put the umbrella holder and its collection by the printer and stand left of the desk. I use the exact same one as Mycroft played by Mark Gatiss does in the Sherlock telenovela, a gift from my mother, which I carry on our nightly walks when it rains.
To my left is a lovely old High Victorian tiger oak correspondence cabinet with a drop front secretary desk, oval mirror in a curved top piece, scrollwork, and shelves with glass front doors which display curios and books. A lamp with a painted blue vase and honey gold hobnail lampshade sits on top, with Dolly’s promo picture for her piano act when she was seventeen, when she lived her last year of high school in a suite at the Davenport Hotel in Spokane as its pianist, and a year before our grand romance began during Expo 74, just before my fateful trip to Brazil the summer before I began high school and after her graduation from it when she began a two year gig at the Empress Hotel in Victoria BC, and thereafter played Vegas and grand hotels and cruise ships in Europe for the next twenty years.
Close by is a photo of her building a sandman; this was the summer before my senior year of high school, when I drove up to visit her when she was playing her regular summer gig at Otter Crest Oregon, at the time the hottest resort on the coast, and we built a sandman together and let the tide carry him out to sea, so that the tides would always bring us back together; I believe this magic has returned me from death many times since.
We would find one another once again before our different currents carried us into strange seas for a long time, in Seattle the summer after my graduation from high school in 1978, myself 18 and university bound, she 22 and a career pianist in Europe with a home in Bath England and while playing gigs living at her favorite resort in the Black Forest of Germany, the opulent Brenners Park-Hotel with the Villa Stefanie spa – my favorite in Baden-Baden is the quiet Hotel Belle Epoque, on Princess and Norwegian cruise ships, and in Paris within a short walk from the Opera Garnier and her gig playing Harry’s New York Bar. Through her twenties and thirties Dolly was a minor star in Europe, and once turned down a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon to retain artistic control of her music.
To my right and across the room is a window with a view through the Tiki Bar Deck, roofed with outdoor speakers, of the secret valley behind our home and the rising moon. Under the window is placed my big Cat Napping Chair, often claimed by actual cats, swaddled in a comforter and piled with pillows, all from the daybed set in burgundy and gold with similar curtains above. In front of the chair is Mala’s bed, a Beautyrest Black mattress exactly like ours but dog sized, in which she luxuriates.
At ones right hand while seated in the Cat Nap Chair is a Mission style table bearing a lamp, a jar of chocolates, and bookends in the shape of birds awaiting new books to hold; currently I’m reading The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra, The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad, and Carpet Diem by George Bradley which is indeed about Oriental rugs. At left is a bureau with four drawers in three tiers and a lovely dressing mirror that tilts of the same period as the secretary and in the same striped oak, bearing jewelry chests. A cutesy dressing chair chosen by Dolly with a distressed cottage paint job sits nearby, declaring “friends forever you & me”.
Behind me when writing is the door and a closet with mirrored sliding doors, into which oddments are stuffed including my collection of fifty tiki bar shirts, meant to make me look fun when out and about with Dolly in the summer. The door which connects to the house opens into the hall running from the door to the Cat Tower at the rear to the open dining nook and kitchen and the theatre room with its bay windows overlooking the swan bird bath in our park, with a custom built couch made to Dolly’s instructions by the fellows who did the seats for her dad’s classic cars.
So to the conundrum of the barren and grubby writing desks and work spaces of the handful of distinguished and acclaimed authors who merit the fine sifting of the Booker Prize list, who presumably command wealth and power as the champions of our civilization and products of its excess wealth and time, de facto members of the global intelligentsia elite, I have by interrogating my own such space and the stories, histories, and memories represented by and embedded in its objects, arrived at a defining idea, that of intentionality.
This does not negate the fact that it requires some excess wealth to create such a space, but more crucially any act of creative art including writing requires excess time, which is more precious by far. Yes, some of these writing desks and rooms are artifacts of making do with very little, while I have realized in writing this essay that our whole home is designed intentionally as a space of refuge, joy, serenity, and reflection in a world which offers little of these beyond our hill. But all of us have chosen our spaces with intention, as conducive to creative play, wondering, and discovery.
What our writing spaces reveal about us includes who we are, what we value, and what we need. The true question then becomes; What do I need that the world and my life does not offer, that I must create for myself to balance the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world?
For some it may be a space free of distractions, with no images, no music, no research library, where I need these things to inspire me, and Beauty to balance the horrors of the world, its grief and loneliness and despair.
Implicit in this realization is another which bears upon the tale I am now telling, because to tell the story of my writing desk I must tell stories of my partner Dolly and I, and of the home we built together with our own hands and no small amount of family help, Dollhouse Park.
Our home began when Dolly’s father sold the land she was living on in a prefabricated mobile home out from under her to build a housing development, a somewhat extreme solution to the problem of adult children living at home. This of course was not the classic Failure to Launch, as she had lived on the road playing music for over twenty years before returning to go to university for the very first time, first to Gonzaga University in Engineering where her father had founded the Engineering Advisory group when he owned a multinational and had eighty engineers working for him during her childhood, thereafter she went to Eastern Washington University in Cheney to study Chemical Geology to work in mining.
Between her family home and the old Jesuit monastery of Mount St. Michaels where her father Gene used to jog over and help in the bakery as a boy was a hill with a spectacular view of the city at night, across a wetlands and up a winding dirt road where a horse farm once stood. To this spot she brought a chair and watched the sun set for several days from different vantage points and angles of view, and then with her father’s help bought the hilltop, had a daylight basement dynamited out of the backside and concrete poured for the foundation, framed in steel I beams, and her mobile dragged over them and oriented just as she had chosen.
Then she had a detective track me down where I was teaching high school AP English in California, and called me. We had not spoken in over twelve years, since my father’s funeral in 1989; I had gone through yet another teacher credential program and returned to teaching to fulfill the terms of a vision I had in which she came to my classroom to claim me.
Much happened in the meanwhile; the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Second Intifada, the Siege of Sarajevo, the resistance of the Karen and Shan against the ethnic cleansing campaign of Myanmar, the defense of Kashmir, the Revolution in Nepal, the end of Apartheid, the Zapatista movement, a pirate campaign to liberate enslaved sailors in the Indonesian Islands and South China Sea, and so much more of which I am a witness of history.
Looming over all of this was the tidal change that defined the 20th century, the collapse and fall of the Soviet Union, wonderful and terrible, and the influential political experiment of the modern world other than its wholly evil dark twin fascism, both tyrannies of the state as embodied violence and the enforcement of authorized identities as virtue. This for myself was an ambiguous event, much like a crusader looking to the heavens for signs only to behold a message writ large in the sky declaring; “I do not exist.”
While I was happy to help bring down the Wall and liberate Eastern Europe from Soviet imperial dominion and its puppet tyrants, a de facto regime of the KGB which had captured the state and subverted the Revolution, it also meant the loss of the world’s greatest sponsor of liberation struggle and disruption of my own network which included among many others Soviet advisors and Cuban volunteers. Apartheid would never have fallen without them, and this history must remember.
Yes, the Soviet gold was stolen in the greatest multiple bank heist in history which destabilized the economy, and the immediate trigger of the Fall was the withholding of the food ration coupons in Moscow by their distributors which caused a manufactured famine and drove people into the streets where the tanks sent to restore order refused to fire on them and instead invited people to ride on them, both operations conducted by Americans; but in the end the Soviet Union fell not to external forces but to internal subversion and capture by the KGB and other Avtoritet in collusion with crime syndicates and oligarchs. Its an example of the Praetorian Guard problem; those who enforce a regime are its true masters, and will inevitably attempt to seize direct control or make puppets of its tyrants and figureheads. We Americans may be about to witness another such demonstration of the principle, if Homeland Security subjugates the military and seizes the state, as they intend.
Putin is unspeakably evil, an evil I know all too well from his days as kingpin of the East Berlin black market when I made mischief across Europe and behind the Iron Curtain with Bluey’s crew, but unlike his star agent Trump he’s no fool and was absolutely right in his diagnosis of the Fall of America, of global democracy and the idea of universal human rights, and of western civilization born of the Enlightenment and the Forum of Athens as a self-questioning dialectical system; in parallel with the Fall of the Soviet Union, we are collapsing from infiltration and subversion, in our case from Nazi revivalists and fascism as white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, but also as terminal stage capitalism seeks to free itself of its host political system, exactly as the KGB and its hegemonic elites of oligarchs and crime syndicates freed itself of communism as its host political system.
The Fall of America, democracy, and civilization to an Age of Tyrants and the centuries of horrific wars to come may not be inevitable; there may be possibilities I cannot foresee because of my own limits, so it is imperative that we all of us dream and do beyond our horizons, the limits of our form, and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
On each first day of school during my happy years as a Forensics teacher and debate coach at Sonoma Valley High School, I began class with a demonstration of purpose, placing a fulcrum and lever on my desk with the words; “This is a fulcrum. It balances a lever. When your parents ask what you are learning in Forensics, tell them you are learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world”.
So I ask of you now, friends.
The previous time I had spoken with Dolly was also by phone, just after the funeral where we met again. I was living in a two level Victorian brick house in Glen Ellen near Sonoma at the foot of Jack London State Park and next to the burned out derelict of the Chauvet Hotel, once the hideout of Machine Gun Kelly and a casino of Bugsy Siegel’s, and a port for the steamboats that ran up Sonoma Creek from San Francisco when it was a navigable waterway. My view was an open wild meadow along the creek where a gypsy would park his wagon over the winter, a real wooden wagon pulled by a donkey who brayed mournfully at night, and just upstream from the Old Mill.
Dolly called me just as a rascally opossum arrived on my kitchen counter to share my breakfast as he often did, quite uninvited, and impatient for the offering of leftovers I would put out on the deck, through eaves where my bats lived. He was sniffing my breakfast fry up as we said our hellos, and I turned from our conversation to yell at him Get Out of Here!
As she has told me, she thought I was yelling at her, and hung up.
The line went dead, and there was no caller id or callback on the old landline phones. I had no idea where in the world she was, only that she had reached out to me and believed herself rebuffed. But she was out there, somewhere, waiting for me to find her.
There were many other causes and reasons for what I chose to do next; first the death of my father, who took me to his theatrical rehearsals where I sat with him and Edward Albee listening to their conversations between director and author, taught me to fence and play chess, took me to martial arts lessons and brought me in to his theatricals of ceremonial magic staged with his Beatnik friend William S. Burroughs, was my high school Drama and Forensics teacher and speech and fencing coach, was a life disruptive event, which left me wondering who I was without these things connected with my father that shaped me, and who I was doing all this Forensics and martial arts teaching for.
Second, we had just brought down the Berlin Wall, and I thought; Why not bring down all the Walls, everywhere, my own most especially?
The third cause and trigger event was the tragedy of the Dropped Call and missed connection; somewhere in this very large world love was waiting for me to find.
And for love we must dare anything.
So I found myself driving to work one day, with my lunch packed beside me, and in a moment of lightning bolt illumination realized that I was literally living in Nietzsche’s Hell, that I was about to have the same day as I had beyond remembering, swallowed by the sameness and the Nothing. And I thought; Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this”, and took a wrong turn, to the airport where I bought a continuous ticket for round the world travel. When the ticket agent asked where I wanted to go, I said the other side of the world.
I only discovered my destination was Kuala Lumpur Malaysia when I got off the plane, and was whisked away to the glittering business district where everyone was doing things I could have easily done at home in San Francisco if I wished. So I found a map of the bus routes, where all the roads ended in the Cameron Highlands, and decided to begin my journey there, doing what no one else was doing and where none dared go. I got off the bus at the end of the road, and walked into an unmapped jungle.
Thus began my Great Trek, wherein I crossed much of South Asia on foot and by sail, and after many adventures returned on the tenth anniversary of my journey because of a vision which set forth the conditions I must meet to find Dolly; I had to be teaching high school again, which required classes and recertification, and she would come to my classroom to claim me. This she did nearly three years later in 2002.
Quite wily about her plan she was; she called and ended the conversation with; “I’m coming to San Francisco to visit a Jesuit priest who was my friend at Gonzaga. Would you like to meet for coffee?” Over coffee she told me; “Really I came to see you.”
Once I moved in we began rebuilding everything, and all of it is custom work now, but the Dollhouse, so named because it belongs to her, began as a mobile home for a couple who had never lived together before, with a lot of dreams and very little money with which to realize them. That last bit has changed in the past few years, long after Dollhouse Park was completed, and we did most of the work ourselves with whatever we could gather, though with crucial family help.
Her father drew the plans for the house; I drew the design for the landscape, and we hired out only the electrical box and the plumbing, with help from a number of her family’s employees, available because her brothers own Bullseye Amusements which they founded as a pinball arcade on their uncle Bob’s carnival as teenagers and now own two thousand machines in casinos and bars in the Spokane area and control the local gaming industry.
Our cottage is now a main house of three thousand square feet on two levels, with a Cat Tower connecting the daylight basement with the main upper floor by two flights of stairs. The interior of the Cat Tower is twenty by twelve feet, which adds 240 square feet on three levels or 720, totaling 3,720 square feet for the house. Add the 12×36 sf Tiki Bar Deck or 432 sf and the total is only 4,152 sf of living space. The garage is 1280 sf and there are two garden sheds and a 12×12 or 144 sf gazebo, but they are outbuildings and don’t count. This means that the Dollhouse is tiny, 5,576 sf if you count the gazebo and garage, with just enough storage room for two people and our things, but I think the grounds are the finest private park in the city.
And nothing can surpass for us the stories of ours it holds, the hopes and dreams and visions of our lifelong romance and the histories of our struggles to make them real.
On this day in 1619 over four centuries of slavery and Resistance began in America with the first slave auction, and no human being has been truly free or equal here since, for we are all possessed by the legacies of our history as shared national trauma.
We must bring a Reckoning for this pervasive evil, central to the Original Lie which founded America as a free society of equals on paper while remaining one of masters and slaves in fact, in the reimagination and transformation of humankind through changing the systems of unequal power that have shaped us to things of fear, power, and force, in the centralization of power to authority and to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and patriarchal white privilege through divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and through seizures of power in revolutionary struggle and the solidarity of The Wretched of the Earth from the carceral states of force and control which create and are created by elites as instruments of power.
Let us bring, after four centuries of inequality and the state as embodied violence and systemic white supremacist terror, an American Revolution.
As I wrote in my post of August 31 2021, 401 Years of Slavery and Resistance in America, and Counting; One of the most important Reckonings we must have with ourselves and our history is the four hundred and one years of slavery and resistance in America which this August marks.
Both the content and context of this issue and its discussion has and will continue to shift and realign for as long as there are humans to interrogate the meaning and consequences of inequality and racism; I propose merely that we must make this central question of American identity and values a national priority in politics and education, and in the practice of our daily lives.
To quote the ACLU newsletter of last year for August; “Four hundred years ago this month, more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in what was then the British colony of Virginia. To mark the anniversary of the beginning of slavery in America, The New York Times launched a major initiative called The 1619 Project. Through a special issue of the New York Times Magazine, along with a slew of other resources, the project centers slavery in our national narrative, tracking how the legacy of that brutal institution continues to manifest in every aspect of American life.”
As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature for 2020; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As I wrote in my post of June 19 2021, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed, and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
To be a true American patriot is to be a liberator, not a conqueror.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?”
As I wrote in my post of September 21 2020, History, Memory, Identity: Whose Story Is This?; Whose story is this? This question must be the beginning of a new pedagogy of education in history and literature, and remain central to the project of its study. True education in the discipline of history asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, and the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this dialectical interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil combine in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
The Underground Railroad retells slavery’s horrors with a dreamlike twist, review of the Amazon Prime series by CBS News
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times Magazine staff writer, and the driving force behind The 1619 Project — joins At Liberty host Emerson Sykes (@emersonsjsykes) to discuss the initiative.
Nikole Hannah-Jones on the 1619 Project’s reframing of American history (EP. 61) August 22, 2019”
Text of the historic interview:
“Four hundred years ago this month, more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in what was then the British colony of Virginia. To mark the anniversary of the beginning of slavery in America, The New York Times launched a major initiative called The 1619 Project. Through a special issue of the New York Times Magazine, along with a slew of other resources, the project centers slavery in our national narrative, tracking how the legacy of that brutal institution continues to manifest in every aspect of American life. Nikole Hannah-Jones — an award winning investigative journalist, a New York Times Magazine staff writer, and the driving force behind The 1619 Project — joins At Liberty host Emerson Sykes (@emersonsjsykes) to discuss the initiative
[00:00:04] From the ACLU, this is At Liberty. I’m Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.
Four hundred years ago this month, more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in what was then the British colony of Virginia. To mark the anniversary of the beginning of slavery in America, the New York Times has launched the “1619 Project” with a special edition of the Sunday paper and a slew of other related resources. The goal of the project is ambitious.It aims to reframe the country’s history to center slavery in our national narrative, emphasizing how the legacy of that brutal institution continues to manifest in every aspect of American life. The project has been enthusiastically received, selling out multiple print runs in the last few days. Here to discuss the project is Nikole Hannah-Jones, an award-winning investigative journalist, a New York Times Magazine staff writer and the driving force behind the 1619 Project.
Nikole Hannah Jones, it’s a great pleasure to have you with us on the show today. Welcome to the podcast.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES
Thank you for having me.
EMERSON
So this project is quite astonishing for its ambition and scope. The 1619 Project includes several long essays, including one by yourself, shorter vignettes, works of poetry, photography, and even a curriculum for schools, and I understand a podcast series is also about to drop. But your introductory essay, I think, frames the project and introduces its core thesis. Can I ask you to start by reading a passage from your essay which is entitled, “The Idea of America”?
NIKOLE
[00:01:38] Sure: “The United States is a nation founded both on an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4th, 1776, proclaimed that ‘All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of Black people in their midst. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans believe fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of Black resistance and protest, we have helped this country live up to its founding ideals and not only for ourselves. Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights. Without the idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of Black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different. It might not be a democracy at all.”
EMERSON
Thank you very much for sharing that reading and also for the 1619 Project’s existence. As I understand it, the project was very much your brainchild. Can you tell us about how the idea came about in what you hope it will accomplish?
NIKOLE
Sure. I first came across the year 1619 as a high school student, and I was reading a book that my Black Studies teacher gave me by Lerone Bennett called Before the Mayflower. And in coming across that date, I just was struck. I remember being very struck by the fact that I had never seen that date before, that I had never been taught that enslaved Africans had been here that long, that enslaved Africans had arrived even before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. And that date, therefore, that year, has always stuck with me, my entire life. And so as the 400th anniversary was approaching, I really was thinking about how for most Americans, this month, this year, was going to pass and they weren’t going to know that this was the anniversary; they weren’t going to know this was a four hundredth year of slavery being introduced into what would become America, and it would just pass without notice. And that really bothered me.
[00:03:52] So, I pitched this project to the New York Times because I feel that the year 1619 is as foundational to the American story as the year 1776, and that we clearly, as a country, have not grappled with the legacy of one of our oldest institutions and one that I would argue, has impacted most aspects of modern American life. And this seems like a great opportunity to use the platform of The Times to force a reckoning with that.
EMERSON
Well, it’s a powerful idea, and you were worried that the anniversary would pass without notice, and you’ve certainly accomplished making sure that that has not happened. The-the response has been overwhelming, and mostly positive, but also, of course, with predictable backlash from people on the right. Can you say a bit about the responses that you’ve received?
NIKOLE
I am completely overwhelmed by the response. If you’re listening to this and you’ve sent me an e-mail or left me a voicemail or DM-ed me on Twitter, and I haven’t responded, I’m getting to it. Of everything I’ve ever done, I’ve never received this many responses. It’s been, in that way, very unexpected. I had no idea how this would land in the world. I knew what we were trying to do was evocative. I believed it was powerful, but I just didn’t expect the reaction that we’ve received. As you mentioned, we have sold out of copies, people are posting their stories of driving miles and miles and going to several stores just trying to get a copy of the print product. And that’s been very gratifying because the reason I wanted to do this was to get us talking about something that we all think we know, and we really don’t, and hoping to really reframe the narrative particularly of Black Americans but also the nation itself. So the–the response has been amazing.
EMERSON
[00:05:46] Well I’m–I’m lucky. Our producer Noa Yachot is the only reason I actually have a physical copy, and I’m very happy to have one. It’s such a beautiful document and artifact that I think people will return to over time. And as you said, the messages are very powerful in reframing our national narrative. But also, it’s not a reported news document, right? This information is not exactly new, but it’s presented in an extraordinarily powerful way. And I’m curious about the impact that you were hoping to have on individual readers.
NIKOLE
So, the entire project is making an argument. It’s definitely reported. I wouldn’t call it “news,” but it’s very rigorously researched and very heavily reported. But the conceit of the magazine, so there’s–there’s two parts of the print product. There’s a special section of the newspaper, and that’s really a corrective on the way that we’ve been taught slavery. That special section of the newspaper is a history, and we did that in partnership with the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
But the magazine’s conceit is that you can take all of these modern aspects of American life, all these institutions and phenomenon in modern American life and contemporary American life, and things that you think have nothing to do with slavery, and we were going to take– start in the present and trace those institutions back and show that all of these interlinking aspects of our society have a commonality. And that’s that they developed out of slavery or the anti- Black racism that came about to justify slavery. So there are, in the magazine, there are stories about why Americans consume so much sugar. Why were the only Western industrialized country without universal health care. Why traffic is so terrible in Atlanta. Our very geography as cities. Why our politics are so dysfunctional. And then, of course, my essay speaks about our democracy itself. It really was my attempt to make this institution and its legacy real, and to really answer that claim that I get all the time, which is, “Slavery ended a long time ago. It’s in the past. It has nothing to do with modern society.”
[00:08:02] And that’s simply not true. If we believe that the Constitution still matters, if we believe the Declaration still matters, every year we celebrate the Fourth of July, if those things matter, then 1619 and slavery mattered as well. You cannot pick and choose which parts of our society are important and that we will remember the history in which we don’t. And I think we make a very powerful argument about the ongoing legacy of slavery.
EMERSON
Well, indeed, it is a very powerful argument, and it’s striking and in the expansive scope that you’ve taken, as you mentioned, all the different aspects and the threads that you pull through in terms of slavery’s legacy in our modern society, but being from the ACLU, I wanted to focus a bit on the prevalence of law in facilitating oppression as a part of the slavery and its legacy but also, in creating some progress in freedom that we’ve seen since.
I mean, you talk in your piece, but also in other pieces, about the Reconstruction Amendments that granted citizenship and equal protection under the law, that was originally targeted at Blacks but then as you mentioned applied then to many other marginalized groups, the Civil Rights Acts, are all highlighted as well in terms of landmark laws that helped protect the rights of African-Americans, and by extension other marginalized folks. But one feature that stood out, in the New York Times Magazine edition, was a photo essay on Howard Law School students, and I guess the– the premise was basically that Howard is one of the oldest black law schools and has played an important role in forming society as we have it today. But, I’m interested in your perspective about the role of law in changing society and either enforcing or challenging these types of norms that we know are deeply in our DNA as a country.
NIKOLE
[00:09:56] Yeah, I think clearly law has played an indelible role. Laws played the role of ensuring the caste system, of ensuring the institution of slavery, and the kind of systematized racial oppression of Black Americans and other marginalized groups. And so the law’s also been the means of trying to undo them. The 14th Amendment is, as you know, “Equal Protection Before the Law”; it is understanding that, yes, of course, it is important to change quote unquote “hearts and minds” but whether “hearts and minds” change or not, people who are citizens of this country, and I would argue who are noncitizens, who may not even have legal status here, should still be protected equally by the law and treated as equal members of society by the law. And so the law, of course, has been critical in moving the country and the rights of Black Americans and other groups, and protecting those rights, even when the majority of society has not wanted to.
EMERSON
Well, and there’s this interplay also between law and culture, but also in the issue you–you, sort of, juxtapose law, policy, as well as artistic expression and literary expression. I was also drawn to a piece by Reginald Dwayne Betts. He has a poem. I was drawn to it in part because he’s a previous guest on the podcast but also because he’s an attorney as well as a poet. And so, he redacted parts of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 which is signed by George Washington. His overall redaction project is about flipping the tools that are used by the government to obscure the truth, to create clarity. And I know he did that with writs of habeas corpus in a recent recent exhibition as well. But it seems like it’s analogous to what you’re doing, in some ways: where you’re sort of taking a platform, like the New York Times, which like all American institutions has its own checkered history, but then flipping that tool and using it to provide clarity and correct the American meta-narrative.
NIKOLE
[00:11:59] Yeah, for sure. I have been extremely aware of the history of white-run media in propagating and promulgating white supremacy in this country. I mean, enslavers ran ads for their property in newspapers and in media. And when I think particularly about the New York Times, the longer part of our legacy has been that Black people have been very mistreated in the stories that have been published. And this was, in a way, an opportunity to use the paper of record as a corrective, and I have thought about that a lot: that as a lay historian, when I’m going back to do historical research like many historians, you turn again and again to the New York Times to see, how was the New York Times covering whatever was happening that you’re that you’re trying to research. And when I think that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, when people are coming back and trying to understand our times, that there will be this massive project in the paper of record that they will go back, and to try to view the American experience and the Black experience through that, is very powerful to me. And, of course, any one project, any one institution, cannot correct all of these wrongs that were done, but it certainly is a way to put into the record, and into the paper of record, a counternarrative to a very long and–and torrid legacy of the mistreatment of Black Americans.
EMERSON
This is clearly a project about meta-narrative and our sort of national narrative, and it’s noteworthy that we do start with 1619. You know, you talked about, it’s about the American experience and the Black experience. And I’m someone who’s been deeply influenced, I think, not only by all of the the the history that you tell in America but also by the Pan Africanist movement, and in my previous job I spent a lot of time working in Africa with activists and political leaders.
[00:13:59] And so, I did want to just touch on the idea of the African-American story in relation to Africa and in a global context. Obviously, I understand that the the project is about American history, but I think it’s controversial in some ways to start our history with slavery. And, you know, you in your article referred several times to Africa as quote, “A place we’ve never been,” which, of course, is true for the vast majority of African-Americans, and the fact that our–our links with Africa were systematically broken. This was not a mistake. This was a part of our story.
But to the extent that the project is about sort of reclaiming African-American identity, I’m curious about how you think about the implications of starting the story where you did. It makes sense to start there, but for me it’s also not really the beginning of our story.
NIKOLE
Well, so, it’s not, clearly. We know that we descend from the continent of Africa and most likely from the western central region of the continent of Africa, but I very intentionally started a 1619. I very intentionally argue that we are a new people born on these shores, because I think in the reframing of America, I’m also trying to reframe the way that we have been treated and how we have thought about ourselves: that we are never treated as full citizens in this country, that we have always been taught that somehow, our story beginning with our enslavement here is something that we should be ashamed of, that we have to find this connection which is always going to be a vague connection to a continent, or to a region of the second largest continent in the world, because we can’t go and look up our specific nations, or our specific languages. That is where we have to try to find our identity. I think it’s been very harmful.
[00:15:47] So it’s not eschewing that connection and I say in there, “We have echoes of Africa, but we are not African.” And we are not. We are fully American. We are an amalgamated people. We are a mixed race of people. We speak English, for the most part. Our cultural institutions we created here. The original American music we created here. We have created original American names. We have created original American culture. And I want us to be proud of that. As Black Freedom Fighters said during slavery, “Our ancestors bones and blood is in this soil.” And it is great to have a sense of Pan Africanism; I definitely feel that connection to the Diaspora is very critical, but I also think that it is fine for us– We have as much claim on this country, where the only ancestors that we can trace are on these shores. And why should we not feel pride in that? Why should we not claim the full citizenship and full identity of the country for which some of us have been here for 400 years?
EMERSON
I totally hear that; that makes a lot of sense. I think from my– my personal journey, I think, feeling alienated as an African-America from my home country and having spent a lot of time in Africa, actually did give me that sense of ownership of America: it sort of solidified the fact that I am definitely an American, and I have every right to claim that story. So, I think it’s interesting that people are coming to these stories with all different sorts of backgrounds.
You know, I am someone who I think it’s, without being too braggadocious, I think I have an above average familiarity with a lot of African-American history and culture, and sometimes I find myself being impatient with people who are, sort of, smacking their heads and saying, “I had no idea America was so racist.” But at the same time this knowledge that I gained was from my parents, it was from my family. It was not in my public elementary or middle school. So–
NIKOLE
Right.
EMERSON
I think it’s–it’s it’s fascinating to think about these stories that some of us have heard, some of us haven’t heard, but we’re all coming to them with our own with our own baggage, so to speak.
NIKOLE
[00:17:57] Black Americans don’t have the luxury of not knowing that our country is racist. We’re the most legislated against group of people in the history of this country, and from the moment we landed here, our lives have been constrained by white racism. We have never even been able to live fully as individuals because our membership in this race, that white people made, that we call Black, has meant that no matter what we do personally as individuals, we are lumped in and treated as a group. So we don’t have that luxury, but what I will say is my patience for people who are surprised is better than it used to be because when you really understand, and part of what we do with the project in the special section is examine the way we are taught slavery in school, the way we are taught slavery in society.
And, if you’re like most Americans, where you learn history from what you’re taught in school, you’re not, kind of, a history nerd like me, obsessively reading history books, then what you know is what you’ve been taught. And I’m not going to blame, you know, entire population because, frankly, a lot of Black Americans know very little about this history, as well. I think what I’ve learned, I’ve been studying African-American history since I took my first Black Studies class in high school. I majored in African-American history in college, and I still learn things every single day. Reporting my essay, I learned a ton of things that I didn’t know, and I’ve been studying for two decades. So, I think there is a kind of unending amount of history that we can unearth. This project is just, clearly, the tip of the iceberg. But even knowing that if you read that 100 pages of this magazine, shoot, if you read one article in the magazine, I think for most Americans, it is already going to give them a perspective and information that they haven’t had.
EMERSON
[00:19:50] Well certainly, it’s all there for people to get that information, and it’s presented in such a compelling way that it’s clearly been attractive to people, and– and I think the message is really sinking in. I’m interested in, sort of, a bigger picture thought about if there’s any particular action. Changing the national narrative is no small feat. I mean, I don’t mean to minimize that, but I’m also wondering if you also see some piece of action that you were hoping that readers might take. Is it just about deeper reflection or understanding, or is there something more tangible that you’re hoping to achieve as well?
NIKOLE
Well, you know, I’m a journalist, so I just point out the problems and that other people like y’all worry about the solutions.
[LAUGHS]
But no, I think, first, if you look at, let’s just take the conversation, or lack thereof, around reparations. How do you even gain traction and have a real legitimate conversation if we can’t even grapple with the truth of what slavery was and what its legacy remains?
So, I think having that information, in some ways, you could look at this entire project as an argument that makes the case that something is owed. I don’t know how you read the entire issue of the magazine, where we point out again and again the modern day legacy of slavery and not see that as a whole as asking the question of, “What do we then owe?” I mean, all my work is about, you know, the most deeply entrenched societal issues. I never have an expectation that people are going to read something I produce, or anyone produces, and we’re just gonna get–
Oh I almost cussed, sorry.
EMERSON
That’s all right. No, that’s alright.
NIKOLE
Right.
EMERSON
We’re–We’re not on– we’re not out on the network news.
NIKOLE
[00:21:40] Right, that we’re gonna get our shit together and suddenly, you know, have a kumbaya moment and make amends for what we’ve done. But we certainly are not going to take the steps to rectify and remedy this legacy, if we can’t even tell the truth about it. So, I see this truth in bringing this to a large mass of American citizens who have never had it as the first step. My hope then, would be that there can be a real conversation about what is ultimately owed to the descendants of the enslaved for this history. And how do we come to a place where we can actually be the society that our founders laid out at our most idealistic place?
And I guess, the last thing I would add because if people actually read the issue with an open mind, white Americans in particular, but also other non-Black Americans, I think what they will see is that we have not been able to contain the harms of the legacy of slavery only to Black people. That everyone in our society has been hurt by this. When we’re the only country, Western industrialized country that doesn’t offer universal healthcare, because white Americans, surveys and polling show, are the least likely to support social programs if they think Black Americans are going to benefit from them. There are a bunch of white Americans who are suffering for that. There are millions of white Americans who have not been able to get insured, proper insurance, who have not been able to get their health care needs met, who have died because of this anti-Black racism.
So when people sit in traffic in Atlanta for four hours, wasting their lives away that is universally affecting Americans, even though the highway system was built to hurt Black people. So if you sit with this, there is a reckoning that will need to be had to understand that Black people are fully American. Black people have been those that driving force to make the ideals of our Constitution real. And if we want to be a better country as a whole, if we as Americans want to have the greatest benefits of our country as a whole, we’ve got to purge ourselves of what is one of our original sins.
EMERSON
[00:23:54] The thing that jumps out to me about the current reparations debate is that people are not just talking about, you know, “This happened in the 19th century, and therefore, we need to update for inflation and figure out a payment mechanism,” but that the legacy of slavery survives to today and that the harms are still recognizable and identifiable. And so I think, the work that you’ve done in terms of pulling these threads, as I said, is really is really important, but it also kind of jumps out to me that, unless I missed it, I think that this there is no explicit call for reparations, or at least that’s not a central focus in terms of reparations in and of themselves, of the project. So, you’re hoping that it leads people there but, you made the call not to include it as an explicit call within the project.
NIKOLE
So, there is no explicit call for anything in this project. There is an assessment of the legacy. I did assign initially a piece that asked that very question, “What is owed,” and it ended up uh being a piece about the wealth gap. So I think we will still have a piece that ask that question and that speaks to scholars who have been studying this and maybe comes up with a figure, but definitely talks to scholars about what is owed. But even that is going to be a question and an assessment. I don’t think that it is the role of this project to call for any one thing: that’s for activists to do, and that’s for activists to work on, but we are certainly assessing that legacy which again I think culminates in a powerful argument that we need to figure out what is owed.
EMERSON
That makes a lot of sense, and I guess, you sort of led me into my next question, which was about how you cover so many different topics, and I’m curious if there are any that you wish had made it in?
NIKOLE
[00:25:41] Oh, God. Of course. I mean, even as comprehensive as we tried to be, and this magazine is twice as many pages as our typical New York Times Magazine, there’s a ton that was left out. And some of this, I think you’ll see in other sections of the magazine in the future. There’s nothing on food. I think food is critical. There’s not really a story on culture. I think you could do more around a lot of the subjects that are already in there. Probably what some people may see as the most glaring omission, considering what I report on most of the time, is there’s nothing on schools or education. I think that could be some great work on college debt and college attendance.
So, I mean, there’s really an unlimited number of stories that could go in, and we certainly plan on publishing more stories through the end of the year. And one other thing that is definitely going to come, if you go to the magazine, at the very end of the magazine, there is a very haunting picture of the site of the largest auction of human beings in the history of our country that was called “The Weeping Time.” And the picture is of the modern American landscape, what is there now. And we wanted to get that entire photo essay into the magazine. We went to various sites of auction spots where uh human beings were bought and sold and took pictures of what those sites look like now, kind of as a metaphor for how we have–slavery is all around us, the ghosts are there but we have allowed it to just fade into the background. And so, we’re going to be publishing that photo essay in the magazine later as well.
We worked with a lot of historians. We had a big brainstorming session here at the Times before we even picked what stories we were going to put in the issue and asked historians, you know, “What should we be writing about, what do we need to make sure to cover?” Several those historians ended up writing for the issue. But I’m sure, I’ve heard from a number of historians since the issue published who have ideas about stories that they would like to write or other areas that they think we should cover and we welcome those pitches as well.
EMERSON
[00:27:52] Well that’s great to hear that the drumbeat will continue. So, you’ve talked about a few of the articles that may be released between now and the end of the year, and we know there’s the curriculum for students and teachers, and there’s also the podcast series that’s coming out. Is there anything else that you want to highlight about what’s coming next for the project? And I’m also very interested in what you’re excited about working on next.
NIKOLE
I guess the only other thing we didn’t talk about is we are doing an all day symposium at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
EMERSON
Wow.
NIKOLE
October 30th, in Washington D.C., and it is going to be both somber and celebratory and very much looking forward to that, so listeners should look out for announcements about that, and how to get tickets as well. As for what’s next with me, you sound like an editor.
EMERSON
No deadlines.
NIKOLE
I’m trying to to to survive, you know, this project, it has consumed me since January. It has not let up yet, and I have no idea what’s next day. My book editor hopes that me finishing my book is next, so maybe I’ll say that.
EMERSON
Well, we look forward to whatever you put out next. I’ve found all of your reporting on education fascinating and illuminating and of course the 1619 Project is already a triumph, and the legend of this project will only grow in the years to come, so Nikole Hannah-Jones, thanks so much for taking the time out of your very busy schedule to speak with us and thanks for all your great work.
NIKOLE
Thank you, I really appreciate it.
EMERSON
Thanks very much for listening. If you valued this conversation, please be sure to subscribe to At Liberty wherever you get your podcasts and rate and review the show. We really appreciate the feedback.
The Lovecraft Mythos remains an iconic study in fear as the organizing principle of an invented mythology of Absurdist Nihilism; it also reveals how we use fear to shape ourselves and others. What are its methods and purposes in Lovecraft, and in horror literature in general? Why do we need fear as an instrument of identity creation?
Fear is both a limit of our openness to change which defines our boundaries and a disruptive force which transgresses normalities; a form of Chaos which is a measure of the adaptive potential of ourselves and our society as systems. We must listen to the secrets our fear whispers to us, for it both reflects our true selves and describes the negative spaces of our future possibilities of becoming human. Above all, fear is an instrument by which we create ourselves.
Cherish your fear and hold it close; question and probe the limits of your darkness, for it speaks to us of ambiguous truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Especially we must explore and interrogate the Uncanny Valley of horror, revulsion, disgust; the instinctive terror of things not quite like ourselves as figures of otherness, and the shock and awe of unknown possibilities of becoming human which live beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden.
We are seized and shaken by overwhelming forces of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity; the pathology of our disconnectedness and the psychopathy of power, the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and its loathsome manifestations of tyranny and carceral states of force and control as embodied violence which co-evolves with elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, hierarchies of belonging and otherness, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
How shall we answer the terror of our nothingness?
Among the angels with which we must wrestle and the demons with which we must dance or be consumed by, the fracture of life disruptive events becomes a Rashomon Gate of relative and multiple truths and possible selves. Herein we may choose between two paths in seizures of power; we may become liberators or tyrants.
On one face of this coin, the tyrant Janus; the terror of our nothingness, falsification, dehumanization, abjection, and theft of the soul. On its reverse the liberator Janus; the joy of total freedom, seizure of power, self ownership, love which exalts us beyond the limits of our flesh and the discovery of our best selves as truths both self created and immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
Becoming human as a process of identity formation, self-construal or personae which is the word for a character mask which actors speak through in classical Greek theatre and which I believe describes identity as a performance and a narrative structure with precision, clarity, and great explanatory power, remains fluid, ambiguous, relative, ephemeral, and a primary ground of struggle.
Who chooses how we are to be defined, the boundaries between our limits and the possibilities of what we may become, and hos and under what conditions boundaries become interfaces between divergent realms?
This is the first question to ask of any story; whose story is this?
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Such is the work of Resistance as Repair of the World, tikkun olam in the Kabbalah and Judaism in general, under imposed conditions of struggle which include our fragile human form and the ambiguous and ephemeral truths written in our flesh.
As I wrote in my post On the Wisdom of Our Darkness in the wake of my mother’s death years ago; Grief, despair, and fear, the trauma of loss, the torment of loneliness, and the guilt of survivorship; the realm of our darkest and most negative passions immerses us in atavistic states with totalizing and tidal force.
Life disruptive events can destabilize identity and realign personality, transform meanings and values, send shockwaves through our network of relationships, shift our worldview and unmoor us from the anchorages of our ideological paradigms and historical contexts.
As such they both shatter who we are and open us to becoming anew, like a bird emerging from the shell of its egg.
Such traumas confront us with the unfiltered face of our shadow self as a healing process, a transformative journey filled with dangers but also with the limitless possibilities of rebirth. As redirections of our momentum, disruptive events force reflection and redefinition of ourselves as intentional choice; among them the death of a loved one is surely the most terrible.
Overwhelming and painful as they may be, our negative emotions have adaptive value or we wouldn’t have evolved and developed them. How then do they help us survive? What is their purpose?
Grief, especially but not exclusively, connects us with other people, opens us to the pain of others, and brings us to a renegotiation of the terms of ourselves and our lives.
We are bound together by the flaws of our humanity, by our brokenness and our pain, by the fragile nature of our lives and our vulnerability to disruptive events.
Beneath our masks we are a continuum of consciousness, history, and mimesis through which we are interconnected, especially with our loved ones and ancestors for whom our bodies are anchorages to this world.
The negative emotions are a biosocial tax on individuals which in part serve to drive us together to meet threats collectively as families and societies united in the cause of our survival, wherein the costs are shared among distributed resources. This is the origin of altruism; humans are designed to help each other. Each of us is marked by our nature as our brother’s keeper.
Far from wholly destructive, our darkness can be growth oriented and creative; destruction may be read as liberation and Chaos as the adaptive potential of a system.
Our darkness whispers, embrace your passion and your true self, and be reborn.
Passions of both light and darkness can act as warning buoys as we navigate into the future and the unknown; they can also illuminate and provoke us to abandon the known and discover new possibilities. Here I think of the green light at the end of his rival’s dock which drives Gatsby to reimagine himself, and in the end to destroy himself like Icarus in reaching for false illusions. Joy and sorrow, as with all our myriad passions, come as balanced pairs which help us process events by leveraging change.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
So I described grief process and the abjection and despair of life disruptive events as trauma but also as a gift of the unknown which bears potentialities of liberation and transformative rebirth.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians in the Netflix series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous tyrant and cannibal god, a figural study of Hitler and the motive forces of fascism and the psychopathy of power, a line which like a Zen riddle enfolds and typifies what for myself is the primary question of how to become human under imposed conditions of struggle which require the use of force in resistance, where the use of social force is always ambiguous, dehumanizing, and obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion as bidirectional forces of reaction which create their own antithesis. “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak.”
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil and carceral states of force and control as embodied violence; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values.
But there are other ways of facing our darkness, among them the path of poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and through our actions of humankind and our world; of revolutionary struggle against the systems of oppression which possess us and of liberation from our own hegemonies of power, of embracing our monstrosity and questioning the origins and limits of that which we find abhorrent within us, of violations of normality and transgression of the boundaries of our authorized identities and the limits of the human, of dancing our demons; the way of Lovecraft.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
As I wrote in my post of December 26 2021, Reflections During the After Party; As the festivities of a wonderfully out of control after party swirl around me with raucous and dissonant sounds and the silent hungers, unanswerable pain, and strange desires of our guests press upon me like living brands, I sit among my ghosts, dreaming their dreams, both those they lived and those yet to be realized.
On such occasions as this, surrounded by feasts and family, I am also surrounded by chasms of darkness, loneliness, disconnection, and the voices and presences of the dead which interpenetrate my flesh with the shadows of their histories, literally in the case of our genetic code as transforms of messages about how to shape ourselves to the material world and its imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle to become human.
We are bearers of stories, made of memories and histories which echo back through the numberless unknown lives of our ancestors as an unfolding of human intention and poetic vision, prochronisms or histories expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation like the shells of fantastic sea creatures, songs which reverberate through our lives as epigenetic informing, motivating, and shaping forces which are not unique to us but part of an immense and incomprehensible wave of the limitless possibilities of becoming human, which can seize us with dreams of being, meaning, and value we ourselves cannot imagine.
Such is the power of vision as reimagination and transformation, and the nature of our persona and identities as performances in a theatre of which, as Shakespeare teaches us, all the world is a stage. What is important is to ask, whose stage is it? In whose story do we perform our lives? For these questions direct us not to the subjugation to authority of learned helplessness, but to seizures of power and revolutionary struggle.
How answer we the terrible pronouncement in MacBeth,
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
How shall we answer the terror of our nothingness and the legacies of our history? I have but one reply; to gather and cherish my trauma and pain, and make something beautiful with it. Thus may we stand against the darkness, and remain Unconquered.
My answer to the suffering of the world is to give voice to the voices which have been stolen from us, the numberless generations of the silenced and the erased.
Welcome and embrace your pain and the terror of our nothingness as sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Dance your demons before the stage of the world; go ahead, frighten the horses.
Forge great beauty from the flaws of your humanity and the brokenness of the world, and wield it as an instrument of reimagination and transformation in glorious change.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As I wrote in my post of October 26 2021, On Fear as the Basis of Exchange, Madness as Poetic Vision, and the Terror of Our Nothingness: the Case of Lovecraft; Who is this Absurd fellow Lovecraft, with his gorgeous phraseology and peculiar allegiance to British rather than American English, his Surreal strangeness, an Absurdist Nihilism which echoes in Samuel Beckett and Kobo Abe, bizarre Sadeian transgression, Freudian horror, and poetics of fear?
Above all in this age of political polarization and historical culture and identity as a ground of struggle, how are we to understand him?
Is he a fascist? Nowhere in literature will you find a more useful case study of fascist psychology, and in nonfiction only the book I discovered, while a senior in high school in the wake of studies of Holocaust literature and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, which led me to a lifelong study of the origins of evil through the intersections of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, a multidisciplinary analysis of Hitler entitled The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite, is more illuminating.
Lovecraft is a conflicted author who mocked Hitler as a clown but also admired his performances as a form of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Pirandello’s Theatre of the Grotesque; many Americans thought of Trump in this way as parallel figures of public spectacle. Hitler’s famous maxim “Politics is the new art” marks the turning point of an unknown artist into a monstrous tyrant, and of our civilization to an age of darkness. From this moment on, image has replaced content and public life has been a theatrical performance wherein values are irrelevant.
Lovecraft’s paranoid delusions of alien conspiracies and ancient cults can be read as antisemitic allegories derived from propaganda like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion of which Umberto Eco wrote so beautifully in Prague Cemetery, but for the fact that he was a madman who believed them to be literally true; humanity is a tenuous and illusory quality for Lovecraft, whose world is filled with monsters wearing human masks who might reveal themselves at any moment, himself most especially, a precarious reality under constant threat.
His only known romantic relationship was his brief marriage to a Jewish woman, to whom he incessantly muttered dark imprecations, poisonous metacommentary, and racist characterizations about virtually everyone they passed on the streets of New York as monsters from his stories in disguise, as he did in his hundred thousand letters to his literary proteges.
He is not a fascist, which requires submission to authority and the abandonment of all meaning other than power and all value other than wealth, but he shares with fascists the terrible truth that fear is the basis of human exchange. Fascism weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear in service to power and operates as tyranny; Lovecraft’s work is filled with elite hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness as images and figures which may be read as racist, and he shares many of the obsessions of fascism, but nowhere does he long for authority or imposed meaning; instead he signposts and calls it out as cruelty without meaning or value, and his narratives are driven by existential dread and terror of authority.
His is a poetics of rebellion and nihilism like that of Camus and Beckett in a universe wherein the gods are not merely dead as in Nietzsche’s reimagination of the problem of the Deus Absconditus, the god who bound us to his laws and abandoned us, Thus Spake Zarathustra, but are actively hostile to humankind, mad idiot superbeings whose motives are utterly alien and predatory, who created humankind as slaves and food, a radical nihilistic atheism which has its political form as anarchy. The Anarchist slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World, “No gods, no masters”, coined by the socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui in 1880 and popularized by Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent in 1907, might have been written for him.
Is he a racist? Yes and no, as we may say of fellow Surrealists Djuna Barnes and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His fears of otherness, miscegenation, contamination, devolution to an animal state, and of the monstrosity of others is often expressed in racist terms, but he neither begins nor ends with unselfcritical racism. It remains ambiguous whether he is calling it out or employing such tropes to advance his themes; the first interpretation ascribes intentionality and self awareness which is unprovable but aligns with his themes, the second miscasts him as a Warhol like mocker of expectations whose images are deliberately discontiguous and unaligned, or a fabulist without a cause which he was not.
He was instead a profoundly wounded and savaged soul who fears his own monstrosity most of all, and this is why he is useful to us. His cause was to speak the truth in witness, remembrance, and Reckoning with systems of oppression and legacies of history which like a private Holocaust had disfigured him and stolen much of his humanity. In the literature of madness only the works of Akutagawa and Philip K. Dick are true equals, authors who like Lovecraft were fighting a losing battle against madness, and aware of the degeneration of their skill and artistic control. We may say of him as Renfield says of himself in Dracula; “I’m not a mad man. I’m a sane man fighting for my soul.”
Why should we read Lovecraft now?
Like the Hanging of the Maids in Homer’s Ulysses, the inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, his writing becomes meaningful for us when it is relevant to problems we face in our own lives, and literature is useful when it helps us solve problems of adaptation and change, such as confronting and interrogating implicit privilege as patriarchy and racism. What else is literature for? Purge it of its power to disturb, incite, and provoke, and it becomes meaningless and worthless.
The tragic flaw of Lovecraft is also that of our civilization; a blindness to our own privilege and a failure to embrace our monstrosity and otherness. Such lines of fracture can be read in our borders with their concentration camps of migrants and our prisons whose purpose is the re-enslavement of Black people as contract forced labor, and in our democracy which has been infiltrated and subverted by fascists and transformed into a carceral state of imperial force and control.
We must claim our monstrosity, and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
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!”
Here I think of our monstrosity in terms of the classic allegorical novel of America as a family with the dark purpose of breeding its own carnival freak show, Geek Love by Katherine Dunn.
Any serious scholarship of Lovecraft begins with Michel Houellebecq’s stunning debut and manifesto, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, whose chapter titles suggest the ars poetica of Lovecraft; “Attack the story like a radiant suicide, utter the great NO to life without weakness. Then you will see a magnificent cathedral, and your senses, vectors of unutterable derangement, will map out an integral delirium that will be lost in the unnamable architecture of time”.
Next comes the definitive biography I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Volumes 1 & 2, by S.T. Joshi, Joshi’s An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, and the volumes he edited in the Black Wings series of Lovecraftian horror anthologies. Finally there is Thomas Ligotti’s manifesto The Conspiracy against the Human Race, and his darkly luminous fictions.
Why is Lovecraft relevant to us now?
H.P. Lovecraft investigates the failure of our civilization to protect us from our animal nature, the shadow which grants us depth and limitless passion; the purpose of our invention of civilization according to Camille Paglia’s magisterial Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.
His writing is filled with images and themes which have been misread as racist, but his intent is the reverse; to name and disempower the forces which destroyed civilization in World War One as fear of otherness, exactly as did his model T.S. Eliot. Together with Vladimir Nabokov, they are the greatest, and perhaps the last, of our true conservatives.
But this, too, is ambiguous, for he is equally a revolutionary; Lovecraft’s vision of Western civilization is that of a colony of ants mining the waning power of a dead god’s carcass, a horror without purpose. He shares the critique of Idealism with Eliot, Nabokov, and especially Thomas Mann in Death in Venice, but also of traditional society as structural and systemic tyranny and authoritarian force and control with his fellow Absurdists and Surrealists, to some degree of normality as a basis of the power of church and state with de Sade as a literary provocateur and the valorization of transgression as liberation from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, and above all of formal power itself with the great visionary for whom he was a direct model with Genet and Bataille, William S. Burroughs.
Burroughs’ conspiracy of Venusian insects to conquer humankind through drug addiction as a metaphor of capitalism, summarized in his formulation of Marxism as The Algebra of Need, is an appropriation of Lovecraft. The master and his disciple were also both serious scholars of the occult obsessed with dark magic, who saw in mysticism a tradition of counterculture and dissent, as with the martyrdom of the Templars and Jacques DeMolay. As magicians and scholars of the occult there is a direct line of transmission and successorship from medieval ceremonial magic and Aleister Crowley to Lovecraft to Burroughs.
Anyone who has read my literary criticism or my political commentary will be aware that I despise and abjure fascism above all else. Why, then, do I love and admire conservative authors as a treasure, and acclaim any quixotic defense of Idealism against the onslaught of atavistic barbarism and dehumanized modernity?
Let me clarify; fascism is an intrusive force of destruction and no part of the Western Civilization which I champion, born as self-criticism in the Forum of Athens. Conservatism in America or indeed any free nation founded on the values of the Enlightenment begins with a free society of equals, a secular state, objective and testable truth, and a system of justice which is impartial to class, race, or gender, founded on the Rights of Man, scientific rationalism, and Humanism.
Any philosophy of totalitarian authority which centralizes power to a state of force and control, either theocratic, monarchist-aristocratic, communist, or fascist, is anathema to myself and to democracy and freedom. I am an American and a bearer of the Torch of Liberty. This is why I am on the side of rebellion, transgression, revolution, anarchy, chaos, and the frightening of the horses.
Regarding the themes of existential dread of otherness and the terror of alien civilizations, of being overrun by a zombie apocalypse of mindless cannibal brutes which has always been a metaphor of nonwhite immigration, H.P. Lovecraft explored this territory of fear as a cause of the collapse of our civilization. He interrogates rather than valorizes the causes of monarchy and fascism as forms of colonial imperialism.
Lovecraft asked a simple question; what happens to humankind and to human being, meaning, and value without Freudian control of our animal instinctive nature? Throughout his works he recapitulates and extends Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis and interrogation of Nietzsche in The Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist critique of state power based on a legal reformulation of the Doctrine of Original Sin; that without the restraining force of law man devolves into a subhuman condition and the most ruthless and amoral wins and becomes king, originally formulated to limit the divine right of kings and crucial to the Enlightenment project and the birth of modern secular democracy.
Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s savage morality play which examines concepts of state power, justice, and the theology of the depravity of man on which our legal system is founded, is luminous with Kafka-esque Absurdism and Freudian horror.
Here are Lovecraft’s primary sources and references; grimoires of magic, Shakespeare and classical Greek theatre which are common sources, Nietzsche, and Freud. What he did with them, however, was utterly unique and a luminous work of genius which interrogated the failure and collapse of our civilization in World War One from its internal contradictions and forged from his vision an ars poetica of Absurdist-Surrealist Nihilism which prefigured Existentialism.
This line of transmission originates with Dostoevsky and Gogol, was codified by Kafka, and finds realization in Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Kobo Abe, and Thomas Ligotti as Absurdist Nihilism and in William S. Burroughs, Jorge Borges, Philip K. Dick, Haruki Murakami, Andre Breton, Philip Lamantia, Allen Ginsburg, Jonathan Carroll, Jeff Vander Meer, and others as Surrealism.
It is his Surrealism for which I love him; Lovecraft’s principal stories form an
Initiation cycle of Jungian shadow work and the confrontation with ones own darkness as the Other in a metamorphosis of Orphic descent like Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, or in Augustinian exaltation like Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue, culminating in his reimagination of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, William S. Burrough’s model for his own final masterwork The Western Lands.
Fellow Surrealist Vladimir Nabokov articulated the principles of poetic vision and dreams as transcendent imaginal journeys through time and other dimensions to seize control of our own evolution in his great novel Ada, Jung models them in the Red Book, and Philip K. Dick was consumed by them, but Surrealism as a transhumanist project to become a god or to unite with the Infinite draws on myriads of esoteric, mythic, occult, and mystery traditions, many of which inform Lovecraft’s work. Like Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Lovecraft can be read as a summa theologica and codex of the whole Western mystery tradition.
Like his models and sources, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, Gogol’s Dead Souls, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and those for whom he became a model and reference in turn, Jung, Nabokov, Burroughs, Lamantia, and Philip K. Dick, and aligned with the works of Akutagawa in Kappa, Leonora Carrington, Djuna Barnes, and Jerzy Kosinski in The Painted Bird, the works of Lovecraft are also a therapy journal which documents his struggles with madness.
Like Baudelaire he realizes the world is mad; but he is also mad, and his great works chart the course of his degeneration and unmooring from consensus reality which was also a liberation of the spirit and of the imagination, a madness and rapture which transformed him into an angelic figure, combining in one being illumination and darkness, depravity and exaltation.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As a figure of Orpheus and Milton’s Rebel Angel Lovecraft struggled to escape the limits of the human and the legacies of his history, his madness a consequence of unresolved internal conflicts and the massive trauma of being an emotionally abandoned child whose parents both died of madness in an asylum, a madness which he shared and feared he could not escape, which made strange his vision as a unique genius but also marked him with a sign of otherness, robbed him of self control and reason at times and crippled his ability to bond or even socialize in person with others, making him a reclusive hermit without sexual interest of any kind.
Lovecraft bore the wound of the Fisher King in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; he married at age 34 having never even kissed anyone before, and his wife remarked that she had to initiate sex as he was uninterested; the failure of their marriage is unmysterious in this light. This and lack of interest in eating which may have been attempts to starve himself to death and resulted in his gauntness make me suspect that he was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, who hated his body and feared his desires. He may also have been held prisoner in isolation during his formative years, under the strict regime of his insane mother and female guardians, and the tortures he survived are described in symbolic and allegorical form in his works.
Here is a great secret of the mechanism of unequal power as epigenetic and multigenerational trauma and internalized oppression; the son is shaped and deployed as the vengeance of the mother, and the victim by the abuser who is a tyrant and also a survivor of powerlessness and victimhood, and so the system of oppression perpetuates itself. Patriarchy and racism are persistent because they create some of us as monsters with which to subjugate the rest of us.
Lovecraft suffered from what I call Dr Moreau syndrome, fear of devolution to an animal state; also of ones own animal nature, like the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow and could not and which William S. Burroughs gloried in being possessed by, avatar of a god of darkness and nightmares which he claimed as the successor of Nietzsche and shared with me as a boy through his bizarre and unique storytelling rituals, drawn from diverse sources including Crowley, Lovecraft, and his friend Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche.
This fear of degeneration and loss of humanity coupled with the xenophobic fear of being overwhelmed by representations of parental authority as alien outsiders are compounded in the leitmotif of ancient and superior prehuman civilization which renders our own insignificant, pathetic, and meaningless, and robs us of culture as a primary control mechanism of our id or shadow self. Hence the existential horror of the Western scholar confronted by elder and superior alien civilizations such as Eqypt, as in the Randolph Carter stories which were brilliantly reimagined in The Mummy films starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. In the mythology of Lovecraft, the Other is feared because it is superior and uncontrollable, not because it is despised as inferior, and this too is a crucial difference between Lovecraft and fascism as identitarian nationalist politics. The fascination with Egyptian mythology is an element of Surrealism in general as well as with Lovecraft and Burroughs as Surrealists, especially in the poetry of its great visionary Philip Lamantia.
As regards his style; Lovecraft extends Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and as the direct model of Burroughs reimagines the nihilism and transgressive eroticism of Georges Bataille as Surrealism harnessed to the project of Romantic Idealism; to paraphrase the words of Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, to break through the mask of our material existence and seize the Reality it conceals. That the quest of Ahab was also his is quite evident; “to the end I shall grapple with thee, from Hell’s heart I strike at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee” as Ahab declaims to the White Whale, figure of authoritarian tyranny who stands in for God and for his abusers. Whether he was able through his stories to leave us a map of the journey to the unknowns which lie beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden is another matter, proven only in the doing.
As to the stylistics of his rhetoric and ars poetica, Lovecraft has lost his adjectives, which are running amok and taunting their substantives. His howls of desolation are a cause of great merriment among the several grammars he employs, and this is the only thing on which they are in agreement.
His words are formed of scrabble pieces, randomized by being shaken in a dice cup in a game against the gods of madness and the ravening dark, the future of our emerging humanity wagered against the barbarism of our past.
What can be saved, and what dreamed anew? For the stately pleasure dome of Xanadu is once again revealed as an illusion, a palace of memories and lies which in their dance of chaos cannot be limited by their classification and taxonomies of value, but frangible and hollow do betray us.
Mirrors and false images which capture, distort, and falsify us, a wilderness of lost meanings which steal our souls, sound and fury signifying nothing but which seizes and shakes us with the terror of our nothingness like a rag doll in a lion’s mouth, and the signifying monkey who lives at the Buddha’s foot to denote the inherent animal nature of all humankind as a theriomorphic representation has harnessed and is riding him like a pony.
Sometimes our demons must be let out to dance.
What can we learn from Lovecraft now?
One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre or a Lovecraftian one, referential to classical sources which include Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign and hostile to humanity, rests with our solution to the paradox of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils? I have come to believe that both are true at once, as Korzybski taught in his General Semantics.
Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen, of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith as did T.S. Eliot. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bears the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation. Hope in this context is subjugation to authority.
The terror of our nothingness, meaninglessness, and powerlessness in a hostile universe wherein the gods are mad and depraved monsters, a universe empty of imposed meaning or value, may also become the joy of total freedom, autonomy, authenticity, self-ownership and self-creation, as it was for Sartre; a universe in which the mould of man is broken and we are utterly without authorized identities.
Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop Lightningbolt Awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”
It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.
Now imagine humanity after civilization destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars as we are once again in the process of doing in the ongoing Third World War facing that same awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country, exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one but herself.
Our responses to this awakening to possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.
Everyone possesses and uses both forces just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. 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, or ruptures to our prochronism, the history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our 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 both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their interdependence. And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and history. Much of our sorrows originate in the conflicts between the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, nature and nurture, the historical and social informing, motivating, and shaping forces of identity.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.
Is Lovecraft such a figure of heroic struggle against authority, like Icarus, Milton’s Rebel Angel, or Victor Frankenstein, fallen but great, a tragic bearer of the Torch of Liberty?
Great authors are a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, which like the fragmented images of the Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror in Anderson’s Snow Queen reflect and reveal aspects of ourselves and come alive in their readers; which Lovecraft shall I describe?
The poet of Chaos whom I adore, of madness and the existential terror of our nothingness in a universe of dethroned authority, a visionary and tragic hero?
The survivor of abandonment and abuse who forged beauty from their trauma, a flawed and very human man whose fear of otherness was expressed in tragically disfigured allegories of dysmorphia, dehumanization, and degradation which are horrifically filled with racist figures and images and can be read as illuminating case studies of fear and of the dyadic origins of evil in overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized by authority in service to power and the systemic inequalities of power and privilege in hierarchies of elite belonging and otherness?
Lovecraft understood the principle of dancing ones demons; the monstrous figures he describes as shuggoths can be read as racist metaphors, but are also unflinching descriptions of actual childhood night terrors, manifestations of sexual abuse, which invaded his dreams and his flesh to “tickle” him awake. It is this relentless engagement with his fear and darkness, with the legacies of his victimization, this willingness to see the abominable and not look away, and to witness the truth as an author, like Camus to refuse to submit, and above all to embrace his own monstrosity, which makes him useful to us and places his work among the literature of madness and therapy journals, with Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Leonora Carrington, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Jerzy Kosinski, Philip K. Dick, and Kathy Acker. Foucault called this truth telling, and this parrhesia as a sacred calling to pursue the truth as a witness of history lies at the heart of Lovecraft’s bizarre invented mythos.
How does this help us forge our future as antifascists and antiracists, citizens of a free society of equals and bearers of the Torch of Liberty?
We must speak directly to that fear which is the origin of evil; to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, and we do this best by bearing sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others. In the words of Karl Popper; “No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not wish to adopt a rational attitude.” Let us embrace instead the irrational, our Shakespearean taxonomies of passion as motive forces, of rapture and terror, in the great work of reimagination and transformation of humankind and our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
We may say of Lovecraft what is said of Vincent Van Gogh in Doctor Who; “He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of the world; no one had ever done it before, perhaps no one will ever do it again. To my mind, that strange, wild man was not only among the world’s greatest artists, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.”
What is greatness? What does it mean to be a great author or creative genius of any kind, a great human being, in this or any time?
For myself, greatness does not require us to overcome the limits of our histories, which possess and inhabit us like the Toad of Nietzsche and Burroughs, only to engage the legacies of our history and the systems of oppression which entangle us in authentic struggle. Like Jacob wrestling the angel, everything in life is more powerful than we are; victory lies not in defeating the forces which shape us, but in refusal to submit to them, and in reaching beyond our limits. And in this Lovecraft emerges as a tragic hero, who can teach us how to struggle with our own darkness in our journey toward becoming human.
From the darkness of the unknown and the Forbidden, our demons call to us with siren songs which echo and thunder among limitless chasms of our possibilities, and whisper secrets in our dreams; and they say, Come dance with us.
The Psychopathic God, Robert G.L. Waite (the book that fixed me on the origins of evil as my field of study, through the lens of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy)
Conversing Around Lovecraft: Leslie S. Klinger and Neil Gaiman
(yes, the fact that Gaiman sexually enslaved a homeless fan actually makes him a better authority on the subject, for he speaks from within its darkness)
The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic, Peter Levenda (author of the 1977 Necronomicon writing as Simon, from the perspective of a rogue Greek Orthodox priest)
There are some things which must never be forgotten, lest they be repeated, and five years ago today America came perilously close to re-enacting the Holocaust.
Trump did not conceal it; he campaigned on it. And won. This is the central truth with which we must grapple, we Americans, we human beings, and we Democrats in crafting a vision of our future that can prevail in our elections. I personally have a Plan 2028; does the Democratic Party? Do all who Resist fascist tyranny and terror in the cause of democracy and our universal human rights throughout the world?
While there are many policies on which I disagree with the collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party, including the fact that not only have we failed to abolish police, prisons, and the apparatus of the carceral state, we still allow police to carry guns with which to murder nonwhite people with impunity, nor have we stripped the legislators and other conspirators of the January 6 Insurrection of their citizenship and exiled them, neither have we united in Boycott, Sanction, and Divestiture of Israel in aid of the liberation of Palestine nor of China in aid of the independence of Hong Kong and an end to the Occupation of Tibet and genocide in Xinjiang, nor lifted sanctions against Cuba, nor stood in solidarity with myriads of independence movements throughout the world unless there was profit in it for the hegemonic elite class which owns our state, nor sent to the aid of Ukraine everything we can in her historic fight as the main theatre of World War Three and the gates of Europe, among many other issues of our global imperial dominion; actually I have quite a long list of failures of vision and will on the part of our government and our nation, but none of this obscures a simple fact that what is at stake in America and the world today and in our time is a choice between democracy and fascist tyranny.
Trump meets with Putin, wishing to trade him Alaska for some little blonde children to perv, his partner in human trafficking Epstein no longer being available and the countless stolen migrant children disappeared into what hell we know not of being insufficiently mirror images of his daughter for his vile purposes, and now meets with Zelensky to perpetrate the Ritual of Abasement upon Ukraine, this last being stopped only by the European Alliance. Standing with Zelensky and European Unity and Solidarity against the Axis of Fascist Tyranny led by Putin and his star agent Trump were United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, President of the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.
Trump squealed like a piggy in terror when Europe defied him, as Ursula drove him back with her whip and the others took turns mocking him with clever jibes, but he also rolled over and showed his belly to his puppetmaster Vladimir whenever the Russian tyrant signaled for obeisance.
In all the past days were a fine time for the Trump show and his circus of freaks and treasonous criminals, but gladly not in the way Trump intended. He looked weak, and he looked ridiculous.
Mockery too is Resistance, and Europeans are masters of the art.
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again.
And Trump’s timing of this photo op spectacle with the five year anniversary of a particularly horrific example of his crimes against humanity make the meaning and design of himself, his regime, and his plans for the subversion of democracy and the fall of civilization to an age of tyrants incontestably clear.
As I wrote in my post of August 18 2020, Who Begins By Building Walls Ends With Gas Chambers: Why We Must Defeat Trump’s Re-Election; Today saw two important events relevant to the 2020 Presidential election campaign other than the Democratic convention; the release of a report confirming Russian espionage in the Stolen Election of 2016, and the failure of Trump’s vote suppression attempt to shut down the United States Postal Service. I had originally planned to write about the latter today, but public revilement and lawsuits have already forced Trump to abandon his vote suppression plans for the post office; I was thinking of this listening to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorse Bernie when I noticed a story which has escaped national attention, and it focused my awareness on what is at stake.
I believe AOC is the President we deserve, and I am declaring for her in 2024 tonight, but it is imperative that we elect any placeholder Democratic government we can now, for America and global democracy may not survive another four years of Trump and his Fourth Reich of foreign spies, white supremacist terrorists, and Gideonite patriarchs of sexual terror.
The Stolen Election of 2016 left the former KGB’s most successful infiltration, subversion, and influence agent in charge of America, which he has been monkey wrenching since. History will always remember Trump as the traitor and foreign saboteur who is responsible for the end of America’s hegemony of power and privilege and the fall of America as the primary guarantor of democracy and universal human rights in the world.
America has drawn a line in the sand to weaponize disparity of wealth and create masses of exploitable invisible labor, modeled on the Bantustan system of Apartheid in South Africa which in full circle was modeled both on America’s Indian Reservation system and the camp system of the Nazis who designed their own system for genocide of the Jews, no real surprise here, on our own nation’s genocide of the Native Anmerican peoples, and have been using ICE and the Border Patrol to abduct migrant laborers into concentration camps in a campaign of dehumanization and crimes against humanity. Migrant labor is slave labor; and it has become more horrific still with the advent of a new instrument of state terror; gas chambers.
Concentration camps, secret prisons, child abduction, a federal occupation force of secret police, vote suppression, paramilitary units of white supremacist terror, pervasive and endemic surveillance and state disinformation and propaganda, assaults on equality, truth, justice, liberty, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil; Republicans have much to answer for.
And of course, who begins by building walls ends with gas chambers.
As Dave Lindorf writes in Counterpunch; “As the first and hopefully only presidential term of Donald Trump nears its November 3 moment of truth, the accusations of fascist or even Nazi tendencies and actions by him and his administration have multiplied.
But this latest one I’m calling out is particularly horrific: The use of a powerful “for industrial use only” disinfectant called HDQ Neutral on captive immigrants at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, a Trump administration-funded for-profit detention center outside of Los Angeles, CA.
According to a report in the Independent, a UK newspaper, the powerful toxic ammonia-based chemical made by Spartan Chemical Co. is being sprayed in the occupied detention facility despite company warnings on the label that it only be used near people outdoors, not in confined spaces. Worse yet, there are allegations from detainees that the chemical is being sprayed directly on them, though the company’s label warns that exposure to the eyes can cause “permanent eye damage” while inhaling it can cause lung damage , breathing difficulty and asthma.
The Nazi connection? As Charles Vidich, author of a powerful and timely new book due out later this year on the history of quarantines in the US, dating back to the earliest days of the Colonies in the 1600s down to the present (Germs at Bay, Praeger), notes, Zyklon B, the extermination gas of choice of Hitler’s Third Reich for its extermination camps, was actually a powerful cyanide-based insecticide invented during the late 19th Century. It was for decades, well into the early 20th century, used to fumigate ships engaged in international trade in order to kill rats, mice, fleas and other vermin. The Nazis adopted a variant of the product to eliminate Jews, Gypsies, Communists, people with deformities or retardation and other “undesirables” during the war years.
Now we have the administration of Donald Trump, whose own family had a history of Nazi sympathies and who himself has referred to Nazi demonstrators in the US as “good people,” similarly using an insecticide/disinfectant that is highly toxic and life-threatening on detained immigrants awaiting deportation.
Investigations by Reuters an organization called the Shut Down Adelanto Coalition and a not-for-profit legal organization called Earthjustice, have learned that immigrants locked indoors in detention at Adelanto have been getting sprayed “as often as every 15-30 minutes,” sometimes directly at them, with a chemical that the company says should only be used outdoors or in well-ventilated areas. They are reporting rashes, nosebleeds, nausea, headaches and breathing difficulties among other symptoms following the spraying.
I must point out that when I first learned about the vicious way African slaves were treated in the colonies and later in the United States by their owners, it struck me, even as a youngster, that it was strangely worse than these white owners treated their own beasts of burden. I wondered at that, only coming to understand later as I got older, that the abuse of slaves — the whippings, the starving, the over-working, etc. — was a control mechanism, a dehumanization process of both owner and slave that wasn’t necessary in dealing with horses or cattle. I recognize that the same analysis applies to the way ICE and its detention center contract employees cruelly abuse their immigrant captives.
HDQ Neutral thankfully isn’t as toxic as the Zyklon B gas used by Nazi death squads at the German extermination camps, but what is being done is still a grotesque chemical assault on America’s “undesirables,” differing from the Nazi efforts against their human victims only in degree. The inhumanity of the overlords administering this toxin to their captive victims is little different from that which was punished, often with death sentences, in the Nuremberg Trials that followed World War II.
One can only hope that when this Trumpian nightmare is over in the US, Donald Trump and his criminal henchmen in the Homeland Security Department will be similarly hauled before a court to face crimes against humanity charges for their abuse of immigrants, including young children, as well as for their other grotesque crimes.”
Zelensky and his posse
Four key takeaways from Trump’s White House summit on Ukraine
Let us celebrate and amplify the cause of all black cats, figures of historically marginalized others and all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, with whom I, as the founder of Lilac City Antifa and member of the Resistance founded in Paris 1940 as sworn to its Oath by the great Jean Genet in Beirut 1982, and my friends and allies in the cause of liberation place our lives in the balance.
A whole secret history of resistance and revolutionary struggle lies here written in the figure of the Black Cat, whose genealogy as a symbol and legacy of resilience and empowerment I outline in brief here, as a heritage we may all claim.
Since the dawn of our civilization black cats have held a special place in our mythologies as figures and symbols of unconquerable power beyond the reach of kings and priests to subjugate, repress, and control, or indeed any who would enslave us and steal our souls; so also they have symbolized forces of nature, and as chthonic figures of the realm of shadows which includes death and dreams. Servants of Hecate, whose Festival of Torches or Hecatean Ides was celebrated August 13-15 by the Roman Empire in connection with her role as co ruler of the Underworld with Peresephone, and also servants of Freya who pulled her chariot through the nights of the Wild Hunt, and like all cats sharing in the liminal powers of the Egyptian dual aspected goddess Maat the nurturing mother and Sekhmet the protective lioness.
We have today the comic and film mythology of Catwoman, whose autonomy and powers of resurrection are a mirror reverse image of the traditional evil witch in Christian theocratic patriarchy, who can transform into a black cat or leonine battle form. Sadly we have yet to be offered a film in which Catwoman can change into a lioness battle form, nor possesses her magical powers as a goddess of death.
Black cats have symbolized freedom since they were chosen by Le Chat Noir, the original Kropotkin-Bakunin anarchist clandestine rendevous spot and the first cabaret, which opened in Paris in 1881, depicted in the iconic Théophile Steinlen poster of 1896. This was a decade since the glory days of an ancestor of mine, called The Red Queen after the Alice in Wonderland character for her signature means of assassination, was defending the barricades during the Paris Commune.
As I wrote in my post of March 18 2024 Anniversary of the Founding of the Paris Commune; We celebrate today the one hundred fifty third anniversary of the founding of the Paris Commune, a glorious legacy of resistance in which all humankind shares. It conjures for me visions of the Bacchantes, a society of women revolutionaries who printed tickets with an image of the god of ecstasy and poetic vision on one side and the address of an enemy of the people on the other, bearing the legend “good for burning”. Distribution of the lottery tickets was through street runners as if it were any other black market gambling ring, something of no real interest to the police; teams bearing axes and torches would converge on the target as a flash mob.
As I told my nieces when Trump was elected; girls, all you need is the home address of the enemy, an ax, and a posse of wild girls.
An ancestor of mine was one of them, called the Red Queen in reference to the character in Alice in Wonderland due to her signature method of assassination, a friend of figures of the Commune including Karl Marx, Gustave Courbet, Arthur Rimbaud, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and a comrade of Louise Michel; she was among the members of the Garde Militaire of the Commune who later immigrated to San Francisco as an intact unit, with their banners and uniforms. The secret society of revolutionaries descended from the original Garde Militaire remains among the most influential of global covert military organizations independent from any nation, though clearly not unique in this.
I imagine her as a combination of Helena Bonham Carter’s Eudoria Holmes in Enola Holmes, which depicts the key figures of Suffragette history Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Sylvia, Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns.
When you dream of ur-sources of historical identity and archetypal figures who can act as guardians and guides and provide spaces to grow into, dream big.
Sustained and relentless waves of liberation actions and revolutionary struggle continue to hammer the world’s tyrannies of authoritarian force and control and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil with massive protests and electoral activism, and as we did in the Autonomous Zones of Seattle, Portland, and New York and hundreds more throughout the world, we will emerge victorious from the fight against unequal power and oppression because whosoever refuses to submit to force and defies authority and those who would enslave us becomes Unconquered and free. Each of us is a Living Autonomous Zone, ungovernable as the tide, uncontrollable as the wind; we are wild things, who serve no masters.
The Black Flag flies from the barricades in al Quds-Jerusalem, Moscow, Hong Kong, Atlanta, and dozens of other cities in every continent of earth, and its primary meaning has not changed since its use by the First International and by Louise Michel, veteran of the Paris Commune, who first flew it as an anarchist banner when she led the Paris worker’s revolt of March 9 1883; freedom versus tyranny, refusal to submit to authority, the abolition of state terror, surveillance, and control, resistance to nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and abandonment of fear as the basis of human exchange and the social use of force as a principle of human organization.
With this bold signal the people declare: we shall be ruled by none.
Vive la Commune!
When the Garde Militaire of the Paris Commune came to America with its flags and uniforms as a military society of the Internationale, the Black Cat as a recognition sign of liberation struggle came with it. Passed down along generations of international revolutionaries from its founders as a secret military society, who dispersed it everywhere while gathering in and lending aid and solidarity of action to the remnants of the Abolitionists, the Suffragettes, the Russian and other Revolutions, and especially the anarchist communes of the Seattle coast from which the labor union movement was born in America, it became the Sabotage Cat of the IWW with its electric spiky fur, also called the Wildcat and the origin of the term Wildcat Strike which harkens back to the Bacchantes of the Paris Commune.
As successors and inheritors of these original organizations of liberation struggle became Antifascists and Resistance cadre, first in the People’s Militia founded in 1921 in Italy to oppose Mussolini, then Antifaschistische Aktion founded in 1932 in Germany, the International Brigades of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, and finally in the French Resistance of World War Two, to name four major sources which we claim as forebears, symbols and ideologies of resistance and revolution such as the Black Cat became pervasive and were carried forward to the next great movement of liberation struggle, the Black Panthers.
Here I wish to note that among the vast and rich history of Black resistance and liberation struggle, against both slavery and colonialism, the Pan-African Leopard Society brotherhood of warriors provided a ready and wholly African model and context both for the Black Panthers and the mythology of the comic and film hero Black Panther.
As written by Billie Anania in Hyperallergic, in an article entitled How Black Cats Went From Bad Luck to Symbols of Defiance: Icons like the Black Panther Party logo, the “Sabo-Tabby,” and innumerable pieces of protest art go against the traditional Western taboo around the felines; “The superstition associating black cats with bad luck is rooted in the European fear of darkness. In Celtic mythology, the Cat Sìth stole the souls of the recently deceased. During the Middle Ages, Devil-fearing Christians killed black cats because of their perceived proximity to the underworld. This fear even carried over to the Salem Witch Trials, when ownership of a black cat could be cited in charges of witchcraft. While pop culture still preserves this troubled legacy, underground artists have revived an alternative tradition that dates back thousands of years.
The pantheon of Ancient Egypt included Bastet, the goddess of domesticity and fertility who took the form of a black cat. Generations of Egyptian artists portrayed Bastet differently as her mythos evolved, to the point that crimes against cats were punishable by death. Some representations of black cats have been more in this vein, against the Western taboo that they are ominous or sinister.
Feline disobedience works against the Western notion that nature serves humanity, and therefore disrupts a sense of order. The Industrial Workers of the World use a black cat (“Sab-Kitty” or “Sabo-Tabby”) as their icon for sabotage. Similarly, the Black Panthers named their party after an animal that only attacks when provoked.
Why do analyses of black cat folklore avoid this connection? Perhaps it’s because the IWW and the Black Panthers are still considered unsavory by those above a certain tax bracket. In most political contexts, black cats are silent agitators advocating for redistribution of wealth or even the overthrow of the government. As the first industrial labor union to recruit women and BIPOC, the IWW (or Wobblies) challenged the tactics of more conservative unions like the American Federation of Labor. Socialist writer Ralph Chaplin created the original Sabo-Tabby at the apex of the union’s radicalism, when it was hated by predatory capitalists and targeted for police suppression and surveillance. Over time, the symbol foreshadowed bad luck for bosses but liberation for workers, and artists adapted its likeness for political cartoons and propaganda to suit localized actions.
The Black Panther logo was originally drafted in 1966 by Dorothy Zellner and Ruth Howard at the request of Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael) to represent the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. The symbol evolved after the Party for Self-Defense incorporated in Oakland. Local artist Lisa Lyons popularized alternative designs of the panther on black-and-white flyers for rallies and marches, particularly for the freeing of Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver’s presidential campaign. Lyons helped transform the panther into a symbol of beauty and honor. One poster declares: “An attack against one is an attack against all. The slaughter of Black people must be stopped! By any means necessary!”
Although the Wobblies and Panthers both suffered sabotage by the US government, their ideologies have inspired insurrection among anarchists and environmentalists worldwide, and their legacies continue in the fights for labor reform and prison abolition. In the last month, stunning copyright-free tributes have emerged on social media. A recent illustration by Brazilian artist Gabriel Borjoize shows a black cat with the Gadsden rattlesnake — a libertarian symbol based on the American Revolution’s “Don’t Tread on Me” flag — between its teeth. This scene feels evergreen in light of anti-lockdown protests as well as the ongoing right-wing push for smaller government and reduced social welfare spending (outside of police and the military, of course). Another illustration by Canadian artist Michael DeForge asserts, “Cops Aren’t Workers, No Cops in Labour,” with a giant Sabo-Tabby chomping on a cop car. It remains to be seen whether these black cats are a sign of progress, or of a longer battle on the horizon.”
Myth, history, identity, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human. How can the idea of the Black Cat help us become who we wish to be, to discover and perform those truths written in our flesh?
Our history as a series of seizures of power in liberation struggle offers us two vivid and immediate role models and figures of the Black Cat as outsider and champion of outsiders; Catwoman and Black Panther.
Adopt a black cat, lovers of liberty!
Let us run amok and be ungovernable.
The Syracusan Bride leading Wild Animals in Procession to the Temple of Diana by Lord Frederick Leighton (depicts the Ides of Hecate festival of August 13-15)
Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther
Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns
FB Group For the Love of Black Cats Appreciation Day
Recent days have seen the return of my sister’s scented products shop online, and our celebration of resilience and survival as a triumph of will and vision.
Fragrance can be an art which brings Beauty to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world. I like fragrance because it asks nothing of us other than breath to behold and live its conjured dreams, being a thing of the Invisible and unbound from of the limits of form. So also may it take us up into the gaps as it ascends to the heavens, opening passages to the Infinite as vision, exaltation. and rapture.
Here is her original post and link to her store:
“I’ve been working on my fragrance website. It’s not finished but I’ve got a rough draft of my note list page.”
Here follows our conversation in the comments and my interrogation of the idea and role of Bay Rum fragrances in the special category of aftershaves which I call The Arming of Achilles in my page on Fragrantica.
Myself writing to my sister in the comments: Your Pirates Bay sounds like the aftershave I used to buy, maybe like C.O. Bigelow. Of this I have curious thoughts; what if you deconstructed the components of exquisite liquors, and built out from this scaffold? Fine rum can have so many nuances, and its what Cavendish process tobaccos are cured in. So they pair nicely. Lots of information online from hobby tobacconists who make their own, as a cottage industry. I’ll put together a precis for you on this.
Erin Lale: cool, I’d love to see your list. Drink based fragrances are part of the gourmand trend so there are actually a number of them out there. Just today as I made myself a Black Aviator I was thinking it would make a great fragrance. The cocktail notes are black cherry juice (or black cherry electrolyte drink, which is what was in mine), creme de violette, and a splash of lemon juice.
Oh, wasn’t there a thing you used to buy that you wanted me to try to replicate? I just now remembered, seeing your mention of something you used to use.
My reply to her: I’m not sure what the name was or who made it, but I used it as an aftershave in my twenties. It had a gold foil stamped label with a very nice image of a sailboat, maybe originally etched art, in a glass bottle; I may have found it in Cuba at a Congress of the Joint Revolutionary Council, which included representatives from just about every such organization globally and was led personally by Raul Castro, because someone told me Hemingway used to wear it. If it was made in Cuba, probably as a labour of love in someone’s home shop and sold by appointment only, that explains why I can’t find an image of the bottle online or any references to it. This would have been between the liberation struggles in Central America which for myself began in the wake of the 1982 Siege of Beirut, and the 1988 Battle of Cuito Cuanavale which began the liberation of South Africa from Apartheid, a period of my life when I often worked with Cuban international volunteers.
What I’d like from a fragrance with which to launch the day is something to wear while defending the Bridge at San Luis Rey; “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
There is a truth to perform in being alive, in never staying down and refusal to submit regardless of the cost and becoming Unconquered, in living with grandeur as Jean Genet once advised me to do, in embracing both the terror of our nothingness and the joy of total freedom which balances it; for each moment of our lives is a victory no matter the horrors that may come with it, the grief and loneliness of our disconnectedness, the pain and flaws of our humanity which like sacred wounds open us to the pain of others as compassion.
Each day is a Last Stand, as I have now made more times than I can remember, as I did in recent years at Mariupol in Ukraine, Panjshir in Afghanistan after the Fall of Kabul, throughout Palestine and in the Red Sea Campaign to counter blockade the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza where both Biden and Trump tried and failed to kill me in bombing our positions in Yemen. As I said to Genet when we met in Beirut, after my morning dash across a sniper alley to reach a marvelous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world, in reply to his asking me “I’m told you do this every morning, steal breakfast from death“; Such moments stolen from death are all we truly own, and which make us real.
I have lived for forty three years now in the places beyond all laws and all limits, where human being, meaning, and value are forged from nothing, in the unknown spaces marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human, where we can claw back something of our humanity from the darkness and make yet another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and I say to you that we must live our lives as if every day were a Last Stand. Live boldly, on your own terms and by your own rules, and love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner.
Live with grandeur, friends.
With all of this written into my flesh like a living brand, I find myself like Schopenhauer increasingly reliant in my sixth decade of life on Beauty to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
So I look herein to fragrance as a kind of Beauty which is unbound from the limits of form as conceptual art, in this case the Bay Rum shaving paraphernalia which I associate with starting the day.
Here follows an interrogation of existing aftershaves and scented instruments of personal beauty and the evocation of a liminal space in which to begin the day.
C.O. Bigelow no. 32 Bay Rum, which has the Bay leaf, clove and other pie spices balanced with pepper, and citrus with a gorgeous Bay or pimenta racemosa note is the nearest I’ve found to the aftershave of my dreams.
I like the idea of the Barbary Coast company- all natural ingredients, the Bay Rum is listed alcohol, glycerin, bay, cinnamon, clove, allspice, orange, vanilla, purified water; havent tried it yet.
Generally I like the Taylor of Old Bond Street products, and like all shaving products are designed to remain close to the skin rather than lure in passersby and to evanesce quickly rather than linger as a main fragrance through the day; but their Bay Rum is no longer a Dominican product and is sadly limp seeming now where it used to smell like something to wear during the Running of the Bulls. So began my search for the Bay Rum of my dreams, lost to history; when Taylor of Old Bond Street’s lost its mojo.
A Bay Rum should smell of daring, adventure, and the elegance of a stalking lion.
St Johns Bay Rum lands a punch like the old ToOBS, with a camphorous menthol underlying the composition; its supposed to tingle when you slap your face with it after shaving to signal disinfection. Rich, bold, deep spices of cloves and cinnamon are balanced with real West Indian Bay, and trailed by attendant shadows of camphor, eucalyptus, and a clean musk which deepens them.
The eucalyptus top note can be problematic; like the actual tree it smells like cat piss or astringent fougere depending, and it can smell like both. I’d choose other green or fresh notes for this balance in a formula; maybe something of the dark jungles that smells of voodoo and secrets.
If one were looking to the botanical diversity of the Caribbean, floral scents of ravishing plumeria and intoxicating jasmine abound, and I cannot imagine why no one has used this iconic pairing as the opening act of a luxury Bay Rum. Indigenous spices and herbs include nutmeg and cinnamon, mace, ginger, cocoa, cloves, turmeric, and of course bay leaves.
The chocolate note could be played up; my picks for best chocolate fragrances are Guerlain Fève Gourmande for a woman or Écrin de Fumée by Serge Lutens for a man. That last is among my favorites; what I would advise wearing to a first romantic encounter for its luxurious opulence and seductiveness. Its on both my favorites and Imaginal Calling Cards lists, but could also be listed under Dreams of Love, Acts of Desire or Ports of Call as it evokes the ravishing darkness of Mexican chocolate.
As a Gourmand fragrance one may consider the culinary arts of the region; here I am thinking of the signature Scotch Bonnet Pepper, both fruity and fiery, in Haitian epis, which also has the Djon Djon black mushroom with its deep, earthy flavor and used to colour black rice dishes, though I would leave out the smoked herring which confers to epis its remarkable stink; epis also has a spice component of which the thyme and cloves are better in a fragrance than the garlic. Cuban sauces balance citrus, savory, and earthy flavors; I find the counterpoint of bay with oregano, cumin, and cilantro interesting, and annatto is a signature facet of many dishes, peppery, nutty, and earthy.
Bentley For Men Intense offers a parfum version of Bay Rum, of complex and sophisticated nuances and classical structure. While the Bay Rum notes inscribe Bentley For Men Intense as a fragrance of this kind, the wood and leather smell exactly like the interior of a luxury classic car, just as intended. Restoring classic cars was a hobby of my partner Dolly’s father, and the scent is enveloping and wonderful, smelling of tailgate parties and family road trips. https://www.fragrantica.com/perfume/Bentley/Bentley-for-Men-Intense-17666.html
So completes my survey of existing Bay Rum fragrances, and I return now to my original suggestion of deconstructing the scent profile of rum as a model for a fine Bay Rum perfume.
Yes, drinking alcohol is haram under Islamic law, but nothing suggests we cannot smell it.
My sister makes fragrances using the enfleurage method of maceration in alcohol, so we use the target rum as the base and add things to it, and with time voila it is perfume.
Herein one intends to amplify, echo and reflect existing notes, and sometimes to create counterpoint and chiaroscuro with new notes which balance them.
Let us begin with the world’s finest luxury rum, Zacapa No. 23 Centenario. As described on the distiller’s site;
“Nose
Soft, sweet start with aromas of caramel, vanilla, cacao and butterscotch. Continued by sherried notes of caramelized roasted brazil nuts and toasted hazelnut, rounded out by toffee, banana and dried pineapple.
Taste
Complex, generous and full-bodied. Starting with a depth of dried fruit and apricot, building to savory oak, nutmeg, leather and tobacco with notes of coffee and vanilla, balanced with a spicy touch of cinnamon and ginger.
Finish
Intricate with honeyed butterscotch, spiced oak and dried fruit.”
Tasting notes in Digest Miami’s Worlds Best Rums are; “Balance of sweetness, fruit, spice and spirit. Long, smooth and sweet with dark cherry, chocolate, date, prune with sweet oak spices of clove, vanilla and cinnamon.”
The Luxury Editor describes it as; “Luxurious rum with notes of honeyed butterscotch, spiced oak, Christmas cake fruit, chocolate orange, roasted apricots, brown sugar, sweet tobacco, marzipan, and a faint waft of cigar smoke.”
As described on Bespoke Unit; “Ron Zacapa 23’s Nose
Notes: Forest honey, bitter chocolate, brown sugar
Nosefeel: Caramelised
The nose is immediately lured into a creamy sweet, caramelized sugar aroma. An abundance of sweetness is the first impression, slowly transforming into forest honey notes. Some nutty qualities start to emerge, whilst a charred, roasted hazelnut and some almonds add a layer of complexity.
Bitter walnuts are coated in rich bitter chocolate. To lighten the rather thick impression a bit, ethereal freshness and citrus zest make themselves noted. The combination almost reminds me of a mint chocolate chip cookie, that is drenched in dark brown golden syrup.
A gentle smokiness reveals hints of pipe tobacco, with a sprinkle of fresh mint leaves, basil, and thyme. Finally, it all comes back to a vanilla-like, caramel fudge, nutmeg, and mace expression, that perfectly sums the sweet, spicy, and caramelized signature of this solera rum.
It’s a very mellow bouquet with intense aromatics, an intriguing level of complexity, and medium-plus diversity.
Ron Zacapa 23’s Palate & Mouthfeel
Primary Tastes: Dried prune, golden syrup
Mouthfeel: Oily
Opening: Raisin, eucalyptus, wood cask
Heart: Licorice, golden syrup, vanilla
Finish: Long [bitter chocolate, mint, roasted walnut]
As the nose already indicated, the mouthfeel and palate are predominantly sweet and opulent. The rum feels thick, oily, mouth-coating, almost chewy in texture.
I sense dried fruits, mostly prunes, every now and then accompanied by a touch of charred nuts, which were also detectable in the olfactory analysis. Furthermore, that ethereal quality, which really elevates the experience by giving an extra layer of liveliness and freshness, makes a stellar comeback. It very much brings a eucalyptus note to the retronasal impression.
To further support these complex nuances, a sprig of mint is thrown in for good measure, and the side of the palate is tickled with a whiff of astringency. I get some wood spice and more of the dried fruit, sweet raisins that distinctively points towards Pedro Ximénez Sherry.
The lingering finish is carried by licorice, golden syrup, and sweet, luscious vanilla.
Hands down, the Ron Zacapa 23 is a cigar lover’s dream-come-true rum. Smoky, woody, lusciously sweet, velvety in texture, creamy in the finish. Me personally, I’d probably choose a Cameroon wrapped cigar.
A great example would be a Don Carlos from the Fuente family, using that distinct wrapper from Meerapfel in Cameroon. There you can also find an intriguing combination of sweetness, with just a hint of spice, further elevated by the characterful blend of the filler and binder tobaccos. “
So with Ron Zacapa 23 as a fragrance base I would add spices, beginning with star anise for the licorice though experimentation with absinthe may be interesting. My partner Dolly loves licorice, something I search for in fragrances with which to please her like the long lost icon Lolita Lempicka au Masculine. Basil, thyme, mace, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, ginger, and the finest vanilla one can source round out the spices. But there is a special herb, possibly both mint and eucalyptus, which gives it astringency without being camphoraceous.
Then there are the candied and dried fruits, fig and apricot which suggest simply adding drops of Amaretto liqueur which is processed from apricot. The dark fruits tie the spices together, like a candied fig and clove morsel. And tobacco, which here seems like a candied fruit as well and offers glimpses of honey and sherry.
Finally that dark bitter chocolate note remains; between Hershey’s Special Dark and Bittermens Xocolatl Mole bitters for rum cocktails.
Diplomático Reserva Exclusiva, a confection of licorice, toffee, and orange peel set in a vanilla goblet of luminous amber.
Bespoke Unit describes it as; “The bouquet is luscious, with bold tones of honey and chocolate, in addition to some brighter notes of citrus, particularly orange.
Robe: Rich mahogany/amber color
Nose: Distinct caramel, butterscotch, and orange
Palate: Velvety smooth, full-bodied texture with a slight spice and prominent notes of chocolate and candied fruits.”
Clement XO, a rum Agricole, with a silky balance of floral, tarragon-forward herbal, and dark dried fruit notes.
Rhum, Ron de Cuba, Eminente, Reserva 7 years old, described in The Luxury Editor as “notes of coffee, tobacco, dark chocolate, spices, cherry and florals abound to create a deep, rich flavour.”
As described on the Pleasure Wine website; “Tasting notes for the Eminente Ron de Cuba “Reserva” 7 YO
EYE:
The gold-colored robe of this Ron de Cuba “Eminente” 7 YO Reserva elegantly captures our gaze. Its amber tint, an evidence of careful aging, suggests a tasting session worthy of our expectations.
NOSE:
This rum unveils a harmonious bouquet. Subtle aromas of vanilla and caramel blend with woody wafts, foreshadowing a balanced sensory experience. Light notes of tropical fruits and honey add an exotic touch to this olfactory symphony.
MOUTH:
The “Eminente” 7 YO Reserva convinces us with its velvety smoothness. Sugarcane flavors marry nuances of candied fruits and nuts. The discreet presence of oak imparts subtle complexity, while spicy notes punctuate this tasting with elegance.
In short: Its enticing visual aspect, balanced nose, and smooth palate make the Eminente Reserva 7 YO an accessible option for Cuban rum enthusiasts. With its 7-year aging, it has reached an ideal maturity to fully express its gustatory qualities, combining smoothness and complexity. Pair this Reserva with caramelized desserts, soft cheese, dried fruits, or savory canapés.”
Flor de Caña 18 Year Old Centenario, possibly the ultimate gourmand rum with an opening of peaches, bay, and praline, a middle of toffee, gingerbread, and Turkish delight, and a finish of earthiness, caramel, and dried fruit, and a nose which is our main interest here of Cavendish tobacco, roses, and gingerbread which hides a pomander of Christmas dried fruits in its darkness.
As described by Bespoke Unit;
“Flor de Caña’s Nose
Notes: Cavendish, Gingerbread, Roses
Nosefeel: Unctuous
Flor de Caña 18 boasts an unctuous yet refined nose. While its bouquet isn’t exactly intense and rather mild, it’s rich in flavour. It reveals complex aromas that are somewhat diverse and vivid in the nostrils.
Its most overt note is a distinctive aroma of black Cavendish tobacco. Spicy and yeasty gingerbread quickly follows, which is then finished by a light hint of floral rose petals.
Flor de Caña 18’s Palate & Mouthfeel
Primary Tastes: Salty, Sweet
Mouthfeel: Oily
Opening: Peaches, Praline, Bay Leaf
Heart: Turkish Delight, Gingerbread, Toffee
Finish: Earth, Dried Fruit, Caramel
Firstly, Flor de Caña’s palate follows closely from its aromatic bouquet. An overall mild rum with intricate complexity, it reveals a juxtaposition of sweet and salty flavours.
Delivered with an oily velvet texture, it opens on ripe peaches, praline confections, and crushed bay leaf. Its long and natural ageing process is immediately apparent and the depth of its flavours flourish shortly afterwards.
The resulting heart offers Turkish delight, gingerbread, and toffee, which partly echoes the initial nose given the presence of the former two notes. Finally, Flor de Caña results in a long finish, which reveals an earthy note reminiscent of patchouli, shortly followed by dried fruit, and sticky caramel.
If I were pairing this with a tobacco, which is an entirely different fragrance from our Bay Rum, Flor de Caña Centenario or Ron de Cuba Eminente Reserva are the rums I would choose, because both are structured around a central facet of tobacco. Were I to recommend a rum to be sipped while smoking at ones cigar club, these are again my first choices. In cigars, the Plasencia Original Reserva offers a gingerbread spice and toffee profile that compliments both rums.
My pipe tobacco of old, which I smoked from my senior year of high school as a daily alternative for cigars for over twenty years, was always a Golden Virginia Vanilla Cavendish blend with a bit of fire cured mixed in, redolent of fine Madagascar vanilla and stored with orange peel.
Why did I do this? Because for myself the smells of tobacco are associated with memories of my father smoking his pipes in the evening, evenings he often spent playing chess with me after dinner from childhood in the comforting semi darkness by the fireplace, and telling fabulous stories. Pipe smoking became a ritual conjuration of safety, refuge, serenity, and space of reflection for me.
Cavendish refers to the process of fermentation in rum, also to the long ribbon cut, and Virginia is a type of tobacco, with a sweet hay like scent. The vanilla or other flavoring is pressed or steamed into the leaf, sometimes both, which classifies it among tobaccos as an Aromatic.
Top choices in or near this category include Mac Baren Vanilla Cream, the very charming Peter Stokkebye PS27 Pistachio, Royal Yacht which was once Dunhill but now Peterson, Peterson Connoisseur’s Choice, Sutliff Tobacco Company Creme Brulee #701, Cornell & Diehl Autumn Evening, and the superb dessert blend W.O. Larsen Signature Vintage Mixture.
During this time through my university years I smoked Arturo Fuente cigars upon occasion, the limited edition Hemingway when possible. Cigar International calls it; “rich, toasty, and spicy” and by a reviewer “impeccably crafted… spicy and woody notes turn to sweet leather and cedar. Balanced and elegant, medium-bodied.” Also the Don Carlos Personal Reserve Robusto, described by Cigar Aficionado as; “an earthy and sweet smoke, offering a profile of molasses, vanilla, nutmeg and a touch of pepper” .
My ideal rum and tobacco fragrance therefore adds vanilla and orange oil to the molasses and hay of tobacco leaf, gingerbread spices of cinnamon and nutmeg its attendant throughout the whole, and shadowed with chocolate bitters, with a drydown of caramel-toffee, leather that smells like the naked skin of a lover, and dried fruits of darkness like the ghost of Christmas past.
When the Abyss looks back at me, Beauty can restore the balance. My thanks to Schopenhauer for solving the riddle Nietzsche posed for us in Beyond Good and Evil.
We cannot know the future, for the possibilities are limitless. But we know this; the universe cares nothing for us, there is no Great Plan, no reward for goodness nor punishment for evil, nor good or evil of any kind, for these are human words and cannot exist without human deeds to make them real.
This is the terror of our nothingness in a universe without imposed meaning or value, no Authority either beneficent or tyrannical to create and order ourselves and our lives. But the reverse is also true; in such a universe of total freedom, wherein the only human being, meaning, and value is what we ourselves create, we hold the only powers that exist, that of poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our choices about how to be human together, of love to transcend the limits of our form, realize the truths of others, and to liberate us from hierarchies of belonging and otherness, of hope to free us from systems of oppression, from tyranny and terror, and from the state as embodied violence in the primary defining human act of refusal to submit and granting us the will to claw our way out of the ruins to make yet another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival, and of faith in each other as solidarity of action and a United Humankind in a free society of equals in which we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights.
On this day American patriots gathered in mass action and protest at our capitals and palaces of government throughout the nation, against the capture of the state by a fascist regime of tyranny and terror, the subversion of democracy and destruction of its values and institutions, against vote suppression and the theft of citizenship from Black Americans through gerrymandering, against the ethnic cleansing of Latin Americans by the ICE white supremacist terror force, and against the federal Occupation of our sanctuary cities and bastions of democracy.
This day we reached out to each other and held fast our line against the darkness. And with each such act of solidarity and refusal to submit to the force and control of an Authority of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, we remain Unconquered.
This is the beauty of human beings.
What shall we do with our lives, whatever may remain of them, and how shall we live if we are to become human?
Live with grandeur, my friends.
Postscript
Thank you for sharing this journey with me; your friendship has brought me joy, as I hope mine has to you. These past days I was reminded of our mortality and the limits of our form as an imposed condition of struggle, of the flaws of our humanity and the ephemeral and impermanent nature of our lives.
I dreamed of a cat we once shared our home with named Bunny; we saw someone throw her out of a car window driving past the animal shelter near our home, and stopped. I opened my door and said; “Do you want to come home with us? We have lots of food” and she jumped right up into my lap and started purring. We had some lovely years together before she got sick, and after treatments she seemed to recover a bit, and spent a glorious day running in the park, chasing butterflies and climbing trees, but died in the night.
Sometimes you only get one good day, and you never know when that will be.
Make each of your days glorious, find your joy, and chase your dreams.
“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it, do not cheat with it.”
In this single paragraph, Hemingway compresses a worldview, an ethics, and a challenge. At first glance it sounds cruel. Forget your personal tragedy? The modern ear resists such advice, steeped as we are in the language of self-care and the dignity of wounds. Yet Hemingway is not asking us to deny our suffering. He is asking for something harder. He is asking us to turn the raw material of hurt into something that lives beyond us.
The opening assertion, “We are all bitched from the start,” carries the fatalism that runs through much of his work. It is not only the writer who is born into a compromised condition. Every human being begins with an inheritance of loss, fragility, and impermanence. To be alive is to live in the shadow of endings. For Hemingway, this is not a source of despair but the common ground upon which all art stands.
The second clause, “you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously,” is not romanticizing pain but acknowledging its strange capacity to strip us of illusions. Deep hurt exposes the fault lines in the self. It forces us to see what our ordinary defenses conceal. Without that stripping away, writing risks becoming decoration rather than revelation.
But Hemingway’s most important demand comes in the final sentence: “When you get the damned hurt, use it, do not cheat with it.” To use the hurt is to transform it, to work it through the discipline of craft until it speaks not only for the self but for others who share the condition of being human. To cheat with it would be to indulge in mere self-expression, to lean on the easy drama of suffering without undertaking the harder labor of turning it into insight.
This is the alchemy of art at its most uncompromising. Pain is the unrefined ore. The writer’s task is to submit it to the fire of language until it yields something both personal and universal. Hemingway’s own life was a long test of this creed. His war wounds, his broken loves, his mental unraveling were not things he romanticized in their living, but they became the very muscle of his sentences.
In the end, Hemingway is telling us that the writer’s responsibility is not to be spared but to be transformed. Hurt is not the obstacle to serious writing. It is the starting point. What matters is whether you shape it into something that, like a well-made story, can stand in the world long after you are gone.”
For learning about the world of spirited liquors, Bespoke Unit: A Guide to the Dapper Life is an excellent resource. https://bespokeunit.com/spirits/
Bunny July 13 2024
From Erin Lale
Just a nice kitty. Look how attentive she is watching something. Is it a bird?
Reply
Jay Lale To Erin Lale
She beholds the past behind, poised to leap into the future.
Of the Fall of Afghanistan we may say with Charles Dickens as written in A Tale of Two Cities; “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way …”
This Defining Moment of our history, of both America and Afghanistan and of the broader conflict of civilizations of which our story is a part, beginning with the creation of civilization itself in the wars between the democracies of Greece and the autocratic Persian Empire, I imagine the Fall of Kabul now not in terms of vast systemic forces but as darkness illuminated by sudden flashes of vivid memories out of time from what has thus far been my final expedition into this theatre of war and ground of struggle; terror, pain, death, and hope, that gift and curse of Pandora to us all.
I wrote my journal entry of this day three years ago from Peshawar during preparations for the expedition; by August 24 2021 I was across the Khyber Pass, and my journal for that date includes a film clip from Inglorious Basterds, Shoshanna Prepares for German Night with the glorious music by David Bowie, my theme song for Last Stands, which I post only when I am about to do something from which there is no return.
Long ago I lost count of such Last Stands; it seems now to be my true state of being, this leap of faith into the Abyss. As Jean Genet said to me in 1982 Beirut, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a suicide pact of refusal to surrender when he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance which set me on my life’s path; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
During our Defense of Panjshir that September a forlorn hope of Independence for her people was lost, but never shall be forgotten.
Afghanistan my love; one day I will return to you, though hell should bar the way.
As written by Alfred Noyes in The Highwayman;
PART ONE
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
He’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin.
They fitted with never a wrinkle. His boots were up to the thigh.
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard.
He tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred.
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
Where Tim the ostler listened. His face was white and peaked.
His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
But he loved the landlord’s daughter,
The landlord’s red-lipped daughter.
Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say—
“One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I’m after a prize to-night,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;
Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.”
He rose upright in the stirrups. He scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair in the casement. His face burnt like a brand
As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
(O, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the west.
PART TWO
He did not come in the dawning. He did not come at noon;
And out of the tawny sunset, before the rise of the moon,
When the road was a gypsy’s ribbon, looping the purple moor,
A red-coat troop came marching—
Marching—marching—
King George’s men came marching, up to the old inn-door.
They said no word to the landlord. They drank his ale instead.
But they gagged his daughter, and bound her, to the foot of her narrow bed.
Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!
There was death at every window;
And hell at one dark window;
For Bess could see, through her casement, the road that he would ride.
They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest.
They had bound a musket beside her, with the muzzle beneath her breast!
“Now, keep good watch!” and they kissed her. She heard the doomed man say—
Look for me by moonlight;
Watch for me by moonlight;
I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!
She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!
She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!
They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years
Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,
Cold, on the stroke of midnight,
The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!
The tip of one finger touched it. She strove no more for the rest.
Up, she stood up to attention, with the muzzle beneath her breast.
She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;
For the road lay bare in the moonlight;
Blank and bare in the moonlight;
And the blood of her veins, in the moonlight, throbbed to her love’s refrain.
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horsehoofs ringing clear;
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did not hear?
Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,
The highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The red coats looked to their priming! She stood up, straight and still.
Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!
Nearer he came and nearer. Her face was like a light.
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him—with her death.
He turned. He spurred to the west; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o’er the musket, drenched with her own blood!
Not till the dawn he heard it, and his face grew grey to hear
How Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
The landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.
Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high.
Blood red were his spurs in the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat;
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.
. . .
And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding—
Riding—riding—
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.
Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard.
He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred.
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
As I wrote in my post of August 16 2021, The Fall of Kabul and Afghanistan; We are confronted with mesmerizing images this weekend of the Fall of Kabul and Afghanistan to the victorious forces of the Taliban and the collapse of our Potempkin Village regime and its mirage army who fired not a single shot in resistance, images which recall the Fall of Saigon in 1975 under parallel conditions.
If America wants a seat at the table in shaping the policies of the new government, we must recognize it as the legitimate independence movement that it is and refuse to play the role of foreign ogres of imperialism. We may win with the carrot what we have lost with the stick.
Send not soldiers but diplomats with humanitarian aid and material support; this can be conditional on adherence to the principles of universal human rights. The Taliban need something from the US and the world at large; recognition of legitimacy, and this can be a powerful lever.
As Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth says; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”
America’s epic crusade and imperial adventures in Afghanistan began with a stunningly successful campaign to bring down the Soviet Union by luring and trapping it into an unwinnable invasion and conquest, a lesson subsequently forgotten, in which we armed, trained, funded, and often directly commanded and fought alongside freedom fighters who are today the warlords who actually rule Afghanistan. These American clients infamously included the brilliant religious scholar Osama bin Laden, and I think we all know how well that worked out.
It seems we have learned nothing from the failures of our imperialism; this time may be different, but I doubt it.
Unless we change the forces and conditions which make war profitable to elites and useful to authorities in the centralization of power.
This will not be the first time the Taliban, a Pashto word meaning “students”, have ruled Afghanistan, as they did so from 1996 to 2001 as proxies of Pakistan, until America invaded in the wake of 911. Nor is it the first time Afghanistan has merited its title as “the Graveyard of Empires”; Alexander the Great’s successor state of Bactria, the Mongols, the British Empire and the Soviet Union all were broken upon its anvil. It has also been the birthplace of great empires which then fragmented; Parthia, Scythia, the Buddhist Kushans, White Huns, Kidarites, the Hindu Shahi Dynasty, and the empire of Nader Shah. Modern Afghanistan was founded in 1747 by Ahmad Shah Durrani from the remnants of the Mughals and Nader Shah’s heirs in Persia, after a mutually destructive conflict between the Safavid Dynasty of Persia and the Mughals of India for possession of Kandahar.
And now, it seems, it is America’s turn. What madness possesses us, we humans, that we are driven to dominate and control others, with the institutionalized psychotic rage and violence of war on the one hand and the seductive lies and illusions of falsification and capitalist theft of public resources and wealth on the other?
How can we escape the destructive vicious cycle and Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force?
What are some lessons we can learn from our imperial failures to divide and conquer through manufacturing proxies and hegemonic elites along balkanized sectarian and ethnic lines, warlords, illusory client states, and the harnessed strategies of state terror and tyranny and a global carceral state of torture, surveillance, repression of dissent, borders, and police, in tandem with assimilation, co-optation, colonial exploitation through the pawns of corrupt oligarchs and puppet regimes, and the weaponization of our values and ideals, of democracy and universal human rights, as propagandistic bait for the trap of our dominion?
Who bears arms bears death; choose life.
Let us abandon the social use of force.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue.
As I wrote in my post of April 19 2021, Biden Proclaims the End of America’s War in Afghanistan: Hooray, and Good Luck With That; In Afghanistan we came for vengeance, and stayed for profit. It has proven difficult to let go of either.
President Biden has proclaimed the end of America’s War in Afghanistan; this I celebrate, my joy at news of peace shadowed only by the fact that we have been here before. Declaring peace is one thing; keeping the peace is quite another.
2019 was a year of great hope tempered with tragic failure, typified by its end and the start of a new year with a fragile peace in Afghanistan after 18 years of war, a peace lost a few days later in a six hour fight in the total darkness of a cave, rescuing the SEALs trapped in a Taliban fortress by the destruction of their helicopters during an assault in violation of the treaty, a mission of provocation whose objective was sabotaging the peace, in which the whole history of millennia of civilizational conflict was borne by four men who free climbed a mountain in recapitulation of Alexander the Great’s capture of the Sogdian Rock and then with stealth, misdirection, and precision defeated a force which had overwhelmed and pinned down an airborne assault team of SEALs.
As with many events which unfold as a regression of throwing words into throwing stones, it was both a tactical success and a strategic failure, a glorious act of heroism and an imperialist provocation which sabotaged our withdrawal from the madness of a forever war.
This was a theatrical set-piece action designed to provide a casus belli, a secret mission to sabotage peace modeled on the ruse used by the Japanese to legitimize their invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Mukden Incident, which involved a single Japanese soldier, a Missing Man whom other soldiers were sent to rescue.
Biden’s Peace will be a test of the soul of America, of our true values and intentions toward the world, and of our unity of purpose. This is a line I hope we can hold, for if our profiteers of death and what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex sabotage the chance for peace yet again in service to wealth and power, as Trump did in 2019 and the forces of Imperial Japan did in 1931, the possible futures which unfold from that moment do not promise a better world.
We know what happened the last time, at Pearl Harbor.
As I wrote in my post of January 2 2020, An end in sight to the Forever War in Afghanistan?; The New Year brings a gift of peace, or its possibility, which may allow us to end our 18 year Forever War in Afghanistan and bring our 12,000 troops there home.
Hundreds of thousands have died in this epic conflict with no real benefit to anyone, a war in which the objectives, alliances, and constellations of power have been amorphous and shifting, a flood America has tried to oppose with a bucket brigade.
If a peace can be forged, if a nation can be put together again like Humpty Dumpty, it will be a miracle, but one much like Vietnam in which America flees in defeat and abandons its allies to an implacable enemy dedicated to enforcing its vision of an ideal society on everyone it can. Such comparison is limited in many ways, among them the odd fact that America has been subsidizing the Taliban through the tribute paid by our civilian contractors while our militaries have been savaging each other in a pit fight marked by war crimes on all sides, attended by dehumanization and the civilizational loss of values.
War makes for good business for a few, and incomprehensible horror for the many.
As described by Rahim Faiez and Kathy Gannon in Huffpost; “A key pillar of the agreement, which the U.S. and Taliban have been hammering out for more than a year, is direct negotiations between Afghans on both sides of the conflict.
Those intra-Afghan negotiations are expected to be held within two weeks of the signing of a U.S.-Taliban peace deal. They will likely decide what a post-war Afghanistan will look like, and what role the Taliban will play. The negotiations would cover a wide range of subjects, such as the rights of women, free speech and the fate of the tens of thousands of Taliban fighters, as well as the heavily armed militias belonging to Afghanistan’s warlords who have amassed wealth and power since the Taliban’s ouster.”
And in my subsequent post of February 29 2020, Peace in Afghanistan?; We celebrate today the historic signing of the peace accord between America and the Taliban, and the chance to bring our troops home from an 18 year war which has achieved little at great cost in blood and treasure. It is a tentative, conditional peace, formulated in a brilliant document which will forever remain an example of masterful diplomacy, in which both sides may claim victory.
America has won the destruction and disavowal of a great enemy, al-Qaeda, by their Taliban allies; this also poises the Taliban as a Sunni nation with de facto American recognition directly on the eastern border of Iran as a counterweight, an unqualified win in terms of geopolitical strategy.
The Taliban can claim victory over America in their long war to free their nation of foreign imperialism. We have ceded legitimacy to the Taliban and admitted in writing our total defeat, by direct order of our cowardly idiot President Trump, whose words mean nothing; it remains only to abandon our allies and flee Afghanistan like whipped dogs.
This may not be how the narrative will be framed, spun, and sold in America, either by our government nor a nation weary of meaningless destructive forever wars, but I guarantee you this is how much of the world will interpret it.
But this is not the reason I am uneasy and filled with brooding dread at the prospect of a chance for peace which this accord offers. Why am I not jubilant and dancing with victorious rapture at the chance of an end to war, any chance at all?
As Jennifer Hansler writes in CNN; “The four-page agreement states that the Taliban will take steps “to prevent any group or individual, including al-Qa’ida, from using the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” Those steps include commitments that the Taliban will instruct its members “not to cooperate with groups or individuals threatening the security of the United States and its allies” and that it “will prevent any group or individual in Afghanistan from threatening the security of the United States and its allies, and will prevent them from recruiting, training, and fundraising and will not host them in accordance with the commitments in this agreement.”
“The text of the agreement does not contain any specific language regarding the protection of women or civil society,” such trivialities as universal human rights and democracy, and especially the rights of women, being of no value to the Republican government of America, the abolition of liberty and equality in both domestic and global spheres constituting the main goal of all three factions which allied to seize what has become the Party of Treason; the Patriarchy and sexual terror of the Gideonite fundamentalists, the white supremacists who want to overturn the rule of law entirely, and the plutocrats who would dehumanize and enslave us.
The idea that all of us have equal rights under the law is a nuisance for the Republican alliance which seeks to impose a tyranny of fascism on the whole world as the Fourth Reich. They want to contain and limit viable external threats like Al Qaeda and ISIS, not eliminate them, as such enemies are very useful in driving nationalist fear and rage and in winning the submission of our own citizens to an authoritarian state of force and control, of surveillance and the counterinsurgency model of policing. Tyrants must create such threats if they do not actually exist.
How many of the terrorist acts against us were perpetrated by pawns who were unaware of their true masters? How many such deniable forces does America employ globally to sow fear and hate, historically in the cause of our imperialism and now also in the subversion of democracy throughout the world?
We fail to challenge the mechanisms and structures of our enslavement because they are well hidden, devious, subtle, made of smoke and mirrors. Fascisms of blood, faith, and soil now resurgent throughout the world are often characterized as outliers, but they are central to the course of human history. The long game of the Fourth Reich, its invisible tentacles sinuously proliferating and seizing power throughout decades of influence operations until it ensnares us in its grasp, must not be underestimated.
So my gladness at news of peace is shadowed by my mistrust in our government, for making peace and bringing our soldiers home conditional to the Taliban policing their areas against al-Qaeda and any terrorists at all, threats they may be powerless to save America from, sabotages peace and renders this accord a spectacle of Trump’s election campaign whose failure can be blamed on others.
I hope that in this I am wrong, and we will soon be reunited with our loved ones who serve with honor and valor a government which has none, and that nevermore will we fight wars.
“Restrepo documents the 15-month deployment of a US Army platoon serving in Korengal Valley, Afghanistan in 2007”
Korengal
“Korengal continues the eye-opening and terrifying account of a US military platoon in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan during 2007 and 2008. The documentary follows the same soldiers featured in Restrepo. Rather than focusing on the action and battles experienced by the platoon, the aftermath on the psyche is considered. With hauntingly detached, yet emotional interviews, soldiers from the platoon give their personal account of the war in all its facets. Shot in what’s called extreme closeup, the interviews are meant to physically and emotionally dive into the man under the uniform.
Battle-worn soldiers from the Korengal Valley discuss their experiences: the good, the bad, and what’s leftover. Fear, adrenaline, brotherhood, honour and bravery are some of the topics brought into the full light of the war in these interviews. With a bittersweet note, several soldiers speak longingly for the intense bonds developed with one another.”
من سقوط أفغانستان ، قد نقول مع تشارلز ديكنز كما هو مكتوب في حكاية مدينتين ؛ “لقد كانت أفضل الأوقات ، كانت أسوأ الأوقات ، كانت عصر الحكمة ، وكان عصر الحماقة ، لقد كان عصر الاعتقاد ، لقد كان عصر الشق ، كان موسم الضوء ، لقد كان موسم الظلام ، لقد كان ربيع الأمل ، كان شتاء اليأس … ، لم يكن لدينا شيء أمامنا ، كنا جميعًا نذهب مباشرة إلى الجنة ، وكنا جميعًا نسير في الاتجاه الآخر … “
هذه اللحظة الحاسمة من تاريخنا ، لكل من أمريكا وأفغانستان ، لا أتخيل الآن ليس من حيث القوى الجهازية الشاسعة ، ولكن مع ظلام الظلام من خلال ومضات مفاجئة من الذكريات الحية في الوقت المناسب من ما كان حتى الآن بعدوتي الأخيرة في مسرح الحرب هذا وأرض الصراع ؛ الإرهاب والألم والموت والأمل ، تلك الهدية ولعنة باندورا لنا جميعًا.
كتبت مجلسي في هذا اليوم من العام الماضي من بيشاور خلال الاستعدادات للبعثة ؛ بحلول 24 أغسطس ، كنت عبر ممر خيبر ، وتتضمن مجلتي لهذا التاريخ مقطع فيلم من Inglorious Basterds ، تستعد Shoshanna لـ German Night ، مع أغنيتي الموضوعية لـ Last Stands ، من قبل David Bowie ، والتي أنشرها فقط عندما أكون حولني لفعل شيء لا يوجد منه عودة. خلال دفاعنا عن Panjshir في سبتمبر الماضي ، فقدت أمل في الاستقلال لشعبها ، ولكن لن يتم نسيانها أبدًا.
أفغانستان حبي. في يوم من الأيام سأعود إليك ، على الرغم من أن الجحيم يجب أن يمنع الطريق.
منذ زمن بعيد فقدت عدد هذه المدرجات الأخيرة ؛ يبدو الآن أنه حالتي الحقيقية ، قفزة الإيمان هذه إلى الهاوية. كما قال لي جان جينيه عام 1982 ، بيروت ، في منزل محترق ، في قضية خاسرة ، في ميثاق انتحاري لرفض الاستسلام وقسم المقاومة الذي وضعني على طريق حياتي. “عندما لا يكون هناك أمل ، نحن أحرار في القيام بأشياء مستحيلة ، وأشياء مجيدة.”
كما كتبه ألفريد نويز في الطريق السريع ؛
الجزء الأول
كانت الريح سيلًا من الظلام بين الأشجار العاصفة.
كان القمر جاليون شبحًا تم إلقاؤه على البحار الملبدة بالغيوم.
كان الطريق شريطًا من ضوء القمر فوق المستنقع الأرجواني ،
وجاء الطريق السريع – ركوب –
ركوب – الدوافع –
جاء الطريق السريع يركب ، حتى باب النزل القديم.
لقد كان قبًا فرنسيًا على جبينه ، حفنة من الدانتيل في ذقنه ،
معطف من مخملي كلاريت ، ومؤخرات من الجلد البني.
أنها مزودة مع أبدا التجاعيد. كانت حذائه حتى الفخذ.
وركب مع وميض مرصع بالجواهر ،
مسدسه بأعقامه ،
رابيره أقصى طوبان ، تحت السماء المرصعة بالجواهر.
فوق الحصى ، اشتبك واشتبك في ساحة الظلام.
استغله مع سوطه على مصاريع ، ولكن تم قفل كل شيء ومنعه.
صفير نغمة إلى النافذة ، ومن يجب أن ينتظر هناك
لكن ابنة المالك السوداء ،
بيس ، ابنة المالك ،
ضفيعًا لعقدة حب حمراء داكنة في شعرها الأسود الطويل.
ومظلمة في ساحة النزل القديمة المظلمة
حيث استمع تيم أوستلر. كان وجهه أبيض وذروة.
كانت عيناه جوفاء من الجنون ، وشعره مثل القش متعفن ،
لكنه أحب ابنة المالك ،
ابنة المالك الحمراء.
غبي ككلب استمع إليه ، وسمع السارق يقول –
“قبلة واحدة ، حبيبتي البوني ، أنا بعد جائزة ليلا ،
لكنني سأعود مع الذهب الأصفر قبل ضوء الصباح ؛
ومع ذلك ، إذا ضغطوا علي بشكل حاد ، وهاري لي طوال اليوم ،
ثم ابحث عني بواسطة ضوء القمر ،
شاهد لي بواسطة ضوء القمر ،
سآتي إليك بواسطة ضوء القمر ، على الرغم من أن الجحيم يجب أن يمنع الطريق “.
ارتفع منتصبا في ركاب. نادر يمكن أن يصل إلى يدها ،
لكنها خففت شعرها في الدسم. محترق وجهه مثل العلامة التجارية
عندما جاء سلسلة العطور السوداء على صدره.
وقبل موجاتها في ضوء القمر ،
(يا ، الأمواج السوداء الحلوة في ضوء القمر!)
ثم قام بسحبه في ضوء القمر ، وخرج بعيدًا عن الغرب.
الجزء الثاني
لم يأت في الفجر. لم يأت عند الظهر.
ومن بين غروب الشمس المقلق ، قبل صعود القمر ،
عندما كان الطريق شريط الغجر ، يحلق المستنقع الأرجواني ،
جاءت قوات حمراء في مسيرة-
مسيرة – مارشينغ –
جاء رجال الملك جورج يسيرون ، حتى باب النزل القديم.
قالوا لا كلمة للمالك. شربوا البيرة بدلا من ذلك.
لكنهم وضعوا ابنته ، وربطوها ، على سفح سريرها الضيق.
ركع اثنان منهم على قذائفها ، مع المساحات إلى جانبهم!
كان هناك موت في كل نافذة.
والجحيم في نافذة مظلمة واحدة ؛
لأن بيس يمكن أن يرى ، من خلال قاعها ، الطريق الذي كان يركبه.
لقد ربطوها بالانتباه ، مع العديد من الدعابة.
كانوا يرتبون مسكيت بجانبها ، مع كمامة تحت صدرها!
“الآن ، حافظ على مراقبة جيدة!” وقبلوها. سمعت الرجل المحكوم يقول –
ابحث عني بواسطة ضوء القمر.
راقب لي بواسطة ضوء القمر.
سآتي إليك بواسطة ضوء القمر ، على الرغم من أن الجحيم يجب أن يمنع الطريق!
انها ملتوية يديها خلفها. لكن كل العقدة كانت جيدة!
كانت تتلوى يديها حتى كانت أصابعها رطبة بالعرق أو الدم!
امتدوا وتوتروا في الظلام ، وساعات الزحف من قبل سنوات
حتى الآن ، على السكتة الدماغية في منتصف الليل ،
بارد ، على السكتة الدماغية في منتصف الليل ،
طرف إصبع واحد لمسته! كان الزناد على الأقل لها!
طرف إصبع واحد لمسته. لم تسعى أكثر للباقي.
صعودا ، وقفت انتباه ، مع كمامة تحت صدرها.
لن تخاطر بسماعهم ؛ لن تسعى مرة أخرى.
للطريق وضع عارية في ضوء القمر.
فارغة وعارية في ضوء القمر.
ودماءها ، في ضوء القمر ، تخثرت على امتناع حبها.
tlot-tlot ؛ tlot-tlot! هل سمعوا ذلك؟ الرنين Horsehoofs واضحة.
tlot-tlot ؛ tlot-tlot ، في المسافة؟ هل كانوا صما لدرجة انهم لم يسمعوا؟
أسفل شريط ضوء القمر ، فوق جبين التل ،
جاء الطريق السريع ركوب –
ركوب – الدوافع –
نظرت المعاطف الحمراء إلى تحضيرها! وقفت ، مستقيمة وما زالت.
tlot-tlot ، في الصمت الفاتر! tlot-tlot ، في ليلة الصدى!
أقرب جاء وأقرب. كان وجهها مثل الضوء.
نمت عيناها للحظة. رسمت نفسا عميقا آخر ،
ثم تحركت إصبعها في ضوء القمر ،
حطم بندقية ضوء القمر ،
حطمت صدرها في ضوء القمر وحذرته – مع وفاتها.
التفت. دفع إلى الغرب. لم يكن يعرف من يقف
انحنى ، مع رأسها على المسكيت ، غارق بدمها!
ليس حتى الفجر سمعها ، ونما وجهه رمادي لسماع
كيف بيس ، ابنة المالك ،
ابنة المالك السوداء ،
كانت قد شاهدت حبها في ضوء القمر ، وتوفي في الظلام هناك.
مرة أخرى ، حفز مثل رجل مجنون ، صرف لعنة على السماء ،
مع تدخين الطريق الأبيض خلفه ورصاصه العالي.
كان الدم الأحمر يوتنهام في الظهر الذهبي. وي
كان NE-Red معطفه المخملي.
عندما أطلقوا النار عليه على الطريق السريع ،
أسفل مثل كلب على الطريق السريع ،
ووضع في دمه على الطريق السريع ، مع مجموعة من الدانتيل في حلقه.
. . .
يقولون إنه لا يزالون في ليلة الشتاء عندما تكون الريح في الأشجار ،
عندما يكون القمر جاليون شبحًا يتم إلقاؤه على البحار الغائمة ،
عندما يكون الطريق شريطًا من ضوء القمر فوق المستنقع الأرجواني ،
يأتي طريق سريع – ركوب –
ركوب – الدوافع –
يأتي الطريق السريع ركوبًا ، حتى باب النزل القديم.
فوق الحصى يتساقط ويتطوع في ساحة النزل المظلمة.
انه ينقر مع سوطه على مصاريع ، ولكن كل شيء مغلق ومنع.
صافرة نغمة إلى النافذة ، ومن يجب أن ينتظر هناك
لكن ابنة المالك السوداء ،
بيس ، ابنة المالك ،
ضفيعًا لعقدة حب حمراء داكنة في شعرها الأسود الطويل.
كما كتبت في منصبي في 16 أغسطس 2021 ، سقوط كابول وأفغانستان ؛ نحن نواجه صورًا ساحرة في نهاية هذا الأسبوع من سقوط كابول وأفغانستان إلى القوى المنتصرة في طالبان وانهيار نظام قرية بوتمبكين وجيشه الميرغ الذي أطلق النار على لم يتمتع بمقاومة ، صور تتذكر سقوط سقوط سقص في عام 1975 في ظل الظروف المتوازية.
إذا أرادت أمريكا مقعدًا على الطاولة في تشكيل سياسات الحكومة الجديدة ، فيجب علينا أن ندركها على أنها حركة الاستقلال المشروعة وهي ترفض أن تلعب دور الغول الأجنبي للإمبريالية. قد نربح مع الجزر ما فقدناه مع العصا.
لا ترسل جنودًا بل دبلوماسيون بمساعدة إنسانية ودعم مادي ؛ هذا يمكن أن يكون مشروطًا بالالتزام بمبادئ حقوق الإنسان الشاملة. تحتاج طالبان إلى شيء من الولايات المتحدة والعالم بشكل عام ؛ الاعتراف بالشرعية ، ويمكن أن يكون رافعة قوية.
كما يقول هنري شكسبير الخامس. “عندما يلعب التسامح والقسوة للمملكة ، فإن اليد اللطيفة هي أفضل الفائز”.
بدأت الحملة الصليبية الملحمية الأمريكية والمغامرات الإمبراطورية في أفغانستان بحملة ناجحة بشكل مذهل لإسقاط الاتحاد السوفيتي من خلال جذبها ومحاصرةها في غزو وموقد لا يمكن التغلب عليه ، وهو درس نسيه لاحقًا ، نسلح فيه وتدريبه ، وغالبًا ما تم تمويله مباشرة ، وغالبًا ما تم تمويله مباشرة ، وغالبًا ما تم تمويله مباشرة ، وقاتلوا جنبا إلى جنب مع مقاتلي الحرية الذين هم اليوم أمراء الحرب الذين يحكمون بالفعل أفغانستان. شمل هؤلاء العملاء الأميركيين بشكل سيء العالم الديني الرائع أسامة بن لادن ، وأعتقد أننا جميعًا نعرف مدى نجاح ذلك.
يبدو أننا لم نتعلم شيئًا من إخفاقات الإمبريالية ؛ قد تكون هذه المرة مختلفة ، لكنني أشك في ذلك.
ما لم نغير القوى والظروف التي تجعل الحرب مربحة للنخب ومفيدة للسلطات في مركزية السلطة.
لن تكون هذه هي المرة الأولى التي يحكم فيها طالبان ، وهي كلمة الباشتو التي تعني “الطلاب” ، أفغانستان ، كما فعلوا ذلك من عام 1996 إلى عام 2001 كوكيل في باكستان ، حتى غزت أمريكا في أعقاب 911. كما أنها ليست المرة الأولى وقد أستحق أفغانستان لقب “مقبرة الإمبراطوريات” ؛ تم كسر ولاية ألكساندر الخليفة الكبرى في باكتريا ، المغول والإمبراطورية البريطانية والاتحاد السوفيتي جميعها على سندانها. لقد كان أيضًا مسقط رأس الإمبراطوريات العظيمة التي تم تجزئها بعد ذلك ؛ Parthia ، Scythia ، The Boddhist Kushans ، White Huns ، Kidarites ، The Hindu Shahi Dynasty ، و Empire of Nader Shah. تأسست أفغانستان الحديثة في عام 1747 من قبل أحمد شاه دوراني من بقايا المغول وورثة نادر شاه في بلاد فارس ، بعد صراع مدمر متبادل بين سلالة السفافيد في بلاد فارس ومغول الهند لحيازته كاندهار.
والآن ، يبدو أن دور أمريكا. ما يمتلكهنا ما الجنون ، نحن البشر ، ونحن مدفوعون للسيطرة على الآخرين والسيطرة على الآخرين ، مع الغضب الذهاني المؤسسي وعنف الحرب من جهة والأكاذيب المغرية وأوهام التزوير والسرقة الرأسمالية للموارد العامة والثروة على الآخر ؟
كيف يمكننا الهروب من الدورة المدمرة المدمرة وخاتم فاجنر من الخوف والقوة والقوة؟
ما هي بعض الدروس التي يمكن أن نتعلمها من إخفاقاتنا الإمبراطورية في تقسيم وتهاب الوكلاء التصنيعيين والنخب المهيمنة على طول الخطوط الطائفية والعرقية البلقان ، وأمراء الحرب ، ودول العميل الوهمية ، واستراتيجيات الحنطة الإرهابية والطغيان ودولة تعذيب عالمية. ، مراقبة ، قمع المعارضة ، الحدود ، والشرطة ، جنبًا الطعم الدعائي لفخ هيمنةنا؟
الذي يحمل السلاح يحمل الموت. اختيار الحياة.
دعونا نتخلى عن الاستخدام الاجتماعي للقوة.
دعونا لا نرسل أي جيوش لفرض الفضيلة.
كما كتبت في منصبي في 19 أبريل 2021 ، أعلن بايدن نهاية حرب أمريكا في أفغانستان: الصيحة ، ونتمنى لك التوفيق في ذلك ؛ في أفغانستان ، جئنا للانتقام ، وبقينا من أجل الربح. لقد ثبت أنه من الصعب التخلي عن أي منهما.
أعلن الرئيس بايدن نهاية حرب أمريكا في أفغانستان ؛ هذا أحتفل به ، فرحتي في أخبار السلام التي تظل فيها فقط حقيقة أننا كنا هنا من قبل. إعلان السلام شيء واحد ؛ الحفاظ على السلام هو آخر تماما.
كان عام 2019 عامًا من الأمل العظيم الذي خفف من الفشل المأساوي ، الذي تم تصويره بنهايته وبداية عام جديد بسلام هش في أفغانستان بعد 18 عامًا من الحرب ، خسر سلام بعد بضعة أيام في معركة مدتها ست ساعات في المجموع ظلام كهف ، إنقاذ الأختام المحاصرة في قلعة طالبان من خلال تدمير طائراتهم الهليكوبتر خلال اعتداء في انتهاك للمعاهدة ، وهي مهمة الاستفزاز التي كان هدفها تخريب السلام ، حيث كان تاريخ آلاف السنين في الحضارة كله.
تم تحمل CT من قبل أربعة رجال قاموا بحرية تسلق جبلًا في إعادة تسوية ألكساندر ذا كبرز القبض على صخرة سوجديان ، ثم مع خلسة ، وتوجيه خاطئ ، وهزمت الدقة قوة طغت عليها وتثبيتها في فريق هجوم محمول جواً من الأختام.
كما هو الحال مع العديد من الأحداث التي تتكشف باعتبارها انحدارًا لرمي الكلمات في رمي الحجارة ، فقد كان نجاحًا تكتيكيًا وفشلًا استراتيجيًا ، وعملًا مجيدًا للبطولة وإمبريالية استفزاها التي أجرت انسحابنا من جنون حرب إلى الأبد.
كان هذا بمثابة عمل مسرحي مصمم لتزويد Casus Belli ، وهي مهمة سرية لتخريب السلام على غرار الحيلة التي يستخدمها اليابانيون لإضفاء الشرعية على غزوهم لمانشوريا في عام 1931 ، وهو حادثة موكدن ، التي تضمنت جنديًا يابانيًا واحدًا ، وهو أحد الجنود الياباني ، رجل مفقود تم إرسال الجنود الآخرين للإنقاذ.
سيكون سلام بايدن بمثابة اختبار لروح أمريكا ، وقيمنا ونوايانا الحقيقية تجاه العالم ، ووحدتنا للهدف. هذا هو الخط الذي آمل أن نتمكن من الاحتفاظ به ، لأنه إذا كان مستثنينا للموت وما وصفه أيزنهاور بتخريب المعقدة العسكرية ، فإن الفرصة للسلام مرة أخرى في الخدمة للثروة والسلطة ، كما فعل ترامب في عام 2019 وقوى الإمبراطورية اليابانية فعلت في عام 1931 ، فإن العقود الآجلة المحتملة التي تتكشف من تلك اللحظة لا تعد بعالم أفضل.
نحن نعرف ما حدث في المرة الأخيرة ، في بيرل هاربور.
كما كتبت في منصبي في 2 يناير 2020 ، نهاية في الأفق إلى الحرب إلى الأبد في أفغانستان؟ يجلب العام الجديد هدية من السلام ، أو احتماله ، مما قد يسمح لنا بإنهاء حربنا 18 عامًا إلى الأبد في أفغانستان وإحضار قواتنا البالغ عددها 12000 قوات إلى المنزل.
مات مئات الآلاف في هذا الصراع الملحمي دون أي فائدة حقيقية لأي شخص ، وهي حرب كانت فيها الأهداف والتحالفات وأبراج السلطة غير متبلورة وتتحول ، وقد حاولت أمريكا الفيضان معارضتها مع لواء دلو.
إذا كان من الممكن تزوير سلام ، إذا كان من الممكن تجميع أمة مرة أخرى مثل Humpty Dumpty ، فستكون معجزة ، ولكنها واحدة مثل فيتنام التي تهرب فيها أمريكا في الهزيمة وتتخلى عن حلفائها لعدو غير مريح مخصص لإنفاذ رؤيتها لها مجتمع مثالي على الجميع يمكنه. هذه المقارنة محدودة بعدة طرق ، من بينها الحقيقة الغريبة التي تدعمها أمريكا طالبان من خلال الجزية التي يدفعها مقاولينا المدنيين بينما كانت الجيوش لدينا توفر بعضها البعض في معركة حفرة تتميز بجرائم حرب من جميع الأطراف ، التي حضرها تجريد الإنسانية وفقدان الحضارة للقيم.
الحرب تجعل العمل الجيد لعدد قليل ، ورعب غير مفهوم للكثيرين.
كما وصفها رحيم فايز وكاثي غانون في HuffPost ؛ “إن الركن الرئيسي للاتفاقية ، التي كانت الولايات المتحدة و Taliban تتخلى عن أكثر من عام ، هي مفاوضات مباشرة بين الأفغان على جانبي الصراع.
من المتوقع أن تُعقد تلك المفاوضات داخل الأفغان في غضون أسبوعين من توقيع اتفاق سلام في الولايات المتحدة. من المحتمل أن يقرروا كيف ستبدو أفغانستان بعد الحرب ، وما هو الدور الذي سيلعبه طالبان. ستغطي المفاوضات مجموعة واسعة من الموضوعات ، مثل حقوق المرأة ، وحرية التعبير ومصير عشرات الآلاف من مقاتلي طالبان ، وكذلك الميليشيات المسلحة المسلحة التي تنتمي إلى أمراء الحرب في أفغانستان الذين جمعوا الثروة والقوة منذ طالبان الإطاحة “.
وفي منصبي اللاحق في 29 فبراير 2020 ، السلام في أفغانستان؟ نحتفل اليوم بالتوقيع التاريخي لاتفاق السلام بين أمريكا وعلى طالبان ، وفرصة لإعطاء قواتنا إلى المنزل من حرب 18 عامًا والتي لم تحقق سوى تكلفة كبيرة في الدم والكنز. إنه سلام مبدئي ، مشروط ، صُمم في وثيقة رائعة ستبقى إلى الأبد مثالًا على الدبلوماسية الرائعة ، والتي قد يطالب فيها كلا الجانبين بالانتصار.
لقد فازت أمريكا بتدمير وتنسيق عدو عظيم ، تنظيم القاعدة ، من قبل حلفائهم في طالبان ؛ هذا أيضًا يتأرجح طالبان كدولة سنية مع اعتراف بحكم الواقع على الحدود الشرقية لإيران باعتباره ثقلًا موازًا ، وهو فوز غير مؤهل من حيث الاستراتيجية الجيوسياسية.
يمكن لطالبان المطالبة بالفوز على أمريكا في حربهم الطويلة لتحرير أمهم الإمبريالية الأجنبية. لقد تنازلنا عن الشرعية إلى طالبان واعترفنا في كتابة هزيمتنا التامة ، من خلال النظام المباشر لرئيسنا الأبله الجبان ترامب ، الذي لا تعني كلماته شيئًا ؛ يبقى فقط للتخلي عن حلفائنا والفرار من أفغانستان مثل الكلاب المخفوقة.
قد لا تكون هذه هي الطريقة التي سيتم بها تأطير السرد ، وتنسجها ، وبيعها في أمريكا ، إما من قبل حكومتنا ولا أمة من حروب الأبد المدمرة التي لا معنى لها ، لكنني أضمن لك أن هذا هو مقدار ما سوف يفسره العالم.
لكن هذا ليس هو السبب في أنني غير مرتاح ومليء بالفزع الحضنة على احتمال وجود فرصة للسلام التي يقدمها هذه الاتفاقية. لماذا أنا لست مبتهجًا ويرقص مع نشوة الطرب المنتصرة في فرصة إنهاء الحرب ، أي فرصة في آل
ل؟
كما تكتب جنيفر هاندلر في سي إن إن ؛ “ينص الاتفاق المكون من أربع صفحات على أن طالبان ستتخذ خطوات” لمنع أي مجموعة أو فرد ، بما في ذلك القاعدة ، من استخدام تربة أفغانستان لتهديد أمن الولايات وحلفائها “. تتضمن هذه الخطوات التزامات بأن طالبان ستوجه أعضائها “عدم التعاون مع مجموعات أو أفراد يهددون بأمن الولايات المتحدة وحلفائها” وأنها “ستمنع أي مجموعة أو فرد في أفغانستان من تهديد أمن الولايات المتحدة وحلفائها ، وسيمنعونهم من التوظيف والتدريب وجمع التبرعات ولن يستضيفهم وفقًا للالتزامات في هذه الاتفاقية. “
“نص الاتفاق لا يحتوي على أي لغة محددة فيما يتعلق بحماية المرأة أو المجتمع المدني” ، مثل هذه التظاهرات مثل حقوق الإنسان والديمقراطية العالمية ، وخاصة حقوق المرأة ، لا قيمة لها للحكومة الجمهورية الأمريكية ، إلغاء الحرية والمساواة في كل من المجالات المحلية والعالمية التي تشكل الهدف الرئيسي لجميع الفصائل الثلاثة التي تحالفها الاستيلاء على ما أصبح حزب الخيانة ؛ الإرهاب الأبوي والإرهاب الجنسي لأصولي الجدونيت ، والتفوق البيض الذين يرغبون في إلغاء حكم القانون بالكامل ، والبلوتوقراطيين الذين يتجاهلوننا ويستعبدونا.
إن فكرة أن جميعًا لدينا حقوق متساوية بموجب القانون هي مصدر إزعاج للتحالف الجمهوري الذي يسعى إلى فرض طغيان من الفاشية في العالم بأسره باعتباره الرايخ الرابع. إنهم يريدون احتواء وتقييد تهديدات خارجية قابلة للحياة مثل القاعدة وداعش ، وليس القضاء عليها ، لأن هذه الأعداء مفيدة للغاية في قيادة الخوف القومي والغضب وفي الفوز بتقديم مواطنينا إلى حالة سلطنة من القوة والسيطرة ، من المراقبة ونموذج مكافحة التمرد للشرطة. يجب أن يخلق الطغاة مثل هذه التهديدات إذا لم تكن موجودة بالفعل.
كم من الأعمال الإرهابية ضدنا ارتكبها البيادق الذين لم يكونوا على دراية بسادائهم الحقيقيين؟ كم عدد هذه القوى التي يمكن إنكارها التي توظفها أمريكا على الصعيد العالمي لزرع الخوف والكراهية ، تاريخياً في قضية الإمبريالية والآن في تخريب الديمقراطية في جميع أنحاء العالم؟
نفشل في تحدي آليات وهياكل استعبادنا لأنها مخفية جيدًا ، ملتوية ، خفية ، مصنوعة من الدخان والمرايا. غالبًا ما يتم تمييز الفاشية من الدم والإيمان والتربة في جميع أنحاء العالم على أنها القيم المتطرفة ، لكنها أساسية في مجرى تاريخ البشرية. اللعبة الطويلة في الرايخ الرابع ، مخالبها غير المرئية التي تنتشر بشكل خاطئ وتستولى على السلطة على مدار عقود من عمليات التأثير حتى لا تنفجر في قبضتها.
لذا فإن سعادتي في أخبار السلام قد تظل من خلال عدم ثقتني في حكومتنا ، ولعمل سلامهم وجواد جنودنا إلى المنزل الشرطي لبطولة طالبان مناطقهم ضد تنظيم القاعدة وأي إرهابيين على الإطلاق ، قد يكونون عاجزين لإنقاذ أمريكا من ، تخريب السلام ويجعل هذا الأمر يتفق على مشهد في حملة ترامب الانتخابية التي يمكن إلقاء اللوم على فشلها على الآخرين.
آمل أن أكون مخطئًا في هذا ، وسنجمد قريباً مع أحبائنا الذين يخدمون بشرف وشجاعة حكومة لا يوجد بها شيء ، ولن نحارب الحروب أبدًا.
قد يكون السلام علينا جميعًا.
Pashto
6 اګست 2024 د کابل او افغانستان د سقوط کلیزه
د افغانستان د سقوط په اړه موږ ممکن د چارلس ډیکنز سره ووایو لکه څنګه چې د دوه ښارونو کیسه کې لیکل شوي؛ “دا تر ټولو ښه وخت و، دا تر ټولو بد وخت و، دا د حکمت عمر و، دا د حماقت زمانه وه، دا د باور زمانه وه، دا د بې باورۍ دور و، دا د رڼا موسم و، دا د تیارو موسم و، دا د امید پسرلی و، دا د نا امیدۍ ژمی و …، زموږ په وړاندې هیڅ شی نه و، موږ ټول مستقیم جنت ته روان وو، موږ ټول په مستقیم ډول بل لوري ته روان وو … “
زموږ د تاریخ دا ټاکونکې شیبه، د امریکا او افغانستان دواړو او د تمدنونو د پراخې جګړې چې زموږ کیسه یې یوه برخه ده، د یونان د ډیموکراسۍ او د فارس د استبدادي امپراتورۍ تر منځ په جګړو کې پخپله د تمدن له رامینځته کیدو سره پیل شو. د کابل سقوط اوس د پراخو نظامی ځواکونو له نظره نه، بلکې د تیارو په څیر د وخت په تیریدو سره د ناڅاپه روښانه یادونو په رڼا کې د هغه څه څخه چې تر دې دمه د جګړې دې ډګر او د مبارزې ډګر ته زما وروستی سفر دی؛ ډار، درد، مرګ، او امید، دا ډالۍ او د پانډورا لعنت موږ ټولو ته.
ما د دې ورځې د ننوتنې په ورځ کې درې کاله مخکې له پېښور څخه د سفر لپاره د چمتووالي په حال کې لیکلی و. تر 24 اګست 2021 پورې زه د خیبر د لارې په اوږدو کې وم، او د دې نیټې لپاره زما په ژورنال کې د Inglorious Basterds څخه یو فلمي کلپ شامل دی، شوشانه د ډیویډ بووی لخوا د عالي موسیقۍ سره د جرمن شپې لپاره چمتو کوي، د وروستي سټینډز لپاره زما موضوع سندره، کوم چې زه یوازې هغه وخت پوسټ کوم زه د هغه څه په اړه یم چې له هغې څخه بیرته راستنیدل نشته.
ډیر پخوا ما د داسې وروستي سټینډونو شمیر له لاسه ورکړ. اوس داسې بریښي چې زما ریښتیني حالت دی ، د عقیدې دا کودتا په حبس کې. لکه څنګه چې ژان جینټ په 1982 بیروت کې ما ته وویل، په یوه سوځیدلي کور کې، په یوه ورک شوي دلیل کې، د تسلیم کولو څخه د انکار په ځانمرګي تړون کې او د مقاومت حلف چې زما د ژوند لاره یې جوړه کړه؛ “کله چې هیڅ امید شتون ونلري، موږ د ناممکن شیانو، عالي شیانو ترسره کولو لپاره آزاد یو.”
زموږ د پنجشیر د سپتمبر د دفاع په جریان کې د هغې د خلکو لپاره د خپلواکۍ یوه هیره شوې هیله له لاسه ورکړه، مګر هیڅکله به هیر نشي.
افغانستان زما مینه؛ یوه ورځ به زه تا ته بیرته راستون شم، که څه هم دوزخ باید لاره بنده کړي.
دا ممکن دا نه وي چې داستان به په امریکا کې څنګه جوړ شي، سپړل شي او وپلورل شي، نه زموږ د حکومت لخوا او نه هم د تل لپاره د بې معنی ویجاړونکي جنګونو څخه ستړي شوي، مګر زه تاسو ته تضمین درکوم چې دا به د نړۍ څومره تشریح کړي.
مګر دا د دې لامل نه دی چې زه د سولې لپاره د هغه فرصت په اړه چې دا تړون وړاندیز کوي ناخوښه او له ویره ډک یم. ولې زه د جګړې د پای ته رسیدو په چانس کې د بریالۍ خوښۍ سره خوښ نه یم او نڅا کوم ، په هیڅ چانس کې؟
لکه څنګه چې جینیفر هینسلر په CNN کې لیکي؛ په څلور مخیز هوکړه لیک کې راغلي چې طالبان به د القاعدې په ګډون د هرې ډلې یا فرد د مخنیوي لپاره اقدامات کوي چې د افغانستان له خاورې د امریکا او د هغې د متحدینو امنیت ته ګواښ پېښ کړي. په دې ګامونو کې هغه ژمنې شاملې دي چې طالبان به خپلو غړو ته لارښوونه کوي چې “له هغو ډلو یا اشخاصو سره همکاري ونه کړي چې د متحده ایالاتو او د هغې د متحدینو امنیت ته ګواښ پېښوي” او دا چې “په افغانستان کې د هرې ډلې یا فرد مخه نیسي چې د متحده ایالاتو امنیت ته ګواښ پېښوي.” او متحدین به یې د استخدام، روزنې او تمویل څخه مخنیوی وکړي او په دې تړون کې د ژمنو سره سم به د دوی کوربه توب نه کوي.”
“د تړون متن د ښځو او مدني ټولنې د خوندیتوب په اړه کومه ځانګړې ژبه نه لري،” د نړیوالو بشري حقونو او ډیموکراسۍ او په ځانګړې توګه د ښځو حقونه لکه د امریکا د جمهوري غوښتونکي حکومت لپاره هیڅ ارزښت نلري. په کورنیو او نړیوالو دواړو برخو کې د آزادۍ او مساواتو له منځه وړل چې د ټولو دریو ډلو اصلي هدف جوړوي چې د هغه څه د نیولو لپاره متحد شوي چې د خیانت ګوند بدل شوی؛ د ګیډونیت بنسټپالو سرپرستي او جنسي ترهګري، هغه سپینې واکمنان چې غواړي د قانون حاکمیت په بشپړه توګه له منځه یوسي، او هغه پلوټوکراټان چې موږ به بې انساني او غلامان کړي.
دا نظر چې موږ ټول د قانون له مخې مساوي حقونه لرو د جمهوري غوښتونکو اتحاد لپاره یو خنډ دی چې غواړي د څلورم ریخ په توګه په ټوله نړۍ د فاشیزم ظلم مسلط کړي. دوی غواړي چې د القاعدې او داعش په څیر باثباته بهرني ګواښونه محدود او محدود کړي، نه یې له منځه یوسي، ځکه چې دا ډول دښمنان د ملتپالو ویره او قهر په راپارولو او د زور او کنټرول حاکمیت ته د خپلو اتباعو د تسلیمولو په ګټلو کې خورا ګټور دي. نظارت او د پولیسو د بغاوت ضد ماډل. ظالمان باید دا ډول ګواښونه رامینځته کړي که دوی واقعا شتون نلري.
موږ د خپل غلامۍ میکانیزمونو او جوړښتونو په ننګولو کې پاتې راغلي یو ځکه چې دوی ښه پټ، منحرف، فرعي، د لوګي او شیانو څخه جوړ شوي دي. د وینې، عقیدې او خاورې فاشیزم اوس په ټوله نړۍ کې بیا راژوندي کیږي ډیری وختونه د بهرنیانو په توګه پیژندل کیږي، مګر دوی د بشري تاریخ په جریان کې مرکزي دي. د څلورم ریخ اوږده لوبه، د هغې نه لیدل کیدونکي خیمې د لسیزو د نفوذ عملیاتو په اوږدو کې په پراخه کچه پراخوي او واک ترلاسه کوي تر هغه چې دا موږ په خپل گرفت کې راګیروي، باید له پامه ونه غورځول شي.
نو د سولې په خبرونو زما خوښي زموږ په حکومت کې زما د بې باورۍ له سیوري لاندې ده، ځکه چې سوله کول او زموږ سرتیري کور ته په دې شرط راوستل چې طالبان خپلې سیمې د القاعدې او هر ډول تروریستانو په وړاندې پولیس کړي، هغه ګواښونه چې دوی ممکن د امریکا د ژغورلو توان نلري. ، سوله سبوتاژ کوي او دا تړون د ټرمپ د ټاکنیز کمپاین یوه تماشه وړاندې کوي چې ناکامي یې په نورو باندې اچول کیدی شي.
زه امید لرم چې پدې کې زه غلط یم ، او موږ به ډیر ژر له خپلو عزیزانو سره یو ځای شو چې په غیرت او زړورتیا سره د داسې حکومت خدمت کوي چې هیڅ نه لري ، او دا به هیڅکله جګړه ونه کړي.
پر موږ ټولو دې سوله راشي.
Persian
6 آگوست 2024 سالگرد سقوط کابل و افغانستان
در مورد سقوط افغانستان می توان گفت با چارلز دیکنز همانطور که در داستان دو شهر نوشته شده است. «بهترین روزگار بود، بدترین روزگار بود، عصر خرد بود، عصر حماقت بود، عصر باور بود، دوران ناباوری بود، فصل نور بود، فصل تاریکی بود، بهار امید بود، زمستان ناامیدی بود…، ما چیزی پیش روی خود نداشتیم، همه مستقیم به بهشت می رفتیم، همه از طرف دیگر مستقیم می رفتیم…»
تصور میکنم این لحظه تعیینکننده تاریخ ما، هم در آمریکا و هم در افغانستان و درگیری گستردهتر تمدنهایی که داستان ما بخشی از آن است، با ایجاد خود تمدن در جنگهای بین دموکراسیهای یونان و امپراتوری استبدادی ایران آغاز میشود. سقوط کابل اکنون نه از نظر نیروهای گسترده سیستمی، بلکه به مثابه تاریکی روشن شده توسط جرقه های ناگهانی خاطرات زنده خارج از زمان از آنچه تاکنون آخرین سفر من به این تئاتر جنگ و میدان مبارزه بوده است. وحشت، درد، مرگ و امید، آن هدیه و نفرین پاندورا به همه ما.
من دفتر خاطرات خود را در این روز سه سال پیش از پیشاور در حین آماده سازی برای اعزام نوشتم. تا 24 آگوست 2021 من در سراسر گذرگاه خیبر بودم، و دفتر خاطرات من برای آن تاریخ شامل یک کلیپ فیلم از حرامزادههای بیعظم، شوشانا برای شب آلمانی آماده میشود با موسیقی باشکوه دیوید بووی، آهنگ موضوع من برای Last Stands، که فقط زمانی پست میکنم من در شرف انجام کاری هستم که از آن بازگشتی نیست.
مدتها پیش شمار این آخرین جایگاهها را از دست دادم. به نظر می رسد اکنون وضعیت واقعی من است، این جهش ایمان به ورطه. همانطور که ژان ژنه در سال 1982 در بیروت، در یک خانه در حال سوختن، در یک هدف از دست رفته، در یک پیمان خودکشی برای امتناع از تسلیم و سوگند مقاومت که مرا در مسیر زندگی ام قرار داد، به من گفت. “وقتی امیدی نیست، ما در انجام کارهای غیرممکن آزاد هستیم، کارهای باشکوه.”
در جریان دفاع ما از پنجشیر در آن سپتمبر، امید ناامید شده استقلال برای مردمش از دست رفت، اما هرگز فراموش نخواهد شد.
افغانستان عشق من; روزی به سوی تو باز خواهم گشت، هر چند جهنم راه را ببندد.
همانطور که توسط آلفرد نویز در بزرگراه نوشته شده است.
بخش اول
باد سیلابی از تاریکی در میان درختان تند بود.
ماه یک گالیون شبح مانند بود که روی دریاهای ابری پرتاب می شد.
جاده نواری از مهتاب بود بر روی لنگر بنفش،
و بزرگراه سوار آمد-
سواری – سواری –
بزرگراه سوار سوار شد، تا در مسافرخانه قدیمی.
او یک کلاه فرانسوی روی پیشانی اش گذاشته بود، یک دسته توری روی چانه اش،
کتی از مخمل کلارت، و شلوارک از پوست خس قهوه ای.
آنها با هیچ چروک. چکمه هایش تا ران بود.
و با چشمک جواهر سوار شد،
قنداق تپانچه اش چشمک می زند،
دسته راپیرش در زیر آسمان نگین دار.
روی سنگفرش ها در تاریک حیاط مسافرخانه با هم برخورد کرد.
او با شلاق به کرکره ضربه زد، اما همه چیز قفل و مسدود بود.
او آهنگی را به پنجره سوت زد و چه کسی باید آنجا منتظر بماند
اما دختر چشم سیاه صاحبخانه،
بس، دختر صاحبخانه،
گره عشقی قرمز تیره را روی موهای مشکی بلندش میبافد.
و در تاریکی تاریک حیاط مسافرخانه قدیمی دریچه اصطبلی به صدا در آمد
جایی که تیم صحرا گوش داد. صورتش سفید و اوج گرفته بود.
چشمانش گودال های جنون بود، موهایش مثل یونجه کپک زده،
اما او عاشق دختر صاحبخانه بود،
دختر لب قرمز صاحبخانه.
گنگ مانند سگ گوش داد و دزد را شنید که گفت:
“یک بوس، عزیزم، من امشب دنبال جایزه هستم،
اما من با طلای زرد قبل از روشنایی صبح برخواهم گشت.
با این حال، اگر آنها به شدت مرا تحت فشار قرار دهند و در طول روز مرا آزار دهند،
سپس در نور ماه به دنبال من بگرد،
زیر نور ماه مراقب من باش،
من با نور ماه پیش تو خواهم آمد، هرچند جهنم باید راه را ببندد.»
او در میان رکاب ها ایستاده بود. به ندرت می توانست به دست او برسد،
اما او موهایش را در جعبه شل کرد. صورتش مثل مارک می سوخت
همانطور که آبشار سیاه عطر روی سینه اش می چرخید.
و امواج آن را در نور ماه بوسید،
(ای امواج سیاه شیرین در مهتاب!)
سپس افسار خود را در نور مهتاب گرفت و به سمت غرب رفت.
بخش دوم
او در سحر نیامد. ظهر نیامد.
و از غروب خرمایی، قبل از طلوع ماه،
وقتی جاده روبان کولی بود که لنگه بنفش را حلقه می کرد،
یک سرباز کت قرمز آمدند و راهپیمایی کردند –
راهپیمایی – راهپیمایی –
مردان شاه جورج در راهپیمایی آمدند، تا در مسافرخانه قدیمی.
آنها به صاحبخانه چیزی نگفتند. به جای آن دمنوش او را نوشیدند.
اما آنها دهان دخترش را بستند و او را به پای تخت باریکش بستند.
دو نفر از آنها در کنار قاب او زانو زدند و مشک ها در کنارشان بودند!
مرگ در هر پنجره بود.
و جهنم در یک پنجره تاریک.
زیرا بس میتوانست از لابهلای جعبهاش، جادهای را ببیند که سوار میشود.
آنها او را با شوخی های خنده آور زیادی به او جلب کرده بودند.
آنها یک تفنگ در کنار h
بسته شده بودند
وه، با پوزه زیر سینه اش!
“حالا، خوب مراقب باش!” و او را بوسیدند. او شنید که مرد محکوم به فنا گفت:
در نور ماه به دنبال من بگرد.
زیر نور ماه مراقب من باش.
من با نور مهتاب نزد تو خواهم آمد، هرچند جهنم باید راه را ببندد!
دستانش را پشت سرش چرخاند. اما همه گره ها خوب بود!
دستانش را آن قدر می پیچید که انگشتانش خیس عرق یا خون شدند!
آنها در تاریکی دراز میکشیدند و میکشیدند و ساعتها مانند سالها میخزیدند
تا به حال، در نیمه شب،
سرد، در نیمه شب،
نوک یک انگشت آن را لمس کرد! ماشه حداقل مال او بود!
نوک یک انگشت آن را لمس کرد. او دیگر برای بقیه تلاش نکرد.
بالا، او در حالی که پوزه زیر سینه اش بود، در مقابل توجه ایستاد.
او شنوایی آنها را به خطر نمی اندازد. او دوباره تلاش نمی کند.
زیرا جاده زیر نور مهتاب برهنه بود.
خالی و برهنه در نور مهتاب؛
و خون رگهایش در نور مهتاب به صدای عشقش می کوبید.
Tlot-tlot; تلات-تلات! آیا آنها آن را شنیده بودند؟ صدای سم اسب ها واضح است.
Tlot-tlot; Tlot-tlot، در دوردست؟ آیا کر بودند که نشنیدند؟
پایین روبان مهتاب، بالای پیشانی تپه،
بزرگراه سوار آمد-
سواری – سواری –
کت های قرمز به رنگ آمیزی خود نگاه می کردند! او صاف و بی حرکت ایستاد.
Tlot-tlot، در سکوت یخبندان! Tlot-tlot، در شب پژواک!
نزدیکتر آمد و نزدیکتر شد. صورتش مثل نور بود.
چشمانش برای لحظه ای گشاد شد. او آخرین نفس عمیق را کشید،
سپس انگشت او در نور ماه حرکت کرد،
مشک او مهتاب را شکست،
سینهاش را زیر نور مهتاب شکست و به او هشدار داد – با مرگش.
چرخید. او به سمت غرب حرکت کرد. او نمی دانست چه کسی ایستاده است
خم شده، با سرش روی مشک، آغشته به خون خودش!
تا سپیده دم آن را شنید و چهره اش برای شنیدن خاکستری شد
چگونه بس، دختر صاحبخانه،
دختر چشم سیاه صاحبخانه،
در نور ماه مراقب عشق او بود و در تاریکی آنجا مرد.
به عقب، او مانند یک دیوانه جهش کرد و نفرینی به آسمان فریاد زد،
با جاده سفیدی که پشت سرش دود میکرد و راپرش بالا میزد.
خارهای سرخ او در ظهر طلایی بودند. قرمز شرابی کت مخملی او بود.
وقتی او را در بزرگراه تیراندازی کردند،
پایین مثل یک سگ در بزرگراه،
و در اتوبان دراز کشید و دستهای توری در گلویش داشت.
. . .
و هنوز از یک شب زمستانی، می گویند، وقتی باد در درختان است،
وقتی ماه یک گالیون شبح مانند است که روی دریاهای ابری پرتاب می شود،
وقتی جاده نواری از مهتاب بر روی لنگر بنفش است،
یک بزرگراه سوار می آید –
سواری – سواری –
مرد بزرگراهی سوار بر مسافرخانه می آید.
روی سنگفرش ها در حیاط تاریک مسافرخانه به صدا در می آید و به صدا در می آید.
او با شلاق خود به کرکره ضربه می زند، اما همه چیز قفل و مسدود است.
او آهنگی را به پنجره سوت میزند، و چه کسی باید آنجا منتظر بماند
اما دختر چشم سیاه صاحبخانه،
بس، دختر صاحبخانه،
گره عشقی قرمز تیره را روی موهای مشکی بلندش میبافد.
همانطور که در پست خود در 16 اوت 2021، سقوط کابل و افغانستان نوشتم. ما در این آخر هفته با تصاویر مسحورکننده ای از سقوط کابل و افغانستان به نیروهای پیروز طالبان و فروپاشی رژیم روستای پوتمپکین ما و ارتش سراب آن روبرو هستیم که حتی یک گلوله در مقاومت شلیک نکردند، تصاویری که سقوط سایگون را به یاد می آورد. در سال 1975 در شرایط موازی.
اگر آمریکا میخواهد در شکلدهی به سیاستهای دولت جدید، یک کرسی بر سر میز داشته باشد، باید آن را به عنوان جنبش استقلالطلب مشروع بدانیم و از ایفای نقش غلامان خارجی امپریالیسم خودداری کنیم. ممکن است با هویج چیزی را که با چوب از دست داده ایم به دست آوریم.
نه سرباز، بلکه دیپلماتهایی را با کمکهای بشردوستانه و حمایت مادی بفرستید. این می تواند مشروط به رعایت اصول جهانی حقوق بشر باشد. طالبان به چیزی از ایالات متحده و جهان در کل نیاز دارند. به رسمیت شناختن مشروعیت، و این می تواند یک اهرم قدرتمند باشد.
همانطور که هانری پنجم شکسپیر می گوید; “وقتی نرمش و ظلم برای پادشاهی بازی می کند، دست مهربان تر مطمئن ترین برنده است.”
جنگ صلیبی حماسی و ماجراجویی های امپریالیستی آمریکا در افغانستان با یک کمپین موفقیت آمیز خیره کننده برای سرنگونی اتحاد جماهیر شوروی با فریب دادن و به دام انداختن آن در یک تهاجم و فتح غیرقابل پیروزی آغاز شد، درسی که متعاقباً فراموش شد، که در آن ما مسلح، آموزش دیدیم، کمک مالی کردیم و اغلب مستقیماً فرماندهی می کردیم. و در کنار مبارزان آزادی که امروز جنگ سالارانی هستند که در واقع بر افغانستان حکومت می کنند، جنگید. این مشتریان آمریکایی به طرز بدنامی شامل اسامه بن لادن، محقق مذهبی باهوش بود، و فکر میکنم همه ما میدانیم که این کار چقدر خوب انجام شد.
به نظر می رسد ما از شکست های امپریالیسم خود چیزی یاد نگرفته ایم. این بار ممکن است متفاوت باشد، اما من شک دارم.
مگر اینکه نیروها و شرایطی را تغییر دهیم که جنگ را برای نخبگان سودمند و برای مقامات در تمرکز قدرت مفید می کند.
این اولین باری نخواهد بود که طالبان، یک پا
کلمه shto به معنی “دانشجویان”، از سال 1996 تا 2001 به عنوان نیابتی پاکستان، تا زمانی که آمریکا در پی سال 911 به آن حمله کرد، بر افغانستان حکومت کردند. ”؛ کشور جانشین اسکندر مقدونی باختری، مغول ها، امپراتوری بریتانیا و اتحاد جماهیر شوروی همه بر سندان آن شکسته شدند. این شهر همچنین زادگاه امپراتوری های بزرگی بوده است که سپس تکه تکه شدند. پارت، سکا، کوشانی های بودایی، هون های سفید، کیداریت ها، سلسله شاهی هندو و امپراتوری نادرشاه. افغانستان مدرن در سال 1747 توسط احمد شاه درانی از بقایای مغولان و وارثان نادرشاه در ایران، پس از درگیری ویرانگر متقابل بین سلسله صفویه ایران و مغولان هند برای تصاحب قندهار تأسیس شد.
و حالا، به نظر می رسد، نوبت آمریکاست. چه جنون ما انسانها را در بر می گیرد که با خشم و خشونت روانی نهادینه شده جنگ از یک سو و دروغ ها و توهمات فریبنده جعل و سرقت سرمایه داری منابع و ثروت عمومی از سوی دیگر به سوی تسلط و کنترل بر دیگران سوق داده می شویم. ?
چگونه می توانیم از چرخه معیوب ویرانگر و حلقه واگنری ترس، قدرت و زور فرار کنیم؟
چه درس هایی می توانیم از شکست امپریالیستی خود در ایجاد تفرقه و تسخیر از طریق تولید نیابت ها و نخبگان هژمونیک در امتداد خطوط فرقه ای و قومی بالکانیزه شده، جنگ سالاران، دولت های مشتری واهی، و استراتژی های مهار شده ترور و استبداد دولتی و وضعیت جهانی شکنجه بیاموزیم. نظارت، سرکوب مخالفان، مرزها و پلیس، همراه با همگون سازی، همدستی، استثمار استعماری از طریق پیادههای الیگارشی فاسد و رژیمهای دست نشانده، و سلاحسازی ارزشها و آرمانهای ما، دموکراسی و حقوق بشر جهانی، طعمه تبلیغاتی برای دام سلطه ما؟
کسی که اسلحه حمل می کند مرگ را تحمل می کند. زندگی را انتخاب کن.
بیایید استفاده اجتماعی از زور را کنار بگذاریم.
بیایید هیچ ارتشی برای اعمال فضیلت نفرستیم.
همانطور که در پست خود در 19 آوریل 2021 نوشتم، بایدن پایان جنگ آمریکا در افغانستان را اعلام کرد: هورا، و با آن موفق باشید. در افغانستان برای انتقام آمدیم و برای سود ماندیم. ثابت شده است که رها کردن هر یک از آنها دشوار است.
پرزیدنت بایدن پایان جنگ آمریکا در افغانستان را اعلام کرده است. این را جشن میگیرم، شادی من از اخبار صلح تنها با این واقعیت که ما قبلاً اینجا بودهایم تحت الشعاع قرار میگیرد. اعلام صلح یک چیز است. حفظ صلح چیز دیگری است.
سال 2019، سالی سرشار از امید همراه با شکست غمانگیز بود که با پایان آن و آغاز سال جدید با صلحی شکننده در افغانستان پس از 18 سال جنگ مشخص شد، صلحی که چند روز بعد در یک نبرد شش ساعته در مجموع از دست رفت. تاریکی غار، نجات SEAL های گرفتار شده در قلعه طالبان با انهدام هلیکوپترهای آنها در جریان حمله ای که نقض معاهده بود، ماموریتی تحریک آمیز که هدف آن خراب کردن صلح بود، که در آن کل تاریخ هزاره ها درگیری تمدنی در جریان بود. با تحمل چهار مردی که آزادانه به تصرف صخره سغدی توسط اسکندر مقدونی پرداختند، از یک کوه بالا رفتند و سپس با مخفی کاری، هدایت نادرست و دقت، نیرویی را شکست دادند که یک تیم حمله هوایی متشکل از SEAL ها را مغلوب کرده بود و سرنگون کرده بود.
مانند بسیاری از وقایع که به صورت قهقرایی از پرتاب کلمات به سنگ پرتاب می شوند، هم یک موفقیت تاکتیکی و هم یک شکست استراتژیک، یک اقدام باشکوه قهرمانانه و یک تحریک امپریالیستی بود که خروج ما از جنون یک جنگ ابدی را خراب کرد.
این یک اکشن صحنهای تئاتری بود که برای ارائه یک casus belli طراحی شده بود، یک ماموریت مخفی برای خراب کردن صلح با الگوبرداری از حیلهای که ژاپنیها برای مشروعیت بخشیدن به تهاجمشان به منچوری در سال 1931 استفاده کردند، حادثه موکدن، که شامل یک سرباز ژاپنی بود. مرد گمشده ای که سربازان دیگر برای نجات او فرستاده شدند.
صلح بایدن آزمونی برای روح آمریکا، ارزشها و نیات واقعی ما نسبت به جهان و وحدت هدف ما خواهد بود. این خطی است که امیدوارم بتوانیم آن را حفظ کنیم، زیرا اگر سودجویان ما از مرگ و آنچه آیزنهاور آن را مجتمع نظامی-صنعتی نامید، شانس صلح را دوباره در خدمت به ثروت و قدرت خراب کنند، همانطور که ترامپ در سال 2019 و نیروهای امپراتوری ژاپن انجام داد. در سال 1931، آیندههای احتمالی که از آن لحظه آشکار میشوند، نوید دنیای بهتر را نمیدهند.
ما می دانیم که آخرین بار، در پرل هاربر چه اتفاقی افتاد.
همانطور که در پست خود در 2 ژانویه 2020 نوشتم، پایانی برای جنگ برای همیشه در افغانستان؟ سال نو یک هدیه صلح یا امکان آن را به ارمغان می آورد، که ممکن است به ما اجازه دهد تا به جنگ 18 ساله برای همیشه در افغانستان پایان دهیم و 12000 سرباز خود را به خانه بازگردانیم.
صدها هزار نفر در این درگیری حماسی جان خود را از دست داده اند که هیچ سود واقعی برای کسی نداشته است، جنگی که در آن اهداف، اتحادها و صور فلکی قدرت بی شکل و در حال تغییر بوده است، سیل آمریکا سعی کرده با یک تیپ سطلی با آن مقابله کند.
اگر بتوان صلحی برقرار کرد، اگر
یک ملت را می توان دوباره مانند هامپتی دامپی گرد هم آورد، این یک معجزه خواهد بود، اما کشوری بسیار شبیه ویتنام که در آن آمریکا با شکست می گریزد و متحدان خود را به دشمنی سرسخت رها می کند که برای اجرای دیدگاه خود از یک جامعه ایده آل برای هرکسی که می تواند تلاش می کند. چنین مقایسه ای از بسیاری جهات محدود است، از جمله این واقعیت عجیب است که آمریکا از طریق خراجی که توسط پیمانکاران غیرنظامی ما پرداخت می شود، به طالبان یارانه پرداخت می کند، در حالی که نظامیان ما در یک نبرد چاله ای که با جنایات جنگی از همه طرف مشخص شده است، یارانه می دهد. انسانیت زدایی و از بین رفتن تمدنی ارزش ها.
جنگ برای عده معدودی تجارت خوبی ایجاد می کند و برای بسیاری وحشتی غیرقابل درک.
همانطور که رحیم فیض و کتی گانن در هاف پست توصیف کردند. یکی از ستونهای اصلی این توافق که ایالات متحده و طالبان بیش از یک سال است که آن را امضا کردهاند، مذاکرات مستقیم بین افغانها در هر دو طرف درگیری است.
انتظار می رود این مذاکرات بین الافغانی ظرف دو هفته پس از امضای توافقنامه صلح میان ایالات متحده و طالبان برگزار شود. آنها احتمالا تصمیم خواهند گرفت که افغانستان پس از جنگ چگونه خواهد بود و طالبان چه نقشی ایفا خواهند کرد. این مذاکرات طیف وسیعی از موضوعات مانند حقوق زنان، آزادی بیان و سرنوشت دهها هزار جنگجوی طالبان و همچنین شبهنظامیان به شدت مسلح متعلق به جنگسالاران افغانستان را در بر میگیرد که از آن زمان ثروت و قدرت جمعآوری کردهاند. برکناری طالبان.»
و در پست بعدی من در 29 فوریه 2020، صلح در افغانستان؟ ما امروز امضای تاریخی توافق صلح بین آمریکا و طالبان و فرصت بازگرداندن نیروهایمان به خانه از یک جنگ 18 ساله را جشن میگیریم که دستاوردهای اندکی به قیمت خون و گنج به دست آورده است. این یک صلح آزمایشی و مشروط است که در سندی درخشان تنظیم شده است که برای همیشه نمونه ای از دیپلماسی استادانه باقی خواهد ماند که در آن هر دو طرف ممکن است ادعای پیروزی کنند.
آمریکا در نابودی و انکار دشمن بزرگ القاعده توسط متحدان طالبان خود پیروز شده است. این همچنین طالبان را به عنوان یک ملت سنی با به رسمیت شناختن واقعی آمریکا در مرزهای شرقی ایران به عنوان وزنه تعادل، یک پیروزی بدون صلاحیت از نظر استراتژی ژئوپلیتیک، قرار می دهد.
طالبان می توانند ادعای پیروزی بر آمریکا را در جنگ طولانی خود برای رهایی ملت خود از امپریالیسم خارجی کنند. ما مشروعیت خود را به طالبان واگذار کرده ایم و به دستور مستقیم رئیس جمهور ترامپ احمق ترسو خود که سخنانش هیچ معنایی ندارد، به شکست کامل خود اعتراف کرده ایم. تنها باقی می ماند که متحدان خود را رها کنیم و مانند سگ های شلاق خورده از افغانستان فرار کنیم.
ممکن است این روایت در آمریکا چه توسط دولت ما و نه کشوری که از جنگهای ویرانگر بیمعنا خسته شدهاند، در آمریکا قاببندی، چرخانده و فروخته شود، اما من به شما تضمین میدهم که اینگونه تفسیر خواهد شد.
اما این دلیلی نیست که من از چشم انداز فرصتی برای صلح که این توافق ارائه می دهد، ناآرام و مملو از هراس هستم. چرا در فرصت پایان جنگ، اصلاً هیچ شانسی، خوشحال نیستم و با وجد پیروزمندانه نمی رقصم؟
همانطور که جنیفر هانسلر در CNN می نویسد; در این توافقنامه چهار صفحه ای آمده است که طالبان اقداماتی را برای جلوگیری از استفاده هر گروه یا فردی از جمله القاعده از خاک افغانستان برای تهدید امنیت ایالات متحده و متحدانش انجام خواهد داد. این اقدامات شامل تعهداتی است که طالبان به اعضای خود دستور می دهد “با گروه ها یا افرادی که امنیت ایالات متحده و متحدانش را تهدید می کنند همکاری نکنند” و “از هر گروه یا فردی در افغانستان از تهدید امنیت ایالات متحده جلوگیری خواهد کرد.” و متحدانش را از جذب، آموزش و جمع آوری کمک مالی ممانعت می کند و طبق تعهدات مندرج در این قرارداد میزبانی آنها را نخواهد داشت.»
«متن توافقنامه حاوی هیچ زبان خاصی در مورد حمایت از زنان یا جامعه مدنی نیست.» موارد پیش پا افتاده ای مانند حقوق بشر جهانی و دموکراسی و به ویژه حقوق زنان که برای دولت جمهوری خواه آمریکا ارزشی ندارد. الغای آزادی و برابری در هر دو حوزه داخلی و جهانی که هدف اصلی هر سه جناحی را تشکیل می دهد که برای تصرف حزب خیانت متحد شدند. پدرسالاری و ترور جنسی بنیادگرایان گیدونیتی، برتری گرایان سفیدپوست که می خواهند حکومت قانون را به طور کامل زیر پا بگذارند، و پلتوکرات هایی که ما را از انسانیت خارج می کنند و به بردگی می کشند.
این ایده که همه ما تحت قانون از حقوق مساوی برخورداریم، برای اتحاد جمهوری خواهان که به دنبال تحمیل ظلم فاشیسم بر کل جهان به عنوان رایش چهارم است، مزاحم است. آنها می خواهند تهدیدهای خارجی قابل اجرا مانند القاعده و داعش را مهار و محدود کنند، نه از بین بردن آنها، زیرا چنین دشمنانی در ایجاد ترس و خشم ناسیونالیستی و در برانگیختن تسلیم شدن شهروندان خود در برابر یک دولت استبدادی زور و کنترل بسیار مفید هستند. نظارت و الگوی پلیس ضد شورش ظالمان باید چنین تهدیدهایی را ایجاد کنند، اگر واقعا وجود نداشته باشند.
چگونه
سیاری از اقدامات تروریستی علیه ما توسط پیاده هایی انجام شد که از اربابان واقعی خود بی خبر بودند؟ چه تعداد از چنین نیروهای انکارناپذیری را آمریکا در سطح جهانی به کار می گیرد تا ترس و نفرت بکارد، از نظر تاریخی در راه امپریالیسم ما و اکنون نیز در براندازی دموکراسی در سراسر جهان؟
ما نمی توانیم سازوکارها و ساختارهای بردگی خود را به چالش بکشیم زیرا آنها به خوبی پنهان، فریبنده، ظریف، ساخته شده از دود و آینه هستند. فاشیسم های خونی، ایمانی و خاکی که اکنون در سرتاسر جهان احیا می شوند، اغلب به عنوان فاشیسم های پرت توصیف می شوند، اما در مسیر تاریخ بشریت محوری هستند. بازی طولانی رایش چهارم، شاخکهای نامرئی آن که در طول دههها عملیات نفوذ بهطور ناپیوسته تکثیر میشوند و قدرت را در دست میگیرند تا زمانی که ما را در چنگال خود گرفتار کند، نباید دست کم گرفت.
بنابراین خوشحالی من از اخبار صلح تحت الشعاع بی اعتمادی من به دولتمان است، زیرا صلح و بازگرداندن سربازان ما به خانه مشروط به طالبان برای پلیس کردن مناطق خود در برابر القاعده و اصلاً هر تروریستی است، تهدیدهایی که ممکن است در نجات آمریکا از شر آن ناتوان باشند. ، صلح را خراب می کند و این توافق را به منظره کمپین انتخاباتی ترامپ تبدیل می کند که شکست آن را می توان به گردن دیگران انداخت.
امیدوارم که من در این مورد اشتباه می کنم و به زودی با عزیزانمان که با افتخار و شجاعت به دولتی خدمت می کنند که هیچ کدام ندارد، متحد شویم و دیگر هرگز جنگ نخواهیم کرد.
درود بر همه ما باد.
Urdu
6 اگست 2024 کابل اور افغانستان کے زوال کی سالگرہ
افغانستان کے زوال کے بارے میں ہم چارلس ڈکنز کے ساتھ کہہ سکتے ہیں جیسا کہ اے ٹیل آف ٹو سٹیز میں لکھا ہے۔ “یہ بہترین وقت تھا، یہ بدترین وقت تھا، یہ حکمت کا دور تھا، یہ حماقت کا دور تھا، یہ یقین کا دور تھا، یہ بے اعتباری کا دور تھا، یہ روشنی کا موسم تھا، یہ اندھیروں کا موسم تھا، یہ امید کی بہار تھی، یہ مایوسی کی سردی تھی…، ہمارے سامنے کچھ نہیں تھا، ہم سب سیدھے جنت کی طرف جا رہے تھے، ہم سب سیدھے دوسری طرف جا رہے تھے…”
ہماری تاریخ کا یہ متعین لمحہ، امریکہ اور افغانستان دونوں کی اور تہذیبوں کے وسیع تنازعات کا جس کا ہماری کہانی ایک حصہ ہے، یونان کی جمہوریتوں اور مطلق العنان فارسی سلطنت کے درمیان جنگوں میں خود تہذیب کی تخلیق سے شروع ہوا، میں تصور کرتا ہوں۔ کابل کا زوال اب وسیع نظامی قوتوں کے لحاظ سے نہیں بلکہ اندھیرے کی طرح روشن یادوں کے اچانک چمکنے سے روشن ہو گیا ہے جس سے اب تک جنگ کے اس تھیٹر اور جدوجہد کے میدان میں میری آخری مہم رہی ہے۔ دہشت، درد، موت، اور امید، وہ تحفہ اور پنڈورا کی لعنت ہم سب کے لیے۔
میں نے اس دن کا اپنا جریدہ تین سال قبل مہم کی تیاریوں کے دوران پشاور سے لکھا تھا۔ 24 اگست 2021 تک میں خیبر پاس تھا، اور اس تاریخ کے لیے میرے جریدے میں Inglorious Basterds کا ایک فلمی کلپ شامل ہے، شوشننا ڈیوڈ بووی کی شاندار موسیقی کے ساتھ جرمن نائٹ کی تیاری کرتی ہے، لاسٹ اسٹینڈز کے لیے میرا تھیم سانگ، جسے میں تب ہی پوسٹ کرتا ہوں جب میں ایک ایسا کام کرنے والا ہوں جس سے واپسی نہیں ہوتی۔
بہت پہلے میں نے اس طرح کے آخری اسٹینڈز کی گنتی کھو دی تھی۔ اب لگتا ہے کہ یہ میری حقیقی حالت ہے، ایمان کی یہ چھلانگ پاتال میں۔ جیسا کہ جین جینیٹ نے مجھ سے 1982 میں بیروت میں ایک جلتے ہوئے گھر میں، ایک گمشدہ مقصد میں، ہتھیار ڈالنے سے انکار کے خودکش معاہدے اور مزاحمت کے حلف میں کہا جس نے مجھے میری زندگی کی راہ پر گامزن کیا۔ “جب کوئی امید نہیں ہے، ہم ناممکن چیزوں کو کرنے کے لئے آزاد ہیں، شاندار چیزیں.”
ہمارے پنجشیر کے دفاع کے دوران ستمبر اس کے لوگوں کے لیے آزادی کی ایک مایوس کن امید کھو گئی، لیکن اسے کبھی فراموش نہیں کیا جائے گا۔
افغانستان میرا پیار؛ ایک دن میں آپ کے پاس واپس آؤں گا، اگرچہ جہنم راستے میں رکاوٹ بن جائے۔
جیسا کہ دی ہائی وے مین میں الفریڈ نوائس نے لکھا ہے۔
حصہ اول
ہوا درختوں کے درمیان اندھیرے کا ایک طوفان تھی۔
چاند ابر آلود سمندروں پر پھینکا ہوا ایک بھوت گیلیون تھا۔
سڑک جامنی مور کے اوپر چاندنی کا ربن تھی،
اور ہائی وے مین سوار ہو کر آیا-
سواری – سواری –
ہائی وے مین سوار ہو کر پرانی سرائے کے دروازے تک آیا۔
اس کے ماتھے پر فرانسیسی کاکڈ ٹوپی، ٹھوڑی پر فیتے کا ایک گچھا،
کلارٹ مخمل کا ایک کوٹ، اور بھوری ڈو-جلد کی بریچ۔
وہ کبھی بھی شیکن کے ساتھ لیس۔ اس کے جوتے ران تک تھے۔
اور وہ ایک جواہرات والی چمک کے ساتھ سوار ہوا،
اس کے پستول کے بٹ ایک دم چمکتے ہیں،
اس کا ریپیر جواہرات سے بھرے آسمان کے نیچے چمکتا ہوا جھلک رہا تھا۔
موچیوں پر وہ ہڑبڑاتا اور اندھیرے سرائے کے صحن میں ٹکراتا رہا۔
اس نے شٹر پر اپنے کوڑے سے ٹیپ کیا، لیکن سب کچھ بند اور روک دیا گیا تھا۔
اس نے کھڑکی کی طرف سیٹی بجائی، اور وہاں کس کا انتظار کرنا چاہیے۔
لیکن زمیندار کی کالی آنکھوں والی بیٹی،
بیس، زمیندار کی بیٹی،
اس کے لمبے سیاہ بالوں میں گہرے سرخ محبت کی گرہ لگا رہی ہے۔
اور اندھیرے پرانے سرائے کے صحن میں ایک مستحکم وکٹ گرنے لگی
جہاں ٹم دی آسٹر سنتا تھا۔ اس کا چہرہ سفید اور چوٹی تھی۔
اس کی آنکھیں جنون کی کھوکھلی تھیں، اس کے بال گھاس کی طرح،
لیکن وہ زمیندار کی بیٹی سے پیار کرتا تھا،
زمیندار کی لال ہونٹ والی بیٹی۔
ایک کتے کی طرح گونگا اس نے سنا، اور اس نے ڈاکو کو کہتے سنا-
“ایک بوسہ، میرے پیارے پیارے، میں آج رات انعام کے بعد ہوں،
لیکن میں صبح کی روشنی سے پہلے پیلے سونے کے ساتھ واپس آؤں گا۔
پھر بھی، اگر وہ مجھے زور سے دبائیں، اور دن بھر مجھے تنگ کریں،
پھر چاندنی میں ڈھونڈو مجھے
مجھے چاندنی سے دیکھو،
میں آپ کے پاس چاندنی سے آؤں گا، اگرچہ جہنم راستے میں رکاوٹ بن جائے۔”
وہ رکاب میں سیدھا اٹھ کھڑا ہوا۔ وہ کم ہی اس کے ہاتھ تک پہنچ سکتا تھا،
لیکن اس نے کیسمنٹ میں اپنے بال ڈھیلے کر لیے۔ اس کا چہرہ کسی برانڈ کی طرح جل گیا تھا۔
جیسے ہی عطر کا سیاہ جھرنا اس کی چھاتی پر گرنے لگا۔
اور اس نے چاندنی میں اس کی لہروں کو چوما،
(اے، چاندنی میں میٹھی سیاہ لہریں!)
پھر اس نے چاندنی کی روشنی میں اپنی لگام کو کھینچا، اور مغرب کی طرف سرپٹ پڑا۔
دوسرا حصہ
وہ سحری میں نہیں آیا۔ وہ دوپہر کو نہیں آیا۔
اور چاند کے طلوع ہونے سے پہلے غروب آفتاب سے باہر،
جب سڑک ایک خانہ بدوش کا ربن تھی، جامنی رنگ کے مور کو لپیٹتی ہوئی،
ایک سرخ کوٹ والا دستہ مارچ کرتا ہوا آیا-
مارچ کرنا – مارچ کرنا –
کنگ جارج کے آدمی پرانی سرائے کے دروازے تک مارچ کرتے ہوئے آئے۔
انہوں نے مالک مکان سے کوئی بات نہیں کی۔ انہوں نے اس کی بجائے اس کی ایل پی لی۔
لیکن اُنہوں نے اُس کی بیٹی کا گلا گھونٹ دیا، اور اُسے اُس کے تنگ بستر کے پاؤں سے باندھ دیا۔
ان میں سے دو اس کے کیسمنٹ پر گھٹنے ٹیکتے تھے، ان کے پہلو میں مسکٹس تھے!
ہر کھڑکی پر موت تھی۔
اور جہنم ایک تاریک کھڑکی پر۔
کیونکہ بیس اپنے کیسمنٹ کے ذریعے وہ سڑک دیکھ سکتا تھا جس پر وہ سوار ہوتا تھا۔
انہوں نے بہت سے طنزیہ مذاق کے ساتھ اسے توجہ دلانے کے لیے باندھ دیا تھا۔
انہوں نے h کے پاس ایک مسکٹ باندھ رکھا تھا۔
r، اس کی چھاتی کے نیچے توتن کے ساتھ!
“اب، اچھی طرح دیکھتے رہو!” اور انہوں نے اسے چوما. اس نے برباد آدمی کو کہتے سنا-
مجھے چاندنی سے ڈھونڈو
چاندنی سے مجھے دیکھو
میں چاندنی سے آپ کے پاس آؤں گا، اگرچہ جہنم راستے میں رکاوٹ بن جائے!
اس نے اس کے پیچھے ہاتھ گھمائے۔ لیکن تمام گرہیں اچھی ہیں!
وہ اس وقت تک اپنے ہاتھ مروڑتی رہی جب تک کہ اس کی انگلیاں پسینے یا خون سے تر نہ ہو جائیں!
وہ اندھیرے میں پھیلے اور تنگ کیے گئے، اور گھنٹے برسوں کی طرح رینگتے رہے۔
اب تک، آدھی رات کے جھٹکے پر،
سردی، آدھی رات کے جھٹکے پر،
ایک انگلی کی نوک نے اسے چھوا! محرک کم از کم اس کا تھا!
ایک انگلی کی نوک اسے چھو گئی۔ اس نے باقی کے لیے مزید کوشش نہیں کی۔
اوپر، وہ اپنی چھاتی کے نیچے تھپکی کے ساتھ توجہ دینے کے لیے اٹھ کھڑی ہوئی۔
وہ ان کی سماعت کو خطرے میں نہیں ڈالے گی۔ وہ دوبارہ کوشش نہیں کرے گی۔
سڑک چاندنی میں ننگی پڑی ہے
چاندنی میں خالی اور ننگے؛
اور اس کی رگوں کا خون، چاندنی میں، اس کی محبت کے گریز میں دھڑک رہا تھا۔
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! کیا انہوں نے سنا تھا؟ گھوڑوں کے کھر صاف بج رہے ہیں۔
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot، فاصلے میں؟ کیا وہ بہرے تھے کہ انہوں نے نہیں سنی؟
چاندنی کا ربن نیچے، پہاڑی کی پیشانی پر،
ہائی وے مین سوار ہو کر آیا-
سواری – سواری –
سرخ کوٹ اپنے پرائمنگ کی طرف دیکھ رہے تھے! وہ سیدھی اور ساکت کھڑی ہو گئی۔
تلاطم خیز خاموشی میں! ٹلو ٹلوٹ، گونجتی رات میں!
قریب آیا اور قریب۔ اس کا چہرہ نور کی طرح تھا۔
اس کی آنکھیں ایک لمحے کے لیے پھیل گئیں۔ اس نے ایک آخری گہری سانس کھینچی
پھر چاندنی میں اس کی انگلی ہل گئی
اس کی مسکٹ نے چاندنی کو بکھرا دیا،
چاندنی میں اس کی چھاتی کو توڑ دیا اور اسے خبردار کیا – اس کی موت کے ساتھ۔
وہ مڑا۔ وہ مغرب کی طرف بڑھا۔ وہ نہیں جانتا تھا کہ کون کھڑا ہے۔
جھک گئی، اپنے سر کے ساتھ، اپنے ہی خون سے بھیگی!
صبح تک اس نے اسے سنا نہیں تھا، اور اس کا چہرہ سننے کے لئے بھوری ہو گیا تھا
کیسے بیس، مالک مکان کی بیٹی،
زمیندار کی کالی آنکھوں والی بیٹی،
چاندنی میں اس کی محبت کو دیکھا تھا، اور وہیں اندھیرے میں مر گیا۔
پیچھے، وہ دیوانے کی طرح تیز ہوا، آسمان پر لعنت بھیجتا ہوا،
اس کے پیچھے سفید سڑک تمباکو نوشی کے ساتھ اور اس کا ریپیر اونچا نشان لگا ہوا تھا۔
سنہری دوپہر میں خون کی سرخی اُس کے شعلے تھے۔ شراب سرخ اس کا مخملی کوٹ تھا۔
جب انہوں نے اسے ہائی وے پر گولی مار دی،
شاہراہ پر کتے کی طرح نیچے،
اور وہ ہائی وے پر اپنے خون میں لت پت پڑا، اس کے گلے میں فیتے کا گچھا تھا۔
. . .
اور اب بھی سردیوں کی رات کے بارے میں، وہ کہتے ہیں، جب ہوا درختوں میں ہوتی ہے،
جب چاند ابر آلود سمندروں پر پھینکا ہوا بھوت گیلیون ہے،
جب سڑک جامنی موور پر چاندنی کا ربن ہے،
ایک ہائی وے مین سوار ہو کر آتا ہے-
سواری – سواری –
ایک ہائی وے مین سوار ہو کر آتا ہے، پرانی سرائے کے دروازے تک۔
موچیوں کے اوپر وہ اندھیرے سرائے کے صحن میں چیختا اور بجتا ہے۔
وہ شٹر پر اپنے کوڑے سے تھپتھپاتا ہے، لیکن سب کچھ بند اور روک دیا جاتا ہے۔
وہ کھڑکی کی طرف سیٹی بجاتا ہے اور وہاں کس کا انتظار کرنا چاہیے۔
لیکن زمیندار کی کالی آنکھوں والی بیٹی،
بیس، زمیندار کی بیٹی،
اس کے لمبے سیاہ بالوں میں گہرے سرخ محبت کی گرہ لگا رہی ہے۔
جیسا کہ میں نے 16 اگست 2021 کی اپنی پوسٹ میں لکھا، کابل اور افغانستان کا زوال؛ ہم کابل اور افغانستان کے زوال کے اس ہفتے کے آخر میں طالبان کی فاتح قوتوں اور ہماری پوٹیمکن ولیج حکومت کے خاتمے اور اس کی سراب کی فوج کے خاتمے کی دلکش تصاویر کے ساتھ سامنا کر رہے ہیں جنہوں نے مزاحمت میں ایک بھی گولی نہیں چلائی، ایسی تصاویر جو سیگون کے زوال کو یاد کرتی ہیں۔ 1975 میں متوازی حالات میں۔
اگر امریکہ نئی حکومت کی پالیسیوں کی تشکیل میں میز پر بیٹھنا چاہتا ہے، تو ہمیں اسے آزادی کی جائز تحریک کے طور پر تسلیم کرنا چاہیے اور سامراج کے غیر ملکی غنڈوں کا کردار ادا کرنے سے انکار کرنا چاہیے۔ ہم گاجر سے جیت سکتے ہیں جو ہم نے چھڑی سے ہارا ہے۔
فوجیوں کو نہیں بلکہ انسانی امداد اور مادی مدد کے ساتھ سفارت کار بھیجیں۔ یہ عالمگیر انسانی حقوق کے اصولوں کی پابندی سے مشروط ہو سکتا ہے۔ طالبان کو امریکہ اور پوری دنیا سے کچھ درکار ہے۔ قانونی حیثیت کی پہچان، اور یہ ایک طاقتور لیور ہو سکتا ہے۔
جیسا کہ شیکسپیئر کا ہنری پانچواں کہتا ہے؛ “جب نرمی اور ظلم کسی بادشاہی کے لیے کھیلتے ہیں، تو نرم ہاتھ یقینی فاتح ہوتا ہے۔”
افغانستان میں امریکہ کی مہاکاوی صلیبی جنگ اور سامراجی مہم جوئی کا آغاز سوویت یونین کو ایک ناقابل شکست حملے اور فتح میں پھنسا کر اسے گرانے کی ایک شاندار کامیاب مہم کے ساتھ ہوا، جو بعد میں ایک سبق بھول گیا، جس میں ہم مسلح، تربیت یافتہ، مالی امداد اور اکثر براہ راست کمانڈ کرتے تھے۔ اور آزادی کے جنگجوؤں کے ساتھ مل کر لڑے جو آج جنگی سردار ہیں جو حقیقت میں افغانستان پر حکومت کرتے ہیں۔ ان امریکی مؤکلوں میں بدنام زمانہ مذہبی اسکالر اسامہ بن لادن بھی شامل تھا، اور میرے خیال میں ہم سب جانتے ہیں کہ اس نے کتنا اچھا کام کیا۔
ایسا لگتا ہے کہ ہم نے اپنے سامراج کی ناکامیوں سے کچھ نہیں سیکھا۔ یہ وقت مختلف ہو سکتا ہے، لیکن مجھے شک ہے.
جب تک ہم ان قوتوں اور حالات کو تبدیل نہیں کرتے جو جنگ کو اشرافیہ کے لیے فائدہ مند اور اقتدار کی مرکزیت میں حکام کے لیے مفید بناتی ہیں۔
یہ پہلی بار نہیں ہو گا کہ طالبان، ایک پا
o لفظ کا مطلب ہے “طلبہ”، جس نے افغانستان پر حکومت کی ہے، جیسا کہ انہوں نے 1996 سے 2001 تک پاکستان کے پراکسی کے طور پر کیا، یہاں تک کہ 911 کے بعد امریکہ نے حملہ کیا۔ ”; سکندر اعظم کی جانشین ریاست باختر، منگولوں، برطانوی سلطنت اور سوویت یونین سب کو اس کی نالی پر توڑ دیا گیا۔ یہ عظیم سلطنتوں کی جائے پیدائش بھی رہی ہے جو پھر بکھر گئیں۔ پارتھیا، سیتھیا، بدھ کشان، سفید ہن، کیدارائٹس، ہندو شاہی خاندان، اور نادر شاہ کی سلطنت۔ جدید افغانستان کی بنیاد احمد شاہ درانی نے 1747 میں مغلوں کی باقیات اور فارس میں نادر شاہ کے وارثوں سے رکھی تھی، قندھار پر قبضے کے لیے فارس کے صفوی خاندان اور ہندوستان کے مغلوں کے درمیان باہمی طور پر تباہ کن تنازعہ کے بعد۔
اور اب، ایسا لگتا ہے، امریکہ کی باری ہے۔ ہم انسانوں کو کیا پاگل پن حاصل ہے کہ ایک طرف ادارہ جاتی نفسیاتی غصہ اور جنگ کے تشدد اور دوسری طرف عوامی وسائل اور دولت کی سرمایہ دارانہ چوری اور فریب کاری کے موہک جھوٹ اور فریب کے ساتھ ہم دوسروں پر غلبہ حاصل کرنے اور ان پر قابو پانے کے لیے مجبور ہیں۔ ?
ہم خوف، طاقت اور طاقت کے تباہ کن شیطانی چکر اور ویگنیرین رنگ سے کیسے بچ سکتے ہیں؟
ہم اپنی سامراجی ناکامیوں سے کیا سبق سیکھ سکتے ہیں جو پراکسیوں اور بالادستی کے اشرافیہ کے ذریعے بالکانائزڈ فرقہ وارانہ اور نسلی خطوط پر تقسیم اور فتح حاصل کر سکتے ہیں، جنگجوؤں، فریب خوردہ کلائنٹ ریاستوں، اور ریاستی دہشت گردی اور استبداد کی حکمت عملیوں اور عالمی سطح پر کارسرل ریاست کے نگرانی، اختلاف رائے کا جبر، سرحدوں اور پولیس، انضمام، تعاون، بدعنوان حکمرانوں اور کٹھ پتلی حکومتوں کے پیادوں کے ذریعے نوآبادیاتی استحصال، اور ہماری اقدار اور نظریات، جمہوریت اور عالمی انسانی حقوق کے ہتھیار بنانے کے ساتھ۔ ہمارے تسلط کے جال کے لئے پروپیگنڈا چارہ؟
جو ہتھیار اٹھاتا ہے موت برداشت کرتا ہے۔ زندگی کا انتخاب کریں.
آئیے طاقت کے سماجی استعمال کو ترک کر دیں۔
آئیے نیکی کے نفاذ کے لیے کوئی فوج نہ بھیجیں۔
جیسا کہ میں نے 19 اپریل 2021 کی اپنی پوسٹ میں لکھا، بائیڈن نے افغانستان میں امریکہ کی جنگ کے خاتمے کا اعلان کیا: ہورے، اور اس کے ساتھ گڈ لک؛ افغانستان میں ہم انتقام کے لیے آئے، اور فائدے کے لیے رہے۔ دونوں کو چھوڑنا مشکل ثابت ہوا ہے۔
صدر بائیڈن نے افغانستان میں امریکہ کی جنگ کے خاتمے کا اعلان کیا ہے۔ یہ میں جشن مناتا ہوں، امن کی خبروں پر میری خوشی صرف اس حقیقت سے چھائی ہوئی ہے کہ ہم پہلے بھی یہاں آ چکے ہیں۔ امن کا اعلان کرنا ایک چیز ہے۔ امن برقرار رکھنا ایک اور چیز ہے۔
2019 ایک بڑی امید کا سال تھا جو المناک ناکامی سے دوچار تھا، جس کے اختتام اور نئے سال کا آغاز افغانستان میں 18 سال کی جنگ کے بعد ایک نازک امن کے ساتھ ہوا، چند دنوں بعد مجموعی طور پر چھ گھنٹے کی لڑائی میں ایک امن ہار گیا۔ ایک غار کی تاریکی، معاہدے کی خلاف ورزی کرتے ہوئے ایک حملے کے دوران ان کے ہیلی کاپٹروں کی تباہی سے طالبان کے قلعے میں پھنسے سیلوں کو بچانا، اشتعال انگیزی کا ایک ایسا مشن جس کا مقصد امن کو سبوتاژ کرنا تھا، جس میں صدیوں پر محیط تہذیبی تصادم کی پوری تاریخ تھی۔ چار آدمیوں نے برداشت کیا جنہوں نے سکندر اعظم کے سغدیان چٹان پر قبضے کی یاد میں ایک پہاڑ پر آزادانہ چڑھائی کی اور پھر چپکے سے، غلط سمت اور درستگی کے ساتھ ایک ایسی طاقت کو شکست دی جس نے SEALs کی ایک ہوائی حملہ آور ٹیم کو مغلوب کر دیا تھا۔
جیسا کہ بہت سے واقعات کے ساتھ جو پتھر پھینکنے میں الفاظ کے رجعت کے طور پر سامنے آتے ہیں، یہ ایک حکمت عملی کی کامیابی اور ایک سٹریٹجک ناکامی، بہادری کا ایک شاندار عمل اور ایک سامراجی اشتعال انگیزی تھی جس نے ہمیشہ کے لیے جنگ کے جنون سے ہماری دستبرداری کو سبوتاژ کیا۔
یہ ایک تھیٹریکل سیٹ پیس ایکشن تھا جو ایک کیسس بیلی فراہم کرنے کے لیے ڈیزائن کیا گیا تھا، جو کہ امن کو سبوتاژ کرنے کا ایک خفیہ مشن تھا جس کا نمونہ جاپانیوں نے 1931 میں منچوریا پر اپنے حملے کو جائز قرار دینے کے لیے استعمال کیا تھا، مکڈن واقعہ، جس میں ایک جاپانی فوجی شامل تھا۔ لاپتہ آدمی جسے بچانے کے لیے دوسرے فوجی بھیجے گئے تھے۔
بائیڈن کا امن امریکہ کی روح، دنیا کے تئیں ہماری حقیقی اقدار اور ارادوں اور مقصد کے اتحاد کا امتحان ہوگا۔ یہ وہ لائن ہے جس کی مجھے امید ہے کہ ہم پکڑ سکتے ہیں، کیونکہ اگر ہمارے منافع خوروں اور جسے آئزن ہاور نے ملٹری-انڈسٹریل کمپلیکس کہا تھا وہ دولت اور طاقت کی خدمت میں ایک بار پھر امن کے مواقع کو سبوتاژ کرتے ہیں، جیسا کہ ٹرمپ نے 2019 میں کیا تھا اور امپیریل جاپان کی افواج 1931 میں کیا، اس لمحے سے سامنے آنے والے ممکنہ مستقبل ایک بہتر دنیا کا وعدہ نہیں کرتے۔
ہم جانتے ہیں کہ پرل ہاربر میں آخری بار کیا ہوا تھا۔
جیسا کہ میں نے 2 جنوری 2020 کی اپنی پوسٹ میں لکھا، افغانستان میں ہمیشہ کے لیے جنگ کا خاتمہ؟ نیا سال امن کا تحفہ، یا اس کا امکان لے کر آتا ہے، جو ہمیں افغانستان میں اپنی 18 سالہ ہمیشہ کے لیے جاری جنگ کو ختم کرنے اور وہاں اپنے 12,000 فوجیوں کو واپس لانے کا موقع فراہم کر سکتا ہے۔
اس مہاکاوی تنازعہ میں لاکھوں افراد ہلاک ہوچکے ہیں جس کا کسی کو کوئی فائدہ نہیں ہوا، ایک ایسی جنگ جس میں مقاصد، اتحاد اور طاقت کے برج بے کار اور بدلتے رہے ہیں، ایک سیلاب امریکہ نے بالٹی بریگیڈ کے ساتھ مخالفت کرنے کی کوشش کی ہے۔
اگر امن قائم کیا جا سکتا ہے، اگر
ایک قوم کو ہمپٹی ڈمپٹی کی طرح دوبارہ اکٹھا کیا جا سکتا ہے، یہ ایک معجزہ ہو گا، لیکن ویتنام جیسی ایک قوم جس میں امریکہ شکست کھا کر بھاگ جاتا ہے اور اپنے اتحادیوں کو ایک ایسے ناقابل تسخیر دشمن کے حوالے کر دیتا ہے جو ایک مثالی معاشرے کے اپنے وژن کو ہر ایک پر نافذ کرنے کے لیے وقف ہو جاتا ہے۔ اس طرح کا موازنہ بہت سے طریقوں سے محدود ہے، ان میں سے ایک عجیب حقیقت یہ ہے کہ امریکہ ہمارے سویلین کنٹریکٹرز کی طرف سے ادا کی جانے والی خراج تحسین کے ذریعے طالبان کو سبسڈی دے رہا ہے جبکہ ہماری فوجیں ہر طرف سے جنگی جرائم کی زد میں آنے والی گڑھے کی لڑائی میں ایک دوسرے کو بچا رہی ہیں۔ غیر انسانی اور تہذیبی اقدار کا نقصان۔
جنگ چند لوگوں کے لیے اچھے کاروبار کا باعث بنتی ہے، اور بہت سے لوگوں کے لیے ناقابل فہم ہولناکی۔
جیسا کہ رحیم فیض اور کیتھی گینن نے ہف پوسٹ میں بیان کیا ہے۔ “معاہدے کا ایک اہم ستون، جسے امریکہ اور طالبان ایک سال سے زیادہ عرصے سے ختم کر رہے ہیں، تنازع کے دونوں اطراف کے افغانوں کے درمیان براہ راست مذاکرات ہیں۔
توقع ہے کہ امریکہ طالبان امن معاہدے پر دستخط ہونے کے دو ہفتوں کے اندر اندر افغان مذاکرات ہوں گے۔ وہ ممکنہ طور پر فیصلہ کریں گے کہ جنگ کے بعد کا افغانستان کیسا ہوگا، اور طالبان کیا کردار ادا کریں گے۔ مذاکرات میں بہت سے موضوعات کا احاطہ کیا جائے گا، جیسا کہ خواتین کے حقوق، آزادی اظہار اور دسیوں ہزار طالبان جنگجوؤں کی قسمت، نیز افغانستان کے جنگجوؤں سے تعلق رکھنے والی بھاری مسلح ملیشیا جنہوں نے اس کے بعد سے دولت اور طاقت جمع کی ہے۔ طالبان کا خاتمہ۔”
اور 29 فروری 2020 کی میری بعد کی پوسٹ میں، افغانستان میں امن؟ ہم آج امریکہ اور طالبان کے درمیان تاریخی امن معاہدے پر دستخط کا جشن منا رہے ہیں، اور اپنے فوجیوں کو 18 سالہ جنگ سے گھر واپس لانے کا موقع ہے جس نے خون اور خزانے کی بڑی قیمت پر بہت کم حاصل کیا ہے۔ یہ ایک عارضی، مشروط امن ہے، جو ایک شاندار دستاویز میں وضع کیا گیا ہے جو ہمیشہ کے لیے شاندار سفارت کاری کی ایک مثال رہے گا، جس میں دونوں فریق فتح کا دعویٰ کر سکتے ہیں۔
امریکہ نے اپنے طالبان اتحادیوں کے ذریعے ایک عظیم دشمن القاعدہ کی تباہی اور نامنظور جیت لی ہے۔ یہ طالبان کو ایک سنی قوم کے طور پر بھی پیش کرتا ہے جس میں ایران کی مشرقی سرحد پر براہ راست امریکی تسلیم کیا جاتا ہے، جو کہ جغرافیائی سیاسی حکمت عملی کے لحاظ سے ایک نااہل جیت ہے۔
طالبان اپنی قوم کو غیر ملکی سامراج سے نجات دلانے کے لیے اپنی طویل جنگ میں امریکہ پر فتح کا دعویٰ کر سکتے ہیں۔ ہم نے اپنے بزدل احمق صدر ٹرمپ کے براہ راست حکم سے طالبان کو قانونی حیثیت دے دی ہے اور تحریری طور پر اپنی مکمل شکست تسلیم کر لی ہے، جن کے الفاظ کا کوئی مطلب نہیں ہے۔ یہ صرف اپنے اتحادیوں کو چھوڑنے اور کوڑے مارے کتوں کی طرح افغانستان سے بھاگنا باقی ہے۔
ایسا نہیں ہوسکتا ہے کہ امریکہ میں بیانیہ تیار کیا جائے گا، کاتا جائے گا اور بیچا جائے گا، یا تو ہماری حکومت اور نہ ہی بے معنی تباہ کن ہمیشہ کی جنگوں سے تنگ قوم، لیکن میں آپ کو گارنٹی دیتا ہوں کہ دنیا اس کی کتنی تشریح کرے گی۔
لیکن یہی وجہ نہیں ہے کہ میں اس معاہدے سے ملنے والے امن کے موقع کے بارے میں بے چین اور خوفزدہ ہوں۔ میں جنگ کے خاتمے کے موقع پر، کسی بھی موقع پر خوشی اور فاتحانہ خوشی کے ساتھ رقص کیوں نہیں کر رہا ہوں؟
جیسا کہ جینیفر ہینسلر CNN میں لکھتی ہیں؛ “چار صفحات پر مشتمل معاہدے میں کہا گیا ہے کہ طالبان “القاعدہ سمیت کسی بھی گروہ یا فرد کو افغانستان کی سرزمین کو امریکہ اور اس کے اتحادیوں کی سلامتی کو خطرے میں ڈالنے سے روکنے کے لیے اقدامات کریں گے۔” ان اقدامات میں یہ وعدے شامل ہیں کہ طالبان اپنے ارکان کو “امریکہ اور اس کے اتحادیوں کی سلامتی کے لیے خطرہ بننے والے گروہوں یا افراد کے ساتھ تعاون نہ کرنے کی ہدایت کریں گے” اور یہ کہ “افغانستان میں کسی بھی گروہ یا فرد کو امریکہ کی سلامتی کے لیے خطرہ بننے سے روکیں گے۔ اور اس کے اتحادی، اور انہیں بھرتی، تربیت اور فنڈ ریزنگ سے روکیں گے اور اس معاہدے کے وعدوں کے مطابق ان کی میزبانی نہیں کریں گے۔”
“معاہدے کے متن میں خواتین یا سول سوسائٹی کے تحفظ کے حوالے سے کوئی مخصوص زبان نہیں ہے،” عالمی انسانی حقوق اور جمہوریت، اور خاص طور پر خواتین کے حقوق جیسی چھوٹی چھوٹی باتیں، جو کہ امریکہ کی ریپبلکن حکومت کے لیے کوئی اہمیت نہیں رکھتیں۔ ملکی اور عالمی دونوں شعبوں میں آزادی اور مساوات کا خاتمہ جو کہ تینوں دھڑوں کا بنیادی ہدف ہے جو غداری کی پارٹی بن چکی ہے پر قبضہ کرنے کے لیے متحد ہیں۔ Gideonite بنیاد پرستوں کی پدرانہ حکومت اور جنسی دہشت گردی، سفید فام بالادستی جو قانون کی حکمرانی کو مکمل طور پر ختم کرنا چاہتے ہیں، اور Plutocrats جو ہمیں غیر انسانی اور غلام بنائے گا۔
یہ خیال کہ ہم سب کو قانون کے تحت مساوی حقوق حاصل ہیں، ریپبلکن اتحاد کے لیے ایک پریشانی ہے جو فورتھ ریخ کے طور پر پوری دنیا پر فاشزم کا ظلم مسلط کرنا چاہتا ہے۔ وہ القاعدہ اور آئی ایس آئی ایس جیسے قابل عمل بیرونی خطرات کو محدود اور محدود کرنا چاہتے ہیں، انہیں ختم نہیں کرنا چاہتے، کیونکہ ایسے دشمن قوم پرستوں کے خوف اور غصے کو بھڑکانے اور ہمارے اپنے شہریوں کو طاقت اور کنٹرول کی آمرانہ ریاست کے تابع کرنے میں بہت کارآمد ہیں۔ نگرانی اور پولیسنگ کا انسداد بغاوت ماڈل۔ ظالموں کو ایسی دھمکیاں ضرور پیدا کرنی چاہئیں اگر وہ حقیقت میں موجود نہیں ہیں۔
کیسے
مارے خلاف دہشت گردی کی بہت سی کارروائیاں ایسے پیادوں نے کی ہیں جو اپنے حقیقی آقاؤں سے بے خبر تھے؟ امریکہ عالمی سطح پر خوف اور نفرت کے بیج بونے کے لیے ایسی کتنی ہی قابلِ انکار قوتوں کو استعمال کرتا ہے، تاریخی طور پر ہمارے سامراج اور اب پوری دنیا میں جمہوریت کی سرکوبی کے لیے؟
ہم اپنی غلامی کے میکانزم اور ڈھانچے کو چیلنج کرنے میں ناکام رہتے ہیں کیونکہ وہ اچھی طرح سے پوشیدہ، منحرف، لطیف، دھوئیں اور شیشوں سے بنے ہیں۔ خون، عقیدے اور مٹی کے فسطائیت جو اب پوری دنیا میں دوبارہ سر اٹھا رہے ہیں، ان کو اکثر باہر کے طور پر نمایاں کیا جاتا ہے، لیکن وہ انسانی تاریخ میں مرکزی حیثیت رکھتے ہیں۔ چوتھے ریخ کا طویل کھیل، اس کے پوشیدہ خیمے کئی دہائیوں کے اثر و رسوخ کی کارروائیوں کے دوران طاقت کو بے دریغ پھیلاتے اور اس پر قبضہ کرتے رہتے ہیں جب تک کہ یہ ہمیں اپنی گرفت میں نہ لے لے، اس کو کم نہیں سمجھا جانا چاہیے۔
لہٰذا امن کی خبروں پر میری خوشی ہماری حکومت پر میرے عدم اعتماد پر چھائی ہوئی ہے، امن قائم کرنے اور اپنے فوجیوں کو اس شرط پر گھر لانے کے لیے کہ طالبان اپنے علاقوں میں القاعدہ اور کسی بھی دہشت گرد کے خلاف پولیس کر رہے ہیں، ایسے خطرات سے جو وہ امریکہ کو بچانے کے لیے بے بس ہیں۔ امن کو سبوتاژ کرتا ہے اور اس معاہدے کو ٹرمپ کی انتخابی مہم کا تماشا بناتا ہے جس کی ناکامی کا الزام دوسروں پر لگایا جا سکتا ہے۔
مجھے امید ہے کہ اس میں میں غلط ہوں، اور ہم جلد ہی اپنے پیاروں کے ساتھ مل جائیں گے جو عزت اور بہادری کے ساتھ ایک ایسی حکومت کی خدمت کرتے ہیں جس کے پاس کوئی نہیں ہے، اور یہ کہ ہم کبھی بھی جنگیں نہیں لڑیں گے۔
The world rejoices in the anniversary of the end of the British Raj, and Independence Day in India and Pakistan, nations which embody the civilizational duality of the subcontinent, long afflicted with sectarian division and its weaponization in service to power as a legacy of colonialism, and of the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle.
Fragmented at the origins of Independence like the Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror in Anderson’s fairytale The Snow Queen, a thousand conflicting narratives and national identities born anew in pain and loss as a bifurcated myth of Exile like that of Mircea Cartarescu in his novel of Bucharest, Blinding; images which distort like those of funhouse mirrors, which lure and deceive as the lies and illusions of falsification, which capture and rob us of our uniqueness in endless repetition but which also exalt us into Infinity; history is a Wilderness of Mirrors in which we wander lost and alone, seeking to reclaim our interdependence, community, and wholeness.
While the words of Gandhi are a light of nations and known to the whole world, I would like to amplify here my favorite quotes from India’s other national treasure, the brilliant and visionary Arundhati Roy:
“The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”
“Use your art to fight.”
“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”
“Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.”
“Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.”
Ancestor spirits who embody the soul of India and the best of our infinite possibilities of becoming human among myriads of futures, represent ideals of masculine and feminine beauty in their actions toward others, and guide our choices about how to be human together, Gandi and Arundati Roy belong to India but also to all humankind and our universal struggle to become human.
When the moment of decision comes we must place our lives in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the marginalized and the erased, or turn away; choose the path of beauty and not of disfigurement of the soul.
When the forces of state tyranny and terror, of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, of hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, come to claim us and steal our souls, let them find not a humankind subjugated by despair and learned helplessness nor divided in service to power, but united in solidarity and liberty, for the use of force and brutality in repression of dissent is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of refusal to obey.
Who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled is free, and becomes Unconquered as a living Autonomous Zone, and this no tyranny can take from us.
Let us seize the gates of our prisons, and be free.
How shall we answer the terror of our absurdity and nothingness? With solidarity and resistance to tyranny and divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging, and to all sectarian fascisms of blood, faith, and soil; this will ever be my answer, for we create ourselves anew when we refuse to submit to authority and authorized identities and become Unconquered and free, as Living Autonomous Zones.
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
One may also welcome total freedom and self-ownership with joy, as we do today, for with Independence come limitless possibilities of becoming human, and our exploration of the unknown within us is only beginning.
Celebrate with me Independence Day as a liminal and transformative time of exploring unknowns beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the defiance of authority, the sabotage of hierarchies and of force and control, and the violation of normalities.
Let us run amok and be ungovernable.
Gandhi film trailer
References
Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies
by Blair Davis (Editor), Robert Anderson (Editor), Jan Walls (Editor)
My Seditious Heart collects two decades of essays, in a thousand pages; one could begin with the foundational The Algebra of Infinite Justice, a favorite of mine as it references and extends William S. Burroughs’ reimagination of Marxist dialectics and Sartrean alienation as The Algebra of Need, and Broken Republic which is an al fresco portrait of India.
15 अगस्त 2024 ब्रिटिश राज का अंत: भारत और पाकिस्तान में स्वतंत्रता दिवस
इस सप्ताह के अंत में दुनिया ब्रिटिश राज के अंत की सालगिरह पर और भारत और पाकिस्तान में स्वतंत्रता दिवस पर खुशी मनाती है, जो देश उपमहाद्वीप के सभ्यतागत द्वंद्व का प्रतीक हैं, जो लंबे समय से सांप्रदायिक विभाजन से पीड़ित हैं और सत्ता की विरासत के रूप में सत्ता की सेवा में इसके हथियार हैं। उपनिवेशवाद, और उपनिवेशवाद विरोधी संघर्ष की थोपी गई स्थितियाँ।
एंडरसन की कहानी द स्नो क्वीन में हॉबगोब्लिन के ब्रोकन मिरर की तरह स्वतंत्रता के मूल में खंडित, बुखारेस्ट, ब्लाइंडिंग के अपने उपन्यास में मिर्सिया कार्टारेस्कु की तरह निर्वासन के द्विभाजित मिथक के रूप में दर्द और हानि में एक हजार परस्पर विरोधी कथाएं और राष्ट्रीय पहचान पैदा हुई; छवियां जो फ़नहाउस दर्पणों की तरह विकृत होती हैं, जो झूठ और मिथ्याकरण के भ्रम के रूप में लुभाती हैं और धोखा देती हैं, जो हमें अंतहीन दोहराव में हमारी विशिष्टता को पकड़ती हैं और लूटती हैं लेकिन जो हमें अनंत में भी बढ़ाती हैं; इतिहास दर्पणों का जंगल है जिसमें हम खोए हुए और अकेले घूमते हैं, अपनी अन्योन्याश्रयता, समुदाय और पूर्णता को पुनः प्राप्त करने की कोशिश करते हैं।
जबकि गांधी के शब्द राष्ट्रों के प्रकाश हैं और पूरी दुनिया को ज्ञात हैं, मैं यहां भारत के अन्य राष्ट्रीय खजाने, शानदार और दूरदर्शी अरुंधति रॉय से अपने पसंदीदा उद्धरणों को बढ़ाना चाहूंगा:
“मुश्किल यह है कि एक बार जब आप इसे देख लेते हैं, तो आप इसे अनदेखा नहीं कर सकते। और एक बार जब आप इसे देख लेते हैं, तो चुप रहना, कुछ न कहना, बोलने जैसा राजनीतिक कार्य बन जाता है। कोई मासूमियत नहीं है। किसी भी तरह से, आप जवाबदेह हैं।”
“लड़ने के लिए अपनी कला का प्रयोग करें।”
“बीसवीं सदी के अधिकांश नरसंहारों का कारण किसी न किसी प्रकार का राष्ट्रवाद था। झंडे रंगीन कपड़े के टुकड़े होते हैं जिनका उपयोग सरकारें पहले लोगों के दिमाग को सिकोड़ने के लिए करती हैं और फिर मृतकों को दफनाने के लिए औपचारिक कफन के रूप में। ”
“आतंकवाद लक्षण है, बीमारी नहीं।”
“किसी भी तरह से, बदलाव आएगा। यह खूनी हो सकता है, या यह सुंदर हो सकता है। यह हम पर निर्भर करता है।”
जब निर्णय का क्षण आता है जब हमें अपने जीवन को उन लोगों के साथ संतुलन में रखना चाहिए जिन्हें फ्रांट्ज़ फैनन ने पृथ्वी का मनहूस कहा, शक्तिहीन और वंचित, हाशिए पर और मिट गए, या दूर हो गए, सुंदरता का मार्ग चुनें और नहीं आत्मा की विकृति से।
जब राज्य के अत्याचार और आतंक की ताकतें, खून, विश्वास और मिट्टी के फासीवाद की, धन, शक्ति और विशेषाधिकार के कुलीन आधिपत्य की, अपनेपन और बहिष्कृत अन्यता के पदानुक्रम, हम पर दावा करने और हमारी आत्माओं को चुराने के लिए आते हैं, तो उन्हें खोजने दें निराशा और सीखी हुई लाचारी के अधीन मानव जाति नहीं है और न ही सत्ता की सेवा में विभाजित है, बल्कि एकजुटता और स्वतंत्रता में एकजुट है, क्योंकि असंतोष के दमन में बल और क्रूरता का उपयोग खोखला और भंगुर है, और पालन करने से इनकार करने के बिंदु पर विफल रहता है।
जो झुकने से इंकार करता है और मजबूर नहीं किया जा सकता वह स्वतंत्र है, और एक जीवित स्वायत्त क्षेत्र के रूप में अजेय हो जाता है, और यह कोई अत्याचार हमसे नहीं ले सकता है।
आइए हम अपने जेलों के फाटकों को जब्त कर लें, और स्वतंत्र रहें।
हम अपनी बेहूदगी और शून्यता के आतंक का जवाब कैसे देंगे? अत्याचार के प्रति एकजुटता और प्रतिरोध के साथ और अपवर्जनात्मक अन्यता के विभाजन और अपनेपन के पदानुक्रम, और रक्त, विश्वास और मिट्टी के सभी सांप्रदायिक फासीवादों के लिए; यह हमेशा मेरा जवाब होगा, क्योंकि जब हम प्राधिकरण और अधिकृत पहचानों को प्रस्तुत करने से इनकार करते हैं और जीवित स्वायत्त क्षेत्रों के रूप में अजेय और मुक्त हो जाते हैं, तो हम खुद को नया बनाते हैं।
फासीवाद का एक ही जवाब हो सकता है; फिर कभी नहीं!
कोई भी पूर्ण स्वतंत्रता और स्व-स्वामित्व का आनंद के साथ स्वागत कर सकता है, जैसा कि हम आज करते हैं, स्वतंत्रता के साथ मानव बनने की असीम संभावनाएं आती हैं, और हमारे भीतर अज्ञात की खोज केवल शुरुआत है।
मेरे साथ स्वतंत्रता दिवस को निषिद्ध की सीमाओं से परे अज्ञात की खोज के एक सीमित और परिवर्तनकारी समय के रूप में मनाएं, अधिकार की अवहेलना, पदानुक्रम की तोड़फोड़ और बल और नियंत्रण, और मानदंडों का उल्लंघन।
आइए हम अमोक दौड़ें और अनियंत्रित हों।
Urdu
15 اگست 2024 برطانوی راج کا خاتمہ: ہندوستان اور پاکستان میں یوم آزادی
اس ہفتے کے آخر میں دنیا برطانوی راج کے خاتمے کی سالگرہ، اور ہندوستان اور پاکستان میں یوم آزادی کی خوشی منا رہی ہے، وہ قومیں جو برصغیر کی تہذیبی دوئی کو مجسم کرتی ہیں، جو طویل عرصے سے فرقہ وارانہ تقسیم سے دوچار ہیں اور اس کے ہتھیار کو اقتدار کی میراث کے طور پر استعمال کر رہی ہیں۔ استعمار، اور استعمار مخالف جدوجہد کی مسلط کردہ شرائط۔
اینڈرسن کی افسانہ دی سنو کوئین میں ہوبگوبلن کے ٹوٹے ہوئے آئینہ کی طرح آزادی کی ابتدا میں بکھرے ہوئے، ایک ہزار متضاد داستانیں اور قومی شناختیں جو اپنے ناول بخارسٹ میں میرسیا کارٹاریسکو کی طرح جلاوطنی کے ایک منقسم افسانے کے طور پر درد اور نقصان میں نئے سرے سے پیدا ہوئیں؛ ایسی تصاویر جو فن ہاؤس کے آئینے کی طرح مسخ کرتی ہیں، جو جھوٹ اور فریب کاری کے فریب کے طور پر لالچ دیتی ہیں اور دھوکہ دیتی ہیں، جو نہ ختم ہونے والی تکرار میں ہماری انفرادیت کو چھین لیتی ہیں لیکن جو ہمیں لامحدودیت میں بھی بلند کرتی ہیں۔ تاریخ آئینوں کا ایک جنگل ہے جس میں ہم کھوئے ہوئے اور اکیلے گھومتے ہیں، اپنے باہمی انحصار، برادری اور مکمل پن کو دوبارہ حاصل کرنے کی کوشش کرتے ہیں۔
اگرچہ گاندھی کے الفاظ قوموں کے لیے روشنی ہیں اور پوری دنیا کے لیے مشہور ہیں، میں یہاں ہندوستان کے دوسرے قومی خزانے، شاندار اور بصیرت اروندھتی رائے سے اپنے پسندیدہ اقتباسات کو بڑھانا چاہوں گا:
“مصیبت یہ ہے کہ ایک بار جب آپ اسے دیکھتے ہیں، تو آپ اسے نہیں دیکھ سکتے۔ اور ایک بار جب آپ اسے دیکھ چکے ہیں، خاموش رہنا، کچھ نہ کہنا، اتنا ہی سیاسی عمل بن جاتا ہے جتنا کہ بولنا۔ کوئی معصومیت نہیں ہے۔ کسی بھی طرح، آپ جوابدہ ہیں.”
“لڑنے کے لیے اپنے فن کا استعمال کریں۔”
’’بیسویں صدی کی زیادہ تر نسل کشی کا سبب کسی نہ کسی قسم کی قوم پرستی تھی۔ جھنڈے رنگین کپڑے کے ٹکڑے ہوتے ہیں جنہیں حکومتیں پہلے لوگوں کے ذہنوں کو سمیٹنے کے لیے استعمال کرتی ہیں اور پھر مردوں کو دفنانے کے لیے رسمی کفن کے طور پر۔
’’دہشت گردی بیماری کی علامت نہیں‘‘۔
“کسی بھی طرح، تبدیلی آئے گی. یہ خونی ہو سکتا ہے، یا یہ خوبصورت ہو سکتا ہے۔ یہ ہم پر منحصر ہے۔”
جب فیصلہ کا وہ لمحہ آتا ہے جب ہمیں اپنی زندگیوں کو ان لوگوں کے ساتھ توازن میں رکھنا چاہیے جنہیں فرانٹز فینن نے زمین کے بدبخت، بے اختیار اور بے گھر، پسماندہ اور مٹائے ہوئے کہا تھا، یا منہ موڑ کر خوبصورتی کی راہ کا انتخاب کریں اور نہ کہ۔ روح کی بگاڑ کی.
جب ریاستی جبر اور دہشت کی قوتیں، خون، ایمان اور مٹی کی فسطائیت، دولت، طاقت اور مراعات کی اشرافیہ کی بالادستی کی، ہم پر دعویٰ کرنے اور ہماری روحیں چرانے کے لیے آئیں، تو انہیں تلاش کرنے دیں۔ مایوسی سے مغلوب اور بے بسی سیکھی اور نہ ہی اقتدار کی خدمت میں بٹی بلکہ یکجہتی اور آزادی میں متحد ہو کیونکہ اختلاف کو دبانے میں طاقت اور ظلم کا استعمال کھوکھلا اور ٹوٹا پھوٹا ہے اور اطاعت سے انکار پر ناکام ہو جاتا ہے۔
جو تسلیم کرنے سے انکار کرتا ہے اور اسے مجبور نہیں کیا جا سکتا وہ آزاد ہے، اور ایک زندہ خود مختار علاقے کے طور پر ناقابل تسخیر ہو جاتا ہے، اور یہ کوئی ظلم ہم سے نہیں چھین سکتا۔
آئیے اپنی جیلوں کے دروازوں پر قبضہ کر لیں، اور آزاد ہو جائیں۔
ہم اپنی بے ہودگی اور بے ہودگی کی دہشت کا کیا جواب دیں گے؟ یکجہتی اور ظلم کے خلاف مزاحمت کے ساتھ اور الگ الگ الگ الگ ہونے کی تقسیم اور تعلق کے درجہ بندیوں، اور خون، عقیدے اور مٹی کے تمام فرقہ وارانہ فاشزم کے ساتھ؛ یہ کبھی بھی میرا جواب ہوگا، کیونکہ ہم خود کو نئے سرے سے تخلیق کرتے ہیں جب ہم اتھارٹی اور مجاز شناخت کے سامنے سر تسلیم خم کرنے سے انکار کرتے ہیں اور خود مختار علاقوں کی حیثیت سے ناقابل تسخیر اور آزاد ہو جاتے ہیں۔
فاشزم کا جواب صرف ایک ہو سکتا ہے۔ دوبارہ کبھی نہیں!
کوئی بھی خوشی کے ساتھ مکمل آزادی اور خود مختاری کا خیرمقدم کر سکتا ہے، جیسا کہ آج ہم کرتے ہیں، کیونکہ آزادی کے ساتھ انسان بننے کے لامحدود امکانات پیدا ہوتے ہیں، اور ہمارے اندر نامعلوم کی کھوج صرف شروع ہوتی ہے۔
میرے ساتھ یوم آزادی کو حرام کی حدود سے باہر نامعلوم کو تلاش کرنے، اختیارات کی خلاف ورزی، درجہ بندیوں کی تخریب کاری اور طاقت اور کنٹرول، اور اصولوں کی خلاف ورزی کے ایک اہم اور تبدیلی کے وقت کے طور پر منائیں۔
On this day the Partition of India unleashed all the timeless evils of Pandora’s Box, a tragedy with few parallels in the history of the world on such a mass scale, and very few hopes for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value.
For myself, I remain unconvinced that Partition was anything other than a scheme of the British Empire in partnership with nationalist elites to retain vestiges of dominion through the old colonial strategies of division by weaponization of faith, race, gender, class or caste, and narratives of victimization and identity politics.
Modi’s India under the heel of the political party of Gandhi’s assassins reflects all of these historical legacies of imperialism and colonialism as an imposed condition of struggle. Here as throughout the world and history, we of the Resistance oppose fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but it is important to recognize that the origins of evil in unequal power and the centralization of authority to a carceral state of force and control propagate from the crimes of masters through the successor states of their liberated slaves.
Nationalism, and its expression as militarized authoritarian states, is a predictable phase of revolutionary struggle, especially anti-colonial revolutions. All of the things that make for victory against overwhelming force become systemic flaws once power has been seized; as if national identity changes benevolent for malign masks in the performance of realizing itself.
What we must do to escape the legacies of our history, once power has been seized and the tyrants cast down from their thrones, is to abandon power over others and refuse to take the place of our abusers; to renounce the social use of force.
Sadly, the flaws of our humanity make it far more difficult to wage revolutionary struggle against ourselves and our own power and privilege than to seize power from those who would enslave us.
We must free ourselves from systems of oppression; this is our true enemy, and not other human beings. Regardless of hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and identity as a strategy of subjugation by hegemonic elites, division which we must resist with solidarity, we must find ways to unite in common cause if we are to free each other, to embrace our uniqueness and to celebrate and learn from the uniqueness of others as diversity and inclusion in a free society of equals.
In the subcontinent of India and its myriads of historical societies and cultures now riven into nations of Hindus and Muslims as political identities shaped by the legacies of history and the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle, I mean that when the best solution, a secular state, is for now out of reach, we must begin with the abandonment of violence to enforce and authorize identities and fascisms of faith, blood, and soil, for the social use of force does one thing above all else from which myriads of injustices derive; it centralizes power to elites, then subjugates those it claims to speak for and dehumanizes, enslaves, and erases others in campaigns of ethnic cleansing, legitimizes authority, and creates tyrannies and carceral states of force and control.
Faith serves power, and both are born of fear. Faith weaponized in service to power by authority centralizes power to carceral states of force and control, which create and enforce divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and national identity; to restore our humanity to each other we must unite in solidarity to seize our power from those who claim to act and speak in our name and make us complicit in unforgiveable crimes as a strategy of our subjugation; for only love conquers hate, frees us from the Ring of fear, power, and force, redeems us from the flaws of our humanity and the flags of our skin, and confers liberation in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us.
To combat the state as embodied violence we must build bridges and not walls.
This day we mourn the birth of a new India in blood and pain, like all human life cast into a world utterly without meaning or value, in which we must create our own in creating ourselves. This is the terror of being human; and this is the joy of becoming human in total freedom.
How will we use this chance, conferred by seizure of power over a brutal oppressor in imposed conditions of struggle which include dehumanization, commodification, and falsification, and most especially divisions of faith, race, and caste?
Here the past has consumed the present, and we must free ourselves from the legacies of our history as systems of oppression.
We must let go of who we were, for the chance to become who we wish to be.
‘My mother was beheaded in front of me’: a survivor recalls India’s violent partition; Zareena Parveen was 12 years old when British colonial India was carved up along religious lines. Documentary by The Guardian
Questioning Hindu Nationalism, a reading list
The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy, Rahul Bhatia
इस दिन भारत के विभाजन ने पेंडोरा के बॉक्स की सभी कालातीत बुराइयों को उजागर किया, इस तरह के बड़े पैमाने पर दुनिया के इतिहास में कुछ समानताएं के साथ एक त्रासदी, और मानव के रूप में, अर्थ, और मूल्य के पुनर्मिलन और परिवर्तन के लिए बहुत कम उम्मीदें ।
खुद के लिए, मैं इस बात पर असीम है कि विभाजन, ब्रिटिश साम्राज्य की एक योजना के अलावा कुछ भी था, जो विश्वास, नस्ल, लिंग, वर्ग या जाति के हथियारकरण द्वारा विभाजन की पुरानी औपनिवेशिक रणनीतियों के माध्यम से प्रभुत्व के वेस्टेज को बनाए रखने के लिए था, और पीड़ित और पहचान की राजनीति की कथाएँ ।
गांधी के हत्यारों की राजनीतिक पार्टी की एड़ी के तहत मोदी का भारत साम्राज्यवाद और उपनिवेशवाद के इन सभी ऐतिहासिक विरासतों को संघर्ष की एक थोपी हुई स्थिति के रूप में दर्शाता है। यहाँ दुनिया और इतिहास के रूप में, हम प्रतिरोध रक्त, विश्वास और मिट्टी के फासीवाद का विरोध करते हैं, लेकिन असमान शक्ति में बुराई की उत्पत्ति और प्राधिकरण के केंद्रीकरण को बल और नियंत्रण के लिए प्राधिकरण के केंद्रीकरण से पहचानना महत्वपूर्ण है। अपने मुक्त दासों के उत्तराधिकारी राज्यों के माध्यम से स्वामी के अपराध।
राष्ट्रवाद, और इसकी अभिव्यक्ति सैन्य रूप से सत्तावादी राज्यों के रूप में, क्रांतिकारी संघर्ष का एक पूर्वानुमानित चरण है, विशेष रूप से उपनिवेश विरोधी क्रांतियों। एक बार बिजली जब्त हो जाने के बाद, भारी बल के खिलाफ जीत के लिए जीत के लिए सभी चीजें प्रणालीगत दोष बन जाती हैं; जैसे कि राष्ट्रीय पहचान खुद को साकार करने के प्रदर्शन में घातक मुखौटे के लिए परोपकारी बदलती है।
हमें अपने इतिहास की विरासत से बचने के लिए क्या करना चाहिए, एक बार शक्ति जब्त कर ली गई है और अत्याचारियों को उनके सिंहासन से नीचे गिरा दिया गया है, तो दूसरों पर सत्ता को छोड़ देना और उनकी जगह लेने से इनकार करना है; बल के सामाजिक उपयोग को त्यागने के लिए।
अफसोस की बात यह है कि हमारी मानवता की खामियां अपने और अपनी शक्ति और विशेषाधिकार के खिलाफ क्रांतिकारी संघर्ष को छेड़ने के लिए कहीं अधिक कठिन बना देती हैं, जो हमें उन लोगों से सत्ता को जब्त करने के लिए।
हमें खुद को उत्पीड़न की व्यवस्था से मुक्त करना होगा; यही हमारा सच्चा शत्रु है, अन्य मनुष्य नहीं। संबद्धता और बहिष्करणीय अन्यता के पदानुक्रमों के बावजूद, और आधिपत्य अभिजात वर्ग द्वारा अधीनता की रणनीति के रूप में पहचान, विभाजन जिसका हमें एकजुटता के साथ विरोध करना चाहिए, अगर हमें एक-दूसरे को मुक्त करना है, अपनी विशिष्टता को अपनाना है और साझा उद्देश्य में एकजुट होने के तरीके खोजने होंगे समानता के मुक्त समाज में विविधता और समावेशन के रूप में दूसरों की विशिष्टता का जश्न मनाना और उससे सीखना।
भारत के उपमहाद्वीप में और इसके असंख्य ऐतिहासिक समाज और संस्कृतियाँ अब इतिहास की विरासतों और उपनिवेशवाद-विरोधी संघर्ष की थोपी गई स्थितियों से आकार लेने वाली राजनीतिक पहचान के रूप में हिंदू और मुसलमानों के राष्ट्रों में विभाजित हो गई हैं, मेरा मतलब है कि जब सबसे अच्छा समाधान, एक धर्मनिरपेक्ष राज्य, अभी पहुंच से बाहर है, हमें विश्वास, रक्त और मिट्टी की पहचान और फासीवाद को लागू करने और अधिकृत करने के लिए हिंसा के परित्याग से शुरुआत करनी चाहिए, क्योंकि बल का सामाजिक उपयोग अन्य सभी चीजों से ऊपर एक काम करता है; यह सत्ता को अभिजात वर्ग के हाथों में केंद्रीकृत करता है, उन लोगों को अपने अधीन कर लेता है जिनके लिए वह बोलने का दावा करता है और दूसरों को अमानवीय बनाता है, प्राधिकार को वैध बनाता है, और बल और नियंत्रण के अत्याचार और क्रूर राज्य बनाता है।
राज्य को मूर्त हिंसा के रूप में मुकाबला करने के लिए हमें पुल बनाने होंगे, दीवारें नहीं।
इस दिन हम रक्त और पीड़ा से भरे एक नए भारत के जन्म का शोक मनाते हैं, जैसे कि सभी मानव जीवन को पूरी तरह से अर्थ या मूल्य के बिना एक दुनिया में फेंक दिया जाता है, जिसमें हमें खुद को बनाने में अपना खुद का निर्माण करना होगा। यह इंसान होने का आतंक है; और यह पूर्ण स्वतंत्रता में मानव बनने का आनंद है।
हम इस अवसर का उपयोग कैसे करेंगे, जो संघर्ष की थोपी गई स्थितियों में एक क्रूर उत्पीड़क पर सत्ता की जब्ती द्वारा प्रदान किया गया है, जिसमें अमानवीयकरण, वस्तुकरण, और मिथ्याकरण, और विशेष रूप से विश्वास, नस्ल और जाति के विभाजन शामिल हैं?
यहां अतीत ने वर्तमान को निगल लिया है, और हमें उत्पीड़न की व्यवस्था के रूप में अपने इतिहास की विरासत से खुद को मुक्त करना होगा।
हमें वह बनने का मौका पाने के लिए जो हम थे, छोड़ना होगा जो हम बनना चाहते हैं।
Urdu
اگست 14 2024 تقسیم کی سالگرہ
اس دن ہندوستان کی تقسیم نے پنڈورا کے خانے کی تمام لازوال برائیوں کو جاری کیا ، یہ ایک ایسا المیہ ہے جس میں اس طرح کے بڑے پیمانے پر دنیا کی تاریخ میں کچھ متوازی ہیں ، اور انسان کی بحالی اور تبدیلی ، معنی اور قدر کی تبدیلی کے لئے بہت کم امیدیں ہیں۔
اپنے لئے ، میں اس بات پر متفق نہیں ہوں کہ تقسیم برطانوی سلطنت کی ایک اسکیم کے علاوہ کچھ بھی تھا جو عقیدے ، نسل ، صنف ، طبقے یا ذات کے ہتھیاروں کے ذریعہ تقسیم کی پرانی نوآبادیاتی حکمت عملیوں کے ذریعے تسلط کے حصول کو برقرار رکھنے کے لئے کچھ اور تھا۔
مودی کا ہندوستان گاندھی کے قاتلوں کی سیاسی جماعت کی ایک ہیل کے تحت سامراج اور استعمار کی ان تمام تاریخی وراثت کی عکاسی کرتا ہے جس کی جدوجہد کی ایک مسلط حالت ہے۔ یہاں پوری دنیا اور تاریخ کی طرح ، ہم مزاحمت کے حامل خون ، عقیدے اور مٹی کے فاشزموں کی مخالفت کرتے ہیں ، لیکن یہ ضروری ہے کہ غیر مساوی طاقت میں برائی کی ابتدا کو تسلیم کیا جائے اور اختیار کی مرکزیت کو مرکزیت کا مرکز بنانا اور اس پر قابو پالنا۔ ان کے آزاد غلاموں کی جانشین ریاستوں کے ذریعہ ماسٹرز کے جرائم۔
قوم پرستی ، اور عسکریت پسند آمرانہ ریاستوں کی حیثیت سے اس کا اظہار ، انقلابی جدوجہد کا ایک پیش قیاسی مرحلہ ہے ، خاص طور پر نوآبادیاتی انقلابات۔ طاقت کے قبضے میں آنے کے بعد زبردست طاقت کے خلاف فتح کے ل جو ساری چیزیں سیسٹیمیٹک خامیاں بن جاتی ہیں۔ گویا قومی شناخت خود کو سمجھنے کی کارکردگی میں مہلک ماسک کے لئے فلاحی تبدیلیوں کو تبدیل کرتی ہے۔
ہمیں اپنی تاریخ کی وراثت سے بچنے کے ل کیا کرنا چاہئے ، ایک بار جب اقتدار پر قبضہ کرلیا گیا اور ظالموں کو اپنے تخت سے اتار دیا گیا ، دوسروں پر اقتدار ترک کرنا اور ان کی جگہ لینے سے انکار کرنا ہے۔ طاقت کے معاشرتی استعمال کو ترک کرنا۔
افسوس کی بات یہ ہے کہ ہماری انسانیت کی خامیوں سے اپنے اور اپنی طاقت اور استحقاق کے خلاف انقلابی جدوجہد کرنا کہیں زیادہ مشکل ہوجاتا ہے جو ہمیں ان لوگوں سے اقتدار سے فائدہ اٹھانا پڑتا ہے جو ہمیں غلام بناتے ہیں۔
ہمیں اپنے آپ کو جبر کے نظام سے آزاد کرنا چاہیے۔ یہ ہمارا حقیقی دشمن ہے، دوسرے انسان نہیں۔ اس سے قطع نظر کہ تعلق اور الگ الگ دوسرے پن کے درجہ بندی، اور تسلط پسند اشرافیہ کے زیر تسلط کی حکمت عملی کے طور پر شناخت، تقسیم جس کا ہمیں یکجہتی کے ساتھ مقابلہ کرنا چاہیے، ہمیں مشترکہ مقصد میں متحد ہونے کے طریقے تلاش کرنا ہوں گے اگر ہم ایک دوسرے کو آزاد کرنا چاہتے ہیں، اپنی انفرادیت کو قبول کرنا چاہتے ہیں اور مساوات کے آزاد معاشرے میں تنوع اور شمولیت کے طور پر دوسروں کی انفرادیت کو منانا اور سیکھنا۔
برصغیر پاک و ہند اور اس کے بے شمار تاریخی معاشروں اور ثقافتوں میں اب ہندوؤں اور مسلمانوں کی قوموں میں سیاسی شناخت بن گئی ہے جو تاریخ کی وراثت اور استعمار مخالف جدوجہد کی مسلط کردہ شرائط سے تشکیل پاتی ہے، میرا مطلب یہ ہے کہ جب بہترین حل، ایک سیکولر ریاست، ابھی تک پہنچ سے باہر ہے، ہمیں عقیدے، خون اور مٹی کی شناخت اور فاشزم کو نافذ کرنے اور اس کی اجازت دینے کے لیے تشدد کو ترک کرنے کے ساتھ شروع کرنا چاہیے، کیونکہ طاقت کا سماجی استعمال سب سے بڑھ کر ایک چیز کرتا ہے۔ یہ طاقت کو اشرافیہ کے لیے مرکزیت دیتا ہے، ان لوگوں کو محکوم بناتا ہے جو اس کے لیے بات کرنے کا دعویٰ کرتے ہیں اور دوسروں کو غیر انسانی بنا دیتے ہیں، اختیار کو قانونی حیثیت دیتے ہیں، اور جبر اور کنٹرول کی ظالمانہ حالتیں پیدا کرتے ہیں۔
ریاست کو مجسم تشدد کے طور پر مقابلہ کرنے کے لیے ہمیں پل تعمیر کرنے چاہئیں نہ کہ
اس دن ہم خون اور درد میں ایک نئے ہندوستان کی پیدائش کا ماتم کرتے ہیں، جیسے تمام انسانی زندگی بالکل بے معنی اور قیمت کے بغیر ایک ایسی دنیا میں ڈال دی گئی ہے، جس میں ہمیں خود کو تخلیق کرنے کے لیے خود کو خود بنانا ہوگا۔ یہ انسان ہونے کی دہشت ہے۔ اور یہ مکمل آزادی میں انسان بننے کی خوشی ہے۔
ہم اس موقع کو کس طرح استعمال کریں گے، جو ایک ظالم جابر پر اقتدار پر قبضے کے ذریعے جدوجہد کے مسلط کردہ حالات میں دیا گیا ہے جس میں غیر انسانی، اجناس، اور جھوٹ، اور خاص طور پر عقیدے، نسل اور ذات کی تقسیم شامل ہے؟
یہاں ماضی نے حال کو کھا لیا ہے، اور ہمیں اپنی تاریخ کی وراثت سے اپنے آپ کو جبر کے نظام کے طور پر آزاد کرنا چاہیے۔
ہمیں اس بات کو چھوڑ دینا چاہیے کہ ہم کون تھے، تاکہ وہ بننے کا موقع ملے جو ہم بننا چاہتے ہیں۔
Maria Popova on How to Bear Your Suffering; exemplars Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, Anne Aldrich, and Walt Whitman
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Torch of Liberty 
