You who are fearless, unconquered, and free, who have seized ownership of your identities and made of your lives enactments of beauty and of defiance; know that you shall never stand alone, while we who love liberty yet remain.
You are not invisible. And to all those who transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden, who in the performance of themselves challenge and defy the authorization of identities including those of sex and gender, and by their representation champion the silenced and the erased as heroic figures of autonomy and liberation, I salute you.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
Gender and sexual personae are a performance, both a struggle for ownership of identity between self and other and an event occurring in the free space of play between these bounded realms.
This day the glorious transgression and performance of unauthorized identities as liberation struggle seizes the streets of San Francisco in the Pride Parade, a triumphal march of the Unconquered. What does it mean for us all as guerilla theatre, questioning of authority, parrhesia and truth telling, seizure of power and autonomy, the victory of solidarity over division and the celebration of our uniqueness over fear, and a public throwing open of the gates of our possibilities of becoming human?
As I have written of love as a force of liberation struggle; I say again; human sexual orientation is not a spectrum with endpoint limits, but a Moebius Loop of infinite possibilities, and we are born and exist by nature everywhere along it at once. All else is limitation and control imposed artificially as dominion, captivity, and falsification by authorized identities, or a seizure of power and self-ownership in revolutionary struggle against such narratives, hierarchies, and divisions.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
As I have written of Stonewall as a case of Resistance; To paraphrase Max Stirner; Freedom must be seized; it cannot be granted by authority. Our self-ownership of identity is a form of autonomy and freedom, and this also must be seized. This is the primary act of human being, this self-creation, because it liberates us from authorized identities, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty. We must perform and celebrate our uniqueness as beauty and goodness which we ourselves create and own, as well as that of others in diversity and inclusion of our infinite possibilities of becoming human.
Those who defy authority beneath the Rainbow Flag of Pride perform a vital service not merely for themselves and for their own community, but for us all. On this and every day, let us question and challenge the limits of our normality as a journey of discovery of our true selves and the unknown topologies of human being, meaning, and value, as a celebration of ourselves and one another as self-created and autonomous individuals, and as an art of guerilla theatre.
Ask no permission in the performance of identity, but seek the exaltation of your uniqueness as a path of beauty and of freedom.
The performance of oneself is an art of discovery, vision, reimagination, and transformation, of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and all true art defiles and exalts.
Always frighten the horses.
There is a cure for the injustice of our normality, the tyranny of theocratic constructions of virtue as an instrument of subjugation and otherness, and the violence of our authorized identities; wage love and not hate, diversity and inclusion and not demonization and criminalization, in the performance of our identities as autonomous individuals and transform society by our example and the resilience of our community.
This is what I mean by inclusion of the phrase “the frightening of the horses” in my social media profile, in which I paraphrase the famous quote by the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, muse of George Bernard Shaw; “I really don’t mind what people do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.” There are times wherein the boundaries of the Forbidden must be transgressed in order to seize the power which it holds over us, and as our system of justice is designed laws must be broken in order to test them as a growing child tests limits in self-construal. When this occurs in public spaces it becomes revolutionary and transformational, a form of guerrilla theatre.
When you begin to question the boundary and interface between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery. May the new truths you forge bring you joy.
As written in The Guardian, in an article entitled Pride across the US: celebration and defiance in the face of threats: LGBTQ+ people and their allies celebrated throughout the nation, even as the number of hate incidents has increased; “Celebrations mingled with displays of resistance on Sunday as LGBTQ+ Pride parades filled streets in some of the the US’s largest cities in annual events that have become part party, part protest.
In New York, thousands marched down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue to Greenwich Village, cheering and waving rainbow flags to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall uprising, when a police raid on a gay bar triggered days of protests and launched a movement for LGBTQ+ rights.
While some people whooped it up in celebration, many were mindful of the growing conservative countermovement to limit rights, including by banning gender-affirming care for transgender children.
“I’m not trying not to be very heavily political, but when it does target my community, I get very, very annoyed and very hurt,” said Ve Cinder, a 22-year-old transgender woman who traveled from Pennsylvania to take part in the country’s largest Pride event.
“I’m just, like, scared for my future and for my trans siblings. I’m frightened of how this country has looked at human rights, basic human rights,” she said. “It’s crazy.”
Parades in New York, Chicago and San Francisco are among the events that roughly 400 Pride organizations across the US are holding this year, with many focused specifically on the rights of transgender people.
In San Francisco, Pride events began on Friday with a trans march through Dolores Park to the Tenderloin.
Just before Saturday’s parade down Market Street, the Alice B Toklas LGBTQ+ Democratic Club held its 26th annual Pride breakfast featuring more than 600 community leaders and elected officials, including Montana representative Zooey Zephyr. The transgender lawmaker in April was barred from speaking on the chamber floor for the rest of the session by Republican politicians after she spoke against a ban on gender-affirming medical care for trans children.
The 53rd annual parade was led by the group Dykes on Bikes, which has kicked off the celebration in a chorus of revving engines and cheering since 1976.
“It’s important for us to be out and queer and visible and show courage,” said Kate Brown, president of the Dykes on Bikes board, to the San Francisco Chronicle. “That’s what we do.”
Representative Adam Schiff rode with House speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi in the parade, which is in its 53rd year and is one of the largest free celebrations in the country.
“I’m thrilled to be here when LGBTQ rights are under assault across the country,” Schiff told the Chronicle.
In Chicago, 16-year-old Maisy McDonough painted rainbow colors over her eyes and on her face for her first Pride parade.
She told the Chicago Tribune she’s excited to “be united” after a tough year for the community.
“We really need the love of this parade,” she said.
Entertainers and activists, drag performers and transgender advocates are among the parade grand marshals embracing a unity message as new laws targeting the LGBTQ+ community take effect in several US states.
“The platform will be elevated, and we’ll see communities across the country show their unity and solidarity through these events,” said Ron deHarte, co-president for the US Association of Prides.
Annual observations have spread to other cities and grown to welcome bisexual, transgender and queer people, as well as other groups.
About a decade ago, when her 13-year-old child first wanted to be called a boy, Roz Gould Keith sought help. She found little to assist her family in navigating the transition. They attended a Pride parade in the Detroit area, but saw little transgender representation.
This year, she is heartened by the increased visibility of transgender people at marches and celebrations across the country this month.
“Ten years ago, when my son asked to go to Motor City Pride, there was nothing for the trans community,” said Keith, founder and executive director of Stand With Trans, a group formed to support and empower young transgender people and their families.
This year, she said, the event was “jam-packed” with transgender people.
One of the grand marshals of New York City’s parade is non-binary activist AC Dumlao, chief of staff for Athlete Ally, a group that advocates on behalf of LGBTQ+ athletes.
“Uplifting the trans community has always been at the core of our events and programming,” said Dan Dimant, a spokesperson for NYC Pride.
Many of this year’s parades called for LGBTQ+ communities to unite against dozens, if not hundreds, of legislative bills now under consideration in statehouses across the country.
Lawmakers in 20 states have moved to ban gender-affirming care for children, and at least seven more are considering doing the same, adding increased urgency for the transgender community, its advocates say.
“We are under threat,” Pride event organizers in New York, San Francisco and San Diego said in a statement joined by about 50 other Pride organizations nationwide. “The diverse dangers we are facing as an LGBTQ community and Pride organizers, while differing in nature and intensity, share a common trait: they seek to undermine our love, our identity, our freedom, our safety, and our lives.”
Some parades, including the event in Chicago, planned to have beefed-up security amid the upheaval.
The Anti-Defamation League and Glaad, a national LGBTQ+ organization, found 101 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents in the first three weeks of this month, about twice as many as in the full month of June last year.
Sarah Moore, who analyzes extremism for the two civil rights groups, said many of the June incidents coincide with Pride events.”
So I wrote and gathered references in my post of 2023, and nothing has made our nation or the world safer for our outcasts and misfits; indeed it grows less so, and more terrible with the looming darkness of theocratic tyranny.
I wonder now if I would have even noticed the existence of these marginalized peoples without the enormous hate and Otherness directed at them as theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and often as state terror and tyranny; how did this become a central issue for me, who has no skin in the game?
Here I must recognize the influence of figures who became informing, motivating, and shaping forces for my own self construction as I grew up; Edward Albee, William S. Burroughs, Susan Sontag, and Jean Genet.
Albee and Burroughs were friends of my father; he directed some of Albee’s plays and from the age of four I sat in the theatre with them listening to their conversations, while Uncle Bill was among his court of arts luminaries and an occasional guest at our home between my fifth and seventh grade years. That my father grew opium in our garden may have had something to do with it. I was unaware of the queer identity of either Albee or Burroughs until far later when a teenager in high school, nor would I have understood its implications; from Albee I was influenced toward Surrealism, and Burroughs taught me the bizarre and unique system of magic he and my father invented and practiced, and his retellings of our family history as bent versions of Grimm’s fairytales were wonderful and strange.
Genet and Sontag were chance encounters of my university years, Susan at an art museum shortly after her final book, Under the Sign of Saturn, was published, Jean at breakfast in Beirut during the Siege. Both were friendships of conversations with fellow scholars of all things curious and curiouser; she my guide and backstage pass to the world of art and other glitterati of the intelligentsia who taught me how to see Beauty, he a comrade in liberation struggle who set me on my life’s path as a revolutionary and swore me to the Oath of the Resistance he had created in Paris 1940 for such friends as he could gather. Interrogations of sex and gender were not among the subjects we discussed beyond art, literature, cinema, and social anthropology, neither Susan nor Jean and I, at least not regarding ourselves personally.
Yet when I later began to problematize questions of sex and gender and the rights of sexual outlaws in terms of liberation struggle against authority and systems of oppression, as a group who were extremely visible in the San Francisco where as a young fellow I went to university, they did not seem alien or threatening to me as Outsiders because I had grown up in the shadows of kind and wise family and personal friends which included Albee, Burroughs, Sontag, and Genet.
As written by the Roman playwright Terrence in Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor) Act I, scene 1; “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,” or “I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.”
Representation matters; among its true powers is to make us see each other, and to make the set of possibilities of becoming human less narrow, and more free.
So for the value of performance of unauthorized identities as Resistance and liberation under imposed conditions of struggle which include Othering, marginalization, silence and erasure, rewritten histories, and falsification by those who would enslave us.
Beyond the theatre of identity, how can we bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world?
“I draw from the Absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion”; so wrote Alfred Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, and as I reflect on the meaning of Pride Parades as acts of resistance and seizures of power against systems of oppression and authorized identities of sex and gender, I can think of no finer summation of the will to become human as a praxis of liberty, self creation, and autonomy.
Frighten the horses.
This day in 2020, at my cottage Dollhouse Park. Here is my magnificent British yacht club shirt; and quite smug about it as I went gallivanting about town. So many other sailing gentlemen! Then I realized it was a Pride weekend, and I was in fact wearing something like a Pride flag. La!
On this glorious and triumphant celebration of community, diversity, inclusion, and the legacy of resistance, which over the last half century has become an integral and universalized tradition in our society and an annual ritual of democracy in which we stand together regardless of our differences and renew our commitment to the principle of liberty that each of us has the universal human right to be who we choose in the performance of our identities and in our bodily autonomy, may we do so in the awareness that it is this seizure of power over ourselves which confers our liberty as a creative and transformative act, and our solidarity with others in the performance of their uniqueness which opens the gates of our future to a free society of equals.
Let us free ourselves of our normality, of history and the ideas of others, for no one of us may choose for another who we shall become nor limit the possibilities of becoming human. Let us transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and seize ownership of ourselves from authoritarian force and control; let us run amok and be ungovernable. For this is the primary human act; to Resist.
I believe resistance confers freedom, that to be free of force and control means to remain unconquered within ourselves as autonomous individuals, that to defy tyranny and fascism is an act of liberation and affirmation of our humanity which cannot be stolen, and a victorious moment of self creation which exalts us beyond the limits of threat of force. And that each of us who remains unconquered becomes a seed of liberty and transformation, able to free others.
To paraphrase Max Stirner; Freedom must be seized; it cannot be granted by authority. Our self-ownership of identity is a form of autonomy and freedom, and this also must be seized. This is the primary act of human being, this self-creation, because it liberates us from authorized identities and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty. We must perform and celebrate our uniqueness as beauty and goodness which we ourselves create and own, as well as that of others in diversity and inclusion of our infinite possibilities of becoming human.
Those who defy authority beneath the Rainbow Flag of Pride perform a vital service not merely for themselves and for their own community, but for us all. On this and every day, let us question and challenge the limits of our normality as a journey of discovery of our true selves and the unknown topologies of human being, meaning, and value, as a celebration of ourselves and one another as self-created and autonomous individuals, and as an art of guerilla theatre.
Always go through the Forbidden Door; transgress boundaries, violate normalities, defy limits.
Become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.
Bring the Chaos, in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value.
Ask no permission in the performance of identity, but seek the exaltation of your uniqueness as a path of beauty and of freedom.
The performance of oneself is an art of discovery, vision, reimagination, and transformation, of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and all true art defiles and exalts.
Always frighten the horses.
As written by Yuval Noah Harari in The Guardian, in an article of 2019 entitled 50 years after Stonewall: Yuval Noah Harari on the new threats to LGBT rights; “In 1969, when the New York police raided the Stonewall Inn and encountered unexpected resistance from LGBT protesters, homosexuality was still criminalised in most countries. Even in more tolerant societies, venturing out of the closet was often akin to social and professional suicide. Today, in contrast, the prime minister of Serbia is openly lesbian and the prime minister of Ireland is proudly gay, as are the CEO of Apple and numerous other politicians, businesspeople, artists and scientists. In the United States, the average Republican today holds far more liberal views on LGBT issues than the average Democrat held in 1969. The argument has moved from “should the state imprison LGBT people?” to “should the state recognise same-sex marriage?” (and almost half of Republicans support same-sex marriage).
That said, about 70 countries still criminalise homosexuality today. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Brunei and several more sentence gay people to death. Even the most gay-friendly societies are rife with discrimination, abuse and hate crimes. Moreover, the remarkable achievements of the past 50 years are no guarantee for the future. History rarely moves in a straight line. There is no reason to think that LGBT liberation will inevitably spread around the world, eventually reaching Saudi Arabia and Brunei. Indeed, violent homophobic backlashes are possible, even in the most liberal countries. Just last week the Guardian revealed shocking statistics that showed homophobic and transphobic hate crimes have doubled in the UK over the past five years.
As a historical analogy, consider the situation of Europe’s Jews in the 1920s and early 1930s. During that period, European Jews were liberated from centuries of discriminatory laws, and in many countries they had gained full legal, economic and political equality. Just as today the LGBT community takes pride in the prime ministers of Serbia and Ireland, so nearly a century ago Jews noted with satisfaction that the German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, and the French prime minister, Léon Blum, were Jews. Just as today gay, lesbian and transgender people insist on the right to serve their countries in the military – as the ultimate marker of national integration – so during the first world war 100,000 Jews served loyally in the German army, and 12,000 lost their lives for the Fatherland.
Even the gay and lesbian people who today feel so sure of their position that they support far-right parties such as Germany’s AfD and Italy’s Lega have had their Jewish counterparts in interwar Europe. Mussolini’s fascist party at first distanced itself from antisemitism, and thousands of Jews supported Mussolini and even joined the fascist party. Mussolini’s lover was Jewish, as was his finance minister in the 1930s. We all know how that story ended. Blum barely survived Dachau, and the Jewish war veterans met the Jewish fascists in Auschwitz.
There are alarming signs that the era of LGBT liberation might also be followed by an era of unprecedented persecution. In particular, LGBT people might become the preferred targets for ultra-nationalist witch-hunts. In eastern Europe, for example, nationalist leaders who refrain from antisemitism due to the terrible memories of the Holocaust instead frighten the population with tales of a global gay conspiracy.
In both Poland and Hungary, the governments routinely depict gay people as foreign agents and as a threat to the survival not only of the nation, but of western civilisation itself. These regimes even manage to link LGBT people to immigration, by arguing that the gay conspiracy hopes to decrease native birth rates in order to open the door to a flood of immigrants.
The Russian regime, too, claims that a worldwide homosexual conspiracy seeks to destroy the country. Official media has depicted both anti-government demonstrations in Russia and the 2013/14 Ukrainian revolution as the handiwork of the gay cabal, Timothy Snyder writes in The Road to Unfreedom. The media also present Russian LGBT people as traitors, arguing that homosexuality is alien to Russian traditions, so the mere fact that you are gay is proof that you must be a foreign agent. A poll conducted in May 2018 revealed that 63% of Russians are convinced that an organised, global gay network is indeed working to undermine Russia’s traditional spiritual values and thereby weaken the country.
To combat this alleged threat, in 2013 Russia passed a notorious law banning “gay propaganda”, which has led to the arrest and persecution of numerous people. In August 2018, a 16-year-old teenager, Maxim Neverov, was charged with the “crime” of uploading several pictures of guys hugging to the Russian social media platform Vkontakte. The high-school pupil was fined 50,000 roubles (£616) – more than the average monthly salary in Russia – before winning a court appeal against the decision.
Eastern Europe is hardly unique. Regimes and politicians in numerous countries, from Brazil to Uganda, spread tales about LGBT conspiracies, and promise to protect the nation from the queer menace. LGBT people are tempting targets for such witch-hunts for two main reasons. First, conservative authoritarian regimes usually bemoan the fluidity and complexity of reality, and promise a return to an imaginary golden age when boundaries were clear, identities were fixed, and people had little room for making personal choices. Back in those good old days, men were men, women were women, foreigners were enemies, and nobody had to think too much about all that complicated stuff. But LGBT people blur the boundaries, mix up identities, and force people to think and choose. No wonder autocrats hate them.
Second, LGBT people don’t have much power, so persecuting them is cheap. Throughout history, autocrats have often singled out a weak minority, made it look far more powerful and dangerous than it really was, and then promised to protect society against this non-existent threat. That was the case in the original witch-hunts in early modern Europe, which often targeted elderly women and lonely eccentrics. The same logic is now at work in such places as Russia – a country that suffers from many serious problems. Its economy is stagnating, corruption is endemic and public services are deteriorating. But fighting corruption means taking on the strongest men in Russia. It is far easier to forget about these headaches and instead protect innocent Russians from the corrupting tentacles of the global gay conspiracy. Just try to put a rouble value on all this. How many roubles would it cost to improve Russia’s dysfunctional healthcare system? How many roubles would it cost to protect Russia from the nonexistent global gay conspiracy?
If LGBT people are increasingly the target of political witch-hunts, we are unlikely to see a return to the pre-Stonewall era of the closet. We might see something far worse. People will not be able to escape persecution by retreating back into the closet, because new technologies are breaking it apart. The combination of information technology and biotechnology is giving birth to new surveillance tools that will soon make it possible to monitor everybody all the time. For the first time in history any regime that so desires will be able to spy on all citizens 24 hours a day, and to know not only what they are doing, but even how they are feeling.
If a future homophobic regime wants to round up all the gay men in a country (as authorities in the Russian province of Chechnya have recently sought to do), it might start by trying to hack the databases of gay dating sites such as Grindr. The Egyptian police, for example, have already used Grindr data to track and arrest gay men by posing as users of the site (Grindr warned users that people may be posing on its site in order to obtain their information). Another option is to use an algorithm to go through someone’s entire online history – the YouTube clips they watched, the headlines they clicked, the photos they uploaded to Facebook.
In August 2018, it was revealed that evangelical Christian groups offering “conversion therapies” to youths used Facebook’s algorithms to target vulnerable teenagers with their adverts (Facebook later removed these adverts saying they were contrary to its policies). The teens did not necessarily identify as LGBT. It was enough for them to show an interest in LGBT-related items – for example “liking” an LGBT-related story – to become a target. Israeli security forces have also been known to use various methods – including online surveillance – to identify gay Palestinians, but not in order to “convert” them. Rather, gay Palestinians are blackmailed to become Israeli informers. Since homophobia is widespread in Palestinian society and, at least in Gaza, homosexuality is still criminalised, blackmailing closeted gay people is one of the easier ways to acquire informants. In a vicious circle, Hamas then doubles its efforts to expose and persecute gay Palestinians, assuming that they pose a security risk (which is really the fault of Hamas’s own homophobia).
In 2016 the Chinese firm Kunlun bought Grindr, but in March 2019 the US government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States informed Kunlun that its ownership of Grindr “constitutes a national security risk”. Kunlun is now forced to sell Grindr by 2020. There was no explanation given for why Chinese ownership of a gay dating site constitutes a national security risk, but I trust that by now you can answer that question yourself.
On 14 July 2017, several Russian cabinet members including prime minister Dmitry Medvedev gathered for a talk by a Stanford professor who has studied the extent to which people’s personality traits can be revealed by analysing their online activity. At the time, the professor was working on proving the ability of algorithms to detect whether a man is gay or straight with an accuracy of 91%, based solely on analysing a few facial pictures. While the professor himself was doing so in order to alert the public to the danger such technology poses for individual privacy, the Russian officials were probably more interested in learning how to use the technology than how to protect people’s rights.
Even if you have never had a Grindr account, never watched gay porn online and never clicked on LGBT-related news items, in the not too distant future merely allowing your eyes to roam freely could cost you your liberty. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism describes how corporations are developing ever more sophisticated tools to know what their customers like. For example, if you watch a television series, the producers want to know which characters or scenes most engage your attention, in order to make future episodes even more addictive. To ask viewers for their opinions is a cumbersome and untrustworthy method. It is much better to directly track involuntary biometric signals such as eye movement and blood pressure. Tracking such signals might tell the network, for example, that 63% of viewers connect to a minor character, so it would be a good idea to expand their role.
Exactly the same technology could also tell the future gender police that you are a secret “gender traitor”. If the biometric sensors incorporated into the TV discover that a man watching the kiss scene in Game of Thrones between Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen focuses his gaze on the macho hero more than on the Mother of Dragons – the gender police might knock on his door at 2am next morning to look further into the matter.
If you think of protecting yourself by not watching any television, not surfing the internet and flushing your smartphone down the toilet, what will you do when cameras are placed on every street corner and sensors constantly scrutinise how people behave in coffeeshops or in school? In 2013 Iranian authorities ordered cafe owners to install cameras and turn over the footage on demand. In March 2019, the Guangdong Guangya high school in China reportedly purchased 3,500 biometric bracelets to monitor students’ physical activities, heart rates and the number of times they raised their hands in class. By cross-referencing data-points, future schools might be able to tell not only who fell asleep during maths class, but also who fell in love with the maths teacher.
Now multiply this thought experiment by several millions. In recent years China has turned its Xinjiang province into the world’s largest surveillance laboratory. In an alleged attempt to stamp out “Islamic extremism”, Chinese authorities are constantly monitoring millions of local Muslims. People are forced to give samples of their DNA, blood, fingerprints, voice recordings and face scans. These markers then allow the government to track personal activities with the help of a countrywide network of CCTV cameras, handheld devices, facial recognition software and machine-learning algorithms. Sensors are placed everywhere – from markets to mosques. When the algorithms recognise a suspected pattern of behaviour – perhaps using religious speech, wearing traditional Islamic clothes, or visiting a mosque too frequently – the “offender” might be warned by the police or sent to a “re-education” camp. Hundreds of thousands of people have reportedly been sent to such camps.
At present, this surveillance regime is aimed against the Muslim minority in Xinjiang, but it can easily target any other group that gets in the regime’s crosshairs. What might happen, for example, if the people in charge of China’s burgeoning social credit system decide that having a same-sex love affair is an antisocial behaviour that should detract from your social credit – and therefore from your ability to enter prestigious colleges, get a mortgage, or buy a plane ticket?
Xinjiang sounds like a far-off place, but we are living in a global world. Agents of various regimes are flocking to Xinjiang these days to learn the methods and buy the technology. The combination of revolutionary technologies with conservative ideologies could well lead to the creation of the most totalitarian regimes in history.
Technology is not inherently bad, of course. I met my husband 17 years ago on one of the first online gay dating sites, and I am deeply grateful to the engineers and entrepreneurs who developed that site. Living in a small conservative Israeli town, the only place to meet guys was online. LGBT people are particularly vulnerable to online surveillance precisely because they have benefited so much from the new online social opportunities. Therefore my message is not that we should all go offline and stop all further technological progress. Rather, the message is that technology makes the political stakes higher than ever.
In the 20th century, people used similar technologies to build very different political regimes. Some countries used radio, electricity and trains to create totalitarian dictatorships – other countries used these inventions to foster liberal democracies. In the 21st century we could use information technology and biotechnology to build either paradise or hell, depending on our political ideals.
Nothing has been determined yet, and however gloomy the future may seem to some of us, in 1969 the future looked ever gloomier. In the end, most of the dystopian scenarios that frightened people in 1969 did not materialise, because many people struggled to prevent them. If you wish to prevent the dystopian scenarios of the 21st century, there are many things you can do. But the most important thing is to join an organisation. Cooperation is what makes humans powerful. Cooperation is what the Stonewall riots were all about. They were the moment when a lot of individual suffering crystallised into a collective movement. Until Stonewall, LGBT people conducted isolated survival struggles against a terribly unjust system. After Stonewall, enough people organised together to change the system itself.
The lesson of Stonewall is as true today as it was in 1969, and is relevant to all humans, not just to those who identify as LGBT. Fifty people working together as members of an organisation can accomplish far more than 500 individuals. Technology now poses the greatest challenges in our history. To cope well with these challenges, we need to organise. I cannot tell you which organisation to join – there are many good options – but please do it soon. Do it this week. Don’t sit at home and complain. It is time to act.”
As written by Edmund White in The Guardian, in an article entitled White men were first to benefit from gay liberation – but it can’t end there; “I was at the Stonewall Riots 50 years ago, the beginning of the current gay rights movement. Not because I was a radical. Quite the contrary. As a middle-class white 29-year-old who’d been in therapy for years trying to go straight, I was initially disturbed by seeing all these black and brown people resisting the police, of all things! I had at one time been a regular patron of this Greenwich Village bar, but in recent months the crowd had changed to kids mainly from Harlem, many in drag.
In the early 1960s, Mayor Robert Wagner had closed all gay and lesbian bars in a misguided effort to “clean up” the city for tourists visiting the World’s Fair. But by 1969 those days seemed long gone. We had a new mayor, John Lindsay, who looked like a Kennedy and we assumed to be liberal. We gays weren’t in a good mood. Judy Garland (the equivalent of Lady Gaga today) had just died and was lying in state in a funeral home on the Upper East Side. It was very, very hot and everyone was sitting out on stoops. And then this! A crowded gay bar had just been raided, a reminder of the recent past.
Whereas gays had always run away in the past, afraid of being arrested and jailed, these Stonewall African Americans and Puerto Ricans and drag queens weren’t so easily intimidated. They lit fires, turned over cars and mocked the cops, even battering the heavy Stonewall doors where some policemen were retaining members of the staff and customers, waiting for the paddy wagon to return.
The protests went on for three days and the whole area around Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue was cordoned off. Ours may have been the first funny revolution. When someone shouted “Gay is good” in imitation of “Black is beautiful,” we all laughed; at that moment we went from seeing ourselves as a mental illness to thinking we were a minority.
Certainly the era was rich in rebellion – the protests against the Vietnam war, the Black Power movement and the women’s movement. We’d all seen on TV men burning their draft cards, athletes making the Black Power salute, radical women such as the Red Stockings being “intolerable” (a slogan). Now a chorus line of gay boys came out kicking behind the cops shouting, “We are the Pink Panthers.” In those days there was a women’s prison (since razed) on the corner of Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street. Soon the women were shouting down encouragement from their cells and strumming their cups against the bars.
Although I’d been shocked at first by these exuberant actions, soon I felt exhilarated by the expression of the indignation I’d repressed for so long. I was joining in, despite my years of submission. Like most revolutions, the occasion for this one was ill chosen. When the Bastille was stormed there were only seven prisoners in it. In a similar way, the Stonewall was an unhygienic, exploitative mafia bar tightly guarded by mafia henchmen. But no matter – the bar may not have been worth defending but the energy of the defense was admirable.
And the energy continued. I moved to Rome for a year but when I came back dozens of bars and discos had opened, go-go boys were dancing under black light, the back rooms were crowded – and the libertine 70s were being born. I even saw Fellini on a snowy night being led into a Sheridan Square gay bar on a prospecting tour. We were trendy!
Gay studies started. Gay politics were being nurtured by new groups, one more radical than the next. I started attending Maoist consciousness-raising groups in which no one was permitted to challenge anyone else. By the end of the decade I was a member of a writers’ group, facetiously named The Violet Quill. No one wanted to imitate straight life; we were against “assimilation”.
Then in 1981 the Aids era ended the party. Gay cruises and resorts went bankrupt. Hospitals were overwhelmed with the ill and dying. I was one of the founders of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Hundreds of our friends and acquaintances and celebrities died. As the writer Fran Lebowitz pointed out, not only did gay creative people die but so did their gay audiences, those cultivated men who’d been the consumers of high culture. Suddenly everyone wanted to look healthy; going to the gym replaced going to the opera.
Whereas one can complain today that Pride parades are corporate-sponsored and gay marriage is heteronormative and gay culture has become commercial, that dismissive point of view toward the liberation movement can be arrogant and unfeeling. It ignores how many people still suffer from oppression due to religious fundamentalism. In western Europe and the Americas gay couples can marry or at least declare themselves joined by a bond. In other parts of the world homosexuals are executed – or commit suicide out of fear and low self-esteem.
People romanticize the pre-Stonewall period, but in truth there was a high rate of alcoholism among gays, it was rare to meet a committed gay couple, no gay I knew had children, few gays had splendid careers, many were in therapy trying to go straight – there’s a whole litany of gay deprivations from the pre-Stonewall years. Most of us devoted all our energy just to being gay.
The first group to benefit from the freedoms won 50 years ago were white men; now the struggle continues among young lesbians, people of color, the trans population – and all those living under dangerously rightwing, hostile religious regimes. In a sense this return to gender-fluid people and gay and lesbian people of color is a recapitulation of the original Stonewall warriors, those drag queens and tough kids from Harlem. They have given new life to a movement that in big-city America at least had become dull, uninspired and materialistic.”
White men were first to benefit from gay liberation – but it can’t end there
Edmund White/ The Guardian
Fifty years ago, Edmund White witnessed the Stonewall riots. Here, he pays homage to the LGBT people of color, drag queens and tough kids of Harlem who paved the way to freedom
We celebrate today the 1905 founding of the Industrial Workers of the World in Chicago, a key event in the history of organized labor and an example of the Butterfly Effect, as from this coming together of revolutionary ideologies and worker solidarity in mass action consequences gathered force as they spread outward to transform our nation and the world, and will continue to do so in the future.
Here is an idea whose time has truly arrived in this age of globalization; a universal labor union which ensures that no worker can be used against another. Regardless of their nation or where they do the work.
Most people don’t think of Spokane and the Pacific Northwest as the crucible of the labor movement and Socialism in America, its anarchist communes and international networks of liberation struggle of over a hundred years ago and its legacies among those who live here, but most people don’t have a life partner whose father grew up with mine in the shadow of her grandfather John F. McKay and his friend Eugene V. Debs.
I have among the tools of my trade, that of resistance, chaos, anarchy, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, a battered length of iron, pitted and scarred from many battles and acts of sabotage, artifact of a heritage of resistance which reaches back into antiquity and connects us with the lives of others who refused to submit to authority, and carried as a walking stick by John F. McKay in his many campaigns of revolutionary struggle throughout the world.
As an Industrial Workers of the World unionist and with his friend Eugene V. Debs, John F. McKay defied and challenged authority throughout the world to forge a better future in which no worker can be used against another. He began this life work as a Montana state senator in 1918-1922; for union organizing among the miners and loggers he was excommunicated by the Church, and defeated an assassin sent against him.
An infamous event from this period was the Centralia Massacre of November 11 1919, in which a local Washington State headquarters of the IWW was attacked by members of the American Legion who had been called on by the town council to restore order during a strike; they surrounded and fired on the building, and a young IWW man who happened to be a World War One veteran fired back, killing several of them. The remaining strikebreakers stormed the building, killed several of the office staff, and castrated, dragged behind cars, and lynched others. Their mutilated bodies were hung about town; captured survivors were convicted on trumped up charges and given sentences of 25 years. From this abattoir emerged a champion of the people; I believe this event began John F. McKay’s shift from political to direct action. He smashed through the ambush with the crowbar now in my toolkit, and through a blockade in a stolen truck to escape. At the end of his term in the senate he became a full time IWW organizer.
In 1930 he moved to Spokane and founded the All Worker’s Party, and with the hundreds of men he organized kept thousands of people alive during the Great Depression, by raiding trains for food to distribute while his teams turned the power and water back on for families who had no cash to pay the utilities with, among other things.
And with this wrecking bar in his fist he fought for liberty, equality, and justice for the rest of his life. I hope to be worthy of its use, in bearing forward the legacy of resistance he created in the quest to make all human beings equal, and all workers to share in the rewards of their labor in a just society.
The sign above the gate of Auschwitz read; “work will set you free.” This is a lie. Only revolutionary struggle and seizure of power will set you free.
As described in Jacobin; “Even Americans familiar with labor history might be surprised by the slogan of the Congress of South African Trade Unions: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” More commonly associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the motto was likely brought to South Africa by IWW members (“Wobblies”) shortly after the revolutionary union’s founding in 1905.
That the IWW was global enough to spread its phraseology across the Atlantic Ocean belies its popular conception, which tends to focus exclusively on the union’s organizing in the US. But the IWW’s revolutionary ideals found purchase among workers throughout the world, eventually gaining members in at least twenty countries on all six of the inhabited continents.
The IWW inspired activists in the Ghadr movement, which sought Indian independence from the British Empire. Its members interacted with Chinese republican revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen and the anarchists of the Partido Liberal Mexicano as well as its hero, Emiliano Zapata. Its ranks included everyone from socialist tribune Eugene Debs to Ghadr movement leader Pandurang Khankhoje to border-hopping migrant laborers in the American Southwest.”
Also writing in a book review in Jacobin, Staughton Lynd analyzes why the most consequential and universal labor union, the first of its kind in the history of the world and the seed idea which originated all unions today, had collapsed utterly, I’d say during the division of 1924 over whether its leadership should take the federal pardon; “Eric Chester’s new book, Wobblies In Their Heyday, fills this gap. It is indispensable reading for Wobblies and labor historians. One way to summarize what is between these covers is to say that Chester spells out three tragic mistakes made by the old IWW that the reinvented organization must do its best to avoid.
1.Macho Posturing
At its peak in August 1917, the IWW had a membership of more than 150,000. Nine months later, Chester writes, “the union was in total disarray, forced to devote most of its time and resources to raising funds for attorneys and bail bonds.” This sad state of affairs was, of course, partly the result of a calculated decision by the federal government to destroy the IWW. But only partly.
According to Chester another cause of the government’s successful suppression of the Wobblies was that during and after the 1913 Wheatlands strike in California hop fields, some Wobblies threatened to “burn California’s agricultural fields if two leaders of the strike were not released from jail.”
For years, Wobbly leaders had insisted that sabotage could force employers to make concessions. But what Chester terms “nebulous calls for arson” and “macho bravado” only stiffened the determination of California authorities not to modify jail sentences for Wobbly leaders Richard Ford and Herman Suhr.
Chester finds no credible evidence that any fields were, in fact, burned. But after the United States entered World War I in April 1917, this extravagant rhetoric calling for the destruction of crops apparently helped to convince President Wilson to initiate a systematic and coordinated campaign to suppress the Wobblies.
2. Avoiding Controversial Stances to Avoid State Repression
International solidarity and militant opposition to war and the draft were central tenets of the IWW. Wobblies who had enrolled in the British Army were expelled from the union. At the union’s tenth general convention in November 1915, the delegates adopted a resolution calling for a “General Strike in all industries” should the United States enter the war.
What actually happened was that general secretary-treasurer Bill Haywood and a majority of IWW leaders agreed that the union should desist from any discussion of the war or the draft, in the vain hope that this policy would persuade the federal government to refrain from targeting the union for repression. At the same time, the great majority of rank-and-file members, with support of a few leaders such as Frank Little, insisted that the IWW should be at the forefront of the opposition to the war.
Self-evidently, what Chester terms the IWW’s “diffidence” was the very opposite of Eugene Debs’s defiant opposition to the war. When Wobbly activists “flooded IWW offices with requests for help and pleas for a collective response to the draft,” the usual response was that what to do was up to each individual member.
Haywood, Chester notes, “consistently sought to steer the union away from any involvement in the draft resistance movement.” Debs notwithstanding, the national leadership of the Socialist Party, like the national leadership of the IWW, “scrambled to avoid any confrontation with federal authorities.” Radical activists from both organizations formed ad hoc alliances cutting across organizational boundaries.
The IWW General Executive Board was unable to arrive at a decision about the war and conscription, and a committee tasked with drafting a statement that included both Haywood and Little failed to do so. In the end, Chester says, “the IWW sought to position itself as a purely economic organization concerned solely with short-run gains in wages and working conditions.”
3.Falling Into the Divide-and-Conquer Trap
The reluctance of the Wobbly leadership to advocate resistance to the war and conscription carried over to a legalistic response when the government indicted IWW leaders. Haywood urged all those named in the indictment to surrender voluntarily and to waive any objection to being extradited to Chicago. In the mass trial that followed, the defendants were represented by a very good trial lawyer who was also an enthusiastic supporter of the war and passed up the opportunity to make a closing statement to the jury.
The judge’s superficial fairness deluded Wobs into hoping for a good outcome. The jury took less than an hour to find all one hundred defendants guilty of all counts in the indictment. Ninety-three received lengthy prison terms. They were imprisoned in Leavenworth, described by Chester as ‘”a maximum-security penitentiary designed for hardened, violent criminals.” Forty-six more defendants were found guilty after another mass conspiracy trial in Sacramento.
Thereafter, Chester writes, the “process of granting a commutation of sentence was manipulated during the administration of Warren Harding to divide and demoralize IWW prisoners.” The ultimate result was “the disastrous split of 1924, leaving the union a shell of what it had been only seven years earlier.”
Executive clemency, like that granted to Debs, was the only hope for the imprisoned Wobblies. President Harding rejected any thought of a general amnesty, obliging each prisoner to fill out the form requesting amnesty as an individual. The application form contained an implicit admission of guilt. (The newly created ACLU supported this process.)
Twenty-four IWW prisoners opted to submit a form requesting amnesty. A substantial majority refused to plead for individual release. More than seventy issued a statement in which they insisted that “all are innocent and all must receive the same consideration.”
The government insisted on a case-by-case approach. Fifty-two prisoners responded that they refused to accept the president’s division of the Sacramento prisoners, still alleged to have burned fields, from the Chicago prisoners. Moreover, they considered it a “base act” to “sign individual applications and leave the Attorney General’s office to select which of our number should remain in prison and which should go free.”
Initially, the IWW supported those prisoners who refused to seek their freedom individually. Those who had submitted personal requests for presidential clemency were expelled from the union.
In June 1923, the government once again dangled before desperate men the prospect of release, now available for those individual prisoners promising to remain “law-abiding and loyal to the Government.” This time a substantial majority of the remaining prisoners accepted Harding’s offer, and IWW headquarters, in what Chester calls “a sweeping reversal,” gave its approval. Eleven men at Leavenworth declined this latest government inducement. In addition, those who were tried in California did not receive the same offer.
In December 1923, the remaining IWW prisoners at Leavenworth, including twenty-two who had been convicted in Sacramento, were released unconditionally. The damage had been done. Those who had held out the longest launched a campaign within the IWW to expel those who had supported a form of conditional release. There were accusations against anyone who had allegedly proved himself “a scab and a rat.”
When a convention convened in 1924, both sides claimed the headquarters office and went to court. An organization consisting of the few hundred members who had supported the consistent rejection of all government offers “faded into oblivion by 1931.”
It is not the intent of Chester’s book, or of this review, to trash the IWW. This review has dealt with only about half of the material in the book (for example passing by the story of Wobbly organizing in copper, both at Butte, Montana and Bisbee, Arizona). Moreover, anyone who lived through the disintegration of Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Panthers is familiar with tragedies like those described here.
The heroism of members of all three groups who were martyrs — such as Frank Little, Fred Hampton, and the Mississippi Three (James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner) — remains. The vision of a qualitatively different society — as the Zapatistas say, “un otro mundo” — remains also.”
Monkeywrench of John F. McKay
The IWW, a reading list
The Wobblies in Their Heyday: The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I Era, by Eric Thomas Chester
Wanted: Men to Fill the Jails of Spokane!: Fighting for Free Speech with the Hobo Agitators of the Industrial Workers of the World, by John Duda (Editor)
In response to my post of the article written by Spencer Garcia for Truthout which situates Stonewall in the history of anti-police action, someone commented; “It’s ridiculous to think that its possible to disband the police. There are a few police who use their power to do bad things but the majority are good citizens that we count on every day. We need to support the police.”
To this I replied; We are not going to agree on the state’s use of force and control to repress dissent and authorize identities; I see this as the origin of evil. Evil arises not from the motives and actions of individuals, but from the systemic and structural inequalities of power imposed on and between individuals by the state. We can agree on the redemptive power of love to heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Quick on the heels of this, a general question in another forum was posed on the death penalty; “What does everyone think of the death penalty? Is it ever justified?” While I was replying; I do not trust the state with the power of life and death over us, someone replied;” Off with their heads!”, a reference to the French Revolution and revolutionary struggle in general which reframes the question of the use of force by the state in a way which brings it great clarity as a general principle. Here is my reply:
By any means necessary, as a hero of my youth, Malcolm X, said. If we are speaking of revolutionary struggle and the historical context of beheading aristocrats, as an ancestor of mine called The Red Queen after the Alice in Wonderland character was during the Paris Commune for her method of assassination.
The violence used by a slavemaster cannot be compared to the violence used by a slave to break his chains, as Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours has been paraphrased. This dictum has its reverse; the state has no legitimate authority to use death, violence, force, and control in the repression of dissent, theft of citizenship or violations of our universal human rights, or authorization of identities. This got Trotsky killed by Stalin, as he rightly called out tyranny and terror as tyranny and terror regardless of what those who would enslave us call themselves. It is possible this is also why Gandhi was assassinated by what is now the ruling party of India, the BJP.
For this same reason my teacher of the arts of war and revolution whom I called Sifu Dragon was forced to flee the China he had helped create in 1969, during the Cultural Revolution by which Mao hoped to avoid capture of the state by Russia as a political counter and dimension of the months long Sino-Soviet War, and this despite being a lifelong friend of the Cultural Revolution’s leader Zhou En Lai and a sometime operative of Zhou’s key alley Kang Sheng, as the Red Guards laid siege to the headquarters of their own commander and nearly dragged Zhou En-Lai into the street for trial. As in the France of Robespierre, when Revolution turns on its own and becomes a Terror, nothing and no one is safe as the use of social force subverts its own values and consumes the society it would save.
This is a predictable phase of revolutionary struggle, when the use of social force is not abandoned by liberation forces which have seized power, especially under the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle. Liberation becomes tyranny and state terror when revolutions become carceral states of force and control which mirror their historical oppressors, particularly when authorized constructions of public virtue and the good permit any atrocity in service to power, as in historical crusades, Inquisitions, conquests and genocides. Gott Mitt Uns; it is our most terrible battle cry, for as Voltaire wrote in his 1765 essay Questions sur les Miracles; “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
Revolutionary struggle, protest movements, and wars of liberation use force and violence to achieve a society free of inequality when there are no other means possible, when the tyranny and terror of authority, state force and control, and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege answer dissent with repression because they are without legitimacy and have only fear to keep the slaves at their work. Those who would enslave us refuse to negotiate because they see only themselves as human, and without debate we are left only the sword.
Any who stand between the tyranny and state terror of conquest, enslavement, and death, and the lives of innocents are heroes and champions of our humanity. The particulars are irrelevant.
I say this in reference to Hamas and other defenders and champions of the powerless in the events of the Third Intifada in which I am both a participant and a witness of history, but it holds true as a general principle of action.
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
If we flip the coin over once again and look at the issue of social force not from the angle of state violence versus liberation from it, nor as the direct use of state force in the death penalty as the ultimate case of enforcement of law and order in the subjugation of others to normative ideas of virtue authorized by elites as obedience, but in the case of staged confrontations between Fascist and Antifascist forces in the battle for the soul of America and the future of humankind which played out in the streets of Portland and throughout our nation in 2020 as the Fourth Reich’s deniable assets and militias attempted to discredit and seize the narrative of the Black Lives Matter protests in a campaign of murder, violence, arson, and looting to provide a pretext for the federal occupation of Democratic cities, funded by fascist oligarchs including the family of Betsy DeVos and centrally planned and organized in coordination with the secret police specially formed for the purpose of abduction and torture of protesters by Chad Wolf, at the command and with the authorization of Trump and Barr, the same organizations of white supremacist terror and fascist tyranny which attempted a coup during the January 6 Insurrection of this year, we can refine our critique of the social use of force even more.
Force, Violence, and Power; the internal contradictions of breaking the law to achieve justice now faced by militias involved in the January 6 Insurrection and the murder of police officers, whose identity is centered on being auxillary forces for the police, and deniable assets of elite white supremacist hegemony and state tyranny, is parallel to that of antifascist groups which challenge them in a kind of fight club.
We must remember always in the staging of performances of guerilla theatre that such grounds of struggle are consequences of division and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and belonging, in which the lies and illusions, narratives of victimization, weaponization of faith and identitarian nationalisms, and strategies of co-optation, assimilation, and falsification leveraged by our true enemies and hegemonic elites in service to their wealth, power, and privilege have shaped and directed those we face in the line of battle; fellow powerless and dispossessed citizens who have been turned against their own class interests.
Our duty of care toward others means that we must ever stand between such forces of repression and their intended victims; but we must also liberate them when possible from subjugation to authority and from the zombiefication of cult and fascist thought control.
Remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
Here I speak as the founder of Lilac City Antifa, whose members and allies placed themselves between armed provocateurs, some with badges and some without, and their intended victims throughout the Red Summer of 2020, in Seattle and Portland, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Minneapolis, and many other cities. By June of that year over two hundred of our cities had imposed curfews, and during the summer some fifty cities had sustained protests of over one hundred days involving between fifteen and twenty million Americans who refused to submit to racist state terror.
Identity built on force and violence characterizes both state tyranny and the revolutions which oppose them. This is why heroes become tyrants, successor states recapitulate the evils of those they replace, and utopias contain the seeds of their destruction.
The escape from this dilemma and vicious cycle of harm is to abandon the social use of force and embrace instead the heart of democracy founded in the Forum of Athens: the traditions of Socratic dialog, open debate, verifiable and objective truth, and freedom of information. In a free society of equals, there are no systemic nor structural inequalities or hierarchies of belonging, no divisions of otherness, no ethnic or sectarian conflicts, and no class struggle.
As Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer wrote in an 1893 medical journal article; “The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” Let us trade stones for words, and force for persuasion.
As I wrote in my post of March 28 2019, in the wake of the Christchurch white supremacist terror and the direct threat of a copycat atrocity against our local mosque here in Spokane; I’ve thought about the origins of evil, of violence and power in the relationships between fear, anger, hate, and other negative emotions as illnesses, for a long time now and in many roles and contexts.
Here are some things I have learned:
First, the process by which violence operates as a system is the same for all spheres of action and levels of scale; within personal and social contexts and in intimate relationships and families as well as nations and historical civilizations.
The precondition of violence as hate crime, and of both tyranny and terror,
is overwhelming and generalized fear as shaped by submission to authority.
Structures and figures of authorized power feed on fear and hate, grow stronger by the cycle of power and violence and the negative emotions and forces of darkness to which they give form and through which they subjugate others.
We must question, expose, mock and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. These are the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen in a free society of equals.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, normality with transgression, and division with solidarity.
Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies and illusions which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.
Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious diversity, democracy, and a free society of equals.
Let us evolve toward a nonviolent and noncoercive society together, become bearers of the Torch of Liberty together, and unite to achieve our dreams of democracy together.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
Here is the article to which I write in reference, as written by Spencer Garcia in Truthout entitled To Celebrate Pride, We Must Honor Its Roots as an Anti-Police Protest: Ongoing police violence against LGBTQ people has led to a nationwide movement to limit or ban cops from Pride events; “The presence of police officers at Pride is completely antithetical to its origins as an anti-police protest. Police officers should have absolutely no role in the modern-day queer and trans liberation movement and any parades, marches or events celebrating the lives of LGBTQ people. In fact, many of the first events resembling current-day Pride parades were born out of community responses to police violence in New York City, San Francisco and other cities across the country. At best, including police officers in Pride events is disrespectful toward LGBTQ people, living and passed, who have experienced police brutality. And at worst, police presence at Pride actively endangers the lives of LGBTQ people, especially Black and Indigenous LGBTQ people, who are here today.
The Violent History of Police Attacks on Pride
Police officers across the country have historically perpetrated horrible acts of physical, sexual and verbal violence against LGBTQ people. Community resistance to this police brutality, particularly by Black trans women and other LGBTQ people of color, birthed the modern-day queer and trans liberation movement. The June 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City and the Compton’s Cafeteria riot in August 1966 in San Francisco are two prominent examples of LGBTQ people, particularly Black trans women and other trans women of color, fighting back against homophobic, transphobic and racist attacks by police. While there had been many other public actions, demonstrations and protests by LGBTQ people throughout the 1960s, the events at Stonewall and Compton’s Cafeteria more directly served as the launching points for Pride marches and the queer and trans liberation movement in New York City, San Francisco and other U.S. cities.
Unfortunately, police brutality against the LGBTQ community has not stopped, and police officers continue to harass and endanger LGBTQ people, even at Pride and other community events. In 2017, more than a dozen police officers attacked LGBTQ activists of color who were peacefully protesting at a Pride event in Columbus, Ohio. Members of Black Queer Intersectionality Columbus (BQIC), a group of Black LGBTQ community organizers, planned to silently block the parade for seven minutes to “protest the recent acquittal of the police officer who killed Philando Castile” and to “raise awareness about the violence against and erasure of Black and brown queer and trans people.” Less than 45 seconds into their silent protest, police officers brutally attacked the protestors.
A similar incident occurred at San Francisco Pride in 2019, when a small group of protesters planned to delay Pride for 50 minutes to “commemorate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall” and “to honor and continue the legacy of our militant trans and queer ancestors, who fought, loved, and rioted to make room for our existence today.” The protesters handed out flyers with their demands, one of which called for no police participation in Pride. The police officers present responded violently, using excessive force against several protesters. They also broke the cane of a disabled trans protester and intentionally misgendered them multiple times.
Police officers’ attacks on LGBTQ people are rarely grounded in legitimate concerns of “public safety.” Instead, they are deeply rooted in homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism and other systems of oppression. As demonstrated by the incidents above, it’s clear that the police targeted the protesters for multiple reasons: their gender and sexuality, their race and their anti-police politics. LGBTQ people of color with anti-police and abolitionist politics, particularly Black LGBTQ people, are seen as “dangerous” to the state. Police officers treat them as such, and respond with physical violence, as well as homophobic, transphobic and racist verbal harassment. For LGBTQ people of color who survive these attacks, they are often left with trauma from both the individual police officers who harmed them and the ramifications of the prison-industrial complex more broadly.
Banning Police and Reclaiming Pride
Several cities across the country have banned police officers from participating in some capacity in Pride parades, marches, festivals and other events. The specific actions vary from city to city, but there is a clear nationwide movement to limit and eliminate police presence at Pride. While these decisions might be recent, the call to action to remove police officers from community spaces has been led by LGBTQ people of color for decades. And considering the origins of Pride, keeping police out of community spaces has been central to the queer and trans liberation movement from the start.
In 2018, police were banned in some capacity from several Pride parades around the country. In Minneapolis, Minnesota; Madison, Wisconsin; and Durham, North Carolina, police officers were banned from marching in Pride parades while in uniform. The organizers of Capital Pride in Washington, D.C. also banned uniformed police officers from marching in Pride in 2018, and reiterated the ban in 2021. As required by the D.C. city government, the police department will have “jurisdiction to close and clear the streets,” but any needed security will be hired through a private company.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, San Diego, California; Charlotte, North Carolina; Portland, Oregon; and Indianapolis, Indiana, all took actions in 2020 to reduce police presence at their future Pride events. The organizers of San Diego Pride released a four-part plan to limit police presence, which included removing parade contingents and festival booths for law enforcement agencies. Similar to San Diego, the organizers of Charlotte Pride in North Carolina also released a four-part plan to limit police presence and power in order to support Black LGBTQ people and other LGBTQ people of color. The plan demands that the city “make less visible the number of uniformed and armed law enforcement officers” they are required to have for security, and encourages the city “to redirect police funding into investments in community-based … initiatives that will uplift Black and Brown people, low-income people, and other marginalized communities.”
In Portland, Pride organizers had asked police officers to not march in uniform in 2017, but after witnessing “the ever-increasing use of violence against our citizens,” organizers have now banned uniformed and armed police officers from marching in the parade and participating in the festival beginning in 2021. And in Indianapolis, Indy Pride “will no longer contract with or utilize police departments for security … unless necessary for road closures.” Pride organizers in each of these cities demonstrate how a variety of tactics can be used to limit or eliminate police presence at Pride events. Beyond this, they also emphasize the need to invest resources to better the livelihoods of the most marginalized people in the LGBTQ community, and show that this liberatory work is indeed possible.
Unfortunately, some of the decisions to ban police officers from Pride were made as direct responses to incidents of police violence. In 2020, the organizers of San Francisco Pride banned uniformed police officers from marching in the parade after the above-mentioned police attacks on protesters at Pride in 2019. The board of San Francisco Pride also worked to have the charges dropped against the protesters. In New York City, the organizers of Pride decided to ban uniformed police officers from marching in the parade from 2021 until at least 2025. Community members in New York City had been demanding that police be removed from Pride for years, but the call to action wasn’t taken seriously by the organizers of Pride until an incident of police violence at the 2020 Queer Liberation March. As the nationwide movement to limit police presence at Pride continues, cities should choose to be more proactive in their approach to avoid further harm to LGBTQ people and communities, and commit to fully removing police officers in all capacities from these spaces.
Honoring the Origins of Pride
As cities continue to debate whether or how to limit or eliminate police presence at their Pride events later this month and in the years to come, we must continue to advocate for community-based solutions that center the most marginalized LGBTQ people. Continuing to organize for the removal of police officers from all LGBTQ spaces, as well as the ultimate abolition of the police and the prison-industrial complex, is one of the most important actions we can take to honor the history of the queer and trans liberation movement. Anti-police and abolitionist politics must be centered in all efforts to achieve queer and trans liberation, because the liberation of LGBTQ people is inherently intertwined with the destruction of all systems of oppression.
Resisting police presence at Pride brings us one step closer to achieving that liberation.”
The Mamdani Miracle of New York smashes the Collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party’s containment cell for revolutionary forces of change, reimagination, and transformation of our systems and institutions which enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and marginalize and silence dissent.
Vast wealth and propaganda machines have been defied and overthrown as a deathgrip of reactionary forces which Janus like bear two faces, Democratic and Republican, and across the last forty five years have conspired together in the neoliberal order of capitalist exploitation and the erosion of our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and as human beings.
As this order collapses from the mechanical failures of its internal inconsistencies and contradictions and before the intrusive force of Nazi revivalism and white supremacist terror together with Gideonite theocratic patriarchal sexual terror which captured the Republican Party in 1980 and now has metastasized throughout our society to capture the state under the loathsome and aberrant Trump regime, the people rise to seize power from those who would enslave us and steal our souls.
Last November the momentum of Resistance to the Fall of America and democracy broke upon the shoal of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of our principle of universal human rights and complicity in the genocide of the Palestinians, as well as abandonment of the Green New Deal and hope of human survival under threat of ecological collapse and species extinction, abandonment of universal healthcare as a precondition of the right to life and a just society, and abandonment of the Abolition of Police as a racist state terror force and army of occupation designed to re-enslave Black citizens as prison bond labor, a police state made m ore terrible still by the nefarious Patriot Act which militarized policing and birthed the counterinsurgency model of police, and now with ICE and federal troops occupying our cities has become a primary instrument of subversion of democracy and theft of our equality and of meaningful citizenship.
Then of course we have our Rapist In Chief, Traitor Trump, who was elected because he is a white supremacist terrorist and patriarchal sexual terrorist whose voters want permission to do the same, openly. The driving force behind all of this is the death spiral of capitalism as capital tries to free itself of its host political system, democracy.
The Democratic Party also lost the crucial votes of nonwhite men who voted to keep the only power they have, patriarchal privilege, during Kamala’s single issue abortion rights campaign which attempted to reverse 2,700 years of patriarchy as our primary system of oppression, dated from the writing of The Hanging of the Maids attributed to Homer and interrogated by Margaret Atwood in The Penelopiad.
These are the four goals any movement toward the Restoration of America as a democracy must champion and realize; universal human rights including those of women and bodily autonomy and Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of Israel, a Green New Deal, universal free healthcare, and Abolition of police and the total dismantling of our institutions of state terror and tyranny.
And now suddenly, as faceless police terrorists abduct nonwhite people without cause or trial and send them to foreign hells to be forgotten, a champion arises to join others in the liberation and Restoration of New York and one day all America.
In the words of Zohran Mamdani himself, writing in Jacobin in an article entitled “We’re Going to Win the City We Deserve”; “here are over three thousand New Yorkers here this evening — and thousands more watching from home. New Yorkers who believe that living here shouldn’t be a daily grind of anxiety. New Yorkers who are ready to turn the page on years of corruption and incompetence. To reject the politics of distraction and fear, of big money and small vision, of cowardice and collaboration in the face of Trump’s authoritarianism. New Yorkers who are ready for a new generation of leadership that puts working people first.
My brothers and sisters, you are the beating heart of this campaign. You have climbed six floor walkups and braved the pouring rain to canvass our city, sharing our message with the very New Yorkers you’ve lived alongside for years but never had the chance to meet. And make no mistake, this campaign is reaching every corner of this city.
I see the work each of you do when New Yorkers wave excitedly from bus windows and shout “freeze the rent” from moving cars.
I see it when volunteers who have never participated in politics before dedicate their every Sunday night to spreading our message. I see it when thousands of New Yorkers post proud screenshots of their first ever ballots. And I feel it when the aunties and uncles who have long felt abandoned by a broken status quo pull me aside to tell me that finally, they’re excited to believe again.
We stand on the verge of a victory that will resonate across the country and the world. Make no mistake: this victory will be historic, not just because of who I am — a Muslim immigrant and proud democratic socialist — but for what we will do: make this city affordable for everyone.
New Yorkers are ready for a new generation of leadership that puts working people first.
I think of a woman I met on the BX33 in the Bronx, who said to me: “I used to love New York — but now it’s just where I live.” We’re going to make this city one that working people can love once again.
That’s who I’m thinking about tonight: the New Yorkers who make this city run. For after this rally, as many of us sleep, millions of our neighbors will step out onto moon-lit streets across our city.
Nurses working the night shift will put on their scrubs and save lives. City workers will clean subway stations and pick up our trash. Office buildings will be made new again, as the midnight shift scrubs and polishes in the dark.
Many of these New Yorkers are immigrants, who traveled to this city from faraway countries with nothing in their pockets except a dream of a better life. And even more of them will spend the entire night tirelessly working, and return home carrying the burden that it still isn’t enough. The sun rises, the bills continue to climb, and the stress never seems to fade.
If New York truly is the city that never sleeps, we deserve a mayor who fights for those of us who labor at every single hour of the day. I will be that mayor.
When we launched this campaign on a cold October evening, few thought we could win. Only a couple more could even pronounce my name. Andrew Cuomo still can’t.
The so-called experts said we’d be lucky to break 5 percent. But I always knew that we would build a campaign like this.
So when a disgraced former governor questions whether or not we can lead this city, I look at our campaign and I know the answer.
Over a million doors knocked. More than 40,000 volunteers. A movement that the pundits and politicians had written off, now on the precipice of toppling a political dynasty. And because of that, we will win a city that we can afford.
But what does winning look like?
It looks like a rent-stabilized retiree who wakes up on the first of every month, knowing the amount they’re going to pay hasn’t soared since the month before.
Together, New York, we’re going to freeze the rent.
It looks like a single mom who can drop her kids off at school and know she won’t be late to work, because her bus will arrive on time and cost nothing at all.
Together, New York, we’re going to make buses fast and free.
It looks like a young family that doesn’t have to move to the suburbs because childcare doesn’t cost more than college. In fact, it’s free.
Together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal childcare.
And it looks like safety for everyone — whether you’re on the street, riding the subway, or in a house of worship — with our Department of Community Safety. We’ll invest in the mental health services that we know work and we’ll tackle the rise in hate crimes that fill too many Jewish and Muslim New Yorkers with fear.
We’re going to make this city one that working people can love once again.
We’ll stand up for small businesses and take on bad landlords and greedy corporations. We’ll make sure our public schools are excellent — our kids deserve better than crowded classrooms and neglected facilities. We’ll do all this from a City Hall that is accountable and transparent to the New Yorkers it proudly serves.
And I’ll be a mayor who doesn’t bow down to corporate interests, doesn’t take his orders from billionaires, and sure as hell doesn’t let ICE steal our neighbors from their homes. There are no kings in America, whether that’s Donald Trump, Andrew Cuomo, or the Republican billionaires who fund their campaigns.
For too long, New Yorkers have learned not to expect much from those they elect. Failure has become familiar.
Make no mistake: our democracy is under attack from the outside, but it has also been eroded from the inside. When politicians give you crumbs time and again and tell you to feel satisfied, it should come as no surprise that so many among us have lost faith.
But this campaign has given hope again through our vision that every person deserves a good and dignified life — and that government must deliver an agenda of abundance that puts the interests of the 99 percent over the 1 percent.
That’s why Republican billionaires are spending millions of dollars to stop you. To stop us.
They know that this election isn’t just about the future of our city. It’s about the future of our democracy. Whether billionaires and massive corporations can buy our elections.
Trust me, they will try. From now until June 24, you will not be able to turn on your TV, check your mail, or watch a video on YouTube without seeing an attack on our movement. There will be lies to stoke fear and suspicion, even hate. And behind these lies are the same billionaires who put Donald Trump back in office.
But we know that this movement is more powerful than their money. That’s what New Yorkers have already begun to say today, at polling places across our city. And on June 24, we will speak in one voice.
The days of moral victories are over.
And to everyone who pulls me aside to whisper with the best intentions: “You have already won”: I am sorry, but the days of moral victories are over. As my father told me years ago, when the Right wins power, the Left writes a great book. Those days are over too.
This campaign is going to win on June 24 — and it’s thanks to each of you.
On Election Night, after the polls have closed and the results have come in, we’ll go home. As we close our eyes, the days of countless others will only be beginning. Doors in Jackson Heights and Parkchester and Bay Ridge will open at midnight. New Yorkers will leave their homes and commute under streetlights to work, where they’ll drive buses and mop floors and bake bread.
For some, this will feel like any other night. But for so many more, thanks to all of you, it will feel like the dawn of a new day. And when the sun finally climbs above the horizon, the light will seem brighter than ever before.
We’re going to win the city we deserve, my friends. And it’s going to be one we can afford. One where we can dream again.”
As written by Tim Murphy in Mother Jones, in an article entitled New York City’s Mayoral Election Is About Way More Than One City: It’s about what Democrats want to be—and whether they’ve learned anything at all; “A few days after the 2024 election, Zohran Mamdani filmed the first video in a mayoral campaign that would come to be defined by them. Standing on street corners in the Bronx and Queens, the 33-year-old Democratic-Socialist state assemblyman asked a procession of New Yorkers two simple questions: Who had they voted for, and why?
There was nary a MAGA hat in sight. But voter after voter—across a range of ages and backgrounds—explained that they’d either voted for Trump or not voted at all. They were fed up with the rising cost of living. They wanted an end to the war in Gaza. And they felt like they were getting nothing from Democratic leaders.
The video, which has more than 2.6 million views on X, was both self-serving and illuminating—a campaign soft-launch rooted in a simple reality: If you want to understand the hole the Democratic Party is currently in, you have to get out of your swing-state bubble and join the Real Americans on the subway. The biggest on-the-ground development of the 2024 election was what happened in the places Democrats took for granted. In blue cities in blue states, President Donald Trump improved his performance among working-class nonwhite voters while Democratic support fell off dramatically. Trump’s popular-vote victory was an earthquake. And New York City was its epicenter.
Trump picked up nearly 100,000 more votes in his home city than he did four years earlier—while Kamala Harris ran more than half a million votes behind Joe Biden. And the more immigrant and working-class a neighborhood was, the greater the dropoff. The three congressional districts with the biggest swings toward Trump in the entire country last year were all in Queens or the Bronx (or both, in the case of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 14th District). While the city and the state stayed comfortably blue, the results embodied a worrisome national trend for Trump’s opposition: The places where support for Democrats eroded the fastest were also the places where they have been in power the longest.
On Tuesday, New York City voters will cast their ballots again, in the biggest contest yet of the party’s post-Trump reset—the Democratic mayoral primary. The race has been, in a lot of ways, a characteristically local affair. The word “re-zoning” comes up a lot. Depending on who you ask, it’s a referendum on Mamdani’s inexperience, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s record of bullying and sexual harassment, or current mayor Eric Adams’ alleged crimes. But it’s also a referendum on where people in America’s biggest Democratic enclave think the Democratic Party went wrong.
You may not be surprised to learn that Mamdani and Cuomo both think the answer is the other guy. At a rally in Brooklyn last month, in a former steel plant that’s been converted into a concert venue, supporters wore buttons touting Mamdani’s campaign promises—free buses, free child care, freeze the rent—and swag from the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. Aside from a few taxi drivers (whom Mamdani had joined on a hunger strike in 2021), and the candidate’s famous filmmaker mom, it was hard to find anyone who looked older than 40.
“I have a lot of friends in this field—except Cuomo,” the Mamdani-endorsing Bronx state Sen. Gustavo Rivera told me, while the actor and Obama White House staffer Kal Penn emceed from the stage. “Cuomo is a piece of human garbage.”
Rivera repeated it again, in a sing-song voice this time, to make sure I got the message: “a piece of hu-man gar-bage, who’s an abu-sive bul-ly, who does not deserve to be anywhere near public ser-vice.”
Cuomo, the frontrunner, resigned his office in 2021 after an investigation by the state attorney general’s office found that he had sexually harassed 11 women—charges that he disputes and says are politically motivated “cancel culture.” To Mamdani and a substantial subset of Democratic voters, Cuomo is the embodiment of how Democrats ended up in their current predicament.
“Democrats are tired of being told by leaders from the past that we should continue to simply wait our turn, we should continue to simply trust, when we know that’s the very leadership that got us to this point,” he said at a debate in June. “We need to turn the page for new leadership to take us out of it.”
Mamdani’s campaign is built on addressing what he calls the city’s “affordability crisis”—allowed to fester for too long by Democratic leaders, he believes—with a series of fits-on-a-button proposals that would require some combination of tax increases and political finesse to implement. But Mamdani is also at the vanguard of a generational challenge to the city and state’s old-guard Democratic leadership that’s been brewing since the last shock Trump victory.
Cuomo spent years steamrolling his liberal critics as governor. He refused to even shake law professor Zephyr Teachout’s hand in 2014, while a top ally belittled the actress Cynthia Nixon as an “unqualified lesbian” four years later. Those progressives, in turn, believed New York was Blue America’s missed opportunity—a place mired in mediocrity by craven, corrupt, or just out-of-touch party leaders. This lack of ambition was epitomized by Cuomo’s support for members of the Independent Democratic Conference, a rogue faction of state senators who gave Republicans control of the chamber in exchange for legislative perks.
But in 2018, even as Cuomo cruised to reelection, progressive challengers knocked off six incumbent state senators in the primaries—mostly in the outer boroughs—and helped cement one-party Democratic control of the state government. The biggest jolt came that June, when a Democratic-Socialist bartender, Ocasio-Cortez, upset 10-term Rep. Joe Crowley—the chairman of the Queens Democratic Party. Those wins announced a new force in New York Democratic politics—youthful, diverse, and hungry to do things Democrats had been too timid to try.
“Along the 7 line in Queens, a new Democratic politics is born,” Bloomberg announced that summer. Local DSA members borrowed a slogan from a famous mural in the neighborhood of Jackson Heights: “Queens is the future.”
Cuomo’s theory of the race—notwithstanding the fact that he was elected governor three times, his dad was governor, and he has the backing of a bipartisan assemblage of billionaires—is that the party’s plummeting fortunes have less to do with him than with the people who don’t like him.
“They want to go further left. My argument is no, we lost because we were too far left,” he said at a private event earlier this year. “Because we were talking about bathrooms and who was gonna play on what team, boys and girls, you lose touch on what people care about, which is safety.” Cuomo has said that “‘Defund the police’ are the three dumbest words ever uttered in politics.” And he’s warned that if taxes on the city’s highest earners are raised like Mamdani wants, “the rich will move to Massachusetts.”
It’s a message that echoes what a lot of other national Democratic leaders have been saying since November—people like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Cuomo’s campaign launch video was the apocalyptic inverse of Mamdani’s man-on-the-street missive, invoking both the post-pandemic uptick in violent crime (which is now dropping) and the arrival of 230,000 migrant crisis in the city over a two-year period.
“You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person,” Cuomo says in the video, staring directly into the camera. “Or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway. You see it in the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence. The city just feels threatening, out of control, and in crisis.”
It’s a bit more complicated than that. Homelessness is a product of a housing crisis Cuomo presided over, he took money from the subway as governor to bail out ski resorts, and the bail-reform law vilified by some New Yorkers bore his signature. But the pitch is the pitch. The party’s nonwhite working-class base, he argued, was “paying the highest price for New York’s failed Democratic leadership.”
If Queens is the future, what exactly is the future telling us? To understand how Democrats lost their groove in New York, I went back to the place where things seemed to be going so well for progressives—the heavily immigrant neighborhoods of Queens that produced Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 upset. Over the last few months, my colleagues and I spent lot of time talking to residents and elected officials in the neighborhoods of Corona and Jackson Heights for a recent episode of Reveal.
Just off the 7 train on Roosevelt Avenue—the dividing line between AOC’s district and that of Rep. Grace Meng (which also swung 23 points to the right at the presidential level last year)—Trump carried some precincts where he won just a quarter of the vote in 2020. This part of Queens embodied the kinds of places Democrats suffered the most nationally: A large percentage of residents are first- or second-generation immigrants of Latin American or Asian descent, and a comparatively low percentage of voters have college degrees. By one projection, naturalized citizens swung 20 points toward the president last year, while Latino men shifted toward Trump by 16 points.
Part of the story is that while the surrounding neighborhoods formed the symbolic backbone of the city’s new-left politics—Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign hawks stylish Green New Deal prints, depicting high-speed trains whooshing through nearby Flushing Meadows Corona Park—Roosevelt Ave. was also becoming a powerful symbol on the right of perceived failures of progressive governance over the last few years.
The “influx of migrants” Cuomo mentioned in that video were not evenly distributed across the city. Many of the newcomers, particularly Venezuelans, ended up in places like Corona, where they jostled for space with existing residents and struggled to make ends meet. (Asylum seekers are legally barred from seeking employment for about six months after applying for protection.) Many new immigrants tried to find work as street vendors, but lacked permits. (So did many vendors regardless of immigration status, due to a broken city permitting process—an example of dysfunctional bureaucracy Mamdani has zeroed in on in his campaign.) Fox News devoted regular coverage to complaints about trash, crime, and sex workers in the area. It should have been easy to see a backlash coming down the pike. In the final weeks before the presidential election, Roosevelt Avenue’s “numerous brothels” were a punchline on Saturday Night Live.
“I think many people were experiencing and seeing crime go up,” said Jessica González-Rojas, a Democrat who represents part of the area in the state assembly. “With a lot of new arrivals, people were resentful, even those who were immigrants that have been around for generations. I think folks felt like their needs weren’t being addressed, which were the very material needs of the rising prices for food and groceries, rising costs of rent and housing, and again, the increases in crime. Many of us who are progressive have been talking about that, but I think it wasn’t resonating in those same ways.”
People felt squeezed on every front. Inflaming all of this was a sense that government hadn’t been there for people when they needed it. The pandemic came up over and over in our conversations. The area was “the epicenter of the epicenter,” as González-Rojas put it—and not by accident. “Essential workers” continued showing up to their jobs while more affluent, white-collar voters adjusted to Zoom. At Elmhurst Hospital, just a few blocks off Roosevelt Ave., so many people died in the first weeks of the pandemic that a mobile morgue unit set up outside. The hospital has just one bed for every 1,000 residents, noted Shekar Krishnan, the area’s Democratic city councilman, and it was the only facility serving the area. It’s hard to be the party of the social contract when the social contract is in tatters.
“There was a sense of almost lawlessness, right?” González-Rojas said. “Like you saw people blow through red lights. Crime ticked up. There was just a lack of order that something about the pandemic caused.”
Catalina Cruz, a progressive who represents a neighboring assembly district that includes parts of Corona, argued that the pandemic response “had a lot of people disillusioned with government.” Ongoing detachment and disinvestment was layered onto existing inequities, and raised questions about who politicians really worked for. “Andrew Cuomo never stepped foot in Corona. Even during the pandemic, I had to fight him to get a vaccination site in my district. I had to fight him and [former mayor] Bill de Blasio.” (Politico recently reported that Cuomo had in fact attempted to block a vaccination site from opening at nearby Citi Field, because the site was de Blasio’s idea and not his.)
What exactly you think of as “disorder” can vary a lot. But it’s something that everyone from the progressives to the reactionaries seemed to agree there was more of after the pandemic—or at least that people felt like there was more of. And there was a propulsive quality to that anxiety. A recent piece in Vital City called New York City’s malaise an example of “negative social contagion”—essentially, the city has been so overwhelmed by bad vibes that the bad vibes were beginning to call the shots.
When we talked to shopkeepers in Corona about what they wanted from the next mayor, public safety was the top concern. It wasn’t just a bit of New York Post–driven hysteria: Major felonies nearly doubled in this police precinct after the pandemic. An Ecuadorean immigrant who sold soccer jerseys said she had been robbed three times in the last few years. Another voter we spoke with, a formerly undocumented immigrant named Mauricio Zamora who had voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden after getting his citizenship, told us he switched to Trump because he felt like Democrats weren’t doing enough about crime. He’d formed a local community group to agitate against sex workers and “vagrants,” and he was leaning toward Cuomo.
There’s plenty for progressives to grapple with in stories like these. The fact that Mamdani is facing millions of dollars in attack ads featuring a five-year-old call to “#DefundtheNYPD” perhaps offers some lessons for aspiring lefty politicians when it comes to public safety messaging. But New York’s uneasy lurch presents a lot of challenges for status-quo Democrats too. These neighborhoods offer a glimpse of what happens when you don’t deliver on progressive policy promises—and when people feel ignored by their leaders. Zamora, for instance, supported a path to citizenship for undocumented residents, and was so frustrated that none of the Democrats he’d voted for in the past had delivered on it that he had stopped believing their promises.
“When you have a former president promising us we are gonna have immigration reform within the first 100 days and four years later, we have nothing to show for it, people remember that,” Cruz, who was once undocumented herself, said of Biden. To her, national Democrats were dealing with the fruits of patronizing and ultimately empty leadership. Instead of showing up, they were just “sending 10,000 text messages telling us that it’s doomsday because we’re not sending $10 for you to do whatever the hell you’re doing.”
It’s hard to overstate just how dysfunctional the party is in the city and the state. In 1953, 93 percent of eligible voters participated in the mayoral election; in 2021, just 23 percent did. That disengagement is part of what made the left’s outer-borough rise possible—AOC won her primary in 2018 through hard work, yes, but also because the head of the Queens Democratic Party couldn’t even rustle up 13,000 people to vote for him. The New York State Democratic Party spent money on a 2018 primary mailer accusing Cynthia Nixon of enabling antisemitism (which the party said was a mistake), but then spent nothing on three losing statewide ballot initiatives in 2021. Afterward, Jay Jacobs, the party’s Cuomo-loving chair, explained that it had only spent $0 on key Democratic priorities conservatives had spent nine figures attacking because no one had asked the party to spend more.
Faced with the fruits of their poor choices, party leaders have sometimes made peace with mediocrity. “We did well in Southern Brooklyn,” Brooklyn Democratic Party Chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn—a Cuomo-backing state assemblywoman—said in November, after an election in which Democrats lost a state Senate seat in the borough for the first time in eight years, and failed to even field a candidate in an assembly district where Democrats held a three-to-one registration advantage over Republicans. “He did a great job as chair, and he continues as chair,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said of Jacobs, after the party’s table-setting collapse in the midterms two years earlier. Last September, with the party careening toward another setback, Jacobs was reelected to his post again.
The problems of disillusionment and disengagement are particularly salient in New York, but they are a problem for Democrats in blue cities more broadly. In the counties that include Los Angeles and Chicago, nearly a million Democrats stayed home in 2024—and support fell dramatically in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods. Just 16.5 percent of voters showed up for a recent municipal election in Philadelphia, where flagging turnout and eroding support helped cost Democrats a Senate seat last year. (“Turnout doesn’t bother me, only bothers me [that] we win” Bob Brady, the city’s Democratic Party boss, told the Philadelphia Inquirer.) Even more than the choice between Cuomo and Mamdani, the biggest indicator of whether Democrats are getting their act together might be how many of them show up to vote at all.
That’s not to say that everything happening in New York tells a story about everywhere else. This is a place that just discovered the existence of trash bins, but still can’t decide whether they’re good or not. (If elected, Cuomo has said he would scrap containerization requirements for “small properties.”) But all of the crosscurrents that have swamped the party over the last eight years are present in New York in an unavoidable way. It’s a test not just of left vs. center, but of the desire for change vs. doubling down, of new blood vs. wait-your-turn, of outsiders vs. insiders. This is where the pandemic hit hardest and first, and where the tangled immigration policies of the Biden era viscerally fell apart. Crime, housing costs, grocery bills, apathy—these were the tests Democrats failed in their backyards before they failed everywhere else.
For a long time, it has been tempting, in a world of red-and-blue electoral maps and swing-state fixations, for politicians to alternatively write off places like New York and take them for granted—a wellspring of safe votes and big checks. But the lesson of 2024 was a cautionary one: If you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere.”
As written by Daniel Falcone in Counterpunch, in an article entitled All Politics Is Global: The Meaning of Zohran Mamdani’s Insurgent Victory; “Andrew Cuomo’s attempt at a comeback served as a case study in civic fragility, hypocrisy, party loyalty, and political amnesia. Aside from the credible allegations that once had the establishment calling for him to step down, Cuomo ensured the maintenance of structures for political reentry, channeled pandemic funds for personal gain, and facilitated a GOP-led state senate through backroom deals. Further, he joined the legal team defending Benjamin Netanyahu against genocide charges, a catastrophic error. While many union members and elected officials may be quietly ashamed of their recent self-serving endorsements, Cuomo’s entire calculus was based on a cynical reliance on strategic soft power in the locale. His reemergence wasn’t based on a political comeback per se; it was more of a revealed assumption that New Yorkers would accept a “race to the bottom” that trumped (ahem) our civic expectations.
Cuomo thought of himself as a formidable incumbent of sorts and had a campaign powered by Super PACs, landlord money, and the strategic use of name recognition. Cuomo also perceived that many voters, worn down and disengaged, would simply vote along party lines. Insurgents like Zohran Kwame Mamdani, who stood for justice and equity, initially struggled for visibility while Cuomo enjoyed disproportionate support in a race he’d lose even more convincingly, if based on a democracy instead of a polyarchy. All throughout the primary season, Cuomo enjoyed a high number of African American and women potential voters, despite his record. His campaign in my opinion, however, was not based on a return to leadership, but rather a cynical power grab rooted in his own knowledge of the structural elements of the Democratic Party machine, still designed to dismiss any past transgressions.
In an era where global conflict, migration patterns, and economic interdependence impacts local politics, the assertion that “all politics is global” has rarely felt more accurate. Mamdani’s bid for New York City mayor exemplified how international solidarity, racial identity, and transnational justice can energize a municipal campaign in direct confrontation with Cuomo’s establishment-backed approach. Operating simultaneously at the city, state, national and global levels of analysis, Mamdani’s insurgency showed how local governance has become an important place for world politics.
Levels of Analysis
Mamdani’s identity as a Ugandan-born, Indian, and Muslim-American enhanced his appeal within New York City’s diverse electorate. As one of the first South Asians in the New York State Assembly, Mamdani, a visible Muslim leader, used his lived experiences of migration, racialization, and diasporic belonging to connect with voters. Born in 1991 in Kampala, and naturalized in the United States in 2018, Mamdani successfully integrated his racial and religious identity openly into his own form of political messaging. He rather famously stated that politics shouldn’t require translation and emphasized the need for authentic representation of communities historically marginalized by traditional power structures. In this sense, Mamdani was not merely a liberal or idealist candidate, but a realistic representative of global citizenship rooted in local struggle against the forces of Blue MAGA.
Mamdani also demonstrated a strong commitment to frontline economic justice. He notably championed the rights of New York City’s taxi drivers during their fight to preserve their medallions. Recognizing the system’s failure as a symbol of the ever-increasing economic precariat, he organized and supported strikes that highlighted the drivers’ struggles against predatory lending and regulatory neglect, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. This leadership extended beyond local issues. In 2023, Mamdani led a high-profile hunger strike demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, acting on a readiness to join local and global politics with urgent human rights concerns. As a New York State Assemblyperson, Mamdani earned praise for his effective budget management, notably tackling debt responsibly while prioritizing community investments. He proved that progressive governance can be both principled and fiscally sound.
At the individual level, Mamdani’s personal story and moral clarity were in rather stark contrast to Cuomo’s gold-plated and shallow establishment Trump-Berlusconi type persona. Mamdani stood out. His background as a foreclosure counselor allowed him to work intimately with immigrant communities. He often spoke Hindi and Urdu. His resume reflected his background in crisis resolution with stakeholders rather than political pedigree and stockholders. His principled international solidarity was something rarely seen in local campaigning efforts. Zohran’s first-name recognition, combined with impressive small-donor fundraising, helped raise in the upwards of $3.8 million early on, and he surpassed $8 million in total. Liza Featherstone wrote about the Mamdani model and how it revealed a grassroots resonance capable of dwarfing Cuomo’s dependence on donor-lobbyist networks. The victorious campaign (an ongoing one to go well beyond June) shows signs of being the most impressive ground game for a progressive in New York since Julia Salazar in 2018. Nathan Robinson also noticed Mamdani’s high-quality, relatable messaging, suggesting it was an inspiration amidst organized cynicism.
In effect, Mamdani’s campaign operated as a coordinated economic populist movement from the left, built on community resilience. He introduced legislation like Assembly Bill A6943A: the “Not on Our Dime” Act, intended to revoke tax exemptions from nonprofits complicit in funding Israeli settlements. His ambitious housing and transit proposals, rent freezes (that affect over two million residents), free buses across all boroughs, city-owned grocery stores, universal childcare, and a $30 minimum wage, indicated his infrastructure-first focused economic model rather than trickle-down and incremental reforms. In another Featherstone article/study, where she combined bottom-up journalism and election ethnography, a closer look at canvassing operations helped her uncover that Mamdani attracted an unprecedented scale of volunteers; one that activated thousands to conduct door knocking and phone banking.
Human Rights and Development
A fundamental and defining difference between Mamdani and Cuomo was seen in their opposing conceptions of development. Cuomo’s development framework aligned closely with neoliberal orthodoxies that equated progress with the expansion of capital, real estate development, and finance. His approach relied on technocrats and the maintenance of elite networks, seen in figures like Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. While these endorsements were meant to convey power and legitimacy, I suggest the opposite. Relying heavily on establishment backing indicates insecurity and weak grassroots connections. Cuomo’s reliance on power acknowledged it as his race to lose, not to win, and at some point (especially in 2028), all Democrats will be called on to respond to fractures emerging within the Party.
Mamdani’s vision of development, on the other hand, was one with much more promise in the long run than Cuomo’s. It was more or less rooted in the capabilities approach championed by Amartya Sen and elaborated by Susan Marks and Andrew Clapham in their International Human Rights Lexicon. It was Sen and scholars like Arturo Escobar who famously asserted that true development was “the expansion of real freedoms that people enjoy,” extending beyond mere economic indicators to include education, health, political participation, and dignity. Human rights are not a luxury, but the foundation for sustainable development ,and Mamdani’s platform exemplified this principle. Unlike Cuomo, politicians like AOC, Tiffany Caban, and Salazar before him, Mamdani did not treat development as a byproduct of capital but as an active expansion of human capability. Local leaders, more often, can create space in addressing the failures of capitalism. Mamdani’s human rights-centered development was also seen in his push to address historic racial and economic injustices.
These two distinctions between development, one as capital accumulation (Cuomo) versus two, expanded human rights and freedoms (Mamdani), will be critical features and binaries for potential candidates moving forward, suffering through the Trump era of fascism. Cuomo’s approach brazenly reinforced a predictable status quo, while Mamdani fostered a more participatory, rights-based, and identity-conscious vision of development. He prioritized local governance and public virtue (not private vices) despite the current uphill battle with POC voting blocs wedded to long-standing political traditions. It was all admittedly very complicated, but Cuomo’s reliance on the establishment revealed his inability to fight fairly on the terrain of democracy. He managed to hold onto enough soft power and forms of influence that traditionally legitimized political authority found in capital, but at the expense of citizen control. The Cuomo industrial complex, however, showed great signs of weakness in the past two weeks, especially after AOC’s role in king-making. Dozens of “amnesia endorsements” compiled Cuomo’s main strategy of political reconstruction along with the people that depended on them, thereby showing a lack of true structural integration. This fragility was demonstrated by the advent of “Frankenstein PACs” such as #DREAM, which started the “Don’t Rank Evil Andrew” campaign, splintering a once unified front.
Mamdani’s legitimacy, by contrast, began with the grassroots, leftist identity politics and a commitment to fairness. His alliance included young voters, (52 percent are under the age of 45), as well as immigrants, working-class families, Muslims, and South Asians, and bypassed traditional Democratic gatekeeping.
Epilogue
On election eve, the savvy political analyst Michael Kinnucan reflected on the remarkable progress of socialist politics in New York, noting how far the movement has come since the early campaigns of Julia Salazar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He acknowledged the emotional stakes of Mamdani’s race. Still, he emphasized that, win or lose, the campaign represented a decisive rejection of establishment centrism and an inspiring outpouring of subsequent political energy. Mamdani, likely to win on July 1st and certified as the Democratic candidate in mid-July, reshaped City politics, using identity as a foundation, not as a technology of the self, while blending global solidarity around peace with local grassroots organizing. He exposed the fragility of Cuomo’s establishment-backed soft power and emphasized the importance of human rights and social movements in defining real development, the capability to live the life you value, and legitimacy, a group or community’s local recognition. Aside from the Mamdani miracle, Alexa Aviles kept her city council seat and progressive Shahana Hanif was also victorious. It was a good night for the left.
Moving forward, newer candidates must reclaim political language from distortion. Phrases like “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” have been deliberately weaponized. Politicians need to reframe these as calls for secular democracy and equal rights across historic Palestine and transnational resistance to colonialism through civil action. As Stephen Zunes once noted to me, misinformation only breeds fear, clarity disarms it, and if you don’t clarify these statements, they are indeed very problematic.
It is also vital that Mamdani continues to skillfully redefine what “existence” means in local/global politics to avoid rhetorical traps. When asked if Israel has a right to exist, progressives should never hesitate to say yes. But even further, as UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese stated, the issue is not just existence (for Israel already exists, as does Italy or Denmark), but whether any state has the right to exist as a settler-colonial apartheid regime.
Just as Kinnucan suggested, one of Mamdani’s great achievements was forcing the establishment to show its hand. Cuomo’s comeback, powered by billionaire donors and political nostalgia, revealed the fragility of establishment politics, and everyone witnessed it happen. Mamdani’s rise, backed by people, showed how justice-oriented legitimacy can displace monied legitimacy. Democrats also need to be ready to always push beyond the ballot line. Cuomo’s capital-centric approach exposed the limits of traditional power in an era where insurgent localism forges global interconnectedness. Mamdani’s campaign very powerfully illustrates the premise that all politics is global.”
Who is Zohran Mamdani? As written by Liza Featherstone in Jacobin, in an article entitled Meet Zohran Mamdani, the Socialist Running for NYC Mayor; “ s socialists, the working class is at the heart of our politics,” says Zohran Mamdani, New York State Assembly member in the Thirty-sixth District in Queens, as the plates keep arriving. I’m at Sami’s Kebab House in Astoria at Mamdani’s suggestion, talking with him about his next big move: running for mayor of New York City.
I’m not surprised that the assemblyman suggested this place, rather than some corporate purveyor of austere salads; Mamdani comes from an immigrant background and is committed to thinking big. Ordering, he opts for abundance: mantu dumplings, borani banjan (Afghan-style eggplant), and salmon kebab. Mamdani is well-liked here, so we’re also given plenty we didn’t order, including bolani kachalu (much like a samosa) and firnee, a dessert custard sprinkled with pistachios.
I’ve interviewed Mamdani before, and his record of left-wing legislating is impressive. But this is different. His mayoral campaign could have huge implications — for New York City, for the socialist movement, and progressive politics as a whole.
Granted, Mamdani’s chances of winning the mayoralty aren’t great. It’s rare for anyone, let alone a socialist, to become mayor without first holding a city- or borough-wide office. But the race could foreground desperately needed working-class policies in a city whose residents are suffering multiple overlapping crises around affordable housing, childcare, public transportation, and much more. And Mamdani has been a stalwart supporter for justice in Palestine at a time of immense pressure for elected officials like him to keep their mouths shut on the ongoing genocide there.
His campaign could shift ideas about what’s politically possible in the country’s largest city, carving out new space in the political imaginary of New York for other socialists to win office and to win reforms that benefit average people, just as Bernie Sanders did on the national stage in 2016 and 2020.
“This is a moment where the political terrain is uncertain,” he says, “and when you have such a moment, it means that there’s an opening.”
A Platform for the Working Class
While I’m distracted by the menu, Mamdani never loses his train of thought. He starts with a discussion of housing. The working class, who built New York, Mamdani says,”is that very class that is being pushed out of the city. They cannot afford to live in the place that they call home. They’ve had to live under a mayor who has taken almost every opportunity available to make a cost-of-living crisis that much harder to bear. This is a mayor who has raised the rent of more than 2 million rent stabilized tenants every single year he’s been in office.”
As mayor, Mamdani would end the rent hikes, he says, freezing the rent of all of the over 2 million tenants in rent-stabilized buildings for his entire mayoralty. That’s something within the mayor’s power, unlike many good campaign promises which are contingent on more federal or state funding. (New York City has no power to levy taxes.) Rent-stabilized apartments are governed by a Rent Guidelines Board, which meets every year to set rent increases, and whose members are appointed by the mayor.
These apartments, says Mamdani, “have been the bedrock of stability for working-class New Yorkers for years,” and increasingly, many are struggling to pay rent, as Adams has failed to protect the affordability of their homes. Adams ran as a tribune of the “working class,” but as mayor, proudly proclaimed “I am real estate” and has governed exclusively on behalf of the city’s landlords.
Mamdani is also running on other policies that would be extremely popular but require more funding from the state government. He’s promising universal free childcare, citing the contribution of childcare costs to the city’s affordability crisis; Adams’s reign of austerity has devastated childcare programs established and built out by his predecessor. As well, Mamdani plans to make city buses fast and free, an issue he has pursued with some success as a state legislator.
Mayors can’t always fulfill such campaign promises due to New York City’s lack of taxation powers, but these three policies certainly have mass appeal. Mamdani says these issues “are specific and also transformative interventions for working-class New Yorkers. They’re also just the beginning of what this campaign is going to propose over the duration of this race.”
We often say as socialists that the choice is between socialism and barbarism, and if we are clear-eyed about the threats to this city from either the current mayor or the previous governor, then it is up to us to stand up and offer our vision as an alternative.
The week of our conversation, the news cycle was full of the scandals surrounding Mayor Eric Adams, who has been indicted by the federal government on multiple corruption charges. The city’s elites seemed to be on the back foot, fearing the loss of a mayor who has protected their interests; exploring, in desperation, the possible return of former governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned after numerous charges of sexual harassment during a period in which 13,000 people died of COVID-19 in the state’s nursing homes — a tragedy for which he has been blamed because, among other mistakes, his health department directed nursing homes to readmit patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus, a congressional committee found.
To Mamdani, this chaotic situation is a moment of left-wing opportunity. “We often say as socialists that the choice is between socialism and barbarism, and if we are clear-eyed about the threats to this city from either the current mayor or the previous governor, then it is up to us to stand up and offer our vision as an alternative.”
As mayor, Mamdani would end the rent hikes, he says, freezing the rent of all of the over 2 million tenants in rent-stabilized buildings for his entire mayoralty.
Building the Socialist Movement
Mamdani, who is thirty-three and the only child of Mahmood Mamdani, a renowned anti-imperialist scholar, and Mira Nair, an award-winning film director, continues:
We’re seeing a bankruptcy of leadership at every level of government. So many New Yorkers do not believe any longer that government is anything to count on or to believe in or to trust. It is one that is failing them at every turn. It’s one that is asking them for their tax dollars to then fund the genocide to kill children halfway across the world in Palestine, in Lebanon and Yemen and Syria.
It doesn’t have to be that way, he argued. We could have “a New York City where the people who built it can afford to live here and can afford all the basic necessities of their life and even do more than that. This is a city where we should be able to afford to dream.”
Mamdani is running with the backing of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA). Interviewed during NYC-DSA’s deliberative democratic endorsement, he told me that if NYC-DSA didn’t endorse him, he wouldn’t run. The day before our conversation, all seven branches of NYC-DSA had voted to endorse Mamdani by an overwhelming margin of more than 60 percent. Two days later, he was endorsed by a supermajority margin (107 out of 130) by the delegates at NYC-DSA’s convention.
Mamdani plainly has a democratic mandate for his campaign within NYC-DSA. Yet important leaders within the group have expressed concerns about the move, though none of them publicly. Considering NYC-DSA’s small base relative to the city’s population, and that the group has no presence at all in many neighborhoods, some fear that a mayoral campaign will fail to garner public support, exposing weakness while animating well-funded opponents, possibly imperiling important work in the state legislature or on the city council. Others say Mamdani, who was only elected to the assembly four years ago, should do more to help the organization build power and legislative accomplishments at the state level, and that running for executive office is premature both for him and for the organization.
Yet Mamdani and his supporters carried the day within NYC-DSA, in part because of the candidate’s considerable charisma but also because his politics bridges divides within the group. His commitment to Gaza and to the antiwar movement has impressed many in DSA who are more skeptical of elected officials, while his “sewer socialist” interest in priorities like transit endear him to those who are more policy-focused — groups that often overlap but can also be at odds.
NYC-DSA’s endorsement of Mamdani reflects a deep yearning in the organization for a big, unifying project like the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.
But more than anything else, the endorsement reflects a deep yearning in the organization for a big, unifying project like the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, which attracted new members and had a visible impact on the left movement, expanding what many Americans thought was possible for the first time in decades. While not everyone in the chapter likes the odds of this race — NYC-DSA has long hewed to a principle of running to win — paradoxically, DSA’s most consequential project to date (and the one for which members are most nostalgic) was a twice-losing presidential campaign. A big campaign like this could also help build NYC-DSA, as the Bernie Sanders campaign helped build DSA across the country. It’s clear that even when socialists don’t win, left politics can benefit from contesting for executive office.
Discussing the relatively small reach of NYC-DSA, and although the group has never run a mayoral candidate before, Eric Adams recognized it as an adversary early on in his mayoralty, taking pains to attack and demonize the socialists, often by name. That’s probably because he recognized DSA’s potential appeal and its history of punching above its weight.
Mamdani pushed hard for better subway service and free buses in a campaign called “Fix the MTA,” which pressured the state for more funding for the ailing NYC transit system. Socialist leaders like Mamdani share this view. “We’re in a city of far more people who are interested both explicitly in socialism but also in alternatives to this current moment,” Mamdani says. “I started to call myself a socialist after Bernie’s run in 2016. It gave me a language that I didn’t know to describe things that I felt were disparate parts of my beliefs, when in fact they were all intertwined as one.”
Mamdani speaks with intensity about how such campaigns, even when they don’t win, build the Left. “My life was transformed by Khader El-Yateem. He gave me a sense of belonging in a city that I had always loved, but one in which I had not known if my politics had a clear place. [My] campaign can do similar things for far more New Yorkers.” El-Yateem is a Palestinian Lutheran minister who ran for city council in 2017, endorsed by NYC-DSA. He lost, but his campaign built electoral infrastructure and convinced many that socialists could win elected office in New York, which Julia Salazar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on to do the following year. Others have followed suit at the city, state, and federal level in every election year since.
He believes his mayoral campaign can put working-class people first and ensure that the proposals that we put forward are ones that will clearly and directly benefit those people. Not a hop, skip, and a jump, not an “if then” or an “inshallah,” but “I’m going to freeze your rent. I’m going to make childcare free. I’m going to get you where you’re going on that bus faster than ever before and without you having to even reach into your pocket.”
He speaks confidently because he’s a good talker, but also because he’s used to making such arguments: he pushed hard for better subway service and free buses in a campaign called “Fix the MTA,” which pressured the state for more funding for the ailing transit system, the Metropolitan Transit Authority. The campaign achieved some modest budget victories, including a free busing pilot, with one free line in each borough. Mamdani envisions a fast and free bus system “in the service of a working-class New Yorker being able to get wherever it is that they want to go, and to get there fast and to get there in a ride that is safe and one that gives them their peace of mind back, because so much of the world is trying to take that from them.”
Why Socialism?
By the time of our interview, several progressive candidates had already entered the primary: city comptroller Brad Lander, who could have a plausible path to victory, and Queens state senator Jessica Ramos, who already has the backing of two Teamsters locals, with other labor support almost certainly forthcoming. Other liberals are competing for a more moderate lane, including state senator Zellnor Myrie and former comptroller Scott Stringer.
The contingencies and possible scenarios are many and complicated: if Adams drops out or is removed from office, public advocate Jumaane Williams, who has called himself a democratic socialist and was endorsed by NYC-DSA in 2018, would become the temporary mayor and, if he chose to stay in the race, an incumbent — a situation which Williams has indicated some interest in.
The quality of progressives already in the race, Mamdani says, bodes well for “the ultimate goal to defeat Eric Adams, the right-wing austerity mayor.” It’s clear that Mamdani is serious about this goal, regardless of his own chances of winning. And because New York City has ranked-choice voting, there is no reason to look upon any candidate as a “spoiler” in a broad-left coalition’s effort to oust the corrupt Eric Adams. Mamdani and many others have suggested that candidates and organizations could unite under a simple message: “Don’t Rank Adams (or Cuomo).” It could end up being tactically smart for some candidates to cross-endorse each other (a move that, when Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia did it in the last mayoral election, nearly allowed Garcia to overtake the better-known Eric Adams).
There’s an opening for more than simply an alternative, but also an affirmative case for what government can do. Why, I asked Mamdani, with such a deep bench to the left of Adams — and Cuomo — does this mayoral race need a socialist?
Running as a socialist, he says, “informs the depth of the policies that you offer at the forefront.” Those policies are about looking to the future, he emphasizes that there’s far more for us to do than simply go back to a time before Eric Adams: “For working-class New Yorkers to be able to afford to live here, they don’t need to go back to 2020. They need to go forward to 2025 and have a fundamentally different City Hall that puts their concerns at the forefront of its administration’s priorities.”
At this point in our conversation, I’ve eaten more than my share because the candidate, speaking almost in full paragraphs, is so intent on laying out his socialist vision for New York. I offer to split the last dumpling. Mamdani insists that I have it; he lives nearby and can eat here anytime. Back to the issue at hand.
“There’s an opening for more than simply an alternative,” he continues, “but also an affirmative case for what government can do. As socialists, we believe in government being a positive force in people’s lives, that it can make life better.”
After Mamdani and State Senate deputy leader Mike Gianaris introduced their pilot free bus program, they analyzed the before and after data and found a 39 percent drop in security problems. That can be a tough sell given the city’s recent history. “So much of my focus has been on the issues where New Yorkers feel most failed by government. The MTA [the city’s transit system] is for many New Yorkers the most frequent way that they engage in government and its failings. And so it is a socialist agenda to say that we need world-class, reliable, safe, universally accessible public transit.”
On policing, Mamdani eschews the language of “abolition” or “defund,” no doubt realizing that this kind of rhetoric tends to worry New Yorkers who already feel unsafe in their neighborhoods or on the subway. Instead, Mamdani identifies a point on which many agree, including police officers: that police are asked to do much to address the many crises in our society, and we’d all be safer leaving some problems, including traffic and some mental health crises, to civilian experts outside the NYPD. As mayor, he says, he also would discontinue the Strategic Response team (which has been responding with violence to protesters), reduce the NYPD’s enormous public relations team, and cancel plans for New York City’s version of “Cop City,” a proposed $225 million police training campus in Queens, which, like Atlanta’s militarized police training center in the middle of a forest, will squander millions on policing in the name of “public safety” even as other needed public programs are decimated.
But Mamdani speaks on this issue with more humility than many movement leaders — including himself, by his own admission — did back in 2020. Of calls to rethink policing, he says, “I understand why people are skeptical. What we are talking about here is asking people to conceive of society in a fundamentally different way than they have thus far. It behooves us to provide them with evidence and reasons why they should believe.”
Mamdani may be one of the few legislators who can point to a data-supported track record of reducing crime, albeit in a small and specific way. After he and State Senate deputy leader Mike Gianaris introduced their pilot free bus program, they analyzed the before and after data and found a 39 percent drop in security problems (a study on free buses in Kansas City found a strikingly similar result). Mamdani says drivers have told him that “when you remove the fare box, you remove a site of tension between a rider and a driver. And you allow the driver to do their job, which is drive the bus.”
What we are talking about here is asking people to conceive of society in a fundamentally different way than they have thus far. It behooves us to provide them with evidence and reasons why they should believe.
Given that Mamdani has been such a strong advocate for the Palestinians during this past year of genocide, including sponsoring the Not on Our Dime bill, which would prohibit New York’s nonprofit organizations from supporting illegal settler activity in the occupied territories (which numerous such organizations are currently doing) and being a stalwart presence (and occasional civil disobedience arrestee) at the antiwar protests, I ask why not instead run for an office with more impact on international relations — a congressional seat, for example? He points out that Adams himself has repeatedly brought the politics of right-wing Zionism into New York City government by encouraging a brutal police response to pro-Palestine protesters, including following the advice of billionaire advisers to send police to student encampments, where one officer even fired his gun.
“We could have seen students killed,” he says. Adams, Mamdani says, “has used his bully pulpit to erase an entire people’s humanity, denying calls for a cease-fire. A cease-fire.” Israel, he insists, is already on the ballot because of the way the current mayor has elevated the issue.
On the even more controversial issue of migrants, Mamdani, who was born in Kampala, Uganda, is also poised to contest the dominant, right-wing narrative. “Mayor Adams has demonized the very people that are looking to our city government for help,” he says:
It’s a deeply personal issue to me. My father’s family were refugees in 1972, expelled from their home in Uganda, becoming refugees, living in a refugee camp in London. It forever changed my grandfather, who in many ways lost his sense of self. He and my grandmother used to go on a weekly basis to Gatwick to watch the planes take off back to Uganda. He was forever a different man after becoming a refugee.
His state assembly office, he says, has worked with community organizations to help over a thousand asylees get the city services they need. “This is an example of what you can do with a staff budget that is the size of a salary of one deputy mayor,” he said:
“Now imagine if you were running a city with an over $100 billion annual budget, and a workforce of more than 300,000 people, and a commitment to seeing these very New Yorkers as part of the nth generation to come to this city in pursuit of a better life. [The migrants] are the continuation of the very things that we have said we love about ourselves in our city, and yet we have denied them their ability to be characters in that same story.”
Mamdani has to rush out to another appointment. I linger to drink tea and make some notes on our conversation. The waiter tells me he arrived in the United States in May 2023, a brand-new resident of Queens. Of Mamdani, he says, unprompted, “He’s my friend.” It reminds me of how so many millions have felt seen and heard by left leaders like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Movements are not made primarily by politicians, but we do need leaders. The question is whether Zohran Kwame Mamdani could become the tribune that working-class New Yorkers need.”
Zohran Mamdani: “We’re Going to Win the City We Deserve”, By
On this day two years ago half our nation’s people were stripped of meaningful citizenship and their bodies declared property of the state by the Supreme Court.
Of this ongoing patriarchal-theocratic horror and crime against humanity I wrote in my summation of that year’s liberation struggle and electoral politics in America in my post of December 28 2022, This Year Was Defined in Politics by Resistance Against the Patriarchy and the Issue of Women’s Rights of Bodily Autonomy; 2022 was defined in politics by resistance against the Patriarchy and the issue of women’s rights of bodily autonomy, both globally in the glorious and spectacular revolution against theocracy and patriarchy originating in Chile and throughout Latin America, and here in America the mass resistance to the end of Roe v Wade which galvanized a historic blue wave in our midterm elections.
While this has always been a wedge issue used by elites and forces of reaction to make women vote against their own interests, freedoms, and equality, and its resistance rode the wave of change of the #metoo movement, something has shifted and become new in this arena, forever transforming the ground of struggle and redefining the terms of debate; it is now an existential crisis central to the survival of democracy itself, and women are responding not with the subjugation of learned helplessness, but with the fury of the oppressed and the solidarity of a dehumanized class.
In 2022, women realized they are enslaved and have begun resistance and revolutionary struggle. Patriarchal authority has lost its legitimacy, and begun its inevitable collapse. Without its fig leaf of theocratic lies and illusions, with the amoral brutality of its systemic and historical forces and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, there is only one way this ends.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Here follows my journal on this Defining Moment for America as it happened :
June 24 2022, The End of Women’s Right of Bodily Autonomy; The Supreme Court has just declared women’s bodies to be property of the state, and mass protests have once again erupted throughout America.
This is an area of ideological fracture and polarization in which few persuadable voters remain on either side, the classic wedge issue by which Patriarchy and sexual terror subjugates and dehumanizes us, and through which our enslavement by hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege legitimize their regimes of weaponized faith.
Electoral politics and legislative change have failed, for in our system a few unelected and corrupt judges, infiltration and subversion agents placed at the apex of social power by hegemonic elites to replace democracy with theocracy, can rule by fiat in total disregard to the will of the people. Our Justice system has lost its legitimacy and become a junta, and this we must resist.
After all our hopes and dreams for Liberty and a free society of equals, we’re back to the Underground Railroad.
As written by Emily Janakiram & Lizzie Chadbourne in Truthout; “As reproductive rights organizers have long anticipated — and as a leaked memo all but confirmed last month — the Supreme Court has ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The decision came in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which involves a Mississippi law prohibiting all abortions after 15 weeks except in the case of medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality. This suit is part of an effort by the right to legally challenge what was previously the constitutionally protected right to abortion in Roe, and the court has sided with the state of Mississippi to repeal that right. This ruling undoes the federal protection of abortion, resulting in the total or near-total ban of abortion in 26 states.
The right has long been organizing for this moment, creating “trigger bans” in expectation of Roe’s overturn, as well as mobilizing to harass and intimidate patients in places where abortion remains legal, like New York and Washington, D.C. Republicans are poised to attempt passing a federal ban on abortion.
Despite Justice Samuel Alito’s claim that the ruling does not affect contraceptive access, the anti-abortion right has also opposed hormonal contraception, the copper IUD and the morning-after pill on the grounds that they are “abortifacients” since from their perspective, human life begins at conception and these methods prevent the fertilized egg from implanting. Last month, Louisiana lawmakers deliberated over a bill which would have criminalized both the IUD and the morning-after pill. The bill ultimately failed, but we can expect to see similar initiatives gaining ground in states hostile to abortion rights.
The anti-abortion right frames the overturn of Roe as an act of democracy, “returning the decision to the states,” and correcting federal overreach. This is misleading at best. The states in which abortion is now illegal are heavily gerrymandered and undemocratic themselves; it is simply not true that abortion bans reflect the will of the people. In fact, a majority of Americans — about 60 percent — believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
The consequences of abortion restrictions in red states prior to this moment have been disastrous as residents have been forced to travel out of state to access care at significant personal cost. Texas’s notorious Senate Bill 8 law resulted in a significant number of patients from Texas with a gestational age past six weeks traveling to Oklahoma for abortion appointments — until Oklahoma passed a total abortion ban, leaving Texans seeking abortions with even fewer options.
We can expect this situation to spread further across the country, with abortion patients forced to travel even longer distances to access abortion. Of course, this will place an undue hardship on patients without the means to travel out of state — whether that be due to the financial burden, lack of access to child care, sick leave, or other reasons.
The right has long been organizing for this moment, creating “trigger bans” in expectation of Roe’s overturn, as well as mobilizing to harass and intimidate patients in places where abortion remains legal.
More grotesquely, abortion patients will not only have to face undue financial and logistical hurdles to access essential health care — but they will also have to brave the police, or in some cases, state-funded vigilantes, in order to do so. Texas’s SB 8 law allows literally anyone to file suit against someone who “aids or abets” in an abortion — though not the abortion patient themselves. Someone who drives a patient to a bus so that they can receive an abortion out of state could be sued, and the plaintiff would be awarded $10,000 in damages. Abortion patients themselves cannot be sued.
While the law has been carefully designed so that there is no criminal penalty — and thus, ironically, protecting it from certain legal challenges — it still invites police violence against abortion patients. Recently, 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera of South Texas was arrested and detained under suspicion of having induced her own abortion after a stillbirth. Even if the states that criminalize abortion only penalize providers and those who “aid and abet” abortion, patients themselves can still be subject to police violence in cases of self-managed abortions, which will become the only recourse available to many patients who cannot travel out of state to a clinic. Although only a handful of states currently criminalize self-managed abortion specifically, in over half the states there have been criminal investigations into pregnancy loss based on suspicion of self-managed abortion. People from communities that experience heightened levels of policing and state surveillance and who choose to self-manage their abortions will be at an increased risk of criminalization.
Even when abortion patients manage to reach less-restricted states, safe and unfettered abortion access in those places is by no means a given either. Many clinics are already functioning at capacity even before the heightened influx of patients from other states, and the anti-abortion movement has set its eyes on cities like New York. Their base has been galvanized to confront “the evil of abortion” at its center — the clinics where abortions happen. When abortion is halted in over half the states, we can expect that campaigns of harassment will expand at clinics in less-restricted states by anti-abortion groups shifting their focus to regions where abortions are still performed legally.
Abortion patients will not only have to face undue financial and logistical hurdles to access essential health care — but they will also have to brave the police, or in some cases, state-funded vigilantes, in order to do so.
In New York City, the Archdiocese leads a campaign of clinic harassment every month in all five boroughs — with the blessing and sanction of the police. The police do not help patients enter the clinic safely but escort the clinic harassers — whom they seem to be on friendly terms with — and threaten and intimidate clinic defenders. It is no secret that the police and the far right are closely allied, in some cases one and the same; we cannot count on them to protect abortion patients. We will need a militant response to counter the right in less restricted states.
Moreover, the criminalization of providing abortion care and aiding and abetting abortion puts pregnant people in grave danger. Some states may make “life of the mother” exemptions. But most United States hospitals are either for-profit or religiously affiliated nonprofits with ideological opposition to abortion. There is seldom a clearly demarcated point at which an abortion becomes absolutely, unambiguously medically necessary. A private health care facility may not risk criminal charges in order to save a patient’s life. Notoriously, Savita Halappanavar died of sepsis in an Irish hospital when doctors refused to perform an abortion because, though her pregnancy was no longer viable, a fetal heartbeat was still detected. As of this writing, an American woman, Andrea Prudente, is set to be airlifted out of Malta, the only country in the European Union with a total abortion ban. Even though her pregnancy is no longer viable, and without an abortion, she risks the same fate, a fetal heartbeat is still detected and doctors refuse to provide an abortion. Of course, the U.S. leads the developed world in mortality during childbirth. With the end of Roe, it will become even more dangerous to give birth in the U.S.
Many reproductive rights organizations advise that pro-choice activists put aside “coat hanger” imagery and refrain from dwelling on history of dangerous back-alley abortions. This is not to erase the history of violence that accompanied abortion bans, but because it unproductively obscures the abortion situation as it exists today. Self-managed abortions are safer than ever, thanks to the advent of the abortion pill and networks that provide access through the mail; and even abortions in the home can be performed safely using aspiration. In fact, they are more safe than home births, belying the right-wing canard that abortion and the abortion pill is more dangerous than childbirth. The right uses this lie to push for the closure of clinics and make obtaining the abortion pill unduly burdensome.
Laws against aiding and abetting abortion — and the ensuing climate of fear, secrecy and isolation — are what kill pregnant people, not self-managed abortions.
However, the secrecy in which abortions have had to happen historically is what made them so dangerous — that people don’t know how such abortions can be performed safely, or even the basic facts of pregnancy (a situation that’s especially dire in red states given a lack of sex education in schools). This secrecy is enforced by the police. Laws against “aiding and abetting abortion” — and the ensuing climate of fear, secrecy, and isolation — are what kill pregnant people, not self-managed abortions.
If we are to resist abortion bans, each one of us must be prepared to aid and abet abortion, whether that’s being trained in administering a self-managed abortion, buying and donating abortion pills, driving someone across state lines to receive an abortion, participating in clinic defense, or donating to an abortion fund. But we cannot lose sight of the ultimate goal: a mass movement to establish free abortion on demand as an inalienable right.”
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Roe v Wade has been overturned. Here’s what this will mean; “Millions of women are now less free than men, in the functioning of their own bodies and in the paths of their own lives.
The story is not about the supreme court. Today, the sword that has long been hanging over American women’s heads finally fell: the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, ending the nationwide right to an abortion. This has long been expected, and long dreaded, by those in the reproductive rights movement, and it has long been denied by those who wished to downplay the court’s extremist lurch. The coming hours will be consumed with finger pointing and recriminations. But the story is not about who was right and who was wrong.
Nor is the story about the US judiciary’s crumbling legitimacy, or the supreme court’s fractious internal politics. In the coming days, our attention will be called to the justices themselves – to their feelings, to their careers, to their safety. We will be distracted by the stench of partisanship and scandal that emanates from the shadowy halls of One First Street; by the justices’ grievance-airing and petty backbiting in public; or by their vengeful paranoid investigation into the leak of a draft of Samuel Alito’s opinion some weeks ago. We will be scolded not to protest outside their houses, and we will be prevented, by high fences and heavy gates and the presence of armed cops, from protesting outside the court itself. But the story is not about the supreme court.
The story is not about the Democratic politicians, whose leadership on abortion rights has been tepid at best, and negligent at worst, since the 1990s. In the coming days, people who have voted to uphold the Hyde Amendment, a provision that has banned federal funding of abortion since 1976 – effectively limiting the constitutional right to an abortion to only those Americans wealthy enough to afford one – will tell us how terrible this is. They will issue statements talking about their outrage; they will make platitude-filled speeches about the worth and dignity of American women. They will not mention their own inaction, persisting for decades in the face of mounting and well-funded rightwing threats to Roe. They will not mention that they did nothing as all that worth and dignity of American women hung in the balance; they will not mention that most of them still, even now, oppose doing the only thing that could possibly restore reproductive freedom: expanding the number of justices on the courts. But the cowardice, hypocrisy, and historic moral failure of national Democrats is not the story. And certainly, the story is nothing so vulgar as what this withdrawal of human rights might mean for that party’s midterm election prospects.
The story is not, even, about the legal chaos that will now follow. It is not about the fact that in 13 states, today’s order has made all abortion immediately illegal, the consummation of sexist ambitions that had long been enshrined in so-called trigger laws, provisions that have been on the books for years and decades that ban abortion upon the court’s reversal of Roe – misogyny lying in wait. Nor is the story about the other 13 states that will almost certainly ban abortion now, too, meaning that the procedure will be illegal in 26 of the nation’s 50 states within weeks.
The story is not about how legislatures, lawyers and judges will handle these laws; it is not about whether they will allow merciful exemptions for rape or incest (they won’t) or impose draconian measures that aim to extend the cruelty of state bans beyond their borders to target abortion doctors, funders, and supporters in blue states (they will).
The story is not about the cop who will charge the first doctor or the first patient with murder – that’s already happening, anyway. The story is not about the anti-choice activists, sneering in their triumph, who will say that they only want the best for women, and that women can’t be trusted to know what’s best for themselves. The story is not about the women who will be imprisoned or committed at the behest of these activists, or the desperate pregnant people, with nowhere to turn, who will be ensnared by them into deceitful crisis pregnancy centers or exploitative “maternity ranches”.
The real story is not about the media who will churn out the think pieces, and the crass, enabling both-sidesism, and the insulting false equivalences and calls for unity. It is not about the pundits who will scold feminists that really, it is the overzealous abortion rights movement that is to blame; that really, women must learn to compromise with the forces that would keep them unequal, bound to lives that are smaller, more brutal, and more desperate. The story is not, even, about those other rights – the rights to parent, and to marry, and to access birth control – that a cruel and emboldened right will come for next.
The real story is the women. The real story is the student whose appointment is scheduled for tomorrow, who will get a call from the clinic sometime in the next hours telling her that no, they are sorry, they cannot give her an abortion after all. The real story is the woman waiting tables, who feels so sick and exhausted these past few weeks that she can barely make it through her shifts, who will soon be calling clinics in other states, hearing that they’re all booked for weeks, and will be asking friends for money to help cover the gas, or the plane, or the time off that she can’t afford. The real story is the abortion provider, already exhausted and heartbroken from years of politicians playing politics with her patients’ rights, who will wonder whether she can keep her clinic open for its other services any more, and conclude that she can’t. The real story is the mom of two, squinting at her phone as she tries to comfort a screaming toddler, trying to figure out what she will have to give up in order to keep living the life she wants, with the family she already has.
The real story is about thousands of these women, not just now but for decades to come – the women , whose lives will be made smaller and less dignified by unplanned and unchosen pregnancies, the women whose health will be endangered by the long and grueling physical process of pregnancy; the women, and others, who will have to forgo dreams, end educations, curtail careers, stretch their finances beyond the breaking point, and subvert their own wills to someone else’s.
The real story is in the counterfactuals – the books that will go unwritten, the trips untaken, the hopes not pursued, and jokes not told, and the friends not met, because the people who could have lived the full, expansive, diverse lives that abortions would allow will instead be forced to live other lives, lives that are lesser precisely because they are not chosen.
The real story is the millions of women, and others, who now know that they are less free than men are – less free in the functioning of their own bodies, less free in the paths of their own lives, less free in the formation of their own families.
The real story is not this order; the real story is these people’s unfreedom – the pain it will inflict and the joy it will steal. The real story is women, and the real story is the impossible question: how can we ever grieve enough for them?”
As I wrote in my post of May 14 2022, The Women’s March for Freedom; Throughout America today women have seized the streets in mass action for the right of bodily autonomy, the first of all rights of property and the defining quality of citizenship, for without ownership of our own bodies there is no freedom, and we are all made property of the state.
Democracy and dehumanization hang in the balance in the issue of women’s reproductive rights; but also life itself, for access to healthcare is a precondition of the right to life and thus among the first of all implied rights guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Without this, no other rights are meaningful.
This is a fight against enslavement and death, and for our equality as human beings and liberty as citizens.
How shall we give answer to our dehumanization and the theft of our citizenship?
Let us say to Gideonite patriarchy and to fascist tyranny with Dylan Thomas;
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
At stake here are issues affecting every American citizen and other persons within the boundaries of our law; freedom versus dehumanization as a means of enslavement, and our universal human right of access to healthcare as a precondition of our right to life.
How can the Gideonite fundamentalists and atavistic forces of Patriarchy deny the right of bodily autonomy, the first of all rights of property, our right to choose our own use of that body which speaks to the definition of being human and to the fundamental rights of a citizen in a democracy as a voting co-owner of our government, on the basis of our right to life which derives both from our citizenship and our humanity as a natural condition, when the right of the mother to life precedes that of her fetus and renders her the sole medical authorizing party in any such matter?
Only a woman’s right to choose her own destiny matters here, and no state or any other authority which operates in the place of a father or husband under the Patriarchal legal fiction of in loco parentis, nor the will or judgement of any other persons especially actual fathers and husbands, has any just role in a free society of equals; all else is slavery.
If one abrogates the separation of church and state and claims Biblical authority as a justification for government policy, surely an act of hubris if not madness, on abortion and for a definition of life, life clearly begins with breath.
As William Tyndale wrote in his beautiful poetic reimagination of traditional sources published as the King James Bible; “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” Genesis 2:7.
This is reinforced elsewhere; “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host” Psalms 33:6. And again; “Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived,” Ezekiel 10. And yet again; “If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust,” Job 34: 14-15.
Plus there’s the abortion method authorized in Numbers 5:11-31, the Ordeal of the Bitter Water, and the penalty for causing an abortion outside of this ritual such as by a violent blow, which is a fine paid to the woman’s husband because it is a crime against property or future economic benefit and not a crime against person as there is no life before breath or natural birth.
Abrahamic faiths regard as human only those who have been ensouled at first breath upon being born; prior to birth we are not human but part of the mother’s body; a fetus has no rights other than hers, and hers is the only legitimate voice regarding one’s own body as the primary right of property from which all others derive. This is because Abrahamic faiths regard the body as an organic machine and not a person until it is animated with a soul.
To argue that abortion is murder is to argue that there is no soul, that we are human prior to the animating breath of the Infinite, and that as mere beasts and organic machines each of our cells are individually sacrosanct and legally persons. Haircuts and manicures are murder in this absurd construction.
Let us not mistake the purpose and intention of those who would seize women’s power of bodily autonomy as both a human being and a citizen; this has nothing to do with faith, and everything to do with power.
As I wrote in my post of May 6 2022, There Is No Freedom Without That of Bodily Autonomy: On the Patriarchal Enslavement and Dehumanization of Women in the State Capture of Liberty and Equality in the Supreme Court’s Revocation of the Right to Abortion; There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
Our Supreme Court just declared half of humankind to be less than human and property of the state, not merely as patriarchal enslavement but also as dehumanization and theft of citizenship. Next will be the right of women to vote, then of all nonwhite persons, then the right to own property and act legally in one’s own name will be restricted to white men as it was at our founding; no matter where it begins with subversion of democracy and the equality of all human beings, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Women’s reproductive rights exhibit dual aspects as both an issue of liberty, our freedom to choose our own identity without coercion by the state, and as a healthcare issue, as universal free access to healthcare is a precondition of our right to life and therefore a Constitutional guarantee upon which none may legally infringe.
This is a direct attack on the idea of citizenship which is central and foundational to democracy, on the personhood and self ownership of all women, and on our values and ideals of freedom and equality.
It is a telling sign of intent that Alioto has cited as precedent the law which legalized witch burning centuries go in his opinion claiming that the right to abortion is unconstitutional, as MSN has pointed out.
Once again, unequal power has been captured and institutionalized by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as a fascism of weaponized faith and systemic Patriarchy.
America’s Supreme Court, now a political bureaucracy of authoritarian power and without legitimacy, and which has delegitimized all law in America and subverted our courts as instruments of repression of dissent and the carceral state, the true goal of the Fourth Reich in the capture of our institutions and systems of Justice, has outlawed the universal right of abortion and given a woman’s power over her own body to the state.
Yes, we all knew this was coming but it is a life disruptive event and a point of fracture in our history. This we must resist with mass action and legislative judo, but the forces of patriarchy and fascism are enormously against us. What happens next, if half of humankind can be dehumanized as property of the state and citizenship with our universal human rights becomes meaningless? In this moment, all is in motion and chaotic change, but this is also a chance of action and a measure of the adaptive range of our system. Patriarchy has made a move which is irredeemable and cannot be walked back, and they are exposed; its our move now.
If we want to keep our system of Justice as a guarantor of our universal human rights and of our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens, and the meaning of citizenship itself, we must reform the Supreme Court. I suggest limiting terms to that of the President who appointed each member, or limiting terms and holding a vote to elect Justices on a one citizen one vote basis so that it is no longer a political appointment.
This must be part of a Restoration of democracy which redesigns our system to guarantee majority rule. We must abolish the electoral college and the parceling of votes by state, and change to a one citizen one vote direct electoral democracy.
The blindfold of Justice has slipped, and we must restore her impartiality to divisions including those of gender and race.
As I wrote in my post of October 3 2021, Women’s March for Reproductive Rights and Freedom of Bodily Autonomy; Institutionalized sexual terror and state tyranny in the legislative assault on women’s reproductive rights and the primary freedom of bodily autonomy were challenged in a mass action yesterday throughout America, organized by the Women’s March and coordinated with the riveting testimony in Congress of three of our representatives who have had abortions, Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal, and Barbara Lee.
There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
We can triumph over this wave of theft of our liberty which seeks to redefine the relationship of individuals to the state and render citizenship meaningless if we act in solidarity with coordinated mass action and legislative process. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me in 1982 in Beirut by Jean Genet goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Anger, fear and desperation: people reflect on two years since fall of Roe
EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton's first interview on the implications of this week's Roe v. Wade news: "It is not just about a woman's right to choose. It is about much more than that."
The Handmaid’s Tale: Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders, by Karen A. Ritzenhoff (Editor, Contributor), Janis L. Goldie (Editor, Contributor)
Beings of darkness and light are we, defined by the boundaries of our chiaroscuro which represent our Janus-like masculine and feminine halves; each creates the other and seeks to realize and awaken itself as a unitary and whole being through dreaming the other.
Often have I written of the primary human act of rebellion and refusal to submit to authority, of negotiations and seizures of power versus authorized identities including those of sex and gender, of the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle as both systems of oppression and as the limits of our forms, but when we interrogate our idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty we must also consider that such systems of signs and representations also describe the work of integration and the origins of human consciousness.
The human psyche is both male and female within itself, anima and animus in Jungian terms, and because the soul is born from this dynamism we can seize control of our own evolution and processes of adaptation and becoming human through embrace of our darkness and chthonic elements of our unconscious, shadows which include the side of us which is the opposite gender of our conscious identity and sometimes of our absurd flesh in which we are bound to this life, this reality, this system of social contracts and agreements about human being, meaning, and value and about how to be human together, this sideral universe.
Our forms are an imposed condition of struggle parallel and interdependent with the systems of oppression which coevolve from this as recursive processes of adaptation and change, and nothing is more universal than our identities of sex and gender and the twin tyrannies of Patriarchy and theocracy we have made of it.
Biology is not destiny, but it is immensely powerful and determinative as a ground of struggle.
Among the legacies of our history there are those we must keep to remain who we are and those we must escape to become who we wish, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
How do we negotiate the boundaries and interfaces of our masculinity and femininity, processes of change which are recursive, chaotic, nuanced and complex, relative, conditional, ephemeral, a dialectics of truths and illusions and of authorized identities, simulacra, falsifications and systems of oppression versus our autonomy and self-creation, and a ground of struggle which lies at the heart of becoming human?
As I wrote in my post of February 14 2024, On the Redemptive and Transformational Power of Love: the Case of Valentine’s Day and the Festival of the Wolf; Valentine’s Day is a holiday we can celebrate as an unambiguous good, without conflicted historical legacies; named in honor of a man who was executed on February 14 278 AD for performing gay marriages in defiance of Imperial law, adelphopoiesis or brother-making which refers to his marrying Roman soldiers not to their girlfriends but to one another, the wedding of same sex couples, legal and sanctified under Christian law, which Emperor Claudius II forbid as related by John Boswell in his Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.
The modern custom of sending messages to one’s lover, whether a forbidden love or not, originated in 1415, with a message sent by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
So we have in one holiday defiance of Authority, transgression of the Forbidden, and the injunction to seize the gates of our prisons and be free.
But this holiday is far more ancient, dating from the sixth century BC and encoding the historical memories of primordial rites of fertility and poetic vision called Lupercalia, the Festival of the Wolf. Rites which echo through our flesh and find form not only as Valentine’s Day as a celebration of the uncontrollable, redemptive, and liberating power of love which exalts us like a madness, but also as a form of the Wild Hunt which we know as the story of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf.
Angela Carter got it nearly right in The Company of Wolves; so also with season two, episode three of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Ah, to be a Wild Thing, and free.
Midnight approaches, and as I ready my wolfskin for the sacred Hunt I think not of the ravishment of our passion, which seizes and possesses us with nameless ecstasies and totalizing truths written in our flesh, but of the redemptive and transformative power of love, of its unique function as a force of healing and reconnection, and of transgression of the Forbidden and defiance of Authority as a seizure of power over the ownership of oneself.
Of this I have written a spell of poetic vision, awakening, and transformation, which I share with you here. Good hunting to you all.
Love Triumphs Over Time
When first I learned of love,
And realized that in loving others we humans were not merely escaping
the boundaries of our lives and the flags of our skins
As transcendence, rapture, and exaltation
But discovering ourselves and those truths written in our flesh
And the limitless possibilities of becoming human
Among the unknown topologies of being marked Here Be Dragons
In the empty spaces of the maps of our Imagination
Beyond the doors of the Forbidden
Where truths are forged,
And in the years since I have always known this one true thing;
We are more ourselves when we are with others
Because humans are not designed to be alone
For we are doors which open one another
And restore each other to ourselves in an indifferent world
When we are savaged and broken and lost;
Love is the greatest power of all the forces
which shape, motivate, and inform living things
Love creates, love redeems, love transforms,
Love triumphs over the pathology of our disconnectedness
From Beauty, from the Infinite, and from the community of humankind;
Love triumphs over Time.
Idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty and identity live at the origins of our power of love and the forms it takes in our lives; If my female side could perform our truth on the stage of the world as songs, without any limits whatever, what would we sing?
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina | Straight to Hell Music Video Trailer | Netflix; because I love this version of Persephone’s myth. How if we must seize our power or be subjugated to that of others?
Little Red Riding Hood – Amanda Seyfried’s cover of the song; sung in a fragile voice filled with such anguish, loneliness, and the absurdity of hope.
I dare the darkness and the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human, beyond all boundaries of the Forbidden.
Where is the wolf who can match my daring and embrace together the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves?
Where is my Red Hot Riding Hood, who like myself lives beyond all limits and all laws?
Each contained within the other, like a nested set of puzzle boxes bearing unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Wednesday dances; How if we must tell our stories, or be rewritten and falsified by others? How is we must dance our truths to free ourselves from those of others? I find it interesting that Jenna Ortega chose a queer cruising anthem for her signature dance, which confuses and conflates in ambiguous meanings the rituals of mating and hunting, as this Netflix series does as an extended metaphor and allegory of subversions of authorized identities of sex and gender
So for the anima; what of the animus? Who speaks for me in masculine register?
Lucifer’s Song of Love: Cover of Wicked Game by Ursine Vulpine & Annaca
Do we live in a world where love cannot redeem anything, as it so often seems when we look into the Abyss?
Or do figments like Beauty and The Good exist because we create them, as Keats suggests?
Hope, faith, and love remain powers which cannot be taken from us and which can liberate us as truths, inherent adaptive powers which define the human, but are also ambiguous, relative, changing, and can be ephemeral and illusory as well.
With such unreliable instruments we must create our humanity from falsifiable informing, motivating, and shaping forces of history, memory, and identity, and win our authenticity from the hungry ghosts of authorized identities as simulacra.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
In loving others we become ourselves.
“Monster” – Imagine Dragons (cover by Runaground on youtube)
With film montage of Marvel’s Loki
Let us embrace our monstrosity and proclaim with Loki the Trickster; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
Like the ripples from a stone tossed into a pool, this; with second and third order consequences which propagate outward through time and the alternate universes produced by Rashomon Gate events.
In a world which is a museum of holocausts and atrocities, how do we live among the unknowns beyond the limits of the human and claw back something of our humanity from the darkness?
In refusal to submit to Authority we become Unconquered and free, but also marked by Otherness and often savaged by loneliness and the pathology of disconnectedness because we no longer truly belong. This is a problem because belonging is the only thing that balances fear as a means of social exchange. But it can also become a sacred wound which opens us to the pain of others.
How do we seize power from those who would enslave us, without becoming tyrants ourselves? To become the arbiter of virtue in an unjust world is a seductive phantasm of tyranny we must avoid, and revolutions tend to become tyrannies as a predictable phase of struggle due to the imposed conditions of unequal power and its legacies.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
David Bowie sings of Resistance, beyond hope of victory or survival: Shoshanna prepares for German Night in the film Inglorious Basterds, a song I post to signal that I now begin a Last Stand; that I am about to do something from which I see no possible chances of survival. This I have done more times that I can now remember, yet I remain to defy and defend. Love too is a total commitment beyond reason, a glorious mad quest to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
There are some things we must behave as if are true, regardless if they ever were or can be; love can redeem the flaws of our humanity, hope can triumph over despair and the terror of our nothingness, abjection, and learned helplessness, solidarity of action and faith in each other can be victorious over division and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, Resistance confers freedom as a condition of being and a power which cannot be taken from us by force and control, and as Rumi teaches us the Beauty that we do can bring healing to the brokenness of the world.
References
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, by John Boswell
The Wild Boys envisions feral youths in rebellion against the Authority that created them, a dystopian future in which man’s animal nature has been betrayed by civilization but which also has the power to redeem and liberate him, the final part of Burroughs’ Anarchist Trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil.
He did claim to be possessed by the Toad as a chthonic spirit, identical with Nietzsche’s Toad which the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra, a novel I later adopted as a counter-text to the Bible, feared he must swallow as a symbol of our animal nature. Burroughs claimed to be Nietzsche’s successor on this basis, as avatar and priest of all that is reviled, disgusting, loathsome and bestial within us, which he identified with Lovecraft’s Tsathoggua and transferred to me as a successor and avatar.
As I never conceptualized or ascribed negative qualities to my own shadow self, this containing nothing which is not me, I experienced this simply as a seizure of power as an avatar and not as possession by a malign entity; exactly as practiced in Voodoo and in the Shaivite-Tantric cult of the Bhairav as I explored it in Nepal during my time as a monk and Dream Navigator of the Vajrayana Kagu order of Tibetan Buddhism. For myself, from childhood and in a family utterly free from the consequences of Freud’s father as lawgiver or from Abrahamic ideas of God as Authority, I imagined nature as truth and freedom, and nothing to be feared.
The magic Burroughs and my father practiced was based equally on his friend Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche called Acephale, the mythos of his model H.P. Lovecraft, and elements of shamanism, traditional ritual magic from grimoires, and the occultism of Aleister Crowley. A decade and more later, Burroughs would be claimed as a founder of Chaos Magic, and his host of invented literary methods designed to destroy systems of control represented an ars poetica which was also a personal faith, including the cut-up method, playback, dreams, out of body travel, mandalas and gates to alternate realities, ecstatic trance and vision, curses, demonology, tarot; I still have the deck of tarot cards he gave me and taught me to use. To this my father brought the family Voodoo, werewolf mythology, ancestral history interwoven with versions of Grimm’s fairytales, and his brilliance as a theatre director; he directed some of Edward Albee’s plays, and I grew up from the age of four listening to them discuss drama during rehearsals from a center front seat in the theatre, which often interrogated Albee’s direct influences and references among his fellow Absurdists Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter, but included sources in Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, Antonin Artaud, and Eugene Ionesco.
As Burroughs wrote The Wild Boys during the period of his visits, I have often wondered how much of it was drawn from my father’s ideas and the claim of our family history that we are not human but werewolves, and had been driven out of Europe for that reason; Martin Luther referred to my ancestors as Drachensbraute, Brides of the Dragon, and we were driven out of Bavaria in 1586 at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions. He was writing it during the Stonewall Riots, which may be a more direct context as a fictionalization of the witness of history. Like much of his fiction, it is also filled with episodes both historical and imagined and set in mirror worlds of exotic locations like Mexico and Morocco transformed as Orientalist fantasies or gateways to underworld realms.
When I asked him, at the age of ten or so, if I was in his book and what he was writing about, he said; “Freedom, nature as truth and civilization as addiction to wealth and power and theft of the soul, and how our pasts get mixed up with our futures.”
The Wild Boys reimagines The Egyptian Book of the Dead, of which fellow Surrealist and poet Philip Lamantia was a scholar and a source for Burroughs, also the subject of his final novel The Western Lands as is its direct model H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, references Octave Mirbeau, Bataille, Genet, and extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as restraint or binding and limit of our nature. David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; wildness as nature and freedom here mingle and intertwine.
All the works of William S. Burroughs are masterpieces of anarchist liberation and transgression, Surrealism and occult mysticism, even if difficult because they are told in collages of random and nonlinear episodes which he described as vaudeville turns, with an iconography that is bizarre and obscene. In spite and possibly because of this, they remain among the great classics of world literature, revealing endless chasms of darkness and infinite possibilities of rapture and illumination.
The Toad is summoned by performance of that which is loathsome to you; as embodiment of disgust, horror, degradation, and what Freud called the Uncanny. It is a type of the Guardian of the Gates of Dreams who must be eaten to transform it into a Guide and ally or protector in underworld journeys. In the Dreaming one may assume its two Battle Forms, the Grendel-like water dragon and the chiropteran raptor as depicted in the film Dracula, and as a chthonic figure of underworld illumination confers powers of insight into others secret desires similar to Lucifer’s power in the Netflix series which fictionalizes the great question of Lacan, What do you desire?, as well as the ability to enter the dreams of others as does Freddy Kruger in the Nightmare films based so faithfully on the cult of the Bhairav in Tibetan Buddhist-Shaivite Tantric faith. I discovered much parallelism between the magic of my childhood and that of the Vajrayana Buddhist Kagyu order of monks in Kathmandu of which I was once a Dream Navigator.
Burroughs had a whole pantheon and system of magic worked out from Lovecraft and Crowley, but that is a different story. What I find interesting is that like Crowley’s mirror image angels and demons who are really the same being, Burroughs’ reimagination of Lovecraft’s mythos has his Others as both good and evil, like wrathful and beneficent aspects of Tibetan gods.
In the end all that matters is what you do with your fear, and how you use your power.
William S. Burroughs, a reading list
Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, Ted Morgan, William S. Burroughs
Its been nearly a year since the July 11 installation of a reformist President, Masoud Pezeshkian, to walk back their nation from the precipice of war and de-escalate the looming nuclear conflict not only between themselves and Israel as proxies of their patrons America and Russia, but also the specter of direct war between America and Russia.
With Trump’s bombing of imaginary nuclear weapons in Iran with real ones, both to build a Riviera of casinos on the graves of the Palestinians and to destabilize and sabotage the democracy movements in Iran and Israel, the coming Age of Tyrants and centuries of wars of imperial dominion ending in human extinction is made both more certain and more immediate.
We may not have the six to eight hundred years of dehumanized quasi slavery under brutal totalitarian and fascist states which I have long predicted; we may have hours, for those who would enslave us linger over buttons which like an evil genie in a lamp call to them, whispering; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
This act has not only aligned America with Israel in her plans of imperial conquest and dominion of the Middle East as Greater Israel which include the invasion and Occupation of Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen as well as the whole of Palestine, but possibly a war of mutual annihilation with Russia. Russia is a wildcard in all of this, for the Iranian Dominion is her only true ally and vital to the strategy of Putin in the re-conquest of the former Soviet Empire, the Middle East, Africa, and the Mediterranean versus Turkey’s plans to re-found the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the abandonment by France of her own empire. Yes, the Chinese Communist Party is both an ally and a competitor of Russia, and sends soldiers to Ukraine as does her ally North Korea, but this cooperation is limited by the fact of near parity for neither Russia nor China can control the other. Iran, however, is a Russian client state and though powerful through Hezbollah and the four nations she controls, Syria having been liberated which proves that Russia is not invincible and can be defeated, Iran needs Russia and Russia benefits greatly from her relationship with Iran.
So, we have here a system of balances of Israel and the Arab-American Alliance versus the Iranian Dominion and her primary Russia. Trump has just demonstrated the instability of multiple focal alliances, because he and his partner in war crimes Netanyahu have just attacked Russia’s key regional ally Iran, and Putin owns Trump. Russia’s captured state of Vichy America just went rogue, and I don’t expect Putin to behave any differently than when he was the kingpin of the East Berlin black market if a top crime syndicate sub boss attacked a key ally.
When is the enemy of my enemy not my friend? When he is also an enemy of other friends whom I cannot give up.
Trump cannot disavow either Israel or Russia, and Russia cannot allow this situation to stand. Putin must retaliate, and will find it very difficult to limit the consequences to conflict between our proxies Iran and Israel. Trump will try and fail to keep his support for Netanyahu’s imperial conquest and total war against the Iranian Dominion and Palestine separate from his support for Russia’s imperial conquest of Ukraine and alliance with Iran in her existential wars of survival and dominion in the Middle East. How and when this system of alliances and grand strategies collapses into ruin, chaos, and the horrors of war remains an open question, but that it will collapse is now certain and a fait accompli.
All that remains to be seen as events unfold is whether or not civilization collapses with it, and if the genie of nuclear annihilation can be kept in its bottle.
As written by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled No matter what Trump says, the US has gone to war – and there will be profound and lasting consequences: rump has fallen slap bang into the trap laid for him by Netanyahu. His reckless gamble makes a nuclear weapon for Iran more, not less, likely; “Bombing will not make Iran go away. US bombs will not destroy the knowhow needed to build a nuclear weapon or the will do so, if that is what Tehran wants. The huge attack ordered by Donald Trump will not halt ongoing open warfare between Israel and Iran. It will not bring lasting peace to the Middle East, end the slaughter in Gaza, deliver justice to the Palestinians, or end more than half a century of bitter enmity between Tehran and Washington.
More likely, Trump’s rash, reckless gamble will inflame and exacerbate all these problems. Depending on how Iran and its allies and supporters react, the region could plunge into an uncontrolled conflagration. US bases in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere in the region, home to about 40,000 American troops, must now be considered potential targets for retaliation – and possibly British and allied forces, too.
Trump says he has not declared war on Iran. He claims the attack is not an opening salvo in a campaign aimed at triggering regime change in Tehran. But that’s not how Iran’s politicians and people will see it. Trump’s premature bragging about “spectacular” success, and threats of more and bigger bombs, sound like the words of a ruthless conqueror intent on total, crushing victory.
Trump, the isolationist president who vowed to avoid foreign wars, has walked slap bang into a trap prepared by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu – a trap his smarter predecessors avoided. Netanyahu has constantly exaggerated the immediacy of the Iranian nuclear threat. His alarmist speeches on this subject go back 30 years. Always, he claimed to know what UN nuclear inspectors, US and European intelligence agencies and even some of his own spy chiefs did not – namely, that Iran was on the verge of deploying a ready-to-use nuclear weapon aimed at Israel’s heart.
This contention has never been proven. Iran has always denied seeking a nuclear bomb. Its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa banning any such programme. Netanyahu’s most recent claim that Iran was weaponising, made as he tried to justify last week’s unilateral, illegal Israeli attacks, was not supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or US intelligence experts. But weak-minded Trump chose to believe it. Reading from Netanyahu’s script, he said on Saturday night that eliminating this incontrovertible nuclear threat was vital – and the sole aim of the US air assault.
So, once again, the US has gone to war in the Middle East on the back of a lie, on disputed, probably faulty intelligence purposefully distorted for political reasons. Once again, as in Iraq in 2003, the overall objectives of the war are unclear, uncertain and open to interpretation by friend and foe alike. Once again, there appears to be no “exit strategy”, no guardrails against escalation and no plan for what happens next. Demanding that Iran capitulate or face “national tragedy” is not a policy. It’s a deadly dead-end.
Iran will not go away, whatever Trump and Netanyahu may imagine in their fevered dreams. It will remain a force in the region. It will remain a country to be reckoned with, a country of 90 million people, and one with powerful allies in China, Russia and the global south. It is already insisting it will continue with its civil nuclear programme.
These events are a reminder of how profound is official US ignorance of Iran. Unlike the UK, Washington has had no diplomatic presence there since the revolution. It has had few direct political contacts, and its swingeing economic sanctions have created even greater distance, further diminishing mutual understanding. Trump’s decision to renege on the 2015 nuclear accord (negotiated by Barack Obama, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the EU) was a product of this ignorance. Ten years later, he is trying to do with bombs what was largely, peacefully achieved through diplomacy by his wiser, less impulsive, less easily led predecessors.
Peace seems more elusive than ever – and Netanyahu is celebrating. The US cannot walk away now. It’s committed. And, as Netanyahu sees it, he and Israel cannot lose. Except, except … Iran cannot somehow be imagined away. It still has to be dealt with. And the reckoning that now looms, short- and long-term, may be more terrible than any of Netanyahu’s scare stories.
Iran previously warned that if the US attacked, it would hit back at US bases. There are many to choose from, in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan and elsewhere. The Houthis in Yemen say they will resume attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. The strait of Hormuz, so important a transit point for global energy supplies, may be mined, as happened in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war. The result could be a global oil shock and markets meltdown. And Iran is still reportedly firing missiles into Israel, despite claims in Jerusalem that most of its ballistic missiles bases have been destroyed.
Reacting to Trump’s attack, Iranian officials say no options are off the table in terms of retaliation. And they say they will not negotiate under fire, despite a call to do so from the British prime minister, Keir Starmer. Rejecting Trump’s unverified claims about the total destruction of all nuclear facilities, they also insist Iran will reconstitute and continue its nuclear programme. The big question now is whether that programme really will be weaponised.
Two radical longer-term consequences may flow from this watershed moment. One is that Khamenei’s unpopular regime, notorious for corruption, military incompetence and economic mismanagement, and deprived of support from Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza, may crack under the strain of this disaster. So far there has been little sign of an uprising or a change in government. That’s not surprising, given that Tehran and other cities are under bombardment. But regime collapse cannot be ruled out.
The other is that, rather than surrender the cherished right to uranium enrichment and submit to the Trump-Netanyahu ultimatum, Iran’s rulers, whoever they are, will decide to follow North Korea and try to acquire a bomb as quickly as possible, to fend off future humiliations. That could entail withdrawal from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and rejection of the UN inspections regime. After years of trying to play by western rules, Iran could really finally go rogue.
The supposed need to acquire nukes for self-defence is a grim lesson other countries around the world may draw from these events. The proliferation of nuclear weapons is the biggest immediate danger to the future of the planet. What Trump just did in recklessly and violently trying to eliminate an unproven threat may ensure the proven danger of a nuclear-armed world grows ever-more real.”
All of this has disturbing historical precedents, including a Big Lie as the just cause of war. As written by Mohamad Bazzi in The Guardian, in an article entitled Like George W Bush, Trump has started a reckless war based on a lie: The Iraq war was built on a lie. Now history is repeating itself; “In May 2003, George W Bush landed on the deck of a US aircraft carrier to deliver a triumphant speech, declaring that major combat operations in Iraq had ended – six weeks after he had ordered US troops to invade the country. Bush spoke under a now infamous banner on the carrier’s bridge that proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished”. It would turn into a case study of American hubris and one of the most mocked photo-ops in modern history.
As Bush made his speech off the coast of San Diego, I was in Baghdad covering the invasion’s aftermath as a correspondent for a US newspaper. It was clear then that the war was far from over, and the US was likely to face a grinding insurgency led by former members of the Iraqi security forces. It would also soon become clear that Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq was built on a lie: Saddam Hussein’s regime did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not intent on developing them. And Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US, despite the Bush administration’s repeated attempts to connect Hussein’s regime to al-Qaida.
Today, Donald Trump has dragged the US into another war based on exaggerations and manipulated intelligence: the Israel-Iran conflict, which began on 13 June when Israel launched a surprise attack killing some of Iran’s top military officials and nuclear scientists, and bombing dozens of targets across the country.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed that Israel had to attack because Tehran was working to weaponize its stockpile of enriched uranium and racing to build a nuclear bomb. “If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,” Netanyahu said, as the first wave of Israeli bombs fell on Iran. “It could be a year. It could be within a few months.”
Before dawn on Sunday, US warplanes and submarines bombed three major nuclear facilities in Iran. In a speech from the White House, Trump declared the operation a “spectacular military success” and said the sites had been “totally obliterated”. Trump added that his goal was to stop “the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror”.
But does Iran pose the immediate threat that Netanyahu and Trump have claimed?
US intelligence officials, along with the UN’s nuclear watchdog and independent experts, say that while Iran has dramatically increased its supply of uranium enriched to nearly weapons grade, there is no evidence it has taken steps to produce a nuclear weapon. In March, the US director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told Congress that America’s intelligence agencies continued “to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon”. She added that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”.
Gabbard also noted that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was “at its highest levels” and “unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons”. That’s largely because, in 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal that was negotiated in 2015 between Tehran and six world powers. Under that agreement, Iran agreed to limit its uranium enrichment in exchange for relief from international sanctions. A few years after Trump tore up the deal that was signed by his predecessor, Barack Obama, Iran began to enrich uranium up to 60% purity – a short step away from the 90% level required for a nuclear device.
Still, in a report issued last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN watchdog that has monitored Iran’s main nuclear enrichment sites for years, said it found no evidence that Tehran was actively developing a weapons program. The agency criticized Iranian officials for failing to provide access to some sites and to cooperate with UN inspectors, especially over Tehran’s past secret nuclear weapons program, which is believed to have ended by 2003. Despite these criticisms, the IAEA report said it had “no credible indications of an ongoing, undeclared structured nuclear program”.
Recent US intelligence assessments found that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon and was up to three years away from being able to develop an actual warhead and deploy it on a missile. (Under pressure from Trump, who said twice last week that Gabbard’s testimony to Congress in March was “wrong”, the intelligence chief changed course on Friday to say that Iran could produce a nuclear weapon “within weeks to months”.)
Of course, there’s one state in the Middle East that has an active nuclear weapons program: Israel, which doesn’t acknowledge having a nuclear arsenal. But in January, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute identified Israel as one of the world’s nine nuclear-armed states, and estimated that it currently has 90 warheads.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Netanyahu continues to insist that Iran was dashing to produce a nuclear weapon. “The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear – was absolutely clear – that they [the Iranians] were working in a secret plan to weaponize the uranium,” Netanyahu told the Fox News anchor Bret Baier (who hosts one of Trump’s favorite news shows) in an interview on 15 June. “They were marching very quickly. They would achieve a test device and possibly an initial device within months and certainly less than a year.”
Netanyahu’s statements echo the exaggerated intelligence and sense of fear peddled by the Bush administration ahead of the US invasion of Iraq – and it’s exactly the kind of open-ended conflict based on lies that Trump promised voters he would avoid as president. In September 2002, Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said in a CNN interview that “there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly” the Iraqi regime could acquire nuclear weapons. “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” she added in a reference that would be repeated by other US officials, including Bush himself.
Not surprisingly, Netanyahu had also lobbied the Bush administration to attack Iraq – and insisted that the Iraqi regime was developing a nuclear bomb. After his first term as Israel’s prime minister, Netanyahu testified before Congress as a private citizen in September 2002, warning of the danger posed by a nuclear-armed Iraq. “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing toward the development of nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu confidently told Congress. He added: “Once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons.”
Netanyahu, who has always had a flair for the extravagant soundbite, also claimed that Hussein no longer needed one large reactor to produce nuclear fuel, but could do so “in centrifuges the size of washing machines” that could be hidden throughout Iraq.
The Israeli leader was not only wrong about Hussein developing weapons of mass destruction, but he also insisted that a US war on Iraq would be a boon for the Middle East and would inspire Iranians to rise up against the Islamic republic. “If you take out Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Netanyahu said. “I think that people sitting right nextdoor in Iran, young people and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots, is gone.”
It’s also important to remember that Netanyahu has practically made a career out of warning that Iran is years (or months) away from developing nukes. Over the past 30 years, he regularly issued some variation on this threat – and often wildly overestimated how close Iran was to having a bomb. In 1992, as a member of Israel’s Knesset, Netanyahu cautioned that Iran was “three to five years” away from developing a nuclear weapons capability. In 1996, as prime minister, he addressed a joint session of Congress and urged the US to “stop the nuclearization of terrorist states”. He added, “The deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close.”
In February 2009, as leader of the Likud party and a candidate for prime minister, Netanyahu told a congressional delegation visiting Israel that Iran was “probably only one or two years away” from developing a nuclear weapons capability – attributing the claim to Israeli “experts” without offering other evidence. The conversation was summarized in a US state department cable released by WikiLeaks.
Later in 2009, when he was back in office as premier, another leaked cable revealed that Netanyahu told a separate group of visiting members of Congress that “Iran has the capability now to make one bomb” or it “could wait and make several bombs in a year or two”.
But the most memorable example of Netanyahu exaggerating the threat of Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon came in September 2012, when the Israeli leader took to the UN general assembly podium armed with a cartoon-style drawing of a bomb with a lit fuse. Netanyahu warned the world that Iran was enriching uranium so quickly that it was on track to be able to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear device within months. He then used a marker pen to draw a red line across the cartoon bomb, to highlight the stage of the nuclear process where he claimed Iran had to be stopped. Netanyahu warned that Iran could produce a working weapon by the following spring or “at most by next summer”.
Nearly 13 years after Netanyahu stood before the world to cry wolf about Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons, he used the same pretext – that Iran is “within a few months” of having a bomb – to launch a devastating war against Tehran. Netanyahu then successfully pulled the US into the conflict, promising Trump a quick victory if the US used its 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs to destroy Fordow, Iran’s most heavily fortified nuclear facility.
Unfortunately, Trump heeded the siren call of a US ally who has spent decades manipulating intelligence and public fears to exaggerate the nuclear threat posed by Iran. And the people of the Middle East will pay the highest price for yet another reckless war built on a lie.”
As written by Robert Reich in his Substack newsletter, in an article entitled The Dogs of War: What’s really going on; “Friends,
The United States is now at war with Iran.
A single person — Donald J. Trump — has released the dogs of war on one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and done it without the consent of Congress or our allies, or even a clear explanation to the American people.
Anyone who has doubted Trump’s intention to replace American democracy with a dictatorship should now be fully disabused.
I share your despair, sadness, and fear. Even if our president was a wise and judicious man, surrounded by thoughtful advisers with impeccable integrity and wisdom, this would be a highly dangerous move.
Last night I spoke with a number of people experienced and knowledgeable about American foreign policy and politics. Here, in brief, is what I asked and what I learned.
1. Why is Trump taking us into war with Iran?
It’s possible that he believes the attacks give him more bargaining leverage with Iran. But a more likely explanation is that the attacks fit perfectly with Trump’s desire to divert attention from his multiple failures at home: the on-again-off-again tariffs that have spooked financial markets while eliciting no meaningful concessions from other nations (especially China). An immigration crackdown that’s been stymied by federal judges. The so-called “big beautiful bill” that’s in deep trouble in the Senate. Trump’s embarrassing tiff with Musk. His failures to achieve peace in either Ukraine or Gaza. And last weekend’s record-breaking “No Kings” demonstrations as compared to his scrawny military parade.
Besides, there’s nothing like a war to help a wannabe dictator like Trump justify more “emergency” powers.
2. Is (or was) Iran building a nuclear weapon?
No one knows for sure. In March, Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, testified before Congress that the intelligence community [IC] “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
Iran’s growing stockpile of enriched uranium could allow it to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon. Experts differ in how long Iran would need to make a usable nuclear weapon out of the fissile material.
In the face of such uncertainty, it’s useful to recall George W. Bush’s claims of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” that proved bogus — at a cost of 4,431 American lives, 31,994 Americans wounded in action, and an estimated 295,000 Iraqi lives.
3. Is Trump getting good information and advice?
Unlikely. He told reporters on Friday that Gabbard was “wrong” to say that Iran is not currently building a nuclear weapon but he didn’t say where he was getting his intelligence from. In May, Trump fired his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and dismissed half the professionals at the National Security Council (the Middle East section went from 10 staffers to five).
Trump is being advised on Iran by a close-knit group of political advisers and ideologues, none of whom has deep knowledge of Iran or the Middle East. All are totally loyal to Trump. (They include JD Vance; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Chief of Staff Susie Wiles; Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller; Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East who was formerly a luxury real estate developer; Lieutenant General Dan (Razin’) Caine, now serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs; Erik (“The Gorilla”) Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM); John Ratcliffe, CIA director, who served in the first Trump administration and was previously a Texas congressman and a small-town mayor; and Steve Bannon.)
As a result, he’s probably getting decent advice about what’s good for Trump but not about what’s good for America or the world. It’s an inevitable consequence of purging from the government anyone more loyal to the United States than to him. Besides, Trump listens only to information he wants to hear.
4. Will Iran now cave and agree to destroy its remaining stockpile of enriched uranium and allow inspectors to confirm that the stockpile is gone?
No. Not one of the experts I spoke to thought this likely. Iran doesn’t trust the United States or Israel, and it doesn’t want to give up its potential nuclear capacities.
5. Have the bombings wiped out Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons?
Unlikely. Trump claims that the facilities were “completely and totally obliterated,” but who trusts Trump to tell the truth, or to be told the truth?
Iran has buried its uranium-enrichment facilities deep underground and distributed them to many locations. Iranian officials acknowledge that three sites were attacked but did not describe the extent of damage.
In any event, America does not have good intelligence about how long it will take Iran to get the three targeted sites back to running order.
6. What’s the worst Iran can now do to the United States in retaliation?
It could wholly or partially close the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway through which about a fifth of global oil must pass. While it was not completely closed during past conflicts, Iran possesses the capabilities to significantly disrupt or halt traffic with mines, anti-ship missiles, and air defense systems. This would cause oil prices to soar in the United States and Europe (helping Big Oil but not American consumers).
Iran could also engage in a range of terrorist actions directed toward the United States. No one knows the extent of any “sleeper cells” in the U.S. or in Europe. The mere possibility could give Trump more license to restrict civil liberties.
7. Will the American public “rally around the flag” and support Trump in this war?
Some Americans clearly will. But a drawn-out war in Iran will be deeply unpopular. A recent YouGov poll found that only 16 percent of Americans thought the U.S. military should get involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran; 60 percent said it should not.
Trump promised no foreign entanglements and lower consumer prices. But this war could prove to be the largest foreign entanglement in years, and the attacks will almost certainly raise oil and gas prices.
8. Will he send in American ground troops?
On balance, the experts I consulted with thought Trump eventually would send in troops if Iran retaliated and the conflict escalated. Last night he explicitly threatened more action against Iran if it did not return to diplomatic efforts: “If they do not [make peace], future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.”
More than anything else, Trump has an abiding need to save face, he hates to lose, and he likes nothing more than conflict. He was willing to send the active military into California to stop trumped-up protests. He’ll likely be willing to send them into Iran.
The war will not be over quickly. Iran and its extensive networks in the Middle East could keep hostilities going for months or years, at a substantial cost of human life.
9. What’s Congress likely to do now?
I hope Democrats will use the War Powers Act to force a vote on the war, putting Republican lawmakers in the awkward position of voting for a war that’s immensely unpopular and can easily go very badly.
10. Bonus question: Where does the phrase “dogs of war” come from?
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which Mark Antony (in Act 3, Scene 1) says: “Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of war” — signifying that war unleashes chaos and violence.
Now that the bombing has begun, there’s no telling where this will end.
Be strong. Be safe. Hug your loved ones.
Persian
۲۲ ژوئن ۲۰۲۵ آمریکا با بمباران ایران به ورطه سقوط میافتد
تقریباً یک سال از انتصاب مسعود پزشکیان، رئیس جمهور اصلاحطلب، در ۱۱ ژوئیه میگذرد تا ملت خود را از پرتگاه جنگ دور کند و از درگیری هستهای قریبالوقوع نه تنها بین خودشان و اسرائیل به عنوان نمایندگان حامیانشان، آمریکا و روسیه، بلکه از شبح جنگ مستقیم بین آمریکا و روسیه نیز بکاهد.
با بمباران سلاحهای هستهای خیالی ایران توسط ترامپ با سلاحهای واقعی، هم برای ساختن ریویرای کازینوها بر روی مزار فلسطینیان و هم برای بیثبات کردن و خرابکاری در جنبشهای دموکراسی در ایران و اسرائیل، عصر قریبالوقوع مستبدان و قرنها جنگ سلطه امپریالیستی که به انقراض بشر منجر میشود، قطعیتر و نزدیکتر شده است.
ممکن است ما ششصد تا هشتصد سال شبه بردهداری غیرانسانی تحت حکومتهای توتالیتر و فاشیست وحشی که مدتها پیشبینی کرده بودم، نداشته باشیم؛ ممکن است ساعتها وقت داشته باشیم، زیرا کسانی که میخواهند ما را به بردگی بگیرند، روی دکمههایی پرسه میزنند که مانند یک جن شیطانی در یک چراغ با زمزمه به آنها میگوید: «مرا آزاد کنید، و من شما را قدرتمند خواهم کرد.»
این اقدام نه تنها آمریکا را در برنامههایش برای فتح امپریالیستی و تسلط بر خاورمیانه به عنوان اسرائیل بزرگ، که شامل حمله و اشغال ایران، عراق، لبنان و یمن و همچنین کل فلسطین میشود، با اسرائیل همسو کرده است، بلکه احتمالاً جنگی برای نابودی متقابل با روسیه نیز در پیش دارد. روسیه در تمام این موارد یک کارت وحشی است، زیرا سلطه ایران تنها متحد واقعی اوست و برای استراتژی پوتین در فتح مجدد امپراتوری شوروی سابق، خاورمیانه، آفریقا و مدیترانه در مقابل برنامههای ترکیه برای تأسیس مجدد امپراتوری عثمانی پس از ترک امپراتوری خود توسط فرانسه، حیاتی است. بله، حزب کمونیست چین هم متحد و هم رقیب روسیه است و مانند متحدش کره شمالی، سربازانی را به اوکراین میفرستد، اما این همکاری به دلیل برابری نزدیک محدود است، زیرا نه روسیه و نه چین نمیتوانند یکدیگر را کنترل کنند. با این حال، ایران یک دولت وابسته به روسیه است و اگرچه از طریق حزبالله و چهار کشوری که تحت کنترل دارد، قدرتمند است، اما سوریه آزاد شده است که ثابت میکند روسیه شکستناپذیر نیست و میتوان آن را شکست داد، ایران به روسیه نیاز دارد و روسیه از رابطهاش با ایران سود زیادی میبرد.
بنابراین، ما در اینجا سیستمی از موازنهها بین اسرائیل و اتحاد عربی-آمریکایی در مقابل سلطه ایران و روسیه اصلیاش داریم. ترامپ به تازگی بیثباتی اتحادهای کانونی متعدد را نشان داده است، زیرا او و شریکش در جنایات جنگی، نتانیاهو، به متحد کلیدی منطقهای روسیه، ایران، حمله کردهاند و پوتین ترامپ را در اختیار دارد. ایالت ویشی آمریکا که روسیه آن را تصرف کرده، به تازگی سرکش شده است و من انتظار ندارم که پوتین رفتار متفاوتی نسبت به زمانی که پادشاه بازار سیاه برلین شرقی بود، داشته باشد، اگر یک رئیس فرعی سندیکای جنایی به یک متحد کلیدی حمله میکرد.
چه زمانی دشمن دشمن من، دوست من نیست؟ وقتی او همچنین دشمن دوستان دیگری است که نمیتوانم از آنها دست بکشم.
ترامپ نمیتواند اسرائیل یا روسیه را رد کند و روسیه نمیتواند اجازه دهد این وضعیت پابرجا بماند. پوتین باید تلافی کند و محدود کردن عواقب آن به درگیری بین نیروهای نیابتی ما، ایران و اسرائیل، بسیار دشوار خواهد بود. ترامپ تلاش خواهد کرد و موفق نخواهد شد تا حمایت خود از فتح امپراتوری نتانیاهو و جنگ تمام عیار علیه سلطه ایران و فلسطین را از حمایت خود از فتح امپراتوری روسیه در اوکراین و اتحاد با ایران در جنگهای وجودیاش برای بقا و سلطه در خاورمیانه جدا کند. اینکه چگونه و چه زمانی این سیستم اتحادها و استراتژیهای بزرگ به ویرانی، هرج و مرج و وحشت جنگ فرو میریزد، همچنان یک سوال بیپاسخ است، اما اینکه فرو خواهد پاشید، اکنون قطعی و یک عمل انجام شده است.
تنها چیزی که با وقوع رویدادها باید دید این است که آیا تمدن نیز با آن فرو میریزد یا خیر، و آیا میتوان غول نابودی هستهای را در بطری خود نگه داشت یا خیر.
No matter what Trump says, the US has gone to war – and there will be profound and lasting consequences, Simon Tisdall
Iran, a retrospective of my liberation struggles in solidarity with her people
July 11 2024, Victory Iran: Why Does Iran Have a New President, and What Does This Mean? At the Edge of Total War With America and Israel, Iran Realigns and De-Escalates
How very interesting this set of Russian Doll puzzles each nested within others, complex, nuanced, obscured, relational and interdependent, in Iran’s game of concealed intent and surprise revelations, wherein true power can wear the mask of opposition and all moves must be weighed on two fronts; internal in balancing the Islamic purity from which the theocratic regime’s power derives with the human rights of its citizens, especially those of women, and external in the nuclear brinksmanship with America and with Israel in confronting the genocide of the Palestinians and the Israeli imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors generally in an escalating regional conflict.
Herein the symbolic and perfunctory tit for tat retaliations between the Arab-American Alliance in regard to our mad dog proxy Israel and the Dominion of Iran which includes Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen has become a theatre of the Third World War as her ally Russia attempts to re-found her empire.
This was the true reason for the assassination of Iran’s former President, opening move in the realignment of Iran and de-escalation of the nuclear front with America and the war for the Rights of Man with Israel which threatens to engulf Lebanon once again. I wish to never come to the attention of whomever assassinated President Raisi, very like that of Prigozhin, with so deft a hand as to leave not even the shadow of his passing on the tides of history.
Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian was elected to change all of this; end the patriarchal sexual terror and control of women which makes Iran a pariah in the international community, of which torture, mutilation, and rape as punishments for hijab violations, education, or other acts of defiance and independence by uppity women and the slave trafficking of often very young women through temporary marriage licenses which fund the syndicate of mullahs are two primary issues, end the brutal repression of dissent and campaign of terror against journalists and freedom of speech, press, and protest for redress of grievances, as well as re-engagement with America through nuclear disarmament process and stepping back from the abyss of total war with Israel.
Such liberalization may signal the birth of a democracy in Iran, and her transformation from an enemy to an ally in the cause of our universal human rights, both within and beyond Iran. We shall see.
In this moment I welcome President Masoud Pezeshkian as a brother and ally in the cause of Becoming Human.
News of the 2024 regime change in Iran
Masoud Pezeshkian: the former heart surgeon who became president of Iran
11 جولای 2024 پیروزی ایران: چرا ایران رئیس جمهور جدید دارد و این به چه معناست؟ ایران در آستانه جنگ تمام عیار با آمریکا و اسرائیل قرار دارد و تنشزدایی میکند
چقدر جالب است این مجموعه از پازلهای عروسک روسی که هر کدام در درون دیگران، پیچیده، ظریف، مبهم، رابطهای و وابسته به یکدیگر، در بازی نیت پنهان و افشاگریهای غافلگیرکننده ایران، که در آن قدرت واقعی میتواند نقاب مخالف را بر تن کند، در درون دیگران قرار گرفته است. دو جبهه؛ درونی در ایجاد توازن بین خلوص اسلامی که قدرت رژیم تئوکراتیک از آن ناشی میشود با حقوق انسانی شهروندانش، بهویژه حقوق زنان، و بیرونی در پرتگاه هستهای با آمریکا و با اسرائیل در مقابله با نسلکشی فلسطینیان و تسخیر امپریالیستی اسرائیل و تسلط بر همسایگانش به طور کلی در یک درگیری منطقه ای در حال تشدید.
در اینجا انتقامجویی نمادین و آشکار بین ائتلاف عربی-آمریکایی در رابطه با نیابت سگ دیوانه ما اسرائیل و سلطه ایران که شامل عراق، سوریه، لبنان و یمن میشود، به عنوان متحد او به صحنه جنگ جهانی سوم تبدیل شده است. روسیه تلاش می کند تا امپراتوری خود را دوباره تأسیس کند.
این دلیل واقعی ترور رئیس جمهور سابق ایران، حرکت گشایش در همسویی مجدد ایران و تنش زدایی از جبهه هسته ای با آمریکا و جنگ برای حقوق بشر با اسرائیل بود که تهدید می کند یک بار دیگر لبنان را در برگیرد. آرزو میکنم هرگز مورد توجه کسی قرار نگیرم که رئیسجمهور رئیسی، بسیار شبیه به پریگوژین، با دستی چنان ماهرانه که حتی سایه مرگ او را بر جزر و مد تاریخ ترور نکرد.
رئیس جمهور جدید ایران مسعود پزشکیان برای تغییر همه اینها انتخاب شد. پایان دادن به ترور جنسی مردسالارانه و کنترل زنان، که ایران را در جامعه بینالملل منحوس میسازد، شکنجه، مثله کردن، و تجاوز جنسی به عنوان مجازات نقض حجاب، آموزش یا سایر اعمال تجاوزکارانه و استقلال طلبانه توسط زنان بداخلاق و تجارت برده اغلب زنان بسیار جوان از طریق جواز ازدواج موقت که به سندیکای ملاها کمک مالی می کند، دو موضوع اصلی است، پایان دادن به سرکوب وحشیانه مخالفان و کارزار ترور علیه روزنامه نگاران و آزادی بیان، مطبوعات و اعتراض برای جبران نارضایتی ها، و همچنین باز هم تعامل با آمریکا از طریق فرآیند خلع سلاح هسته ای و عقب نشینی از ورطه جنگ کامل با اسرائیل.
چنین آزادسازی ممکن است نشان دهنده تولد یک دموکراسی در ایران و تبدیل آن از یک دشمن به یک متحد در راه حقوق بشر جهانی ما، چه در داخل و چه در خارج از ایران باشد. خواهیم دید.
در این لحظه از رئیس جمهور مسعود پزشکیان به عنوان یک برادر و متحد در راه انسان شدن استقبال می کنم.
February 3 2024 Biden’s Presidential Campaign Becomes a War of Imperial Conquest Against the Dominion of Iran
In reply to the victorious Red Sea campaign of allies like myself of Palestine, a counter blockade of Israel’s war crime of blockading humanitarian aid to Gaza, Biden the Baby Killer has launched a broad multistate regional conflict of imperial conquest against the Dominion of Iran, triggered by the deaths of American soldiers at the hands of Iranian allies or proxy forces.
This is horrible, the murders of our guardians at Tower 22 and a crime for which its perpetrators must be held responsible and brought a Reckoning; but so also is the Israeli campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. When Netanyahu and Biden are removed from power as war criminals, and the rain of death our taxes pay for in Gaza silenced, there will be time to pursue justice for the victims of this conflict; all the victims, regardless of what nation claims to act in their name as legitimation of war and the centralization of power.
Why do we sink or seize any ship carrying arms to Israel?
We contest the freedom of the high seas for any nation which funds and arms crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or genocide.
America’s abandonment of the principle of our universal human rights under the command of President Biden is a historic betrayal of all that we love and hold dear as truths which are self-evident, and this is Biden’s re-election campaign of cruelty, amorality, and imperial terror.
This wave of strikes against Iran’s Axis of Resistance and its nonstate forces is merely Biden’s attempt, confronted with hostile crowds of his fellow Democrats at re-election campaign rallies, to divert us from the fact that in sponsoring Israel’s war crimes he has made us all complicit in genocide and crimes against humanity.
And this we must resist.
January 29 2024 Where Do We Go From Here? As the Gaza War Becomes A Great Powers Proxy War and a Theatre of World War Three, and the Arab-American Alliance With Our Colony Israel Versus the Iranian Dominion of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen With Their Key Ally Russia Make A Wishbone of the Holy Land
Much fluttering of diplomatic fans and rattling of sabers has attended the news of the missile strike in Jordan against American forces of imperial dominion, to which my first reaction was this; Confusion to the Enemy is a game which can be played by limitless numbers of players.
It is the reaction to this event, as if it were new and transgressive because American soldiers have died, which disturbs me now, and has provoked my interrogation of the escalation of regional conflict.
Biden has reacted to the news with a vow of vengeance, and I now consider the Gaza War to be a regional conflict and Great Powers Proxy War which has become a theatre of World War Three. And I am very much afraid that we are about to march off a precipice from which there is no return.
If you really want to end this war, if peace, equal power, and mutual respect for each other’s humanity is your goal and not the use of others lives in service to your own power, use BDS or any means necessary to break the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza and silence the bombs of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
Ever curious how things look from the perspectives of others, I include herein those of the eminent historian of current events Heather Cox Richardson and of the power brokers themselves as questioned by The New York Times.
Our ideas diverge wildly from one another on many points, but such discontiguous and asymmetrical gaps can become spaces of free creative play and transformative change, just as boundaries may become interfaces.
First, Biden calls the missile strikes against America’s armies of Occupation and imperial dominion “despicable”, which of course may be said of any willful deaths of fellow human beings in war or otherwise, as is true for the Israeli mass murders in Gaza which they reply to. But he also calls them “wholly unjust”; I gather he would also call Little Bighorn an unjust reply to Wounded Knee, or any other victorious act of liberation struggle by an indigenous people against an imperial oppressor.
Biden’s unhinged diatribe against the idea of human rights and the equality of all human beings includes a spurious threat to “hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner [of] our choosing”. Clearly he means only the murderers who are not his instruments of terror and dominion, as he continues to fund, arm, and authorize Israel to kill thousands of women and children merely because Hamas claims to act in their name as a strategy of subjugation, much as Netanyahu and his loathsome regime claim to act in the name of all Israel and of Jewish peoples everywhere in service to their own power. I would say there are no good guys here, but numberless innocents and civilians whose lives are being instrumentalized by various forces like chips at a roulette table.
Heather Cox Richardson argues the side of the imperial oppressors Israel and America when she reduces the conflict in this moment to an attempt by the Iranian Dominion to sabotage the creation of a viable Palestinian state, when nothing could be further from the truth. What Iran, and the freedom fighters of Hezbollah, Hamas, and dozens of other entities, polities, and organizations whom I have been fighting alongside in the Red Sea Campaign and other direct actions by placing our bodies between death and its victims as we are able, what we want is independence and sovereignty for the Palestinians, whereas Netanyahu is pursuing his Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem and the client state Biden has proposed would be a puppet regime governed by Israel.
Like the authors of the New York Times article, I too would like to see the establishment of a Palestinian state; but one which is owned and controlled by and belongs to the Palestinians. I like and endorse many of their ideas; a Stage One prisoner exchange and the freeing of hostages.
Stage Two involves the creation of a viable state co-owned by its citizens though not one burdened with connections to or like Frankenstein’s monster stitched together of unlike parts from the carcasses of the Palestinian Authority or other Quisling or proxy regimes either under Iranian or Israeli control, and I believe what our true goal in a new nation must be if it is to endure and be just is a secular state in which Jews and Muslims may act as guarantors of each other’s rights and be each other’s liberators and not each other’s jailors, a nation not of masters and slaves but of equals which will require total separation of church and state both in Israel and in Palestine. This is why I speak of the liberation of Israel and the liberation of Palestine as inherently linked together.
Stage three of this plan, the recognition of a sovereign and independent Palestine, requires regime change as well as institutional and systemic reimagination and transformation of the state of Israel, which means America uses defunding the Israeli military and other Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction to bring change and democracy to Israel as a precondition of the Liberation of Palestine.
So while my stages of change may look like theirs, the results and ideal end states are radically different. I too wish to end the war, but I also wish for a future United Humankind wherein we each of us may perform our uniqueness in ways wherein no one’s happiness is harmed by anyone else’s.
What must be done? To this final question I wish to amplify the voice of Bernie Sanders, as always the moral compass of our nation. Only these points must I object to; first, I have been fighting the state of Israel and to bring change to Israel for a very long time now, since 1982, and have worked with allies from many of the forces involved now in this great liberation struggle, and I cannot say that Hamas was the sole responsible perpetrator of October 7; it is complex and absolutely involved complicity on the part of the state of Israel. Israel, Hamas, and several other groups have mutually infiltrated each other, in a cultural environment where loyalties are often transactional or relativistic, and this horrific crime may also have been orchestrated by an unknown party for unknown purposes, which has spies, saboteurs, influence peddlars, power brokers, puppets and puppetmasters, inside Mossad, the IDF, the Netanyahu regime, and their deniable assets among extremists and Zionist terrorists and assassins; and this is true also of Hamas which is an Israeli created and sponsored front organization as well as a genuine anticolonialist revolutionary group, and this may be said of any group of human beings in the region who hold or control power. This does not count crime syndicates, mercenaries, warlords, and traditional clan chiefdoms. Complex, ambiguous, multidimensional, and shifting; such is the Middle East.
Second, Bernie, may he be Beloved of the Infinite, states that Israel and all states have the right of self defense, and in this I cannot concur. There is no right of self defense against a people you are Occupying.
January 3 2024 On the Manufacture of Just Causes For War: Case of the Bombing of the Anniversary Ceremony For Qassem Suleimani In Iran, America’s Greatest Ally in the Fight Against ISIS Assassinated By Order of Traitor Trump To Sabotage Iran’s Democracy Movement
Unknown enemies of peace have in this moment of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the attacks on Lebanon as the opening move of a regional war of imperial conquest and dominion as a theocratic Jewish crusade, have chosen to put out the fire with gasoline and bombed the anniversary ceremony for one of the most beloved figures of Iran and the Shia world, Qassem Suleimani, once America’s greatest ally in the fight against ISIS, assassinated on this day four years ago by order of Traitor Trump to sabotage the anti-theocratic and anti-patriarchal Democracy movement which has spread from Shiraz, where we stormed the palace of the head mullah in 2019, to the whole of the nations Iran now controls; Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and even crossing sectarian lines to destabilize Afghanistan and her patron Pakistan.
The design and objective of all of this is to prevent an Arab Spring which will liberate the region from patriarchal theocracy and the tyranny of military dictatorships; to create forms of casus belli or just cause for war. Totalitarian states of all kinds must create such enemies if they do not exist, and exploit divisions and fears, in order to centralize power to authority and the carceral state.
Fear, power, force; the Wagnerian Ring by which we are dehumanized, falsified, and commodified by authority and those who would enslave us.
So very useful for bringing the Iranian Dominion fully into the war with Israel, this; and to the secret puppetmasters of this event I now warn, be careful what you wish for, and whisper as the charioteer was so tasked to Roman emperors during their parades of triumph; “All glory is fleeting.”
As I wrote in my post of January 4 2020, Cry Havoc: Consequences of the American Assassination of the Iranian and Iraqi Shiite Military Leaders; As the consequences of this event ripple outward through the medium of time, multiplying possibilities. alternate futures, transforms of ourselves and our shapings of one another, the true magnitude of the American assassination of the Iranian and Iraqi Shiite military leaders will unfold.
It is a seed of destruction, but of who?
Trump has cried havoc and loosed the dogs of war; but such agents of death, once free of their leash, know no master and may devour us all.
An age of Chaos dawns, and we are abandoned to its whims and to its wantonness as it seizes and swallows the mighty, disrupts and changes power relations and structures of social form, bringer of death as an aspect of Time but also of transformation and rebirth.
Chaos which I celebrate as a principle, but which must be wielded as a dangerous and multidimensional force with great forethought and caution as we play the Great and Secret Game, for action and reaction always strike in both directions.
The magnificent Guillermo del Toro, in his gorgeous work Carnival Row which explores themes of racism and inequality among war refugees in the nation which failed to defend them from their conquerors and in harboring them finds itself confronted with an alien people as neighbors amid squalor, poverty, and social destabilization, much like many nations in our world today, depicts the formation of an alliance between two leaders of rival factions:
“Who is chaos good for?”
“Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of those in the shadows.”
Yet I cannot overstate its peril.
As I wrote in my post of January 12 2020, A re energized democracy revolution throughout Iran brings the theocracy of the mullahs near its fall in the wake of the government’s mistaken destruction of a civilian aircraft and its lies about its responsibility for the tragedy; After more than two months of massive protests in Iran against the rule of the mullahs, larger than anything seen since the 1979 overthrow of the Shah over forty years ago which brought the Shiite theocracy into power and includes massacres of hundreds of protestors but also open battle in Shiraz and other major cities between the government’s forces of repression and the people of Iran united in the cause of liberty, that no government may stand between man and God nor enforce compulsion in matters of faith, a re-energized democracy revolution brings the theocracy near its fall in the wake of the government’s scandal of murder and failed coverup.
The Islamic Republic’s mistaken destruction of a civilian airliner bearing 82 Iranian citizens among its dead, and the subsequent lies the government told its people regarding its responsibility for the tragedy, has redirected public outrage from America over the assassination of its national hero Qassem Suleimani back to the government and its tyranny of faith and global provocations, shattering a temporary alliance of pro and anti government forces which had aligned to resist American imperialism and the invasion expected to follow Trump’s unprovoked attack.
There has been much speculation regarding Trump’s motive for the Suleimani assassination, both a war crime and an act of war. Sadly, the motives are obvious; Trump ordered the murder of Suleimani from personal jealousy, as well as a diversion from his impeachment for his treasonous and criminal subversion of America and a ploy for the support of the Republican politicians in the pay of plutocrats of war.
As Trump concedes the defeat of America by the Taliban and begs peace after 18 years of pointless war in Afghanistan, he sought to inflate his ego by killing a military genius who was victorious in battle against both the Taliban and ISIS, keeping Iran free from foreign influences and who acted as an important American ally against two of our most implacable enemies.
Telling friend from foe was never a long suit for the Republican party of war, nor the disambiguation of self-aggrandizement from our national interest for our President.
As I wrote in my post of January 28 2020, Protests and Repression in Iraq: America and Iran are now equal ogres of foreign imperialism; As mass protests continue to disrupt Iraq in two interdependent movements, the Revolution for democracy and liberation from sectarian government corruption and the malign influence of Iran’s theocracy, and the resurgent nationalism which unites Shia and Sunni polities against Trump’s groundless and criminal murder of Iranian regional hero Qasem Soleimani and second in command of Iraq’s military forces Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, both relentless and victorious warriors in the fight against ISIS and the Taliban and the most effective allies America had in our struggle against those two greatest of our common enemies and in the regional war on terror, we find ourselves at a strange impasse, who looked to America for help in founding a true secular democracy in Iraq, free of the grip of warlords, semifeudal clan chieftains, and especially the force and repression of armed divisions of faith, for America and Iran are now equal ogres of foreign imperialism.
Casting out both of our benefactors, who are also our adversaries, is a perilous thing and also a sad one, for there are many possible futures in which a liberated Iraq can work constructively with both America and Iran toward a better society and peace throughout the Middle East.
Iran has not always nor in every case been a malign or oppressive force; Hezbollah especially has been a benevolent shield against Israeli militarism and conquest, and I call them my brothers as I did long ago in the days of our resistance in Beirut. This does not mean that I endorse the new government which seized power in Lebanon two days ago, in which pro-Iranian proxies have eliminated plurality of representation in an attempt to co- opt the Revolution and subvert democracy, and which the people will resist.
Nor is America merely the plutocratic fist within the Israeli glove, acting solely from greed and commercial interests to control the strategic resource of oil. Indeed, many of us see ourselves as inheritors and agents of the historic mandate to export the American Revolution, storming the gates of our prisons to bring freedom and equality to all humankind. And primary in this is the principle of freedom of conscience and of faith, that no government may use coercion in matters of faith or in our autonomy and direct personal relationship with the Infinite.
The difference between ally and nemesis, between a nation or any social group as a force of tyranny and authoritarian control or on the reverse side of the coin that of resistance and liberation, is often in how one uses or redirects that force.
In the struggle of good and evil in the human heart and in the public sphere of nations and of history, that which limits us is evil. Efforts by the state to put us in a box of rules severs our connections with each other and with the Infinite, and disfigures the soul by limiting our possibilities for authentic being, which we must each discover for ourselves.
He who stands between the Infinite and each of us serves neither.
September 16 2023 Revolt Against Theocracy and Institutionalized Patriarchal Sexual Terror in Iran: Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Mahsa Ahmini
Mass Protests in Iran and throughout the world on this anniversary of the martyrdom of Mahsa Ahmini in the cause of liberty and women’s rights of bodily autonomy
After more than three years of revolutionary struggle in Iran against the rule of the mullahs, larger than anything seen since the 1979 overthrow of the Shah over forty years ago which brought the Shiite theocracy into power and includes massacres of hundreds of protestors but also open battle in Shiraz and other major cities between the government’s forces of repression and the people of Iran united in the cause of liberty, that no government may stand between man and God nor enforce compulsion in matters of faith, a re-energized democracy revolution brings the theocracy near its fall in the wake of the government’s scandal of murder and failed coverup.
Mahsa Ahmini is all of us, and we may read our future in her fate should we fail to act in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights. In Iran and in America and throughout the world, forces of change are gathering as we refuse to abandon each other.
Comes the whirlwind, and with it escape from the legacies of our history and a reimagination and transformation of the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of September 20 2022, Revolt Against Patriarchy and Theocracy, Not In America This Time But In Iran; In glorious defiance of state sexual terror and patriarchal theocracy, the women of Iran have seized the streets in mass protests throughout the nation and challenged the fearsome and brutal Revolutionary Guards and morality police in several direct actions, a protest movement which may become a general revolt.
Iran is still shaken and destabilized by the echoes and reflections of the near-revolution in its vassal state of Iraq, and as in the chaos of the Battle of Shiraz in December of 2019 in which I fought, mass action provides windows of opportunity in which to bring a reckoning to police and other enforcers of tyranny and to the hegemonic elites whose wealth, power, and privilege they serve, but while we failed to cast those who would enslave us down from their thrones on that occasion three years ago, this time may be different.
For this time we have a martyr, and one who was a member of the Kurdish people, a semi-autonomous nation with vast oil wealth, American and other international support, a dream of independence and a modern army to win it with, and famous for her women warriors and the social equality of genders.
I hope this will be enough to tip the balance; from the moment of Mahsa Amini’s death, the democracy movement against theocracy and patriarchy in Iran has become linked with the independence struggle of Kurdistan as parallel and interdependent forms of liberation struggle.
Patriarchy cannot survive if half of humankind refuses to be unequal to and subjugated by the other half.
The secret of force and control is that it is hollow and brittle; authority loses its legitimacy simply by being disbelieved, and force finds its limit in disobedience and refusal to submit.
As I wrote on the occasion of a previous visit to Iran to make mischief for tyrants in my post of December 2 2019, Battle of Shiraz: the democratic revolution against theocracy in Iran is now an open war; For two weeks beginning Friday November 15 through Monday December 2, Iran’s major city of Shiraz was engulfed in open war as the democracy revolution against the theocratic rule of the mullahs moves into the stage of direct challenge of its military and other tools of state control.
By the count of the neighborhood militia leaders who have now organized themselves into a kind of rebel government, there are 52 or 53 dead among the citizens killed by the police and military throughout Shiraz, plus nine killed in the intense fighting in the Sadra district in which an elite revolutionary unit, myself among them, directly attacked the fortress of the region’s chief mullah on Sunday November 17.
What began as a peaceful protest and a shutdown of the city by abandoning cars in the streets turned quickly to open battle after police shot and killed Mehdi Nekouyee, a 20 year old activist, without cause. Soon armed bands of laborers stormed the police station he was killed in front of, leaving it in flames and marching on other government strongpoints as their ranks swelled.
Throughout the next three days the luxury shopping district on Maliabad Boulevard was largely destroyed, some 80 bank branches and several gas stations set on fire. The Qashqai minority of Turkic nomads and weavers who in Shiraz are an important mercantile polity declared independence and repelled successive waves of attacks by heavy weapons units and helicopter assault cavalry against their outlying district of Golshan. As they are a people virtually unknown to the outside world, I’ve included some pictures.
But the most important revolutionary action of November in Iran was the seizure of the chief mullah of Shiraz and his palace-fortress. An action whose meaning is central to the motives and binding purpose of the secularists who are fighting for democracy and to liberate Iran from the autocratic regime of the mullahs, this was a glorious victory which exposes the hollowness of theocratic rule.
Widely regarded as corrupt, nepotistic, and xenophobic patriarchs, the mullahs, like Catholic priests, were once sacrosanct from personal responsibility and protected by a perceived mantle of piety; so the primary mission of the revolution is to expose their venality and the perversion and injustice of their rule. A task made hideously easy in this case by the pervasive network of pedophile sex trafficking authorized by the mullahs and a major source of trackable income in the form of licenses they sell for temporary “pleasure marriages” in which consent is an imprecise concept. And that’s just one visible part of the vast iceberg of greed and immorality of their regime.
In Iran, the fight for democracy and freedom is also a fight against the patriarchy.
As I wrote in my post of October 13 2022 Embrace What You Fear and Be Free: Case of the Resistance Against Patriarchy in Iran and America; A glorious resistance has swept the world as half of humankind refuses to submit to the authority and power of the other half, a revolt against Patriarchy and an evolutionary shift in consciousness which will transform our possibilities of becoming human; two stunning examples are the mass protests in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the face of brutal repression, murder, torture, and mind control in Soviet-model psychiatric prisons, and the electoral fight for bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and gender equality here in America.
The women of Iran and other theocratic patriarchies are fighting to free themselves from the same kinds of systemic dehumanization the Republicans are attempting to impose in America as subversion of democracy. We need only look to Iran and Afghanistan to see the fate which awaits us all if we do nothing to resist the weaponization of faith in service to power by those who would enslave us.
Here I question the use of fear by authority and how we may resist subjugation in revolutionary struggle through embrace of our fear as seizure of power.
Marina Warner explores the uses of fear in our topologies of authorized identities and their transgression as revolutionary struggle against internalized Patriarchal oppression in her marvelous and insightful No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock, which maps our Animus while its companion volume, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, does the same for our Anima; together some of the finest writing on the dyadic masculine and feminine forces of which human being is made.
Patriarchy is a system and structure of institutionalized sexual terror, one which authorizes identities of sex and gender. The intricacies and diabolical mechanisms of its operations and processes have been described in exhausting detail in the decades since Simone de Beauvoir’s founding work of 1949 The Second Sex; here I wish only to reference it as a system of fear with which all humankind must struggle for self-ownership, autonomy, and authenticity.
Our fears are signposts and anchorages of our shadow self, that which we must swallow but are loath to do, as Nietzsche said of the Toad which embodied his darkness, and which William S. Burroughs was cursed to bear as the avatar of a monstrous god. Feelings of disgust, revulsion, terror, violation, and seizure by the alien and the unclean; these are signs not of warning but of welcome to the secret truths of ourselves which we must discover and embrace.
Sometimes we must let our demons out to play.
As I wrote in my post of October 27 2022, Triumph of the Mahabad Autonomous Zone and the Free State of Kurdistan Over the State Terror of Iran’s Regime of Mullahs: the Iranian Revolution Against Theocracy and Patriarchy; We celebrate the triumph of the Mahabad Autonomous Zone and the Free State of Kurdistan, where the women of Kurdistan, Iran, and Iraq have together in solidarity against the Patriarchy and the state terror of theocracy won an island of liberty in a vast sea of darkness.
It is a darkness now being challenged in street fighting and open mass protests throughout Iran to overthrow the brutal regime and sexual terror of the mullahs in the restoration of a free society of equals, but also in Iraq and Afghanistan, a revolution of women as a slave caste which like America’s #metoo movement and the historic struggle for women’s rights of reproduction and bodily autonomy now being waged in our elections finds echoes and reflections worldwide as a tide of change.
It falls to each of us in this moment to choose a future for ourselves and for humankind, and stand in solidarity with the half of humanity enslaved and dehumanized by the other half; for men to abandon unequal power and the subjugation of women and to join their loved ones, mothers, sisters, partners, daughters, and friends in liberation struggle for a better future and a free society of equals, for the women of America and the women of Iran to unite in common cause and action with women everywhere, and for us all, wherever human beings hunger to be free, to act in solidarity as a United Humankind to free ourselves from the legacies of our history and from systems of oppression and unequal wealth, power, and privilege.
If we do this simple thing, act in solidarity for the liberty of us all, those who would enslave us will fail. Force and control are fragile when authority has no legitimacy and is disbelieved, and when orders are disobeyed. Disbelieve, disobey, and refuse to submit, and we become Unconquered and free.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
December 8 2022 The Women of Iran Bring a Reckoning to Patriarchy and Theocratic Sexual Terror
The people of Iran have seized their power in a glorious General Strike in support of mass actions of liberation struggle against patriarchy and theocracy throughout the nation, a resistance which has become a regional democracy movement which began as a protest by the women of Iran against the legal right of men to hunt and kill them for refusing to submit to their authority and wear its symbol the hijab, a faceless black shroud of living death and depersonalization.
What kinds of patriarchal sexual terror, dehumanization, enslavement, and chasms of evil does the hijab symbolize?
How did the institution of morality police in Islamic societies begin?
As written by Mustafa Akyol in New Lines Magazine, in an article entitled The Dubious Roots of Religious Police in Islam: The Islamic concept of ‘commanding the right and forbidding the wrong’ is applied across the Muslim world to curtail personal liberties and police morality, but this interpretation is questionable; “n Sept. 16, 2022, thousands of protesters poured into the streets of Iran chanting, “I will kill those who killed my sister.” They were referring to Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman arrested a few days earlier by Tehran’s “Gasht-e Ershad” (literally “guidance patrol,” also known as the “morality police”) on charges of insufficiently covering her hair. She died in detention, following blows to her head, with bruises on her corpse. The popular anger sparked by this atrocity soon turned into nationwide civil unrest, which is still ongoing at the time of writing, undertaken bravely by people from all walks of life, despite the brutal response by security forces.
Over the weekend, it was reported (or misreported) that Iran had decided to scrap its morality police, which would mark a major concession to the protest movement, if it were true. A number of Iranian analysts have since clarified these reports were likely misguided and Iranian state media has formally denied them.
But why does Iran have a “guidance patrol” in the first place? Is this institution really a requirement of Islam, as the Iranian regime claims? These questions are important for the future not only of Iran, but also the broader Muslim world, because Iran is not the only country which employs religious police: They are also active in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Malaysia and the Aceh Province of Indonesia. Their strictness may vary, but they all act on the assumption that Islamic religious requirements — as they define them — should be enforced by the state. Thus women should be forced to cover up, alcohol drinkers should be punished and “subversive” books must be banned. In the 1990s, during their first reign in Afghanistan, the Taliban movement went as far as destroying all musical instruments (and punishing their players), chess boards and even kites. Today, back in power for the second time, they claim to be milder but the observable differences are minimal. No wonder female university students in Afghanistan, who are forbidden to receive an education if they do not wear a full-body cover, or burqa, chant the same slogans as the protestors in Iran: “Woman, life, freedom!”
Meanwhile, in many other Muslim countries from the Arab world to Pakistan, there may be no distinct religious police per se, yet the regular police — or its “adaab” (decency) units — still inspect and punish religious misdeeds, such as dancing “seductively” on TikTok or eating or drinking in public during daylight hours in the holy month of Ramadan.
To many Muslims living in the West, especially those accustomed to civil liberties, all these religious dictates often seem baffling. What is the point of any religious practice, many may think, if it is not freely chosen? They might also recall the oft-quoted phrase from the Quran, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256) and conclude that any compulsion in religion must therefore be a deviation from the “real Islam.” Yet to question religious coercion in Islam requires a much deeper discussion, because its advocates have long justified it with two authoritative references: the Quranic duty of “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong” and the institution known as the “hisba.”
Let’s begin with the Quran. Variations of the phrase (or references to the concept of) “al-amr bi-l-maaruf wa-n-nahy ani-l-munkar” (“commanding the right and forbidding the wrong”) appear in eight separate verses (3:104, 3:110, 3:114, 7:157, 9:71, 9:112, 22:41, 31:17), either as a feature of true believers or a duty incumbent upon them. The first of these verses, 3:104, is probably the most definitive, as it calls for a specific group to carry out the duty: “Let there arise out of you a band of people inviting to all that is good, enjoining what is right, and forbidding what is wrong: they are the ones to attain felicity.”
It is on the basis of this verse that Saudi Arabia’s religious police, popularly known as the “mutawa,” call themselves the “Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.” (Since 2016, their powers have been curbed, but by royal decree rather than religious reform per se, and only as an excuse for deepening authoritarianism on the political side.) Similarly, the Taliban has its “Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.” The Iranian “guidance patrol,” too, is based on Article 8 of the Iranian Constitution, which proclaims the same concept of “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong” to be “a universal and reciprocal duty.”
Yet there is a crucial question that all these religious police forces appear to have answered all too quickly: What is “right” and what is “wrong”? How do we know? Who decides it? And do these interpretations of religion really correspond to all the religious commandments and prohibitions of Islam?
These questions are pertinent, not least due to the terminology found in the Quran. The word used for the “right” that is to be “commanded” is “maaruf,” which literally means “the known,” implying conventional ethical norms. The concept existed well before Islam, as pre-Islamic Arabs used the term maaruf for commonly known ethical values, such as gentleness and charitableness. Hence the Arab lexicographer Ibn Manzur (d. 1312) defined maaruf as “things that people find beneficial, likable.” Its opposite, “munkar,” he defined as abhorrent things that offend human conscience.
Due to this elusiveness of vice and virtue, there emerged different views in the early centuries of Islam about the duty, as examined by Michael Cook, whose 700-page book, “Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought,” is the most comprehensive study on the topic. As Cook notes, the earliest commentators on the Quran did not necessarily interpret the duty as religious policing. Instead, some understood it “as simply one of enjoining belief in God and His Prophet.” One such commentator was Abu al-Aliya (died 712 CE), who was among the “tabiun,” or the first generation after the direct companions of the Prophet Muhammad, who reportedly described the duty as “calling people from polytheism to Islam and … forbidding the worship of idols and devils.” A little later, Muqatil ibn Sulayman (died 767 CE), whose three-volume book is one of the oldest commentaries on the Quran, similarly defined the duty in limited terms. For him, “commanding the right” meant “enjoining belief in the unity of God,” whereas forbidding wrong meant “forbidding polytheism.”
A political interpretation of “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong” also emerged in the early centuries of Islam. In this view, the duty primarily involved speaking out against tyrants and even launching rebellions against them. In fact, as Cook observes, “it was quite common in the early centuries of Islam for rebels to adopt forbidding wrong as their slogan.” Among the advocates of this stance were the rationalist Mutazilites, who blamed their traditionalist opponents for preaching that “obedience is due to whoever wins, even if he is an oppressor.”
This idea of quietist political obedience was indeed established by certain hadiths, or narrations attributed to the prophet. “He who insults a ruler,” one of them read, “Allah will insult him.” Another one ruled: “Listen to the ruler and carry out his orders; even if your back is flogged and your wealth is snatched.” With such guidelines, the Hanafi scholar Imam al-Tahawi (died 933 CE) in his widely accepted statement of the Sunni creed, wrote, “We do not permit rebellion against our leaders or those in charge of our public affairs even if they are oppressors.” There was also a legitimate rationale beneath this doctrine: Early civil wars in Islam, caused by rebellions, had proven disastrous. But seeking peace only in obedience — as long as the ruler upheld the basic tenets of Islam — built an authoritarian political culture that has endured in the Sunni world to the present day.
On the one hand, then, “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong” proved to be a politically modest duty in Sunni Islam. On the other, it was fervently enforced against sinners and heretics. The Hanbalis, who were often the most hardline Sunnis, were the leading example.
In the 10th and 11th centuries in Baghdad, the Hanbalis became notorious for plundering shops or homes to seek and destroy wine bottles, breaking musical instruments or chess boards, challenging men and women who walked together in public and disrupting Shiite practices.
Conceptually, this full-scale religious imposition was accompanied by the equation of “maaruf” (the known good) with all the commandments of the Sharia. The third-century Sunni Quranic exegete al-Tabari reflected this view when he argued, in Cook’s paraphrasing, “‘commanding right’ refers to all that God and His Prophet have commanded, and ‘forbidding wrong’ to all that they have forbidden.” In other words, the duty required the enforcement of all piety, and the punishment of all impiety, at least in public eyes. (The privacy of the home, meanwhile, was generally respected, thanks to the Quranic directives against spying and entering homes without permission.)
To get a sense of this expansion of enforcement, one needs to look at the very beginning of the story: the Quran. It decrees many commandments to its believers, and expects obedience from them out of their belief in God and hope for salvation in the afterlife — not out of any earthly coercive measure.
For example, believing in God is the very first commandment of Islam, yet the Quran threatens unbelievers or apostates only with the wrath of God in the afterlife. Similarly, Muslims are commanded to pray and fast, and to abstain from drinking or gambling, but the Quran does not specify any punishment for violations of these commands. The Quran also orders Muslim women to dress modestly but, again, decrees no earthly consequence for those who don’t.
By contrast, the Quran does decree earthly punishments for five specific misdeeds, four of which later became enshrined in Islamic law as “al-hudud,” or “the boundaries” of God. These are murder or injury, banditry, theft, adultery and false accusations of adultery. All are to be punished corporally, as was the norm in the Quran’s historical context.
The pertinent question for our discussion is this: Why does the Quran penalize theft but not, say, giving up prayer? The Quran itself gives us no answer. But we can reasonably infer the difference: Theft is a punishable crime, in almost every society, because it violates another person’s rights. Prayer, on the other hand, is a private connection between a person and God, which harms no other person when it is not performed. (The same is true, in fact, for all matters of faith and worship. As Thomas Jefferson once put it, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”)
Yet the Quran was only the beginning of Islamic law. In the first few centuries that followed it, the scope of earthly punishments grew dramatically, often based on hadiths, most of which came from solitary reports (as opposed to widely transmitted ones) and were hence open to doubt. (Apostasy became a capital crime, for example, due to the report, “Whomever changes his religion, kill him.”) Almost all religious commandments also turned into enforceable laws, due to the latter-day interpretation of “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong.”
This was how giving up the daily prayers, for example, became a grave crime, as the prominent 11th-century jurist al-Mawardi explained in his book, “al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyyah” (“Ordinances of Government”), a standard Sunni text on Islamic political theory:
If the person abandons [the prayer], claiming that it is not an obligation, then he is a nonbeliever; and the same ruling as that governing the apostate applies—that is, he is killed for his denial, unless he turns for forgiveness. If he has not done it because he claims it is too difficult to do, but while acknowledging its obligation, then the jurists differ as to the ruling: Abu Hanifa considers that he should be beaten at the time of every prayer, but that he is not killed; Ahmad ibn Hanbal and a group of his later followers say that he becomes a kafir by his abandoning it, and is killed for this denial … Al-Shafiʿi considers… he is not put to death until he has been asked to turn in repentance … If he refuses to make repentance, and does not accept to do the prayer; then he is killed for abandoning it—immediately, according to some, after three days, according to others. He is killed in cold blood by the sword, although Abu’ Abbas ibn Surayj says that he is beaten with a wooden stick until he dies.
What about fasting in the holy month of Ramadan? Al-Mawardi wrote that the Muslim who refuses to fast “is not put to death,” but is still “given a discretionary punishment to teach him a lesson.” Such punishments in Islamic law, called “tazir,” meaning discretionary rules set by the authorities rather than scripture, typically included lashes or short prison sentences.
Who were the authorities responsible for implementing these laws? There were courts ruled by qadis, or judges, but they did not go after lawbreakers themselves. The latter task, which al-Mawardi described as “one of the fundamental matters of the religion,” was called “hisba,” to be carried out by “those who do hisba,” or the “muhtasibs.” While the duty of “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong” was incumbent on all Muslims, it was these state-appointed officials who physically enforced the rules.
What, then, is hisba? Among the many meanings cited by Ibn Manzur, the word implies enforcing and managing limits, as well as sufficiency, monitoring and reckoning. Both classical and contemporary Muslim sources define it as a kind of law enforcement, established by the prophet. However, when we look carefully into the prophetic practice, we see something rather different from religious policing: market inspection.
The marketplace was a fundamental institution in nascent Islam, thanks to the fact that many of the first Muslims, including the prophet himself, were longtime merchants. No wonder that, soon after settling in Medina after his historic hijra (migration) from Mecca, Muhammad designated a spot in the city, declaring: “This is your market, let it not be narrowed, and let no tax be taken on it.” He also began frequenting the market in person to prohibit any fraudulent practices, which the Quran rebuked severely in a number of verses.
This is also why the prophet appointed some of his companions to oversee the market and prevent the occurrence of fraud. Interestingly, one of these inspectors was reportedly a woman named Samra bint Nuhayk al-Asadiyya — a notable example of the prominent public roles played by early Muslim women. A few decades later, the Caliph Umar also appointed a woman, al-Shifa bint Abd Allah, in addition to three men, to oversee the Medinan market.
In the first century of Islam, these market inspectors were called “aamil al-suq,” or “overseer of the market.” In Muslim Spain, they were also called “sahib al-suq,” or “master of the market.” Their functions were described by the Cordoban scholar Yahya ibn Umar (died 901 CE), who wrote about “the orderly running of the marketplace, particularly with regard to weights, measures and scales.” Significantly, he did not mention any religious policing.
Yet the latter function would soon appear. As the historian Abbas Hamdani observed, while “in his previous role as sahib al-suq, the market inspector had mainly material, not spiritual considerations,” a shift later took place. “In the late ninth century, we find that the office of the market inspector begins to be regarded as a religious office and the inspector is now called muhtasib, a person who takes count of the right and wrong deeds of the people and brings them to book.”
This dual function of the muhtasib was also observed by the historian Yassine Essid, who wrote:
In reading the different treatises devoted to the hisbah we discover two categories of responsibilities, or rather, we find ourselves looking at two different figures: the censor of morals who breaks musical instruments, pours out wine, beats the libertine and tears off his silken clothing, and the modest market provost, a man who controls weights and measures, inspects the quality of the foods on sale, ensures that the markets are well supplied.
As time went on, religious policing even became the principal duty of the muhtasib, whereas market supervising turned trivial. This was evident in “The Revival of Religious Sciences,” the highly influential book by the Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (died 1111 CE), one of the towering scholars of the Sunni tradition. Al-Ghazali wrote a whole chapter on hisba, which he defined as “prevent[ing] an evildoing for the sake of God’s right in order to safeguard the prevented from committing sin.” Thus, everything that is considered sin is to be targeted, from drinking wine to leaving prayer. In retribution for such acts, al-Ghazali proposed “direct” punishments, such as “breaking the musical instruments, spilling over the wine, and snatching the silk garment from him who is wearing it.”
Al-Ghazali also justified “hisba against the religious innovations,” meaning heresies. This was, in fact, even “more important than against all the other evildoings.”
In short, hisba, which began under Muhammad with the limited function of market inspection, turned only much later into full-fledged religious coercion — against not only impieties, but also heresies.
Yet wouldn’t religious coercion infringe on an Islamic value, also cherished by pious scholars such as al-Ghazali himself: the sincerity of intentions behind acts of worship? What would be the value of prayer, for example, if it were performed only out of fear of the muhtasib, not fear of God? And if the suppression of heresy were justified, would this not lead to endless religious conflict among Muslims, since one sect’s “heresy” was another’s true faith?
These questions appear to have been asked only rarely in the classical age of Islamic civilization, though there were a few scholars who noticed the problem with coercion.
One was the Ottoman Hanafi-Sufi scholar Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi (died 1731), who was troubled by the Istanbul-based Kadizadeli movement, a zealous religious group that created much disturbance in 17th-century Ottoman society. Influenced by Ibn Taymiyya (died 1328), the prominent Hanbali scholar, these were puritans who blamed the Ottomans’ decline on “innovations” in Islam, such as Sufi orders that used religious music, “rational sciences” such as philosophy and mathematics, and perceived social vices such as coffee and tobacco, which had become quite popular across the empire. For a while, the Kadizadelis influenced Sultan Murad IV, who destroyed all the coffeehouses in Istanbul and executed tobacco smokers, not to mention wine drinkers. (Ironically, he himself was a heavy drinker, who died of cirrhosis at the age of 27.) In the late 17th century, the Kadizadeli militancy would decline, but not totally vanish.
Al-Nabulsi patiently argued against these puritans in his book, “al-Hadiqa al-Nadiyya” (“The Dew-Moistened Garden”). First, he opposed the conflation of “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong” with hisba, which had become the standard view since al-Ghazali. In al-Nabulsi’s view, the duty was only a “matter of the tongue,” with no enforcement. In return, people could either heed the advice or not — it was their choice, because “There is no compulsion in religion.” According to Cook, this reference by al-Nabulsi to Quran 2:256 may be the very first use of this verse against coercion in Islam. Traditionally, it had been cited only to rule out forced conversions to Islam of Jews, Christians or others.
Al-Nabulsi also referred, in a letter, to a Quranic verse often downplayed by religious enforcers: “You who believe, you are responsible for your own souls; if anyone else goes astray it will not harm you so long as you follow the guidance.” (5:105) The lesson, al-Nabulsi argued, is that instead of judging others, Muslims would be better off spending time examining their own souls.
Al-Nabulsi also deconstructed the ostensible piety of the Kadizadelis. Zealots of their kind set out to command and forbid, he argued, in Cook’s paraphrasing, “because they crave an ego trip, or see it as a way to establish a role of power and dominance in society, or to gain the attention of important people.” Beneath their claims to righteousness, in other words, lay only self-righteousness.
Another Ottoman scholar, the famous polymath Katip Çelebi (died 1657), had also seen Kadizadeli militancy even more closely, and minced no words against it. In his book, “Mîzânü’l-Hak,” or “The Balance of Truth,” he wrote:
“The most noble Prophet used to deal kindly and generously with his community. The arrogant men of later time, not seeing the disgrace of running counter to him, label some of the community as infidels, some as heretics, some as profligates, for trifling reasons … They bring the people to the grievous state of fanaticism, and cause dissension. Ordinary folk know nothing of these rules and conditions; thinking that it is obligatory in every case to enjoin right and forbid wrong, they quarrel and are pertinacious with one another. The baseless wrangling in which they engage, with stone-like stupidity, sometimes leads to bloodshed. Most fighting and strife between Muslims arises from this cause.”
Today, almost four centuries later, it is remarkable to read this sharp critique by Katip Çelebi. It is also sad, because it remains true today that “most fighting and strife between Muslims arises from this cause,” which is religious zealotry and coercion. Various Islamic regimes or parties, from West Africa to Southeast Asia, struggle with each other, and with secular forces, to “command the right and forbid the wrong,” in the narrow way they define it. In the meantime, they hardly make anyone more faithful or pious, if that is really their goal. On the contrary, as seen in Iran today, in the hijabs defiantly burned by the women on whom they are imposed, they only make people lose respect for Islam.
As such, I believe the way forward for Islamic civilization lies in divorcing “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong” from religious coercion. Sure, in any society, certain things have to be coercively “commanded,” such as honesty in trade, or “forbidden,” such as theft, murder or oppression. These are literally maaruf, in terms of being “known” to all humanity as common sense. But how people believe in God and worship him are matters of their own conscience, which should be left to their private minds to freely determine.
While this argument may sound to some like a big “innovation” in Islam, it has firm roots in the earliest interpretations of the Quranic duty of “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong,” and in fact aligns with the original meaning of hisba. It is also strongly grounded in the Quranic dictum rightly expounded by al-Nabulsi: “There is no compulsion in religion.” Properly understood, this means there should really be no compulsion in religion. People should be at liberty to practice it, or not, based on their sincere convictions and free choices.”
Iran, a reading list
As chosen by myself as a scholar of the Naqshbandi Order of Sufism and literate in Classical Persian
Women’s Voices
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Azar Nafisi
Death is the ultimate life disruptive event, the mirror image of Chaos as creative force and the adaptive potential of a system. This day I have re-enacted the stages of grief process as I relive an event of 2021, caught in the labyrinth of its story, and as always with such complexes of memory, history, and identity I emerge through its passage with changed perspective.
Some stories can shatter our lives, but also free us from the legacies of history and the limits of our former selves.
This is a story which has become interwoven with my annual reading of Sartre’s works in celebration of his birthday, a juxtaposition which I find wholly appropriate, illuminating, and strangely hopeful.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
We choose our friends and lovers from among those reflections which embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves or fully integrate into our consciousness and personality; and it is the interface between these two bounded realms, the Ideal and the Real, which I am driven to interrogate today.
Here is where the art of questioning lives, at the intersection of Socratic method and classical rhetoric, the dialectics of history, and the problematization of our motives, feelings, and processes of ideation through the methods of psychotherapy.
We speak of the juxtaposition of imaginal and actual realms of being as a form of Dadaist collage as pioneered by Tristan Tzara and instrumentalized as methodology by William S. Burroughs which creates the universe of our experience, of the discontiguous, relative, ambiguous, and ephemeral nature of truth described by Akutagawa in Rashomon Gate and the methods of fiction exemplified by Raymond Queneau as applied to identity and self construal, and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty as dyadic forces of the psyche which work themselves out through our relationships with ourselves and with others. These three parallel and interdependent processes shape who we become, and how we instrumentalize others in our self creation.
We must first own the fact that dealing with our memories of someone is not the same as the lived experience of our history; it is all one sided and has been moved into an interior space of performance, and in which reimagination and transformation is ongoing. The map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski teaches us, nor is our idea of a person equal to the actual person themselves.
What parts of myself do I embody as a figural space into which to grow in the character whom I have thought of as Cleopatra, with all of the ambivalence, power, legacies of cultural history, and liminality such an identification implies, how do I imagine her now, and what kind of story have I cast us in?
I think of her now in terms of Rachel McAdams’ wily, sophisticated, and transgressive Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, as she became throughout the twelve years of our work in liberation struggle for the independence and sovereignty of Palestine, with elements of Millie Bobby Brown’s fearless, brilliant, and utterly without boundaries Enola Holmes as she began, bearing onward the colours of a beloved and presumed martyred family member in the course of investigating his disappearance. I am reasonably certain that this is not how she saw herself.
For illumination as to how a Palestinian woman might imagine herself, the characters she may choose to play as role models and the stories she may embody as ritual enactments, even a highly unusual one such as she, we may look to the wonderfully rich culture of Palestine’s female film directors and authors; of auteurs Annemarie Jacir, Maysaloun Hamoud, Mai Masri, and Farah Nabulsi, and of novelists Susan Abulhawa, Liana Badr, Ghada Karmi, Sahar Khalifeh, Hala Alyan, and Sahar Mustafah.
Bearing in mind that all such reading lists are nothing less than a set of authorized identities. As Margaret Atwood so splendidly demonstrates in her works, our intertexts are primary in the construction of our identities, including those of sex and gender, as mimesis and as dialectical processes of history.
And this is where it never ceases to be fascinating, the study of human being, meaning, and value and the limitless possibilities of becoming human. For in the sphere of our relationships with others, parallel and interdependent with our relationships between the masculine and feminine halves of our psyche, each co-evolves with the other in recursive processes of growth and adaptation to change in the construction of identity.
I say again; we interpret the actions of others and form relationships on the basis of our self-construal and ideas of ourselves, and we use our relations with real people to shape who we wish to become.
How does this work out in real life? As a personal example of the discontiguous gaps of meaning in the interfaces between bounded realms of masculine and feminine personae, a free space of creative play, I offer the artifacts of memory of a figure which may or may not align with the martyr I know only by her Code Name: Cleopatra.
Of the Last Stand in which we met and forged an alliance, betrayed and caught in a trap which we turned against our enemies who had trapped themselves in with us, which I think of as the final battle scene in the film Mr & Mrs Smith, this operatic quest was set in motion by the conflict of dominion between Hamas and al Qaeda in Gaza during August of 2009, during which the forces of light prevailed over those of darkness in the victory of Hamas, with Israel playing each against the other through infiltration agents, spies, deniable assets, and use of a special Recon team masquerading as various Arab factions to commit atrocities against presumed rival Arab groups in a classic policy of divide and conquer, as Israel did in the tragedy of October 7 as a casus belli for the imperial conquest of Palestine and genocide of her people and continues to do in the Gaza War. This space of play was complicated by clan vendettas such as hers, and the usual political and religious fragmentation, crime syndicates, mercenary forces, tribalism, corruption, and the shadow wars of foreign states.
Our paths crossed several times over the next twelve years, always in memorable circumstances, sometimes as allies and others as rivals, often as both. Which of these is the real and true version of her, or of myself? Such iterations of our images are without number, like the captured and distorted selves in funhouse mirrors aligned to reflect into Infinity.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I contrast with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. Islam itself is a form of this sacred duty, for the faithful are commanded to learn throughout their whole lives, no matter the source or where it leads; the most radical position regarding truth and universal education of any faith I know of, especially when contrasted with the contemporaneous Christian burning of books. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, evil genius of the C.I.A.’s Counterintelligence Service on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are embodied violence and houses of illusion.
The Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat uses the phrase, in a story about the creation of a fictitious officer bearing documents designed to trick the Nazis into preparing for the invasion of Europe somewhere other than Sicily, a case of which I had read long ago become a series I watched with rapt attention because each of us is created by our stories exactly like this false identity attached to the body of a derelict. Within each of us, a team of authors, echoes of ancestors encoded as stories in our flesh as well as archetypes and transpersonal figures both mythic and historical like the anima which concerns us here, create our personae through stories, a network of memories, histories, and identity; and they do so for their own purposes, which we do not always control or understand.
As T. S. Eliot has written in Gerontin, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities”
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as Shakespeare teaches us in Act IV, Scene 1 of The Tempest, a line spoken by Ariel. For if we are ephemeral and insubstantial beings, constructions of our stories, this also means that the ontological nature of human being is a ground of struggle which can be claimed by seizures of power.
The first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; 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.
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?
As I wrote in my post of June 21 2021, The Hope of Humankind: On Becoming Autonomous Zones as Agents of Chaos and Transformative Change; A friend has written in despair of our significance and hope for the liberation of humankind, of the impactfulness of our lives and our struggles which balance the flaws of our humanity against the monstrous and vast forces of a system of dehumanization, falsification, and commodification; for to be human is to live in a state of existential crisis and struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Today is the birthday of Jean Paul Sartre, and so this event finds me reading once again his magnificent reimagination of Jean Genet in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr; Genet who set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982.
Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.
We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said “Fix bayonets?”
And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty nine years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the first of many Last Stands.
This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell with its iconic crack, I am broken open to the suffering of others and the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.
This morning I awoke to a call to identify the body of a friend missing and believed killed in Gaza by Israeli terrorists in the savage street fighting which followed the rocket attacks of last week, which I was unable to do; I searched for my friend in this sad and ruined form, like the skin of a wild thing which has sung itself utterly away, and could recognize nothing.
Where is my friend, agile, lithe, mercurial, fearless, insightful, quick and quick witted, who always had four scenarios running and three escape routes, who survived against impossible odds through improvisation and leveraging chaos, whose vision could discern true motives within the secret chambers of the human heart and play them like an instrument as songs of rapture and terror, who chameleon-like and protean could shift identities as needed and behind their masks move among her enemies unseen?
I never knew her true name; perhaps she no longer had one, as is true for so many of us who play the Great Game of futures and the possibilities of becoming human, a term popularized by Rudyard Kipling in the novel Kim. My own names are numberless as the stars, like those of an actor who has played multitudes of roles in films and theatres of many kinds.
She first entered my orbit during the victorious struggle of Hamas against al Qaeda for dominion of Gaza in August of 2009 in Rafah, an Egyptian Palestinian drawn into the maelstrom of war like countless others by family duty and vendetta.
Yet she said no to authority at great peril when she could have said yes and become a slave, stood in solidarity with others when she could have run; this was a choice, one which confers agency, autonomy, and self-ownership as a seizure of power in a limited and deterministic context. Refusal to submit is the primary human act, one which cannot be taken from us, wherein we become Unconquered and free, and able to liberate others.
So it is that we may escape the wilderness of mirrors in which we wander, a realm of lies and illusions, captured and distorted images, falsification and the theft of the soul. For the authentic self, the image which we seize and claim as our own, flies free of its mad circus of seductions and traps. Hence we achieve our true selves and form, in rapture and exaltation as beings of our own uniqueness.
Impossible that such grandeur could be reduced to its material form, like the abandoned shell of a fantastic sea creature which has grown beyond its limits and moved on, to realms unknown.
The lines spoken by Hamlet while holding the skull of his friend Yorick came unbidden to my thoughts; “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?”
For twelve years you danced with death, and danced away laughing, until today.
Farewell, my friend; I’ll see you in the eyes of the defiant ones, who bear your fire onward into the unknown, and with it I hope your laughter. Our successors will need both fire and laughter, if the future we win for them is to be equal to its price, and worth living in.
Our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus from which warriors arise; from each, multitudes. For we live on as echoes and reflections in the lives of others, in the consequences and effects of our actions, in the good we can do for others which gathers force over time, and in the meaning, value, and possibilities we create.
How can choosing death and freedom be better than submission to authority and its weaponization of fear and force?
My experience of accepting death in confronting force and violence finds parallels in the mock executions of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maurice Blanchot, and I’m not done challenging state terror and tyranny and forces of repression. I’m going to stand between people with guns and their victims in future, as I have many times in past, and here I find resilience among my motivating and informing sources; Sartre’s total freedom and authenticity won by refusal to submit, and Camus’ rebellion against authority which renders force meaningless when met by disobedience and restores our humanity from forces of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, give me the ability to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
And all who are mortal share these burdens with me. In this all who resist subjugation by Authority are alike as Living Autonomous Zones, bearing seeds of change; we can say with the figure of Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
We are all Nikolai Gogol’s hero in Diary of a Madman, caught in the wheels of a great machine he services, like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. But we know that we are trapped and enslaved, and we know how and why; we know the secrets of our condition which our masters would keep silent, and in refusing to be silent we can free ourselves and our fellows. This Michel Foucault called truth telling; a poetic vision of reimagination and sacred calling to pursue the truth which bears transformative power.
So here I offer all of you words of hope for moments of despair, the horror of meaninglessness, the grief of loss, and the guilt of survivorship.
Your voice has defied our nothingness, and resounds throughout the chasms of a hostile and dehumanizing world; gathering force and transformative power as it finds a thousand echoes, and begins to awaken refusal to submit to authority and to heal the pathology of our falsification and disconnectedness.
The voice of even one human being who bears a wound of humanity which opens him to the pain of others and who places his life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who in resistance to tyranny and terror, force and control, becomes unconquered and free, such a voice of liberation is unstoppable as the tides, an agent of reimagination and transformation which seizes the gates of our prisons and frees the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Despair not and be joyful, for we who are Living Autonomous Zones help others break the chains of their enslavement simply by condition of being as well as action; for we violate norms, transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, expose the lies and illusions of authority, and render the forces of repression powerless to compel obedience.
This is the primary revolutionary struggle which precedes and underlies all else; the seizure of ownership of ourselves from those who would enslave us.
Such is the hope of humankind.
Israel and America bedevil Palestine (The Temptation of St. Anthony)
Herein the idea of our universal human rights is abandoned and the lives of the powerless and the dispossessed fed into the machine of power, imperial and colonial dominion, and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege in service to those who would enslave us and steal our souls.
To a Zionist, only their fellow Jews are truly human; this is why they commit atrocities without mercy or remorse, and now with the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians define the limits of the human as once did the Nazis from whom they learned the wrong lessons.
But more terrible still is the amoral kleptocracy of America’s Trump regime and his Republican Party of Treason, White Supremacist Terror, Theocratic Patriarchal Sexual Terror, and plutocratic capitalism, which reduces us all to commodities, information to be profiteered, citizens to be changed into subjects, persons to become things, our stories, voices, and identities falsified through lies and illusions, dehumanized as things to be used in service to the power of those who claim to speak and act for us. For Republicans are the enemy of our humanity itself.
Today America has bombed Iran on the pretext of destroying imaginary nuclear weapons with real ones, joining Israel in her mad quest to conquer the whole of the Middle East so that Trump can build casinos on the graves of the Palestinians.
No words can embody this horror, nor Reckoning balance the scales of justice for this crime. Yet we must bear witness and bring a Reckoning, By Any Means Necessary, for those who respect no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
So I end now with the words underlined by Nelson Mandela in the Robben Island Bible, a dogeared copy of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, to authorize direct action against the Apartheid regime of South Africa, an act which began the final phase of revolutionary struggle and the historic victory and liberation from a regime of seemingly unstoppable force; Sic Semper Tyrannis.
All Resistance is War to the Knife, beyond all laws and all limits, for Nothing Is Forbidden under imposed conditions of struggle which include genocide and nuclear annihilation.
Sic Semper Tyrannis, for in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free, and nothing can take this victory and power of self determination from us.
Sic Semper Tyrannis; this I say three times that you will know it is true, as Lewis Carroll teaches us in The Hunting of the Snark.
“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice;
That alone should encourage the crew.
“Just the place for a Snark!–I have said it thrice;
What I tell you three times is true.”
Here Be Dragons; Negotiating the Interface Between Bounded Realms, a Study in Film and Literature: the Anima or Inner Woman of my Platonic Ideal Versus the Ghosts of Memory of a Lost Friend, Wherein the Discontiguous Boundaries of Identity Become a Space of Free Creative Play Among Unknowns
How I remember our meeting, betrayed and standing together against the world: Mr & Mrs Smith final gunfight scene
How I imagine her now:
Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes Montage to Britney Spears’ version of Bobby Brown’s My Perogative
Enola Holmes Montage to Fifth Harmony’s That’s My Girl
Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
21 يونيو 2024 نحن نوازن بين رعب العدم ومتعة الحرية الكاملة، وعيوب إنسانيتنا مع قوة الحب الفدائية، وانكسار العالم مع أملنا العبثي في الإمكانيات اللامحدودة لنصبح بشرًا: في عيد ميلاد سارتر ، وتأبين
الموت هو الحدث المدمر للحياة، وهو صورة طبق الأصل للفوضى كقوة إبداعية وإمكانات تكيفية للنظام. لقد قمت هذا اليوم بإعادة تمثيل مراحل عملية الحزن بينما أعيش من جديد حدثًا وقع في عام 2021، عالقًا في متاهة قصته، وكما هو الحال دائمًا مع مثل هذه التعقيدات من الذاكرة والتاريخ والهوية، أخرج من خلال مروره بمنظور متغير.
يمكن لبعض القصص أن تحطم حياتنا، ولكنها تحررنا أيضًا من إرث التاريخ وحدود ذواتنا السابقة.
هذه هي القصة التي أصبحت متشابكة مع قراءتي السنوية لأعمال سارتر احتفالا بعيد ميلاده، وهو تجاور أجده مناسبا تماما، ومضيئا، ومفعما بالأمل بشكل غريب.
ألسنا القصص التي نرويها عن أنفسنا، لأنفسنا وللآخرين؟
نحن نختار أصدقاءنا وعشاقنا من بين تلك التأملات التي تجسد الصفات التي نرغب في استيعابها في أنفسنا أو دمجها بالكامل في وعينا وشخصيتنا؛ وهي الواجهة بين هذين العالمين المحدودين، المثالي والواقعي، والتي أنا مدفوع لاستجوابها اليوم.
هنا يعيش فن التساؤل، عند تقاطع المنهج السقراطي مع البلاغة الكلاسيكية، وجدلية التاريخ، وإشكالية دوافعنا ومشاعرنا وعمليات التفكير من خلال أساليب العلاج النفسي.
نحن نتحدث عن تجاور العوالم الخيالية والفعلية للوجود كشكل من أشكال الكولاج الدادائي الذي ابتكره تريستان تزارا واستخدمه ويليام س. بوروز كمنهجية تخلق عالم تجربتنا، الكون غير المجاور والنسبي والغامض والزائل. طبيعة الحقيقة التي وصفها أكوتاجاوا في بوابة راشومون وأساليب الخيال التي جسدها ريموند كوينو كما هي مطبقة على الهوية وتفسير الذات، وإضفاء المثالية على الجمال المذكر والمؤنث كقوى ثنائية للنفسية تعمل من خلال علاقاتنا مع أنفسنا ومعنا. آحرون. تشكل هذه العمليات الثلاث المتوازية والمترابطة هويتنا، وكيف نستخدم الآخرين في خلق أنفسنا.
يجب علينا أولاً أن نعترف بحقيقة أن التعامل مع ذكرياتنا عن شخص ما ليس مثل التجربة المعاشة لتاريخنا؛ كل ذلك من جانب واحد وتم نقله إلى مساحة داخلية للأداء، حيث تتواصل عملية إعادة التصور والتحول. الخريطة ليست الإقليم، كما يعلمنا ألفريد كورزيبسكي، ولا فكرتنا عن الشخص تساوي الشخص الفعلي نفسه.
ما هي الأجزاء من نفسي التي أجسدها كمساحة مجازية أنمو فيها في الشخصية التي فكرت بها على أنها كليوباترا، مع كل التناقض والقوة وموروثات التاريخ الثقافي والحدية التي ينطوي عليها هذا التحديد، كيف أتخيل؟ هي الآن، وما نوع القصة التي ألقيتنا فيها؟
أفكر بها الآن من حيث شخصية إيرين أدلر الماكرة والمتطورة والمتجاوزة لراشيل ماك آدامز في شيرلوك هولمز، كما أصبحت طوال اثني عشر عامًا من عملنا في النضال من أجل التحرير من أجل استقلال فلسطين، مع عناصر من شخصية ميلي بوبي براون الجريئة، رائعة، وبدون حدود تمامًا، إينولا هولمز كما بدأت، تحمل ألوان أحد أفراد العائلة المحبوبين والمفترض أنه شهيد أثناء التحقيق في اختفائه. أنا متأكد إلى حد معقول أن هذه ليست الطريقة التي رأت بها نفسها.
من أجل إلقاء الضوء على الكيفية التي يمكن أن تتخيل بها المرأة الفلسطينية نفسها، والشخصيات التي قد تختار لعبها كنماذج يحتذى بها والقصص التي قد تجسدها كتشريعات طقسية، حتى لو كانت غير عادية للغاية مثلها، قد ننظر إلى ثقافة فلسطين الغنية بشكل رائع المخرجات والمؤلفات السينمائيات في فلسطين؛ المؤلفون آن ماري جاسر، ميسلون حمود، مي المصري، فرح النابلسي، والروائيون سوزان أبو الهوى، ليانا بدر، غادة كرمي، سحر خليفة، هالة عليان، وسحر مصطفى.
مع الأخذ في الاعتبار أن جميع قوائم القراءة هذه ليست أقل من مجموعة من الهويات المعتمدة. وكما توضح مارغريت أتوود في أعمالها بشكل رائع، فإن تناصاتنا أساسية في بناء هوياتنا، بما في ذلك هويات الجنس والجندر، كمحاكاة وعمليات جدلية للتاريخ.
وهذا هو المكان الذي لا تتوقف فيه أبدًا عن روعة دراسة الإنسان والمعنى والقيمة والإمكانيات اللامحدودة ليصبح إنسانًا. لأنه في مجال علاقاتنا مع الآخرين، بالتوازي والمترابط مع علاقاتنا بين النصفين المذكر والمؤنث من نفسيتنا، يتطور كل منهما مع الآخر في عمليات متكررة من النمو والتكيف مع التغيير في بناء الهوية.
أقول مرة أخرى؛ نحن نفسر تصرفات الآخرين ونشكل العلاقات على أساس تفسيرنا لذاتنا
نفكر في أنفسنا، ونستخدم علاقاتنا مع الأشخاص الحقيقيين لتشكيل ما نرغب في أن نصبح عليه.
كيف يعمل هذا في الحياة الحقيقية؟ كمثال شخصي على فجوات المعنى غير المتجاورة في الواجهات بين العوالم المحدودة للشخصيات الذكورية والأنثوية، ومساحة حرة للعب الإبداعي، أقدم مصنوعات ذاكرة شخصية قد تتوافق أو لا تتوافق مع الشهيد الذي أعرفه فقط. باسمها الرمزي: كليوباترا.
من “المواجهة الأخيرة” التي التقينا فيها وشكلنا تحالفًا وخُدرنا ووقعنا في فخ انقلبنا عليه ضد أعدائنا الذين حاصروا أنفسهم معنا، والذي أعتقد أنه مشهد المعركة الأخير في فيلم السيد والسيدة سميث، بدأ هذا المسعى الأوبرالي بسبب صراع الهيمنة بين حماس وتنظيم القاعدة في غزة خلال شهر أغسطس من عام 2009، والذي انتصرت خلاله قوى النور على قوى الظلام في انتصار حماس، حيث لعبت إسرائيل كل منهما ضد الأخرى من خلال التسلل. عملاء وجواسيس وأصول يمكن إنكارها واستخدام فريق ريكون خاص متنكر في زي فصائل عربية مختلفة لارتكاب فظائع ضد الجماعات العربية المنافسة المفترضة في سياسة كلاسيكية فرق تسد، كما فعلت إسرائيل في مأساة 7 أكتوبر كسبب للحرب لـ الغزو الإمبراطوري لفلسطين والإبادة الجماعية لشعبها وما زالت تفعله في حرب غزة. كان مجال اللعب هذا معقدًا بسبب الثأر العشائري مثل انتقامها، والتشرذم السياسي والديني المعتاد، وعصابات الجريمة، وقوى المرتزقة، والقبلية، والفساد، وحروب الظل للدول الأجنبية.
لقد تقاطعت مساراتنا عدة مرات على مدى السنوات الاثنتي عشرة التالية، دائمًا في ظروف لا تُنسى، أحيانًا كحلفاء وأخرى كمنافسين، وفي كثير من الأحيان كلاهما. أي من هذه هي النسخة الحقيقية والحقيقية لها، أو لنفسي؟ مثل هذه التكرارات لصورنا لا حصر لها، مثل الذوات الملتقطة والمشوهة في مرايا المرح المصطفة لتنعكس في اللانهاية.
برية المرايا، عبارة من ت.س. إليوت جيرونتن، هو الذي أستخدمه لوصف مرض تزوير أنفسنا من خلال الدعاية والأكاذيب والأوهام، وإعادة كتابة التاريخ، وأسرار الدولة، والحقائق البديلة، والإيمان الاستبدادي الذي يلتهم الحقائق. وهذا يتناقض مع نقيضه، الصحافة وشهادة التاريخ باعتباره السعي المقدس للبحث عن الحقيقة. الإسلام نفسه هو شكل من أشكال هذا الواجب المقدس، فالمؤمنون مأمورون بالتعلم طوال حياتهم، بغض النظر عن المصدر أو المكان الذي يؤدي إليه؛ الموقف الأكثر تطرفًا فيما يتعلق بالحقيقة والتعليم الشامل لأي دين أعرفه، خاصة عند مقارنته بحرق الكتب المسيحية المعاصر. لقد جعلنا أنفسنا مزيفين من قبل أنظمة السلطة المهيمنة النخبوية مثل النظام الأبوي، ومن قبل أولئك الذين يريدون استعبادنا، من خلال الاستيلاء على قصصنا باعتبارها سرقة للروح.
جيمس أنجلتون، العبقري الشرير في خدمة مكافحة التجسس التابعة لوكالة المخابرات المركزية والذي بنى جون لو كاريه عليه شخصية جورج سمايلي، استخدم هذه العبارة بشكل سيئ السمعة بهذا المعنى أيضًا، وأصبحت عالمية في جميع أنحاء مجتمع الاستخبارات الذي شكله وأثر فيه خلال الحرب الثانية. الحرب العالمية وتداعياتها الحرب الباردة. في إشارة إلى السيرة الذاتية التي كتبها ديفيد مارتن عن نفسه بعنوان برية المرايا، وصفها أنجلتون بأنها “عدد لا يحصى من الحيل والخداع والحيل وجميع أدوات التضليل الأخرى التي تستخدمها الكتلة السوفيتية وأجهزة استخباراتها المنسقة لإرباك وتقسيم البلاد”. الغرب… مشهد مائع دائمًا حيث تندمج الحقيقة مع الوهم. وبطبيعة الحال، فإن كل ما نسبه إلى السوفييت كان صحيحًا بالنسبة له، ولوكالته، ولأميركا أيضًا، ولكل الدول، لأن الجميع عبارة عن عنف متجسد وبيوت من الوهم.
تستخدم Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat هذه العبارة، في قصة حول إنشاء ضابط وهمي يحمل وثائق مصممة لخداع النازيين للتحضير لغزو أوروبا في مكان آخر غير صقلية، وهي الحالة التي قرأت عنها منذ فترة طويلة أصبحت سلسلة لقد شاهدت باهتمام شديد لأن كل واحد منا خلقته قصصه تمامًا مثل هذه الهوية الزائفة المرتبطة بجسد مهجور. داخل كل واحد منا، فريق من المؤلفين والنماذج الأولية والشخصيات العابرة للشخصية مثل الأنيما التي تهمنا هنا، يخلقون شخصياتنا من خلال القصص وشبكة الذكريات والتواريخ والهوية؛ وهم يفعلون ذلك لأغراضهم الخاصة، التي لا نتحكم فيها أو نفهمها دائمًا.
وكما كتب ت.س. إليوت في جيرونتن: “بعد هذه المعرفة، أي مغفرة؟ فكر الآن
التاريخ لديه العديد من المقاطع الماكرة، والممرات المفتعلة
والقضايا، تخدع بالهمس بالطموحات،
يهدينا بالباطل”
نحن مادة تُصنع منها الأحلام، كما يعلمنا شكسبير في الفصل الرابع، المشهد الأول من «العاصفة»، وهي عبارة قالها آرييل. لأنه إذا كنا كائنات زائلة وغير جوهرية، نبني قصصنا، فإن هذا يعني أيضًا أن الطبيعة الأنطولوجية للإنسان هي أرض صراع يمكن الاستيلاء عليها من خلال الاستيلاء على السلطة.
السؤال الأول الذي يطرحه أ
لقصة هي، قصة من هذه؟
يبقى دائمًا الصراع بين القصص التي نرويها عن أنفسنا وتلك التي يرويها الآخرون عنا؛ الأقنعة التي نصنعها لأنفسنا وتلك التي صنعها لنا الآخرون.
هذه هي الثورة الأولى التي يجب علينا جميعا أن نقاتل فيها، النضال من أجل ملكية أنفسنا.
فمن سنصبح إذن؟ يسأل أنفسنا عن الأسطح والصور والأقنعة التي تتفاوض في كل لحظة حول حدودنا مع الآخرين.
تجيب عليها ذاتنا السرية، ذات الظلام والعاطفة، الذات التي تعيش خارج المرآة ولا تعرف حدودًا، غير مقيدة بالزمان والمكان، ولا نهائية في الإمكانيات؛ من تريد أن تصبح؟
كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 21 يونيو 2021 ، أمل البشرية: أن تصبح مناطق حكم ذاتي كوكلاء للفوضى والتغيير التحويلي ؛ لقد كتب صديق يأسًا من أهميتنا وأملنا في تحرير البشرية ، وتأثير حياتنا ونضالاتنا التي توازن عيوب إنسانيتنا ضد القوى الوحشية والواسعة لنظام التجريد من الإنسانية والتزوير والتسليع ؛ أن تكون إنسانًا يعني أن تعيش في حالة أزمة وجودية ونضال من أجل امتلاك أنفسنا.
اليوم هو عيد ميلاد جان بول سارتر ، ولذا وجدني هذا الحدث أقرأ مرة أخرى إعادة تخيله الرائع لجان جينيه في سانت جينيه: الممثل والشهيد ؛ جينيه الذي وضعني على طريق حياتي بقسم المقاومة في بيروت صيف 1982.
كان جنود الاحتلال قد أضرموا النار في المنازل في الشارع الذي أسكن فيه ، ودعوا الناس للخروج والاستسلام. كانوا يعصبون أعين أطفال من فعلوا ويستخدمونهم كدروع بشرية.
لم يكن لدينا أي سلاح آخر غير زجاجة الشمبانيا الفارغة التي انتهينا للتو من تناول وجبة الإفطار المكونة من كريب الفراولة ؛ سألت “أي أفكار؟” ، فهز كتفيه وقال “أصلح الحراب؟”
ثم أعطاني مبدأ العمل الذي عشت من خلاله تسعة وثلاثين عامًا حتى الآن ؛ “عندما لا يكون هناك أمل ، يكون المرء حراً في القيام بأشياء مستحيلة ، وأشياء مجيدة.”
سألني إذا كنت سأستسلم فقلت لا. ابتسم وقال: “ولن أفعل”. ولذا أقسمني على القسم الذي ابتكره في عام 1940 في باريس في بداية الاحتلال لمثل هؤلاء الأصدقاء الذين يمكن أن يجمعهم ، وقد أعيدت صياغته من القسم الذي كان قد أقامه كجندى. قال إنه أفضل شيء سرقه على الإطلاق ؛ “نقسم على ولائنا لبعضنا البعض ، أن نقاوم ولا نستسلم ، ولا نتخلى عن زملائنا.” لقد أصبحت الآن حاملًا لتقليدًا يتجاوز عمره الثمانين عامًا وصنعت في أكثر الصراعات المخيفة والأكثر رعبًا التي عرفها العالم على الإطلاق ، قبل وقت قصير من توقعي أن أحترق حيًا في الأول من بين العديد من المدرجات الأخيرة.
كانت هذه لحظة تزويري ، هذا القرار باختيار الموت على القهر ، ومنذ أن أصابني الجرس ، أدق الجرس. ومثل جرس الحرية بصدعه الأيقوني ، أنا منفتح على معاناة الآخرين وعيوب إنسانيتنا. كانت هذه أعظم هدية حصلت عليها على الإطلاق ، هذا التعاطف الناجم عن جرح مقدس ، ولن أتوقف أبدًا عن الدعوة إلى الحرية ، ولن أتردد في الرد لأنني قادر على الدعوة إلى التضامن مع الآخرين.
استيقظت هذا الصباح على اتصال هاتفي للتعرف على جثة صديق مفقود ويعتقد أنه قُتل في غزة على يد إرهابيين إسرائيليين في قتال الشوارع الوحشي الذي أعقب الهجمات الصاروخية الأسبوع الماضي ، وهو ما لم أستطع فعله ؛ لقد بحثت عن صديقي في هذا الشكل الحزين والمدمّر ، مثل جلد الشيء الوحشي الذي غنى بنفسه تمامًا ، ولم يستطع التعرف على أي شيء.
أين صديقي ، رشيق ، رشيق ، زئبقي ، شجاع ، ثاقب وسريع الذكاء ، الذي كان دائمًا لديه أربعة سيناريوهات قيد التشغيل وثلاثة طرق للفرار ، والذي نجا من الصعاب المستحيلة من خلال الارتجال والاستفادة من الفوضى ، والذي يمكن لرؤيته أن تميز الدوافع الحقيقية داخل الغرف السرية من قلب الإنسان ولعبها كآلة موسيقية مثل نشوة الطرب والرعب ، من الذي تشبه الحرباء والبروتين يمكن أن يغير الهويات حسب الحاجة وتتنقل وراء أقنعةها بين أعدائها غير المرئيين؟
لم أعرف اسمها الحقيقي قط. ربما لم يعد لديها واحدة ، كما هو الحال بالنسبة للكثيرين منا الذين يلعبون اللعبة الكبرى للمستقبل وإمكانيات أن يصبحوا بشرًا ، وهو مصطلح شاعه روديارد كيبلينج في رواية كيم. أسمائي لا تعد ولا تحصى كنجوم ، مثل أسماء الممثل الذي لعب أدوارًا عديدة في الأفلام والمسارح من أنواع عديدة.
دخلت فلكي لأول مرة خلال كفاح حماس المنتصر ضد القاعدة للسيطرة على غزة في أغسطس من عام 2009 في رفح ، وهي فلسطينية مصرية انجرفت إلى دوامة الحرب مثل عدد لا يحصى من الآخرين بسبب واجب الأسرة والثأر.
ومع ذلك ، قالت لا للسلطة في خطر كبير عندما كان بإمكانها أن تقول نعم وتصبح عبدة ، ووقفت متضامنة مع الآخرين عندما كان بإمكانها الركض ؛ كان هذا اختيارًا يمنح الوكالة والاستقلالية والملكية الذاتية كاستيلاء على السلطة في سياق محدود وحتمي. إن رفض الخضوع هو الفعل الإنساني الأساسي ، الذي لا يمكن أن يؤخذ منا ، حيث نصبح غير مقيدين وأحرارًا ، وقادرين على تحرير الآخرين.
لذلك قد نهرب من برية المرايا التي نتجول فيها ، عالم الأكاذيب والأوهام ، الصور الملتقطة والمشوهة ، التزييف وسرقة الروح. بالنسبة للذات الأصيلة ، فإن الصورة التي نلتقطها ونطالب بها على أنها صورنا ، تطير خالية من سيركها المجنون من الإغراءات والفخاخ. ومن هنا نحقق ذواتنا وشكلنا الحقيقيين ، في نشوة الطرب والتمجيد ككائنات فريدة من نوعها.
من المستحيل اختزال هذه العظمة إلى شكلها المادي ، مثل القشرة المهجورة لمخلوق بحري رائع نما إلى ما وراء حدوده وانتقل إلى عوالم غير معروفة.
جاءت السطور التي قالها هاملت بينما كان ممسكًا بجمجمة صديقه يوريك غير محظورة على أفكاري ؛ علقت هنا تلك الشفاه التي قبلتها ، ولا أعرف كيف كثيرًا. حيث يكون الإستهزاء بك الآن؟ الخاص بك gambols؟ أغانيك؟ ومضات الفرح الخاصة بك ، التي لن تضبط الطاولة على هدير؟ لا أحد الآن ، للسخرية من ابتسامتك؟ “
لمدة اثني عشر عاما رقصت مع الموت ورقصتي ضاحكة حتى اليوم.
الوداع يا صديقي. سأراكم في عيون التحدي ، الذين يحملون نيرانكم نحو المجهول ، ومعها أتمنى أن تضحكوا. سيحتاج خلفاؤنا كلا من النار والضحك ، إذا كان المستقبل الذي نربحه لهم هو أن يكون مساوياً لسعره ، ويستحق العيش فيه.
حياتنا مثل أسنان التنين التي زرعها في الأرض الأمير الفينيقي قدموس الذي نشأ منه المحاربون. من كل جموع. لأننا نعيش كأصداء وانعكاسات في حياة الآخرين ، في عواقب وتأثيرات أفعالنا ، في الخير الذي يمكننا فعله للآخرين الذي يجمع القوة بمرور الوقت ، وفي المعنى والقيمة والإمكانيات التي نخلقها.
كيف يكون اختيار الموت والحرية أفضل من الخضوع للسلطة وتسليحها بالخوف والقوة؟
تجربتي في قبول الموت في مواجهة القوة والعنف تجد أوجه تشابه في الإعدام الوهمي لفيودور دوستويفسكي وموريس بلانشو ، ولم أنتهي من تحدي إرهاب الدولة والاستبداد وقوى القمع. سأقف بين الأشخاص المسلحين وضحاياهم في المستقبل ، كما فعلت مرات عديدة في الماضي ، وهنا أجد مرونة بين مصادري المحفزة والمعلمة ؛ تم كسب الحرية الكاملة لسارتر برفضه الخضوع ، وتمرد كامو على السلطة الذي يجعل القوة بلا معنى عندما يقابلها العصيان ، يمنحني القدرة على شق طريقي للخروج من الأنقاض والقيام بموقف أخير آخر ، بعيدًا عن الأمل في النصر أو حتى البقاء على قيد الحياة. .
وجميع البشر الفانين يشاركونني هذه الأعباء. في هذا كل الذين يقاومون الاستعباد من قبل السلطة هم على حد سواء مناطق حية ذاتية الحكم ، تحمل بذور التغيير. يمكننا القول مع شخصية لوكي ؛ “انا أعاني الارهاق لتحقيق غاية مجيدة.”
نحن جميعًا بطل نيكولاي غوغول في يوميات رجل مجنون ، عالقون في عجلات آلة رائعة يخدمها ، مثل تشارلي شابلن في فيلمه Modern Times. لكننا نعلم أننا محاصرون ومستعبدون ، ونعرف كيف ولماذا. نحن نعرف أسرار حالتنا التي سيصمت أسيادنا ، وفي رفضنا الصمت يمكننا تحرير أنفسنا وزملائنا. هذا ميشيل فوكو دعا قول الحقيقة. رؤية شعرية لإعادة التخيل والدعوة المقدسة لمتابعة الحقيقة التي تحمل قوة تحويلية.
لذلك أقدم لكم جميعًا كلمات الأمل في لحظات اليأس ، والرعب من انعدام المعنى ، والحزن من الخسارة ، والشعور بالذنب من البقاء على قيد الحياة.
لقد تحدى صوتك العدم لدينا ، ويتردد صداه في جميع أنحاء فجوات عالم معادٍ وغير إنساني ؛ تجمع القوة والقوة التحويلية لأنها تجد ألف صدى ، وتبدأ في إيقاظ رفض الخضوع للسلطة وشفاء أمراض تزويرنا وانفصالنا.
صوت إنسان واحد يحمل جرحًا إنسانيًا يفتحه على ألم الآخرين ويضع حياته في الميزان مع أولئك الذين أسماهم فرانتس فانون معذبو الأرض ، والضعفاء والمحرومين ، والمسكومين والمسلمين. المموه ، الذين في مقاومة الاستبداد والإرهاب ، القوة والسيطرة ، يصبحون غير مقهرين وحررين ، صوت التحرير هذا لا يمكن إيقافه مثل المد والجزر ، عامل إعادة التخيل والتحول الذي يستولي على أبواب سجوننا ويحرر الإمكانيات اللامحدودة من أن يصبح إنسانًا.
لا تيأس وكن مبتهجًا ، لأننا نحن الذين نعيش في مناطق حكم ذاتي نساعد الآخرين على كسر قيود استعبادهم ببساطة بشرط أن يكونوا فعلًا ؛ لأننا ننتهك الأعراف ، ونتجاوز حدود المحرمات ، ونكشف أكاذيب وأوهام السلطة ، ونجعل قوى القمع عاجزة عن فرض الطاعة.
هذا هو النضال الثوري الأساسي الذي يسبق ويؤسس كل شيء آخر. الاستيلاء على ملكية أنفسنا من أولئك الذين يستعبدوننا.
هذا هو أمل البشرية.
The Scream, Munch
Jean Paul Sartre, on his birthday June 21
There is no literature without Sartre.
In our great quest to create ourselves and become free and independent beings throughout our lives, to test the limits of the human and grow beyond them into the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of being, meaning, and value, to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden as seizures of power and revolutionary struggle, and in our performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, we may look to Sartre among others as iconic figures of Liberty, for the terror of our nothingness in a universe without imposed meaning can be balanced with the joy of total freedom.
Sartre wrote for the Resistance fighters who must claw their way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, without hope of victory or even survival. If I have learned anything in my very long and strange life, it is that this describes all of us, every last one, for such is the defining human condition.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
One must read the novel Nausea, the play No Exit, the short story The Wall, the philosophical essay Being and Nothingness and its guide To Freedom Condemned, the lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, and his magnificent work of literary scholarship and iconography in which he creates a figure of the human ideal, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr.
Nausea begins his engagement with Heidegger’s “An Introduction to Metaphysics” which he read in 1935 and “Being and Time” read by Sartre in 1940-41, and Husserl as interpreted by Levinas, ongoing through the critical formative period between 1930, when he began writing it, and 1943, when he published Being and Nothingness. These are his primary sources in forging Existentialism; though his literary references are no less important. He prefaces the novel with a quote from Celine; “He is a fellow without any collective significance, barely an individual.”
In Saint Genet he reimagines the archetypal Trickster-Rebel figure of Romantic Idealism, subsuming Milton’s fallen angel and Nietzsche’s truth teller and herald of the death of God in Zarathustra into a Modernist Orphic myth in which Genet’s crimes, Absurdist mock Catholic rituals of deauthorization, subversion, delegitimation, and liberation, his Surrealist use of ecstatic trance and derangement of the senses as poetic vision, and his literary performances of self-reinvention provide a model for seizure of oneself as the primary human act of self-creation and autonomy. Here is a magisterial allegory of the praxis he sought to articulate for the values of Existentialism in Notebooks for an Ethics; he should have written it as fiction rather than essays, for he shows in Saint Genet with devastating clarity what is obscure in his telling.
Poor Genet; I mention once again that he was a friend of mine, for a few brief weeks of terror and hope which changed my life during the 1982 Siege of Beirut, for the man never escaped the angelic rebel Sartre made of him in this magnificent work, into which was poured all of Sartre’s own hopes and dreams for a better humankind in the terrible war against the Nazis.
Sartre wrote many beautiful and illuminating works, but Saint Genet is his New Testament and vision of a new Adamic Man, free from the legacies of our histories and the systemic forces of our dehumanization. For close to forty years now I have struggled to achieve such a thing, both as personal transformation and as revolution.
I have failed countless times to claw back something of our humanity from the terror of our nothingness, as I did this spring in Mariupol and last year in Panjshir and al Quds, and what few triumphs I may claim are secrets lost to history, but this is unimportant; what matters is to refuse to be subjugated and to stand in solidarity and abandon not our fellows, to place our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the marginalized, the silenced and the erased. Only do this, and you can say that you have lived as a human being.
Beyond this there are some few small works of Jean Paul Sartre, which may reasonably occupy one throughout a lifetime. And whatever time you may spend in his company, it will reward you as time well spent.
Where do we begin, and where do we go from here?
A reading list on Existentialism and Sartre:
Sartre: A Philosophical Biography, by Thomas R. Flynn provides an excellent guide to his life and work.
For an insightful discussion of Existentialism which gives you a seat at the table during its founding, read Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others.
The Labyrinth: An Existential Odyssey with Jean-Paul Sartre, by Ben Argon is a graphic novel of rats caught in a maze and trying to discover a path to freedom, as are we all.
We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939-1975, collects the best from the ten volumes of essays published as Situations. As the publisher describes; “Here Sartre writes about Faulkner, Bataille, Giacometti, Fanon, the liberation of France, torture in Algeria, existentialism and Marxism, friends lost and found, and much else.”
Conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre provides an engaging overview of his ideas on politics, literature, and philosophy. I thought it hilarious to witness him discussing feminism with Simone de Beauvoir; among the Lost Books yet unwritten is one in which someone like the terrifying and delightfully funny Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things To Me, interrogates this exchange in fiction.
Literary Essays, which discusses William Faulkner, Francois Mauriac, John Dos Passos, Jean Giraudoux, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Ernest Hemingway, and the longer single volume critical works Baudelaire and Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness, are brilliant views of great literature through the eyes of one of its masters.
Existential Psychoanalysis, and the screenplay he wrote for John Huston, The Freud Scenario, together provide his views on the subject, and Betty Cannon’s Sartre and Psychoanalysis: An Existentialist Challenge to Clinical Metatheory, explores it from the viewpoint of a therapist.
Also useful on Existentialist Psychotherapy are Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy, by Viktor E. Frankl, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, by Lacan, and Philosophy of Existence, by Karl Jaspers.
If one is to be castaway on a tropical island for the foreseeable future, there is Sartre’s final obsessive study of Gustave Flaubert, The Family Idiot. Hazel E. Barnes’ Sartre and Flaubert provides a guide to the four volumes and fifth unfinished work which absorbed Sartre’s last ten years. Her enormous Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature of Possibility, introduced Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus to America in 1959, and remains a thorough overview.
Truth and Existence, his rebuttal to Heidegger’s Essence of Truth, discusses key concepts of freedom, authenticity, bad faith, and truth.
Notebooks for an Ethics, an enormous lifelong project to extend the work he began in Being and Nothingness, records his struggles to forge a consistent system of thought and develop a praxis or code of action from his ontology.
The massive and ponderous Critique of Dialectical Reason, and the theatrical defense he made of it before the assembled luminaries of European communism recounted in the lecture What is Subjectivity?, a rebuttal to Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, might together represent a study of his whole mature political thinking.
And his massive interrogations of ideas of history in Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 1: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History, and Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History, are great followup studies.
Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, by Tilottama Rajan is an excellent history of relevant ideas.
The A to Z of Existentialism, by Stephen Michelman is a dictionary of 300 entries clarifying the ideas of its major figures including Sartre, De Beauvior, Camus, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and others.
May you find joy, love, hope, seek poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our world, free yourself of things you wish to escape and let go of in the bonfire dance, perform your uniqueness and find your glorious purpose.
For guidance in the celebration of Midsummer I turn to Shakespeare’s beautiful manual of rituals A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written to codify the pre Christian faith of the British Isles in the way that Wagner and his lover Ludwig of Bavaria designed the Ring trilogy and the Brothers Grimm recorded the oral traditions of fairytales to preserve that of Germany. The play is a version of Beauty and the Beast which is a subject unto itself, and features one of Shakespeare’s recurring stock characters, the Trickster who moves the action forward and disrupts order and power, in this case Puck who recalls the Jester of King Lear.
Shakespeare however, had other purposes, which may serve us well in revolutionary struggle, for A Midsummer Night’s Dream demonstrates the interdependence of his two great themes; first that love redeems the flaws of our humanity and can transcend the limits of our flesh as it reveals the truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and can return to us our true selves as liberation from authorized identities and falsification. Second that transgression is a gateway to liberty as a Living Autonomous Zone and self-created being, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the limits of normality, and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, three things I practice as a sacred path to the truth and as revolutionary struggle. A golden thread of anarchy and critique of power in the state as embodied violence informs all of Shakespeare’s theatre.
Happily, the Dream also charts a course of poetic vision as reimagination and transformation as an explicit dream navigation guide of ecstatic trance, and of transgressive sex as a practice of rapture and exaltation, much like the Tibetan Book of the Dead and aligned with the whole project of Surrealism.
A Trickster god’s labyrinth of transformation, the redemptive power of love, the liberation conferred by transgression and reversals of order, the truth of ourselves set free and returned to us in the gaze of a lover, rituals of ecstasy and vision; may your dreams this Midsummer be full of fearless wonders and joys.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream film trailer
The Midsummer Night of Fairies | Day of Sânziene, by Crowhag
Torch of Liberty 