Celebrate with me the birthday of Fidel Castro, who became a figure of Liberty throughout the world, who dared to challenge and defy the power of unjust authority and the brutal colonial regime of the Mafia as an instrument of American imperialism in Cuba, who defended and stood in solidarity with the powerless and the dispossessed, with all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, against those who would enslave us, and whose heroic example in refusal to submit to tyrannies of force and control inspired generations of us in revolutionary struggle and liberation, and in the Quixotic quest to forge a better future for all humankind.
As with all revolutions which become states, regardless of their ideologies, the qualities which made Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution victorious also shaped a regime which reenacted as tyranny many of the conditions it fought against as revolutionary struggle. Authoritarianism, macho culture and the valorization of war and fetishization of its instruments and symbols, a tendency to selective othering and repression of dissent and its justification through propaganda; these and other elements are artifacts of the nature of power and violence and the imposed conditions of anticolonial and anti-imperialist wars of liberation. Bands of freedom fighters and their charismatic leaders often make for terrible governments, the difference being who holds power.
Unequal power and the social use of force combine poisonously to transform liberty into tyranny. Just look at the United States of America.
Yet with all their many flaws, Castro and his Cuba have also been a beacon of hope and an emissary of mercy to the world. A case in point is the key role played by Cuba in the liberation of South Africa from Apartheid, a struggle in which I was a participant and a witness of history.
In a massive campaign involving over 300,000 Cuban volunteer soldiers between December 1987 and March 1988, in coordination with Angolan fighters, international volunteers, and with Soviet aid and advisors, we defeated the far larger and technologically superior American forces, America’s puppet regime South Africa, and their UNITA allies and mercenary armies in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, an Angolan military base which South Africa had failed to capture with five waves of assaults. The results included the independence of Namibia, the withdrawal of South African troops from Angola, the replacement of the racist Prime Minister Botha by de Klerk in South Africa and his negotiations with the African National Congress, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the end of Apartheid.
History is a Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror, and the many figures and images it offers are reflective of the beholder as much as any subject; Fidel Castro, the nation he came to embody, and the Cuban Revolution live multiple parallel lives in our imagination as a set of paradoxes whose narratives shift with the teller. But for me the meaning of this triple dimensional being of person, nation, and process of events is unambiguous, and we may say of Castro and his legacy what Chamberlain said of the Union Army at Gettysburg; “This is a different kind of army. If you look back through history, you will see men fighting for pay, for women, for some other kind of loot. They fight for land, power, because a king leads them or, or just because they like killing. But we are here for something new. This has not happened much in the history of the world. We are an army out to set other men free.”
As Fidel Castro said in his epochal speech to the 1966 Tricontinental Conference of Revolutionary Leaders in Havana; “We revolutionary Cubans understand our international obligations. Our people understand their obligation because they understand that we face a common enemy. The enemy that threatens Cuba is the same enemy that threatens everyone else. That is why we say and we proclaim that Cuban fighters will lend support to any revolutionary movement in any corner of the earth.”
We can but hope to bear forward his praxis of solidarity and his message of the universal liberation of humankind into the future.
Fidel Castro speech in 1966
full text of Castro’s 1966 speech to the Tricontinental Conference of Revolutionary Leaders
Fidel Castro Lost Tapes (PBS / National Geographic, 2016
Spanish
13 de agosto de 2024 Un legado de lucha y liberación revolucionaria: en celebración de Fidel Castro
Celebre conmigo el cumpleaños de Fidel Castro, quien se convirtió en una figura de libertad en todo el mundo, que se atrevió a desafiar y desafiar el poder de la autoridad injusta y el brutal régimen colonial de la mafia como oligarquía del imperialismo estadounidense en Cuba, que defendió y defendió se mantuvo en solidaridad con los impotentes y los desposeídos de la tierra contra aquellos que nos esclavizarían, y cuyo ejemplo heroico en negarse a someterse a las tiranías de la fuerza y el control inspiró a generaciones de nosotros en la lucha y la liberación revolucionaria, y en la búsqueda quijotescita Un futuro mejor para toda la humanidad.
Al igual que con todas las revoluciones que se convierten en estados, independientemente de sus ideologías, las cualidades que hicieron que Fidel Castro y la revolución cubana victoriosa también dieron forma a un régimen que recreó muchas de las condiciones con las que luchó como lucha revolucionaria. Autoritarismo, cultura machista y la valorización de la guerra y la fetichización de sus instrumentos y símbolos, una tendencia a la represión de la disidencia y su justificación a través de la propaganda; Estos y otros elementos son artefactos de la naturaleza del poder y la violencia y las condiciones impuestas de las guerras de liberación anticoloniales y antiimperialistas. Bands of Freedom Fighters y sus líderes carismáticos a menudo hacen gobiernos terribles, la diferencia es que tiene poder.
El poder desigual y el uso social de la fuerza se combinan venenosamente para transformar la libertad en tiranía. Solo mira a los Estados Unidos de América.
Sin embargo, con todos sus defectos, Castro y su Cuba también han sido un faro de esperanza y un emisario de misericordia para el mundo. Un ejemplo de ello es el papel clave desempeñado por Cuba en la liberación de Sudáfrica desde el apartheid, una lucha en la que fui participante y testigo de la historia.
En una campaña masiva que involucra a más de 300,000 soldados voluntarios cubanos entre diciembre de 1987 y marzo de 1988, en coordinación con combatientes angoleños, voluntarios internacionales, y con ayuda y asesores soviéticos, derrotó al proxy estadounidense mucho más grande y tecnológicamente superior Sudáfrica y sus aliados de UNITA y Mercenary Los ejércitos en la batalla de Cuito Cuanavale, una base militar angoleña que Sudáfrica no había podido capturar con cinco olas de asaltos. Los resultados incluyeron la independencia de Namibia, la retirada de las tropas sudafricanas de Angola, el reemplazo del primer ministro racista Botha por De Klerk en Sudáfrica y sus negociaciones con el Congreso Nacional Africano, la liberación de Nelson Mandela de la prisión y el final del apartheid.
La historia es un espejo roto de Hobgoblin, y las muchas figuras e imágenes que ofrece reflejan al espectador tanto como cualquier tema; Fidel Castro, la nación que llegó a encarnarse, y la revolución cubana vive múltiples vidas paralelas en nuestra imaginación como un conjunto de paradojas cuyas narraciones cambian con el cajero. Pero para mí, el significado de este ser triple dimensional de persona, nación y proceso de eventos es inequívoco, y podemos decir de Castro y su legado lo que Chamberlain dijo del ejército de la Unión en Gettysburg; “Este es un tipo diferente de ejército. Si miras hacia atrás a través de la historia, verás hombres luchando por el pago, por las mujeres, por otro tipo de botín. Luchan por la tierra, el poder, porque un rey los lleva o solo porque les gusta matar. Pero estamos aquí por algo nuevo. Esto no ha sucedido mucho en la historia del mundo. Somos un ejército para liberar a otros hombres
Como dijo Fidel Castro en su discurso de época ante la Conferencia Tricontinental de Líderes Revolucionarios de 1966 en La Habana; “Los cubanos revolucionarios entendemos nuestras obligaciones internacionales. Nuestra gente entiende su obligación porque entienden que enfrentamos un enemigo común. El enemigo que amenaza a Cuba es el mismo enemigo que amenaza a todos los demás. Es por eso que decimos y proclamamos que los combatientes cubanos prestarán apoyo a cualquier movimiento revolucionario en cualquier rincón de la tierra “.
Podemos pero esperamos soportar su praxis de solidaridad y su mensaje de la liberación universal de la humanidad en el futuro.
Fidel Castro, a reading list
My Life: A Spoken Autobiography, Fidel Castro, Ignacio Ramonet
Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War: Authorized Edition, Ernesto Che Guevara
Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel, and the Improbable Revolution That Changed World History, Tony Perrottet
Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground, Julia E. Sweig
The Real Fidel Castro, Leycester Coltman, Julia E. Sweig
The Yankee Comandante: Love and Death in the Cuban Revolution, Michael Sallah, Mitch Weiss
Persona Non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution, Jorge Edwards, Octavio Paz (Preface)
We Are Cuba!: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, Helen Yaffe
Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer
The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times, Anthony DePalma
Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution, The Corporation: An Epic Story of the Cuban American Underworld, T.J. English
Cuba: A History, Hugh Thomas
Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution, Socialism in Cuba, Leo Huberman, Paul M. Sweezy
Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence, Phillip Brenner
The Great Game in Cuba: How the CIA Sabotaged Its Own Plot to Unseat Fidel Castro, Joan Mellen
The Cuban Counterrevolution, Jesus Arboleya, Rafael Betancourt (Contributor)
Fighting Over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution, Rafael Rojas
Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971, Lillian Guerra
The Island Called Paradise: Cuba in History, Literature, and the Arts, Philip D. Beidler
The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, Aviva Chomsky (Editor), Barry Carr (Editor), Pamela María Smorkaloff (Editor)
Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion, The Light Inside: Abakua Society Arts and Cuban Cultural History, David H. Brown
Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller
Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Ned Sublette
Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba, Robin D. Moore
La Belle Créole: The Cuban Countess Who Captivated Havana, Madrid, and Paris, Alina García-Lapuerta
Our Woman in Havana: Reporting Castro’s Cuba, Sarah Rainsford
Travelers’ Tales Cuba: True Stories, Tom Miller
The Reader’s Companion to Cuba, Alan Ryan (Editor), Christa Malone (Editor)
Literature
Singing from the Well, The Palace of the White Skunks, Farewell to the Sea: A Novel of Cuba, The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights,
The Assault, Hallucinations: or, The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando, Before Night Falls, Autoepitaph: Selected Poems, Reinaldo Arenas
Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia
The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, Carlos Hernandez
Cobra, Firefly, From Cuba with a Song, Footwork: selected poems, Written on a Body, Christ on the Rue Jacob, Severo Sarduy
The Kingdom of This World, The Chase, Alejo Carpentier
Three Trapped Tigers, Holy Smoke, Mea Cuba, Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Woman in Battle Dress, Sea of Lentils, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, Antonio Benítez Rojo
Cuba and the Tempest: Literature and Cinema in the Time of Diaspora, Eduardo González
The Distant Marvels, Chantel Acevedo
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Beautiful Maria of My Soul, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, A Simple Habana Melody, Thoughts Without Cigarettes, Oscar Hijuelos
In the Cold of the Malecon and Other Stories, Tales from the Cuban Empire, Antonio José Ponte
My Last Name/El Apellido, Nicolás Guillén, Roberto Márquez
The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano, The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist, The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom, Lion Island: Cuba’s Warrior of Words, Dreams from Many Rivers: A Hispanic History of the United States Told in Poems,
Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings, Soaring Earth: A Companion Memoir to Enchanted Air, Margarita Engle
We remember the murder of Heather Heyer in a white supremacist terror attack in Charlottesville this day in 2017 during the Unite the Right march of Klu Klux Klan, Nazi revivalists, and other feral lunatics of racist ideologies and psychopathic rage.
Trump’s authorization of violence against nonwhite people in the infamous line “There are good people on both sides” will remain a badge of the cruelty and criminality of his regime for all history.
Yesterday to commemorate the Unite the Right march and authorize its fascist and racist ideology, Trump placed Washington DC under Occupation by federal terror forces. This he has tried before in a general campaign of repression of dissent and the criminalization of our rights of protest and free speech in numerous failed attempts to steal our citizenship and reduce us to subjects during the Black Lives Matter protests, and our capitol city is but the first of many of his list of majority nonwhite cities to terrorize; but there is no question or ambiguity of the meaning and intention of such crimes of tyranny and terror.
The Confederacy many of the Deplorables dreamed of refounding under the Trump regime was nothing more grand than a human trafficking syndicate that had declared itself a nation.
And we know Trump’s history as a human trafficking crime lord and key partner of his friend Epstein.
This is the world Trump would condemn us all to; wherein human beings are things that can be owned and used.
And above all else, the America of the Republican Party is a white ethnostate whose economy is based on the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison bond labor, with migrants and other nonwhites gathered into concentration camps and the bond of their labor sold on the open market to white elites exactly like the Bantustan system of South Africa and those of the Nazis whom Trump idolizes.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
And no matter where you begin with divisions of belonging and otherness, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
As written by Blake Montgomery in Buzzfeed, in an article entitled Here’s What Really Happened In Charlottesville: Who came ready for violence? Was it on “many sides”? The answers are clearer on the ground; “Yes, you can blame the Nazis.
The race-fueled chaos that wracked Charlottesville, Virginia, finally came to rest on Sunday night. And the hundreds of people who spent the weekend fighting in streets — and the millions who watched them — began what has become a new American ritual: arguing about what really happened, and what a spasm of localized political violence means.
Was this an assault by racist extremists on innocent, rightly outraged Americans? Was it a clash between “many sides,” as President Trump notoriously said? Was the scale of the white supremacist threat blown out of proportion? Was the violence of the black-hooded “antifa” understated?
The answers are clearer on the ground than they are in the filter bubbles driven by fierce partisan argument on social media and cable news. They are complicated but not ambiguous. Here are a few:
The right-wing protesters were relatively homogenous — in ideology and appearance — and largely ready for violence. They ranged from old-line racists like the Ku Klux Klan to the ones who wear polo shirts instead of hoods who try to brand themselves “alt-right.” There was no ambiguity about their cause — they demand the nation become whiter, and they are emboldened by a White House administration they believe makes that promise when the president yells “America first.”
The counterprotesters, in contrast, represented a far broader spectrum of the American center and left. There were self-identified “anti-fascists”; Black Lives Matter activists from around the country; religious leaders, including around 100 Christian ministers wearing their clerical collars; furious Charlottesville residents; and garden-variety liberals from as far away as Seattle. A handful of the “anti-fascists” wore Black Bloc garb — black shirt, black pants, black balaclava — to conceal their identities from police, though most did not.
The right-wingers were more prepared for violence. Most white supremacist and Nazi groups arrived armed like a paramilitary force — carrying shields, protective gear, rods, and yes, lots of guns, utilizing Virginia’s loose firearm laws. They used militarized defensive maneuvers, shouting commands at one another to “move forward” or “retreat,” and would form a line of shields or a phalanx — it’s like they watched 300 a few times — to gain ground or shepherd someone through projectiles. It seemed that they had practiced for this. Virginia’s governor said that the right’s weaponry was better than that of the state police. The opposition was largely winging it, preferring to establish bases in other parks with water, coffee, food, first aid, and comfort. Conflict would start much the same as it has at other alt-right rallies: two people, one from each side, screaming, goading each other into throwing the first punch.
By Sunday, even among the most radical voices on the left, there was incredulity at attempts — from various swaths of the mainstream to pro-Trump media, and of course, the president himself — to compare them to their enemies. This is Trump’s “many sides.”
“No one on our side is calling for vast swaths of the public to be put to death,” said Lacy McAuley, an anarchist activist based in DC who led counterdemonstrators in a march through the streets.
That is all to say that the neo-Nazis came to fight. And then their car attack escalated their rolling American streetfight with antifa to a far deadlier level than previously seen.
White nationalist organizer Jason Kessler set the stage for the bloody day when he announced months ago that he would “Unite the Right” against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park in downtown Charlottesville.
On Friday night, white supremacists gathered for an eerie torchlit march through the University of Virginia. They fought with counterdemonstrators and menacingly encircled student activists who held the line at the statue of Thomas Jefferson — the image of the darker circle of students surrounded by the light from burning tiki torches becoming an image that traveled widely on social media. The torch-bearers were chanting the Nazi slogan “blood and soil” and the KKK mantra “You will not replace us.” Richard Spencer led a similar march in Lee Park on May 15 to protest the removal of the statue of Lee.
Kessler scheduled the Saturday rally to start at noon. By the time BuzzFeed News arrived at 10:30 a.m., violent conflict was already in full swing.
Through the day, the right-wing extremists brawled with the leftists who had really come to fight, all in a park formerly named for a Confederate general. The day got bloodier and more dangerous until 1:45 p.m., when a young man identified by police as James Alex Fields, 20, drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of anti-racist counterdemonstrators, and peeled away in reverse. He allegedly injured 19 people and killed one, Heather Heyer, in the act of terrorism.
Hard to see from afar, but intensely visible on the ground, were the different shades of right-wing extremist. They included new racist and personalities like social media personality Baked Alaska, Spencer, and Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group that argues for pure European heritage, alongside more old-school hate groups like the Traditionalist Workers’ Party, affiliated with the KKK, and the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi organization that held its ornate banner, which clearly evokes a Swastika, aloft throughout the day. Fields was marching with Vanguard America, a small white nationalist organization, wearing the group’s uniform and carrying its shield.
A few of the counterprotesters — namely members of a group called Redneck Revolt — were armed with shotguns, assault rifles, and pistols.
But there were many more guns on the right, many carried by a group called the Three Percenters, a heavily armed “patriot” militia group that’s acted as security at other alt-right rallies in Portland and elsewhere. The group’s views align more with libertarianism — fundamentalist interpretations of the Constitution and an emphasis on personal liberty — than with the alt-right.
Those groups, evidently aware of the real danger, appeared to keep members of each side separate from the other in certain areas. Three Percenters stood on one side of Emancipation Park, Redneck Revolters a few blocks away at a different park.
Three Percenters said in an official statement after the rally that they disowned the racist groups at Unite the Right and issued a stand-down order during the rally. But they also served as a kind of armed guard for their leaders: After police forced the white nationalists out of Emancipation Park, Three Percenters formed a protective barrier around alt-right blogger Mike Enoch and Spencer. Enoch appeared to have been pepper-sprayed.
The area of most intense conflict was on the steps into Emancipation Park. Each side squared off against the other in a schoolyard turf war. At around 11:00, counterdemonstrators deployed a large sign made from plywood spray painted with “alt-right scum your time has come” and a decapitated Pepe the Frog. It doubled as a barrier and quickly became a prize, with each side fighting to gain control of it. Eventually it fell, right-wingers stomped on it, and people continued fighting.
Each side also threw dozens of water bottles at the other. It was the preferred projectile of the day, along with rocks, tomatoes, broken flagpoles, and balloons filled with paint, one of which splattered a police car.
Right-wing extremists carried a variety of different flags — the libertarian “Don’t Tread on Me” with the familiar sliced-up snake, flags with symbols of the racist neo-pagan cause Odinism, Confederate flags, Blue Lives Matter flags, Kekistan flags, and others. Counterdemonstrators made a game of stealing the banners, though right-wingers would beat them with the shorn flagpoles.
The weapon of choice — for the police, right-wing fighters, and antifa alike — was pepper spray. Police used the most, blasting it from large canisters at protesters. None of the fights that broke out lasted very long because one side or the other would use pepper spray to rescue their combatants.
Around noon, both state and local police declared Unite the Right and the demonstrations in the surrounding streets an unlawful assembly. They evicted everyone from Emancipation Park by a police line. Right-wing extremists and white nationalists fought the police, which is highly unusual. (At previous rallies in Berkeley and Portland, the alt-right has complied with police direction and sought permits for their gatherings, which has helped them maintain the stance that they are acting in self-defense when things get violent. The permits, in particular, ensure that their left-wing antagonists, often antifa in Black Bloc formation, end up on the wrong side of a police riot shield.)
In Charlottesville, though, white nationalists, including Spencer, leaned against police’s riot shields in a desperate attempt to keep their place. Police pushed them along the entire length of the park and down the stone steps into a waiting, screaming crowd.
While police were removing people from the park, counterdemonstrators had a chance to storm one side of it as right-wingers retreated. There were mixed messages among right-wingers, some of whom said to fall back and some of whom wanted to hold their ground despite police warnings.
One young white man carrying the black and white flag of Odinism started brawling with counterprotesters even as his own comrades retreated.
“Let’s get this race war started! Shoot me!” he yelled.
Instead, a counterdemonstrator stole his flag and tried to escape over a police fence. The man with the Odinist flag followed the protester, grabbed his backpack, and smashed his head into the metal barricade.
After police vacated the park by force, both sets of protesters splintered. BuzzFeed News followed a group of white nationalists and Black Lives Matter activists who engaged in a brutal brawl involving metal poles in a parking garage adjacent to the Charlottesville police station. One of the victims, De’Andre Harris, said he was yelling curses at white nationalists and was wearing a white scarf with curses about the Klan scrawled on it. They chased him, caught him, and beat him with wooden poles and punches.
When Fields allegedly drove his car into a crowd after the crowds were forced from the park, people at the intersection of 4th and Market were hysterical, calling out for friends and asking people they knew if others in their circles were safe, though each person seemed to have less information than the last. Emergency responders had difficulty making their way to the site of the attack because of the crowd’s sheer size. After, there were isolated reports that white nationalists were driving around town taunting people, but things remained largely quiet.
The day after the rally, Kessler attempted to hold a press conference but was run off by protesters. Later, on Periscope, he disputed the characterization of the rally as affiliated with the KKK or neo-Nazis, saying it was “only about the statue” and blaming the day’s carnage on police inaction. Many right-wingers at the rally have charged police and Charlottesville city government with the crimes of the day.
He did not reject the description of it as a white nationalist rally, and he did say that the KKK and neo-Nazi groups who were slated to speak had “good points to make.” He exaggerated the extent of the antagonism right-wingers faced by saying that antifa were armed with rifles and that right-wingers had been pinned in the park by thrown bricks. Police in fact evicted right-wingers from Emancipation Park, and the only left-wingers armed with guns appeared to be blocks away.
At the heart of the arguments since Saturday has been the question: Was this a symmetrical battle between two parallel sides?
Sheryl Gay Stolberg @SherylNYT posted on social media “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding “antifa” beating white nationalists being led out of the park” 2/2 03:34 AM – 13 Aug 2017.
Each side did engage in intense violence and attempted to seriously injure the other. But when the battle lines were formed, the right came better equipped and ready to use force to defend their belief that white people are better than nonwhite people. And on the white supremacist side is Fields, whose alleged act was named terrorism by people from the far left to members of the Trump cabinet (but not the president himself). He is charged with one count of second degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding, and one count of hit and run.
After posting the tweets above, Sheryl Gay Stolberg later apologized and modified her statement, clarifying that she was talking about physical violence rather than hate.
On the ground, leftists were incredulous at the parallel between the Nazis and their range of enemies.
“One side wants to eject all black people from America, the other wants fair hiring,” said Emily Gorcenski, a Charlottesville activist. “It makes me sick to hear people say both sides are equally bad, especially when we tried so hard to make it nonviolent.”
Despite the deep enmity on the ground in Charlottesville, the violence came after some backchannel efforts a week ago to prevent it failed. Gorcenski met with C.J. Ross and Daniel Highberger, members of the Virginia Three Percenters, in Fishburn Park in Roanoke, Virginia, last Saturday, Gorcenski and Ross both confirmed.
Ross had been in conflict with right-wingers online; he did not want the event to have white nationalist overtones and did not want the Three Percenters to participate if it did. Kessler personally disinvited him. He went in plainclothes.
Ross was looking for Gorcenski at the time of the car attack. She said she was mere feet from the Dodge Challenger. He said he was around the corner. In the mayhem following the attack, Ross said he tried to make way for emergency responders. As paramedics went to work, he said he got into conversation with Black Lives Matter activists and found he liked and agreed with them.
“I had a great conversation with them. I’d never met anyone in a BLM group before. These particular people said they were all about freedom and liberty as well,” he said. “Something awful happened, and, for me at least, it turned into a small positive thing, which, I think, is what we all want.”
As written by Eliott C. McLaughlin in CNN, in an article entitled Charlottesville rally violence: How we got here; “Despite the outrage and uproar, everyone had to know the protests were coming to Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend – and that they would get out of hand.
This is how we got here.
It began in February when the City Council voted to rechristen two parks named for Confederate generals and to remove a bronze statue of one of those generals, Robert E. Lee, from an eponymous downtown park.
This came on the heels of several Southern cities removing dozens of Confederate monuments from public property after a self-described white supremacist massacred nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
The Charlottesville move met with resistance, as some residents sued, and a judge blocked the statue’s removal for six months as the matter was litigated.
The City Council voted again in April, this time agreeing to sell the statue and let the buyer remove it, CNN affiliate WVIR reported.
Violence began in May
Prominent white nationalist RIchard Spencer led a demonstration in mid-May that served as prelude to Saturday’s violence. Angered by the city’s decision, torch-wielding demonstrators marched on the city, drawing condemnation from its leaders who regarded the protest as intimidation.
They were met by counterprotesters carrying banners that read “Black Lives Matter” and “F**k White Supremacy.”
Police made three arrests. One police officer was injured when a flying object struck him in the head.
Fast-forward to July, and about 50 Ku Klux Klan members, some in Klan robes, arrived in the city, where they were outnumbered 20-to-1 by counterprotesters.
Shouts of “Racists go home” clashed with chants of “white power.”
Police had to employ pepper spray and tear gas to disperse crowds. They arrested 22 people.
The most recent violence began Friday night, ahead of a planned Saturday rally that the Southern Poverty Law Center described as the “largest hate-gathering of its kind in decades.”
Charlottesville had tried to move the demonstration, citing safety concerns, but a federal judge issued an injunction allowing the rally to take place at Emancipation Park, formerly Lee Park and the site of the contentious statue.
Jason Kessler, who organized the “Unite the Right” rally, said the rally was aimed at “standing up for our history.”
“The statue itself is symbolic of a lot of larger issues,” including preserving history against “revisionism,” combating political correctness, advocating for white interests and free speech, Kessler said.
Scuffles erupted near a statue of President Thomas Jefferson on the nearby University of Virginia campus. Police declared the demonstration illegal and ran off the white nationalists and counterprotesters.
The Saturday event lived up to its SPLC billing, as fistfights and screaming matches broke out in this blue town of 47,000 that is home to Monticello, Jefferson’s onetime estate.
Protesters fired pepper spray at each other. Police scrambled to disperse the crowd ahead of the rally’s noon kickoff and declared an “unlawful assembly” just before the rally was slated to begin.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe quickly declared an emergency.
“Go home,” the Democrat told right-wing groups in the city. “You are not wanted in this great commonwealth. Shame on you.”
By 1 p.m. police had cleared Emancipation Park, and by early afternoon, police in riot gear stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind their shields, at times advancing toward protesters.
Fights continued to break out, with people kicking and swinging at each other, while other protesters tried to de-escalate tensions without police intervention. One side chanted, “Blood and soil!,” an old Nazi slogan, while counterprotesters cried, “Nazi scum off our streets!”
Police reported 15 injuries associated with the rally, but that toll jumped around 1:30 p.m. when a man drove a silver Dodge Charger into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old local paralegal whose father said she was always fighting for others.
Nineteen more people were injured. Video shows the Charger barreling down a narrow side street packed with protesters. It slams into a silver convertible, throwing one protester onto the convertible’s roof.
The driver then backs down the street, its bumper dragging, and several protesters give chase.
The suspect being held in a Virginia jail in connection with a deadly crash near a scheduled rally of white nationalists has been identified as James Alex Fields Jr., 20, of Maumee, Ohio.
Authorities later arrested James Alex Fields, 20, of Maumee, Ohio, jailing him on suspicion of second-degree murder, malicious wounding and failure to stop in an accident that resulted in death. The Justice Department is also looking into the case.
A social studies teacher at Fields’ Union, Kentucky, high school later told CNN the young man had “outlandish, very radical beliefs.”
“He really bought into this white supremacist thing. He was very big into Nazism. He really had a fondness for Adolf Hitler,” said Derek Weimer, who taught Fields as a junior and senior.
The day got deadlier just before 5 p.m., when two Virginia State Police troopers died after their helicopter crashed while they were on patrol near the clashes. They were identified as Lt. H. Jay Cullen, 48, and Trooper-Pilot Berke M.M. Bates, 40.
While President Donald Trump issued his condolences to the families of Heyer and the troopers, he issued a controversial statement on the violence, admonishing “hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides,” rather than singling out the white nationalists who staged the rally.
As written by Chris Cillizza in CNN, in an article entitled Donald Trump’s incredibly unpresidential statement on Charlottesville; “A group of white supremacists – screaming racial, ethnic and misogynistic epithets – rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday. One person was killed and 19 others were injured when a car sped into a group of counter-protesters.
This is what the President of the United States said about it:
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.”
It’s hard to imagine a less presidential statement in a time in which the country looks to its elected leader to stand up against intolerance and hatred.
Picking a “worst” from Donald Trump’s statement – delivered from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club – isn’t easy. But, the emphasis of “on many sides” – Trump repeated that phrase twice – is, I think, the low ebb.
Both sides don’t scream racist and anti-Semitic things at people with whom they disagree. They don’t base a belief system on the superiority of one race over others. They don’t get into fistfights with people who don’t see things their way. They don’t create chaos and leave a trail of injured behind them.
Arguing that “both sides do it” deeply misunderstands the hate and intolerance at the core of this “Unite the Right” rally. These people are bigots. They are hate-filled. This is not just a protest where things, unfortunately, got violent. Violence sits at the heart of their warped belief system.
Trying to fit these hate-mongers into the political/ideological spectrum – which appears to be what Trump is doing – speaks to his failure to grasp what’s at play here. This is not a “conservatives say this, liberals say that” sort of situation. We all should stand against this sort of violent intolerance and work to eradicate it from our society – whether Democrat, Republican, Independent or not political in the least.
What Trump failed to do is what he has always promised to do: Speak blunt truths. The people gathered in Charlottesville this weekend are white supremacists, driven by hate and intolerance. Period. There is no “other side” doing similar things here.
“Mr. President – we must call evil by its name,” tweeted Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colorado. “These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism.” Tweeted Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, another fellow Republican: “Very important for the nation to hear @potus describe events in #Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by #whitesupremacists.”
What Trump is doing – wittingly or unwittingly – is giving cover to the sort of beliefs (and I use that word lightly) on display in Charlottesville today.
Chalking it all up to a violent political rhetoric that occurs on both sides and has been around for a very long time contextualizes and normalizes the behavior of people who should not be normalized. It is not everyday political rhetoric to scream epithets at people who don’t look like you or worship like you. Trump’s right that this sort of behavior has existed on American society’s fringes for a long time – but what we as a nation, led by our presidents, have always done is call it out for what it is: radical racism that has no place in our world.
So, that’s the big one. But there are other things in Trump’s statement that are also worth calling out – most notably “not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama.”
What Trump is doing here is pre-emptively absolving himself of blame for creating a political climate in the country in which people like these “Unite the Right” demonstrators feel emboldened enough to rally in public. Not my fault, Trump is saying. There were hate groups and hate speech under Obama too!
With someone dead and more than two dozen people injured, this is, of course, not the time for assigning blame. Or for making political calculations. This is a time to say: We stand together against what we saw in Charlottesville today. Trump didn’t do that. Not even close.
Then, last but not least, is what Trump said a few paragraphs after his “on many sides” comment. Here it is:
“Our country is doing very well in so many ways. We have record – just absolute record employment. We have unemployment, the lowest it’s been in almost 17 years. We have companies pouring into our country. Foxconn and car companies, and so many others, they’re coming back to our country. We’re renegotiating trade deals to make them great for our country and great for the American worker. We have so many incredible things happening in our country. So when I watch Charlottesville, to me it’s very, very sad.”
White nationalist Richard Spencer and his supporters clash with Virginia State Police in Lee Park after the “Unite the Right” rally was declared an unlawful gathering August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the “alt-right” clashed with anti-facist protesters and police as they attempted to hold a rally in Lee Park, where a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is slated to be removed.
Really? A pivot to an I-am-not-getting-enough-credit-for-all-the-good-I-am-doing-in-the-country line? With scenes of hatred splashed across TV screens? With someone dead?
This speech is not the time to tout your accomplishments. I mean “we’re renegotiating trade deals to make them great for our country”? Who thought that was a good thing to say in the same speech in which Trump, theoretically, was trying to reassure people that what we all saw in Charlottesville is not, fundamentally, who we are?
That no one – starting and ending with the President – raised a red flag about tacking on a laundry list of accomplishments to a speech that should have simply condemned the behavior in Charlottesville and called to our better angels, is staggering, even for this White House.
There are moments where we as a country look to our president to exemplify the best in us. They don’t happen every day. Sometimes they don’t happen every year. But, when they do happen, we need the person we elected to lead us to, you know, lead us.
Trump did the opposite today.”
As I wrote in my post of January 16 2021, Silence Is Complicity: No One Gets to Sit This One Out; A post in which I quote Adam Parkhomenko elicited an interesting reaction from someone, one which makes me question how the rhetoric of fascist and racist privilege creates complicity; the quote is in reference to the massive responsibility avoidance and denial on the part of the Republican lawmakers who refuse to join the call impeach our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his rabble of murderous barbarians.
Here is the quotation; “I have a very simple message for Republicans calling for unity without accountability: the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.”
This was the reaction; first, repetition of the very call for unity without accountability, which I would characterize as granting permission through failure to consequent behaviors, which the quote calls out; “These words are just creating more divisions!”
Second, an attempt at silencing dissent; “Please Stop!”
Third, an attempt at blame shifting; “Whenever one person thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong you are the problem!”
And Fourth, the very worst of the apologetics of historical fascism, a claim of moral equivalence; “Everyone just needs to stop all of these posts because there are good people on both sides!”
And this last I cannot let pass, for on the last occasion of its general use this propagandistic lie and rhetorical device led directly to the Holocaust and the global devastation of total war.
I am unclear which good people she could be referring to; the ones who were going to capture and hang or guillotine members of Congress, the ones who murdered a police officer and attempted to bomb both the Democratic and Republican offices, the white supremacist terrorists who have rallied to the cause of treason and armed sedition, or the mad tyrant who commanded them?
To this I replied; You are wrong. Treason, terror, and the murder of police officers has no excuse. You are either with us as American patriots or against us; no one gets to sit this one out and be counted among the honorable, the moral, and the loyal.
Silence is complicity.
Such is the Talmudic principle, “Shtika Kehoda”, famously paraphrased by Einstein in his 1954 speech to the Chicago Decalogue Society as “If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity”, and referenced by Eli Weisel as “the opposite of love is not only hate, it is also indifference.”
Martin Luther King said it this way in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story; “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
John Stuart Mill expressed a related idea in his 1867 Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews; “Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
Leonardo da Vinci formulated it as resistance to tyranny, with which he was very familiar in the wars of dominion between the princes of Renaissance Italy; “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
Silence is complicity.
Should this concept require further clarification, please refer to the following recording and transcript of Elie Wiesel’s Millennium Lecture at the White House, on April 12 1999, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton; “Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President — Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others — and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people.
Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary — or Mrs. Clinton — for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations — Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin — bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting — more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.
Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner,” as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.
Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God — not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps — and I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance — but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.
And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader — and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death — Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us.
No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history — I must say it — his image in Jewish history is flawed.
The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo — maybe 1,000 Jews — was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back.
I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people — in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?
But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the “Righteous Gentiles,” whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war?
Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.
Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?
What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them — so many of them — could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.
“On August 11, Donald Trump declared “Liberation Day” in Washington, D.C.—federalizing its police, deploying the National Guard, and claiming to save a city where violent crime is at historic lows. Invoking emergency authority under Section 740 of the Home Rule Act, he replaced the city’s chain of command with loyalists, placing Attorney General Pam Bondi—alongside, in some reports, DEA Administrator Terry Cole—at the helm. Within hours, 800 National Guard troops were ordered into the city, joined by a surge of federal agents from the FBI, ICE, ATF, U.S. Marshals, Secret Service, and Homeland Security. The streets filled with uniforms and armed vehicles.
The stated reason was a familiar litany: crime, homelessness, gangs, urban decay. He pointed to a recent carjacking of a federal staffer, claimed violent gangs were in control, and promised to make the capital “safe, clean, and beautiful.” In his telling, Washington was a city in collapse. The reality is otherwise. Crime in D.C. is down: 26 percent this year, following a 35 percent drop last year—marking the lowest violent crime levels in decades [1]. The “emergency” is not in the statistics. It is in the politics.
Federal intervention in D.C. is not without precedent, but it has historically been reserved for moments of real and visible crisis: Lyndon Johnson’s use of federal troops after the 1968 riots following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, or large-scale unrest during the Vietnam War protests. Even Trump’s 2020 deployment of federal forces during the George Floyd demonstrations was tied to sustained protests. By contrast, this move comes at a time of falling crime, with no citywide breakdown of order. The August 11 deployment is less about responding to danger than about staging power in the nation’s capital—a ritualized display meant to show the state’s monopoly on force, not just to D.C. residents but to the country.
In authoritarian systems, a “test city” often serves as the proving ground for tactics later applied nationwide. D.C. is an ideal choice for such a trial: a majority-Black city without voting representation in Congress, making it politically vulnerable and symbolically potent. Bondi stood beside Trump with a list of other cities—Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit—implicitly marked as next in line. The message was clear: if your local government “won’t exercise control,” the federal government will. Trump’s comment that officers would be “authorized to do whatever the hell they want” sends an unmistakable signal that constitutional protections, due process, and judicial oversight are optional.
The racial and symbolic dimensions are hard to miss. For decades, D.C. has been cast in racially coded narratives as dangerous, dirty, and crime-ridden. Federalizing its police under a false emergency reinforces these stereotypes and reasserts who is governed by force. The city’s majority-Black population, long denied full representation, is reminded that their civic voice is weaker than the armed presence on their streets.
The “clean and beautiful” rhetoric is equally revealing. In urban politics, these words often precede displacement—sweeps of homeless encampments, aggressive policing of public spaces, and redevelopment projects that push out low-income communities. Political ecology teaches that such interventions reshape the “human ecology” of a city, altering who can inhabit which spaces and under what conditions. Security narratives open the door to economic capture, clearing neighborhoods for investment under the guise of public safety.
What we saw on August 11 was not only a militarized takeover of local policing, but a rehearsal for a model of governance built on fear. It uses moral panic—in this case, a manufactured crime wave—to justify extraordinary measures. Once accepted in one place, those measures can spread. The agents on D.C.’s streets have long histories of aggressive enforcement. Expanded to multiple cities, this approach could fill detention centers and military facilities with people detained on broad “public safety” grounds.
The timing is as political as the move itself. Trump’s approval ratings are slipping, protests are growing, and the capital became the stage for a performance meant to reassert control. A massive show of force distracts from political trouble while sending a warning to opposition movements, city leaders, and anyone considering organized resistance.
If this is allowed to stand, the precedent is dangerous. Section 740 was intended for brief, extraordinary emergencies. Trump has already hinted at going further, even using active-duty military. While the law nominally limits his control of the D.C. police to 48 hours without extension, the machinery is now in place for repeated takeovers—and for the militarized policing that comes with them—to become routine.
D.C. was the opening act. The intended audience is the whole country.
Endnotes:
[1] R Street Institute. D.C. Needs Local Policing, Not a Federal Takeover, Aug 11, 2025.”
On this anniversary of the savage attack on Salman Rushdie, champion of the people in our universal right of free speech and of our Liberty in the sacred calling of writing as the pursuit of truth, we mourn and remember the crime of theocratic terror which he endured as a figure of us all, and celebrate his resilience and unconquerable will in struggle with the pain and trauma of this life disruptive event in continuing to write and publish.
Let us follow his example in the performance of ourselves before the stage of history and the world; write, speak, teach, organize.
This year his heroism is most especially useful to us as an example, as Israel assassinates journalists en masse and Trump represses dissent in our universities and the press in the two front war on humanity now being fought in America and Palestine by criminal regimes of tyranny and terror.
Netanyahu and Trump have driven us right off the edge of the Abyss, and our civilization is falling.
What difference now, between Trump, Netanyahu, and the Ayatollah whose death order set in motion the attack on Salman Rushdie?
Or between the theocratic tyrannies of the American, Israeli, and Iranian regimes?
Nothing at all.
Friends, what can we do in unwinnable conditions of struggle against forces whose power cannot be matched and systems of oppression woven into the fabric of our society across millennia?
We can refuse to submit, and this is a power which cannot be taken from us, and which confers freedom upon all who disbelieve and disobey.
Jean Genet once offered me a maxim by which to live, paraphrasing his famous quote in Miracle of the Rose. In our last moments I had asked him; “What do I do now, with the rest of my life?”
And he said; “Live with grandeur.”
As I wrote in my post of August 12 2022; Salman Rushdie, Champion of the People and of our Liberty, who like the Jester of King Lear speaks truth to power to restore the balance of the world, recovers from his recent assassination attempt by a madman enacting the decades old command of a long dead tyrant.
Herein issues of free speech and an independent press become entangled and interdependent with that of truth as an inherent value of democracy as a system which questions itself and the role of citizens as truthtellers, and with the principle of separation of church and state on which America was founded as a secular nation, and all of this engaged in revolutionary struggle against theocracy and tyranny as humankind reinvents itself yet again.
What can we learn from this tragedy as a democratic society and the primary guarantor of our universal human rights throughout the world?
As written by Jill Filipovic in The Guardian, in an article entitled Salman Rushdie teaches us an invaluable lesson: It is courageous and necessary to stand up against tyrants – even when those tyrants claim to have God on their side; “Salman Rushie has spent decades living under threat from religious zealots after a religious leader in Iran called for him to be put to death for the alleged blasphemy of his book The Satanic Verses. On Friday, an assailant attacked Rushdie in Chautauqua, New York, stabbing the 75-year-old author multiple times. Rushdie is now reportedly on a ventilator with serious injuries and may lose an eye, according to his agent Andrew Wylie. A 24-year-old New Jersey man named Hadi Matar is in custody.
Even with a decades-long fatwa hanging over Rushdie, the attack is still shocking. While he spent many years in hiding after the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini put a fatwa on his head, and there was a $3m bounty offered for his murder, the author has, in recent years, been much more public. Initially, he tried to be reasonable: he said he regretted hurting people’s feelings (“I profoundly regret the distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam,” he said in 1989), and he suspended the paperback release of the book to let the dust settle – a move he said later he regretted.
Since then, Rushdie has not apologized for creating art that offended the delicate sensibilities of religious people who can’t seem to let God handle his own business. He has refused to cower in the face of so many calls to violence. His refusal to hide or take his work back also reveals the cravenness of those who have long sought to justify or downplay the threats on his life – a group that includes, shamefully, a number of self-styled liberals.
Standing up to extremism and standing for the rights of free speech and expression, particularly in the face of threats to one’s life, is laudable and incredibly brave. The world should have rallied around Rushdie when he initially came under threat. Appallingly, it did not. Now, though, with the benefit of hindsight and the understanding of the immediate, life-threatening stakes, we can collectively change course.
People who believe criticism, mockery, or even insult to religion should never be a crime, let alone a capital offense – decent people, in other words – should speak up for Rushdie, and against the many nations worldwide that criminalize blasphemy. As of 2019, some 40% of countries worldwide had blasphemy laws on the books. That’s not just backwards and dangerous, it’s embarrassing. Certainly any god worth worshipping is able to handle petty insults on his own – and if he believes that taunting an all-powerful and omniscient being is grounds for death, why in the world are you worshipping that guy?
The attack on Rushdie is abhorrent, but it is not isolated. Others who have been accused of criticizing or insulting religion have also faced threats to their lives; many have been imprisoned and even sentenced to death; others have been murdered for insisting on free expression.
Attacks on free speech run the gamut. While violence is obviously shocking and appalling, we should also reject attempts to shut down texts or other pieces of art simply because they offend someone’s beliefs. Of course every culture has its taboos. One question worth asking is whether a particular taboo is worth enforcing either legally or socially; to answer that, we have to assess the potential harm in breaking it. Social rules – and certainly legal rules – that are simply about protecting privileged people from hurt feelings or challenging ideas, and where the harm is no larger than taking offense because of one’s religious or other beliefs, should fall.
And yet the world over, people insist on erecting them. In the US, religious conservatives have long sought to use the power of the state to shut down speech and expression they dislike, from pulling arts funding because of pieces that offend Christians to attempting to ban books because they are about queer identity and therefore “obscene” to pushing state laws that limit how teachers can discuss gender and sexual orientation. And liberals have their censorious impulses too, although, importantly, they seem inclined to rely on cultural institutions and businesses more than the state. Globally, free speech is depressingly under-supported. And as of 2015, 40% of young people in the US troublingly told researchers they were OK with the government limiting speech if that speech was offensive to minority groups.
“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game,” Rushdie told an audience at Columbia University in 1991, as he continued to live under siege. “Free speech is life itself.”
And that includes, absolutely, the right to offend. People may think you’re a jerk; they may tell you you’re being offensive; depending on the speech or the art and the context, you may lose friends or supporters, and you may deserve it (Rushdie, for the record, did not deserve it). But no one deserves to be threatened or criminally penalized for their work or for words that simply caused offense. And frankly, we would collectively be better off if we could engage with, criticize, and even reject pieces of literature or art without calling for their removal or censorship. We would absolutely be better off if we stopped treating religion as a special category of belief for which no insult is justified, and which is deserving of special levels of deference (not to mention, in the US, vast privileges and benefits, including to discriminate, not accorded to other groups).
Religion is a belief system. If yours cannot stand up to criticism, interrogation, and even mockery or insult – if you need to threaten or punish, up to the point of death, those who insult an idea you hold dear – it is perhaps worth asking if your beliefs are as strong as you believe they are. And this is the lesson of Salman Rushdie: it is courageous and necessary to stand up against tyrants and those who would use violence to suppress words and art – even when those tyrants claim to have God on their side.”
Gott Mitt Uns; it is the most terrible battle cry of our history, for it authorizes permission for anything in the cause of faith. Herein the subversion of truth and the degradation of faith as terror in service to power combine as submission to authority, falsification of identity, and theft of the soul.
Who stands between any of us and the Infinite serves neither.
And as Voltaire teaches us in his 1765 essay Questions sur les miracles; “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
What does this idea of Voltaire’s, on which America was founded as a secular state and the embodiment of Enlightenment values, mean for us today?
I call for the universal recognition of freedoms of information and of expression for all humankind, to research and study, debate and publish, speak and teach, any crazy damn thing at all, with the sole exception of hate speech, especially if it is inconvenient to tyrants and regardless of whether or not we agree with it, as a sacred calling to pursue the truth and for a united front in solidarity to preserve the witness of history, the independence of the press, and the transparency of all governments as institutions which must answer ultimately to their people.
Any power or authority held by a government of any form is granted by its citizens or has been appropriated from them unjustly, and it is the highest principle of natural law as articulated in our Declaration of Independence that we may seize and reclaim it at any time it is held without our participation and co-ownership, or used against our interests.
True democracy as a free society of equals requires the four ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and one thing more; an engaged electorate of truth tellers which will hold its representatives and the institutions of their government responsible for enacting our values. Hence the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
Like the role of a free press in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, the role of a citizen is to be a truth teller. Both serve Truth, and truth is necessary to the just balance of power between individuals which is the purpose of the state.
As I wrote in my post of August 16 2020, Democracy, the Right of Free Speech Versus the Crime of Hate Speech, and the Principle of Open Debate; To free ourselves of the ideas of other people; such is the essence of democracy. Conversely, the use of social force in marginalizing and silencing dissent is the definition of tyranny.
Much talk of late has employed the term cancel culture to deflect and obscure the true issues involved with the disambiguation of free speech from hate speech and the role of open debate in a democracy; cancel culture is a figment used without sincerity to obfuscate loathsome acts of white supremacist and patriarchal sexual terror, incitement to violence and dehumanization.
Conversely, antifascist action in defense of equality and our universal human rights such as platform denial, independent verification of claims, and forms of peer ostracism and boycott are part of the free market of ideas and have no relation to silencing and erasure used by authoritarian tyrannies of force and control to subjugate a population and repress dissent, as exemplified by the Chinese Communist Party’s recent arrest of newspaperman Jimmy Lai in their campaign against democracy and truth in Hong Kong.
But the values issues which the phenomenon raises are interesting, as they signpost the heart of what democracy means and our responsibility to others as well as our freedom from the ideas of others.
Democracy is reducible to a simple idea; the abandonment of social force and control in shaping others to our own image, in the authorization of identity, in our freedom of conscience, and from the establishment and policing of boundaries of the Forbidden.
The autonomy of individuals takes precedence over all rights of authority and the state, which exists only to secure those rights which we cannot secure for ourselves. The state protects us from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue; and others from our own.
Any society or culture requires shared values and principles, agreements about things such as freedoms of and freedoms from, whether in systems of law and justice or as standards of courtesy. Democracy is unique in that it requires rights of free access to information and the sharing of it, and freedoms from surveillance, censorship, and lies disguised as truths, but also requires for its functioning the tradition of open debate founded with our civilization in the Forum of Athens.
Hate speech, which seeks to harm a class of persons, is the only exception to the right of free speech as parrhesia, the sacred calling to expose injustice, and the independence of journalism as a sacred calling to seek the truth, for hate speech dehumanizes others as a criminal theft of humanity, citizenship, and identity which violates our ideals of equality and liberty; hate speech is an act of tyranny and terror which is subversive to democracy as a free society of equals.
To make an idea about a kind of people is a hate crime and an act of violence.
I explored the implications of parrhesia and Foucault’s extension of this classical principle as truth telling in my post of May 27 2020, On Speaking Truth to Power as a Sacred Calling; I found myself responding with candor to a conversation today in which a friend, a fearless champion of the marginalized and the wretched of the earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, expressed fear of retribution in calling out the police as an institution of racist state force and control, thereby illustrating the mechanism of silencing on which unjust authority depends.
Of course this was a preface for an act of Breaking the Silence; I did say they are my friend.
Here is the beginning of that conversation; “Today I’m going to do something stupid.
On my Facebook and Twitter feeds I am going to express a viewpoint that I have long held to myself. A viewpoint I believed, if ever made public, would kneecap my dreams of a political career and public service.
Today I realized my silence was just a vestige of my own internalized oppression and respectability politics, and fuck respectability. It has never, and will never, save us. So here goes: here’s why I am a #PoliceAbolitionist”
What followed was a brilliant and multivoiced discussion of the role of police violence in white supremacist terror, as an army of occupation whose purpose is to enforce inequality and elite hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and to subvert the institutions and values of democracy, and of the use of social force in a free society of equals. This is among the most important issues we face today and questions some of the inherent contradictions of our form of government, of which George Washington said, “Government is about force; only force.”
But this is only indirectly the subject on which I write today; far more primary and fundamental to the institution of a free press is the function of other people’s ideas of ourselves, of normality and respectability, in the silencing of dissent.
To our subjugation by authorized identities, I reply with the Wicked Witch; I will fuck respectability, authorized identities, and other people’s ideas of virtue with you, and their little dog normality too.
Authorized identities and boundaries of the Forbidden are about power, and we must call out the instruments of unequal power as we see them. Foucault called this truthtelling, and it is a crucial part of seizure of power and ownership of identity; always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
Against state tyranny and terror, force and control, let us deploy parrhesia and the performance of our best selves as guerilla theatre. Go ahead; frighten the horses.
Often have I referred to this key performative role in democracy as the Jester of King Lear, whose enactments of mockery and satire, the exposure and deflation of the mighty as revolutionary seizures of power which reclaim that which we the people have lent them when it is used unjustly, are necessary to maintain the balance of interests in a society in which government is co-owned equally by its citizens and has as its overriding purpose the securement of the freedom and autonomy of individuals and of their universal human rights.
Without citizens who refuse to be silenced and controlled by authority, democracy becomes meaningless.
So with my arts of rhetoric and poetry as truthtelling, and with my praxis of democracy in my daily journal here at Torch of Liberty; to incite, provoke, and disturb.
For democracy requires a participatory electorate willing to speak truth to power.
To all those who defy and challenge unjust authority; I will stand with you, and I ask that all of us do the same.
As written by Margaret Atwood in The Guardian, in an article entitled If we don’t defend free speech, we live in tyranny: Salman Rushdie shows us that; “The Satanic Verses author didn’t plan to become a hero, but as he recovers from this attack, the world must stand by him.
Along time ago – 7 December 1992, to be exact – I was backstage at a Toronto theatre, taking off a Stetson. With two other writers, Timothy Findley and Paul Quarrington, I’d been performing a medley of 1950s country and western classics, rephrased for writers – Ghost Writers in the Sky, If I Had the Wings of an Agent, and other fatuous parodies of that nature. It was a PEN Canada benefit of that era: writers dressed up and made idiots of themselves in aid of writers persecuted by governments for things they’d written.
Just as the three of us were bemoaning how awful we’d been, there was a knock on the door. Backstage was locked down, we were told. Secret agents were talking into their sleeves. Salman Rushdie had been spirited into the country. He was about to appear on stage with Bob Rae, the premier of Ontario, the first head of government in the world to support him in public. “And you, Margaret, as past president of PEN Canada, are going to introduce him,” I was told.
Gulp. “Oh, OK,” I said. And so I did. It was a money-where-your-mouth-is moment.
And, with the recent attack on him, so is this.
Rushdie exploded on to the literary scene in 1981 with his second novel, Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker prize that year. No wonder: its inventiveness, range, historical scope and verbal dexterity were breathtaking, and it opened the door to subsequent generations of writers who might previously have felt that their identities or subject matter excluded them from the movable feast that is English-language literature. He has ticked every box except the Nobel prize: he has been knighted; he is on everyone’s list of significant British writers; he has collected an impressive bouquet of prizes and honours, but, most importantly, he has touched and inspired a great many people around the globe. A huge number of writers and readers have long owed him a major debt.
Suddenly, they owe him another one. He has long defended freedom of artistic expression against all comers; now, even should he recover from his injuries, he is a martyr to it.
In any future monument to murdered, tortured, imprisoned and persecuted writers, Rushdie will feature large. On 12 August he was stabbed on stage by an assailant at a literary event at Chautauqua, a venerable American institution in upstate New York. Yet again “that sort of thing never happens here” has been proven false: in our present world, anything can happen anywhere. American democracy is under threat as never before: the attempted assassination of a writer is just one more symptom.
Without doubt, this attack was directed at him because his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, a satiric fantasy that he himself believed was dealing with the disorientation felt by immigrants from (for instance) India to Britain, got used as a tool in a political power struggle in a distant country.
When your regime is under pressure, a little book-burning creates a popular distraction. Writers don’t have an army. They don’t have billions of dollars. They don’t have a captive voting block. They thus make cheap scapegoats. They’re so easy to blame: their medium is words, which are by nature ambiguous and subject to misinterpretation, and they themselves are often mouthy, if not downright curmudgeonly. Worse, they frequently speak truth to power. Even apart from that, their books will annoy some people. As writers themselves have frequently said, if what you’ve written is universally liked, you must be doing something wrong. But when you offend a ruler, things can get lethal, as many writers have discovered.
In Rushdie’s case, the power that used him as a pawn was the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. In 1989, he issued a fatwa – a rough equivalent to the bulls of excommunication used by medieval and renaissance Catholic popes as weapons against both secular rulers and theological challengers such as Martin Luther. Khomeini also offered a large reward to anyone who would murder Rushdie. There were numerous killings and attempted assassinations, including the stabbing of the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi in 1991. Rushdie himself spent many years in enforced hiding, but gradually he came out of his cocoon – the Toronto PEN event being the most significant first step – and, in the past two decades, he’d been leading a relatively normal life.
However, he never missed an opportunity to speak out on behalf of the principles he’d been embodying all his writing life. Freedom of expression was foremost among these. Once a yawn-making liberal platitude, this concept has now become a hot-button issue, since the extreme right has attempted to kidnap it in the service of libel, lies and hatred, and the extreme left has tried to toss it out the window in the service of its version of earthly perfection. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to foresee many panel discussions on the subject, should we reach a moment in which rational debate is possible. But whatever it is, the right to freedom of expression does not include the right to defame, to lie maliciously and damagingly about provable facts, to issue death threats, or to advocate murder. These should be punished by law.
In fact, there are no perfect artists, nor is there any perfect art. Anti-censorship folks often find themselves having to defend work they would otherwise review scathingly, but such defending is necessary, unless we are all to have our vocal cords removed.
Long ago, a Canadian member of parliament described a ballet as “a bunch of fruits jumping around in long underwear”. Let them jump, say I! Living in a pluralistic democracy means being surrounded by a multiplicity of voices, some of which will be saying things you don’t like. Unless you’re prepared to uphold their right to speak, as Salman Rushdie has done so often, you’ll end up living in a tyranny.
Rushdie didn’t plan to become a free-speech hero, but he is one now. Writers everywhere – those who are not state hacks or brainwashed robots – owe him a huge vote of thanks.”
We must all read Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses now, and for all of history it has become embedded into our character and psyche as part of human being, meaning, and value, a satire which is now become a story of us all.
For The Satanic Verses, like Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra which it references, has become a central myth of our limitless possibilities of becoming human, and a song of liberty, our defiance of force and state terror, and our refusal to submit to authority. Here is a myth of freedom and revolutionary struggle, and this is the context in which it must now be interpreted.
As I wrote in celebration of his birthday in my literary blog which forms a calendar of holidays on the birthdays of over 200 literary figures and summarizes all their works, sister to my political journal Torch of Liberty;
Salman Rushdie, on his birthday June 19
Midnight’s Children and Independence, Shame and Partition, The Satanic Verses and the founding of an alternate-world Islam (if you don’t like it you can always write your own book- there are endless possible realities to choose from), The Moor’s Last Sigh and modern multiethnic India, which was my favorite book ever during the final years of my teaching English in high school, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and the myth of Orpheus which is central to my ideology and self-construal, Fury and modern New York as a Dante-esque underworld, Shalimar the Clown and the tragedy of Kashmir, where once I sailed upon the lake of dreams, defended a Sufi shrine of mercy and free hospital against a riot and siege with a saint, his idiot servant, and an escaped criminal who had claimed sanctuary, was wooed by Beauty but instead was claimed by Vision, The Enchantress of Florence and gender based power asymmetries, The Golden House and capitalism as a system of oppression and dehumanization, even for its beneficiaries; the great novels of Salman Rushdie are rooted in a meticulously researched historicism and thematically targeted to expound on enduring social issues.
All are brilliant, dizzying, densely layered with meaning and scholarly references, yet filled with humor and a sense of play, his characters reflections of aspects of ourselves and immediately relatable as universal human images.
In some ways he has created a national identity of India; in others a transnational diasporic Indian identity.
Together, the works of Salman Rushdie illuminate a hidden landscape within us, as if they form the secret Book of Man and the World that da Vinci sought throughout his life. His work shares a dense coding with the notebooks of da Vinci and the poetry of Coleridge and Keats, a love of secrets with Umberto Eco, a use of traditional sources as texts of subversion and social criticism with Margaret Atwood, and reflects the work of R.K. Narayan.
Salman Rushdie maps a realm of human being and possibilities which is liminal, filled with transformative power, endless and boundless, visions and fables which extend a realism of character and place and connect us with each other through our universal qualities while exploring and recognizing the formative power of our differences.
Salman Rushdie speaks on universal human rights, freedom, truth, and the ownership of our stories, Interview by the New York Times
Among the many atrocities, horrors, and crimes against humanity of the Gaza War and the Genocide of the Palestinians is Israel’s assassination campaign against journalists and the War On Truth; against journalism as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth. Here in the name of an abominable God a theocratic tyranny of brutal force and control seeks to maintain a mirage of national identity through erasure and silencing of dissent, of witness, remembrance, and exposure.
Here in a land of derelict holiness where savages once tried to raise themselves above the degradation of beasts and become human by binding themselves to a Covenant that declares all men are brothers, all human souls are created equal, and that judgement of the good or evil of others does not belong to man, the state as embodied violence constructed of lies and illusions as a Wilderness of Mirrors has reversed all of this.
There is a word for this struggle to realize the Good, and to liberate humankind from systems of oppression which dehumanize us; jihad.
Seen through a different glass, here the idea of the human born of the Enlightenment with the universal Rights of Man and its political form democracy is driven to collapse as a world order and the first human global civilization falls, as the idea of human rights and the inherent worth of each one of us is abandoned by its guarantor states who refuse to defend it when challenged.
Off the edge of the cliff we go, hammered by images of famine as a weapon of war as our nations send no navies to break the Israeli blockade of food and medical aid, as American death contractors fire on crowds seeking food and both our political parties during Biden and Trump Presidencies bombed the positions of the Red Sea counter blockade including ones they believed I myself was in, as American tax dollars buy the deaths of civilians including children and utterly destroyed whole cities so that Trump and Netanyahu could build a Riviera of casinos on the ashes of the dead, some 800,000 total dead in this genocidal war of imperial conquest and dominion or one third the population of Palestine by my estimation from the carnage and mass death I observed during the fighting since Black Saturday, and as the depraved Netanyahu regime and their deniable assets among the settler militias kill journalists, doctors, and aid workers first as primary targets, then isolate and annihilate everyone else.
Exactly as did Hitler and Franco with the doctrine of Total War they designed and tested at Guernica.
With the unity and solidarity of humankind divided and smashed by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and national identities falsified and weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us and who claim to speak and act in our name, ideas of good and evil become meaningless and cease to exist, and only power and its means of exchange fear remain. Such is the world and the future to which monsters and fascist tyrants like Trump and Netanyahu would condemn us all, and this we must Resist.
Our martyrs in the cause of our humanity are numberless and largely nameless in Palestine, but we know the names of the courageous journalists who died to give them voice and memory and to bring meaning to their deaths, among these the Al Jazeera truth tellers and witnesses recently murdered en masse to silence them.
Let us remember and celebrate those who died for the humanity of us all; remember, and bring a Reckoning.
For in the words of the Matadors who saved me from a police death squad and welcomed me into their ferocious brotherhood in Sao Paulo 1974, We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.
As written by Anas al-Sharif and published in The Guardian; “The following statement was posthumously published on Anas al-Sharif’s X account, after an attack on a tent for journalists near al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Seven people in total were killed including al-Sharif, the Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa, according to Al Jazeera.
This is my will and my final message. If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.
First, peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings. Allah knows I gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my people, ever since I opened my eyes to life in the alleys and streets of the Jabaliya refugee camp. My hope was that Allah would extend my life so I could return with my family and loved ones to our original town of occupied Asqalan (al-Majdal). But Allah’s will came first, and His decree is final.
I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification – so that Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half.
I entrust you with Palestine – the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world. I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace. Their pure bodies were crushed under thousands of tons of Israeli bombs and missiles, torn apart and scattered across the walls. I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland.
I entrust you to take care of my family. I entrust you with my beloved daughter, Sham, the light of my eyes, whom I never got the chance to watch grow up as I had dreamed. I entrust you with my dear son, Salah, whom I had wished to support and accompany through life until he grew strong enough to carry my burden and continue the mission. I entrust you with my beloved mother, whose blessed prayers brought me to where I am, whose supplications were my fortress and whose light guided my path. I pray that Allah grants her strength and rewards her on my behalf with the best of rewards.
I also entrust you with my lifelong companion, my beloved wife, Umm Salah (Bayan), from whom the war separated me for many long days and months. Yet she remained faithful to our bond, steadfast as the trunk of an olive tree that does not bend – patient, trusting in Allah, and carrying the responsibility in my absence with all her strength and faith. I urge you to stand by them, to be their support after Allah Almighty.
If I die, I die steadfast upon my principles. I testify before Allah that I am content with His decree, certain of meeting Him, and assured that what is with Allah is better and everlasting. O Allah, accept me among the martyrs, forgive my past and future sins, and make my blood a light that illuminates the path of freedom for my people and my family. Forgive me if I have fallen short, and pray for me with mercy, for I kept my promise and never changed or betrayed it.
Do not forget Gaza. And do not forget me in your sincere prayers for forgiveness and acceptance.”
‘If these words reach you … Israel has succeeded in killing me’: the last words of a journalist killed in Gaza, Anas al-Sharif
١ أغسطس ٢٠٢٥: حرب إسرائيل على الحقيقة: حملة اغتيال الصحفيين
من بين الفظائع والأهوال والجرائم ضد الإنسانية العديدة التي ارتكبتها حرب غزة والإبادة الجماعية للفلسطينيين، تأتي حملة اغتيالات إسرائيل ضد الصحفيين وحرب الحقيقة؛ ضد الصحافة كرسالة مقدسة في البحث عن الحقيقة. هنا، باسم إله بغيض، يسعى طغيان ثيوقراطي قائم على القوة والسيطرة الوحشية إلى الحفاظ على سراب الهوية الوطنية من خلال محو وإسكات المعارضة، والشهادة، والذكرى، والكشف.
هنا في أرض القداسة المهجورة، حيث حاول المتوحشون ذات يوم أن يسمو بأنفسهم فوق انحطاط الوحوش وأن يصبحوا بشرًا بإلزام أنفسهم بعهد يُعلن أن جميع البشر إخوة، وأن جميع النفوس البشرية خُلقت متساوية، وأن حكم الخير أو الشر في الآخرين ليس من اختصاص الإنسان، قلبت الدولة، كتجسيد للعنف المبني على الأكاذيب والأوهام، كصحراء من المرايا، كل هذا. هناك مصطلحٌ لهذا النضال من أجل تحقيق الخير، وتحرير البشرية من أنظمة القمع التي تُجرّدنا من إنسانيتنا؛ إنه الجهاد.
وإذا نظرنا إلى الأمر من منظورٍ مختلف، نجد أن فكرة الإنسان المولود في عصر التنوير، مع حقوق الإنسان العالمية وشكله السياسي، الديمقراطية، تُقاد إلى الانهيار، مع سقوط النظام العالمي وأول حضارة إنسانية عالمية، مع تخلّي الدول الضامنة عن فكرة حقوق الإنسان والقيمة الأصيلة لكل فرد منا، رافضةً الدفاع عنها عند مواجهتها. ننزل من حافة الهاوية، وقد سحقتنا صور المجاعة كسلاح حرب حيث لا ترسل دولنا أي قوات بحرية لكسر الحصار الإسرائيلي للغذاء والمساعدات الطبية، بينما يطلق متعهدو الموت الأمريكيون النار على الحشود التي تبحث عن الطعام وكلا حزبينا السياسيين خلال رئاستي بايدن وترامب قصفوا مواقع الحصار المضاد في البحر الأحمر بما في ذلك المواقع التي اعتقدوا أنني كنت فيها، بينما تشتري دولارات دافعي الضرائب الأمريكيين موت المدنيين بمن فيهم الأطفال ودمروا مدنًا بأكملها حتى يتمكن ترامب ونتنياهو من بناء ريفييرا من الكازينوهات على رماد الموتى، حوالي 800000 قتيل إجمالي في هذه الحرب الإبادة الجماعية للغزو والسيطرة الإمبراطورية أو ثلث سكان فلسطين حسب تقديري من المذبحة والموت الجماعي الذي لاحظته خلال القتال منذ السبت الأسود، وبينما يقتل نظام نتنياهو الفاسد وأصوله التي يمكن إنكارها بين ميليشيات المستوطنين الصحفيين والأطباء وعمال الإغاثة أولاً كأهداف أساسية، ثم يعزلون ويبيدون كل من تبقى. تمامًا كما فعل هتلر وفرانكو بمبدأ الحرب الشاملة الذي صمماه واختبراه في غيرنيكا.
مع وحدة البشرية وتضامنها، المنقسمة والمحطمة بفعل فاشيات الدم والإيمان والأرض، والهويات الوطنية التي زُوّرت وتسلّحت في خدمة السلطة من قِبل أولئك الذين يريدون استعبادنا والذين يدّعون التحدث والتصرف باسمنا، تفقد مفاهيم الخير والشر معناها وتختفي، ولا يبقى سوى الخوف من القوة ووسائلها التبادلية. هكذا هو العالم والمستقبل الذي سيُديننا به جميعاً وحوش وطغاة فاشيون مثل ترامب ونتنياهو، وهذا ما يجب أن نقاومه.
شهداؤنا في سبيل إنسانيتنا لا يُحصى عددهم ولا يُذكرون في فلسطين، لكننا نعرف أسماء الصحفيين الشجعان الذين ضحوا بحياتهم من أجل منحهم صوتًا وذكرى، ولإضفاء معنى على موتهم، ومن بينهم رواة الحقيقة وشهود الجزيرة الذين قُتلوا مؤخرًا بشكل جماعي لإسكاتهم.
لنتذكر ونحتفي بمن ضحوا بحياتهم من أجل إنسانيتنا جميعًا؛ لنتذكر، ولنحاسب. فكما قال مصارعو الثيران الذين أنقذوني من فرقة موت الشرطة ورحبوا بي في أخوتهم الشرسة في ساو باولو عام 1974: “لا يمكننا إنقاذ الجميع، ولكن يمكننا الانتقام”.
Hebrew
11 באוגוסט 2025 מלחמת ישראל באמת: קמפיין ההתנקשויות בעיתונאים
בין הזוועות, הזוועות והפשעים נגד האנושות של מלחמת עזה ורצח העם של הפלסטינים נמצא קמפיין ההתנקשויות של ישראל בעיתונאים ומלחמת האמת; נגד העיתונות כמשימה קדושה במרדף אחר האמת. כאן, בשם אל מתועב, עריצות תיאוקרטית של כוח ושליטה ברוטליים מבקשת לשמור על תעתוע של זהות לאומית באמצעות מחיקה והשתקה של התנגדות, של עדות, זיכרון וחשיפה.
כאן, בארץ של קדושה נטושה, שבה פראים ניסו פעם להתעלות מעל השפלת החיות ולהפוך לבני אדם על ידי קשירת עצמם לברית המכריזה שכל בני האדם אחים, כל נשמות האדם נבראו שוות, וכי שיפוט הטוב או הרע של אחרים אינו שייך לאדם, המדינה כאלימות מגולמת הבנויה משקרים ואשליות כמדבר של מראות הפכה את כל זה.
יש מילה למאבק הזה להגשמת הטוב ולשחרור האנושות ממערכות דיכוי שמוציאות מאיתנו את האנושות; ג’יהאד.
מבעד לזכוכית אחרת, כאן הרעיון של האדם שנולד מתקופת הנאורות עם זכויות האדם האוניברסליות וצורתו הפוליטית דמוקרטיה נדחף לקריסה כאשר סדר עולמי והציוויליזציה האנושית הגלובלית הראשונה נופלת, כאשר רעיון זכויות האדם והערך הטבוע של כל אחד מאיתנו ננטשים על ידי המדינות הערבות שלו, המסרבות להגן עליו כאשר מאתגרים אותו.
אל קצה הצוק אנו גולשים, מוכים בתמונות של רעב ככלי מלחמה, בעוד שאומותינו אינן שולחות ציים לשבור את המצור הישראלי על מזון וסיוע רפואי, בעוד קבלני הרג אמריקאים יורים על המונים המחפשים מזון, ושתי המפלגות הפוליטיות שלנו בתקופת נשיאות ביידן וטראמפ הפציצו את עמדות המצור הנגדי בים סוף, כולל כאלה שהאמינו שאני עצמי נמצא בהן, בעוד כספי מס אמריקאים קונים את מותם של אזרחים, כולל ילדים, והרסו ערים שלמות לחלוטין כדי שטראמפ ונתניהו יוכלו לבנות ריביירה של בתי קזינו על אפר המתים, כ-800,000 הרוגים בסך הכל במלחמה רצחנית זו של כיבוש ושליטה אימפריאלית, או שליש מאוכלוסיית פלסטין לפי הערכתי מהטבח וההרג ההמוני שראיתי במהלך הלחימה מאז שבת השחורה, וככל שמשטר נתניהו המושחת ונכסיו הניתנים להכחשה בקרב מיליציות המתנחלים הורגים עיתונאים, רופאים ועובדי סיוע תחילה כמטרות עיקריות, ואז מבודדים ומשמידים את כל השאר.
בדיוק כפי שעשו היטלר ופרנקו עם דוקטרינת המלחמה הטוטאלית שתכננו ובדקו בגרניקה.
עם האחדות והסולידריות של האנושות, המחולקות ומרוסקות על ידי פשיזם של דם, אמונה, אדמה וזהויות לאומיות, שזויפו ומשתמשים בנשק בשירות הכוח על ידי אלו שרוצים לשעבד אותנו וטוענים לדבר ולפעול בשמנו, רעיונות של טוב ורע הופכים לחסרי משמעות וחדלים להתקיים, ורק כוח ואמצעי החליפין שלו, פחד, נותרים. כזה הוא העולם והעתיד שאליהם מפלצות ועריצים פשיסטים כמו טראמפ ונתניהו יגזרו על כולנו, ולכך עלינו להתנגד.
הקדושים המעונים שלנו למען אנושיותנו הם רבים מספור וברובם חסרי שם בפלסטין, אך אנו מכירים את שמותיהם של העיתונאים האמיצים שמתו כדי לתת להם קול וזיכרון ולהביא משמעות למותם, ביניהם דוברי האמת והעדים של אל-ג’זירה שנרצחו לאחרונה בהמוניהם כדי להשתיק אותם.
הבה נזכור ונחגוג את אלה שמתו למען האנושיות של כולנו; נזכור ונביא חשבון נפש. כי במילותיהם של המטדורים שהצילו אותי מכויית מוות משטרתית וקיבלו אותי לאחווה האכזרית שלהם בסאו פאולו 1974, אנחנו לא יכולים להציל את כולם, אבל אנחנו יכולים לנקום
What is Beauty? Models often speak of beauty as a construction, an art. But is Beauty an illusion, or a revelation? Does it exist only when we see it, as Keats and other Idealists claim?
When asked directly to identify my faith, especially by men with guns and badges for official forms and depending on what nation we are in and in what language the question is posed, I often reply by quoting Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” My alternative is to quote Rumi; “Let the Beauty you love be what you do.”
For myself the dialectics of Beauty and Vision have been an endless source of wonder. Susan Sontag taught me to see Beauty in the ordinary, as deprivileging elite or high culture and a form of class war, during our conversations in 1980 after the publication of her final work, Under the Sign of Saturn. And I needed Beauty to balance the trauma of the flaws of our humanity in a broken world; something I need increasingly these past few years, as the wounds of my history become densely layered like the whorls of a seashell and I move nearer the position of Schopenhauer in the use of Beauty as light to balance darkness.
As to my own history with visual arts, I grew up from the age of nine with inkbrush calligraphy in Chinese and Japanese, inkbrush art as part of my Zen Buddhist studies, and practiced painting landscapes from the studio book of forms Mind Landscapes: The Paintings of C. C. Wang, Jerome Silbergeld, Chi-Ch’ien Wang. For myself this was art as a practice of serenity, reflection, healing from the trauma of my momentary death from a police grenade at Bloody Thursday March 15 1969 and the vision of our myriad possible futures as I stood outside of time, and learning to experience Chaos not as a threatening force of death and loss but as the birth of the new and a measure of the adaptive range of systems.
During high school my enthusiasm for Surrealist art, literature, and film was bound together with glorious weekends running amok in San Francisco and Berkeley entirely on my own among the wonderlands of the hippie counterculture and the transgression of boundaries of the arts community, and with magic, dreams, fantasies, and the imagination as a ground of being beyond the limits of the flesh.
Later at university I learned to paint using Monet’s techniques, to see through both inward and outward eyes as did he; “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks outward, the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images that creates the world which we see.” This was during a period in which I studied the natural world in search of universal principles and allegories of human being, meaning, and value immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
After that I studied the art of Egon Schiele while a graduate student, whose glorious figures became windows of illumination like human bodies made of stained glass and transformed into cathedrals, and at the same time grotesque in their similarity to anatomical illustrations of cadavers, eros and thanos made ambiguous, to learn to see the Beauty of ordinary people.
Thus my explorations of Beauty through art unfolded over my second and third decades of life, across dimensions of the inner and outer realms of experience, and in the context of my successive immersions in Zen Buddhism and Taoism, Surrealism and magic, natural sciences, and of the human in my disciplines of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy.
In the 1990s living in Kashmir and learning Sufi literature as I sailed upon the Lake of Dreams, I was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision, and mostly gave up painting for poetry. But it was a long contest between the two, and each helped the other to the extent I would advise everyone to practice both visual and literary arts.
Learn to see the truths of things, and to create new truths in the telling.
Sadly none of this interrogation of Beauty is the issue which has provoked public discourse regarding Sydney Sweeney’s ad for American Eagle, whose customers are teen and young adult girls; that would be the jeans/genes fascist dogwhistle pun which centers the marketing campaign.
She has lent her images to the propaganda of Nazi ideology and the horrific history of scientific eugenics as an apologetics of racism and white supremacist terror.
Fascism has a new recruiting poster, and its target is young women.
This is designed and intended to create a pool of women as resources for fascist men in a political environment which is overwhelmingly polarized left female and right male among young people and isolates Republican men from possible partners and wives which is a problem for fascist recruitment, and in the long term to provide a counterforce to white replacement which is a key idea in the apologetics of racist terror.
The American Eagle advertising campaign whose spokesmodel Sydney Sweeney registered as a Republican in Florida just before the last election isn’t about selling jeans; its about political power and selling white supremacy as a national identity.
“My genes are blue” she says in the film, referring to the recessive trait which the Nazis bred for as a sign of racial purity. “To lighten the dark Bavarians” as Hitler said; I find it interesting that the Nazi eugenics program was designed to create and control an authorized national identity and directed specifically against my own kind of Germans rather than outsiders, whom they simply killed. In America under the Fourth Reich as in its predecessor, hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness sift exceedingly fine.
Hitler got the idea from America, where forced sterilizations, electroshock, and lobotomies were widely practiced by mental hospitals and prisons to control, enforce subjugation, and commit genocide against Black citizens, just as he got the idea of concentration camps from our Indian reservation system. The concentration camps have already come home to roost in our migrant camps and prisons; I expect it won’t be very long before Eugenics returns to enforce authorized identities with the scalpel and horrific new forms of medical erasure and genocide.
In context I find it suspicious that Sydney Sweeney is from my own city of Spokane Washington, an area referred to by fascists as the White Redoubt, where The Base and other terrorist organizations have a number of secret militia training compounds, the Democratic Party headquarters was bombed during the 2020 election, both the mosque and synagogue and their members were tracked, harassed, threatened, and targeted, and I became a Precinct Captain of the Democratic Party several years ago and founded Lilac City Antifa in order to counter the work of Matt Shea, while he was the Republican representative in my district and my opposite number, leader of the Secessionists whom the Republicans threw out of the state legislature because he had distributed lists of the home addresses of police officers and federal agents to a number of fascist terror organizations to be assassinated at home with their families during the planned breakaway revolt against the United States. He remains an active threat among many other fascist terror threats and now leads a church whose purpose is to protest our local Planned Parenthood hospital, in addition to his other activities with fellow lunatics. And so long as such threats to our liberty and our society remain, I shall continue my work in countering them.
Lest anyone take away a wholly negative impression of the city which my cottage Dollhouse Park overlooks, Spokane has a multigenerational history as a stronghold of Socialism and part of the original anarchist communes of the Seattle Red Coast, of the Industrial Workers of the World and the labor movement, and of settlement by Abolitionist families, all of which describes the family of my partner Dolly McKay and many others.
With the true purpose of this attack on our society by Nazi propagandists being established, I ask you to look with me into the Abyss of white supremacist terror and its poster girl Sydney Sweeney, as I ask again; what is Beauty?
Or as Spock’s line in Star Trek season 3 episode 5 goes; “Is there in truth no beauty?”
As I wrote in my post of July 21 2025, I Am A Leaf On the Wind: On Beauty In A Time Of Chaos; “ I am a leaf on the wind”; now an iconic line from the telenovela Firefly and film Serenity and pervasive in popular culture, this quote has a unique meaning and history for me; some twenty years before these films I answered a question from a student during a class with this line, quoting the death poem of a kamikaze pilot.
The question; “What are you?” was in the context of a discussion of national identity and how we construct ourselves through history, what I now refer to along with race and other forms of identity as the flags of our skin.
I had just returned from the Siege of Beirut where Jean Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance, the second of my many Last Stands, and in no way wished to align myself with identity politics or identitarian nationalism by claiming any ancestral homeland, nation, or people in the sense of die Volk as the Nazis used it, as remains true now.
Especially in this moment wherein the spectre of fascisms of blood and soil have once again been raised from the abyssal chasms of darkness by Trump and his regime of white supremacist terror in the pogrom of ICE now ongoing throughout Vichy America.
My solution to the question What am I was to reply “I am a leaf on the wind.” In the shadows of Beirut and becoming involved in liberation struggle and solidarity in Guatemala versus the Mayan Genocide, Central America generally, Angola and South Africa versus Apartheid, and other places, I felt a deep kinship with that kamikaze pilot. Because I am forever become a Last Stand, as I place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon dubbed The Wretched of the Earth. This is who I am and shall always be, and it is the only identity that matters.
This remains my reply now, to any attempt to define me not by my actions but by condition of being.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
As I wrote of my last wishes in a poem entitled Final Thoughts;
Bury me at sea, for I belong to no nation but to the world
Send me out in flames, for this is how I have lived
Not silent but incandescent in the night
An agent of change and illumination, like fire itself.
This is my answer to the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world; to embrace the darkness and live with grandeur in refusal to submit.
As Genet wrote in Miracle of the Rose; ‘A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.’
There remains the question of how to find beauty, joy, hope, faith in our humanity, and love by which to transcend ourselves and the limits of our skin, to balance the terror and horror of our imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle under systems of oppression, to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
As I wrote in my post of May 19 2025, Beauty and Ugliness, Horror and Wonder, and the Limits of the Human: Case of the Kristi Noem Television Commerical For Homeland Security’s White Supremacist Terror; We are surprised now and again with the unlooked for juxtaposition of the beautiful, the ugly, and the strange, like a fiery chili heart in a Mexican candy on the side of wonderful surprises, or on the side of horrible surprises reaching out to hold a frightened comrade’s hand as the world shatters under artillery fire to discover its just the hand that’s left.
Yemen that last was, as Trump ordered the bombardment of our positions in the counter blockade of Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid to Palestine on March 19, exactly as had Biden last year. Tyranny has traded masks in our elections, but the abandonment of our principle of universal human rights has not changed, if it was ever true.
Ansar Allah’s glorious Resistance to our dehumanization and the depravity of an America which would buy the deaths of children with our taxes and conspire with Israel in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine in order to build a Riviera of casinos on their bones as Trump and Netanyahu together plot are become a chiaroscuro which defines us all, and the limits of the human.
I wish I could say that all things are equal to me in this regard, horror and wonder, ugliness and beauty, but its not true, or true only in moments when I am Most Sincerely Dead and my consciousness is free from the limits of our form.
For all that I have lived in this vast wilderness of unknowns, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and the limits of the human, through Rashomon Gate Events which destroy and create universes and possibilities of becoming human and fracture time like a Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror, how little have I escaped the legacies of our history and the flags of my skin.
But the suffering of others remains greater than my own, and our duty of care for others compels me to do what I can to help, even when it is meaningless, when it is impossible, when it can change nothing. In the end this is what defines our humanity, and it is the greatest power in the universe.
Ours is an Absurd universe, and one wherein two contradictory things can both be true, in which the terror of our nothingness is balanced with the joy of total freedom.
While watching Benedict Cumberbatch’s beautiful Dr Strange on television, my partner Dolly and I were confronted serially by a loathsome box of evils in Kristi Noem’s advertisement for white supremacist state terror and ethnic cleansing now ongoing by the Department of Homeland Security she commands.
Her plastic mouth simulates human speech like a possessed Barbie doll, made of lies disguised as truths, diabolisms as virtues, an artificial and illusory beauty of surfaces which masks horrors like the justifications of our concentration camps for nonwhite people and political dissidents as security.
Security is an illusion, law serves power, order is theft, and there is no just Authority.
And really, Kristi, you’re as dark as some Mexicans and you poisoned your lips with botox to make them look like a black girl’s in the hope that you may deceive men into thinking them yummy, and you are leading the ethnic cleansing of America through your secret armies of police white supremacist terror? Is this because you think they will come for you last?
Because that didn’t work out so well the last time, for the Jewish veterans of World War One who were awarded the Iron Cross; despite repeated assurances of exemption by Hitler, the SS came for them in the end.
No one controls such forces, once they are set in motion.
Beneath the human mask of those who would enslave us and steal our souls, including all Republicans and any who voted for our Rapist In Chief, Nazi revivalist, and Russian agent Traitor Trump and his Theatre of Cruelty with all of his freaks and degenerate subhuman monstrosities of his regime of systems of oppression including theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, and amoral nihilistic capitalism in the grand strategic trinity of predation designed to transform us from persons to things that can be owned and fed as raw material into the machine of elite wealth and power and from citizens to subjects through processes of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization; beneath all of this lies the depravities and perversions of endless chasms of darkness, full of crawling things.
This is why the stench of putrefaction trails Kristi Noem and all minions of Our Clown of Terror, slaves of Moloch the Seducer and Demon of Lies, and wafts a poisonous sweet candy scent into the labyrinth of the Wilderness of Mirrors with its endless echoes and reflections of propaganda, conspiracy theories, lies and illusions, bizarro worlds and reversals of meaning, and alternate realities which trap the unwary with their siren songs; for all such apologists of tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are zombified and hollowed out.
To be a Republican is to be like the Man of Worms in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer two part episode Whats My Line?, or Oogy Boogy Man in The Nightmare Before Christmas; a husk of human flesh utterly consumed by its own darkness and worn like a sock puppet by the horrors that possess it.
And remember, folks, you can always tell a Republican’s secret name; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.
Behold the horror of hate and white supremacist terror:
My Bugs! Oogy Boogey Unravels, Nightmare Before Christmas
Behold the horror and ugliness of hate and white supremacist terror:
Stills from the photoshoot
What loathsome crawling darkness lies beneath the illusion of our flesh? Like a skinwalker, a Nazi moves among us bearing a human face as an ambush predator, with its siren songs of lies with which to ensnare us and steal our souls.
Herein images become mirrors which capture and distort as well as reflect, for like the Gaze of Medusa they can reveal and return to us our truths, but also create and transmit new truths not of our making, with the power to transform us in both wonderful and horrible ways.
As the scene in Is There In Truth No Beauty? goes:
“Dr. McCoy: Isn’t it suicidal to deal with something ugly enough to drive men mad? Why do you do it?
Mr. Spock: I see, Doctor McCoy, that you still subscribe to the outmoded notion, promulgated by your ancient Greeks, that what is good must also be beautiful.
Larry Marvick: And the reverse, of course, that what is beautiful is automatically expected to be good.
Captain James T. Kirk: Yes, I think most of us are attracted by beauty and repelled by ugliness – one of the last of our prejudices”
February 9 2025 Why Do I Write, and Why Am I Writing To All of You Here, in the Nakedness of my Life, my Voice, and my Truth, as a Fallen America Begins Her Last Stand Against Fascism As a Captured State of the Fourth Reich
The Construction of Whiteness: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Race Formation and the Meaning of a White Identity, Stephen Middleton, David R. Roediger, Donald M Shaffer (Editors)
Tolstoy: What is Art? & Wherein is Truth in Art (Essays on Aesthetics and Literature): Exploring the Soul of Art: Tolstoy’s Essays on Truth, Beauty, and Morality, Leo Tolstoy
Such were my first thoughts on seeing the photos of Lahaina become ashes; how if all our dreams and all that we have lived one day looks like this, and man become the quintessence of dust, doomed by our fear of nature and addiction to power?
Lahaina burned in a sea of lava for a day and a night until the morning of the ninth of August 2023, consuming everything, changing everything. Nature’s wrath was an unstoppable tide, and before it we humans were revealed to be nothing.
So fragile, we humans and our world, and ephemeral, possibly illusory; will all that we have been and dreamed one day come to such a fate as this? Will something like ourselves one day discover the ruins of our civilization, and question?
For over twenty years, Hawaii has been an annual getaway of two to four weeks for our family during the frozen month of January, for my partner Theresa, her parents now years gone, her brothers and sister, all of whom own vacation homes in the Islands, sometimes with all her nieces and nephews, parents of siblings’ spouses, the whole of her immediate family, and Maui with its cathedrals of forest and black sand beaches was her special place of refuge. Likely all gone now, with its idyllic beach party town and arts community, and as with so much else become nothing but the ghosts of memory.
She’s not returned since; like Beirut after the explosion for myself, its hard to face the ruins and the emptiness.
We are leaves on the wind, we humans and our memory palaces which we enact as identity, a prochronism or history expressed in our form, our souls created over time like the shells of fantastic sea creatures, legacies we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail. Created by ourselves and others in dynamic and recursive struggle, between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the work of becoming human, and the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
If we are to be useful in birthing new ways of being human together, we must know who we are, and where we belong.
How if there is no living natural world into which to extend ourselves, and the signposts and anchorages of our memory and identity become phantasms of lost experience, ephemeral and transitory; do we become nothing with them and enter oblivion, forget who we are?
A natural disaster shaped by climate change and our catastrophically failing civilization has stolen our joy and fragments of who we are in the destruction of Lahaina; so during this Festival of the Hungry Ghosts month which in 2025 begins on August 23 to September 21 I offer the ghost town of Lahaina, which echoes for me with laughter and resonates with nameless joys like a song which has escaped the limits of its form, as a home among its memories to my own Hungry Ghosts, shadows of cherished friends, lost loves, and honored nemeses.
May we all one day return to discover each other here, beyond grief and despair in the Lahaina of our imagination forever illuminated in tropical sun, across vast seas of time, beings made not of flesh but of stories; and unlike Orpheus I will not be looking back.
For the dead and the ruins of fallen grandeur we can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged, and the future that must be redeemed.
As written by in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Like a bomb went off’: Maui wildfires decimate historic town of Lahaina; “Lahaina, a historic town on Maui, has been decimated, leaving residents reeling at the loss of homes, nature and human life. At least 53 people had been confirmed dead by Thursday evening. The ashy, charred landscape has been described as apocalyptic.
Richard Olsten, a helicopter pilot for a tour company, flew over the fire site on Wednesday and said Lahaina “looked like a bomb went off”.
“It’s horrifying. I’ve flown here 52 years and I’ve never seen anything come close to that. We had tears in our eyes, the other pilots on board and the mechanics and me,” he said, recalling even the boats in the harbor were burned.
“We never thought we’d experience anything like this in our whole life,” he said.
In the 1700s, Lahaina was established as the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The town became one of the main ports for the North Pacific whaling fleet and later, as the whaling industry began to collapse, transitioned to a sugar plantation town.
The downtown area and Front Street was designated a national historic landmark in 1962 and many of the buildings had been preserved and were open to the public. However the wildfire that erupted in the middle of the night brought widespread destruction to the area.
Photos posted by the county showed a line of flames blazing across an intersection and leaping above historic buildings.
Another Lahaina resident, Ke’eaumoku Kapu, was tying down loose objects in the wind at the cultural center he runs when his wife showed up and told him they needed to evacuate. “Things got crazy, the wind started picking up,” said Kapu, who added that they got out “in the nick of time”.
It was not immediately known how many structures have burned or how many people have been evacuated.
The unprecedented blazes were fanned by strong winds from Hurricane Dora. Rescuers with the US Coast Guard pulled a dozen people from the ocean water off Lahaina after they had dived in to escape smoke and flames. Burn patients have been flown to the island of Oahu, officials said.
Another casualty of the inferno was the 150-year-old Lahaina Banyan tree, that at its peak stood at 60ft high with branches that extended across an entire city block. Though the tree appears to have survived the fire and is still standing, according to local social media commenters, it has been severely damaged by the flames.
Governor Josh Green is expected to be back in Hawaii on Wednesday evening, after returning home from a scheduled trip. Green has been in contact with the White House and is preparing to request emergency federal assistance sometime in the next two days, once he has a better idea of the damage, his office said in a news release. Hundreds of families have been displaced and much of Lahaina has been destroyed, Green said in the statement.
Joe Biden also released a statement in which he offered condolences to those who have lost loved ones and prayers for those left to rebuild their community.”
Our hearts have been eaten by the voracious greed of hegemonic elites in the sacrifice of beautiful Lahaina on the altar of amoral capitalism and the dominion conferred by control of oil as a strategic resource, interdependent fronts in our ancient civilizational war against nature, and a history which in the face of impossible odds managed to claw back something of our humanity and create beauty from the ugliness of imperial-colonial conquest and exploitation, however thin and ephemeral the illusions which concealed atrocities; but neither the world nor humankind need our sorrows.
The world and our fellow human beings need our resilience and refusal to submit to learned helplessness, abjection, and despair; this fragile earth and ark of life hurtling through the darkness and lost in the infinite meaninglessness of space needs our solidarity of action and faith in each other, our power of vision in the reimagination and transformation of systems of oppression and unequal power, our redemptive power of love to heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, and our hope for a better future among the infinite possibilities of becoming human.
Somewhere over the Rainbow sung by Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwoʻole
Lahaina Before the Fire
Hawaii: Maui residents escape wildfires while strong winds cause blaze to spread – video report
Hawai’I seizes me with an immediacy and vividness in the context of Asian American literature and history, for it embodies both the terror of our racist and imperial-colonial history and our hopes for a better future as a diverse and inclusive United Humankind in which all human beings are truly equal. Between the systemic evils in which we are complicit and our liberation from unequal power and elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness there lies a long path of reckoning and emergence; but first we must find a vision of who we want to become, we humans, and in Hawai’I this too we may discover.
Hawai’I is a Cuba that never found a liberator.
You may notice that herein I do not follow my usual rule of including only works by authors who are members of a historical people and may speak both of and for them, which in this case would limit my selection to books by native indigenous persons of Kānaka Maoli identity.
What is a Hawaiian, or an American? In Hawaii we see an image of our possible future as a united humankind, multiethnic and transhistorical, protean, inclusive, and diverse beyond limit or categorization.
In such a society, to claim membership is to become a member without question or qualification. To write as such a member is to negotiate the legacies of our history, which include epigenetic harms of racism and colonialism, and to reimagine and transform the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Here are works by people born in Hawaii, or written in Hawaii from within its many layered and interdependent communities.
This is also true of its two great ancestor spirits, guardians and guides of the soul, who speak to us through dreams and poetic vision of our futures from a mythic past, Barack Obama and Maxine Hong Kingston. Some scholars argue that they were once living human beings like any other, who became exalted and deified in a remote age not because they were embodiments of Hegelian world-historical forces, but because they changed such forces and processes through the reimagination and transformation of poetic vision and a praxis or realized action of human values, and the nature and fate of humankind changed with them.
May we all become such fulcrums of change, and help to dream and to realize a free society of equals.
Hawaii speaks here with many voices, all of which belong.
History and Culture
Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’I, by Hokulani K. Aikau (Editor)
Pacific Worlds, by Matt K. Matsuda
Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii, by Susanna Moore
Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands, Honolulu: The First Century, by Gavan Daws
Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings and America’s First Imperial Adventure, by Julia Flynn Siler
Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowell
Captive Paradise: The Story of the United States and Hawaii, by James L. Haley
From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’I, by Haunani-Kay Trask
Waikiki: A History of Forgetting & Remembering, by Andrea Feeser
Volcanoes, Palm Trees, and Privilege: Essays on Hawai’I, by Liz Prato
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, by Tony Horwitz
A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief: The Island Civilization of Ancient Hawai’I, On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact, Unearthing the Polynesian Past. Explorations and Adventures of an Island Archaeologist, by Patrick Vinton Kirch
No Footprints in the Sand: A Memoir of Kalaupapa, by Henry Nalaielua, Sally-Jo Keala-O-Anuenue Bowman
Big Happiness: The Life and Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior, by Mark Panek
Waking Up in Eden: In Pursuit of an Impassioned Life on an Imperiled Island,
by Lucinda Fleeson
My Time in Hawaii: A Polynesian Memoir by Victoria Nelson
Hawaiian Mythology, by Martha Warren Beckwith
Ancient Hawai’I, by Herb Kawainui Kane
The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant, by Keaulumoku
The Burning Island: Myth and History of the Hawaiian Volcano Country, by Pamela Frierson
Kika Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music, by John W. Troutman
The Haumana Hula Handbook: A Manual for the Student of Hawaiian Dance,
by Mahealani Uchiyama
Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions from the Past, by John R.K. Clark
Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai’I,
by Isaiah Helekunihi Walker
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan
Archipelago: Portraits of Life in the World’s Most Remote Island Sanctuary,
by David Liittschwager, Susan Middleton
Sam Choy’s Island Flavors, Sam Choy Woks the Wok: Stir Fry Cooking at Its Island Best, The Choy of Seafood: Sam Choy’s Pacific Harvest, Sam Choy’s Polynesian Kitchen: More Than 150 Authentic Dishes from One of the World’s Most Delicious and Overlooked Cuisines, by Sam Choy
Written By Outsiders Looking In, as was said of Timothy Leary by The Moody Blues
Hotel Honolulu, by Paul Theroux
The Curse of Lono, by Hunter S. Thompson, Steve Crist (Editor), Ralph Steadman (Illustrator)
Travelers’ Tales Hawai‘I, By Rick & Marcie Carroll
Six Months in the Sandwich Islands: Among Hawaii’s Palm Groves, Coral Reefs and Volcanoes, by Isabella Lucy Bird
Literature
Shark Dialogues, House of Many Gods, Kiana Davenport
Night Is a Sharkskin Drum, by Haunani-Kay Trask
This is Paradise: stories, Kristiana Kahakauwila
The Heart of Being Hawaiian, by Sally-Jo Keala-O-Anuenue Bowman
Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Shadow Child, by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
The Tattoo, by Chris McKinney
School for Hawaiian Girls, by Georgia Ka’Apuni McMillen
The Descendants, by Kaui Hart Hemmings
Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn
Diamond Head, by Cecily Wong
Language of the Geckos and Other Stories, A Ricepaper Airplane, by Gary Pak
Hawaii Nei: Island Plays, by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl
Molokai, Kaaawa: A Novel about Hawaii in the 1850s, by O.A. Bushnell
A Little Too Much Is Enough, Makai, by Kathleen Tyau
Jan Ken Po, by Dennis M. Ogawa
The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, by W.S. Merwin
Moloka’I, Daughter of Moloka’I, Honolulu, by Alan Brennert
Aloha Las Vegas: And Other Plays, by Edward Sakamoto
Picture Bride, The Land Of Bliss, Cloud Moving Hands, by Cathy Song
On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems, All-Night Lingo Tango, Babel, Holoholo: Poems, Delirium: Poems, The Alphabet of Desire, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, by Barbara Hamby
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, We Can Be Better: The Influential Speeches of Barack Obama, The Promiser: Barack Obama’s Fireside Chats, A Promised Land, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Barack Obama
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, by David Remnick
Woman Warrior, China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Broken Book of Life: An Intertextual Study of the Woman Warrior and China Men, by Maureen Sabine
The Art of Parody: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Use of Chinese Sources,
by Yan Gao
Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Fiction,
by Jeanne Rosier Smith
Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature, by Brandy Nālani McDougall
The Power of the Steel-tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History, by Noenoe K. Silva
On this Full Moon the Ides of Hecate falls, opening gates of vision at the crossroads and through bodies of water called the Mirror of Diana, Diana being the name of Artemis, Selene, and Hecate together as aspects of one goddess.
Herein I include a general introduction to Hecate written by the founder of the Covenant of Hecate, Sorita d’Este; her website has an Ides of Hecate ritual for those who wish.
For myself it’s a bit light on the combat sports which are at the heart of the Hecatean Ides, and the ritual hunt which follows as hunting dogs, spears, arrows, and other tools of hunting are forbidden use and made ready during this time, and the Firedance or art of fighting with a flaming whip or rope dart which is its signature. Historically this would have been chariot whips, or rope on sailing ships, though pugil sticks with torch ends would do nicely, and modern Firedance is straight up Shao Lin rope dart techniques.
The central mythos is the battle between the priest of Hecate and his challenger for kingship during the coming year, much like tigers fight annually to determine territory. This was between escaped slaves, and materially benefitted ancient society by conserving the bloodlines of the greatest of warriors and hunters who would be wed to representatives of the goddess for the next year; also a way to relieve pressure in a slave raiding society and class system as any slave able to escape and dethrone the current ruler could become king. In other words, the ladies choose husbands by letting the men fight it out amongst themselves; the sporting games conducted during the Ides of Hecate were nonlethal contests unlike that of the trial by battle for kingship. I speculate that this was a universal origin of sports, a proving ground of mate selection which also regulated social hierarchy. Knights were still jousting for a lady’s favor until modern times, and cheerleaders still rooting for their team in schools throughout America.
So for myself, a proper Ides of Hecate puts feats of skill, strength, endurance, and speed and contests at arms front and center, offerings and sacrifices to a representative of the goddess to prove oneself worthy of her favor. This might presage a hierosgamos of some kind, and be followed by a Hunt and the offering of a feast.
Another notable feature of the festival of Hecate is the use of bodies of water as The Mirror of Diana or a gateway to other worlds, a parallel to how one would use a crossroads, one of Hecate’s titles being “of the Crossroads”, to enter the realm of the dead through ecstatic trance and visionary rites. This associates her with Legba in Voodoo, a Guardian of the Gates figure, with necromancy and demon summoning magic, and with transformative magic and werewolves as figures of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
Life is full of Rashomon Gate events, all of which may be considered crossroads, relative truths in which possible futures are created and destroyed by our choices, fates mediated by Hecate as a figure of change and poetic vision as the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human.
Therefore I include rites of ecstatic trance, vision quests, and dreamwork in my repertoire of Hecatean celebrations, along with contests, feasts, and the practice of joy.
Last I mention her role as Luciferia, the Lightbringer who in the thousands of years later mythos of Christianity was conflated with the serpent of Eden, read into the story of the Nephilim or Fallen angels in the Book of Enoch, and emerges fourteen hundred years later in Milton’s magnificent Paradise Lost as the rebel angel Satan, and having switched genders though originally she is also a shapechanger so this should not disturb us. Her original masculine parallel was Prometheus, thief of the fire of the gods and ally of humankind against powers beyond our control and the tyranny of amoral and sometimes hostile gods, forces, systems of oppression, and Authority.
As a guardian and guide of the soul who like Virginia Woolf’s time traveling immortal Orlando can change gender, Hecate may be most familiar to us through this novel as well as Herman Hesse’s Demian and The Red Book of Carl Gustave Jung under the name of Abraxas, the Gnostic Infinite who is both good and evil and beyond good and evil, a Union of Opposites which includes the masculine and feminine halves of our souls.
The story of Hecate as a legacy of our history is one of demonization of all that is Good, True, and Beautiful in us, a history of civilization as war on nature and on human nature, of systems of oppression in service to power and our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by those who would enslave us and steal our souls. But we can take our power back by embracing our monstrosity and reclaiming our wildness, by transgression of the Forbidden, violation of our normalities and other people’s ideas of virtue as submission to Authority, most especially refusal to submit, to believe, or to obey, things which I count as sacred acts in pursuit of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
If like myself you prefer to run amok and be ungovernable to subjugation by Authority, seizures of power and liberation struggle to tyranny and systems of oppression, and practice the violation of normalities, transgression of the Forbidden, and defiance of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities and their enforcers in the state as embodied violence, if you live the truths written in your flesh as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth, you may find kinship with the figure of Hecate the Lightbringer.
As written by Sorita d’Este in the Covenant of Hecate’s site; ”Our journey towards understanding this festival starts at Lake Nemi, Italy.
The Speculum Dianae
At Lake Nemi stood and was celebrated perhaps the most important temple and festival of the Goddess Diana, a goddess who is never far from the centre in the modern Pagan witchcraft revival: Diana is the goddess of Leland’s 1892 Aradia: Gospel of the Witches. Diana is named in documents linked to the European Witchcraft trials too, for example, King James I of England’s Daemonoloy in 1597 this discussion about Diana and the Faeries we read:
“That fourth kinde of spirites, which by the Gentiles was called Diana, and her wandring court, and amongst vs was called the Phairie (as I tould you) or our good neighboures, was one of the sortes of illusiones that was rifest in the time of Papistrie: for although it was holden odious to Prophesie by the deuill, yet whome these kinde of Spirites carryed awaie, and informed, they were thought to be sonsiest and of best life. …”
Diana’s legacy is enduring and permeates the magical revival.
Lake Nemi was known as Speculum Dianae (The Mirror of Diana) by the Romans, both because this was a sacred place of Diana’s and because the Moon – associated with Diana – reflected so beautifully in the lake.
Here Diana Nemorensis (Diana of the woodlands) was celebrated. Stratius wrote describing this, saying that:
“It is the season when the most scorching region of the heavens takes over the land and the keen dog-star Sirius, so often struck by Hyperion’s sun, burns the gasping fields. Now is the day with Trivia’s Arician grove, convenient for fugitive kings, grows smoky, and the lake, having guilty knowledge of Hippolytus, glitters with the reflection of a multitude of torches; Diana herself garlands the deserving hunting dogs and polishes the arrowheads and allows the wild animals to go in safely, and at virtuous hearths all Italy celebrates the Hecatean Ides…”
Lake Nemi was also named Speculum Dianae (Mirror of Diana) by Virgil and was a wealthy centre where Diana was worshipped as a goddess for at least 1000 years. Here Diana was served by the Rex Nemorensis (King of the Woods) who was both Priest and guardian to the temple, fulfilling an important role of office, one which started and ended with bloodshed. The British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) in his translation of The Battle of Lake Regillus poetically describes Lake Nemi and the cruel reality of its priest:
“From the still glassy lake that sleeps
Beneath Aricia’s trees–
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.”
Strabo’s The Geography provides us with further insights on the Rex Nemorensis telling us that the position of priest was held by a man who was a run-away slave, who having successfully attacked and killed his predecessor, took his place as King of the Woods. As a result the serving priest was always armed with a sword and on the look-out for would-be attackers in order to defend his life and his position. Thus the Priest-King of Diana was a hunter who was hunted in turn, a King who had to prove him-self to be the best against each challenger in order to maintain his position as servant and guardian to the goddess.
Diana, like Hekate and Artemis, was depicted and described as a virgin goddess.
Like Artemis – and on occasion Hekate – she is depicted or described as a huntress.
All three of these goddesses had significant links to childbirth and the well being of women during conception and pregnancy. All three are associated with the Moon and depicted with dogs. It really is rather complicated separating them from each other completely!
Curiously, the festival known as the Nemoralia was also known as the Hecatean Ides; and though at this time we know very little about it there was a festival celebrated that the Temple of Hekate at Lagina which also took place during the Ides of August. The poet Ausonius remarks in his Idyll, that the Ides of August is dedicated to Hekate of Latonia [Leto]: “Sextiles Hecate Latonia vindicat Idus.” (for more see the 4th century CE Idyll 5.23).
Nemoralia or the Hecatean Ides
We don’t have information to prove exactly when this festival started, but it might have been as early – or earlier – than the 6th century BCE. The “Ides” of a month are the middle days, usually the 13th to the 16th, which are why these are the dates still celebrated today. While this is not technically wrong, the calendar dates during the Roman period would have been calculated by the Moon, rather than a fixed calendar of days – so this would have corresponded to the Full Moon period, as the first of the month was marked by the New Moon. Today it is typically the 13th or 16th of August that is celebrated.
The historical festival lasted for three days. People travelled from all over the region, often on foot. Torches were lit, participants wore wreaths and also tied string to trees near the water – all of it with offerings of song and prayer. Votive tablets (tabella) and objects representing body parts that needed healing were also brought to the site and left, presumably with prayers.
The lake and temples at Nemi enjoyed the attention of treasure hunters for many centuries, including the excavations of 2 full-sized ships (in fact very large considering they were both on a small inland lake with no access to water ways) which were – seemingly deliberately sunk (possibly as offerings, but there are also other theories) during the Roman period. These ships were excavated and put on display during the early part of the 20th century, but as a result of WWII work stopped and most of the finds, including the ships, went up in flames on the 31st of May 1944. Reports on who was responsible for the fire vary, but the museum was hit by US army shells aimed at getting Nazi occupiers to leave the area two hours before it went up in flames. Either way, a lot of information has been lost forever as a result.
The use the ships had are a matter of debate, it is very possible that one or both functioned as floating temples, they were built during the reign of the Emperor Caligula who favoured some of the Isian cults (of the Greco-Egyptian Isis) and that of Diana at Nemi. Like other Romans of his time he equated the two goddesses through a process called interpretatio romano, a way through which the culture and gods of another place were understood from a Roman perspective – not all deities were considered equal, but those with significantly similar qualities or origins were equated. Of course both Isis and Diana were also equated to Hekate in this way.
More work is being done to record and document what is left of the site in recent years, and hopefully we will be able to learn more from the work being done here and elsewhere to document finds.
Hekate & Diana
Although the goddesses Diana and Hekate at first appear to be quite different, when we scratch the surface we find that they are intrinsically tangled. For the Romans Diana was also Trivia (Of the Three ways – Latin) like Hekate was Trioditis (Of the Three ways / roads – Greek). Diana was a triple goddess, worshipped as Artemis-Selene-Hekate, so much that a triple image of a goddess appeared on the coins in the local region.
I hope to hear about your celebrations and suggestions, and leave you with this verse from Ben Johnston (1573-1637):
Hymn to Diana
QUEEN and huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair,
State in wonted manner keep:
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.
Earth, let not thy envious shade
Dare itself to interpose;
Cynthia’s shining orb was made
Heaven to clear when day did close:
Bless us then with wished sight,
Goddess excellently bright.
Lay thy bow of pearl apart,
And thy crystal-shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe, how short soever:
Thou that mak’st a day of night—
Goddess excellently bright.
With many blessings for your celebrations, Sorita d’Este
Fire Dance (Shao Lin rope dart, with fire)
If anyone films their duels with such, or you hold flaming pugil stick fight day in your platoon, I want to see the video.
Circle for Hekate by Sorita d’Este. For the history and mythology lovers, this books provides an overview of Hekate’s place in mythology, her places of worship, her symbols and place next to the other gods and goddesses.
Cats do not obey; this is the most important truth about what it means to be a cat, and why I love them.
Non Serviam, as Milton’s rebel angel declares.
The second most important thing about being a cat is their inherently pluralistic and ambiguous nature; dual aspected figures of both Maat, Egyptian goddess of motherhood and nurturance, but also a lioness and fierce hunter and protector in her form as Sekmet.
These are the defining terms and limits of the taxonomy and identity of cats; playful and purring, hedonistic and boundlessly loving, whose games are those of an ambush predator with sabre like claws hidden in the soft paws which knead us into nests to dream upon.
Humans and cats have evolved together and shaped one another in partnership since the pyramids of Egypt, where their role was to guard our dreams from nightmares, demons, hungry ghosts and other symbolized and archetypal threats and legacies of our history. This is why to dream with their chosen human is the greatest joy and signifier of status among cats, with grooming and the offering of food close seconds.
As artifacts of this partnership cats have a complex culture which includes trade languages used only to communicate with humans, songs which must be learned from other cats and which are proof not only of sentience and sapient intelligence but also of culture.
So we have taught them how to interact and communicate with us; what have we learned from them?
From the independence and agency of cats we have become unique individuals, emerged from group identity, and forged souls or persona, a word which originates with the theatrical mask of Greek drama as roles we perform in the construction of ourselves. As Julian Jaynes teaches us in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the birth of the human arrives with the silence of the gods.
From cats as figures of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves we learn to inhabit our bodies, claim ourselves, and embrace those truths written in our flesh.
Part of this essential wildness is that each and every cat bears within it a Great Cat; both the behavior and genetics of cats is nearly identical to that of wild tigers. There is less genetic drift between our cats and tigers than there is between different breeds of dogs.
All cats are trophy hunters, like ourselves; my partner Dolly tells of her finding a circle of mouse skulls under a building on her childhood family farm, exactly like the lions in the great film The Ghost and the Darkness who artfully displayed human remains in their den, and like those in the cave of a tiger with whom I danced in Burma long ago. In this too we humans and cats are much alike.
A cat may claim you as a family member by touching noses or enjoy the mutual grooming rituals of being petted or swirling your hair with its sandpaper tongue, but we do not own them, nor they us.
One can immediately identify potential friends and partners who do not wish to impose their own agency upon ours, to dominate, control, and own, by a preference for cats.
As we are taught in the film Breakfast at Tiffanys, the difference as a border of identity and an interface of connection between owning each other and belonging to each other is both a ground of revolutionary struggle and a space of free creative play.
I have practiced dancing the cat inside as martial arts for fifty years now, first as Northern Shao Lin Tiger and Leopard and related or successor styles Hung Gar and elements of Choy Li Fut, and for three decades as Raja Harimau Silat which hybridizes Chinese, Arab, Indian, and indigenous influences. These include Peranakan or Straits Chinese arts, mainly of the Hokkien speaking diaspora in Singapore and Malaysia, especially the Fujian Crane, Southern Snake modeled on the pit viper which I studied in Georgetown Penang at the Snake Temple, all of which are referred to locally as Kuntao meaning Chinese fighting arts and includes BaGua, Tai Chi, and in Penang the Chu family Shao Lin Phoenix styles unchanged from their origins. Much of Kuntao looks like Wing Chun, which shares common origins. Like escrima and kali in the Phillipines, the influence of European sword and dagger fighting on Silat is immense. Silat still uses the sacred weapon of the Hindu dynasty of Java, the flame-bladed Kris, made of Damascus steel and often with gold fittings, a caste indicator and claim of identity and part of the pan-Hindu diaspora cult of the Rakshasa weretiger demons.
All of these influences and layers of history are embedded into the Raja Harimau art I learned from the Minangkabau people of Sumatra with whom I once lived, based on direct observation of wild tigers in nature, and is pervasive throughout the Islamic diaspora among Indonesian and Malay Silat fighting arts propagated by Sufi warrior brotherhoods including my own Naqshbandi order.
You may recognize its unique karambit knife which mimics the dewclaw of a tiger from Mazakine’s knives in the telenovela Lucifer. It is used reversed gripped in the manner of an Omani Khanjar and made ubiquitous by Arab sailors as both a rigger’s tool and weapon, sharp on the inner curve, as a weapon of surprise, stealth, leverage, and deceptive curving angles of movement. A Silat warrior can dissect an enemy with it in closing during ambush or counterattack, or as a ground fighting and grappling weapon, where the karambit has special advantages of angle, like a tiger with its prey. Silat also has the defining characteristic of using gamelon music to set the timing for sparring matches.
Harimau Silat became the tribal art of the Bugis people who are the main seafaring and shipbuilding tribe of the region, and came to Penang in the 1800’s with an exiled prince who changed its name to Silat Seni Gayong and made it a national art of Malaysia centered on the sacred Kris sword. I’ve practiced with Bugis sailors with whom I raided slave ships to free their captives, in Georgetown on the island of Penang which I made my home port during that time, and in Sumatra after being castaway in a storm in the Mentawai Islands and building an outrigger sailboat to reach the main port of Padaung several hours across open seas, and the differences among these three variants of the art were negligible.
As the idea of the cat is for myself bound together with martial arts as resistance and liberation struggle, freedom, wildness, and sovereignty, it has become both a symbol and praxis of seizures of power from Authority.
Freedom and wildness as states of being define the cat, and signpost its power as an archetypal figure of ourselves as Unconquered beings and as Living Autonomous Zones. And its praxis has political implications, which is why cats were demonized by the Church as familiars of witches, a witch being nothing more or less than a human who owns themselves and submits to nothing; no gods and no masters as Blanqui and Kropotkin popularized the Anarchist motto in the 1880’s, whose symbols include Le Chat Noir.
We are familiar with the poster created in 1896 for the world’s first nightclub in Montmarte, its true meaning and significance has become obscure; for Le Chat Noir was the secret meeting place of the Anarchists.
Herein I imagine anarchism as an art of total freedom in the context of the Anarchist Trilogy of William S. Burroughs, who was among the literati collected by my father and a kind and wise mentor of my childhood.
The Cat Inside, first of Burrough’s Anarchist Trilogy, is a delightful and precious allegory of freedom and rebellion, a meditation on values which extends Nietzsche’s analysis of master- slave psychology to a philosophy of anarchist liberation, and references Nietzsche’s interpreters Nikos Kazantzakis, Karl Jaspers, Maurice Blanchot, C.G. Jung, and Gilles Deleuze. Burroughs wrote it in direct reply to Dr Suess’ reimagination of the god of Chaos, a variant of whose name I bear, Janus, as The Cat in the Hat, also influenced by Soseki’s hilarious, strange, and uncategorizable novel of Japan The Cat Inside.
The Revised Boy Scout Manual, second of the trilogy, is a brilliant parody and a manual of anarchist revolt and liberation from systems of oppression. Along with T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the works of Mao and Che Guevara, it is among the finest classics of direct action and guerrilla warfare one might consult. I believe he wrote some of it, being a collection of recorded spoken word poetry, for me when I was an actual Boy Scout. I do hope I have made good use of his wisdom in making mischief for tyrants and revolutionary struggle.
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 him, the final part of his 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. As he wrote it 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, with the blood of ancient terrors, and had been driven out of Europe for that reason; Martin Luther referred to my ancestors as 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. It is also filled with episodes from the glory days of his youth and set in Mexico and Morocco as imaginal realms; the Surrealist transcendence of dreams and ecstatic vision and the degradation of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau here mingle and intertwine.
When I asked him, at the age of ten or eleven, 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 his fellow Surrealist and poet Philip Lamantia was a scholar, also the subject of his final novel The Western Lands as is H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath which was among its direct models, references Octave Mirbeau, Celine, 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 of our nature which he so deliciously called “polymorphosly perverse”. David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; here dance Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche and Lovecraft’s gods of madness.
All true art exalts and defiles.
Let us embrace the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.
On this International Cat Day, let us bring the Chaos, run amok, and be Ungovernable
Tournée du Chat Noir de Rodolphe Salis, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen 1896
The Surprising Story of the Cat-Obsessed Artist Behind the Famed ‘Le Chat Noir’ Poster: We take a closer look at an artist whose passion for house cats was rivaled only by his passion for workers’ liberation.
A grand spectacle of white supremacist terror, vote suppression, dehumanization of nonwhite people and theft of black citizenship unfolds in Texas in the wake of Trump’s order to gerrymander districts to steal the votes of black citizens, Democrats flee the state to block its legislature from enacting such, and Republicans send police to arrest them.
We are witnessing one of the most undisguised acts of racist state terror and institutional white supremacy in American history, and no one has arrested Trump or his regime of subversion of democracy. This is an ancient evil, and it lingers in the shadows of our history which we drag behind ourselves like invisible reptilian tails.
Let us give to fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of September 17 2024, On Voter Registration Day and Meaningful Citizenship Wherein We Are Co-Owners of the State: In a Democracy, the Vote Is Everything; We are in a crisis of democracy during civilizational collapse and the subversion and fall of America and other guarantor nations of freedom and our universal human rights, and specifically the meaning of citizenship and the equal social power of the vote is once again in question in America because we are among the many fronts of a Third World War against Putin’s criminal regime and his mad dream of a new Russian Empire.
No less than the battlefields of Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Moldova, nearly the whole of Africa now made a wishbone of Russian and NATO client states, and the peace and democracy movements in Russia which challenge a brutal police state with liberation struggle, in the complex and pre existing liberation struggle of Palestine from Israel now a theatre of both the Iran-Arab American Alliance conflict and of the Third World War as a proxy war of Russia versus America through our client states of Israel and the Iranian Dominion, and last in our elections, legislative actions, and the arena of our courts, and in struggle against the political subversion and ongoing insurgent warfare of the Fourth Reich on the American Front and our Resistance to it will decide the fate of humankind.
Full mobilization of our loyal citizens in voting and political action is crucial, for while democracy remains, tattered though it is, the vote is our one power which may yet redeem everything else. We fight a Total War begun by Russia and Israel and modeled on the doctrine created by Franco and Hitler and tested at Guernica, social, economic, political, cultural, with the ideals and values that underlie our systems and institutions at risk; liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
The vote is everything.
And I can tell you from long experience, voting is better than shooting. We must protect the sanctity of the vote, as an equal share in our nation, if we are to avoid the next civil war and the near thousand years of a new Dark Age it may bring.
This chapter you are reading now, and now are also writing, for it is each of us who will together choose a future for humankind. The nature of that choice is become unambiguous and simple with the invasions of Ukraine and Palestine by the enemies of liberty, the capture of the state by Traitor Trump in the Stolen Election of 2016, and the dawn of World War Three; tyranny or liberty?
In one of these choices and one only, we may win a future where something resembling ourselves looks back centuries from now on this moment of civilizational collapse or rebirth, with questioning, hope, and wonder.
“God Bless Us, Every One” as Dickens wrote in A Christmas Carol, the story which founded the modern holiday and originated Liberation Theology in wedding Marx to the Sermon on the Mount. In this time of darkness, we must answer division with solidarity, fear with love, despair with hope, fascism and tyranny with resistance, and the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.
What has happened?
As written by Sam Levine in The Guardian, in an article entitled What does Texas redrawing its voting maps mean and why have Democrats left the state? Explained; “At the insistence of Donald Trump, Republicans in Texas are pushing ahead with an effort to redraw their congressional map to pick up as many as five additional Republican seats.
The decision has set off a cascading legal battle. State lawmakers have fled Texas as part of an effort to stop Republicans from passing the map. Democrats in other states have said they will retaliate, setting the stage for a nasty and prolonged redistricting tit-for-tat that could last for years.
What is redistricting?
After a nationwide census every 10 years, all 50 US states are required to redraw their congressional districts to account for population shifts. The US constitution entrusts the power to draw congressional lines to the state legislatures in each state. Since the 18th century, politicians have tried to use this line-drawing power to punish their political rivals. In the 19th century, the practice of manipulating district lines for political lines became known as gerrymandering.
While states are required to redistrict every 10 years, the constitution contains no explicit ban on redrawing boundaries before the decade is up.
Why is Texas redistricting now?
Republicans currently hold an extremely slim 219-212 majority in the US House (there are four vacancies, three of which are seats previously held by Democrats). Republicans know they will probably lose seats in next year’s mid-term elections, when all members of the US House will stand for re-election and the sitting president’s party typically does not perform well.
Republicans have complete control of state government in Texas, which has 38 US House seats (second only to California’s 52 seats). Republicans currently hold 25 of those seats. Seeking to shore up the Republican advantage in the US House, Trump urged the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, to redraw the state’s lines to add additional Republican-friendly districts.
Abbott called a special session to draw the districts last month. Last week, Republicans unveiled a map in which they could pick up five additional seats, giving them a 30-8 advantage in the state’s delegation.
Is this legal?
Texas also undertook a mid-decade redistricting in 2003. In 2006, the US supreme court said that nothing in the US constitution prohibited Texas from redrawing its district mid-decade.
The US supreme court has also given states virtually unlimited leeway to gerrymander districts for partisan gain. In a 5-4 decision in 2019, it said that federal courts could not do anything to stop the drawing of districts for partisan advantage, no matter how severe.
There are still legal protections that prohibit states from diluting the influence of minority voters when they draw districts or explicitly sorting them based on their race. But the supreme court has made those cases extremely difficult to win and they can take years to resolve in court.
Why did Texas Democrats flee the state?
Democrats are in the minority in the Texas state legislature. But the body’s bylaws require the presence of two-thirds of its lawmakers to conduct business. There are 150 members of the Texas house of representatives, 62 of whom are Democrats. More than 51 fled the state on Sunday to Illinois, Massachusetts and New York to deny that quorum, halting the legislature from moving forward on the maps.
This isn’t the first time Democrats have fled the state to break quorum to try to stop Republicans from passing legislation. In 2021, Democrats fled to Washington DC as Republicans were poised to pass sweeping new voting restrictions. That standoff lasted several weeks, but Democrats eventually returned to the state and the legislation passed. Democrats also fled the state in 2003 to try to stop mid-decade redistricting.
Can Republicans force Democrats to return to Texas?
The Texas house voted on Monday to authorize arrest warrants for the members who fled the state. Such warrants are unlikely to be enforced while the members are out of the state.
Abbott and the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, have pledged to aggressively pursue the Democrats. Abbott has cited a 2021 non-binding opinion from Paxton’s office to suggest that the lawmakers who broke quorum could be removed from office. But such an extraordinary action would need to go through the Texas courts and would likely be tied up in state court for some time.
Rules enacted by the House in 2023 subject state lawmakers to a $500 daily fine for each day they are absent. Lawmakers are paid about $600 a month. While the rules prohibit lawmakers from using campaign funds to pay the fines, there are loopholes Democrats can use to have someone else cover them. The current special legislative session runs through 19 August but Abbott can continue to call more sessions, and it’s unclear how long Democrats are willing to wait out returning.
How are Democrats outside of Texas responding?
As Texas has moved ahead with its effort to implement a new map, Democrats have threatened to retaliate by redrawing districts in states where they have complete control.
Most notably, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, is leading an effort to redraw California’s 52 districts to drastically reduce the number of Republican seats (Democrats already hold 43 seats). Democratic governors in Illinois and New York have also pledged to retaliate.
Democrats face significant legal obstacles to achieving this goal. In California, voters approved a referendum in 2010 that strips lawmakers of their redistricting power and instead hands it to a bipartisan and independent citizens commission. Newsom and California Democrats are reportedly moving ahead with a plan to have voters approve a new map through a referendum this fall. In New York, the state constitution bars mid-decade redistricting absent a court order, but Democrats are reportedly considering putting a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would allow them to redistrict later in the decade. “I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,” Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, said on Wednesday.
Will other Republican states redraw their maps?
Trump is reportedly urging Republicans in Missouri to redraw their congressional map to pick up an additional GOP seat. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, has also suggested that his state, where Republicans hold 20 of 28 seats, should redraw districts, which would likely lead to additional GOP gains.
Ohio, where Republicans hold 10 of 15 seats, is required to redraw its map this year because of a unique state law. That is likely to also lead to additional Republican seats.”
What does this mean?
As written by Rotimi Adeoye in MSNBC, in an article entitled The Voting Rights Act exists — for now; “The Supreme Court last week announced it wants to reconsider one of the core assumptions behind the Voting Rights Act: whether it’s even constitutional to intentionally draw congressional districts where Black or Latino voters make up the majority.
The justices requested new briefing in a Louisiana redistricting case, asking whether the creation of a second majority-Black district, meant to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — which turns 60 this week — might violate the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. It’s a quiet but seismic signal. The court isn’t just skeptical of the Voting Rights Act’s power. It’s asking whether the law’s foundational remedy, majority-minority districts, is itself illegal.
I remember the frustration of trying to explain this to national reporters: We had the facts and still lost.
For those of us who’ve worked to protect the Voting Rights Act, this moment feels less like a surprise than a culmination. I spent years at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, where I helped lead public messaging through some of the most pivotal cases in recent memory. I helped coordinate the fallout from Brnovich v. DNC, a Supreme Court ruling that made it nearly impossible to prove that new voting laws discriminate against voters of color. But the fights that haunt me most happened in Georgia and South Carolina.
In South Carolina, our legal team showed — convincingly — that the Republican-led Legislature had deliberately drawn district lines to disenfranchise Black voters along the coast. A federal court agreed, calling the redistricting a “bleaching” of Black political power.
But the Supreme Court overturned the ruling anyway.
I remember the frustration of trying to explain this to national reporters: We had the facts and still lost. Georgia wasn’t much different. There, we fought maps that split Black communities just enough to dilute their voting power, a modern form of suppression so subtle it often escapes public notice.
But with each passing term, the court moved the goalposts. And I watched in real time as the Voting Rights Act, once one of the most forceful civil rights laws, was reduced to a ceremonial reference point.
For the last 10 years, the law has lived in two parallel worlds. In public, politicians from both parties issue statements honoring it. They speak of Selma and sacrifices, of John Lewis and moral clarity. But inside the courts, where the law is supposed to matter most, it has been hollowed out.
It began with Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, which struck down the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance formula and allowed jurisdictions with histories of discrimination to change voting laws without federal approval. Then came the Brnovich decision, which neutered Section 2’s power to challenge those laws after the fact. Now, with the court asking whether majority-Black districts are themselves unconstitutional, we’re nearing the logical endpoint of this erosion. A law designed to empower voters of color is being reframed as a threat to a “colorblind” Constitution.
The irony, of course, is that the tactics used to suppress voters of color have evolved. They don’t always look like Jim Crow. Today, suppression is algorithmic and bureaucratic. It’s moving polling places, manipulating district lines and purging voter rolls. And because the courts require increasingly unrealistic proof of discriminatory intent, these modern methods often slide by unchecked.
Republican officials, especially at the state level, understand this perfectly. They’ve mastered the art of voter suppression that can pass constitutional muster.
We cling to the Voting Rights Act because we want to believe that democracy, once secured, is permanent.
Louisiana’s Legislature drew a second Black district only after being ordered to do so by a lower court. That decision now hangs in the balance. And make no mistake: If the Supreme Court rules that race-conscious redistricting is unconstitutional, the consequences will stretch far beyond Louisiana. Dozens of districts across the country — including ones in Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina — could be legally unsettled overnight.
Democrats, for their part, haven’t been able to respond with the urgency this moment demands. The Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act languished in the Senate because the Democrats haven’t figured out how to win in purple states. The Biden administration’s Justice Department tried to do what it could, but it was limited by the tools the court dulled.
I don’t write any of this with cynicism. I write it with the perspective of someone who has tried to defend this law from the inside. I’ve seen organizers in the South build entire campaigns around the belief that the Voting Rights Act could still protect them. I’ve seen the hope — and then the heartbreak — when it didn’t.
We cling to the Voting Rights Act because we want to believe that democracy, once secured, is permanent. But that’s not true; it requires vigilance, leverage and capturing power. The Supreme Court’s message is becoming clearer by the term: Nostalgia isn’t a substitute for protection.
The Voting Rights Act still exists. But like so many monuments in American life, it’s starting to feel more like memory than law.”
As written by George Chidi in The Guardian, in an article entitled The Voting Rights Act is facing the biggest threats in its 60 years; “Facing images of violent white mobs defending racial segregation, the condemnation of the world and of its own citizens, Congress in 1965 passed the Voting Rights Act, a law meant to end the hypocrisy of a democratic country that denied Black people the power of their vote.
Sixty years later, race remains at the center of American politics. Cases before the US supreme court, and a platoon of Texas legislators fleeing the state to prevent redistricting, demonstrate how the Voting Rights Act – and its erosion – remains on the frontline of the political battlefield.
“Democracy is at stake,” said Todd Cox, associate director-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Even as voting rights advocates use the act to win additional congressional representation in Alabama and press cases in Louisiana and North Carolina, a conservative supreme court makes gains precarious, he said.
“We wouldn’t be under such a threat if we weren’t doing so well in making sure our communities were engaged, that they were turning out and that their rights were protected,” Cox said. “This is a cyclical part of history, that when we see some success in advancing rights, there’s always backlash.”
Veterans of the struggle for civil rights view passage of the act as a revolutionary, historical demarcation point equal to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Confederate general Robert E Lee’s surrender at Appomattox or the establishment of women’s suffrage. Enforcement of the Voting Rights Act fundamentally rewrote politics in America.
“I know I stand on the shoulders of folks … who fought and died in some cases,” Cox said.
Though constitutional amendments passed after the American civil war ended slavery and commanded racial equality before the law, American lawmakers regularly found ways to keep Black citizens from exercising political power. Literacy tests, poll taxes, separate ballot boxes for Black and white voters, white-only primary elections, purges of Black voters from the rolls and discriminatory district lines rigged elections for white voters in the US’s Jim Crow era.
Each time a court struck down a state law or demanded the end of a discriminatory practice, obstructionist local lawmakers – mostly but not exclusively in southern states – would quickly adapt, often enacting new election changes without enough time for a court to intervene. Civil rights laws at the time held insufficient authority to stop the practice.
After years of campaigns for voting rights and racial equality across the south, the civil rights struggle came to a head in March 1965 in Selma, Alabama. The death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Baptist deacon and local voting rights activist, at the hands of state troopers led 600 people to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
State troopers attacked demonstrators with truncheons and teargas. As networks broadcast the assault, the US watched future US representative John Lewis get beaten into unconsciousness by white police officers live on national television. Support crystalized for civil and voting rights after the events of the “Bloody Sunday” broadcast.
Congress wrote the Voting Rights Act to prevent the case-by-case whack-a-mole games local lawmakers were playing with election rules. It forced jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to clear elections changes with the Department of Justice before they could go into effect. It banned literacy tests to vote and allowed challenges to district maps when those maps would not allow proportional representation for minority voters.
The principles of the Voting Rights Act have shaped the way lawmakers from the halls of Congress to a city council hearing room have to respond politically to voters of color.
Congress has reauthorized the Voting Rights Act four times since its enactment, each time under a Republican president. But the law’s protections have suffered a death of a thousand cuts.
In the Shelby County v Holder case of 2013, the US supreme court held that the data defining jurisdictions with a history of discrimination was too old to be relied upon; Congress must update it for the Voting Rights Act’s pre-clearance rules in Section 5 to remain constitutional, the court ruled. Republicans in Congress have blocked legislation – the John Lewis voting rights advancement act – updating the law, effectively ending pre-clearance.
“It was a pretty significant blow to the project of ensuring voting free of racial discrimination in this country,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s voting rights project. “I think it really accelerated in this moment the attacks on voting access across the country.”
States previously restricted by pre-clearance enacted a wave of election legislation following the ruling, closing polling places, changing voter registration rules and redrawing district lines unhindered.
The 5-4 decision in Rucho v Common Cause in 2019 further eroded the power of the Voting Rights Act, by explicitly permitting political gerrymandering, even as racial gerrymandering remained off-limits.
The mid-decade redistricting in Texas proposed by Donald Trump presents a particularly vivid example of the consequences of an end to pre-clearance and recent supreme court decisions. Democratic state representatives have fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum to pass the redistricting legislation, which would likely grant Republicans an additional five congressional seats in Texas by concentrating some minority voters into fewer districts while diluting clusters of other voters.
“Those maps would have had to be reviewed by the federal government coming in after the fact to challenge them, and winning,” Lakin said.
In 2003, the eighth circuit federal appellate court further restricted the use of the Voting Rights Act, ruling in Arkansas State Conference NAACP v Arkansas Board of Apportionment that private groups do not have a right to challenge state election laws under the act; only the Department of Justice can bring a voting rights case to court. A second eighth circuit decision extended the ban on private voting rights suits from redistricting cases to suits challenging restrictions on voter assistance.
Of the 180 or so successful claims brought under the Voting Rights Act, only 15 have been brought by the Department of Justice, said Jacqueline De León, senior staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund. The Department of Justice’s voting rights division used to have about 30 staff attorneys; under the Trump administration, it has lost all but two or three, she said.
“We know the Department of Justice is not going to be in the business of enforcing voting rights,” De León said. “Right now, we don’t know if there will be a future where a Voting Rights Act is available to our country. This is really a moment for concern and reflection on this anniversary.”
Lakin said she expects the eighth circuit ruling to be appealed to the supreme court.
Meanwhile, a case in Louisiana that has reached the US supreme court threatens the last leg standing of the Voting Rights Act.
On Friday, the court signaled that it will consider the constitutionality of section 2, asking for supplemental briefs in Louisiana v Callais. The case, to be heard later this year, asks whether the state’s creation of a majority-minority congressional district violates the 14th or 15th amendment to the constitution.
“I think this is, unfortunately, another opportunity for the court to continue to attack this pillar of our democracy, the Voting Rights Act,” Lakin said.
In Callais, a group of “non-African-American voters” filed suit against the state of Louisiana, arguing that lawmakers acting on the order of the federal court drew a congressional district map that unconstitutionally considered race.
The Equal Protection Clause of the US constitution and the 15th amendment’s guarantee that the right to vote cannot be denied because of race says that lawmakers cannot consider race predominantly over other factors when redistricting without a compelling reason. But section 2 of the Voting Rights Act requires lawmakers to consider race when it is necessary to ensure that the voting power of racial minorities has fair representation.
The cases are an effort to create conflict between the Voting Rights Act and the constitution as a rationale for a conservative court to chip away, Lakin said.
“Congress can enact laws to ensure the 14th and 15th amendments are given life,” she said. “I think that there’s an attempt to create tensions around this and say that there’s a disconnect with the Voting Rights Act. But as the supreme court has stated … the act is a properly, constitutionally authorized use of Congress’s powers.”
Such a finding would turn hard-fought civil rights law on its head. It would establish a legal basis for white voters to challenge laws meant to protect minority voters from discrimination.
“I would say it’s a perversion of what the Department of Justice has symbolized, specifically what its historic role, its purpose was meant to be,” Lakin said.”
What does Texas redrawing its voting maps mean and why have Democrats left the state? Explained
September 2 2023 Strategies of Tyranny and Resistance: White Supremacist Terror and Theft of Citizenship as Vote Suppression and Gerrymandering in Atlanta
September 21 2024 Election Rigging and Vote Suppression in the Case of Georgia: The Party of Treason, White Supremacist Terror, and Theocratic Patriarchal Sexual Terror Pursues Not Victory In A Free and Fair Election But Subversion of Democracy and Capture of the State
Today is the anniversary of possibly the most terrible war crime ever perpetrated in the history of man’s inhumanity to man and a bitter monument to the collapse of values under the pressure of fear; Hiroshima.
Though the litany of such atrocities would roll on endlessly like a song of despair and horror, there is nothing like America’s use of a weapon which cast men’s souls from their bodies and left their shadows etched upon the walls.
As with all Defining Moments of humankind which have become negotiated truths and a ground of struggle for ownership of the stories of ourselves, memory, history, and identity as a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we have adapted to change over vast epochs of time, there are really two stories here, which swallow each other like the Ouroboros of Time; the story of events themselves as lived and the Rashomon Gate of stories about these Defining Moments as witnesses of history and what Foucault called truthtelling or the sacred calling to pursue the truth. Stories, and the stories about the stories; and which has ahold of us at any given moment we cannot know.
Hiroshima is such a Defining Moment and Rashomon Gate event, in which humankind is forever changed by our new capacity to annihilate ourselves. As Oppenheimer described it, quoting the Bhagavad-Gita; “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
How will we use such dread power, and how will the mere fact of its existence shape us and our future possibilities of becoming human?
Is this the greatest war crime in history, and the measure of America as the furthest depths of human evil? There are many candidates for that title, however, as humans are cruel and our governments are monuments of force and control. Historically I would say the Mongol origination of biowarfare in catapulting the bodies of plague victims over the walls of the cities they wanted to conquer was also very wicked, and resulted in the population of Europe losing one in every four persons, possibly one in three, during the three hundred year terror of the Black Death. But if Hiroshima is the most terrible of crimes against humanity, it is because it is ours.
The evils of which we are beneficiaries are always the most terrible, if only to us. Sadly, such evils are manifold and numberless; the Conquest and genocide of indigenous peoples of the Americas, slavery, Patriarchy, imperialism, and the culture of violence, militarism, toxic masculinity, and the fetishization of guns which sustains them.
And we have neither renounced nor abandoned the use of such weapons. Indeed, we are making more, and more terrible. In this the true meaning of America to the rest of the world is undeniable and clear; we are a nation whose objective is imperial conquest and whose mission is the annihilation of the human soul.
We can change this path we are on toward destruction and the subjugation of others simply and at any time; abandon the use of social force. A good beginning might be mothballing our nuclear arsenal and all weapons of mass destruction and terror, and disarming the police and other forces of tyranny, repression, and control.
Which brings us to my theme today; unequal power is also violence. For the key to our bewildering transformation from an egalitarian democracy wherein universal rights and the autonomy of individuals is paramount to an authoritarian tyranny of force and control is that militarism and the fetishization of instruments of violence is enormously profitable and necessary to imperialism and a global hegemony of power and privilege. This requires an elite, which both profits from and creates the conditions of inequality in a recursive process.
The fragmentation and class stratification of our free society of equals by hierarchies of exclusionary otherness into a vast precariat inclusive of prison labor as a national policy of the re-enslavement of Black people and theft of citizenship, and an elite hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege constructed on white supremacy and Gideonite patriarchy, is no flaw but a central and inherent design of our society, whereby authority centralizes power unto itself as a tyrannical subversion of Liberty.
The horrific spectacles of open violations of our values and ideals, the perversions and aberrant performances of atavistic barbarism, and the arrogance of impunity of power of the years of the Fourth Reich’s capture of America and the regime of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, are direct consequences of this process of undemocratization, which began with the demonstration of federal power in the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, in the global interventions of Manifest Destiny and the paramount dominion of our empire won by our victories in the World Wars, the disastrous co-optation of the Nazi elite in service to the projects of anticommunist imperialism and their capture of the Republican Party in 1980 in alliance with Gideonite fundamentalists, white supremacists, and plutocrats, and the failed attempt to shake off the host political system of the January 6 Insurrection.
As proofs of this theory I offer here two examples; the emergence of a technocratic elite in the creation of a nuclear arsenal and of a medical elite whose purpose is to ensure the dominance of its own class and of social order, and which acts as an arbiter of what is real and what is mad, in the creation of a carceral regime of torture and thought control at Guantanamo and in secret prisons as a test laboratory for America and the world, in part a result of the inevitable imperial phase of America after 911 but which originates with the torturers whose escape from justice we abetted after the Second World War.
In one of the founding documents of our civilization, The Republic, Plato argues that the achievement of virtue is only possible when society is mediated by an elite, philosopher-kings who are beholden to no one and independent of financial interest or influence, experts who may govern by reason. It’s an attractive idea, and one with a long reach; America charged Aaron Burr with treason over corruption, nepotism and bribery, results of an idea of the role of gentlemen in government embedded in the traditions of the British aristocracy.
As Gramsci famously said, “Between force and consent lies corruption”. At the heart of this ancient debate about equality and the nature of the Good lies a simple and easily demonstrable truth; the rule of elites is always against the interests of its subjects, as it concentrates power rather than distributing agency among its citizens as co-owners of their government.
If you wish to see what lies on the opposite side of democracy, just look at Hiroshima and Guantanamo, Wounded Knee and the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, or beyond America’s sphere of dominion and responsibility at political atrocities like the Holocaust, Gaza, the Siege of Mariupol, Srebrenica, Xinjiang, or at any of the authoritarian regimes throughout the world today which sadly control most of humankind and scheme endlessly to conquer and enslave the rest; Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Modi’s India, and far too many others.
Or to the collapse of the utopia Plato attempted to found by reimagination of the Empire of Syracuse, first by reconstructing the tyrant Dionysius the Second as a Philosopher-King and then by revolutionary seizure of power through his uncle Dion, both his students. This was the first Republic, whose failures and collapse Plato interrogates and fictionalizes in The Republic, the ur-source and founding document of democracy, wherein the sharing and use of social power is envisioned as a ground of struggle between liberty and tyranny.
Why is this important to us now, this origin story of our civilization as a free society of equals born in the Forum of Athens?
Because we today are witnesses to a parallel civilizational collapse from the mechanical failures of our systems’ internal contradictions and the legacies of our histories, caught in the gears of the great machine we serve like Charlie Chaplin in The Factory.
Ours is a machine which runs on the recursive processes of fear, power, and force, forever defined by Hiroshima as its terminal limit. The psychopathy of power and the nihilism of force may be shadows which devour our ideals of the good as freedom, equality, truth, and justice as their originals, our forms and realities from which they are cast, but they are also the products of political decisions and historical processes and not natural and inherent conditions of our humanity. Nor is civilizational collapse an inevitable consequence of democracy.
There are two obvious escapes from this dilemma; the redemptive power of love triumphs over fear and hate as motive forces and systemic harms, and seizures of unequal power restore balance in reply to structural harms. Plato tried them both, and both times failed; but he never tried both together as interdependent and parallel processes of change, as I propose herein.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes full film
Hiroshima Mon Amour film
Dr. Strangelove trailer
Oppenheimer trailer
The Victims of Hiroshima & Nagasaki
Hiroshima marks 78th anniversary of atomic bombing – The Japan Times
Torch of Liberty 