On this anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub Massacre which left 49 dead, one of the most terrible hate crimes in American history and which bears the marks of an intersectional multilayered dimensionality in its apparent motives and etiology; the internalized oppression of a conflicted and self-hating homosexual as shaped by religious intolerance and the escalating spiral of derangement and violence of theocratic and fundamentalist submission to authority, the latter cause belonging to the same category of terrorist hate crime as abortion clinic bombings.
Had there been no religious ideology telling the perpetrator he is not merely abnormal but also evil and damned because of the nature of his desires, those forty nine people would be alive today.
Such tragedies illuminate the fault lines of our society; the perpetrator is responsible for his crimes, but we are also responsible for the divisions of exclusionary otherness and the maladaptive social medium in which hate crimes occur.
We have allowed atavisms of barbarism to survive into the twenty-first century, like an invisible reptilian tail we drag behind ourselves.
There is a cure for the injustice of our normality and the violence of our authorized identities; wage love and not hate, diversity and inclusion and not demonization and criminalization, in the performance of our identities as autonomous individuals and transform society by our example and the resilience of our community.
This is what I mean by inclusion of the phrase “the frightening of the horses” in my profile, in which I paraphrase the famous quote by the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, muse of George Bernard Shaw; “I really don’t mind what people do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.” There are times wherein the boundaries of the Forbidden must be transgressed in order to seize the power which it holds over us. When this occurs in public spaces it becomes revolutionary and transformational, a form of guerrilla theatre.
Go ahead; frighten the horses.
For we must not only expose and challenge forces of patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror which multiply intersectionally in this horrific incident to illuminate the pervasive fascism which threatens us all; we must also celebrate the fearless defiance and glorious transgression of the drag clubs as stages of guerilla theatre of disruption of heteronormative narratives, as intentional communities beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, and of authorized identities of sex and gender.
The Pulse Massacre was a hate crime precisely because it attacked an entire community and class of marginalized persons, one which illustrates a great truth; to make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
And this we must resist, by any means necessary. No matter where you begin with the use of social force in the manufacture of otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Among the most insightful and relevant writing on the subject of homophobic hate crimes as symptoms of systemic inequality and internalized oppression is that of Professor Rowan Wolf, whose article for Uncommon Thought I amplify herein; “Sadness marks this day after the horrific massacre in Orlando, Florida. at the PULSE nightclub (Sunday, June 11,2016). As a lesbian and a sociologist, my thoughts grapple with “Why?” Omar Mateen and James Howell are both Americans born and raised in the United States. While there are protestations that these two men have nothing connecting their activities, that is flatly wrong for they share not only deep seated homophobia, but the belief that they have the right to act on it, and likely that they would be “heroes” for doing so. Homophobia runs though the veins of U.S. culture, and it is woven into the fabric of our society by misogyny, and socialization into sex roles as they are constructed in mainstream culture. These biases are legitimated in the arguments about “political correctness” and the persistent and deliberate misunderstanding about “protected classes” and “hate crimes.” This article attempts to draw these arguments and issues together in a critique that illuminates the reality of inequality and bias in U.S. society, and how it gets legitimated and even fanned, into the rhetoric that is commonly used.
Omar Mateen, the homophobic beserker who went on a killing spree in Orlando, Florida, was a “security guard” for G4S (a global security firm formerly known as Wachenhut, and the 3rd largest publicly traded company in the world).1 It took awhile for the media to acknowledge that Omar Mateen was a homophobe, but that was hardly out of their mouths before they were off speculating that he was an Islamic terrorist under orders from ISIS. This shift in the story line is important from the perspective of not addressing homophobia, and trying to link it to a presumed “larger threat” to the country. This morphing of the story is consistent across various disasters and incidents. The media creates a world of hypotheticals pointing every direction except for those that would allow some progress on addressing very serious issues.
Donald Trump, in his usual uninformed spouting, blasts that the massacre is because of “ lax” immigration laws and accused President Obama of “political correctness” in not targeting “radical Islam.” (The Wrap) Never mind that Mateen was NOT an immigrant. Further, neither was James Howell (arrested yesterday), the other homophobe arrested in LA with guns and bomb making materials in his van heading for the LA Gay Pride march.
Of course, you have to feel a little bit of sympathetic (not) for the sticky position that the Trumpster is in. After all, most of his “fifth column” are homophobes too. They are just way right, and Christian evangelical right, homophobes. So poor Donald can’t say anything too sympathetic for the victims of Mr. Mateen or he risks offending his base.
However, the corporate media is not doing much better than Trump, and with relief they are jumping from the uncomfortable issue of homosexuals as victims of this atrocity, to Islamic “terrorism” or even “home grown, Islamic terrorism.”
For nobody wants to confront two very nasty facts. First, that Mateen and Howell and all the other U.S. homophobes are products of U.S. culture, and their homophobia is the homophobia embedded deeply in this culture. And second, that hate crimes ARE terrorism; that is what makes them hate crimes. The constant media and governmental protestations that Mateen and Howell have no connection to each other is a lie on the face of such a statement. Mateen and Howell share two very important things. 1) their homophobia ran deep enough, and 2) they felt that they had some right or permission to violently attack the targets of their hatred. I am sure that no one wants to go there, but Trump bears some responsibility for creating an atmosphere that fans this hatred at the same time that he encourages people to act out that hatred violently.
Rationalizing Hatred and Hiding It In Plain Sight: People do not want to address the unfortunate reality that there really are deep veins of misogyny, homophobia, racism, and classism that run through US society. They always have, and looking the other way, or attributing to the biases held by some people (not “us” of course) does not make them any less real nor less devastating. These biases are deeply engrained in the culture and reinforced thousands of times in images and references that most of us hear every day. We hear and see them so often that we rarely even notice as they traipse across our consciousness.
This lack of awareness of the systemic nature of these cultural biases (that become writ large in devastating ways at times, as with the massacre in Orlando), also reinforces the persistent misrepresentation of hate crimes. The distinguishing characteristic of hate crimes is that the message sent by the perpetrators is to the whole target GROUP. Hate crimes are perpetrated upon an individual (or sometimes a small group or property), but the message is to the group. For example, the torching of black churches or mosques or synagogues, are not aimed at that specific place of worship. The message is to all people who worship in that way. Likewise when a person of perceived “hispanic” descent is beaten up at a bus stop. The message is to everyone who “looks like” that person that they should not be there, or sometimes anywhere.
The message sent by hate violence is to the whole group, and it is intended to “terrorize.” So, in effect, hate violence is terrorism even though there is great legal resistance to recognizing it as such. Further, violence against women is also hate violence (and hence a form of terrorism), but legislators really do not want to start down that path. For while (perhaps), acknowledging that hate crime is different from regular crime, to acknowledge that in the case of women would challenge the basic structure and operation of sex roles within the U.S., for they are by their very nature unequal. This fundamental cultural atavism over women, the feminine, and gender roles, lies at the very heart of homophobia.
The Deliberate Obfuscation of “Hate Crime”: Whenever the issue of “hate crime” comes up, or there is pressure to have something prosecuted as a hate crime, there are many folks who get up in arms. They argue that it is discriminatory to have “extra” penalties, and “special” prosecution for some crimes simply because they happened to someone who is a person of color, and most particularly for reasons of gender or sexual orientation. “Why should “they” get “special” treatment under the law?” The answer is two fold. One, because the message sent by the perpetrator is to ALL people with that characteristic. It is not a “personal” crime. Two, anyone can be the victim of a hate crime, but people of higher social status (white, male, heterosexual, or middle class or above, Christian, or any combination of the preceding) rarely are the victim of hate crime. They are protected in many ways, not the least being social constraint based on deep socialization. However, it is the STATUS of race, ethnicity, religion, that is “protected,” and everyone has those statuses – not just people with lower status in each of these social categories. In other words, everyone has a race, everyone has a sex, everyone has a sexual orientation, everyone has a religious designation (even atheists), and everyone has a social class.
This, unfortunately, takes us back around to the ever popular spout of “political correctness.” For at its base, the real anger over political correctness is that people with low (or lower) status should not have the “right” to be treated with equal courtesy and respect. We should not have the “right” (or the social expectation) to name ourselves or expected to be treated as equals. The anger over “political correctness” is that whites, and particularly white males, should not be “burdened” with “having to watch” what they say. They shouldn’t have to be “burdened” with having to worry about how some “over sensitive” woman/queer/Black/Asian/Mexican/Indian/ (and most specifically since 9/11/2001) “Arab” f e e l s about how they have been addressed, acted towards, or talked to or about. Nor should they have the “right” to complain about it if they are offended and pull the “race card” or the “sex card.” This is the coding and legitimation of deeply seated oppression in the 21st century.
So some may wonder how the hell we got from a massacre of folks in a “gay” night club to the issue of “political correctness.” The answer is that the rancor that is evoked about political correctness points directly at the root of the systemic inequality that ends up with folks feeling that they have a moral and social right to harass, beat up, or even kill, people of one of these “lesser” groups. Of course, those with fundamentalist religious association may also feel that they have a religious responsibility and god given authority, to put “those” folks “in their place” (or in the ground). If you do not believe that there is tremendous anger over “political correctness,” then listen to one of Trump’s stump speeches and the response he gets back from the crowd; or bring up the topic in casual conversation at a family dinner or at work.
This same outrage carries over to deciding to call (and particularly prosecute) something as a “hate crime.” Remember the outrage over George Zimmerman’s murder of Trayvon Martin (also in Florida) being prosecuted as a hate crime? The same is happening with the flight to “terrorism” in the case of Mateen, and the deep relief on the part of corporate commentators to not have to deal with the combination of homosexuality and hate crimes. Instead, they deflect the issue to ISIS and Islamic terrorism where the real issue becomes not these 103 people whose lives have been violently shoved onto a different course because of one person’s deep hatred for who they were assumed to be (homosexual). Nor for the millions of homosexuals who are getting not only the message of how very dangerous it is to be an “out” LGBT in this society, but how much the society still does not want to deal with homophobia or structured inequality.”
Where are we now, in this Wilderness of Mirrors in which we are lost? As written by Brandon J. Wolf in Time, in an article entitled 7 Years After the Pulse Nightclub Shooting, Florida Must Reject Hate; “Growing up in rural Oregon, I often dreamt of a world where I could be all of myself. A world where I didn’t feel the nagging societal pressure to be “Black enough” for some spaces and “white enough” for others. A world that saw my queerness not as a dealbreaker, but as a superpower.
Pulse Nightclub embodied that for me. After packing two suitcases and running away to the refuge of Orlando, I uncovered what I had been looking for. The spinning disco balls and strobe beams ricocheting across the bar dared all of us to dance like no one was watching. The beats radiating from the floorboards unearthed our authenticity, nudging us into rhythmic protest against a world that had always told us to uncross our legs, stiffen our wrists, and deepen the gravel in our voices. There was safety there. Inside those walls, we were normal.
When I close my eyes at night, I can remember the moments when that normal shattered into a million shards on June 12, 2016. I can feel it, hear it, see it. The vibrant poster above the urinal. The cup teetering on the edge of the sink, perched precariously as if it might tumble to the tiles below. The first cracks of gunfire from an assault rifle. The stench of blood and smoke wafting into the room.
Hours later, the world woke to our horror: 49 dead; 53 injured. LGBTQ communities across the globe reeled with the jarring reminder that no space is a safe space when your very humanity is perpetually up for debate. The celebrations over marriage equality and surging social acceptance were suddenly cleaved by violence. Overnight, ours was a community under siege, picking up the broken pieces of the nation’s deadliest attack on LGBTQ people in history.
This community remains under siege today.
Florida, just years removed from that horrifying tragedy, has become synonymous with the breathtaking assaults on LGBTQ civil rights sweeping the nation. From book censorship to health care prohibitions on trans youth to bathroom bans, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his right wing allies have ushered in a raft of dehumanizing policies designed to build political careers at the expense of our civil liberties. These laws are all animated by the same dangerous ideology that has long been used to rationalize discrimination and violence against LGBTQ people: That we are a “contagion” whose “spread” can only be stopped by wielding the power of government to censor us out of society. This utterly absurd argument is peddled alongside promises to “protect the children” from us in an effort to force us back into that makeshift closet.
The demonization of LGBTQ people isn’t new. Whether it was the police raids that led to the Stonewall Riots or the HIV/AIDS crisis that fueled the ACT UP movement, this community has had its back against the wall countless times before. And at each pivotal point in history, we blazed a new path forward. We willed a better, more inclusive future into existence by sharing our stories unapologetically and choosing radical love over the ferocious hate threatening to consume us.
In the wake of the tragedy at Pulse seven years ago, Orlando faced a similar critical choice. We could succumb to the TV pundits. We could beat the drums of war. Or we could choose love. We could embody the spirit of Pulse itself, unapologetically becoming a city that dares everyone to dance as if no one is watching. We chose the latter. We chose love over hate.
When I left home in search of a place to belong, I didn’t expect to fall in love with a new community. I never thought I’d watch that community traverse the flames of militarized hatred. And I couldn’t have imagined that our struggle to put the pieces back together might demonstrate to a weary nation that when hate tries to demonize our neighbors, terrorize them into submission, and tear us apart at the seams, there is another path. We simply must choose to walk it together.”
Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film Paris Is Burning- Deleted Scenes & Outtakes
Paris is Burning & The Tragic Story of Venus Xtravaganza
The House of Impossible Beauties, by Joseph Cassara
This was my choice for Best Novel of 2018, of which I wrote in review; A marvelous and beautiful debut novel, which poses fundamental questions regarding identity and the struggle for its ownership, and of the shaping forces of the families we have chosen and the ones imposed on us. To whom are we responsible for who we are, if not ourselves?
Because our immigration policy is about white supremacist terror and weaponizing disparity as de facto slave labor. This requires dehumanization of the slave caste, and erasure of their history, identity, and voices.
As the Chamberlain line in the film Gettysburg goes; “We are an army out to set other men free.”
In this great cause I offer my flesh and my life; Is this not the true lesson of the Sacrifice of Ibrahim whose festival we celebrated on the day of Eid al-Adha, that our lives are for something greater than ourselves alone, that we are called to sacrifice ourselves and the ephemera of our form and lives for the chance to realize the impossible, to transcend our limits and the flags of our skin, and to balance the flaws of our humanity, the terror of our nothingness, and the brokenness of the world?
For myself I see this as nothing unusual; merely the duty of care we owe to one another as human beings, and which we cannot abandon without becoming less than human.
In the Trump regime we face an enemy which violate our ideals, defile our values, destroy the institutions of democracy and the state, dehumanize us and steal our souls. In the case of immigration policy and the ICE terror force, the enemies of liberty instrumentalize fear as division and racism, hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, the enforcement of elite hegemonies of white wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of authorized national identity as white supremacist terror as systems of oppression, inequality, and imposed conditions of liberation struggle.
So in the streets of Los Angeles and throughout America, the flag of Mexican liberation from the Spanish Empire and the flag of American liberation from the British Empire are divided against each other by those who would enslave us, when they historically represent the same anticolonial revolutionary struggle. Herein the lies and false narratives of our true enemies seek to falsify us and break our solidarity, but this they will never do.
Truly, those who steal our wealth and power arrive by limousine and not on foot or in wretched boats across harsh and dangerous deserts, jungles, and seas, and we can only take back what has been stolen from us by joining together as a United Humankind and a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights and humanity.
As I wrote in my post of December 18 2024, International Migrants Day: “There Is No Migration Crisis; There Is a Crisis of Solidarity”; We celebrate today the human will to become, to explore, to discover new worlds and create new possibilities of becoming human, in the iconic figure of the migrant as the epitome and driving force of civilization.
Often the migrant also enacts the symbol, archetype, and allegory of the Stranger as well, with all of the ambiguities, dangers, and opportunities for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value implicit in the themes of this primary universal psychodrama.
Often has Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, quoted the book he kept on his nightstand for years in place of a Bible, Mein Kampf, to cheering crowds during an election rally in reference to migrants; “They’re poisoning our blood.”
No matter where you begin with ideas of otherness as a threat to identity, the origin of all fascism, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Let us give to fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!
The wave of fascism sweeping the world these past few years originates in a primal fear of otherness as loss of the self; this is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, becomes divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, racism, patriarchy, nationalism, and all of this coheres into authorized identities and a savage and cruel identity politics.
The Other is always our own mirror image, and we cannot escape each other. This is why fascism and tyranny are inherently unstable and always collapse in depravity and ruin; when we project what we dislike about ourselves onto others, as objects to abuse as if exorcising our demons, we dehumanize ourselves as well as them. And such denial fails as a strategy of transformation and adaptation to change, aggrandizing ossified institutions and systems until they become threats rather than solutions, and the whole edifice collapses from the mechanical failures of its contradictions as is happening now in America and throughout human civilization.
This is why the embrace of our own darkness and monstrosity is crucial to liberation struggle; how else can we bring change to systems of oppression if we cannot confront it in ourselves? Especially we must hold close and interrogate feelings like disgust, revulsion, rage, and other atavisms of instinct which we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail with the recognition that nothing we feel is either good or evil, but only how we use them in our actions toward others.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Against this Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force we must set a counterfire of solidarity and love, for only this can set us free. We must speak directly to that fear of otherness as loss of identity and of power if we are to turn the tide of history toward a free society of equals and not fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, toward democracy and a diverse and inclusive United Humankind and not carceral states of force and control, toward love and not hate.
We are stronger together than alone, as Benjamin Franklin demonstrated with his bundle of arrows in reference to Ecclesiastes 4:12 and the Iroquois Great Peacemaker called in some contexts Deganawidah. A diverse and inclusive society makes us more powerful if in different ways, wealthier, more resilient and adaptive, offers unknown joys and opens new vistas and possibilities of becoming human.
Change need not mean fear and loss; for it also offers limitless new wonders. We must be agents of change and bringers of Chaos, if we are to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.
The idea of human rights has been abandoned by its former guarantor nations, with whole peoples in Palestine and Ukraine being erased in wars of ethnic cleansing and genocide as exhibits of atrocities and crimes against humanity, and because of this and many other systems failures civilization is collapsing; ephemeral and illusory things like wealth and power are meaningless in the shadow of our degradation and the terror of our nothingness in the face of death.
A reader’s comment on my post of December 8, The Fall of America as a Guarantor of Democracy and Human Rights, contained the phrase “more hopeful of the good in most people”.
Here follows my reply; I too believed in things like human goodness once, but after forty years of wars, revolutions, resistance, and liberation struggle throughout the world I cannot. What I trust and hope for, if not believe in, is solidarity of action in struggle against systems of oppression and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. Such is my faith; the equality of human needs and the necessity of our unity in seizures of power to create a free society of equals.
As written by Jean Genet, who swore me to the oath of the Resistance and set me on my life’s path during the Siege of Beirut in 1982; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”
How shall we welcome the Stranger?
As I wrote in my post of July 13 2024, The Flag of My Skin; Here is a poem which I originally wrote in French for a publisher in Switzerland, a nation with four official languages including German, Italian, and Romansh, and where place name conventions and other government business is conducted in Latin. I have often used its title, a phrase of my own invention, to refer to identity politics and the construction of ideas of race and nationality as authorized identities and an imposed condition of struggle, divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of blood and soil.
In my journals I refer to this idea in terms of the redemptive power of love, an interrogation of what is human, and how we may reply to death. I find it bears a definition in context; here then is my poem, and may it serve you as a Rashomon Gate event of transformation and liberation.
Becoming human as a process of identity formation, self-construal or personae which is the word for a character mask which actors speak through in classical Greek theatre and which I believe describes identity as a performance and a narrative structure with precision, clarity, and great explanatory power, remains fluid, ambiguous, relative, ephemeral, and a primary ground of struggle.
Who chooses how we are to be defined, the boundaries between our limits and the possibilities of what we may become?
This is the first question to ask of any story; whose story is this?
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
Let us abandon this claiming and naming, taxonomies of identification and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, this use of social force as ideas of virtue, beauty, normality, membership, nation, of the violence of us and them. For until our boundaries become interfaces, the leading edges of such identities draw blood.
When we have escaped the legacies of our history and created ourselves anew as autonomous beings bound by nothing but our own visions and desires, what have we become, and who are we then?
Whoever we wish to be.
The Flag of My Skin
Time, memory, history, identity, and the revolution of becoming ourselves;
the skin I have escaped in serpentine transformation has become a flag,
but of what nation?
Who owns this kingdom of flesh that we share?
This realm of the senses is both a boundary we must transgress
to discover ourselves and seize ownership of our freedom and being,
and an interface by which we shape each other, a propulsive and generative force of the human sublime, of truths written in our skin.
We are interdependent, vast and oceanic beings, exalted by our passion beyond the limits of our form but also autonomous individuals who create ourselves and one another over enormous gulfs of time, limitless in our possibilities of becoming human but also forms described as negative spaces of each other.
Being is a dance of myriad partnerships, transforms of messages and principles of organization and growth which are recursive, chaotic, a beauty of strangeness and the bizarre, a realm of Medusa, goddess and monster.
There is but one rule in nature; anything goes.
Who authorizes and validates the possibilities and performances of our identity?
Shall we not dethrone, mock, and challenge such tyrannies of normality?
Let us forge an art of fire by which to liberate us from the shells of our history, a poetics of revolution by which to incite, provoke, and disturb.
There are no maps of the unknown; only of the history written in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation, assigned values, interpreted meanings, and created ourselves through our anchorages of civilization, a prochronism whose purpose is to buffer the shock of change and shield identity from loss.
Yet it is this history and memory we must escape to create ourselves anew as we wander this wilderness of mirrors and of echoes, a labyrinth of shifting paths which leads both inward to our true selves and outward to other peoples and to their different truths and possibilities of becoming human.
Our senses are transducers through which we change energy into messages and topologies of reality; it is this logosphere within which we live and from which we arise and recreate ourselves continually, transcendent and surreal.
Humans are a system for transforming things into ideas.
So also do we transform our world and each other by our ideas, the real and the ideal reflecting and shaping each other in recursion. And this revolutionary and ongoing coevolution and process of becoming human is the central creative force of existence and of humankind.
The struggle for ownership of identity between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight. And what of the flag of our skin, of our history which we have unwound from ourselves as an endless scroll of signs, as a shroud, a chrysalis?
This I leave to you, to those we claim and who in turn claim us, to others who are different as well as those alike, and to us all.
We may belong to our past, but the future belongs to us.
It is yours and ours, the undiscovered country; use it wisely.
As written by Daniel Peña in The Guardian, in an article entitled Why are people so triggered by the Mexican flag at the LA protests? The flag serves as a reminder of a fundamental truth about Mexican Americans: we are from here; we are also from there; “Republicans are using images of Ice protesters waving Mexican flags atop burning Waymo cars to foment fear among Americans. Like this photograph that Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday: a shirtless protester wielding the Tricolor atop a vandalized robotaxi as flames billow toward the weak sunlight backlighting the flag. His dark curls fall to his bare shoulders. He stares into the camera.
Frankly, the image belongs in a museum.
I understand my reaction is not the feeling Republicans hope to inspire in Americans broadly this week. Their messaging thus far about the protests against immigration raids in Latino communities has largely been alarmist – proof, they say, of an “invasion” of “illegal aliens”.
“Look at all the foreign flags. Los Angeles is occupied territory,” said Stephen Miller on X. According to Adam Kinzinger, a former congressman and more moderate voice, the Mexican flags carried by protesters are “terrible … and feeding right into Donald Trump’s narrative”.
“I just think that it would be much stronger if they were carrying American flags only,” he said on CNN this week.
By this logic, Mexican flags are proof-positive that Mexican Americans are not really American; that we are somehow collaborating on a planned “invasion”; that we harbor secret loyalties to Mexico; that we’re here to displace white people and undermine the American way of life via some Plan de Aztlan. In short, none of this is true.
In front of Congress Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, cited the presence of “flags from foreign countries” in LA to legitimize supporting Trump’s deployment of the national guard. This unilateral invocation of Title 10 by the Trump administration, without the consent of the governor, is exceedingly aggressive. So is the deployment of 700 US marines to be used to crush American protest in an American city.
The subtext here is that by many metrics, Americans’ patience for Ice and its antics is wearing thin, even as Ice’s deportation numbers are anemic compared with past administrations. The Trump administration realizes something has to change. Fanning outrage about a flag is both a legal pretext to pursue martial law and a diplomatic means of getting consent from the American populace to do unpopular things in the name of security.
But what is it about the Mexican flag that triggers so many people?
I’d argue that in the American context, the Mexican flag is not a nationalist symbol but something decentered from Mexico as a nation-state. Historically, it was a key banner of the Chicano movement, flown by supporters surrounding Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez during the California grape boycott in the 1960s. It flew alongside the United Farm Workers flag, the American flag and banners of the Virgen de Guadalupe as a means of fomenting cultural unity. It also served as a reminder of a fundamental truth: we are from here; we are also from there. We’re children of the in-between, or what the Tejana writer Gloria Anzaldúa referred to as nepantla in her seminal work Borderlands/La Frontera. Nepantla is simply Nahuatl for the liminal space between cultures, identities and worlds. To this end, we might think of the Mexican flag as a symbol of double-consciousness in the Mexican American psyche specifically. We understand our middleness, yet we also understand how America sees and defines us: Mexicans. We take that prejudice and transform it into power.
Amidst these burgeoning protests, the Mexican flag is a bold articulation: we are like you; you are like us
It’s through this lens that I see the Mexican flag as just one banner among many, a remembrance of roots but also a shared experience between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants alike. Night after night, you can see captivating scenes with Mexican flags flying in the downtowns of Dallas and Houston and Atlanta and New York, as a solidarity grows between those explicitly targeted by Ice and those soon-to-be targeted by Ice. This is not hyperbole. Today, phenotype and politics are grounds enough for detention: in order for Ice to meet the Trump administration’s goal of 3,000 arrests a day, targets have increasingly included student protesters, tourists and even American citizens. The only rule is to meet the metric at all costs.
Amid these burgeoning protests, the Mexican flag is a bold articulation: we are like you; you are like us. We have struggled and persist in this place together. See me and don’t be afraid; I see you and I am not afraid. To wield the flag amid a protest is to paint yourself a target, to take both your body and your future into your own hands. This is precisely why the marines have been called in. To intimidate these bodies. Or to destroy them.
What Trump fails to realize is that the bones of Mexican people are the metadata of the land in California and indeed the rest of the country. Our place here is in the food, in the street names, in the name of Los Angeles itself.
Already, I can hear some within my own community admonishing my defense of Mexican flags at American protests as treasonous or ungrateful or something along those lines. To them I might ask: why is it that the protesters’ allegiances are held to higher standards than an American president who seeks to turn the US armed forces against American citizens?
From Republican leaders, you’ll never hear such questioning rhetoric surrounding other foreign flags that fly prominently in America. The Irish flag on St Patrick’s Day instantly comes to mind. As does the Israeli flag at both political and non-political events. And, of course, the Confederate flag, though white supremacists have explicitly stated goals of both overthrowing the US government and taking back US land. Heritage is the most commonly used defense. Though wouldn’t heritage apply to the Mexican flag as well?
I’m reminded of James Baldwin when Mexicans Americans and Mexicans call for restraint from using Mexican imagery in US protests: “In Harlem,” Baldwin wrote, “… the Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.” We think our respectability will protect us. But we know historically and empirically that has not been true. Respectability did not protect Japanese Americans from being interned. Nor did it protect Vietnamese veterans who fought alongside Americans in Vietnam from facing discrimination in the US. Nor did it protect Afghan translators from having their visas revoked.
Our American bona fides are not the things that will save us now. Not in the era of detention metrics and collateral targeting and now the prospect of authoritarian violence.
It should be said: I don’t go looking for these images. For my sins, having clicked on one, the algorithm floods me with them now. Protesters with Mexican flags getting a haircut in front of police. Protesters with Mexican flags forming a human chain. They just keep coming to me. But other images, too. Like one of a guy popping a wheelie past a ton of burning Waymo cars. I mean, come the fuck on – it’s cool. The thing that immediately jumps out to me is the frivolity of the image. A body perfectly in balance, perfectly in motion. It moves of its own volition. It is completely in command of its trajectory and space in the landscape.
It is beyond the fascist impulse to live so beautifully as this. Luckily, it also is beyond the fascist ability to remove the memory of this body from the land.”
As written in The Guardian Editorial entitled The Guardian view on Trump and deportation protests: the king of confected emergencies: Strongmen love inventing or exploiting crises to justify extreme measures and extended power. The US is taking another step towards authoritarianism; “Donald Trump will celebrate his birthday with a North Korean-style military parade costing tens of millions of dollars this weekend. He has gratefully accepted the early gift of the demonstrations, which have spread across the country, with more scheduled for Saturday. The president’s immigration crackdown spurred overwhelmingly peaceful protests in Los Angeles. Ordering in troops, over the governor’s head, then inflamed the situation and allowed the agent of chaos to portray himself as its nemesis once more.
Mr Trump has diverted attention from his rift with Elon Musk, the stalling of his “big, beautiful” tax and spending bill, the court-ordered return of the wrongly deported Kilmar Ábrego García and the impending impact of tariffs. But underlying the manufactured crisis is a deeper agenda: reigniting fear of undocumented migrants, delegitimising protest, and thus expanding his power. Migrant families, and those who have taken to the streets to support them, are portrayed as “animals” and the perpetrators of “invasion and third-world lawlessness” – requiring Mr Trump to amass more might to protect America.
Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, rightly described this as an assault on democracy. As he noted, “authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there.” Due process has been discarded. American citizens are among those being swept up in raids. Mr Trump has said that Mr Newsom himself should be arrested. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, calls the protesters “insurrectionists” – though his boss, of course, pardoned the actual insurrectionists of the January 6 Capitol attack.
Mr Trump’s tactics are familiar in both the broad and narrow sense. In his book On Tyranny, published in 2017, the historian Timothy Snyder urged readers to listen for “dangerous words” such as “emergency” and reminded them that “the sudden disaster” requiring the suspension of freedoms “is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book”.
Mr Trump drew a bleak portrait of American carnage in his inaugural speech and described himself as “the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy”. Since his re-election he has declared emergencies to push through tariffs, loosen energy regulations and ramp up deportations. His methods are transparent – and sometimes blocked by courts – yet still effective. For his supporters, each rock thrown, each billow of smoke, is fresh evidence of the menacing “other” encroaching upon their home.
Yet if his methods are familiar, they are also going further. He has moved from xenophobia to echoing fascist tropes of migrants “poisoning the blood” and portrays an enemy within, suggesting that Mr Newsom and Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, are trying to aid “criminal invaders”. In his first term, Mr Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act (and, reportedly, said that troops should “just shoot” Black Lives Matter protesters). Gen Mark Milley and others are no longer present to hold him back. Alarmingly, he warns that any protests at his parade will face “very heavy force”.
All those who stand against Mr Trump’s weaponised bigotry and hunger for untrammelled power must make it clear that they are defending the law and not defying it. Responsibly challenging the abuse and entrenchment of power is not only the right of citizens, but a duty.”
Let us unite in solidarity to achieve the vision of an America which is a beacon of hope to the world, as written by Emma Lazarus and emblazoned on our Statue of Liberty;
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Spanish
12 de junio de 2025 Por qué luchamos: Identidades nacionales autorizadas versus elegidas y ambiguas como base de lucha, simbolizadas por la bandera mexicana en la Batalla de Los Ángeles
Porque nuestra política migratoria se basa en el terror supremacista blanco y en la instrumentalización de la disparidad como trabajo esclavo de facto. Esto requiere la deshumanización de la casta esclava y la eliminación de su historia, identidad y voz.
Como dice Chamberlain en la película Gettysburg: «Somos un ejército que busca la libertad de otros hombres».
Por esta gran causa ofrezco mi carne y mi vida. ¿No es esta la verdadera lección del Sacrificio de Ibrahim, cuya festividad celebramos el día de Eid al-Adha? Que nuestras vidas son por algo más grande que nosotros mismos, que estamos llamados a sacrificarnos a nosotros mismos y a lo efímero de nuestra forma y nuestras vidas por la oportunidad de alcanzar lo imposible, de trascender nuestros límites y las banderas de nuestra piel, y de equilibrar las imperfecciones de nuestra humanidad, el terror de nuestra nada y la fragilidad del mundo. Para mí, esto no es nada inusual; simplemente el deber de cuidado que nos debemos unos a otros como seres humanos, y que no podemos abandonar sin convertirnos en menos que humanos.
En el régimen de Trump nos enfrentamos a un enemigo que viola nuestros ideales, profana nuestros valores, destruye las instituciones de la democracia y el Estado, nos deshumaniza y nos roba el alma. En el caso de la política migratoria y la fuerza terrorista ICE, los enemigos de la libertad instrumentalizan el miedo como división y racismo, las jerarquías de pertenencia y la otredad excluyente, la imposición de hegemonías de élite de riqueza, poder y privilegio blancos, y los fascismos de identidad nacional autorizada como terror supremacista blanco, como sistemas de opresión, desigualdad y condiciones impuestas de lucha por la liberación.
Así, en las calles de Los Ángeles y en todo Estados Unidos, la bandera de la liberación mexicana del Imperio español y la bandera de la liberación estadounidense del Imperio británico se enfrentan entre sí por quienes pretenden esclavizarnos, cuando históricamente representan la misma lucha revolucionaria anticolonial. Aquí, las mentiras y los falsos relatos de nuestros verdaderos enemigos buscan desvirtuarnos y quebrantar nuestra solidaridad, pero jamás lo lograrán.
En verdad, quienes nos roban la riqueza y el poder llegan en limusina, no a pie ni en embarcaciones miserables a través de desiertos, selvas y mares hostiles y peligrosos, y solo podemos recuperar lo que nos han robado uniéndonos como una Humanidad Unida y una sociedad libre de iguales que garanticen los derechos y la humanidad de los demás.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 18 de diciembre de 2024, Día Internacional del Migrante: “No hay una crisis migratoria; hay una crisis de solidaridad”. Hoy celebramos la voluntad humana de transformarse, explorar, descubrir nuevos mundos y crear nuevas posibilidades de humanización, en la figura icónica del migrante como epítome y motor de la civilización.
A menudo, el migrante también representa el símbolo, arquetipo y alegoría del Extranjero, con todas las ambigüedades, peligros y oportunidades para la reimaginación y transformación del ser humano, el significado y el valor implícitos en los temas de este psicodrama universal fundamental.
Nuestro Payaso del Terror, el Traidor Trump, ha citado a menudo el libro que mantuvo en su mesita de noche durante años en lugar de la Biblia, Mein Kampf, ante la multitud que lo vitoreaba durante un mitin electoral, en referencia a los migrantes: “Nos están envenenando la sangre”. No importa dónde se comience con las ideas de la otredad como amenaza a la identidad, origen de todo fascismo, siempre se termina a las puertas de Auschwitz.
Demos al fascismo la única respuesta que merece: ¡Nunca más!
La ola de fascismo que azota el mundo en los últimos años se origina en un miedo primario a la otredad como pérdida del yo; este miedo, utilizado como arma al servicio del poder por quienes buscan esclavizarnos, se transforma en divisiones y jerarquías de pertenencia a la élite y otredad excluyente, racismo, patriarcado, nacionalismo, y todo esto se cohesiona en identidades autorizadas y una política de identidad salvaje y cruel.
El Otro es siempre nuestro propio reflejo, y no podemos escapar el uno del otro. Por eso el fascismo y la tiranía son inherentemente inestables y siempre se desmoronan en depravación y ruina; cuando proyectamos en los demás lo que nos desagrada de nosotros mismos, como objetos de abuso, como si exorcizáramos nuestros demonios, nos deshumanizamos a nosotros mismos y a ellos. Y dicha negación fracasa como estrategia de transformación y adaptación al cambio, engrandeciendo instituciones y sistemas anquilosados hasta que se convierten en amenazas en lugar de soluciones, y todo el edificio se derrumba por las fallas mecánicas de sus contradicciones, como sucede ahora en Estados Unidos y en toda la civilización humana.
Por eso, aceptar nuestra propia oscuridad y monstruosidad es crucial para la lucha por la liberación; ¿de qué otra manera podemos cambiar los sistemas de opresión si no podemos enfrentarlos en nosotros mismos? En especial, debemos aferrarnos e interrogar sentimientos como el asco, la repulsión, la rabia y otros atavismos instintivos que arrastramos como una cola de reptil invisible, reconociendo que nada de lo que sentimos es bueno o malo, sino solo cómo lo usamos en nuestras acciones hacia los demás.
Al final, lo único que importa es lo que hacemos con nuestro miedo y cómo usamos nuestro poder.
Contra este círculo wagneriano de miedo, poder y fuerza debemos contraatacar con solidaridad y amor, porque solo esto puede liberarnos. Debemos abordar directamente ese miedo a la alteridad como pérdida de identidad y de poder si queremos cambiar el rumbo de la historia hacia una sociedad libre de iguales y no hacia tiranías fascistas de sangre, fe y tierra; hacia la democracia y una Humanidad Unida, diversa e inclusiva, y no hacia estados carcelarios de fuerza y control; hacia el amor y no hacia el odio.
Juntos somos más fuertes que solos, como demostró Benjamin Franklin con su haz de flechas en referencia a Eclesiastés 4:12 y al Gran Pacificador Iroqués llamado en algunos contextos Deganawidah. Una sociedad diversa e inclusiva nos hace más poderosos, si de diferentes maneras, más ricos, más resilientes y adaptables, ofrece alegrías desconocidas y abre nuevas perspectivas y posibilidades para convertirnos en humanos.
El cambio no tiene por qué significar miedo y pérdida; pues también ofrece infinitas maravillas. Debemos ser agentes de cambio y portadores del Caos si queremos convertirnos en un punto de apoyo y cambiar el equilibrio de poder en el mundo. La idea de los derechos humanos ha sido abandonada por sus antiguas naciones garantes, con pueblos enteros en Palestina y Ucrania aniquilados en guerras de limpieza étnica y genocidio, como ejemplos de atrocidades y crímenes contra la humanidad. Debido a esto y a muchos otros fallos del sistema, la civilización se está derrumbando. Cosas efímeras e ilusorias como la riqueza y el poder carecen de sentido a la sombra de nuestra degradación y el terror de nuestra nada ante la muerte.
Un comentario de un lector en mi publicación del 8 de diciembre, «La caída de Estados Unidos como garante de la democracia y los derechos humanos», contenía la frase «más esperanzado en el bien de la mayoría de la gente».
A continuación mi respuesta: yo también creí en cosas como la bondad humana, pero después de cuarenta años de guerras, revoluciones, resistencia y luchas de liberación en todo el mundo, ya no puedo. En lo que confío y espero, si no en lo que creo, es en la solidaridad de acción en la lucha contra los sistemas de opresión y las hegemonías de las élites de la riqueza, el poder y el privilegio. Tal es mi fe. La igualdad de las necesidades humanas y la necesidad de nuestra unidad en la toma del poder para crear una sociedad libre de iguales.
Como lo escribió Jean Genet, quien me hizo jurar la Resistencia y me guió por el camino de mi vida durante el asedio de Beirut en 1982: «Si nos comportamos como los del otro bando, entonces somos el otro bando. En lugar de cambiar el mundo, solo lograremos un reflejo del que queremos destruir».
¿Cómo acogeremos al Extranjero?
Como escribí en mi publicación del 13 de julio de 2024, “La Bandera de Mi Piel”, les presento un poema que escribí originalmente en francés para una editorial en Suiza, un país con cuatro idiomas oficiales: alemán, italiano y romanche, y donde las convenciones de nombres de lugares y otros asuntos gubernamentales se gestionan en latín. A menudo he usado su título, una frase de mi propia invención, para referirme a las políticas de identidad y la construcción de ideas de raza y nacionalidad como identidades autorizadas y una condición impuesta de lucha, divisiones de pertenencia y otredad excluyente, y fascismos de sangre y tierra.
En mis diarios, me refiero a esta idea en términos del poder redentor del amor, una interrogación sobre lo humano y cómo podemos responder a la muerte. Creo que merece una definición en contexto; aquí está mi poema, y espero que les sirva como un evento de transformación y liberación en la Puerta Rashomon. Devenir humano como proceso de formación de identidad, autoconstrucción o personae (la palabra que designa la máscara del personaje a través de la cual hablan los actores en el teatro griego clásico y que, en mi opinión, describe la identidad como representación y estructura narrativa con precisión, claridad y gran poder explicativo), sigue siendo fluido, ambiguo, relativo, efímero y un tema central de lucha.
¿Quién elige cómo se nos define, los límites entre nuestros límites y las posibilidades de lo que podemos llegar a ser?
Esta es la primera pregunta que debe hacerse en cualquier historia: ¿de quién es esta historia?
Formular una idea sobre un tipo de pueblo es un acto de violencia.
Abandonemos esta reivindicación y denominación, las taxonomías de identificación y las jerarquías de pertenencia y la otredad excluyente, este uso de la fuerza social como ideas de virtud, belleza, normalidad, pertenencia, nación, de la violencia de nosotros y de ellos. Porque hasta que nuestros límites se conviertan en interfaces, las aristas de tales identidades derramarán sangre. Al escapar de los legados de nuestra historia y reconstruirnos como seres autónomos, limitados únicamente por nuestras visiones y deseos, ¿en qué nos hemos convertido y quiénes somos entonces?
Quienes queramos ser.
La Bandera de Mi Piel
Tiempo, memoria, historia, identidad y la revolución de convertirnos en nosotros mismos;
la piel de la que he escapado en una transformación serpenteante se ha convertido en bandera,
pero ¿de qué nación?
¿Quién es dueño de este reino de carne que compartimos?
Este reino de los sentidos es a la vez una frontera que debemos transgredir
para descubrirnos a nosotros mismos y apropiarnos de nuestra libertad y ser,
y una interfaz mediante la cual nos moldeamos mutuamente, una fuerza propulsora y generadora de lo sublime humano, de verdades inscritas en nuestra piel.
Somos seres interdependientes, vastos y oceánicos, exaltados por nuestra pasión más allá de los límites de nuestra forma, pero también individuos autónomos que nos creamos a nosotros mismos y a los demás a través de enormes abismos de tiempo, ilimitados en nuestras posibilidades de humanizarnos, pero también formas descritas como espacios negativos de cada uno. El ser es una danza de innumerables alianzas, transformaciones de mensajes y principios de organización y crecimiento recursivos, caóticos, una belleza de lo extraño y lo bizarro, un reino de Medusa, diosa y monstruo.
Solo hay una regla en la naturaleza: todo vale.
¿Quién autoriza y valida las posibilidades y representaciones de nuestra identidad?
¿No deberíamos destronar, burlarnos y desafiar tales tiranías de la normalidad?
Forjemos un arte de fuego que nos libere de los cascarones de nuestra historia, una poética de la revolución que nos incite, provoque y perturbe.
No existen mapas de lo desconocido; solo de la historia escrita a nuestra manera, de cómo resolvimos problemas de adaptación, asignamos valores, interpretamos significados y nos creamos a nosotros mismos a través de nuestros anclajes de civilización, un procronismo cuyo propósito es amortiguar el impacto del cambio y proteger la identidad de la pérdida.
Sin embargo, es de esta historia y memoria de la que debemos escapar para crearnos de nuevo mientras vagamos por este desierto de espejos y ecos, un laberinto de caminos cambiantes que nos lleva tanto hacia nuestro verdadero ser como hacia otros pueblos y sus diferentes verdades y posibilidades de humanización.
Nuestros sentidos son transductores a través de los cuales transformamos la energía en mensajes y topologías de la realidad; es esta logosfera en la que vivimos y de la que surgimos y nos recreamos continuamente, trascendentes y surrealistas.
Los humanos somos un sistema para transformar cosas en ideas.
Así también transformamos nuestro mundo y a los demás mediante nuestras ideas: lo real y lo ideal se reflejan y moldean mutuamente en recursión. Y esta coevolución revolucionaria y continua, y el proceso de humanización, es la fuerza creativa central de la existencia y de la humanidad.
La lucha por la propiedad de la identidad entre las máscaras que otros nos construyen y las que nosotros mismos nos creamos es la primera revolución en la que todos debemos luchar. ¿Y qué decir de la bandera de nuestra piel, de nuestra historia que hemos desenrollado de nosotros mismos como un rollo interminable de signos, como un sudario, una crisálida?
Esto se lo dejo a ustedes, a quienes reclamamos y quienes a su vez nos reclaman, a otros que son diferentes así como a aquellos que son iguales, y a todos nosotros.
Puede que pertenezcamos a nuestro pasado, pero el futuro nos pertenece.
Es suyo y nuestro, el territorio por descubrir; úsenlo sabiamente.
Why are people so triggered by the Mexican flag at the LA protests?
January 17 2025 Origins of Our Migrant Crisis: Echoes and Reflections of American Imperialism and Operation Condor in Latin America’s Destabilized Nations
Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from the Colonial Period to the Present Era, Zaragosa Vargas
El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, Carrie Gibson
The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, Miriam Pawel
The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States, John Storm Roberts
My Art, My Life: An Autobiography, Diego Rivera
The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, Carlos Fuentes intro
Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, Luis Alberto Urrea
The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, Dolores Tierney, Deborah Shaw, & Ann Davies, Editors
Hispanic-American Literature
Bless Me Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya
The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, The Sum of Our Days, Eva Luna, The Stories of Eva Luna, The Infinite Plan, Daughter of Fortune, Zorro, Island Beneath the Sea, Ines of My Soul, Maya’s Notebook, The Japanese Lover, The Sum of Our Days, Conversations With Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea, Isabele Allende
Isabel Allende: A Literary Companion, Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Latin Moon in Manhattan, Our Lives Are the Rivers: A Novel, Cervantes Street, Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me, Jaime Manrique
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Yo!, In the Time of the Butterflies, In the Name of Salome, The Woman I Kept to Myself, Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA, Something to Declare, Julia Alvarez
Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion, Silvio Sirias
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
The Moths and other stories, Under the Feet of Jesus, Their Dogs Came with Them, Helena Viramontes
Hummingbird’s Daughter, Queen of America, Into the Beautiful North, The Water Museum, The House of Broken Angels, Tijuana Book of the Dead, Luis Alberto Urrea
So Far From God, Peel My Love Like an Onion, The Guardians, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, Watercolor Women / Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, I Ask the Impossible, Ana Castillo
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, Oscar Hijuelos
The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollaring Creek and other stories, Caramelo, My Wicked Wicked Ways: Poems, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Harold Bloom
House of the Impossible Beauties, Joseph Cassara
Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia
Strange and unknown remains the Undiscovered Country, as Shakespeare called the future, for it is a thing of relative and ambiguous truths, ephemeral and in constant motion and processes of change, and limitless possibilities of becoming. “An undiscovered country whose bourne no travelers return—puzzles the will”, as the line in Hamlet goes, in reference to death and what may lie beyond the limits of human being and knowing.
But it applies equally to the myriads of futures from which we must choose, shaped by our histories and systems of being human together as imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle and by our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value.
The emergence of the Autonomous Zones as a spontaneous adaptation to universal conditions of unequal power and brutal repression by carceral states of force and control was in part an echo and reflection of the Occupy Movement which began in New York’s Zuccotti Park on September 17 2011; by October nearly a thousand cities in 82 nations and in 600 American communities had ongoing and sustained sister protests and Occupy movements. The Black Lives Matter movement began in July of 2013 in protest against the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, and in 2020 with the death of George Floyd ignited the Summer of Fire; some 26 million Americans joined protests in 200 cities, joined by sister protests in two thousand cities in sixty nations. The Autonomous Zones were a prodigy of the harmonic convergence of these two global movements of social justice, as shaped by influences of the #metoo antipatriarchal movement and Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strike and other global ecological movements. We now hope achieve something as massive and paradigm shifting with No King’s Day and the movement to defend our democracy from fascist tyranny and state terror.
In the Autonomous Zones global protest movements against white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, tyranny and state terror both as democracy movements and as the police abolition movement, recombined and integrated as an agenda of revolutionary struggle against systems of unequal power.
And as we brought a Reckoning for systemic evils, epigenetic trauma, and the legacies of our histories, we also sought to launch humankind on a total revisioning of our being, meaning, and value, and the reimagination and transformation of the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Here is a journal entry of mine speaking as a witness of history to that time of revolutionary struggle and liberation; as I wrote in my post of June 11 2020, Utopia Now: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone; Marvels and jubilation in the streets, a carnival of transgressions of the Forbidden and masquerades of possible identities and futures of becoming human, anarchy and chaos and joy, running amok and being ungovernable, and the frightening of the horses; come and dance with us, America. Come find your heart and be free.
Whosoever remains unconquered is free. For each of us who defies injustice and tyranny, who resists subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement, who questions, mocks, and challenges authority, becomes an agent of Liberty who cannot be silenced, and who passes the torch of freedom as an uncontrollable catalyst of change to everyone with whom we interact, and thereby can never be truly defeated.
Each of us who in resistance becomes Unconquered and a bearer of Liberty are also become a Living Autonomous Zone, and this is the key to our inevitable victory. We ourselves are the power which state terror and tyranny cannot conquer.
The people of Seattle have answered brutal repression and police violence, an attempt to break the rebellion against racial injustice and hate crime enacted by the police throughout America and the world led by Trump and his white supremacist terrorists both within the police as a fifth column and operating in coordination with deniable forces like the gun-toting militias now visible everywhere, by storming the citadel of city government with waves of thousands of citizens demanding the right to life regardless of the color of our skin.
The people have seized control of six city blocks, including the police precinct and City Hall, and established the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, a name which rings with history and reflects the Paris Commune and the Italian Anarcho-Syndicalists of the 1920s, Rojava in Syria and Exarcheia in Athens, but was directly modeled on the ideals, methods, and instruments of the Occupy Movement founded in New York’s Wall Street.
Such beautiful resistance by those who will not go quietly to their deaths. To all those who tilt at windmills; I salute you.
Let us take back our government from our betrayers, and our democracy from the fascist tyranny of blood, faith, and soil which has attempted to steal our liberty and enslave us with divisions of exclusionary otherness.
When the people have reclaimed the government of which they are co-owners and this new phase of protest, a movement to Occupy City Halls and Police Stations Everywhere in defiance of tyranny, has seized every seat of power in the nation and restored democracy to America, we can begin the reforging of our society on the foundation of equality and racial justice, and of our universal human rights.
Let us join together in solidarity and restore America as a free society of equals, and liberate all the nations of the world now held captive by the Fourth Reich.
There can be but one reply to fascism and state terror; Never Again.
As written by Kate Yoder in Salon; “The year 2020 seems to be drawn straight from the plot of some discarded dystopian novel — a book that never got published because it sounded too far-fetched. Not only is there a pandemic to contend with, unemployment nearing levels last seen in the Great Depression, and nationwide protests against police brutality, but it’s all happening in the same year Americans are supposed to elect a president.
Amid the chaos and tear gas, some people see a chance to scrap everything and start over, a first step toward turning their visions for a better world into reality. In Seattle, protesters in one six-block stretch of Capitol Hill, a neighborhood near downtown, have created a community-run, police-free zone, recently renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, CHOP. It’s a scene of masked crowds, vibrant signs and street art, a “no cop co-op” giving away food and supplies, and newly planted community gardens. In Minneapolis, volunteers turned a former Sheraton hotel into a “sanctuary” offering free food and hotel rooms — until they got evicted.
“We’re seeing a new resurgence of utopianism,” said Heather Alberro, an associate lecturer of politics at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom who studies radical environmentalists and utopian thought.
Problems like climate change, the widening gap between the rich and everybody else, and racial inequality gives many the sense that they’re living through one giant unprecedented crisis. And these combined disasters create “the exact conditions that give rise to all sorts of expressions” of utopian thinking, Alberro said. From broad ideas like the Green New Deal — the climate-jobs-justice package popularized by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — to Seattle’s “autonomous zone,” people are offering up new plans for how the world could operate. Whether they came from literature or real-life experiments, these idealistic efforts can spur wider cultural and political change, even if they falter.
Based on President Donald Trump’s tweets about Seattle’s CHOP (or Fox News websites’ photoshopped coverage of the protest) you’d picture pure chaos, with buildings afire and protesters running amok. The reality was more like people sitting around in a park, screening movies like “13th,” and making art. It’s a serious protest too, with crowds gathered for talks about racism and police brutality in front of an abandoned police precinct. The protesters’ demands include abolishing the Seattle Police Department, removing cops from schools, abolishing juvenile detention, and giving reparations to victims of police violence.
“The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone #CHAZ is not a lawless wasteland of anarchist insurrection — it is a peaceful expression of our community’s collective grief and their desire to build a better world,” Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan tweeted last week.
The protest zone goes by many names: Originally called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, it was later rebranded as CHOP. The barricaded area, which spans from Cal Anderson Park into nearby streets, is part campground, part block party. Tourists wander through, snapping photos of the street art.
A week earlier, protests in Cal Anderson Park, sparked by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, were met by police officers spraying rubber bullets, mace, and tear gas. Then, last week, the police abandoned the area, and the protesters declared it their own, turning the “Seattle Police Department” into the “Seattle People Department” with a bit of spraypaint.
The CHAZ follows a long history of anti-capitalist experiments that reimagined the way the world was run. In 1871, the people of Paris, sick of oppression, rose up to take control of their city for a two-month stint. The Paris Commune canceled debt, suspended rent, and abolished the police, filling the streets with festivals. The French government soon quashed their experiment, massacring tens of thousands of Parisians in “The Bloody Week.” Even though it was short-lived, the Paris Commune inspired revolutionary movements for the next 150 years.
In 2011, Occupy Wall Street protestors took over New York City’s Zuccotti Park for two months to highlight the problems of income inequality. Their encampment offered free food, lectures, books, and wide-ranging discussions. The radical movement ended up changing the way Americans talked, giving them a new vocabulary — the “99 percent” and “1 percent” — and its concerns about income inequality went on to mold the priorities of the Democratic Party.
Alberro compared Seattle’s CHOP to a community of 300 environmental activists in western France who set up camp at a site earmarked for a controversial new airport starting in 2008. One of many ZADs (zones à défendre) that have sprung up in France, the community ended up being not just a place to protest the airport, but to take a stand against what protesters saw as the underlying problems — capitalism, inequality, and environmental destruction. (The government ended up shelving plans for the airport in 2018). “The point of these autonomous zones is not only to create these micro exemplars of better worlds,” Alberro said, “but also to physically halt present forces of destruction” — whether that’s an airport or, in the case of Capitol Hill, how police treat black people.
Seattle has a lengthy history of occupations and political demonstrations tracing back to the Seattle General Strike in the early 1900s. The Civil Rights era brought sit-ins and marches. Indigenous protesters occupied an old military fort in 1970 and negotiated with the city to get 20 acres of Discovery Park. Two years later, activists occupied an abandoned elementary school in Beacon Hill, demanding that it be turned into a community center (now El Centro de la Raza).
And it might not be a coincidence that the new protest zone appeared on the West Coast, often portrayed in literature as an “ideal place” to set up utopian communities, Alberro said. For instance, the book “Ecotopia,” published in 1975 by Ernest Callenbach, depicted a green society — complete with high-speed magnetic-levitation trains! — formed when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the United States. The book went on to become a cult novel, influencing the environmental movement’s focus on local food, public transportation, and renewable energy.
Ecotopia isn’t exactly an ideal parallel for the current wave of protests, as its utopia was white. Callenbach envisioned a segregated society where black people opted to live in the less affluent “Soul City.” Still, it’s apparent that some of its other messages live on. Alberro has talked to many “radical” environmental protesters for her research, and most of them haven’t read any of the green utopian books she asks about. But they repeat some of the ideas and phrases from that literature nearly “word for word” when describing the changes they want to see in the world.
Though Seattle’s protest zone is focused on racial oppression, not environmental destruction, Alberro sees a similar impulse behind all these projects. “Many activists would argue that it’s all part of the same struggle,” she said, arguing that people can’t successfully take on environmental issues without addressing racism and other socioeconomic problems. “There seems to be a cultural atmosphere that molds these different movements, even though they often don’t come into contact with one another.”
And in the words of those who lived it as interviewed and written by Shane Burley in ROAR and republished by Black Rose Anarchist Federation; “Over the past few weeks we have witnessed one of the largest uprisings in recent US history. The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, brought millions of people in the US and around the world out into the streets in aggressive demonstrations. In cities across the country, police precincts were set on fire, corporate stores looted, and as the police turned their sights on the protests, the numbers only grew.
In Seattle, Washington, confrontations with protesters in a gentrified part of the city known as Capitol Hill led to law enforcement’s retreat from their office. Organizers and community members advanced on the area and transformed this eight-block segment of the neighborhood into a collective space, which they soon called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).
The CHAZ has become the focus of right-wing rage, from the media to the president, as they intimate that this is a terrorist operation controlled by brutal anarchist cells. Photos, videos, testimonies from the inside the CHAZ paint a very different picture, communicating something closer to other occupations (Occupy movement?) where people moved from simple protests to experimenting in living differently.
Hundreds of people are putting in the labor to keep things like a medical clinic, a café, concerts and speakers, a community garden, and other resources into a stable infrastructure of mutual aid. They have done so with the support of local organizations and even businesses. Now the CHAZ is hitting a point where they are building for the future, discussing differences in direction and priorities, and how they are going to navigate the negotiation between immediate reforms and more revolutionary aims.
I spoke with two organizers of the CHAZ about what drew them there, how it has been working, and where they hope to go with the project. Both are using pseudonyms, one going by Officer CHAZ (OCHAZ) and the other going by Frank Ascaso (FA), who also organizes with the Black Rose / Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation. These organizers were interviewed separately from one another and were combined here into one conversation.
We’re in one of the largest rebellions in the last fifty years. How did you get involved in the demonstrations and the autonomous project that became the CHAZ?
OCHAZ: It’s been a long road to the breaking point. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths really pushed us over the edge this time. I knew I could no longer live with myself if I remained silent and complacent. I became infused with a burning desire to take action, so I rushed to the front lines of the protest marches in Seattle at the earliest opportunity. It was the least I could do, but quite literally a step in the right direction. Everybody’s got a unique story to tell about their journey to Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), but for me, it was the ecstasy of finally taking a firm stand against systemic oppression. That feeling became such an intense high, that I never wanted to come down. I am addicted to justice, and it’s one drug that I will never give up.
FA: Networks of activists and organizers here in Seattle had been having discussions as Minneapolis and other cities had ignited in protests and riots. There’s a long history of anti-police organizing here with movements to block the expansion of a youth detention center and a so-called “police bunker,” an expansion to a police facility in the northern part of the city. So in those networks people started talking about what we could do here in solidarity with Minneapolis. So people started planning protests for that weekend. And a whole bunch of various groups, from anarchists to church and pacifist groups to the anti-police coalitions, started planning their own thing. The first weekend of protest there were a half dozen different calls to action, and that’s when the riots started here as well. So that’s when I showed up, in those early days.
How does the CHAZ coordinate with the rest of the city’s protest movement?
FA: I would say they are a piece of it, but I would not call it the center [of the movement]. This moment around Black lives is incredible and every group is taking pretty dramatic action. And I would say that is continuing. There are non-profit groups leading marches, there are church groups leading marches, there’s the anti-prison and abolition groups leading marches, and a lot of those are happening outside the space. They were happening before and they were using their own infrastructure and resources to make them happen, and that is still happening.
For example, there was recently a march of 60,000 people between two of the largest parks in Seattle, which, from what I could tell, had little connection to the CHAZ. There was also a children’s march, which seemed to have little connection to the CHAZ. That said, there are things being planned in the autonomous space. So, for example, last night (June 14) I participated in a protest that marched out of the autonomous zone, a Black Lives Matter march, to challenge the police and occupy streets elsewhere. People are planning things from the autonomous space too, but this moment is so dramatic and diverse that lots of things are happening outside of it too.
What was the process by which the zone was first opened up and established? What were the protests like before its formation?
OCHAZ: As with any social movement, it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact origin. The events leading up to the formation of CHAZ have been so surreal and chaotic at times that I’m not sure whether I’ll ever fully understand what happened to get us here. But I want it to be clear that the “Regime” [CHAZ-lingo for the Seattle Police Department] struck first. They’ve been killing us for decades. For as long as we can remember, the people of Capitol Hill have begged the City Council to clean up their mess, but they never listen. They’re too busy sucking Jeff Bezos’s dick to even glance at us. Our so-called political “leaders” will never miss a wink of sleep over the dead bodies of marginalized folks piling up in the streets, so now we’re going to give them something to really lose sleep over.
But even when we protested “the right way,” by peacefully marching, did they listen then? No. They sent their Seattle Police Department (SPD) goon squad after us, treated us like we were criminals—worse than criminals, because at least criminals get a trial. We were more like animals to them. During the march, I watched as dozens of my comrades were brutalized by riot police, simply for demanding reform and racial equity. We tried safe civil disobedience, but the “good ol’ boys” at the SPD never let us down when it comes to the level of violence we’ve come to expect from them.
FA: There had been a week and a half of steady confrontations in that space. Every day from maybe six or seven o’clock in the evening to midnight or one in the morning, pretty regular confrontations. People were pretty exhausted, actually, by the time the police withdrew from that space. Definitely, lots of people showed up that night, but a lot of folks went home early. So when the declaration of the autonomous zone came out after midnight, a lot of people were not there for the evening — I wasn’t there either.
How did the crowd take the space?
OCHAZ: There wasn’t any particular tactic or method, we just… took it. It was ours anyway, as far as we were concerned. Putting up those barriers just felt like the most natural thing we could ever do to protect ourselves. When shit hit the fan at the protest, we switched to auto-pilot, no thought required, just the pure energy of the crowd directing our concentrated motion. We moved as a unit, as if we all shared the same body and mind in the heat of that moment.
The last thing I remember was facing off against the cops down on Pine Street. Recalling the black bloc tactic, we used our bodies to create a wall, but I never expected one of them to run around and sucker-punch my good pal, Dikembe, who was standing off to the side. “Big D” wasn’t even part of our bloc, just an innocent bystander, and that was the last straw for me. I snapped. I knew the bloc needed me, but D was in trouble. I couldn’t desert him even if it meant putting my own safety at risk. I basically blacked out in rage at that point, and when I came to, I was waking up in CHAZ.
All I know is that our group had rushed the line and eventually took the East Precinct. The cops got pushed back, and our barriers went up. My boy Dikembe was injured pretty bad, but that didn’t stop him from spraying the first of many tags at the border crossing in bright bold letters for the whole world to see: “CHAZ.” To the cops, that tag was a threat to back off. To us, it meant freedom.
FA: That whole day was so weird. There had been clashes with the police every night. The mayor promised not to use tear gas, but the very next night the police used tear gas anyway. The day after that, someone got shot, and the following day the police withdrew. They made this dramatic announcement in the afternoon with the police chief saying they were going to withdraw from the East Precinct.
I think there was a lot of anxiety and confusion about what to do. There was some kind of speculation that the police were withdrawing as a set-up to have people attack the precinct and break windows or burn it down so the police would have an excuse to say how bad the protesters were. This was a rumor. That evening when people got to the space, they got right up to the building and there was hesitation about doing anything. People weren’t sure, “what should we do? Do we attack it? Do we just keep the protest in the space?” And those conversations were going on throughout that day and into the night.
Then there were rumors that Proud Boys were in the area, also totally unconfirmed and probably untrue. So then people were thinking about maybe defending the space. What if other fascists come to attack the space? And my understanding is that out of those conversations came to declare an autonomous zone.
What is the idea behind the CHAZ? What is an “autonomous zone?”
FA: Autonomous zones have a long history, likely going back to the Paris Commune in which the French government refused to defend the city against a Prussian siege, a foreign siege. The people of Paris just kind of took over the mechanisms of the city and thought “we can run this better in our own interests. It turns out we don’t need you protecting us, we can take care of ourselves perfectly fine.” And they sort of restructured the city on a radically new democratic principle, a much more directly democratic form of organization.
And since then there have been a whole series of similar popular democratic actions to reclaim space and infrastructure. To run it in the interests of people instead of the police, business or military. So I see this as part of that tradition and a part of that lineage. And one of the things that is most beautiful about this space is that it is such a clear message in this moment when police can literally not stop killing people in the streets.
This past weekend there was just another Black person killed by the police in Atlanta. The autonomous zone is saying “Hey, it turns out we actually don’t need you. We can run our neighborhoods safely without policing. We can run them in much more humane interests without policing.” That political message is pretty clear and pretty strong out of this particular occupation.
OCHAZ: CHAZ is living proof that a world without police is possible. When we say, “Defund the police,” we mean exactly what that sounds like. Cops only create more problems than they try to solve. Especially for undocumented immigrants, BIPOC, WOC, trans, queer and other marginalized communities who simply do not have the privilege of being protected when they call the police for help (or when the police are called on them by some tone-deaf “Karen,” you know the type).
For us marginalized folks, any minor interaction with the police can be a death sentence. CHAZ is the antidote to all that. Our emphasis on restoration over retribution is a major part of the guiding ethos and driving force behind CHAZ. “Autonomous” to us means autonomy from the SPD’s boot on our collective neck. We don’t need the police, because we look out for each other instead. Call it what you want: a collective, a cooperative, a commune. Above of all, CHAZ is a family.
What is day-to-day life like there right now? Is it just a protest space, or are you rebuilding everyday community structures?
FA: It’s pretty interesting because the first day after the autonomous zone was declared there was almost no infrastructure in place yet. I think the call surprised a lot of people. In the next couple of days, hundreds of people came to start and set those up. Now the space feels like a sort of city within the city. It’s got a medical station. It’s got a pretty sophisticated and abundant food distribution. It has community check-ins around disputes and disturbances. It’s got a discussion space; a café space called “the decolonial café.” A community garden, informational tents, and informational sessions with free literature, nightly film screenings and a band stand with nightly performances from different bands.
So there is a ton of activity going on there, and the space itself feels very vibrant and exciting. It does feel like a festival of resistance. And people can plug into movement spaces and have organizing conversations and plan the next action. Or they can think about how to design the garden and the purpose of a community garden, things like that. To me it’s pretty incredible.
In the first few days there was no structure, by the end of the first week people initiated a general assembly model in the middle of the afternoon. The first one was more like a “speak-out,” people talking about their experiences and processing a lot of stuff. A lot of trauma from the police violence of the previous weeks. Black voices were highlighted in their day-to-day struggles with the police. After that the general assembly turned into a “working group” model with report-backs, breaking away to work on things like logistics and then coming back to the space.
I don’t know if they have been able to make any collective decisions and I don’t know if they really have a process for that, whether it is voting, majority voting, or consensus. But it is definitely a space for the whole zone to talk to each other.
OCHAZ: Well it’s certainly nothing like the way it’s portrayed on right-wing propaganda channels like Fox News. We don’t have guarded “checkpoints,” or any of that rubbish. Our borders are open to anyone who stands in solidarity with Black lives, and anyone who seeks safety and refuge from police harassment. Some people drive into CHAZ from out of state to lend a helping hand, while others live and work completely within the boundary. Everyone who comes here with an open mind sees a flourishing environment filled with boundless love.
It feels like walking through a lucid dream 24 hours a day. We use the park to host recreational activities, such as free movie nights, stand-up comedy shows and dance parties. We have local farmers growing crops, artists painting murals to raise social awareness and wholesome activities for kids and families. There are friendly faces everywhere, like our resident 63-year-old street musician, “Papa Jacoby,” who teaches authentic West African djembe music with a focus on cultural sensitivity.
Everybody is having a lot of fun in CHAZ, but we also can’t forget why we are here and who we are fighting for. That’s why we make sure to hold regular classes on the history of racism, strategies for decolonization and the destructive legacy of whiteness. We’re working hard to unlearn systems of racism, and create a place in CHAZ where for once in the history of America, white folks take a back seat to make room for the unheard voices of Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples.
Everywhere you look in CHAZ, you will find a vibrant, thriving community where every citizen understands that Black Lives Matter, and they mean it with all their hearts. I’ve never seen something so beautiful that it actually makes me cry, but that pretty much sums up CHAZ for you.
How are mutual aid projects supporting the Zone to continue?
OCHAZ: Robust mutual aid programs are key to CHAZ’s success, as well as harm reduction methodologies wherever possible. The people organize themselves around community needs. Our “No-cop co-op” doesn’t accept any cash — anything a citizen of CHAZ needs is provided free of charge from the co-op, because we believe in people over profits. Our kitchen distributes food to the homeless night and day, and we’re not just talking cans of cold beans here. In CHAZ, anyone who is hungry can receive a full, nutritious and locally-sourced hot meal, and we’ll even top it off with a scoop of ice cream and some of those little Keebler mint cookies for dessert.
Around the corner, we have a free childcare center to take some of the stress off working women of color, along with a “no questions asked” medical care facility to anyone in need. Undocumented immigrants in particular, who live outside the CHAZ, are often afraid to see a doctor because revealing their personal information could bring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to their doorstep. CHAZ ensures that our immigrant comrades have nothing to fear when they go in for a check-up, by providing a viable alternative to Big Pharma and other western imperialist medical institutions.
Another pride and joy of the Autonomous Zone is our cooperative agricultural program. All citizens are welcome to grow and share crops in our garden area, but of course we have designated the most fertile plot of land to Indigenous peoples, so they can take ownership over what is rightfully theirs without intrusion. To those who would have never believed the people of America could break away from capitalism and say goodbye to the oligarchy: think again — the CHAZ works, and we’re expanding it with even more socially-minded programs every day.
FA: So the mutual aid group in Seattle that formed just as the pandemic hit has been very involved organizing the autonomous zone space. Setting up the food and some of the other distribution resources they used for Covid they have been able to use in this space. So that’s been really great. Then I just think the idea of mutual aid and supporting each other in the space is also a big part of this. So the “No cop co-op,” where people are just providing whatever they have and distributing it freely to people who need it. And the kind of food donations that are coming in are all part of that notion.
Some people are putting in tremendous amounts of work, way more than I am. The medical team is incredible. They have been battling the police for weeks and treating people who have been injured by the police very, very seriously. Their ability to get medical supplies and distribute them to people in need is really incredible.
What do you think about the portrayal in right-wing media? Is it really different from your own experience?
FA: The CHAZ really does feel like a festive and joyous space. There have been lots of efforts to discredit the space from the Seattle Police Department or right-wing media, even just mainstream media.
Are the police or right-wing vigilantes trying to get into the zone?
FA: The police have re-entered the space. The precinct was left completely upended. It was open, unlocked and completely accessible. In the first couple of days, no one went in. There was still that hesitancy about getting into the East Precinct. People were still unsure of what to do. And after the first couple of days the police came in and locked it and fenced it off.
From what I know, that is the only time the police have come into that space and other than that other city services are responding to the area. The mayor has directed the Fire Department, the Department of Transportation and the Parks Department to be the ones who come to that area. So I haven’t seen any police there since they came in the one time.
OCHAZ: The fascists are always on our ass, predictable as usual. Unfortunately, it’s just something we have to expect and figure out how to deal with the best we can. The cops have left us alone for the most part, running scared ever since we exiled them from the Zone. But there is definitely a looming cloud of right-wing assholes threatening to swoop in and destroy what we’ve created here. What those assholes don’t realize, is that we are watching them like a hawk. We’ll never just lie down and take it, or let them hurt even a single hair on our people’s bodies. Sure, we’ve received threats from cops, “patriots,” biker gangs, you name it. But CHAZ has a message to all you bootlickers out there: we’ve got your number. Fuck around and find out.
How are you thinking about the CHAZ in the long term? Are you thinking of this extending into weeks and months?
OCHAZ: I’m trying my best to not get blinded by optimism. We still have a long way to go to achieve racial equity. There’s a lot of work to do to expand our reach, secure our infrastructure, and build up the kind of community that works for everybody, not just whites and white-passing POC. Those among us who come from a place of privilege are still struggling to avoid centering themselves, because dismantling the effects of racism and colorism isn’t just a one-time gig — it’s a full time job.
That’s why we are putting up daily reminders, so that the very roads we walk on will declare loud and clear what we all stand for. Little by little, we’re covering every building in sight with tributes to George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and others. We are de-gentrifying the city, renaming streets that were previously named after colonizers and diligently taking down any and all lingering remnants of our country’s racist past, so we can move on to a better future. We are setting our sights high, toward full self-sustainability, so that we no longer rely on donations from the outside to keep us going. The next thing on my list is to get a greenhouse going, to cultivate crops that will provide a wider range of vegan options for the kitchen.
FA: That’s a great question. When I was there yesterday, it seemed entrenched to me. People have uprooted part of the park and planted community gardens there. There’s a tent city, protesters kind of reminiscent of Occupy. All the mutual aid projects I was mentioning, the medics and the food distribution and things like that, are really well set up. The infrastructure they have is impressive. So it looks like it has staying power, to me.
What will come of that, I am unsure. There are several groups that have issued demands, some of which are aligned and some of which are a little different. We don’t know yet what they will be able to leverage from the city and what the end goal is, and I think a lot of those conversations are still emerging in the general assembly sessions that are happening and conversations in the space. But at this point it has staying power and I don’t imagine it going away anywhere anytime soon.
How have you worked with Indigenous tribes in the area?
OCHAZ: Every decision made in CHAZ comes to fruition with the full acknowledgement and understanding that this land belongs to Indigenous peoples first, full stop. Tribal needs remain a top priority in CHAZ to ensure that they get the representation they deserve, which had previously been stripped away from them by the old regime. We always take special care and consideration to work beneath local tribal leaders for approval. One of the first things we did when we established CHAZ was consult with a Duwamish Chief and his spiritual advisor. We wouldn’t dream of doing anything without their blessing.
Why are you personally so passionate about it?
FA: One, is just being concerned for Black lives, which is part of where it came from and where it started. I think where it has to end is the recognition of Black humanity, Black integrity and Black dignity. Also, at the moment we can try to rethink and radically reimagine what our cities can look like. This is one of those moments. Our budgets, at a local level, so favor militarism and violence. And that’s true at a national level too. This points to the idea that when we organize ourselves to meet human needs what emerges is beautiful constructions of art, new forms of music, new forms of literature, new political ideas, new infrastructures to provide medical care and food for each other. Those are the priorities that we should be emphasizing, and the autonomous zone states that really clearly.
OCHAZ: Simply put, Capitol Hill is my home. Our people are sick to death of being pushed around by the regime on a daily basis. I can’t sit back and watch my people be tormented by the “thin blue line” anymore. We have our own “line” up on Cap Hill: the rainbow line. And our line isn’t thin — it’s thick as fuck, and you better not cross it.”
I say now from the glorious Battle of Los Angeles, where we confront hate and division with love and solidarity, as I said five years ago on this day five years ago when joy was victorious over fear and hope conquered abjection and despair; come and dance with us, America. Come find your heart and be free.
And don’t forget to run amok and be ungovernable.
“A Day in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”
Meet the Activists Inside Seattle’s Police-Free Zone
Watch “The TRUTH on the ground inside CHAZ CHOP Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone Seattle Washington
By Tuesday June 10 2025 the Battle of Los Angeles had gone national, in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Omaha and Seattle.
Protests across US as anger grows over Trump’s immigration crackdown
By June 11 it was everywhere, like Black Lives Matter, and growing; Ben Stuckart, a former city councilman in Spokane Washington where I am a precinct captain of the Democratic Party, has led a protest which has now trapped ICE agents in with their prisoners at the 411 West Cataldo facility. This is ongoing now, and I am publishing notice here as a hey rube or all hands on deck call for anyone in Spokane who can show up, amplifying the call from Jac Archer who is onsite where a hundred protesters are preventing the disappearance of the kidnapped workers by the ICE terror force. When Bernie Sanders spoke here, fourteen thousand people came to hear him, mostly members of his Our Revolution group like myself. A thousand revolutionaries could seize the prison, arrest the kidnappers, and free the prisoners.
It’s a scenario being repeated countless times all across America, and the stakes will become higher when Trump sends the military to “restore order”; there is no better time to restore democracy to our nation, and for the prisoners there is no other time.
“Every urban riot, shoot-out and bloodbath in recent memory has been set off by some trigger-happy cop in a fear frenzy.” Hunter S. Thompson
Anarchy, a reading list:
Literary and Political Sources of the Autonomous Zones Ideology
Pirate Utopia, Bruce Sterling (this book I read aloud passages from to the crowd throughout the days of liberty, as a model for Living Autonomous Zones)
America awakes in mass protests against ICE and the racist Trump Reign of Terror, in cities across our nation, though the Battle of Los Angeles ignites our Resistance and unleashes our reimagination in transformative change and seizure of power in revolutionary struggle.
This is how democracies fall to tyrannies, and civilizations to ruins and dark ages; but it is also how the people seize their stolen power from those who would enslave us, and how we adapt the threats and recreate ourselves and how we choose to be human together. When our beautiful shells become cages, we must escape them.
What is the origin of the Revolution and Resistance, and why now?
As written by Maanvi Singh in The Guardian, in an article entitled Los Angeles responds with roaring backlash to Trump’s dramatic escalation: The president vowed to crush opposition to his immigration raids – but his attempted show of force may have awoken something else; “Donald Trump’s administration promised to crush opposition in Los Angeles.
Late on Saturday night, the US president deployed national guard soldiers in LA following protests against immigration raids in the city – a stunning escalation in the administration’s promise of “mass deportations”. His administration has promised to quell protests, and warned local leaders to brace for at least 30 days of ramped-up immigration enforcement.
But the overwhelming show of force may have awoken something else. The city is responding with a roaring backlash.
The moment Trump was sworn in for his second presidential term, he unleashed a barrage of draconian immigration restrictions. Ice agents began ambushing people inside their homes, in schools and churches. Children were being detained in what activists have called “baby jails”. Asylum seekers were exiled to a brutal mega-prison in El Salvador.
There were protests across the US – but the resistance that marked Trump’s first term seemed to have flagged. Institutions had begun folding to the president’s threats. As the administration escalated immigration raids and stripped away immigrants’ rights; politicians mounted muffled objections.
And then Trump came after Los Angeles.
Fueling the fury was the brutality with which federal agents had approached their targets, including a clothing manufacturer in Los Angeles’s garment district, and Home Depot in the Westlake district and a warehouse in South Los Angeles. The arrests were carried out without judicial warrants, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – advocates say that more than 200 people were taken.
Lawyers reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been holding detained families in the basements of federal immigration facilities, separating children and mothers from their fathers. Agents have refused access to attorneys and family members, according to the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef).
As masked immigration officers ripped workers away from their jobs, other agents in riot gear attacked protesters with teargas and flash-bang grenades, escalating a handful of isolated demonstrations into a clash that roiled the city and spurred several hundred to join the protest.
Among the protesters arrested was the union leader David Huerta, president of SEIU-USWW and SEIU California. The images of a middle-aged man in a plaid button-down shirt who was shoved down to the ground have angered millions of union workers across the US, wrote the LA Times columnist Anita Chabria. “The battleground has been redrawn in ways we don’t fully yet appreciate,” she wrote.
Trump has responded to the protests with escalating force, bypassing the governor to activate the state’s national guard for the first time since the 1992 LA riots, when police officers were acquitted over the beating of Rodney King. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, suggested that in addition to the 2,000 guardsmen promised, the government would consider sending in the marines – a suggestion that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, called “deranged”.
JD Vance suggested that the administration was targeting this Democratic city in a Democratic state as part of a political lesson, referring to protesters as “insurrectionists”.
The show of might is all part of a deliberate strategy to “flood the zone”, according to the White House border czar, Tom Homan, who told Fox News recently that the administration would be zeroing in on “sanctuary cities” that refuse to cooperate with immigration enforcers.
But communities don’t like to see their friends and neighbors cuffed. “These are workers, these are fathers, these are mothers,” said Angelica Salas, executive director for the advocacy group Chirla, said at a news conference on Friday. “Our community is under attack and is being terrorized.”
The Los Angeles-area US representative Maxine Waters, who also was denied entry to the federal immigration office in downtown LA, said the crowds should “grow and grow and grow” until Trump reversed course on his deployment of soldiers.
Similar raids took place in Newark, Chicago, Nashville and other cities across the US. In San Diego last week, a neighbourhood mobilized as federal agents raided restaurants, yelling “Shame! Shame!” at officers in military gear.
“The administration is testing Los Angeles to see if we break under pressure,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, president of ImmDef. “But we won’t back down.”
What does it mean?
As written by Robert Reich in The Guardian, in an article entitled We are witnessing the first stages of a Trump police state: The national guard’s deployment in Los Angeles sets the US on a familiar authoritarian pathway. History shows the results; “Now that Donald Trump’s tariffs have been halted, his big, beautiful bill has been stymied, and his multi-billionaire tech bro has turned on him, how does he demonstrate his power?
On Friday morning, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) conducted raids across Los Angeles – including at two Home Depots and a clothing wholesaler – in search of workers who they suspected of being undocumented immigrants.
Though figures vary, they reportedly arrested 121 people.
They were met with protesters who chanted and threw eggs before being dispersed by police wearing riot gear, holding shields, and using batons, guns that shoot pepper balls, rubber bullets, teargas, and flash-bang grenades.
On Saturday, Trump escalated the confrontations, ordering at least 2,000 national guard troops to be deployed in Los Angeles county to help quell the protests.
He said that any demonstration that got in the way of immigration officials would be considered a “form of rebellion.” Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, called the protests an “insurrection”.
On Saturday evening, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, threatened to deploy active-duty marines, saying: “The violent mob assaults on ICE and Federal Law Enforcement are designed to prevent the removal of Criminal Illegal Aliens from our soil. A dangerous invasion facilitated by criminal cartels (aka Foreign Terrorist Organizations) and a huge NATIONAL SECURITY RISK. Under President Trump, violence and destruction against federal agents and federal facilities will NOT be tolerated.”
We are witnessing the first stages of a Trump police state.
Last week, raids in San Diego, in Martha’s Vineyard and in the Berkshires led to standoffs as bystanders angrily confronted federal agents who were taking workers into custody.
Trump’s dragnet also includes federal courthouses. Ice officers are mobilizing outside courtrooms across the US and immediately arresting people – including migrants whose cases have been dismissed by judges.
History shows that once an authoritarian ruler establishes the infrastructure of a police state, that same infrastructure can be turned on anyone.
Trump and his regime are rapidly creating such an infrastructure, in five steps:
(1) declaring an emergency on the basis of a so-called “rebellion”, “insurrection”, or “invasion”;
(2) using that “emergency” to justify bringing in federal agents with a monopoly on the use of force (Ice, the FBI, DEA, and the national guard) against civilians inside the country;
(3) allowing those militarized agents to make dragnet abductions and warrantless arrests, and detain people without due process;
(4) creating additional prison space and detention camps for those detained, and
(5) eventually, as the situation escalates, declaring martial law.
We are not at martial law yet, thankfully. But once in place, the infrastructure of a police state can build on itself.
Those who are given authority over aspects of it – the internal militia, dragnets, detention camps, and martial law – seek other opportunities to invoke their authority.
As civilian control gives way to military control, the nation splits into those who are most vulnerable to it and those who support it. The dictatorship entrenches itself by fomenting fear and anger on both sides.
Right now, our major bulwarks against Trump’s police state are the federal courts and broad-based peaceful protests – such as the one that many of us will engage in this coming Saturday 14 June, on the No Kings Day of Action.
It is imperative that we remain peaceful, that we demonstrate our resolve to combat this tyranny but do so non-violently, and that we let America know about the emerging infrastructure of Trump’s police state and the importance of resisting it.
These are frightening and depressing times. But remember: although it takes one authoritarian to establish a police state, it takes just 3.5% of a population to topple him and end it.”
As written by James Greenberg in a FaceBook post; “Trump is looking for a pretext. He isn’t waiting for chaos—he’s provoking it. With the Marines and National Guard now deployed in Los Angeles, we are watching a page turn—not in the story of public safety, but in the unfolding script of authoritarian consolidation.
This isn’t just about L.A. It’s a test. A move to see who pushes back, who stays quiet, and how far he can go without consequences. The justification, as always, is “law and order.” But the real purpose is power—not safety, not justice, not stability. Power.
Trump doesn’t need to rewrite the Constitution to get what he wants. He only needs to bend it—slowly, repeatedly—until what used to be illegal becomes normal. He’s not trying to fix a crisis. He’s trying to manufacture one. One that gives him cover to impose control on his terms.
Martial law in the U.S. has no clear definition. It’s not even mentioned in the Constitution. But it has been invoked—during wars, rebellions, disasters—as a rare, short-term emergency measure. In Trump’s hands, it would be something else entirely: not a response to upheaval, but a suspension of democracy. A way to put the public on hold. To replace rights with orders.
And cruelty isn’t collateral—it’s the point. Every shove, every raid, every humiliating arrest is a message: power no longer needs justification. It only needs spectacle. Trump knows that to rule by force, you must make people feel it. What he’s staging isn’t law—it’s punishment.
Anthropologists have long warned that when societies suspend their norms “temporarily,” they often end up redefining them permanently.
This is how authoritarianism works: not through sudden rupture, but through the slow erosion of what people believe is normal. The law doesn’t disappear. It just stops doing what it was meant to do.
Deploying the National Guard isn’t about restoring calm. It’s a ritualized display of submission. From an anthropological perspective, this is symbolic drama. Uniforms, sirens, curfews—these are signals of who now commands and who must obey. It’s not just about control. It’s about conditioning the public to see domination as stability.
The legal tool he’s likely to invoke is the Insurrection Act—a vague and dangerous statute that gives the president power to deploy troops when civil unrest threatens enforcement of federal law. In the wrong hands, it’s a blank check. Trump could override governors, take over policing, and suppress protest under the guise of “defense.” By the time courts or Congress respond, the damage will be done—and he knows it.
What makes this moment so dangerous is not just the actor, but the stagehands. Courts stall. Agencies hesitate. Political leaders look away. A demagogue doesn’t seize power alone—he is enabled by institutions that fail to stop him.
Trump’s supporters have been fed a steady diet of grievance and fear. Disorder becomes proof of betrayal; Trump, the only cure. This is what anthropologists recognize as myth in action—a story that explains suffering, names enemies, and sanctifies the redeemer.
The myth doesn’t need to be true. It only needs to be repeated. And the more brutal the enforcement, the stronger the myth becomes. Public beatings, racialized policing, illegal detentions—these aren’t accidents. They are performances of power. Spectacles of degradation meant to break solidarity, isolate the vulnerable, and teach the rest to look away.
And the result isn’t just obedience—it’s internalized compliance. When fear governs daily life, submission begins to feel like safety. People stop resisting not because they agree, but because resistance feels futile—or dangerous.
The first to be targeted will be those already at the margins: immigrants, Black communities, the unhoused. Authoritarianism is always rehearsed on the vulnerable before it is scaled up. What we allow to happen to them becomes the template for what happens next.
And we’ve seen this script before. Japanese internment. COINTELPRO. The surveillance of civil rights leaders. America has used fear to suspend rights before. The difference now is scale—and intent.
If this move succeeds—if troops on American streets are met with resignation—it will mark a turning point. Not just in politics, but in how we understand power, citizenship, and the very idea of public life. Martial law wouldn’t just suspend rights. It would redefine who counts, who obeys, and who belongs.
What begins as spectacle becomes the structure of the state.
And when brutality becomes routine—when punishment becomes a public ritual—we don’t just lose our rights. We lose the ability to recognize their absence. The troops may leave, but the lesson remains: fear rules, and obedience is the price of peace.”
As written by Tess Owen in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘The language of authoritarianism’: how Trump and allies cast LA as a lawless city needing military intervention: As a pretext to sending in the national guard, the White House marked the Ice protests as a broader threat to the US; “Donald Trump and his allies turned to a familiar script over the weekend, casting the sprawling city of Los Angeles in shades of fire and brimstone, a hub of dangerous lawlessness that required urgent military intervention in order to be contained.
“Looking really bad in L.A.,” Trump posted on Truth Social in the very early hours of Monday morning. “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!”
But contrary to the Trump administration’s characterization of an entire city in tumult, the demonstrations were actually confined to very small areas and life generally went on as usual across much of the city.
Protests began on Friday outside the federal building in downtown LA following reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents were conducting raids nearby. The protests later spread to the cities of Paramount and Compton in response to reported and rumored raids there too, and demonstrators faced off with local and state authorities armed with “less-lethal munitions” and tear gas.
By Sunday, despite objections from local officials, Trump made the unusual move of asserting control over California’s national guard and deployed 300 soldiers to support Ice (nearly 2,000 troops were mobilized in total).
As a pretext to this action, the Trump administration had characterized the protests as a broader threat to the nation. On X, White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, called LA “occupied territory”. “We’ve been saying for years this is a fight to save civilization. Anyone with eyes can see that now.”
Trump posted on Truth Social: “A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals. Now violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations – But these lawless riots only strengthen our resolve.”
FBI director, Kash Patel, wrote on X that LA was “under siege by marauding criminals”.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and scholar on fascist and authoritarian movements, says the rhetoric coming from the Trump administration is “an authoritarian trick”.
“You create a sense of existential fear that social anarchy is spreading, that criminal gangs are taking over. This is the language of authoritarianism all over the world,” said Ben-Ghiat.
“What is the only recourse to violent mobs and agitators? Using all the force of the state. Thus we have the vision of the national guard, armed to the teeth. It’s like a war zone. That’s on purpose, it’s habituating Americans to see those armed forces as being in combat on the streets of American cities.”
Ben-Ghiat pointed specifically to a post on X by defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
“The violent mob assaults on ICE and Federal Law Enforcement are designed to prevent the removal of Criminal Illegal Aliens from our soil,” Hegseth wrote. “A dangerous invasion facilitated by criminal cartels (aka Foreign Terrorist Organizations) and a huge NATIONAL SECURITY RISK.”
Ben-Ghiat said Hegseth employed “the classic authoritarian thing, of setting up an excuse, which is that the internal enemy, illegal criminal aliens, is working together with an external enemy, the cartels and foreign terrorists, and using that to go after a third party, of protesters, regular people, who came out to show solidarity”.
In his post, Hegseth added that active duty marines at Camp Pendleton were on “high alert” and would also be mobilized “if violence continues. On Monday, the Pentagon said it had mobilized approximately 700 marines. CNN reported that the government was still ironing out “rules of engagement” for encountering protesters.
The protests turned violent when federal immigration authorities used flash bang grenades and tear gas against demonstrators, per reporting in the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times. Over the weekend, fiery and chaotic scenes played out in downtown LA, Compton and Paramount. Dozens of people were arrested for an array of crimes, including an alleged tossing of a molotov cocktail towards Ice officers. Protesters shut down a freeway, several self-driving vehicles were torched and dumpsters were set alight, and there were scattered reports of looting.
Still, as mayor Karen Bass noted on CNN on Monday, on “a few streets downtown, it looks horrible”, but there was “not citywide civil unrest”.
Local officials said that the addition of troops, who were seen standing shoulder to shoulder on Sunday holding wooden bats, long guns and shields, to the already fraught situation only made things worse. Bass described the decision to involve the national guard as a “chaotic escalation”; Governor Gavin Newsom called it “inflammatory”.
Newsom said on Monday that he will sue the Trump administration; attorney general Rob Bonta later previewed that lawsuit by telling the public that the Trump administration “trampled” on the states sovereignty by bypassing the governor.
“This was not inevitable,” Bonta said of the demonstrations that built over the weekend following immigration raids across LA, adding: “There was no risk of rebellion, no threat of foreign invasion, no inability for the federal government to enforce federal laws.”
The inclusion of the national guard functioned as a show of force against a powerful blue state that Trump – and his allies – have cast as an existential threat to the rest of America, in part on account of its “sanctuary status”, meaning local officials don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
“Simply put, the government of the State of California aided, abetted and conspired to facilitate the invasion of the United States,” Stephen Miller wrote on X.
As Trump and his allies fomented chaos on the streets, Maga-world personalities and some Republican officials added to the mayhem by sharing misinformation online. Senator Ted Cruz and Infowars’s Alex Jones reshared a video, originally posted by conservative commentator James Woods, of a burning LAPD car during a protest in 2020, claiming it was from the current LA unrest.
Prominent accounts also shared a video from last year of a flash mob attack on a convenience store clerk, claiming that violent protesters were currently assaulting a small business owner. An account called US Homeland Security News, which has almost 400,000 followers, posted an image of a stack of bricks with the caption: “Alert: Soros funded organizations have ordered hundreds of pallets of bricks to be placed near ICE facilities to be used by Democrat militants against ICE agents and staff!! It’s Civil War!!” The image, which was also used to spread false information about Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, was taken at a building supply company in Malaysia.
Trump has also repeatedly suggested that some of the individuals involved in the protest were “paid”, invoking a popular rightwing conspiracy about dark money bankrolling liberal causes.
This, too, is another tactic out of the authoritarian playbook, according to Ben-Ghiat.
“If there are any protests against the autocrat, you have to discredit them by saying they are crisis actors, they are foreign infiltrators,” Ben-Ghiat said. “You have to discredit them in the public eye.”
Officials in LA are bracing for further protests. The Los Angeles police department received backup from at least a dozen police forces in southern California, according to the Los Angeles Times. California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said on Monday that he thinks it’s “highly likely” that all 2,000 of the national guard soldiers who were mobilized will be deployed to LA.
The weekend’s unrest also casts a potential shadow over Trump’s military parade slated for this Thursday in Washington DC. Opponents of that event are organizing protests across the US under the banner of “No Kings”.
As written by Moustafa Bayoumi in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump is deliberately ratcheting up violence in Los Angeles: The president is escalating the situation to justify greater force and repression. Now he’s talking about sending ‘troops everywhere; “Donald Trump was on his way to Camp David for a meeting with military leaders on Sunday when he was asked by reporters about possibly invoking the Insurrection Act, allowing direct military involvement in civilian law enforcement. Demonstrations against Trump’s draconian immigration arrests had been growing in Los Angeles, and some of them had turned violent. Trump’s answer? “We’re going to have troops everywhere,” he said.
I know Trump is “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag”, to borrow the words of the Republican senator Rand Paul, and that this president governs using misdirection, evasion and (especially) exaggeration, but we should still be worried by this prospect he raises of sending “troops everywhere”.
Already, Trump and his administration have taken the unprecedented steps of calling up thousands of national guard soldiers to Los Angeles against the wishes of the California governor, of deploying a battalion of hundreds of marines to “assist” law enforcement in Los Angeles, and of seeking to ban the use of masks by protesters while defending the use of masks for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents. Needless to say, none of this would be happening if these times were normal.
What makes this moment abnormal is not the fact that Los Angeles witnessed days of mostly peaceful protests against massive and destructive immigration arrests. We’ve seen such protests countless times before in this country. Nor is it the fact that pockets of such protests turned violent. That too is hardly an aberration in our national history. What makes these times abnormal is the administration’s deliberate escalation of the violence, a naked attempt to ratchet up conflict to justify the imposition of greater force and repression over the American people.
The Steady State, a non-partisan coalition of more than 280 former national security professionals, has issued a warning over these events. “The use of federal military force in the absence of local or state requests, paired with contradictory mandates targeting protestors, is a hallmark of authoritarian drift,” the statement reads. “Our members – many of whom have served in fragile democracies abroad – have seen this pattern before. What begins as provocative posturing can rapidly metastasize into something far more dangerous.”
The hypocrisy of this administration is simply unbearable. If you’re an actual insurrectionist, such as those who participated in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by destroying federal property and attacking law enforcement officers, you’ll receive a pardon or a commutation of your sentence. But if you join the protests against Ice raids in Los Angeles, you face military opposition.
Then there’s Stephen Miller. The White House deputy chief of staff unironically posts on social media that “this is a fight to save civilization” with no apparent awareness that it is this administration that is destroying our way of life, only to replace it with something far more violent and sinister.
Are we about to see Trump invoke the Insurrection Act? It’s certainly possible. On the White House lawn on Monday, Trump explicitly called the protesters in Los Angeles “insurrectionists”, perhaps preparing the rhetorical groundwork for invoking the act. And by invoking the Insurrection Act, Trump would be able to use the US military as a law enforcement entity inside the borders of the US – a danger to American liberty.
The Insurrection Act has been used about 30 times throughout American history, with the last time being in Los Angeles in 1992. Then, the governor, Pete Wilson, asked the federal government for help as civil disturbances grew after the acquittal of four white police officers who brutally beat Rodney King, a Black man, during a traffic arrest. The only time a president has invoked the Insurrection Act against a governor’s wishes has been when Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama in 1965. But Johnson used the troops to protect civil rights protesters. Now, Trump may use the same act to punish immigration rights protesters.
One part of the Insurrection Act allows the president to send troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws”. According to Joseph Nunn at the Brennan Center, “[t]his provision is so bafflingly broad that it cannot possibly mean what it says, or else it authorizes the president to use the military against any two people conspiring to break federal law”.
No doubt, Trump finds that provision to be enticing. What we’re discovering during this administration is how much of American law is written with so little precision. Custom and the belief in the separation of powers have traditionally reigned in the practice of the executive branch. Not so with Trump, who is dead set on grabbing as much power as quickly as possible, and all for himself as the leader of the executive branch. To think that this power grab won’t include exercising his control of the military by deploying “troops everywhere”, whether now or at another point in the future, is naive.
Such a form of governance, with power concentrated in an individual, is certainly a form of tyranny. But tyranny, as Hannah Arendt reminds us in On Violence, is also “the most violent and least powerful of forms of government”. And while a government may have the means to inflict mass violence, it is ultimately the people who hold the power. These are the lessons we need to be studying, and implementing on our streets everywhere, while we still can.”
As written by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump LA protest response risks turning US military into political force, veterans warn:
Memo authorising the military to be deployed against anticipated protests is pre-emptive act – a first for the US; “The Trump administration’s deployment of national guard troops to Los Angeles to intervene in civilian protests in the face of opposition from the Californian governor is a major escalation that risks the politicisation of the US military, armed service veterans are warning.
Former top military figures have told the Guardian that the decision to put up to 2,000 troops under federal control and send them into the streets of LA is a violation of the military’s commitment to keep out of domestic politics in all but the most exceptional circumstances. The last time a US president federalised the national guard against the wishes of a state governor was in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson deployed them to protect civil rights marchers in Alabama.
“This is the politicisation of the armed forces,” said Maj Gen Paul Eaton. “It casts the military in a terrible light – it’s that man on horseback, who really doesn’t want to be there, out in front of American citizens.”
Eaton, who commanded the training of Iraqi troops during the invasion of Iraq, predicted that the LA deployment would lead to the eventual invocation of the Insurrection Act. The 1807 law empowers the president to deploy the full US military against insurrection or armed rebellion.
“We are headed towards the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which will provide a legal basis for inappropriate activity,” he said.
The largely peaceful protests in LA against Trump’s deportation efforts have entered their fourth day. National guard troops began arriving in the city on Sunday, with authorisation to protect federal personnel and buildings but not to engage in law enforcement activities.
Trump’s move in the absence of a genuine civil emergency has sent alarm through military circles, which have long prided themselves on being above politics. “This deployment was made counter to what the governor wanted, so it seems like a political forcing – a forced use of the military by Trump because he can,” said a retired senior US army officer who requested anonymity in order to preserve their lifelong non-partisanship.
Trump’s memo federalising the national guard for deployment in LA is written in sweeping terms, in effect casting it as a nationwide mobilisation. It says that regular military troops, as well as national guard forces, can be employed by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to protect federal functions anywhere in the country where protests are occurring.
Most troublingly, the memo also acts pre-emptively – an action never seen before in the US – authorising the military to be deployed against anticipated protests. It says that troops can be sent to “locations where protest against [federal] functions are occurring, or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments”.
On Sunday, Trump signaled that LA was just the start of a much wider deployment. “We’re gonna have troops everywhere,” he said.
Janessa Goldbeck, a Marine Corps veteran who is CEO of Vet Voice Foundation which advocates for veterans and military families participating in American democracy, said that the executive order was an invitation to Hegseth to “mobilise as many troops as he wants anywhere within the US. That’s a massive escalation across the country.”
Geoffrey DeWeese, a former US army judge advocate who is now a legal director within the National Institute of Military Justice, expressed concern about how the national guard would be used in LA. Under the memo, they can act as protection for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, which potentially means that troops could accompany Ice in immigration deportation raids on homes and businesses.
“Ice and the national guard are [both] wearing camouflage, carrying automatic weapons – so how do civilians differentiate them? And what message does it send, when all you see are men and women in uniform, with guns and helmets and goggles and maybe gas masks?”
The military mobilisation that is now unfolding is far from unexpected. Military and constitutional experts who were convened by the law and policy institute the Brennan Center last summer to wargame what Trump might do in a second administration predicted precisely the current train of events.
Trump himself made no attempt to disguise his intentions, repeatedly telling his supporters during last year’s election campaign that if re-elected he would use the military against “the enemy within”.
Concerns about the deployment have been heightened by Trump’s previous actions which already pointed towards a politicisation of the armed services. In February he fired the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and several other top brass without giving just cause.
Retired lieutenant general Jeffrey Buchanan, the former commander of the US Army North, said the dismissals also had a politicising effect. “It will lead to Biden’s generals, and Trump’s generals – or generals who are ‘my guys’ and generals who are ‘not my guys’. That erodes confidence in the military, because the people will think that the military are now politicians.”
Buchanan added: “The military’s ultimate loyalty is to our constitution, not to a particular leader. We’ve had plenty of tensions between military leaders and presidents in our history, but we’ve always maintained this tradition.”
There are also worries about Trump’s upcoming military parade to be staged in Washington DC on 14 June to mark the 250th anniversary of the US army. The date happens to coincide with the president’s 79th birthday.
“Tanks are rolling into DC, $40m is about to be spent, in a giant function to celebrate one man. That’s deeply unAmerican,” said Vet Voice’s Goldbeck.
She added that while the military celebrated its birthdays, street parades were avoided “because that is the action of a dictator. This is all in line with how Trump views the military as a tool at his personal disposal, not as a professional fighting force made up of men and women whose oath is to the constitution.”
America Awakes: Protests Across America Against ICE and the Trump Reign of Terror
Trump Is Normalizing the Unthinkable: Federal Troops in American Streets, Breaking the Law — and Getting Away With It: If you think this ends with L.A., you haven’t been paying attention. This is Portland 2.0 — but scaled up, and aimed at the soul of American democracy/ The Hartmann Report
Trump LA protest response risks turning US military into political force, veterans warn: Memo authorising the military to be deployed against anticipated protests is pre-emptive act – a first for the US
The lies of Trump become transparent as American politics reshapes once again. Nonwhite Trump voters chose him to keep their only power, patriarchal power over women, and now witness that they are regarded as threats to white power by the side they gave the power to steal their citizenshop and human rights. Did they think the Republican Party will come for them last, or not at all? That didn’t work out for the Jewish ww1 vets who held the Iron Cross and were promised exception by Hitler, and Trump closely follows Hitlers playbook. Now that he doesn’t need them, Trump is purging Latino peoples in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and state terror.
Latinas for Trump co-founder criticizes president’s immigration arrests: ‘Unacceptable and inhumane’
How do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Take a moment to savour with me the indictment of Trump for the crime of espionage. Ahhh, the bliss.
A commentator on MSN’s Eleventh Hour on this night one year ago pronounced the magic words which I hope will awaken our nation from the long nightmare of capture by the Fourth Reich; “I think Trump is done.”
It has been a fairytale from which we may learn many kinds of morals, a story which begins in the 1980 capture of the Republican Party by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement as a fundamentalist theocracy and the Presidency of its figurehead Ronald Reagan, and found its true form in the Presidency of a pedophile rapist and Russian agent who for years slept with a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible.
Here in the trial of Traitor Trump is a morality play which is also a Rashomon Gate of our possible futures, for it is more than a legal last stand of the rule of law and the idea of democracy in America against a rigged electoral process which offers capture of the state to its enemies, but also a trial of democracy in America and of our infiltrated and subverted justice system whose court of ultimate appeal is a Supreme Court which is become a whorehouse.
What is the meaning of the Trump regime in the story of America and our future possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals?
As I wrote in my post of November 3 2020, One Hundred Years of Racist Vote Suppression and White Supremacist Terror: Anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre; This election has seen attempts at vote suppression unknown in our lifetimes; Trumps mission to subvert democracy includes intimidation by calling for armed white supremacists to deny nonwhite citizens access to the polls, an attack on Biden’s campaign caravan by the Trump Train mobile force, failed assassination attempts against Biden and other political figures, sabotage of the postal system, politization of the Justice department, and his farcical declaration of victory before the vote is counted, among his many treasonous crimes.
Today liberty and tyranny play for the soul of America and the freedom of the world.
I spent some time today at a Trump rally trying to defuse a hate crime in the making. A hey rube went up that a rally staged between our local mosque here in Spokane and a Middle Eastern grocery was becoming a violent mob; while others responded as a protection detail and placed themselves with great courage between potential perpetrators and their victims, I blended into the rally to assess and shape its development as an incubator of violence and work to defuse it through dialog and negotiation.
Today these angry young men chose not to allow fear, rage, and hate to master and dehumanize them, nor provoke them into violence which would be the ruin of their lives; what will all of the other angry young men choose tomorrow?
I’d like to believe this incident is atypical and not being played out a thousand times over across America; but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Tyranny weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear as an instrument of subjugation. This we must resist, but unless we speak directly to those fears we cannot heal the divisions of our society which authority has so skillfully manipulated.
In the words of Sigmund Freud, “Civilization begins when we throw words instead of stones.” Sadly, we humans have often chosen stones when words would serve us better.
In all the madness of this election and of the deranged perversions and assaults upon our liberty, equality, truth, and justice of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump’s kleptocracy of state terror and tyranny, we must not forget that though he exploited the flaws of our society to orchestrate the Fall of America and of democracy throughout the world, he did not originate them.
Trump has revealed, tested, and hammered at our flaws, yet we remain unbroken and unconquered. This we should celebrate; in the main we are voting and not shooting, because our faith in one another and in the ideals on which our society is founded remain intact, though the institutions of our government may need radical and revolutionary change.
Nor is there anything new in the threat to democracy of vote suppression; today is the one hundred year anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre, the most terrible incident of racist vote suppression in the history of our nation since the Civil War. What may give us hope now that failed us then is the emerging consensus of racial equality and the mass coalition for racial justice won for us by the Black Lives Matter movement and the heroic citizens who have seized the streets of our cities in an unparalleled months long mass action.
Regardless of the election results, anyone who wishes to actually govern must do so at the head of these protests and not barricaded against the will of the people. This is the true meaning of this years seizure of power by our citizens, and it is a genie which cannot be returned to the prison of its lamp, for each of us is now a Living Autonomous Zone.
As I wrote in my post of November 5 2020. Trump’s Last Coup Attempt and Subversion of Democracy as His Ship of Fools Sinks in Pathetic Failure; As Trump’s Ship of Fools comes apart at the seams and sinks beneath the waves in pathetic failure, our Clown of Terror collapses in infantile tantrums and tries to take democracy down with him, a final gesture of madness and idiocy in his delusional quest to subvert our values and institutions of liberty and seize tyrannical power.
We must never forget how close we came to a repeat of the 1933 German Federal Election that set Hitler on the path to a tyranny of absolute power; this is clearly the most important electoral event in the history of humankind since then, and the two elections are terrifyingly parallel. Trump tried several times to use the Black Lives Matter protests to create fear and legitimize the federal occupation of America under the pretext of re-establishing law and order in an exact duplication of Hitler’s successful strategy using the Reichstag Fire, and failed.
We have escaped the jaws of the Fourth Reich which have held us fast for four years, since the Stolen Election of 2016, while Trump and his cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and plutocratic robber barons have violated everything about America which is noble and true, plundered the public wealth, dehumanized and divided us, sabotaged and subverted the institutions of our freedom, equality, truth, and justice, betrayed our allies and emboldened our foes, lost the American hegemony of global power and privilege and our position as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us never forget the bottomless depravities, treasons, and amoral predation and greed of Trump’s many enablers and conspirators in the Fall of America as we struggle in the years ahead to reclaim our nation and our souls. We must hold them to account, but we must also reimagine our society and the many systemic and structural flaws by which we came to this broken and lost state.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2022, The Greatest Show on Earth: Presenting the January 6 Committee; Tonight our puppets will dance upon the stage of history and our imaginations, while a chiaroscuro of light as truth and democracy versus darkness as fascist tyranny and falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, conspiracy theories and propaganda play for the kingdom of our souls and the fate of America and the world.
Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a prison planet of masters and slaves?
Now begins a great Reckoning, and we shall see.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2021, Treason, Tyranny, and Terror on Trial: As the Second Impeachment of Traitor Trump Begins, I Submit Charges Before the People’s Tribunal of Crimes Against Humanity for Which Trump and His Collaborators Should Now Be On Trial; Among the many crimes against humanity for which Traitor Trump and his collaborators should be on trial but are not yet include the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Mexican and other nonwhite migrants, the concentration camps at our border, the orphaning and torture of children, and the state tyranny and terror of fascist and racist violence as national policy perpetrated by the ICE and Border Patrol components of Homeland Security, forces of repression which are antidemocratic by their nature and which should be abolished as a top priority of the Restoration of America.
Just as villainous and reprehensible is the parallel program of racist police violence and the carceral state to re-enslave Black American citizens and enforce systemic forms of inequality and injustice through state terror, repression of dissent, the force of a militarized police and the counterinsurgency model of policing which has transformed our security services into an army of occupation with primarily political objectives, and the control of pervasive and endemic surveillance and propaganda, lies, illusions, and subversions of the truth.
Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his circus of fools, degenerates, and barbarians, his enablers and collaborators both within the government and his shadow forces rallying under the Confederate and Nazi flags to bring violence and insurrection to our nations capital and to the streets of our cities throughout America, are co-conspirators and instigators in the murders of every Black American killed by police shooting or other racist violence since its authorization by Trump in the wake of Charlottesville.
And every missing child kidnapped by the state and disappeared into what abominable slavery or human trafficking designed in the diseased imagination of Trump and his Epstein buddies we know not of, every migrant of the huddled masses yearning to be free who died in the quest to reach the safety of America because the water caches had been intentionally sabotaged by criminals in the uniform of our nation who were “just following orders” like their counterparts in the SS during the Holocaust, every prisoner who died in custody because they were denied water or medical care; the blood of these and countless other victims of Trump’s narcissistic self-aggrandizement and regime of fascist corruption, racism, and patriarchal sexual terror is on the hands of every Republican who voted for him and fails now in this trial to repudiate him publicly and renounce his works as among those of the devils which he serves.
For in his actions Trump has been not only a foreign agent and Putin’s puppet whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America, but also a slave of Moloch the Seducer, Demon of Lies, in that he is not merely a pathological liar but also an idiot madman who cannot distinguish truth from lies, and who has weaponized his delusions and psychopathy as instruments of our falsification and subjugation in his quest for tyrannical power.
The bizarre and lurid dark fairytales of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, like the charges of the Inquisition and the Nazis which othered witches and Jews on which QAnon is constructed, serves as deflection from Trump’s loathsome perversions and sexual terrorism. What terrors did he conceal behind the beauty pageant, modeling, and human trafficking syndicate he once controlled?
His Stop the Steal campaign is a similar deflection which shields him from inquiry into the Stolen Election of 2016 and the fact that his Presidency was entirely illegitimate and due to Russian interference; it was also the rhetorical and organizational basis of his final attempted coup on January 6, for which he is now being impeached for the second time.
We must cast out the monsters from among us, the racists and white supremacist terrorists, the Gideonite fundamentalists and patriarchs of Christian Identity theocratic fascism and sexual terror, and the amoral forces of repression of those who would enslave us and who enforce hegemonies of elite power and privilege and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness armed with guns and badges and the authority of a government which has been infiltrated by the Fourth Reich, an implacable and relentless enemy which has come just short of seizing us in its jaws.
We must give fascism no second chances.
As I wrote in my post of January 11 2021, Allegories and Symbols of the Fall of America: the January 6 Insurrection as Theatre of Cruelty; Here is an expanded version of my post of January 6 on the Surrealist film Gummo as a satire of the Deplorables who committed treason and armed insurrection against our nation at the command of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump; on Insurrection Day, I offer for your consideration the film Gummo, a sensitive and elegant documentary of the Deplorables from whom the Fourth Reich cadre who staged the assault on Congress were recruited, and an allegory of America.
Bacon? Stapled to the wall, a strip of bacon captures ones attention as a symbol of degeneration and barbarian atavisms of instinct. Werner Herzog signposted it for our attention, and it persists as a symbol of degeneration to an animal state, like a trophy of wealth which is also offal above a bathtub filled with filth as our young protagonist eats spaghetti, his mouth smeared with red like a cannibal; an unforgettable image of the fallen American Dream.
It is the little things which disturb, provoke, and incite us to challenge normality, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, the authorized identities of hegemonic elites and divisions of otherness, and to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden with glorious sins of beatification.
Here as always, all true art defiles and exalts.
We dine in filth on the carrion of others lives and by their labor. This is a Surrealist film intended as an allegory of America and a thematic interrogation of our flaws and dark legacies of injustice, and in large part restates Nietzsche’s critique of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and the idea of the innate depravity of man, an extension of the doctrine of original sin, on which all our law is based, as Nikos Kazantzakis argues in his thesis Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.
So also does the film restate William S. Burroughs’ analysis of capitalism and imperialism as the Algebra of Need, in which drug addiction becomes a metaphor of our addiction to wealth, power, and privilege, an engine of self-destruction, commodification, and dehumanization which feeds on and worsens our most atavistic instincts. Here the flaws of our humanity, fear and rage, vanity and jealousy, the need to dominate and control, become the instruments of our subjugation to hegemonic elites through divisions of exclusionary otherness and to tyrants of force and control and the imperial and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
The film itself is brutally shocking, grotesque, and borders on the obscene; which is why I adore it so. I must warn you that while I like it as an allegory of America’s flaws, and to poke fun at Trump’ s followers, this is brutal and depressing; anyone with suicidal ideation should avoid it. This debut of a heralded wonder of the new age as director was not understood as a critique of state power as a force of dehumanization and regression to an animal state, like that of the Deplorables, and unjustly derailed a promising career; a historical injustice I would like to redeem, because Gummo is a film we need now.
We must see the enemies of Liberty as they truly are, if we are to heal our nation from the primary trauma of fracture they enacted in the January 6 Insurrection.
Both the Insurrection and the film Gummo, like the Trump presidency as a whole, must be interpreted as performances of the Theatre of Cruelty as articulated by Antonin Artaud in his manifesto The Theatre And Its Double. Trump is a figure of the mad emperor from his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist; his performances as a clown of terror, disruption, and sadism were also brilliantly prophesized by Robert Coover in The Public Burning, A Political Fable, written as a satire of Nixon.
Let us see beyond the lies and illusions with which Trump and his Deplorables conceal their subversions of democracy, sabotage of our institutions, and violations of our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s never anything but “just an old humbug.”
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2021, Profiles in Treason and Terror; The dishonorable and the mad, the delusional and the sadistic epicures of brutality and perversions, the feral predators hooting and champing before the gallows and guillotines they have brought to murder members of congress with and their partners in uniform unleashing racist terror and gun violence in the streets, and the amoral and predatory grifters and puppetmasters of fascism who have subjugated and enslaved them and stolen their honor and their souls; these are among the idolators of Traitor Trump who conspired, enabled, and collaborated in his plot to subvert democracy and overthrow America in the January 6 Insurrection which attempted to seize Congress and execute its members, which like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch on which it was modeled was intended to decapitate the government of the people in a single stroke.
As details emerge of the internal operations and massive scale of the plot against America, in terms of its central coordination and logistics under direct operational command of Trump and his cabal of conspirators, we are offered not only the spectacle of his aberrance and monstrosity as a mad idiot Clown of Terror drooling and gloating in bestial depravity at the destruction of our values and institutions, the violation of our ideals and the endless suffering he has caused, but of those of his freakish and degenerate followers as well.
The role of deniable forces of the Fourth Reich such as the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, and other organizations of white supremacist terror, and of their partners and infiltration agents within our police, military, and security services, in the January 6 Insurrection is by now well documented and will become more so as the greatest manhunt in our history exposes and entraps more of its perpetrators.
The images we have been witnessing of their assault on liberty during the Second Impeachment trial will be remembered in the history of the world as the true legacy of an era of fascist tyranny under the figurehead of Trump which nearly ended America as a guarantor of global democracy and universal human rights, and had we fallen as the primary domino and a beacon of hope to the world both democracy and human rights would be lost to humankind for unknown ages; the last time civilization fell it took a thousand years for the idea that government derives its authority from its citizens and not by divine right, the idea that no one of us is better than any other by right of birth, and that freedom, equality, truth, and justice are the foundational values of our society and truths of human being and meaning, to reawaken.
And it took centuries of wars and revolutions to do so; how if this time civilization falls not to hordes of barbarians seeking nothing but pillage and destruction, but to regimes of totalitarian force and control?
This is the great contradiction of the forces of repression and subjugation to authority which overran our capitol on January 6; they have been betrayed by their masters in believing they were acting to restore our traditional values and civilization, when in fact they had been weaponized in service to its destruction. Here is a clear and present danger, but also an opportunity; shared motives can be redirected to heal divisions, for they too want an American Restoration. As yet we just disagree on our definition of terms.
When fear is overwhelming and generalized, it can be shaped through submission to authority by lies, illusions, alternate realities, especially when pervasive and endemic surveillance, big data, and propaganda are available as instruments of state control. Authority achieves submission through falsification and the theft of the soul, but this is also the weakness of control which cannot stand against truth, just as the weakness of force is that it is powerless against resistance, disobedience, and refusal to submit.
The election of Biden and Harris, the failure of Trump’s sixth coup attempt on January 6, and the public exposure and shaming of his co-conspirators, collaborators, and enablers before the stage of the world of the Second Impeachment trial; in these events we have witnessed a turning of the tide from fascism to a restoration of democracy, frangible and temporary though it may be.
Once the Reckoning has been achieved, the Restoration must heal our divisions; and this means we must embrace and transform the fear that lives at the heart of hate, and drives the rage, violence, and need to conquer and dominate others which shadows our historical inequalities and injustices.
Fear, Power, Force; such is the Ring of Power which enslaves us, and which we must abandon if we are to become whole.
Herein I offer a previous version of the role of Trump as Angelo in the savage morality play Measure For Measure, a work luminous with Kafka-esque Absurdism, Freudian horror, and a brilliant interrogation of the dynamics of patriarchy and power asymmetry in gender relations in the brilliant review of the Simon Godwin production, critiqued with marvelous insight by Geoffrey O’Brien in the New York Review of Books; entitled “Shakespeare’s Pornography of Power by Geoffrey O’Brien.
“This is the disgusting, stinking world of medieval Vienna. The darkness of this world is absolutely necessary to the meaning of the play…When this play is prettily staged, it is meaningless—it demands an absolutely convincing roughness and dirt.” Thus Peter Brook, who directed a legendary production in 1950, on his vision of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Simon Godwin’s pathway into the play at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn is by way of a corridor through Mistress Overdone’s brothel, along a narrow basement path lined with discreetly closed cubicles and arrays of lubes, dildos, anal plugs, shackles and handcuffs, multicolored condoms, an inflatable sex doll. It is a space dimly lit but by no means medieval, an ingratiatingly tacky emporium more likely to amuse than repel the New York theatergoers passing through.
Given the perennial relevance of the various injustices it circles around—the sexual exploitation and pious hypocrisy and persecution of whistleblowers—Measure for Measure invites updating. The virginal Isabella, realizing that no one will believe her story of victimization against that of the all-powerful Angelo—who has been named regent of Vienna by its absent duke—cries out: “To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, / Who would believe me?”—language so direct it could be lifted from the latest celebrity harassment trial, especially when spoken with the angry clarity that Cara Ricketts gives the line.
Angelo—the moral disciplinarian with a spotless reputation who, once given power, swiftly succumbs to his most predatory impulses—can be envisioned almost too neatly as the sort of high-minded conservative who from time to time finds himself indicted for sexual malfeasance. There is no problem with Thomas Jay Ryan’s performance: Ryan’s delineation of Angelo’s ethical collapse and his half-hearted efforts to justify himself to himself have the barely controlled panic of a public figure realizing how little he knows himself. The regent lies, and the most unhampered truth-telling comes from sex workers and criminals who make no pretense to any credo beyond their own self-interest, as in the unarguable defense of the tapster Pompey, arrested for procuring: “Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live.”
But it’s in the nature of Measure for Measure that whatever contemporary analogies are invoked cannot quite make sense of what happens. In its early stages the play is centered on the three characters whose destinies collide so violently: Angelo, Isabella, and her brother Claudio, who has been condemned for fornication. The scenes in which they confront each other have the amplitude of the tragedies that were to follow: Isabella pleading for Claudio’s life, Angelo demanding her virginity as the price of her brother’s pardon, Claudio overwhelmed by the terror of death, Isabella (in a moment that challenges any audience’s sympathy) denouncing her brother for his weakness of character when she realizes he is willing to see her give in to Angelo’s demands.
The grandeur of these scenes becomes most fully alive through Cara Ricketts’s Isabella, intensely focused, supremely pointed in her argumentation, but with a hint of an absolute commitment to the ideal that helps account for her harsh dismissal of her condemned brother’s terror of dying; an altogether serious person, too serious for the world she finds herself inhabiting, perhaps too serious for the madcap Duke when he proposed to her at the very end of the play. Her reaction to Angelo’s harassment goes beyond physical repulsion into profound moral contempt—expressing itself in angry laughter—at the triviality of his character. Her ultimate forgiveness of Angelo—at a moment when she still believes her brother to have been executed—is dramatically the most difficult of all, couched as it is in a nice legal argument, but Ricketts brought a somber conviction to it.
An audience that wants to take the play as readily grasped satire cannot evade the puzzlements and reversals of judgment that come in its later scenes—reversals of judgment that do not end even when the play is done. Measure for Measure is a perpetual questioning machine, exquisitely functional, set to a relentless tempo, yet a machine that bristles and crackles in its joints with contradiction and discomfort. Harold Bloom has described it as “a comedy that destroys comedy.” It is a comedy that threatens to destroy or at least wear down its own characters by subjecting them to the only mechanism—a mechanism demanding elaborate subterfuges and unlikely changes of heart—by which they can avoid a tragic fate. By the end we might imagine them as the exhausted, socially viable remnants of those conflicted, passionate beings we saw tearing apart everything including themselves scene after scene, during the first three acts. They are saved, and some of them have saved others, but for what fate we can only wonder.
In Godwin’s production, to emerge from the brothel’s passageway into the main theater is to find the Polonsky transformed into what looks like an oversize banqueting hall, the playing area laid out as an immense table decked with candles and balloons and trays of drinks, a few audience members seated around the edge. Drunken revelers stagger noisily across the tabletop stage, leaving behind a solitary figure sprawled on its surface, shooting up (presumably) heroin and then wrapping himself up in a tangle of sheets. A woman in business attire approaches him, studying him like a corporate assistant confronted by a messy but familiar management problem. He, it quickly emerges, is Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, and she is Escalus, the “ancient Lord” who serves him, transmuted into Escala, a tightly controlled executive who in January LaVoy’s reading sometimes evokes a less murderous version of Tilda Swinton’s scheming pharmaceuticals exec in Michael Clayton.
As the Duke (Jonathan Cake) rouses himself from his nod he delivers the play’s opening speech, in a broken rhythm suggesting that the passage’s roundabout prolixity reflects his faltering attempt to shake himself out of his opiate daze. It is one way to get the play going: pitched forward headlong, off-balance from the start, the unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions piling up before we even know where we are. What manner of being is the Duke really? Why is he leaving Vienna in such haste and putting in his place a temporary regent, the “precise” Angelo, known for his rigorous strictness? Why does he choose to linger, disguised as a friar, to observe what happens in his absence? Having learned that his moralistic stand-in is attempting to blackmail Isabella—a young woman just about to enter a convent—into sex in order to save her brother Claudio (Leland Fowler) from a death sentence, why does he intervene in such needlessly tortuous fashion, subjecting innocents to agonies of misinformation? When in one of the play’s most eloquent speeches he more or less persuades Claudio that life is not especially worth living—“Be absolute for death”—does he speak his own sincerest thoughts or is this merely part of the role he is playing as prison confessor?
To cast the Duke as a junkie is one way of providing him with a motive. His addiction perhaps discourages him from exercising moral authority; perhaps he sees it as a weakness rendering him unfit to enforce Vienna’s laws with the necessary severity; perhaps he even harbors the thought that those laws are unnecessarily severe; perhaps he simply needs to take some time out. In any event his drug habit, as far as I could observe, comes up only once more (a quick glance at the track marks on his arm, lest he forget), and from the moment he dons his disguise he grows steadily more assured, though it is an assurance boosted by waves of antic humor to which Cake at times gives an almost Monty Pythonish edge. A certain hilarity gives him courage to dream up and carry out his preposterous scheme, which more and more comes to resemble a baroque sting operation.
We can hardly expect to find out who the Duke really is in the course of the evening, since Shakespeare’s text leaves that question so hauntingly open. Even if he assures a confederate early on that he has “a purpose / More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends / Of burning youth,” he never articulates what that purpose is. He is more than central to the play—as the narrative advances he becomes its directing force, moving plot elements around like game pieces—while remaining to the end a fascinating cipher. He is memorably termed “the Duke of dark corners”—a secret devotee of hidden vices—by the witty reprobate Lucio, but Lucio is by no means averse to making things up. If nothing else the Duke can be said to behave very much like a playwright working with improvisatory energy on his play’s last act, an act that will feature a succession of agonizingly drawn-out revelations, a string of pardons, and an unlooked-for proposal of marriage.
The lust of the hypocritical Angelo is not triggered by the attractive power of beauty but perversely by the notion of violating purity: the pornography of power, relished by a man for whom execution and torture are primary tools of policy. There is a terror at the heart of everything. The Duke’s exhortation to Claudio to resign himself to death cannot match in dramatic effect Claudio’s subsequent speech—roughly the play’s midpoint—on the horror of dying: “The weariest and most loathed worldly life / That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment / Can lay on nature, is a paradise / To what we fear of death.”
Sometimes the play feels like a series of decentered snapshots of city dwellers shuffling between sex and death. It is the only Shakespeare play concerned with how a city is run, and what that is like for the people who live there. (Romeo and Juliet is also a city play of sorts, but it centers on the operation of clans, not the municipal government that so ineffectively intervenes in their never-ending feud; and that play’s poetry—so unlike the gnarled, combative, often tensely legalistic exchanges of Measure for Measure—constantly evokes spaces beyond the immediate setting.) In Measure for Measure everything is local, in the most oppressive way. We look at things from the top down and from the bottom up, and the judgment is ambivalent, or rather multivalent. Godwin’s staging conveys very well the sense of airless interconnecting interiors, all linked as part of the same system: claustrophobic offices, claustrophobic cells of both prisons and convents, but mostly of prisons. It could almost be called a prison play, a point underlined here by the cell walls constantly rolling in and out of the foreground.
The motives of the three main characters are seen from many angles, by each other and by bystanders and street-corner commentators of all sorts, from the generously inclined Provost of the prison, realized with great feeling by Oberon K.A. Adjepong, to the unavoidable Lucio, amusingly played by Haynes Thigpen as a self-satisfied comedian a little too hip for the room, always there to speak up for ordinary human vice (“a little more lenity to lechery would do no harm”) although contemptuous of the whores he sleeps with, constantly hovering at the edge of what goes on so he can get his digs in and almost managing to avoid getting called on it. The comedy provides not so much relief as an obverse view, consistently deflating and needling, and it is rarely clear where exactly the boundaries are, or who can truly be called central in this world fallen askew.
Consider the late emergence of Barnardine, a murderer who for nine years has been awaiting execution. The Duke determines to substitute his head for that of Claudio, demanded by Angelo in proof that he has been put to death, but when Barnardine—already described as “a man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come”—emerges from his cell, he simply refuses to die—“I have been drinking hard all night, and I will have more time to prepare me… I swear I will not die today for any man’s persuasion”—and staggers back to his cell. It was a disappointment to see this episode treated as a comic interlude, with too much hokum and unneeded verbal additions. (Zachary Fine did much in his other role as the simple-minded constable Elbow.)
It’s the most surprising scene in Measure for Measure and ought to stop the proceedings in their tracks, with its after beat the Duke’s astonishing pardon of the murderer in the last act. I can still recall being taken to see John Houseman’s production of the play at age eight—a memorable outing to the Shakespeare theater in Stratford, Connecticut in 1956—and however dimly I apprehended its stew of bawdry and sexual extortion, there was no mistaking the uproarious force of Barnardine’s unconditional refusal. The actor was Pernell Roberts, of later Bonanza fame, and he must have delivered Barnardine’s few lines with great vigor, since the scene has lingered in memory ever since. In a play of punitive laws, complex masquerades, and tortuous mutually annihilating arguments, it briefly upholds the intoxicating possibility of simply walking away.”
As I wrote in my post of June 15 2022, Act Three of the Greatest Show on Earth: Where Do We Go From Here?; Where do we go from here?
Democracy in America survived its most terrible moment of peril from internal threat in the January 6 Insurrection, yet here we are, witness to the public exposure of the plot and its treasonous conspirators on television as Congress brings a Reckoning to the Fourth Reich.
Like the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 on which it was modeled, it failed; but in doing so also achieved all of its strategic goals, moving our great enemy nearer to victory by staging a Lost Cause which established the fascist counternarrative as iconography that Trump remains our legitimate President. Next time, and there will always be a next time, we may not be so lucky.
Not only do the forces of fascism remain an active threat, through open allegiance to the Lost Cause which echoes horrifically with that of the Confederacy and the KKK whose adherents are among the networks of deniable assets now among us as they were at the Capitol on that fateful day, but the vast resources of wealth and power at their command after seventy years of infiltration of global elites and governments remain undiminished.
But none of this is relevant to the true threat which fascism poses to us all today; for America has been divided against itself, and as we are warned by Abraham Lincoln in 1858 in his House Divided speech in reference to the synoptic Gospels of Luke 11:17, Mark 3:25, and Matthew 12:25; “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.
We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed –
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
As we are taught with the lyrics of the song Where Do We Go From Here?, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7 of season 6, Once More With Feeling, possibly the greatest musical episode of any telenovela yet created;
“Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
The battle’s done,
And we kinda won.
So we sound our victory cheer.
Where do we go from here.
Why is the path unclear,
When we know home is near.
Understand we’ll go hand in hand,
But we’ll walk alone in fear. (Tell me)
Tell me where do we go from here.
When does the end appear,
When do the trumpets cheer.
The curtains close, on a kiss god knows,
We can tell the end is near…
Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
Where do we go
from here?”
Here is an elegy for the Fall of America, a hymn to a dying hope and the lost grandeur of a fallen nation. When in a distant future the artifacts of our civilization begin to puzzle whatever beings arise from our carrion, and they ask who were the Americans, I hope such music as this lamentation remains to guide their questions.
Yet hope remains when all is lost, and whether it becomes a gift or a curse is in our hands. These lyrics speak of the modern pathology of disconnectedness, of the division and fracture of our Solidarity, of subjugation through learned helplessness and the dominion of fear. But this is not the end of the story, nor of ours.
Once More With Feeling ends not with abjection, but with The Kiss, between the Slayer and Spike, one of the monsters she hunts. A very particular kind of monster, who is also the hero of the story in its entire seven year arc; one who is made monstrous by his condition of being and forces beyond his control, against which he struggles for liberation and to recreate and define himself as he chooses, a monster who reclaims his humanity and his soul. This is why we continue to watch the show twenty years after its debut; we are all Spike, locked in titanic struggle for the ownership of ourselves with authorized identities and systemic evils, a revolution of truths written in our flesh against imposed conditions of struggle and orders of human being, meaning, and value.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an allegory of Sartrean freedom in a world without inherent value or meaning, of the joy of total freedom versus the terror of our nothingness, and above all a song of the redemptive power of love to return to us our true selves.
This is how we defeat fascist tyranny in the long game, after we bring a Reckoning for its crimes against humanity and its subversion of democracy; let us answer hate with love, division with solidarity, fear with hope, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 6 episode 7- Once More, with Feeling – Where Do We Go From Here?
Donald Trump charged with illegal retention of classified documents:
Ex-president is being prosecuted for violating Espionage Act and obstruction over documents held at Mar-a-Lago and has been summoned to court next week
Trump’s GOP critics take aim after indictment is unsealed.
Trump was indicted on 37 counts and has denied wrongdoing. Special counsel Jack Smith urged the public to read the indictment to “understand … the gravity of the crimes charged.”
Five years ago today we launched the Seattle Autonomous Zone, among the greatest experiments in liberty the world has seen since the glorious utopias of our forbearers in history; the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party and American labor movements founded in the communes of the Seattle Red Coast over a century ago, the Paris Commune, the First International of Bakunin, Proudhon, and Marx, and the French and American Revolutions which radically transformed the possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals. We seized and held from those who would enslave us and their police forces of tyranny and state terror six blocks of Capitol Hill.
This epochal moment of liberation and triumph over systems of control and dehumanization is for myself shadowed today by the joy of this weekend’s Anniversary of the Indictment of Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief, Traitor Trump, for theft of state secrets exactly like Snowden and many others, not to expose its evils but for profit, secrets he intended to use as blackmail leverage against our nation and as self-aggrandizement props in his pathetic attempt to retain power as a king in exile, a Defining Moment of Reckoning which like the Torch of Liberty gutters and dies only to be reborn in glory, and this weekend’s public celebrations of the death of Pat Robertson in 2023, fascist apologist who with Jerry Falwell captured the Republican Party in 1980 and began the subversion of democracy by theocratic fascist tyranny, conspired with Kissinger, the propagandist Rush Limbaugh, and Reagan, and opened the door to the crimes against humanity of the Reagan era, the advent of the American Fourth Reich, and the Mayan Genocide perpetrated by his protégé Rios Montt in Guatemala as the most horrific and evil of the consequences of the capture of the state by Gideonite fundamentalist theocracy.
In this moment where the anniversary of the beginning of CHAZ and the global Autonomous Zones network we began in its wake as a fulcrum of change, glorious and wonderful and strange, possibly the birth of a United Humankind in which Nothing Is Forbidden and we abandon the use of social force, limned in chiaroscuro with the brutal repression of dissent and theft of our rights as citizens and as human beings of the Trump regime and its enforcers of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror send an army to occupy Los Angeles, I am reminded that in the dialectics of revolutionary struggle freedom from and freedom to are inherently linked. Freedom from tyranny and state terror as we fight for our liberty in the streets is interdependent with freedom to reimagine and transform ourselves and our society as we explore it in counterculture movements like the Autonomous Zones.
On this day in 2020 I received a message warning that the Hell’s Angels were on the way to Seattle en masse, and presuming they would join the police in restoring order and elite wealth, power, and privilege, as if this were a threat and force of reaction rather than one of America’s most cherished and iconic self-organized societies beyond the boundaries of law and order we might count on to help defend our liberty against police terror and tyranny. I wrote back; “Let us welcome our fellow outlaws as the Merry Pranksters did, with free love and the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.” For law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just Authority.
Today my joy is made ambiguous by the anniversary of the death of George Winston, greatest pianist since Rachmaninoff and most innovative musician of the late twentieth century after Kitaro, whose songs speak to me of great sadness, loss, and loneliness, the terror of our nothingness and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
But here I wish to honor and balance the darkness with the beauty and transcendent joy of the birth of the Autonomous Zones in Seattle.
These were days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.
Within a fleeting moment of joy Autonomous Zones sprang up in Washington DC encircling the White House, Portland, Minneapolis, Atlanta, New York, Austin, and throughout the fifty cities across America where the Black Lives Matter protests had taken control from the government through mass action, and then throughout the world as the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Franz Fanon named the Wretched of the Earth arose in solidarity and for a glorious moment spoke to Authority with one voice, a voice that said; We refuse to submit, and because no one has power over us we are free.
As I had printed at the time on the paper currency I distributed bearing the legend “Good for Nothing” on one side and “Good for Everything” on the reverse, with the following lines:
On the one side; “Good for Nothing; Tyranny.
Let us question, expose, mock, and challenge authority; let us incite, provoke, and disturb; let us run amok and be ungovernable.”
On the other side; “Good for Everything; Liberty.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.”
So I wrote at the dawn of our Brave New World, which sought to liberate humankind from our addiction to power and our subjugation to authority and carceral states. Here I do not refer to the great novel by Aldous Huxley, dark mirror of this source, but to Miranda’s line in The Tempest; “O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!”
For it was a thing of beauty, for a time, until it was consumed by its reflected image, fear and force as is common to both criminals and carceral states as embodied violence, the great lie that in the absence of law and restraining force the most brutal and opportunistic becomes king. In Seattle the Autonomous Zone collapsed because it refused to seize power and misread the use of social force in revolutionary struggle as morally equivalent to the use of force in repression of dissent by those who would enslave us.
It’s a mistake Lenin could’ve warned us about, had anyone been listening, and it’s a mistake we won’t be making again. None of the other Autonomous Zones have ever been retaken by the state; the abolition of the use of social force and of formal authority as states remains our common goal, but this does not mean we surrender our universal human rights nor our solidarity and duty of care for others.
The first thing a successful revolution needs, once it has seized power and the tyrants have been cast down from their thrones, is a Committee of Public Safety like that of France in 1793 to defend the people and meet their material needs for food, medical care, and such. Second comes institutions and systems for preventing the centralization of authority as tyranny, for the leveling of unequal power as elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, for ongoing struggle against social hierarchies and divisions and against fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. We can only abandon the social use of force to the degree we are free from its threat ourselves; this is an imposed condition of revolutionary struggle and not a moral dilemma.
Why did the Seattle Autonomous Zone, the first of many throughout the world, fall when others have not?
First because it was a seizure of territory and the police station and government buildings as symbols, which means ground that must be defended, rather than mobile and temporary zones which can be abandoned and reestablished anywhere at any time, by networks of people who are Living Autonomous Zones. As soon as you need a barricade, a checkpoint, a border of any kind, you are fighting the wrong kind of war.
And we had enemies who were immensely powerful and utterly ruthless, willing to commit any depravity to subjugate and re-enslave us through learned helplessness and terror.
Deniable assets of the Fourth Reich under the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf were sent against us both as infiltration agents, spies and provocateurs, and as elite counterinsurgency forces in raids and acts of random wickedness to sow confusion, mistrust, and terror, and to provoke the police, seize the narrative, and manufacture a casus belli for Occupation.
Looking back from the distance of five years, in which I and others have traveled the world establishing networks of Autonomous Zones, and being case zero of a global alliance of Autonomous Zones as a United Humankind which abandons the use of social force and a stateless successor to the United Nations which offers a way of living together without nations or borders, without war or laws, without police or prisons, without unequal power as patriarchy or racism, without masters or slaves; as I contemplate all of this unfolding of world-historical forces and dialectical processes it occurs to me that the history of the Seattle Autonomous Zone and of the global Autonomous Zones merits being written, especially by those who lived it.
To such ends I will be sharing my journals of the time, and questioning its meaning, and I ask anyone who was there to do the same, to write of your lived experiences and share them with us all here in this public forum as a witness of history.
Memory, history, identity; are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
At the time of their origins on this day five years ago I was thinking of our Autonomous Zones as a globalized quest of the Merry Pranksters and others who formed the tribal elders of my childhood, especially as written in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s novelization of the great trek on the bus Furthur in 1964 to enlighten humankind with Dionysian rituals of music and ecstasy through free love and LSD.
A dialectics of parallel and interdependent forces and themes is revealed in Ken Kesey’s documentary film of the iconic journey of 1964 which launched the psychedelic movement and catalyzed the whole counterculture that was to come, Magic Trip, and of the Autonomous Zones as well; the political and social mission to bring the Chaos, disrupt and destabilize order, perform change and mock authority for the purpose of delegitimation as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth, what Foucault called parrhesia in the lectures I attended in 1983 at the University of Berkeley, and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value through poetic vision and ecstatic trance, an extension of Surrealism which appropriated its methods and iconography in the quest for transcendence through dreams and exaltation through transgression.
Here as Living Autonomous Zones and bearers of visions of liberty as seeds of change we tilt at the windmills which might be giants to break the mould of man and become free and self created beings.
Always go through the Forbidden Door; transgress boundaries, dare unknowns, defy limits, discover, create, embrace, perform and bear witness to your truth.
Magic Trip film: Ken Kesey’s documentary of the trip
In the streets of Los Angeles and throughout Vichy America, the People rise in mass action and solidarity to do battle with Homeland Security’s army of occupation and white supremacist terror, ICE.
Is this not the beauty of human beings, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows? This is the primary act of becoming human which defines us, this refusal to submit to authority, or to betray our duty of care for others.
Here also is our victory, for who cannot be ruled or controlled, who disobeys and disbelieves the lies of those who would enslave us, becomes Unconquered and free, and this is a power that cannot be taken from us.
This is now the fifth time Trump has tried to terrorize America into submission through use of secret armies of federal occupation; and each of these previous campaigns of repression of dissent, which loosed looting, arson, and random violence under the direction of Homeland Security on our cities to delegitimize the Black Lives Mater protests and seize control of the narrative in service to the centralization of power and authority to the carceral state, each and every such action has failed.
The sole result of all of this state terror and repression of dissent was the defeat of the Homeland Security army in the Battle of Portland and the articles of surrender published by the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf and their joint declaration of New York, Seattle, and Portland as Autonomous Zones beyond control of the federal state. To my knowledge, we Antifa are the only force to defeat the federal government of the United States in open battle on ground within her borders since Little Bighorn.
We have been victorious over forces like that of ICE which the Trump regime sends against us now; it can be done, friends, and we all of us can do it again, here and now.
When the enemies of liberty come for us, as they always have and will, let them find not an America divided by propaganda of otherness and defeated by learned helplessness, abjection, and despair, but a United Humankind of Living Autonomous Zones and the Unconquered, citizens who refuse to become subjects, and a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights.
And if we all stand together and the circle is unbroken, we will be victorious.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2025, Resist ICE By Amy Means Necessary; If They Come For One Of Us, Let Them Be Met With All Of Us; If you see ICE agents, send up a general warning. Photograph and publish their identities. Track them to their lair, picket their homes, flash mob them, set false trails and load the sites they raid with protestors.
Never let police take anyone alone; they are both infiltrated by white supremacist terrorists and coordinating actions with them as deniable assets like the Oathkeepers, and states are now hiring bounty hunters with no security clearances or training and paying one thousand dollars per human deported, and that means anyone nonwhite, citizen or not, a policy which has hit the Native American Tribes as racist state terror.
One armed thug with or without a badge cannot abduct a target when three of us intervene; one hundred enforcers of racist state terror cannot overcome a thousand who Resist.
Men without badges, wearing masks, without warrants and who offer no rights of trial as we our guaranteed by our founding documents, who abduct people at random and send them to secret foreign prisons without probable cause or evidence of any kind, without Miranda rights or hearing the evidence against them in a court of law; such teams as ICE now employs are not police of any kind but extrajudicial crime syndicates of racist terror. Resist to the death abduction of yourself or others.
In the words of the character Mick Rory in Legends of Tomorrow, episode Turncoat; “You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re outcasts, misfits, and proud of it. If the enemy attacks in formation, we pop em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, we raid their camp in the night. And if they’re going to hang you, you fight dirty. And we never surrender.”
How shall we resist? By any means necessary, as Sartre wrote in his play of 1948 Dirty Hands, and was made famous by Malcolm X. All Resistance is War to the Knife, for who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
I am prepared at all times to fight to the death, but this does not mean taking unnecessary risks. One must study the possibilities like a problem in chess, have plans for everything you can imagine, and spring the trap only when it is properly set.
The first lesson of the Art of War is diversion and surprise; and the last lesson is the same as the first. On the modern battlefield any threat that can be seen or identified can be destroyed; so don’t tip your hand.
In the context of Resistance against ICE kidnapping teams, your enemy has military weapons, armor, and communications, and possibly some training; if Trump calls in the National Guard to support them as he has threatened today, they will unquestionably be trained to work as a team in ways far superior to that of any pickup team you may be able to put together, even if your team has better skills individually. This means you must avoid direct confrontation; you must be clever, unpredictable, strike anonymously from the shadows when the enemy is off guard and at their weakest in ways which cannot be countered, and never use the same trick twice.
Of course, you want to train as a team as much as possible, and as broadly as possible which among other things means cross training in each other’s disciplines.
This brings us to one of the crucial and decisive factors in any conflict; the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce such as Resistance, so the reaction must be part of its design if one is to use force to shape the future.
Another such principle is that in the Calculus of Fear, too little invites Chaos and social disorder, and too much galvanizes Resistance. I’d have thought the world would have learned this at Nanking, but its something tyrants never truly learn. People who have nothing left to lose are uncontrollable and dangerous, like ourselves.
Herein a word of caution; do not meet force with force, fear with fear, terror with terror. Leave evil to the evildoers. This I advise not as a moral principle, but as a strategic one when the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle include a nominally democratic state which may be brought into alignment with its constitutional ideals of the equality of all human beings under the law and of the co-ownership of the state by its citizens, through mass action, solidarity, and performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen: Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
The great secret of authority as power, force, and control is that it is hollow and brittle, and becomes meaningless without legitimacy.
The Fourth Reich and its figurehead Traitor Trump and the Party of Treason are counting on losing some of their enforcers to mob violence as a pretext for the occupation of America by federal troops under martial law, a trick they tried four times during the Black Lives Matter protests using police provocateurs and campaigns of arson, looting, and random violence to delegitimize the protests against racist police violence and seize the narrative. In this the enemy failed; during months of mass protests in over fifty cities throughout our nation, only one act of violence by anyone other than police and their co-conspirators happened, and that was when our Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl returned fire when fired upon when confronting a motorcade of 600 armed fascists on August 29 2020 in Portland Oregon, and was assassinated by a police death squad days later.
The goal of authority in centralizing power is to win legitimacy, and our goal as revolutionaries is to delegitimize authority and seize the moral high ground. We now find ourselves in a similar situation to that of Gandhi versus the British Empire, and his very elegant solution which tipped the balance was the Salt Tax Protest, during which hundreds of nonresisting Indians were systematically beaten with clubs by police on camera and before the stage of history, reported to the world with the words; “The British Empire has lost any claim to the moral high ground in India.”
Always the question of the social use of force remains central to any action versus or interrogation of evil in its origins as fear, power, and force in recursive processes of the Wagnerian Ring of Power, and any seizures of power in liberation struggle against systems of oppression and unequal power and the state as embodied violence, especially under imposed conditions of struggle which include brutal repression of dissent and thought control by enforcers of the carceral state and its elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
This goal of delegitimation of authority does not override our duty of care for others; if a man kneels on another’s neck he is a murderer and we are obligated to stop him by any means necessary, and if a man points a gun at another let a hundred guns reply.
Everything devolves to fear, power, and force, a maelstrom which only love can free us from, and we who hunt monsters must be very careful not to become so ourselves. As Nietzsche warned; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
As I wrote in my post of September 3 2024, Anniversary of the Assassination of Antifascist Comrade Michael Reinoehl: Violence, Responsibility, the Social Use of Force, and Our Duty of Care For Others; On this terrible day we mourn the extrajudicial and political assassination by police, ultimately under the command of the Fourth Reich Triumvirate of the President of the United States Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad, four years ago of a committed fellow antifascist and brother in the great struggle against white supremacist terror and the carceral state of the Fourth Reich, Michael Reinoehl, who has in a live broadcast interview publicly claimed responsibility for killing in self defense a member of a violent racist terror organization on August 29 2020 in Portland.
To whom does responsibility in such a tragedy belong? First responders are immune from prosecution for trying to save lives because of the doctrine of our duty of care for others; does this not also apply as a general humanitarian principle to intervention to prevent our own death and that of others? Who perpetrates the threat or use of deadly force, displays or fires guns at others to intimidate or kill them, is responsible for the harm their actions cause; so also with organizations of terror which arm, train, fund, and provide communications and logistics support for them, regardless of whether they are a deniable asset of state terror such as the Patriot Prayer group which fielded the perpetrator, police who hide behind the immunity and authority of their badges to enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and authorize others in the commission of acts of terror, or those who provide ideology and authorization, logistics and communication, and other organizational infrastructure for them as a conspiracy of white supremacist terror, even if it originates from the White House.
I now wish to clarify publicly and irrevocably that I neither endorse violence nor the avoidance of responsibility for our actions; anyone who reads my writing will realize that I believe violence is a result of unequal power and of fear, and this informs and motivates everything else. We have a right to defend ourselves and others from harm, but not to compel virtue by force. My abhorrence of the social use of force is the basis for my opposition to law and order, prisons, police, surveillance, tyranny, state force and control, normality and other people’s ideas of virtue or idealizations of beauty, state authorization of identities, and violations of our rights of conscience and of bodily autonomy. I envision a society free of the use of social force and without violence.
As to public confrontations as theatre; I understand the value of public image and presence and of protest in raising awareness of a cause, and especially in the four primary duties of a citizen in the face of unjust authority to question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, and the inviolable principle of solidarity which means that if they come for the marginalized and the oppressed we come for them, and in my world you stand with those who stand with you, but this does not imply an endorsement of ridiculous macho posturing, the fetishization of guns and other male jewelry, or the valorization of warlike displays of toxic masculinity which may become preconditions and incitements to violence. This is especially true where guns are involved; their power is seductive and malign. The fetishization of instruments of violence normalizes and precedes violence.
Who bears arms bears death, has chosen to bear death among us and has degraded every human relationship and interaction to a kill or no kill decision.
Choose life.
But never let this stay your hand in defense of the lives and liberty of yourself or of others; for who respects no laws and no limits can hide behind none. To fascism I give the only reply it merits; Never Again! And to tyranny I say; Sic Semper Tyrannis.
I am a monster and a hunter of monsters, and mine is a hunter’s morality; I have no use for anything which limits our ability to confront and destroy threats such as fascist terror and tyranny, which must be met on its own ground, beyond all laws and all limits.
War to the knife; and we must be very cautious that our actions serve the cause of liberty and not tyranny, and bring hope.
What is the great lesson of Michael Reinoehl, murdered by police assassins for the murder of a fascist terrorist?
If they know you are armed, they will not come to arrest you, but will send a sniper team to assassinate you.
Let us remember always that the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce, and remember the warning of Nietzsche; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”
Here endeth the lesson; or maybe not. For I have used a word throughout my witness of history and eulogy for a comrade which is itself a ground of struggle; Antifascist. A word that cuts slices, polarizes, incites, damns or grants permission, identifies friend or foe, confers nobility of purpose, and engulfs the world in the fires of transformation and rebirth symbolized in the stolen fire of the gods of our Torch of Liberty.
As I wrote in my post of July 31 2020, A Useful Past: What is Antifa?; What do we mean when we say we are Antifascists? What do our enemies mean when they use the term? These mirror reverse meanings face us Janus-like in dialectical contradiction as negative spaces of each other like Escher’s Drawing Hands, and while factions struggle to control the narrative in the media I don’t see much direction provided by anyone speaking as an Antifa-identified voice. I’m changing that, for I speak to you today as the founder of Lilac City Antifa.
In calling Antifa a terrorist group, Trump has inverted its values and libeled every American serviceman, from those who fought in World War II to our entire military services today, for they have been the primary force against fascism and tyranny throughout the world. I am an American patriot and an Antifascist; and if our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us.
The Second World War has been much studied, filmed, and written about; but of course what we mean when we speak of Antifa today proceeds from the history of those whose public service of vigilance in exposing and confronting fascism developed from the partisans of that conflict and from the Allied military and intelligence services sent to assist them in the liberation of Europe, from the Resistance and from those who hunted escaped Nazis after the war.
To begin with, both the OSS which became the CIA and the Jedburgh teams which became the Green Berets or US Special Forces originate as antifascist forces, and this is true generally of the European intelligence and special operations forces and community born and forged in the war against fascism.
One may discover strange and unlikely allies in the Antifascist community because of this history; and we may say the same of enemies. Both our allies and our enemies are partners in a dance, wherein we choose our futures and how to be human together.
A very specific historical context and tradition informs and motivates those who, like myself, use the term Antifascist as a descriptor of identity; I have appended some articles on this useful past, but Antifa is a personal choice to work against fascism and may sometimes be a component of an ideology or belief system but is not an organization. No one calling themselves Antifa speaks for or answers to anyone else; it is a nonhierarchical and mutualistic network of alliances. This is intentional, as it makes our network of alliances impossible to infiltrate, and though we contain members of many nations security and military services, no one can give orders to anyone else. There is no special tie nor fraternal handshake; membership is by declaration.
To claim you are Antifa is to be Antifa. This means whatever we intend when we say it.
For myself, to be an Antifascist is to belong to a tradition of resistance which originates in the Second World War, a war that has never ended but went underground. I look also to the American Revolution against imperial tyranny and colonial inequality and to the Second American Revolution and the great crusade of Abolition against slavery that was the Civil War, to the Paris Commune and the Garde Militaire which survives it, and to our direct origins in the Italian Arditi del Popolo, the Antifaschistische Aktion direct action forces of the German Democratic Socialists from whom we inherit our name, the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, and the Resistance, for antecedents and inspiration. For the principles which I feel are consistent with Anti-fascism, see my repost below of the original proclamation with which I founded Lilac City Antifa.
Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa: Resistance Against Fascism and Tyranny; We, the People of Lilac City and of America, being of all imaginable varieties of historical origin, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual personae, faith and the lack thereof, class and status, and all other informing and motivating sources of becoming human and frames of identity as yet undiscovered, declare our independence from fear and from authorized identities, boundaries of the Forbidden, images and narratives of ourselves made for us by others as instruments of subjugation, the tyranny of false divisions and categories of belonging and exclusionary otherness among us.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
We stand united as human beings whose universal rights depend on no government but on the inherent nature of our humanity, and as American citizens and co-owners of our government in a free society of equals, inclusive of all who so claim and declare as heirs of the legacy and idea of Liberty and of America as an historical expression and manifest form of its ideals and values, among these being freedom and the autonomy of individuals, equality as an absolute structural principle in law and ideal in social relations, truth and its objectivity and testable nature and our right to seek and verify and to communicate it which includes freedom of the press and the right of access to information and from surveillance and all forms of thought control, justice and its impartiality, and a secular state in which freedom of conscience is absolute and there can be no compulsion in matters of faith.
We are a web of human lives which connect us with one another and anchor us to our Liberty, to our history and to our future, and we are resolved to our common defense as human beings and as Americans, and to the mutual safety and freedom of ourselves and of others from fascist violence and intimidation, coercion and the social use of force, in the performance of our identities and in our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We are American patriots and heirs to the glorious tradition of resistance by those who stood for Liberty at the balance points of history, at Saratoga and Yorktown, Gettysburg, Normandy, and many others, against the three primary threats of tyranny, inequalities of race and gender and slavery in all its forms, and fascism which combines and expands them, as we must always do against the atavistic forces of barbarism and the nightmares of totalitarian force and control which threaten our nation and our civilization, against what madness and evil may together do.
We must unite together as free citizens who will not be broken by fear, but instead embrace our differences as a strength and a heritage purchased for us all by the blood of our sacred dead in countless wars throughout our history.
To all those who have offered their lives in our service, members and veterans of the military and other security services: join us. If our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us. For America is a Band of Brothers, sworn to one another and to the defense of our union, with liberty and justice for all.
To all enemies of America and a free society of equals: We are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Join us in resistance, who answer fascism and tyranny with equality and liberty.
I am an American patriot and an Antifascist. Pledge thus with me:
I swear zero tolerance for racism or the supremacy of any persons by categories of identity, racist violence and white supremacist terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, hate and its symbols and speech, for all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for all inequalities and divisions of exclusionary otherness and victimization of the dispossessed and the powerless.
I will make no compromise with evil.
As you have sworn to challenge and confront fascism, therefore I offer you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut in 1982 by Jean Genet; here is the story of how it happened, and of my true origin.
During the summer before my undergraduate senior year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Feral bands of soldiers were roaming the streets, committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, and more joined us. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.
A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”
To which I replied, “We have nothing but moments stolen from death; these alone belong to us, and set us free. It’s a poor man who has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before his capture, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path of struggle for liberty against tyranny and autocracies of state force and control, for equality against racist violence and injustice, and against the fascism which combines both state tyranny and racist terror.
He introduced himself as a former Legionnaire by the name of Jean, was mischievous, wise, immensely learned in classical scholarship and possibly had once been educated as a priest, and filled with wild stories about the luminaries of modern European culture. I was stunned when I discovered days later that my strange new friend was one of the greatest literary figures of the century. I had quoted The Thief’s Journal in refutation of something he said, which he found hilarious, while we were discussing Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as compared to that of Georges Bataille, a conversation which remained unfinished as he couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually he sputtered, “I myself am Jean Genet.” To me he remains a Trickster figure and part of my historical identity and personal mythology.
There came a day when the barricades were overrun and our neighborhood along with it, one of our last days together. With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers running amok in a sack of murder, arson, and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, our house set on fire and about to be burned alive as the soldiers called for us to come out and surrender, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with a very Gallic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”
We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all.
Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’
To which I replied, “No.”
“Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.
We escaped capture that day because we were led through the checkpoints of the encirclement by an unlikely ally, a figure who materialized out of the background at the far end of the alley and walked over to us grinning. This was the sniper whom my friends and I had been playing our games with for two weeks, who had been utterly invisible and had outwitted every attempt to track, trap, ambush, or identify him, and who had in fact besieged the city from within. He held out his hand to me and I shook it as he said, “Well played, sir. I’ve tried to kill you every day for fourteen days now, but the Israelis have occupied the city, and this changes everything. We have a common enemy, and they don’t know that, so I’m in a position to help you. But I can’t fight them alone. Want a partner?”
So began a great adventure and friendship, which I share with you now in the context of the nature of antifascist resistance because it illustrates something which can never be forgotten by anyone who does this kind of work; human beings are not monsters, are deserving of human doubt, and are never beyond redemption.
The struggle between good and evil in the human heart often pivots and balances on the differences between the purpose of the use of force; to punish transgression when inflicted by authority as an act of subjugation and repression against the powerless, or to seize power and to protect the powerless as a duty of care. Be very sure you know which cause your actions serve.
The end goal of Antifascism, and of revolutionary struggle and liberation, is to achieve a democratic society of true equality, diversity, and inclusion in which we can abandon the social use of force.
Such a day will not be easily won, nor quickly, even with seizures of power, for the systems of oppression in which we are embedded also inhabit our flesh as living stories, and we must escape the legacies of our history if we are to create ourselves anew in a free society of equals. Of our histories, memories, identities let us remember always this; there are those we must escape and those we must keep and remember, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
As I wrote in my post of January 14 2025, A Curse Upon Traitor Trump and All Who Voted For Him Or Celebrate His Inauguration; In less than a week’s time a man who modeled himself on Hitler will be Inaugurated as President of the United States, to the hooting and champing of his dishonorable and treasonous Deplorables who celebrate his white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror because they want permission to do the same.
This event of fracture and disruption calls for rituals of grief and healing for our shared public trauma, but also for solidarity in Resistance and performances of acts of refusal to submit and bringing a Reckoning.
If I had enough hands, and windows into their private spaces, I would flay their white skins and mount them on my wall, I would douse them in gasoline while they sleep and drop the match, I would visit horrors on them and give reply to their violations, atrocities, tyranny and terror with those of my own as they merit; but I do not because I would not become as they, and we must never allow our enemies to become our teachers.
Look to Israel, a nation which learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis, and to the genocide of the Palestinians if you require a scrying glass into our future should we choose the path of force and violence without embracing the humanity of our enemies regardless of their otherness and monstrosity; and we must also embrace our own if we are to free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and its systems of oppression.
The enemy are monsters because they have transgressed the limits of the human, and we must not join them in the place of unknowns. I have lived in this place, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human, for forty three years now since the Siege of Beirut, and as Nietzsche warned the Abyss has begun to look back at me.
Imposed conditions of struggle may require seizures of power by force, but in so doing we must not forget to see others as fellow human beings, even if we must meet them in battle as brother warriors to find the truths of ourselves.
When the Matadors rescued me from the police death squad in Brazil over fifty years ago, the leader said; ”You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.” This principle serves well enough for Resistance, but the moment we are now living in requires both Resistance, always War to the Knife without law or limit, and Revolution as reimagination and transformative change. Revenge is a weakness we cannot afford if we are to build a better future than we have the past.
Herein I offer all of you a curse upon our enemies, betrayers of our humanity and of our nation; join me in invoking a Reckoning and in Solidarity of action to make it real.
A Curse Upon Our Enemies: Traitor Trump and All Who Voted For Him Or Celebrate His Inauguration
I invoke death and horror upon all who voted for Traitor Trump or celebrate his Inauguration, Rapist In Chief, Russian agent, and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, and ruin upon all their works. May all they love and dream come to nothing and be destroyed.
By the beard of the Ice King of Entropy and the poison songs of the Queen of Lies,
By the dead eyes of the Faceless Ones and the Wailing in the Darkness,
By the Abyss and the terror of our Nothingness,
May our enemies and all who celebrate today the Inauguration of Traitor Trump live loveless and die unmourned,
May their bodies be prisons of illness and pain, and their souls consumed by their cruelties.
In annotation of the text, I refer in my poem and conjuration here to the old and true forces of our universe, which I sometimes call the Giants of Frost and Old Night to convey something of the wonder and terror of a universe free from any meaning or value except for that we ourselves create, but also as symbols of Defining Moments which I have lived.
In my imagination I give form and force to The Wailing in the Darkness as an incident in the defense of Mariupol, hours crawling in utter darkness through the bloody remains of the dead in a partially collapsed tunnel filled with the voices of the dying whom I could not help as Russian bombs shook the earth. They are with me still, my companions in darkness at the edge of life and death, and they whisper things in my dreams; of horror and despair, loneliness and abandonment, of being shattered into countless fragments of myself under the hammer of mass trauma to which I can bring no healing and give no answer as to why humans do such things to each other.
At the time this bothered me not at all; I have survived worse and more terrible, as no doubt I will again. But I spent days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when I discovered what the Russians were doing with the children they abducted, who could not even call for help that was not coming from the torture brothels on army bases far away in Russia, and this silencing and erasure is another form of Wailing in the Darkness.
When I speak of the dead eyes of the Faceless Ones, I am thinking of the Jar of Eyes.
Of Sarajevo I shall speak here not of the monstrous acts of those who would be conquerors, nor of the courageous resistance of their intended victims who held true to their faith and to each other in the face of death and torture, nor even of the valor and compassion of the volunteers of the International Brigade who placed themselves between hammer and anvil, but of a small horror which has come to symbolize for me the unimaginable horrors of war; the Jar of Eyes.
On the desk of a commander of death squads sat a jar full of eyes, and beside it an ice cream scoop which he would toy with, stroking its stainless smoothness with an absentminded and sensual languor while interrogating prisoners.
This he did in imitation of the Roman Emperor Basil the Second the Bulgar Slayer, who after the battle of Kleidion in 1014 Christianized Bulgaria by blinding the army he had defeated, and leaving one man in one hundred with a single eye to guide the others home and terrify the nation into submission.
How do I know this, and what were we to each other, this monster and I? Herein I recall and speak as a witness of history a Defining Moment in which we played a game of chess with the life of a prisoner of his as the prize.
Having materialized at his gate and asking to see the commander, itself unusual and a curious thing to a man with his fearsome reputation, I came bearing the gift of a recording of an opera I knew he loved and could not attend due to his duties and the price on his head as a war criminal, Leoš Janáček’s House of the Dead set in a Serbian prison and based on the Dostoevsky novel, with the promise of more music in trade for a prisoner he held and did not know the value of. He agreed to the bargain, but with one condition; we would play three games of chess after dinner in the following days, and demanded I must win or force a draw once.
We had three meetings over three days of an hour each, over dinner and chess, during which we conversed of the historical civilization he was fighting to defend, a fight which had made him a monster; music, philosophy, art, literature. Once a prisoner was brought in, seated and held fast by guards like a third companion at dinner whom he tortured while we sipped tea and spoke of the scene between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky‘s The Brothers Karamazov. I think he was lonely.
Within the jar the eyes would float randomly, hypnotic, reflective, capturing ones will to resist with a Medusa-like gaze of objectification and dehumanization appropriated from their tormentors, a talisman of transference of power. A jar of silent screams, erased lives, and the lost witness of history; how can we accuse our destroyers when we have no mouths?
Here among the dragons, where the rule of law cannot reach and our maps of meaning and value have given way to tantalizing empty spaces which beckon with the siren call of the Forbidden, where the only currency is fear and the only relationships those of power and dominion, we challenge and define by their absence and contrary the limits of what is human.
For we are all trapped in the Jar of Eyes, and if we are to reawaken and assume our true forms we must find a means of escape.
January 24 2025 The Six Coup Attempts of Traitor Trump; a Retrospective
September 3 2024 Anniversary of the Assassination of Antifascist Comrade Michael Reinoehl: Violence, Responsibility, the Social Use of Force, and Our Duty of Care For Others
Donald Trump on Saturday authorized the deployment of 2,000 national guard troops to Los Angeles, after an immigration crackdown erupted into mass protests for a second day and police in riot gear used teargas on bystanders.
The California governor, Gavin Newsom, said in a statement on X that the federal government was “moving to take over” the California national guard. Newsom said the mobilization was “purposefully inflammatory” and warned that it would “only escalate tensions”.
“The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles — not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle,” he said later. “Don’t give them one.”
The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, wrote on X that national guard troops were being mobilized “IMMEDIATELY” and threatened to send “active duty Marines” if the unrest continued.
Tensions this week started on Friday, when protesters clashed with law enforcement officials conducting immigration raids on multiple locations in the city’s downtown. On Saturday, US immigration authorities extended enforcement action into Paramount, a majority Latino area south-east of Los Angeles, and were met with more protests outside an industrial park.
In an hours-long standoff, border patrol personnel in riot gear and gas masks stood guard outside the park, deploying teargas as bystanders and protesters gathered on medians and across the street, some jeering at authorities while recording the event on smartphones.
“Ice out of Paramount. We see you for what you are,” a woman announced through a megaphone. “You are not welcome here.”
One handheld sign said: “No Human Being is Illegal.”
Law enforcement personnel and protesters mostly stayed at a distance, kicking teargas canisters back and forth amid streams of white gas. Among several hundred protesters, a handful were bloodied by projectiles.
More than a dozen people were arrested and accused of impeding immigration agents, according to the US attorney’s office for the central district of California.
A Los Angeles sheriff’s department spokesperson said their office arrested two individuals for assaulting an officer, that one demonstrator threw a molotov cocktail, and that three deputies had been struck, with minor injuries. The sheriff’s office said the department “was focused solely on traffic management and crowd control” and was not involved in any federal law enforcement operations.
By Saturday evening, protests in Paramount had dwindled from their peak on Saturday afternoon, but some protesters and authorities were engaged in a tense standoff. Protesters had also gathered in nearby Compton, amid reports that a few were hurling glass bottles at police, and police were deploying teargas.
On its end, the Trump administration moved aggressively.
The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Saturday evening accused California’s Democratic leaders of having “completely abdicated their responsibility to protect their citizens”.
“The Trump Administration has a zero tolerance policy for criminal behavior and violence, especially when that violence is aimed at law enforcement officers trying to do their jobs,” she said in a statement, announcing that Trump had signed a memo late Saturday night ordering the national guard deployment.
The memo asserts that the demonstrations impeded “execution of laws” and therefore “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States”. Trump, according to the memo, federalized the state’s national guard troops under what is known as Title 10 authority, which places them under federal, rather than state, control.
Newsom said there was no such need. On Saturday afternoon, he made assurances that the Los Angeles police department was available to authorities and that his administration was in close contact with city and county officials. “There is currently no unmet need,” he said.
Newsom directed the California highway patrol (CHP) to deploy additional officers to maintain public safety on state highways and roads and work to keep the peace.
“The federal government is sowing chaos so they can have an excuse to escalate. That is not the way any civilized country behaves,” Newsom also said.
In a tweet, the governor called Hegseth’s threats to deploy active-duty Marines against American citizens “deranged”.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump insulted Newsom and Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass’s handling of the protests and said the federal government would “step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!” Earlier on Saturday, Tom Homan, the White House “border czar”, was the first to say the administration would mobilize the national guard.
“We’re gonna bring national guard in tonight and we’re gonna continue doing our job. This is about enforcing the law,” Homan said in an interview with Fox News.
It is not the first time the national guard has been deployed in Los Angeles. Troops also were sent in during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, but their deployment at the time came at the request of the California governor and, unlike this time, amid widespread unrest.
Bass called reports of civil unrest across the Los Angeles area “deeply concerning” and said the city was in “direct contact” with law enforcement and officials in Washington.
“Everyone has the right to peacefully protest, but let me be clear: violence and destruction are unacceptable, and those responsible will be held accountable,” she wrote on X on Saturday evening.
The Paramount mayor, Peggy Lemons, told multiple news outlets that no immigration raids had taken place in her city and that demonstrators appeared to have responded to possible preparations of federal agents outside homeland security department facilities.
“They’re just frightened,” Lemons said. “And when you handle things the way that this appears to be handled, it’s not a surprise that chaos would follow.”
On Friday, Ice officers had arrested dozens of people as they executed search warrants at multiple locations, including outside a clothing warehouse, where a tense scene unfolded as a crowd tried to block agents from driving away.
The standoff in Paramount on Saturday. Photograph: Barbara Davidson/Reuters
Advocates for immigrant rights say people were also detained outside Home Depot stores and a doughnut shop.
During afternoon protests at a federal detention facility in downtown LA on Friday, David Huerta, the president of the California branch of the Service Employees International Union, was arrested amid a police response that included teargas and flash-bangs.
Huerta, who was injured and detained, released a statement to the Los Angeles Times from the hospital, saying: “What happened to me is not about me. This is about something much bigger.”
“This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening. Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice,” he added.
DHS said in a statement that recent Ice operations in Los Angeles had resulted in the arrest of 118 immigrants.
California leaders were quick to condemn the raids. Bass said the activity was meant to “sow terror” in the nation’s second-largest city.
“I am deeply angered by what has taken place,” Bass said. “These tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city. We will not stand for this.”
Newsom said: “Continued chaotic federal sweeps, across California, to meet an arbitrary arrest quota are as reckless as they are cruel. Donald Trump’s chaos is eroding trust, tearing families apart, and undermining the workers and industries that power America’s economy.”
Newsom also condemned Huerta’s arrest, saying: “David Huerta is a respected leader, a patriot, and an advocate for working people. No one should ever be harmed for witnessing government action.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) representatives did not respond immediately to email inquiries about weekend enforcement activities.
The arrests by immigration authorities in Los Angeles come as Trump and his administration push to fulfill promises to carry out mass deportations across the country.
The Department of Homeland Security criticized Bass – and other Democratic lawmakers who spoke out against the raids – as using anti-Ice rhetoric to contribute to violence against immigration agents.
“From comparisons to the modern-day Nazi gestapo to glorifying rioters, the violent rhetoric of these sanctuary politicians is beyond the pale. This violence against Ice must end,” said the DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
In a series of incendiary remarks, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and architect of Trump’s hardline immigration agenda, called Friday’s demonstrations “an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States” and on Saturday described the day’s protests as a “violent insurrection”. “
As written in the FB group Feminist News “ICE agents and LAPD turned the beautiful city of LA into a war zone Friday evening. Heavily armed masked ICE goons ransacked a vibrant immigrant community, but they certainly weren’t expecting the neighborhood to stand their ground. Hundreds of community members, workers, and activists overwhelmed ICE agents and had them corralled around the federal building. That’s when Homeland Security and LAPD reinforcements arrived and deployed unhinged brutal violence we haven’t seen since they beat Rodney King to near death.
Here, you can see LAPD and Homeland Security smashing a woman’s skull and ribcage with the butt of their shotguns and police shields. These scenes are reminiscent of the most brutal military dictatorships from Iran, Egypt, or North Korea.
To be clear, our communities are being terrorized because the chief White House Nazi Stephen Miller is demanding 3,000 arrests a day, a number that would not only tank the US economy but make life uninhabitable across vast swaths of America’s cities and rural areas dependent on immigrant workers and their families. In short, there’s no way to meet Stephen Miller’s mass deportation agenda without obliterating our entire society.
LAPD pepper sprayed children and infants, brutalized countless women, and choke slammed one abuela so hard she lost consciousness while her family was screaming in tears. Dozens of innocents had to be rushed to hospital…The LA police department will be paying legal bills for this for years.
This is what MAGA Nazi scum have done to our nation. If you don’t like to see your streets terrorized by masked Jan 6 rioters cosplaying as law enforcement, it’s time to rise up and resist. It’s time for every worker to go on strike, shut this country down until we depose this illegitimate regime.
Let’s also point out the obvious. Stephen Miller is on a warpath because his wife is fucking Elon Musk. No reason to make this a national crisis. Stevie, fix your home, find a new mom for your kids who Mrs Miller abandoned to hang out with a fucking Ketamine crackhead. That’s a YOU problem. Ask JD Vance for advice, he’s got plenty of experience there. But don’t bring your doomer Goebbels energy to our streets. Our side will return to power soon enough and we will throw you and your whole family in a federal superMAX prison.
Yesterday demonstrated that ICE, Homeland Security, and their enablers in DC are the real criminals and domestic terrorists threatening our safety and stability.
It’s time we put a permanent end to this foolishness. It’s time for all of us to stand up and be counted.”
California leaders condemn Ice raids in LA: ‘We will not stand for this’
We celebrate this 81st anniversary of D Day, an iconic image of what it means to be an Antifascist, to be an American as a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and to be a human being bearing a duty of care for others.
“All for one and one for all, united we stand divided we fall” as Dumas teaches us in The Three Musketeers, regardless of the costs, even of our lives.
This anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe finds us once again confronted by rapacious and cruel tyrants and their mad quests for imperial conquest and dominion; Putin, Netanyahu, Xi Jinpeng. But we are also challenged by the subversion of democracy and the rising tide of fascism, nationalism, white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, not only in America by Putin’s star agent and rapist Traitor Trump, but throughout the world.
It remains to be seen if we remain a Band of Brothers still, but in the shadows of Russia’s World War Three and its several active theatres of conflict which include America in the subversion of our democracy and the sabotage of our nation’s institutions, and with American complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, we will find out.
This year finds us all captives of Vichy America under the loathsome Trump regime of treasonous and dishonorable freaks and perverts, grifters and terrorists of Nazi revivalism, Gideonite theocratic authoritarianism and sexual mysogny, and white supremacist terror, and in the pay of Russian crime syndicates and amoral nihilist plutocrats committed to the fall of America and democracy everywhere, who have unleashed the January 6 Insurrections on us as an army of federal Occupation and racist terror in the form of ICE and are scheming to impoverish our citizens to pay for tax cuts for obscenely wealthy capitalists in the most massive transfer of wealth from public to private hands in human history. All of which we fought against in the World War which preceded our current one, whose end we celebrate with remembrance of the horrible cost in human lives it took to set us free, symbolized by D Day.
On this day we fought them on the beaches, to use Churchill’s famous phrase; and now we must do so once again, when the beaches are everywhere and the enemy is among us.
As Biden said in a lost Golden Age a brief one year ago in his historic speech of solidarity with Ukraine, as quoted in The Guardian; “The US president used his address at the American commemorative event to send a message to Moscow that the US and its allies “will not bow down” and will “stand for freedom”.
“To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators, is simply unthinkable,” Biden said in a speech at the American cemetery in Normandy. “If we were to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here on these hallowed beaches.”
“We will not walk away because if we do Ukraine will be subjugated and it will not end there,” Biden said. “Ukraine’s neighbours will be threatened, all of Europe will be threatened.”
“There are things that are worth fighting and dying for”, Biden said. “Freedom is worth it. Democracy is worth it.”
As written by Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian, in an article entitled D-day 80th anniversary comes at time of conflict and growing carelessness: As grim memory of world war fades, many people are anxious amid rise of nationalist, country-first rhetoric; “Twenty-two British D-day veterans, the youngest nearly 100, crossed the Channel on Tuesday to mark this week’s 80th anniversary of the landings in Normandy, representing a thinning thread to the heroics of two or three generations ago when about 150,000 allied soldiers began a seaborne invasion of western Europe that helped end the second world war.
Ron Hayward, a tank trooper who lost his legs fighting in France three weeks after D-day, told crowds assembled in Portsmouth on Wednesday why he and other soldiers were there: “I represent the men and women who put their lives on hold to go and fight for democracy and this country. I am here to honour their memory and their legacy, and to ensure that their story is never forgotten.”
There will not be many more opportunities to commemorate with survivors, while this time the presence of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in France on 6 June will be a reminder that a part of Europe is in the grip of the largest war since 1945. A deadly war also rages in Gaza, while the living memory of the second world war fades into historical record.
That D-day was a risky task is an understatement: 4,441 British, American, Canadian and other allied soldiers are estimated to have been killed on 6 June 1944, and at least a similar number of Germans. One BBC documentary, D-day: the Unheard Tapes, relying on recordings of veterans’ experiences, demonstrates how terrifying the experience was – and how nobody ought to go through it again.
“I just cried my eyes out. I just stood there and cried, I did,” James Kelly, a Royal Marines commando from Liverpool, recalled of finding himself isolated, alone in the French countryside, a few hours after he had managed to fight his way off Sword beach. A buddy had been killed in front of him as they had got to the sand, blood pumping out of his neck, but Kelly had been ordered to press on.
While leaders present at Thursday’s commemorations in Normandy – King Charles, Rishi Sunak, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz – will strike appropriate notes, many of those representing forces of division will not be present, not least Vladimir Putin, the architect of the invasion on Ukraine.
On Friday, Biden is due to speak at Pointe du Hoc, where 80 years ago 225 US Rangers scaled 35-metre sheer cliffs using rope ladders shot over the top to capture a strategically situated artillery bunker. It was perhaps the most dangerous single mission on D-day, and casualties were severe. Only 90 were still able to fight when a count was taken a couple of days later.
There is almost certainly another reason for the location of Biden’s address, given the US president has an election to fight. Forty years ago a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, spoke on the cliffs at the same battle site, and in front of an audience of military veterans he justified the struggle of the day in terms not obviously recognisable in Donald Trump’s Republican worldview.
“We in America have learned bitter lessons from two world wars: it is better to be here ready to protect the peace than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost,” Reagan declared – very different to Trump’s comments that he would refuse to defend Nato members who do not spend enough on defence, never mind previous threats to quit the alliance altogether.
Two years of headline news about Ukraine – but also the conflict in Gaza, so deadly for civilians, and elsewhere in the Middle East – is a reminder that there are those who appear to prefer conflict to stability. Quietly, many people are a little anxious: one recent poll, from YouGov, reports that 55% of Britons believe it is somewhat or very likely that the UK will be involved in a war in the next five years.
Since the end of the cold war at least, and perhaps since 1945, it has been easier to take stability and security in Europe for granted, helped partly by the military pact of Nato and the economic alliance of the EU, but also by the grim memory of all-out conflict. But a rise of nationalist, country-first rhetoric suggests there is also a growing carelessness. If it metastasises, as the stories of D-day survivors demonstrate, ordinary people end up bearing the brunt.”
What happens now, when our fragile democracies are threatened by brutal and degenerate thugs like the organ grinder and his monkey, Putin and Trump?
As I wrote in my post of February 20 2024, Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty and Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa; To all those who like myself prefer to run amok and be ungovernable to the alternative of submission to authority, who align on the side of Prometheus, rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, I offer here a manifesto for bearers of the Torch of Liberty.
Herein I offer the Second Act of my February 9 description of my work and myself as I interrogated both in reflection on the Substack debut of my journal Torch of Liberty, entitled 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 America Begins Her Last Stand Against Fascism in the 2024 Elections, and I now return to the beginning, my September 15 2019 Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa.
The goal of Antifascism, and of revolutionary struggle and liberation, is to achieve a society of true equality in which we can abandon the social use of force.
As I wrote in my post of March 28 2019, in the wake of the Christchurch white supremacist terror and the direct threat of a copycat atrocity against our local mosque here in Spokane; I’ve thought about the origins of evil, of violence and power in the relationships between fear, anger, hate, and other negative emotions as illnesses, for a long time now and in many roles and contexts.
Here are some things I have learned:
First, the process by which violence operates as a system is the same for all spheres of action and levels of scale; within personal and social contexts and in intimate relationships and families as well as nations and historical civilizations.
The precondition of violence as hate crime, and of both tyranny and terror, is overwhelming and generalized fear as shaped by submission to authority.
Structures and figures of authorized power feed on fear and hate, grow stronger by the cycle of power and violence and the negative emotions and forces of darkness to which they give form and through which they subjugate others.
We must question, challenge, mock and subvert authority whenever it comes to claim us; these are the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, conformity with transgression, plutocracy with socialism.
Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.
Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious diversity, democracy, and a free society of equals.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
Let us evolve toward a nonviolent and noncoercive society together, become bearers of the Torch of Liberty together, and unite to achieve our dreams of democracy together.
As I wrote in my post of July 31 2020, A Useful Past: What is Antifa?; What do we mean when we say we are Antifascists? What do our enemies mean when they use the term? These mirror reverse meanings face us Janus-like in contradiction, and while factions struggle to control the narrative in the media I don’t see much direction provided by anyone speaking as an Antifa-identified voice. I’m changing that, for I speak to you today as the founder of Lilac City Antifa.
In calling Antifa a terrorist group, Trump has inverted its values and libeled every American serviceman who fought in World War II as well as our entire military services today, for they have been the primary force against fascism throughout the world. I am an American patriot and an Antifascist; and if our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us.
The Second World War has been much studied, filmed, and written about; but of course what we mean when we speak of Antifa today proceeds from the history of those whose public service of vigilance in exposing and confronting fascism developed from the partisans of that conflict and from the Allied military and intelligence services sent to assist them in the liberation of Europe, from the Resistance and from those who hunted escaped Nazis after the war.
A very specific historical context and tradition informs and motivates those who, like myself, use the term Antifascist as a descriptor of identity; I have appended some articles on this useful past, but to claim Antifa as an identity is a personal choice to work against fascism and may sometimes be a component of an ideology or belief system but is not an organization. No one calling themselves Antifa speaks for or answers to anyone else; it is a nonhierarchical and mutualistic network of alliances. There is no special tie nor fraternal handshake; membership is by declaration.
To claim you are Antifa is to be Antifa. This means whatever we intend when we say it; there are no authorized truths among us, nor authorized identities.
For myself, to be an antifascist is to belong to a tradition of resistance which originates in multiple forms and traditions; the 1921 founding of Antifa by the Ardito del Popolo in Italy, Antifaschistische Aktion founded in 1932 in Germany, the International Brigades of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, and finally in the Resistance of World War Two, a war that has never ended but went underground.
Here I must note that the C.I.A. and the Green Berets or US Special Forces, like many among the West’s intelligence and special operations community, began as antifascist and Nazi-hunting organizations in WWII interdependent with the Resistance partisans they worked and still work with, and remain so in general character, purpose, and function; such are natural allies of Antifa, with common goals, the differences being that where Antifa is a global voluntary network of nonhierarchical alliances outside the control of or membership in any nation, our parallel and interdependent partners in the intelligence and special operations community are institutions of governments and often of military chains of command. To phrase it differently; we swear our loyalty to each other, theirs are oaths sworn to nations and to Constitutions as systems of law to enforce our universal human rights and the rights of citizens.
I look also to our history and the great crusade against slavery that was the Civil War, to the Paris Commune, and to the American Revolution against tyranny and imperial colonialism and its ideology of liberty as a heritage of Humanism and the Enlightenment, for antecedents and inspiration.
For the principles which I feel are consistent with Anti-fascism, see my repost below of the original proclamation with which I founded Lilac City Antifa with the intent to defend our local mosque which was under threat of violence by Christian Identity terrorists led by former Representative Matt Shea and other secessionists who were also planning to murder our policemen and their families as part of a plot to found a white ethnostate or Redoubt here in my lovely part of Washington with its forested mountains and pristine lakes; the militia they were training included members of Atomwaffen Division and The Base, and had links to both the Christchurch and Las Vegas shooters. I took them with great seriousness as threats, and believed we needed a counterforce.
As I wrote in my post of September 15 2019, Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa: Resistance Against Fascism and Tyranny; We, the People of Lilac City and of America, being of all imaginable varieties of historical origin, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual personae, faith and the lack thereof, class and status, and all other informing and motivating sources of becoming human and frames of identity as yet undiscovered, declare our independence from fear and from authorized boundaries and images of ourselves, and the tyranny of false divisions and categories of otherness and exclusion among us.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
We stand united as human beings whose universal rights depend on no government but on the inherent nature of our humanity, and as American citizens and co-owners of our government in a free society of equals, and inclusive of all who so claim and declare as heirs of the legacy and idea of Liberty and of America as an historical expression and manifest form of its ideals and values, among these being freedom and the autonomy of individuals, equality as an absolute structural principle in law and ideal in social relations, truth and its objectivity and testable nature and our right to seek and verify and to communicate it which includes freedom of the press and the right of access to information and from surveillance and all forms of thought control, justice and its impartiality, and a secular state in which freedom of conscience is absolute and there can be no compulsion in matters of faith, for who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
We are a web of human lives which connect us with one another and anchor us to our Liberty, to our history and to our future, and we are resolved to our common defense as human beings and as Americans, and to the mutual safety and freedom of ourselves and of others from fascist violence and intimidation, coercion and the social use of force, in the performance of our identities and in our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We are American patriots and heirs to the glorious tradition of resistance by those who stood for Liberty at the balance points of history, at Saratoga and Yorktown, Gettysburg, Normandy, and many others, against the three primary threats of tyranny and the state as embodied violence, inequalities of race and gender and slavery in all its forms, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil which combine and expand them as theocratic-nationalist-capitalist dehumanization and systems of oppression, as we must always do against the atavistic forces of barbarism and the nightmares of totalitarian force and control which threaten our nation and our civilization, against what madness and evil may together do.
We must unite together as free citizens who will not be broken by fear, but instead embrace our differences as a strength and a heritage purchased for us all by the blood of our sacred dead in countless wars throughout our history.
To all those who have offered their lives in our service, both to our nation and to all humankind, members and veterans of the military and other security services: join us. If our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us. For America is a Band of Brothers, sworn to one another and to the defense of our union, with liberty and justice for all.
To all enemies of America and a free society of equals: We are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Join us in resistance, who answer fascism with equality and tyranny with liberty.
I am an American patriot and an Antifascist. I will bet my refusal to submit against any force of tyranny, and our solidarity against any ideology of division as a strategy of our subjugation. Pledge thus with me:
I swear zero tolerance for racism or the supremacy of any persons by identity politics and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, racist violence and white supremacist terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, hate and its symbols and speech, for all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
I will make no compromise with evil.
In closing, a few words of caution, for the use of force is a Rashomon Gate of relative truths and bifurcating possible futures.
The struggle between good and evil in the human heart often pivots and balances on the differences between the purpose of the use of force; to punish transgression when inflicted by authority as an act of subjugation and repression against the powerless, or to seize power in solidarity with the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, as a duty of care for others and as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights. Be very sure you know which cause your actions serve.
All that matters in the end is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
A History of D Day In Film
The Longest Day film montage
Band of Brothers series trailer
Saving Private Ryan
References
D-day 80th anniversary comes at time of conflict and growing carelessness
The Second World War: A Complete History, Martin Gilbert
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts
The Battle of Britain: Five Months That Changed History, May-October 1940, Fortress Malta: An Island Under Siege 1940-43, Together We Stand: Turning the Tide in the West, Sicily ’43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe, Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France, James Holland
Britain and Churchill
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, Erik Larson
Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts
Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat, Giles Milton
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, William Manchester, Paul Reid
France
The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940, France: The Dark Years 1940-1944, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, Julian T. Jackson
Paris at War: 1939-1944, David Drake
The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis, Matthew Cobb
Outwitting the Gestapo, Lucie Aubrac
The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, Paul Kix
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler, Lynne Olson
The Liberation of Paris: How Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and von Choltitz Saved the City of Light, Jean Edward Smith
Italy
Mussolini Warlord: Failed Dreams of Empire, 1940-1943, H. James Burgwyn
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Rick Atkinson
Bitter Victory: The Battle For Sicily, July August 1943, Carlo D’Este
Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, Peter Caddick-Adams
Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944, Lloyd Clark
Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy, Norman Lewis
Spain
Picasso’s War, Russell Martin
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
The Spanish Civil War, Hugh Thomas
The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War, Giles Tremlett
Russia
Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945, Richard Overy
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943, Antony Beevor
Jewish Peoples
Night, Elie Wiesel
Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, Ariel Burger
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy, Sergio Luzzatto
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom, The Murderers Among Us, Krystyna: The Tragedy of the Polish Resistance, Simon Wiesenthal
Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Moshe Arens
Auschwitz, Laurence Rees
Treblinka, Jean-François Steiner, Simone de Beauvoir (Preface), Terrence Des Pres (Introduction
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva
The Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades, a reading list
This Memorial Day weekend of celebrations and family visits to graves of the fallen we contemplate the victories of the past in the cause of our liberty and equality and its terrible costs, in the shadows of World War Three.
Of revolutionary struggle, principles of resistance, the ideals of a free society of equals and the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force I have written much; today I wish to interrogate violence and the use of social force on the personal and individual level from which such tidal forces arise.
What general principles can be applied at all levels of liberation struggle, from wars, revolutions, and resistance under unequal systems of power as imposed conditions of struggle, and to the personal contests of power and dominion through which we create hierarchies of belonging and membership from childhood on and in political action as we choose how to be human together?
I wish to share with you the Eight Principles of the Art of War as I have imagined and relentlessly tested them, which apply equally to revolutionary struggle and other seizures of power.
I don’t write about martial arts much, for someone who grew up shaped by its practice and has continued to learn whatever I could from anyone at all wherever I have lived, traveled, and fought in over fifty years since I began study, arts tested and refined in Resistance, revolution, wars, and liberation struggle, my whole adult life counting from the summer before I began high school when I hunted police death squads who were hunting abandoned street children through the warrens of Sao Paulo Brazil, at first alone and later as a member of the Matadors founded by the great and terrible Pedro Rodrigues Filho after they rescued me from execution with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
When next I fought it was against the Israeli Siege of Beirut in 1982, when Jean Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance he had rephrased in Paris 1940 from the one he took as a Legionnaire; he said it was the finest thing he ever stole.
From this Defining Moment and Last Stand unfolded all the others; the end of Apartheid in the glorious Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola, the tragic defense against the Mayan Genocide in Guatemala, bringing down the Berlin Wall, Sarajevo and the limits of the human, the Revolution in Nepal and the Resistance in Kashmir, and most recently forlorn hopes in the battle for Panjshir in Afghanistan, the Siege of Mariupol in Ukraine, the horrors of the Third Intifada which began with the defense of al Aqsa, the fight for human rights against genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and Palestine, and the victories in bringing a Reckoning to Prigozhin, the Red Sea Campaign to counter blockade Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid, and the liberation of Syria. So many more; more than I can now recount.
What have I learned in all of this?
The first lesson of the art of war is Diversion and Surprise. This involves a cornucopia of misdirection, illusion, concealment, and the arts of ambush and improvising channels, traps, and arenas to escape pursuit.
Concealment is better than confrontation when force and power are unequal. In battle whatever can be seen, located, identified, predicted can be destroyed; be anonymous, unpredictable, unanswerable. Stealth offers no target to the enemy, gives no warning, leaves no signs, strikes from ambush and returns to the shadows
The second lesson is to Be Unpredictable, and use your enemy’s routines against him to create windows of opportunity. Change your patterns and routines, your playbook, rules, strategies and tactics. Surprise yourself, and the enemy too will be surprised.
The third lesson is to Seize the Rules; never play someone else’s game, on their terms or by their rules, but on ground and at a time of your choosing. If you become trapped in such a game, change the rules and make it yours.
The fourth lesson is to Seize Initiative and Control through continuous attack and patterns of action; make the enemy react to you and you will tie up his resources in defense which may otherwise be free to threaten and attack you. Plan ahead of the enemy’s moves, and use patterns and expectations to create dilemmas, openings, ambushes, and traps.
The fifth lesson is to Seize the Timing, or wrongfooting the enemy. No one can be everywhere at once with equal force, and one must gather maximum force and strike where least expected and where the enemy is weakest. This means luring the enemy into being where you want him to be, such as massing forces where they are useless while exposing strategic targets.
The sixth lesson is to Seize the Momentum and point of balance when attacked; defend nothing, but neutralize greater force and power through evasion and redirection. The principles of simultaneous counterattack to seize control as momentum, and of continuous attack as conservation of momentum, work together in this as a Doctrine of No Defense or pure counterattack and ambush.
The seventh lesson is to Embrace Your Fear and use your pain. Why defend when you can counterattack and teach the enemy to fear you? As my father said; “Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?”
The eighth lesson is to Seize the Narrative of the conflict, for all conflict is theatre. Here we instrumentalize history, famously described by CIA Chief of Counter Intelligence Angleton as the Wilderness of Mirrors.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I disambiguate in comparison with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, racism, and capitalism, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
Our goal in revolutionary struggle is to seize the legitimacy and authority of the enemy, to take their power, by claiming the moral high ground, shaping opinion through narratives of victimization and solidarity by championing the people against those who would enslave us. For who stands alone, dies alone; and who stands in solidarity with his fellows becomes unstoppable as the tides.
The last lesson is the same as the first; diversion and surprise.
An age of force and darkness began on this day fifty eight years ago, the world’s longest military occupation, with the Fall of al Quds to Israeli conquest; grim echo of another crime of theocratic state terror, the end of the Six Day War on June 10 sharing infamy with the 1692 first execution of the Salem witch trials as Bridget Bishop was hanged.
It continues today, as the state of Israel remains an American proxy in our regional hegemony of power and privilege, a belligerent and xenophobic threat which secures our most vital strategic asset of imperial dominion, oil, for our control of fossil fuel as a strategic resource gives us control of everything else, everywhere.
Here is the true reason why Israel can make us complicit in genocide and the use of famine and denial of medical aid, the destruction of cities, the bombing of hospitals and schools, and the assassination of journalists and aid workers as weapons of Total War as designed by Franco and Hitler and tested at Guernica, and America does nothing to end the reign of death nor bring a Reckoning for the abandonment of our universal human rights.
Our civilization’s reliance on oil not only threatens the survival of humankind and of earth as an ark of life, but is also the great lever of imperialism by which some of us enslave and control the great masses of the powerless and the dispossessed.
If those whose lives service ours are also different from ourselves, by representations of race, faith, and nation or historical origin, so much the better for the beneficiaries of fascist tyranny. When no such Others exist, the state must create some, for the state is embodied violence.
Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis; might does not make right, power is not the only thing which has value, and being able to subjugate others through violence, force, and control confers neither authority nor superiority. In fact the reverse is true; tyrannies both rule by fear and are ruled by it, legitimacy and authority are sacrificed by those who use force, and those who would enslave us concede they cannot survive as our equals.
Israel celebrated the Conquest of Jerusalem as Flag Day from May 23 to 26 in 2025 according to the Hebrew calendar, with all of the weaponization of faith in service to power and national identity which flags imply, and violate Palestinian and Islamic spaces to establish dominance through terror while deniable assets modeled on Hitler’s Brownshirts commit crimes of violence and destruction in coordination with Israeli covert ops forces. I try to be in al Quds each year during this event, as a witness of history and a living shield of the people, with my fellow fedayeen and liberation forces throughout both Palestine and Israel.
We must liberate both Palestine and Israel from the iron grip of decades of state tyranny and terror, brutal repression and imperial conquest, the falsification of peoples by a nation which is a mirage of lies and illusions, propaganda, rewritten history, the silencing and erasure of its victims and the false heroism of a vicious military society and a kleptocratic state.
During the Third Intifada which began on May 10 of 2021 with the defense of al Aqsa we exposed the inhumanity and cruelty of Israel’s Occupation, and for a brief and glorious moment brought down the xenophobic oligarchy of the Netanyahu regime. This was a great and historic victory, but an incremental one; for Israel in once again captured by Netanyahu’s settler regime, Gaza lies in ruins and her people are starving to death as the world does nothing, and we must now begin once more the great work of forging a free society of equals wherein Israelis and Palestinians are fellow citizens under the same law for all, and in which theocratic tyranny and sectarian division is abandoned for a secular state of inclusion and diversity.
As the Freedom Flotilla which bears Greta Thunberg and her crewmates sails to Gaza to break the blockade of humanitarian aid under the menace of spy drones and a closing Israeli attack fleet, as the March To Gaza prepares in Cairo to seize the gates of Rafah now barricaded by both Egypt and Israel beginning on the 13th, let us unite in solidarity of action for the liberation of Palestine and Israel.
We must also here and in all lands where humans dwell balance the scales of justice and free ourselves from the shadows of our history, lay down our arms, throw open the gates of our borders, and in this benighted and derelict city which bears dual identities as Jerusalem and al Quds reimagine Israel and Palestine as a unified nation.
Are we not our brother’s keeper?
As written four years ago by Eresh Omar Jamalin in The Daily Star, “Today, June 5, marks the 53rd anniversary of the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbours Egypt, Jordan and Syria. In the six days of conflict, Israel captured the Sinai and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Syrian Golan Heights—all of which, except for the Sinai, it still illegally occupies.”
“The war itself may have lasted only six days, but the occupation that includes the remaining 22 percent of Palestinian land that was conquered by Israel during the war is now in its sixth decade. While Palestine’s freedom struggle has continued in many different forms, so has Israel’s brutal repression of Palestinians. On the scale of “morality”, this is “the greatest issue of our time”, as described by the great Nelson Mandela.”
And what has this terrible conquest brought? As Mehdi Hasan wrote in The Intercept in 2017; “Fifty long years of occupation; of dispossession and ethnic cleansing; of house demolitions and night curfews; of checkpoints, walls, and permits.
Fifty years of bombings and blockades; of air raids and night raids; of “targeted killings” and “human shields”; of tortured Palestinian kids.
Fifty years of racial discrimination and ethnic prejudice; of a “separate but unequal” two-tier justice system for Palestinians and Israelis; of military courts and “administrative detention.”
Fifty years of humiliation and subjugation; of pregnant Palestinian women giving birth at checkpoints; of Palestinian cancer patients denied access to radiation therapy; of Palestinian footballers prevented from reaching their matches.
Fifty years of pointless negotiations and failed peace plans: Allon, Rogers, Fahd, Fez, Reagan, Madrid, Oslo, Wye River, Camp David, Taba, Red Sea, Annapolis. What did they deliver for the occupied Palestinians? Aside from settlements, settlements, and more settlements?”
Let us Boycott, Divest, and Sanction the state of Israel until they return all Occupied Territories to their rightful owners, to whom they owe reparations not unlike those America owes the descendants of her former slaves whose labor created our nation’s wealth and power and the indigenous Native Americans we stole and conquered our nation from, and begin to heal the legacies of unequal power, theocratic nationalist terror, and racial injustice.
Let us escape the legacies of our history which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail, and bring a transformative Reckoning for the systems of oppression which have entrapped us all.
5 يونيو 2025 سبعة وخمسون عامًا من الاحتلال وإرهاب الدولة الثيوقراطية وفاشيات الدم والإيمان والتربة الإسرائيلية: ذكرى سقوط القدس في حرب الأيام الستة عام 1967
في مثل هذا اليوم، بدأ عصر القوة والظلام قبل سبعة وخمسين عامًا، وهو أطول احتلال عسكري في العالم، مع سقوط القدس في أيدي الغزو الإسرائيلي؛ صدى قاتم لجريمة أخرى من جرائم إرهاب الدولة الثيوقراطية، نهاية حرب الأيام الستة في 10 يونيو، والتي تتقاسم العار مع أول إعدام لمحاكمات السحرة في سالم عام 1692 عندما تم شنق بريدجيت بيشوب.
ويستمر هذا الأمر حتى اليوم، حيث تظل دولة إسرائيل وكيلاً أمريكياً في هيمنتنا الإقليمية للقوة والامتيازات، وهي تهديد عدائي ومعادٍ للأجانب يؤمن أصولنا الاستراتيجية الأكثر أهمية للسيطرة الإمبريالية، أي النفط، لسيطرتنا على الوقود الأحفوري كمورد استراتيجي. يمنحنا السيطرة على كل شيء آخر، في كل مكان.
هذا هو السبب الحقيقي الذي يجعل إسرائيل قادرة على جعلنا متواطئين في الإبادة الجماعية واستخدام المجاعة وتدمير المستشفيات كأسلحة للحرب الشاملة كما صممها فرانكو وهتلر وتم اختبارها في غرنيكا، وأمريكا لا تفعل شيئا لإنهاء عهد الموت ولا تقديم حساب للتخلي عن حقوقنا الإنسانية العالمية.
إن اعتماد حضارتنا على النفط لا يهدد بقاء البشرية والأرض باعتبارها سفينة الحياة فحسب، بل إنه يشكل أيضاً الرافعة الكبرى للإمبريالية التي يستعبد بها البعض منا ويسيطرون على الجماهير العظيمة من الضعفاء والمحرومين.
إذا كان أولئك الذين تخدم حياتهم حياتنا مختلفون أيضًا عنا، من خلال تمثيل العرق أو الإيمان أو الأمة أو الأصل التاريخي، فهذا أفضل بكثير للمستفيدين من الطغيان الفاشي. عندما لا يوجد مثل هؤلاء الآخرين، يجب على الدولة أن تخلق البعض منهم، لأن الدولة تتجسد في العنف.
لقد تعلمت إسرائيل الدروس الخاطئة من النازيين؛ القوة لا تصنع الحق، والقوة ليست الشيء الوحيد الذي له قيمة، والقدرة على إخضاع الآخرين من خلال العنف والقوة والسيطرة لا تمنح السلطة ولا التفوق. في الواقع العكس هو الصحيح. الطغاة يحكمون بالخوف ويحكمون به، ويتم التضحية بالشرعية والسلطة من قبل أولئك الذين يستخدمون القوة، وأولئك الذين يريدون استعبادنا يقرون بأنهم لا يستطيعون البقاء على قيد الحياة مثل نظرائنا.
يحتفل الإسرائيليون اليوم باحتلال القدس باعتباره يوم العلم، مع كل تسليح الإيمان لخدمة السلطة والهوية الوطنية التي تنطوي عليها الأعلام، وتنتهك المساحات الفلسطينية والإسلامية لفرض الهيمنة من خلال الإرهاب بينما ترتكب الأصول التي يمكن إنكارها على غرار قمصان هتلر البنية جرائم. أعمال العنف والدمار بالتنسيق مع قوات العمليات السرية الإسرائيلية. وأنا هنا في القدس شاهدا على التاريخ ودرعا حيا للشعب مع الفدائيين وقوى التحرير في كل من فلسطين وإسرائيل.
يجب علينا أن نحرر فلسطين وإسرائيل من القبضة الحديدية لعقود من طغيان الدولة والإرهاب، والقمع الوحشي والغزو الإمبراطوري، وتزييف الشعوب من قبل أمة هي سراب من الأكاذيب والأوهام، والدعاية، وإعادة كتابة التاريخ، والإسكات والمحو. ضحاياه والبطولة الكاذبة للمجتمع العسكري الشرير والدولة الكليبتوقراطية.
خلال الانتفاضة الثالثة التي بدأت في 10 مايو 2021 بالدفاع عن الأقصى، كشفنا عن وحشية الاحتلال الإسرائيلي وقسوته، وأسقطنا الأوليغارشية المعادية للأجانب في نظام نتنياهو. وهذا نصر عظيم وتاريخي، ولكنه نصر تدريجي؛ والآن يبدأ العمل العظيم المتمثل في تشكيل مجتمع حر متساوٍ، حيث يصبح الإسرائيليون والفلسطينيون مواطنين زملاء بموجب نفس القانون للجميع، وحيث يتم التخلي عن الانقسام الطائفي من أجل الشمول والتنوع.
ويجب علينا أيضًا أن نوازن ميزان العدالة ونحرر أنفسنا من ظلال تاريخنا، ونلقي أسلحتنا، ونفتح أبواب حدودنا، ونعيد تصور إسرائيل وفلسطين كأمة موحدة.
ألسنا حارسين لأخينا؟
وكما كتب إيريش عمر جمالين قبل أربع سنوات في صحيفة ديلي ستار، “اليوم، 5 يونيو، يصادف الذكرى السنوية الثالثة والخمسين لحرب عام 1967 بين إسرائيل وجيرانها العرب مصر والأردن وسوريا. في الأيام الستة من الصراع، استولت إسرائيل على سيناء وقطاع غزة من مصر، والضفة الغربية والقدس الشرقية من الأردن، ومرتفعات الجولان السورية – وكلها، باستثناء سيناء، لا تزال تحتلها بشكل غير قانوني.
ربما استمرت الحرب نفسها ستة أيام فقط، لكن الاحتلال الذي يشمل الـ 22% المتبقية من الأراضي الفلسطينية التي احتلتها إسرائيل خلال الحرب أصبح الآن في عقده السادس. وبينما استمر نضال فلسطين من أجل الحرية بأشكال عديدة ومختلفة، كذلك استمر القمع الوحشي الذي تمارسه إسرائيل ضد الفلسطينيين. وعلى مقياس “الأخلاق” فهذه “أعظم قضية في عصرنا”، كما وصفها الزعيم العظيم نيلسون مانديلا.
وماذا جلب هذا الفتح الرهيب؟ وكما كتب مهدي حسن في موقع The Intercept عام 2017؛ «خمسون عامًا طويلًا من الاحتلال؛ ونزع الملكية والتطهير العرقي؛ وهدم المنازل وحظر التجول الليلي؛ من نقاط التفتيش والجدران و
سمح.
خمسون عاماً من التفجيرات والحصارات؛ والغارات الجوية والغارات الليلية. و”القتل المستهدف” و”الدروع البشرية”؛ من الاطفال الفلسطينيين المعذبين
خمسون عاماً من التمييز العنصري والتحيز العرقي؛ ونظام عدالة “منفصل ولكن غير متكافئ” من مستويين للفلسطينيين والإسرائيليين؛ المحاكم العسكرية و”الاعتقال الإداري”.
خمسون عاماً من الذل والقهر؛ والنساء الفلسطينيات الحوامل اللاتي يلدن عند نقاط التفتيش؛ من مرضى السرطان الفلسطينيين المحرومين من الحصول على العلاج الإشعاعي؛ منع لاعبي كرة القدم الفلسطينيين من الوصول إلى مبارياتهم.
خمسون عاماً من المفاوضات العبثية وخطط السلام الفاشلة: ألون، روجرز، فهد، فاس، ريغان، مدريد، أوسلو، واي ريفر، كامب ديفيد، طابا، البحر الأحمر، أنابوليس. ماذا قدموا للفلسطينيين المحتلين؟ غير المستوطنات، المستوطنات، ومزيد من المستوطنات؟”
دعونا نقاطع دولة إسرائيل ونجردها ونفرض العقوبات عليها حتى تعيد جميع الأراضي المحتلة إلى أصحابها الشرعيين، الذين يدينون لهم بتعويضات لا تختلف عن تلك التي تدين بها أمريكا لأحفاد عبيدها السابقين الذين خلقوا أمتنا والأمريكيين الأصليين. سرقوا أمتنا واحتلوها، وبدأوا في شفاء إرث القوة غير المتكافئة، والإرهاب القومي الثيوقراطي، والظلم العنصري.
دعونا نهرب من تراث تاريخنا الذي نسحبه خلفنا مثل ذيل زاحف غير مرئي، ونأتي بحساب تحويلي لأنظمة القمع التي أوقعتنا جميعًا في شركها.
Hebrew
5 ביוני 2025 חמישים ושבע שנות כיבוש, טרור מדינה תיאוקרטי ופשיזם ישראלי של דם, אמונה ואדמה: יום השנה לנפילת ירושלים במלחמת ששת הימים ב-1967
עידן של כוח וחושך החל ביום זה לפני חמישים ושבע שנים, הכיבוש הצבאי הארוך בעולם, עם נפילת אל קודס לכיבוש ישראלי; הד עגום לפשע אחר של טרור מדינתי תיאוקרטי, סיום מלחמת ששת הימים ב-10 ביוני תוך שיתוף לשון הרע עם ההוצאה להורג הראשונה של משפטי המכשפות בסאלם ב-1692 כשבריג’ט בישופ נתלה.
זה נמשך גם היום, כשמדינת ישראל נותרה נציגה אמריקאית בהגמוניה האזורית של כוח וזכות, איום לוחמני ושנאת זרים המבטיח את הנכס האסטרטגי החיוני ביותר שלנו של שליטה אימפריאלית, נפט, לשליטתנו בדלק מאובנים כמשאב אסטרטגי. נותן לנו שליטה על כל השאר, בכל מקום.
הנה הסיבה האמיתית לכך שישראל יכולה לגרום לנו להיות שותפים לרצח עם ושימוש ברעב והרס בתי חולים כנשק של מלחמה טוטאלית כפי שתכננו פרנקו והיטלר ונבדקו בגרניקה, ואמריקה לא עושה דבר כדי לסיים את שלטון המוות ולא להביא חשבון לנטישת זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו.
ההסתמכות של הציוויליזציה שלנו על נפט לא רק מאיימת על הישרדותם של המין האנושי ושל כדור הארץ כארון חיים, אלא היא גם המנוף הגדול של האימפריאליזם שבאמצעותו חלקנו משעבדים ושולטים בהמונים הגדולים של חסרי הכוח והמנושלים.
אם אלה שחייהם משרתים את חיינו שונים גם מעצמנו, על ידי ייצוגים של גזע, אמונה ואומה או מוצא היסטורי, אז עדיף לזוכים של העריצות הפשיסטית. כאשר אין אחרים כאלה, המדינה חייבת ליצור חלק, שכן המדינה מגולמת באלימות.
ישראל למדה את הלקחים הלא נכונים מהנאצים; כוח אינו עושה נכון, כוח אינו הדבר היחיד שיש לו ערך, והיכולת להכניע אחרים באמצעות אלימות, כוח ושליטה אינה מעניקה לא סמכות ולא עליונות. למעשה ההפך הוא הנכון; עריצות הן שולטות על ידי פחד והן נשלטות על ידו, לגיטימציה וסמכות מוקרבות על ידי אלה שמשתמשים בכוח, ומי שישעבד אותנו מודים שהם לא יכולים לשרוד כשווים לנו.
היום הישראלים חוגגים את כיבוש ירושלים כיום הדגל, עם כל הנשק של האמונה בשירות לשלטון וזהות לאומית שדגלים מרמזים עליה, ומפרים את המרחבים הפלסטינים והאסלאמיים כדי לבסס דומיננטיות באמצעות טרור, בעוד שנכסים ניתנים להכחשה שעוצבו בדוגמת חולצות החום של היטלר מבצעים פשעים של אלימות והרס בתיאום עם כוחות מבצעים חשאיים ישראלים. אני כאן באל קודס כעד להיסטוריה וכמגן חי של העם, עם כוחות פדאיין ושחרור ברחבי פלסטין וישראל כאחד.
עלינו לשחרר הן את פלסטין והן את ישראל מאחיזת הברזל של עשרות שנים של עריצות מדינה וטרור, דיכוי אכזרי וכיבוש אימפריאלי, זיוף עמים על ידי אומה שהיא תעתוע של שקרים ואשליות, תעמולה, היסטוריה משוכתבת, השתקה ומחיקה. של קורבנותיה והגבורה השקרית של חברה צבאית מרושעת ומדינה קלפטוקרטית.
במהלך האינתיפאדה השלישית שהחלה ב-10 במאי 2021 עם הגנת אל אקצא, חשפנו את חוסר האנושיות והאכזריות של הכיבוש הישראלי, והפלנו את האוליגרכיה השונאת זרים של משטר נתניהו. זהו ניצחון גדול והיסטורי, אך מצטבר; לעת עתה מתחילה העבודה הגדולה של גיבוש חברה חופשית של שווים, שבה ישראלים ופלסטינים הם אזרחים עמיתים תחת אותו חוק לכולם, ובה חלוקה עדתית מוזנחת לשם הכלה וגיוון.
עלינו גם לאזן את מאזני הצדק ולהשתחרר מצללי ההיסטוריה שלנו, להניח את נשקינו, לפתוח את שערי גבולותינו, ולדמיין מחדש את ישראל ופלסטין כעם מאוחד.
האם איננו שומר אחינו?
כפי שכתב לפני ארבע שנים ערש עומר ג’מאלין ב”דיילי סטאר”, “היום, 5 ביוני, מלאו 53 שנים למלחמת 1967 בין ישראל לשכנותיה הערביות מצרים, ירדן וסוריה. בששת ימי הסכסוך כבשה ישראל את סיני ורצועת עזה ממצרים, את הגדה המערבית ומזרח ירושלים מירדן ואת רמת הגולן הסורית – את כולם, מלבד סיני, היא עדיין כובשת באופן בלתי חוקי”.
“המלחמה עצמה אולי נמשכה שישה ימים בלבד, אבל הכיבוש שכולל את 22 האחוזים הנותרים מהאדמה הפלסטינית שנכבשה על ידי ישראל במהלך המלחמה נמצא כעת בעשור השישי. בעוד שמאבק החופש של פלסטין נמשך בצורות רבות ושונות, כך גם הדיכוי האכזרי של ישראל את הפלסטינים. בקנה מידה של “מוסר”, זהו “הנושא הגדול ביותר של זמננו”, כפי שתואר על ידי נלסון מנדלה הגדול.
ומה הביא הכיבוש הנורא הזה? כפי שכתב מהדי חסן ב-The Intercept ב-2017; “חמישים שנות כיבוש; של נישול וטיהור אתני; של הריסות בתים ועוצר לילה; של מחסומים, חומות ו
היתרים.
חמישים שנה של הפצצות וחסימות; של התקפות אוויר ופשיטות לילה; של “הרג ממוקד” ו”מגן אנושי”; של ילדים פלסטינים מעונים.
חמישים שנה של אפליה גזעית ודעות קדומות אתניות; של מערכת משפט דו-שכבתית “נפרדת אך לא שוויונית” לפלסטינים ולישראלים; של בתי משפט צבאיים ו”מעצר מנהלי”.
חמישים שנה של השפלה והכנעה; של נשים פלסטיניות הרות שיולדות במחסומים; מחולי סרטן פלסטינים נמנעה גישה לטיפול בקרינה; של כדורגלנים פלסטינים נמנעו מלהגיע למשחקיהם.
חמישים שנה של משא ומתן חסר טעם ותוכניות שלום כושלות: אלון, רוג’רס, פאהד, פאס, רייגן, מדריד, אוסלו, נהר ווי, קמפ דיוויד, טאבה, ים סוף, אנאפוליס. מה הם סיפקו לפלסטינים הכבושים? חוץ מהתנחלויות, התנחלויות ועוד התנחלויות?”
הבה נחרים, נסלק וסנקציות על מדינת ישראל עד שהם יחזירו את כל השטחים הכבושים לבעליהם החוקיים, להם הם חייבים פיצויים לא שונים מאלה שאמריקה חייבת לצאצאי עבדיה לשעבר שהעבודה יצרה את האומה שלנו ואת האינדיאנים הילידים שאנו גנבו וכבשו את האומה שלנו, והתחילו לרפא את המורשת של כוח לא שוויוני, טרור לאומני תיאוקרטי ואי צדק גזעני. הבה נמלט מהמורשת של ההיסטוריה שלנו שאנו גוררים מאחורינו כמו זנב זוחל בלתי נראה, ונביא חשבון נפש מהפך למערכות הדיכוי שלכד
The beautiful, brilliant, compassionate, transgressive, and fabulously wonderful and strange alternate universe of Edmund White seduces and outrages, provokes and problematizes the imaginal spaces of our civilization which like the discontiguous and off kilter celebrity portraits of Andy Warhol explore our ambiguous boundaries and interrogate the ill fitting interdependence of our chiaroscuros of self and other.
Best of all is his ability to laugh at himself, to turn his infinite curiosity about the world and the savage lyricism of his unique Gaze on himself as well as all of us, and thereby create new possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
He began by reinventing himself as Wilde’s Dorian Grey, questioned the relationships between Beauty and The Good, and ended in Beckettian Absurdism.
I was saddened by the news of his death, because he tried to give us all something beautiful to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world, and now there will be no more of this from him. We must now, each of us, bear it on alone, with little but the redemptive power of love of illuminate those truths written in our flesh.
All that matters in the end is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
As I wrote in my celebration of his life and work in my literary publication Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium entitled Edmund White, on his birthday January 13; Fearless, empathetic, of refined and elegant prose, heir to the European belles lettres tradition, beloved for his compelling autobiographies and his glittering, insightful literary criticism, Edmund White has polished and made beautiful our lives by the invocations of his words.
His fame was won on the stunning power and lyrical beauty of his autobiographical trilogy A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony.
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s, a fourth volume of novelized autobiography, can stand on its own as a history of the New York intellectual arts scene during the Cultural Revolution.
States of Desire Revisited: Travels in Gay America, his classic of world literature and celebrated masterpiece, is a road trip through American possibilities of being human and an exploration of cultural boundaries of identity and the transgressions which challenge and define them.
He wrote the foreword to The Stonewall Reader by New York Public Library, the definitive work on this pivotal moment of history.
Our Paris: Sketches from Memory, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris, and The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, together form a collage of beautiful images, memories, and the interfaces between persons and the places which shape one another through time. I love his Paris Trilogy best; like the Netflix telenovela Emily In Paris it will make you want to go live there and become part of its story.
Hotel de Dream, a biographical novel of Stephen Crane which recalls Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, borders on Surrealism as the fantasies and memories of the dying author conflate and intertwine in marvelous ways. I wonder now how much was a self portrait and Freudian death transcendence, and how much a version of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memiors Of Hadrian crossed with Fellini’s 81/2.
Fanny: A Fiction, a historical novel concerning the relationship between Mrs Francis Trollope and her great friend, the radical Fanny Wright, is a sweeping epic of America, the fragile and complex nature of Idealism and the difficulties of making the transcendent real, and the infinite varieties and vulnerabilities of love.
His brilliant and gorgeously written literary criticism and biographies run to several books, all wonderful resources for anyone who loves to read, which include: Sacred Monsters, Arts and Letters, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, Genet: A Biography, Marcel Proust, Altars by Robert Mapplethorpe & essay by Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading, Sacred Monsters, and The Burning Library: Essays.
Conversations with Edmund White provides an intimate overview of his ideas.
A Saint from Texas, among the best books of 2020, is the subject of a brief review of mine which I reprint here; From the disciple of Proust who carries onward Truman Capote’s weaponization of gossip and Oscar Wilde’s art of the epigrammatic phrase, in a classic doppelganger story which interrogates themes of identity, otherness, and belonging in an allegorical fable of two sisters, one who becomes a nun in Columbia, the other who becomes a society matron in Paris.
On a secondary level Edmund White’s A Saint From Texas extends the Proustian mission of exploring love as a pathology and life as survivorship among hostile circumstances. Here as in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice beauty is a deceptive illusion, to hold wealth and power is also to be its captive, all values are corruptive lies, all authorized identities and normalities are falsifications and theft of the soul, and the shadow of death watches over all our revels.
A Saint From Texas is a savage and relentless bonfire of the vanities, with ravishing and incandescent language which masks its descent into the Absurdism of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.
As always the ars poetica and lyric beauty of his language and the visionary insight of his aberrant angle of view are delightful and like the transformational cycles of trauma and redemption which are his subjects serve to exalt and enrapture us.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As written by Alan Hollinghurst, Yiyun Li, Colm Tóibín, Adam Mars-Jones, Olivia Laing, Mendez, Tom Crewe and Seán Hewitt in The Guardian, in an article entitled Edmund White remembered: ‘He was the patron saint of queer literature’;
“‘He showed me gay fiction could also be high art’
Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst
British novelist
Edmund White’s luminous career was in part a matter of often dark history: he lived through it all. He was a gay teenager in an age of repression, self-hatred and anxious longing for a “cure”; he was a young man in the heyday of gay liberation, and the libidinous free-for-all of 1970s New York; he was a witness to the terrifying destruction of the gay world in the Aids epidemic in the 1980s and 90s. All these things he wrote about, in a long-term commitment to autofiction – a narrative adventure he embarked on with no knowledge of where or when the story would end. He is often called a chronicler of these extraordinary epochs, but he was something much more than that, an artist with an utterly distinctive sensibility, humorous, elegant, avidly international. You read him not just for the unsparing account of sexual life but for the thrill of his richly cultured mind and his astonishingly observant eye.
What amazed me about A Boy’s Own Story, when it came out in 1982, was that a stark new candour about sexual experience should be conveyed with such gorgeous luxuriance of style, such richness of metaphor and allusion. This new genre, gay fiction, could also be high art, and almost at once a worldwide bestseller! It was an amazing moment, which would be liberating for generations of queer writers who followed. These younger writers Edmund himself followed and fostered with unusual generosity – I feel my whole career as a novelist has been sustained by his example and encouragement. In novels and peerless memoirs right up to the last year of his life he kept telling the truth about what he had done and thought and felt – he was a matchless explorer of the painful comedy of ageing and failing physically while the libido stayed insatiably strong. It’s hard to take in that this magnificent experiment has now come to a close.
‘He brought a lightness into my life’
Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li
American author
About 10 days ago, when I left the east coast for a book launch in London, Edmund and I were in the middle of reading Elizabeth Bowen’s first novel, The Hotel. “Don’t you worry, darling, we’ll finish when you get back,” he said.
Edmund and I were close friends for the past eight years. At the beginning of the pandemic, we met at 5pm on Skype, Monday through Friday, which became our two-person book club. This continued after the pandemic. The first book we read was The Complete Stories by Elizabeth Bowen. Between that collection and The Hotel, my estimation is that we read between 80 and 120 books. Sometimes we marvelled with fake shivering (Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, for instance). Sometimes we compared our underlined parts in the books, and when we found we underlined the same adjective, the same phrase, or the same paragraph, we pretended, once again, to be surprised. When we read Henry Green’s novels, Edmund would act the dialogues out in a British accent. There was a detail from a Yasunari Kawabata novel that we returned to often as a private joke: “Are you low on B?” (As in Vitamin B.) “Yes, I feel low on B.” This would be the closest that we would admit that we were feeling saddened by the losses in our lives. Edmund lost many beloveds to Aids; I lost two children to suicide. And yet there was never a heaviness in our conversations. I think Edmund brought a lightness and a cloudlessness into my life. We gossiped, we giggled, and sometimes I would stare at my little screen, dumbfounded, when Edmund enlightened me with a graphic reminisce of gay sex from 20 or 30 years ago, in a castle or back alley in Europe. Then we would stare at each other before bursting into laughter.
When we first read Bowen together, sometimes Edmund or I would say, “I wish I could write like this.” And the other person would repeat, “I wish I could write like this.” In a few days, I shall return to America where Edmund Valentine White III is no more, and I shall finish The Hotel by myself. Neither he nor I will make our friendship into fiction. I wish I knew a pair of characters like us in literature.
‘He loved gossip and intrigue’
Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín
Irish novelist
Edmund White wrote with style; he cared about style; he made it seem natural and effortless. He wrote and indeed spoke with a kind of delightful candour. He loved revelation and gossip and intrigue. The idea that everyone he knew had secrets fascinated him. He chuckled a lot. He read all the latest French novels. He saw no reason why he should keep things to himself and, because he was gay in a time when gay life had not appeared much in fiction, that became one of his great subjects.
A Boy’s Own Story, which came out in 1982, had enormous influence. It was an essential book for several generations of gay men. In The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, White charted the changes and the tragedies of the gay life that had seemed so promising in A Boy’s Own Story.
In writing about gay characters, White also became one of the chroniclers of city life, especially New York and Paris. (During a brief stay in Princeton, he suggested that the only relief from tedium was to howl nightly at the moon.) White was in full possession of a prose style that was deceptive in how it functioned. His writing could feel like conversation or someone thinking clearly and honestly or taking you slowly into his confidence. The cadences were close to the rhythms of speaking, but there was also a mannered tone buried in the phrasing, which moved the diction to a level above the casual and the conversational.
The book of his that I love most is his 2000 novel The Married Man, which is a kind of retelling of Henry James’s The Ambassadors. White dramatises with considerable subtlety the conflict between the idea that the personal is political (“which,” White wrote in 2002, “may be America’s most salient contribution to the armamentarium of progressive politics”) and the legacy of Vichy France filled with secrecy and ambiguity and the ability to live several compartmentalised lives.
In the recent years, White’s apartment in Chelsea, shared with his husband, the writer Michael Carroll, was a centre of fun and laughter, a place where you got all the latest news. Books were piled up. They, too, were treated as kind of news. He worked every day, writing at the dining-room table. He made light of his illness. He was, in many essential ways, a lesson to us all.
‘I gave his novel a bad review – which positively inflamed his charm’
Adam Mars-Jones
Adam Mars-Jones
British novelist
I met Ed White in London in 1983, at the time of the UK publication of A Boy’s Own Story. I had reviewed the novel for Gay News, and he knew that my verdict was unfavourable but not what my objection was (I described it as a cake that had been iced but not baked). This didn’t deter him from making a conquest of some sort – a degree of resistance could positively inflame his charm. We took a stroll round Covent Garden. I bought him a punnet of whitecurrants, a fruit with which he was unfamiliar, though feigning ignorance in order to please me would have been perfectly in character. He must have registered my lack of carnal interest but went on sexualising our promenade, asking me if one bystander was my type, telling me that another had given me the eye.
To have become his friend without even a moment of sexual closeness was, a least at that time in the New York gay world, an anomaly and perhaps even a distinction. I visited Ed several times in Paris, sleeping on the daybed in his enviable flat on the Île Saint-Louis. In the morning he would help his ex-lover John Purcell get ready for a day of graduate study, a routine – as he was well aware – with overtones of a mother packing her son off to school. We would have one more cup of coffee and listen to some chamber music, Poulenc a favourite. Then he would say, “I must get back to the darling novel” (he was working on Caracole at the time), and lie on his bed to write in longhand. I loved those visits, and some of that was down to Paris, but most to his hospitality. For a night in he might buy rabbit loin in mustard sauce pre-prepared from a traîteur, unthinkable sophistication. It was from him I learned that “cutting the nose off the brie” was not just bad manners, as I hadn’t known, but a named crime.
He was writing a monthly column for American Vogue, sosocialising was a job requirement as well as a pleasure. Even so, I was mildly scandalised that his French literary friends took it for granted that he would pick up the tab in restaurants. Priggishly I would treat him to a meal now and then, though I think he took more pleasure in largesse than in the presumption of equality.
‘He expanded the bounds of what could be written about’
Olivia Laing
Olivia Laing
British writer
I saw Edmund White on the A train once, like glimpsing an emperor in the grocery shop. I must have been barely in my teens when I first read A Boy’s Own Story, the Picador paperback with the brooding boy in a purple vest on the cover. I was seduced by everything: the lovely, supple, almost shimmering language, the explicit precision applied to sex and class. Cornholing, a word I’d never heard before. Above all, it held out an invitation. It was from White that I realised a writer takes the rough material life gives – unwanted, shabby, maybe repellent – and makes it their own by way of sensibility and style, that alchemical translation.
Years later, I met him. He was at an adjoining table when my first American editor took me out for lunch. He was celebrating too, toasting the publication of Justin Spring’s Secret Historian, a book about the unconventional sexual researcher Samuel Steward. It was pure White territory: sex explored exactly and without shame. His presence that day felt like a blessing. He interwove the elegant and the explicit, he expanded the bounds of what could be written about and also how a life could be lived. There is a generation of writers you write for without quite realising it. They set the bar, and then they go. That beautiful room is emptier now.
‘His work was as fresh as gay bar gossip’
Mendez
Mendez
British novelist
Edmund White was one of those writers whose work was as fresh and immediate as gay bar gossip, but from a place of deeper learning and knowledge. I met him once in 2019, over dinner with Alan Hollinghurst in New York, and he remained every bit as witty and sex-positive as I’d found him in his books. The incredible thing about him is that he was one of very few gay writers to remember the pre-Aids era and survive into old age. When I think of White I think of the bathhouses of 1970s New York City and his conspiratorial storytelling, though that’s not to undersell him as a prose stylist. Such was his keenness to connect with a gay-literate rather than a mainstream, almost anthropologically minded audience, that The Joy of Gay Sex, which he co-wrote, retains a contraband feel to this day.
‘He showed us what was really going on’
Tom Crewe
Tom Crewe
British novelist
Edmund White was not a gateway to gay literature, or to the gay experience, since that would imply that he was not in himself a main destination. However, he was very often the man who opened the door to the expectant reader, who took them by the elbow, led them inside and eagerly showed them everything that was going on – that was really going on. There are his novels and his memoirs, of course, with their brave, bracing, dirty and dignifying candour, and his biographies, of Genet, Proust, Rimbaud, not to mention The Joy of Gay Sex, co-authored with Charles Silverstein. But I am thinking especially of States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), which records his visits to the diverse gay communities across the country, before they were united by the internet and representation in mainstream culture. It is of its time – often magnificently so, as in its description of the “San Francisco look”:
A strongly marked mouth and swimming, soulful eyes (the effect of the moustache); a V-shaped torso by metonymy from the open V of the half-unbuttoned shirt above the sweaty chest; rounded buttocks squeezed in jeans, swelling out from the cinched-in waist, further emphasised by the charged erotic insignia of coloured handkerchiefs and keys; a crotch instantly accessible through the buttons (button one already undone) and enlarged by being pressed, along with the scrotum, to one side; legs moulded in perfect, powerful detail; the feet simplified, brutalised and magnified by the boots. For gay men there are three erotic zones – mouth, penis and anus – and all three are vividly dramatised by this costume.
But it is also of its time in its repeated, inevitable attention to the brute facts of homophobia and how it crowds, limits and costs lives. The book, accidentally, became a vital record of gay life on the brink of Aids: the epidemic’s outsized impact in the US (which White went on to describe and protest) was a direct consequence of this indulged prejudice. But States of Desire doesn’t memorialise a lost Eden – “Gay life,” White said, “will never please an ideologue; it’s too untidy, too linked to the unpredictable vagaries of anarchic desire.” At one point in his travels, in Portland, he discovered “an unusual degree of integration with the straight community” worthy of remark: “A gay single or couple must deal with the family next door and the widow across the street; the proximity promotes a mixed gay-straight social life – parties, dinners, bridge games, a shared cup of coffee.” It’s a reminder of how amazingly far we’ve travelled. Edmund White was one of the people that brought us here – but he didn’t think integration and toleration, the right to marriage and a family, was an end-point. It was just one sight on the tour, and White showed us, with a proper absence of shame or embarrassment, many others rather more thrilling. Gay life shouldn’t ever mean one thing in particular; but what it can provide, as he wrote in States of Desire, “is some give in the social machine”.
‘His books were a fabulous reel of anecdote and savage humour’
Seán Hewitt
Seán Hewitt
Edmund White was true giant of letters, the patron saint of queer literature. I can still remember, vividly, reading (in the wrong order), the books of the trilogy from A Boy’s Own Story to The Farewell Symphony, completely absorbed in White’s camp, biting humour, his name-dropping, his ability to capture self-delusion, fantasy, disappointment, anger, lust and romance in a heady, whirling voice. I remember saying to a friend, then, that I thought I could read him for ever.
White’s books were a fabulous, unending reel of anecdote and savage humour, attuned to the erotic impulse of writing, full of mincing queens, effeminate boys and brutal men: a fully stocked world of idolatry and abnegation. What stays with me, years later, is not only the biting social observation, but also the religious tenor of his mind, the affinities of his characters with the world of the sacred, of mystics and martyrs, which processed shame with such exuberance of feeling. I felt, in the company of his voice, educated in a secret, glamorous world, which was operatic in its emotion and brilliantly arch in its range of reference.
In his final book, The Loves of My Life, White proved himself an iconoclast to the end. Even the epigraph made me chuckle, because I could almost hear him chuckling to himself while setting it down: “Mae West hearing a bad actress auditioning for West’s hit comedy Sex: ‘She’s flushin’ my play down the terlet!’”. His honesty, even in his last years, was still enough to make you wince, still sharp enough to bring a shock of laughter, still melancholy and occasionally self-pitying enough to catch you off guard with all the many sadnesses of the world. I’m grateful that he left us so much work, and that the full, unadulterated sound of his voice is so potent, so convivial, so fresh and living on every page.”
As written by Neil Bartlett in The Guardian, in an article entitled Where to start with: Edmund White: After the news of White’s death, here is a guide to a foundational writer of gay lives and elder statesman of American queer literary fiction; “Edmund White, who has died aged 85, was born in Cincinatti, to conservative, homophobic parents. Although he soon rejected almost all his family’s cultural values, he retained their work ethic: White published 36 books in his lifetime, and was working on a tale of queer life in Versailles when he died.
Starting out his career in New York, during the magical and radical years that fell between gay liberation and Aids, he then worked hard and long enough to be eventually acclaimed as the “elder stateman” of American queer literary fiction. White’s most characteristic trick as a writer was to pair his impeccably “high” style with the raunchiest possible subject-matter. When talking about gay men’s sex-lives, the goods have rarely been delivered so elegantly. Author and director Neil Bartlett suggests some good places to start.
The entry point
A Boy’s Own Story (1982) was White’s breakthrough in the UK. A wonderfully well-told and clear-eyed chronicle of one young man’s progress though the 1950s, it was streets ahead of any other queer “coming of age” novel that had appeared up to that point – and changed British publishing. This was the novel that finally proved to the industry that if your sentences are beautiful and true enough, then book-buyers of all stripes will love you. And not despite the fact that you’re gay, but because of it.
If you want to get to know the author
White wrote six volumes of autobiography; in addition, almost all of his fiction has clear autobiographical roots. For its lavishly deadpan evocation of a truly appalling childhood – and especially for its brutal takedown of White’s own trainwreck of a father – try starting your relationship with the man behind the fabulous sentences by sampling My Lives. And to get his view on Aids and its aftershocks – the context of almost everything he wrote – read The Married Man, his autobiographical novel, which ends with an only very lightly fictionalised account of the death of White’s lover Hubert Sorin from Aids in 1994. The heartbreak that lies at the heart of the last 45 years of gay life has often been written about, but rarely so dispassionately or powerfully as in those pages.
The groundbreaking one
White’s book that almost no one now talks about is one of his most important – and enjoyable. The Joy of Gay Sex is a gloriously sex-positive, wise and witty compendium of advice about how to get the best out of your body – and your heart. The term gets used too often, but this is a groundbreaking volume.
The one to drop into dinner-party conversation
White wrote as he talked: unstoppably, generously and at speed. The exception to this rule was his magisterial 1993 biography of Jean Genet, which took him seven years to research and finish. The result is a heartfelt tribute to Genet’s own art and a scrupulously well-organised account of how a gutter-born queer outsider became one of his country’s greatest literary stylists – and one of the most risk-taking political provocateurs of his century. Genet was about as unlike White in his background and life choices as a fellow gay author could have been; nonetheless, the fact that this book was a labour of love shows on its every page.
The most quotable
Forgetting Elena (1973) was White’s first published book. A scrupulously enigmatic account of life on Fire Island, off Long Island, it somehow manages to transmute its bewildered young protagonist’s doubts and fantasies into something as elegant, beautiful and mysteriously meaningful as a Japanese folding screen. Its opening also features my favourite sentence of White’s: “I am the first person in the house to awaken, but I am unsure of the implications.”
If you only read one
Any claim that White was a “great” writer as opposed to a merely brilliant, sexually explicit or culturally pioneering one – all of which he undoubtedly was – has to rest on his two “big” novels: The Farewell Symphony and The Married Man. The Farewell Symphony, which came out in 1997, is an account of one man’s experience during the almost unbelievable transformation of gay male life that happened between the 70s and 90s. Rooted as it is in very specific times and places, this book couldn’t be more deeply felt, more ambitious in its sense of contested cultural history – or simply better written. The Farewell Symphony and The Married Man, published in 2000, are a definitive refutation of the canard that “gay” writing can only ever really be of interest to a “gay” audience – and a significant part of the reason why that tired old argument is now so rarely heard.”
Edmund White remembered: ‘He was the patron saint of queer literature’
Torch of Liberty 