As I have been visited in strange dreams which are doorways to Infinitude, possibilities of being human, and journeys beyond the boundaries of time and of the Forbidden, so I wish to share with you glimpses into Earth Day Past, Present, and Future, fragmentary and conditional though they are, in the hope that we may be situated in our pivotal historical moment as agents of change and transformation, make empowered choices and take actions in our lives with awareness and responsibility for their consequences.
For in dreams we are free from the limits of our form, and may see beyond the illusion of the world and our own condition and place in it to discover paths forward to the healing of the world and the flaws of our humanity.
I was ten years old on the first Earth Day, and like many of the pivotal and defining moments of the counterculture I experienced it from the point of view of a child embedded in the interzones of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury and Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue and the access created by my parents. Such things remain written in my dreams of better futures, and I hope that our celebrations now of the beauty and wonders of our world and the interdependence and coevolution of humankind with it may do the same for new generations to whom we pass the torch.
If you are wondering why I have chosen to frame my Earth Day posts as a revision of A Christmas Carol, the story in which Charles Dickens wed socialism to Christian allegory and thereby originated Liberation Theology, it is because of the relevance of his primary insight, that the quality of our humanity is interdependent with the material conditions of our environment, and that our salvation from such conditions rests with our interdependence, solidarity of action, and duty of care for others, and also relevant to the existential threats we face today.
Herein I do not describe what I believe to be true about the continuance and balance of our past and future; I ask instead that each of us discover our own vision and work toward its realization. For the myriad pathways we will create together through our uniqueness and individual autonomy will overwhelm any barriers of authoritarian force and control in our path to a better future.
Because we need both kinds of truth, history and the poetic or metaphorical truth of literature with which to create ourselves, both Apollonian and Dionysian forces as Nietzsche called them, I offer here the witness of history by a founder of Earth Day, Denis Hayes, and that of Kurt Vonnegut both real and imagined.
The story of Earth Day at its founding and now, in the wake of the mass protests of Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg which seized the world at its balance, and when the Green New Deal promises to save us from our own greed and the need for control born of fear of nature, and after intervening generations of landmark legislation and the direct action of heroes of human survival and multitudes of organizations such as Earth First, can be usefully framed by bookend articles in The Village Voice in which Kurt Vonnegut stands in for all of us as he witnesses the spectacle of Earth Day.
As written by Anna Mayo in her article of 1970 entitled, Vonnegut & Earth Day: Can a Granfalloon Save the Planet?; “It was the night before Earth Day. Kurt Vonnegut, set off by the ambience of the Algonquin Hotel, looked more like Mark Twain than Hal Holbrook.
He was talking about the environment.
“Do you think, Mr. Vonnegut, that the environmental movement is a granfalloon or a universal karass?”
“Everybody knows the answer to that question. But that’s not for publication,” he said. “Not today. By next week, you might as well tell ’em.”
(In Vonnegutian, a granfalloon is a false and meaningless association of people. The Daughters of the American Revolution, citizens of a nation, the International Communist Party, and All-Persons-Under-30 are the examples of granfalloons. A karass, on the other hand, is a true connection among persons meant to be with one another.)
It’s now a week after Earth Day. It’s okay to print the answer. Which everybody knows anyway.
The environmental movement is a granfalloon. “It’s a big soppy pillow,” said Vonnegut. “Nobody’s going to do anything.” He did cheer up briefly and told about a man he’d heard of out at G.M. who’s “invented a big grinder to grind up all the automobiles. Last week they got rid of all the old cars in Cleveland.” He described the grinder with enthusiasm as looking like one a kid would design. He indicated a big crank.
Later he spoke, as in his novel The Sirens of Titan, of the essential capacity to bear pain. In Sirens, the hero is challenged to put up with shocks sent to antennae fixed in his brain whenever he starts to think about anything personal and/or true.
People read his books, Vonnegut supposes, because they’re interested in God. Also, he added, “I’m very funny. I’m the funniest writer in America. That’s always a trump.… All you can teach ’em,” he summed up, “all you can teach anybody, is how to endure.”
At noon, Earth Day, on the steps of the New York City Public Library, the Manhattan College of Music Brass Ensemble played fanfares, the sun burst forth, and whooshes of pigeons filled the air.
Kurt Vonnegut, famous author and Weary Space Traveler, emerged from the library portals and descended to the speakers’ platform. Among the several dignitaries, he was the gloomiest.
“It is unusual,” he began, “for a total pessimist to be speaking at a spring celebration. Anyway here we all are — the peaceful demonstrators. Mostly white… President Nixon has our power and our money and the best thing for him to do is get out of the war business. Will he do it? No.”
And as the war goes on, “meanwhile we are free to walk up and down Fifth Avenue picking up the trash missed by the Sanitation Department.… We can surely look forward to some great advertising campaigns.… Now polluters are looked upon as ordinary Joes just doing their jobs. In the future, they will be looked upon as swine.… Will the president do anything about pollution? Probably not.”
In closing, Vonnegut consoled the crowd — after his fashion. “Those who try their best to save the planet will find a loose, cheerful, sexy brass band waiting to honor them right outside the Pearly Gates. What will the band be playing? ‘When the Saints Come Marching In.’ ”
People in the crowd reacted to Vonnegut in various ways. One elderly lady paced this way and that, talking fiercely throughout all the speeches, including Vonnegut’s. Her name, she said, was Lydia Petrovna, and she looked it. She said she had been born just east of Odessa but had grown up in Yugoslavia. She was wearing black socks on her bulgy ankles, a large dusty black felt hat, and a Belgrade style maxi-coat. A gold monkey pin with green rhinestone eyes was pinned on the back of the hat and she carried a sturdy rubber-tipped cane. Although much of what she had to say was in Yugoslavian, she did get across in English that “the trouble is we don’t listen to the right teachers.”
This could be.
A music professor from Iowa with a neat white mustache walked down the middle of Fifth Avenue. He was holding a flower. He didn’t have time to make much of a comment on Vonnegut’s speech since he was intent on singing the 12th century canon, “Summer Is Icumen In,” in old English, all parts.
He preferred not to give his name, as he didn’t trust reporters. “Bad experiences, you know.” But he didn’t mind being called “Mr. Daffodil” for the day. “Like the roast beef once eaten on Fridays by resourceful medieval monks who baptized it as fish. ‘Te baptizo carpem.’ You can baptize me Daffodil,” he said rosily.
He and Lydia Petrovna gave the impression they knew a lot about how to endure.”
And today Kurt Vonnegut speaks to us during his afternoon tea on a break from time traveling, as written by Ali Smith in her article entitled Kurt Vonnegut Revisits Earth for Earth Day; “We talk with the space-and-time-traveling author about the plight of our planet, and if there is still hope for its rescue.
In 1970, Fred McDarrah captured pedestrians thronging NYC’s streets on the first Earth Day. Along with American flags, the Voice’s staff photographer was careful to include a fallout shelter sign in his frame.
“Sea pirates” named this land “America” back in 1492. They then proceeded to plunder, pillage, and poison it in the name of progress, as pirates will do. Four hundred and seventy-eight years later, a large group of these so-called “Americans” gathered in New York City for an event meant to send the message that in regard to all that plundering, pillaging, and poisoning, enough was enough.
On April 22, 1970, Fifth Avenue was shut down to traffic from 59th to 14th streets. Flyers urged “Come on foot, bicycle or roller skates … but leave your car at home!” People were sincere. They were angry. They were hopeful. They meant it! It was the first (soon to be annual) Earth Day.
At high noon, beloved social satirist, science fiction writer, humanist, and self-proclaimed pessimist Kurt Vonnegut faced the optimistic crowd from a stage at the feet of Patience and Fortitude, the marble lions that guard the New York Public Library, in midtown Manhattan. Mayor Lindsay was there, as were Leonard Bernstein, Paul Newman, Ali MacGraw, and many visionary scientists and pandering politicians. The general sense seemed to be that if corporations and regular people just understood the unprecedented damage we were doing to the planet, they would immediately want to change their behavior. (This was proved wrong.)
The night before, Village Voice writer Anna Mayo had asked Vonnegut whether the environmental movement was a “granfalloon” or a “universal karass,” the former being a false and meaningless association of people, the latter a much more sincere group (both terms coined by the author in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle). “Everybody knows the answer to that question,” he replied, as Mayo reported in her Voice article. “But that’s not for publication.” On the stage on Earth Day, Vonnegut abstractly addressed her question when he used the red-hot tip of his Pall Mall unfiltered cigarette to pop the bubble of optimism the crowd had been bouncing around in: “Now polluters are looked upon as ordinary Joes just doing their jobs. In the future, they will be looked upon as swine.… Will the president do anything about pollution? Probably not.”
He went on deflating the mood before ending with a faint glimmer of encouragement in these words: “Those who try their best to save the planet will find a loose, cheerful, sexy brass band waiting to honor them right outside the Pearly Gates. What will the band be playing? ‘When the Saints Come Marching In.’”
I’ve often wondered why Vonnegut doubled down on pessimism on that monumental day. After all, as he told Mayo back in 1970, “I’m very funny. I’m the funniest writer in America.” And humor always suggests a light at the end of the tunnel. It alleviates the pressure we feel about the things we’re most terrified of, and lets us know we’re not alone.
Vonnegut wrote and spoke for decades about our relentless, merciless destruction of the earth, long before “climate change” was in common parlance. I was sure a man this dedicated to the subject could offer gleaned knowledge and concrete advice.
So I was thrilled to secure the following interview with Kurt Vonnegut’s … ghost? … spirit? … time-traveling doppelgänger? …
Ali Smith: What is it you’d like me to call you, Mr. Vonnegut?
Kurt Vonnegut: I am a space wanderer named Kurt who has become unstuck in time.
OK, then. With your permission, I’ll call you Kurt-Vonnegut-Space-Wanderer. I’m not sure where you are right now or how much time we’ll have, so I’ll cut right to it. In your 1970 Earth Day speech, why didn’t you feel compelled to offer positivity to young people about their future on this planet?
Well, young people have been swindled. Persuaded that it is now up to them to save the world. It isn’t up to them. They don’t have the money and the power. They don’t even know how to handle dynamite. It is up to older people to save the world. Young people can help them. I thought somebody ought to tell it to them straight.
Do you believe that we—older people—can still fix the planet?
All that is required is that we become less selfish than we are. The planet is being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what is being manufactured is lousy, by and large. Something we have never had but desperately need is a Secretary of the Future, who can come up with concrete plans to help my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren. We also have to stop choosing abysmally ignorant optimists for positions of leadership. They were useful only so long as nobody had a clue as to what was really going on—during the past seven million years or so. The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be Nature’s stern but reasonable surrender terms.
What are those terms?
Mother Earth hasn’t told me directly—not even on this spectral plane where I currently reside. But she’s been sending very clear messages to the still-living in the form of hurricanes, sinkholes, failed crops, burnt-to-a-crisp forests, and her continued cosmic joke of producing psychopathic personalities, hell-bent on attaining leadership roles so they can kill as many of us as possible in as many ways as they can dream up.
Here are a few of the things we must do:
• Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
• Teach our kids, and ourselves, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
• Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
• Return all the automobiles to their home planet of Lingo-Three, where they can live and reproduce freely, rather than poisoning our atmosphere.
• If the government is really waging a war on drugs, let them go after petroleum.
• Reduce and stabilize our population.
• Stop thinking our grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive we may be since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship.
On that note, did you know that billionaires have recently been hurtling themselves into space inside rocket ships that look like giant penises? What do you think of them for doing that?
Kurt-Vonnegut-Space-Wanderer’s translucent hand draws, in glowing light in the air in front of him, his signature symbol—a 12-point asterisk meant to be an asshole.
Don’t you agree, though, that Earth Day was a step in the right direction? After all, since the first one, President Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, the modern versions of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were enacted, the first U.S. wind farms went up in New Hampshire, New York closed the Indian Point Nuclear Facility, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established, electric cars were invented, the bald eagle was taken off the endangered species list, Fridays for Future marches have mobilized youth worldwide, and the Green New Deal is being discussed seriously (at least by some) at the highest levels of government. Aren’t these reasons to be optimistic?
KVSW’s image is glitching wildly now and I sense my time with him is coming to a close. The desperation in my own voice surprises me:
WAIT! Please don’t go. WILL THIS ALL WORK OUT?
Surely he’s learned something out there in the great beyond. Surely, like me, he’s only a pessimist because he cares for creation so deeply he can’t bear to watch it destroyed. Surely … there’s hope.
But already he’s just a floating set of lips, a mustache, and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses obscured by smoke, with a static-laced voice that sounds like it’s being transmitted over a thin radio wave from outer space.
There is hope as long as you poison the minds of the young with humanity and encourage them to make a better world. Apologize to future generations for mortally wounding this sweet life-supporting planet. Tell them we were roaring drunk on petroleum. Possessions didn’t help alleviate our loneliness as much as advertisers said they would. We were Planet-Gobblers. Hopefully, they will forgive us.
And with a “pop,” he’s gone, and I’m left feeling abandoned and sad. But wait. Vonnegut’s given me all the advice needed for this descendant of what he described as “sea pirates” to stop huffing on the tailpipe of the American dream. Let the billionaires float away in their penis-shaped evacuation zeppelins. I’ll stay here, feet rooted firmly to this beautiful, wounded planet, with its mess and suffering, alongside others who aspire to give more than they take. I will work hard to become less selfish.
As for all the obstacles in my way? I can hear his voice now:
So it goes.“
As the history of Earth Day is written in The San Francisco Phoenix website; “While April 22, 1970 is seen as the birth of the modern environmental movement, it was not the original Earth Day, nor the purpose of the original mission.
In the spring of 1969, The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), promoting world peace, held a conference in San Francisco. It was at this conference that peace activist and San Francisco resident John McConnell proposed that the Spring Equinox be called “Earth Day” to honor the Earth and promote peace. An Earth Day Proclamation was issued and signed by thirty-six world leaders. On March 21, 1970, San Francisco celebrated McConnell’s first Earth Day by ringing peace bells. The United Nations picked up this tradition the following year and has been practicing it ever since. McConnell used the photo The Blue Marble for his design of an Earth Day Flag, inspired by the photo when it was first published in Life magazine. If you Google Earth Day Flag (assuming like I did that there was only one Earth Day), you will be led to McConnell’s flag. Most people who use it are probably using it for the wrong event.
At the same time that McConnell was giving his UNESCO speech, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, having been deeply affected by the three million gallon oil spill in the Santa Barbara Chanel in California, proposed a national “teach-in” on pollution reduction. Nelson hired Denis Hayes, an environmental activist, as National Coordinator. Hayes not only named this teach-in “Earth Day”, but decided to hold it only a month after McConnell’s event. It was meant to be a one-time educational event at nationwide schools, colleges and universities. But like Jim, the sheer number of people who showed up that day took everyone by surprise. As a result of its spectacular success, Earth Day became an annual event”
The history of the founding of Earth Day is written in a 2019 Time magazine interview of one of its principal organizers Denis Hayes by Olivia B. Waxman; “Nearly 50 years after 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, more than 190 countries mark the annual day for raising awareness of environmental causes. And the stakes only grow as the years go by.
Though Earth Day has been dogged by rumors that it was founded by a murderer and as communist propaganda, the truth is much more straightforward — but no less fascinating. TIME spoke to Denis Hayes, a real organizer of the first Earth Day, dubbed “Mr. Earth Day” by the magazine in 1999. Hayes is now the president of the Bullitt Foundation, which doles out grants to environmental efforts.
Here, he tells the true story of founding of Earth Day, its proudest accomplishments and the work that still needs to be done.
TIME: Where did the idea for the first Earth Day come from?
HAYES: A number of issues basically all came to a head by the late ’60s, starting in 1962, with Rachel Carson publishing Silent Spring, about the dangers of pesticides. In 1969, an oil spill in the elite community of Santa Barbara, Calif., brought it home to people in a terribly visual way — they saw animals covered in goo, people trying to get it off, and you watched them die on camera. Then we had the fire on the Cuyahoga River; the juxtaposition with water, which puts out fire, made a splash. Then interstate highways were being built. That’s when people who didn’t self-identify as conservationists were out there trying to protect their neighborhoods from horrible air pollution. The stuff coming out of tailpipes was all from leaded gasoline, poisoning their children. At the same time that people were trying to talk about organic produce and the impact of pesticides on the foods that people were eating, those pesticides were being sprayed onto the backs of farm workers, so the Chicano movement saw the environmental issues as a way to mobilize public support for their objectives.
What we did was take all of those myriad strands, including wildlife protection issues, and wove them all together. It sounds strange today, but back then, the folks involved with those various causes didn’t think of themselves as having anything in common with one another. No one was asking that question at the end of the 1970s.
How was the first Earth Day organized?
Senator [Gaylord] Nelson reached out to me to build his staff and organize it. I was the most senior of the paid staff and I was 25 years old. Youthful vitality and passion forms the engine of these things.
One of the secrets of Earth Day is that the head of the United Automobile Workers union gave us a budget for an 800 number so we could communicate directly with organizers. Walter Philip Reuther [the head of the UAW] was a genuinely progressive guy who cared about workplace conditions and supported public transit because his workers were making the buses for GM. He was horrified by the pollution coming out of the tailpipes of cars. He supported legislation like the Clean Air Act to protect the industry from people refusing to buy these cars. We were operating on a shoestring budget, so the ability to make free phone calls made it possible for us to be in instant communication with people in the biggest cities.
Gaylord thought something similar to the youth-dominated anti-war movement could be done in the environmental movement, so I went out and hired a number of superb, experienced organizers who had been in anti-war, Hispanic and civil rights movements. But there was almost no interest in our cause on college campuses because we had a war going on. So I looked back at the mail to the Senator’s office, and it was overwhelmingly from relatively young women, mostly college educated, with one or two kids in a single-wage-earner family, with time on their hands, who had gotten frustrated by not being involved in the social tumult of the era and who were deeply affected by environmental threats to their children. They formed a real nexus we organized around. Once the thing got visibility, and it became clear this was a vehicle for change, then the students climbed on board afterwards.
Why is Earth Day on April 22?
[The rationale] was straight forward. This whole thing was envisioned by Senator Gaylord Nelson as a campus teach-in, so it was all about making sure this would be attractive enough to the largest number of college students. He chose the date before he hired me. He came from Wisconsin, which has cold winters, and he wanted to find a date late enough in the year that a teach-in wouldn’t be snowed in, but early enough that college students wouldn’t be cramming for final exams. And he wanted it to be in the middle of the week so people wouldn’t be away on weekend trips. So, he chose a Wednesday near the end of April, and that Wednesday happened to be April 22. Wednesday, candidly, is a terrible day for something other than an environmental teach-in. I live in Seattle; nine out of 10 times there’s a torrential rainstorm at that time of year. It’s a terrible day for organizing stuff outside. After Earth Day was such a spectacular success, it started appearing on calendars. There’s no way to change the date. I’ve had people beg me to declare it’s the spring equinox or summer solstice, but we’re stuck with it.
How did Earth Day get its name?
Madison Avenue. A progressive advertising guy stopped by our office asking, ‘Anything I can do to help?’ I said, well, in brand terms, I think this teach-in thing isn’t going anyplace, and it’s not relevant to the folks who are most responsive to environmental issues. Why don’t you think of ways for us to re-brand it? A couple of weeks later he comes back with some print-outs on newsprint of ads with new names. He suggested names like Ecology Day, E-Day, Environment Day, Earth Day and Green Day. We all sat around with pizza and beer one night and tried to figure out which one would resonate, and Earth Day just sounded right. Fortuitously, Earth Day turned out to be something that translated beautifully in every language.
What was the role in Earth Day’s founding of Ira Einhorn, who was convicted of murder in 2002?
I thought that idea had been long buried. He was onstage as an announcer of the Philadelphia Earth Day — a marginal character in one Earth Day in one city. There’s no way you could think of him as the founder, even of the Earth Day in Philadelphia. If you asked me to name 50 people really crucial to that organizing of that first Earth Day, he certainly wouldn’t be on that list.
Holly [Maddux, of whose murder Einhorn was convicted] was a beautiful, wonderful, gracious person.
How Did Earth Day Influence the Nixon Administration?
The environmentalist in the White House was Nixon’s domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman. Before Watergate, he pushed for everything that was progressive that came out of the White House and pretty much across the board. I had actually known him before he got into the White House and we interacted occasionally when he was in the White House.
One of his sons was a paralegal who worked for me at a law firm in Silicon Valley, and one day Ehrlichman takes us out to dinner. This was after he got out of the slammer. He tells this story about how on Earth Day in 1970, Nixon looked out the window and saw this giant crowd on the mall and went out and tried to mingle, but he was incredibly socially awkward. Then, he saw on television the gigantic crowd that formed when we shut down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and the Mayor of New York John Lindsay, a Republican, was standing on a platform, talking about this environmental stuff.
Here’s when it becomes iffy because it is in Ehrlichman’s interest to tell me this story because it puts him in a good light, and my interest to believe the story because it makes me very influential. Nixon says, What am I going to do become a player here? Ehrlichman reminded him of a commission that Nixon had set up when he was first elected, to reorganize government. He suggested we create a new agency that pulls together the environmental initiatives that the various agencies are doing. Create an Environmental Protection Agency with an executive order, and suddenly you’re a major player. You might even save some money by making it more efficient. According to Ehrlichman, that’s how, on Earth Day, they made the decision that they later implemented to create the EPA.
How do you think Earth Day has held up over the years?
The weakness of Earth Day is the “day” concept. When you do something every year, it can become tired and used for unrelated reasons. In the 1960s — before we had cable news and social media and an avalanche of information — a march to the Pentagon, or from Selma to Montgomery, would get enough visibility for long enough that it left a change in the public consciousness. In none of those cases was something done on that day, but you create a climate in which something that was previously impossible becomes almost inevitable.
Have there been any failed Earth Days?
The Earth Day that took place in 1990, after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, was probably the second most important Earth Day. The main theme was climate change and to move aggressively towards a renewably powered future. But we didn’t have a wave there. We were trying to create a wave from basically nothing but intellectual discourse. Did we succeed? The answer to that nearly 30 years later is pretty obvious, though I’m not sure there was a way it could succeed.
What would you say has been the legacy of Earth Day?
The big advances were all within five years of that first Earth Day: an amended Clean Air Act; the Clean Water Act; the Safe Drinking Water Act; the Endangered Species Act; the Marine Mammal Protection Act; the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). With that early wave of environmental legislation I’m not letting any cat out of the bag out of the bag when I say we didn’t know what we were doing. We really did the best that we could but everyone thought, mistakenly, that we’d pass it, see what worked and what didn’t work, and then go back three or four years later and revise it.
A great many people are buying “greener” cars and light bulbs, and choosing how many children to have because of environmental values. Look at the explosive growth of solar energy, wind power, the dramatic cost reductions of battery and other forms of storage innovations in smart utility grids. There’s been a profound cultural shift. Most public, private and religious schools observe Earth Day. Kids go home and are talking to their parents about this environmental stuff, and that’s important because almost every parent wants to be a hero to their kids.
What’s the future of Earth Day?
To make climate change an issue we will vote on. I’m unaware of any important elected official who has ever lost office because of their position on climate change.”
And for those who may be wondering about Ira Einhorn, the man who was erased from the history of Earth Day, possibly a murderer, possibly amd most likely framed by the FBI or other American political counterintelligence agencies just as they assassinated Malcolm X and countless others in the brutal campaign of repression of dissent and infiltration and subversion of organizations which challenged the status quo and its systems of unequal power, including the Students For a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and many others turned against themselves and rendered powerless in ideological fracture and division. The story of Ira Einhorn is part of that history of state terror and the silencing of our truth tellers.
Here is a Rashomon Gate of relative and ambiguous truths; speaking in the interview after having attempted to cut his own throat he is clearly mad; but the world is also mad, our fear of nature driving forces of dominance as capitalist exploitation which may now be the cause of our extinction, and he knew this and spoke of it with brilliance and passion when decades younger.
This does not make him guilty of the tragic and horrific death of his girlfriend, nor a martyr in the cause of liberation struggle, for both or neither may be true. He remains a man who saw our common peril and spoke truth to power at the risk of his life and all that he loved to give us warning. Yet we celebrate the Ride of Paul Revere, and have erased Ira Einhorn in damnatio memoriae.
I’d like to change that; for we must never accept the terms of struggle of the enemy, nor play by the rules of his game.
Everything the enemy says is a lie.
The personal qualities of a leader are no indication of the merits of his cause. Like the lives of authors, everything real about them is in their works.
Did he found Earth Day? No one voice founds a global mass movement, but no voice is without significance and meaning.
This Earth Day, find yours and give it free reign. Speak your truth with passion and conviction; be unguarded, transparent, raw even, with authenticity and total truth. Perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. Embrace the pursuit of truth as a sacred calling, and with poetic vision enact the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, our choices about how to be human together, and our future.
If we all do this with solidarity and fearlessness in seizures of power, and with respect, tolerance, and inclusion for each other’s uniqueness and strange angles of view, we may yet find new ways to change the systems of our oppression and extinction and unite to create a free society of equals. The costs of our failure to do so may be read in the story of Ira Einhorn and our whitewashed and defanged Earth Day.
As the Ukrainian Front of the Third World War rages on, three years ago on April 20 2022 I stood before an audience of multitudes who had answered our call for volunteers to take the fight to the enemy and bring a Reckoning for the war crimes of Russia in Ukraine, to liberate Russia from tyranny as a free society of equals and bring peace to Europe and the future of humankind in allyship and solidarity with the peace network within the Russian military and the democracy mass movement now pervasive within her society, to bring peace by confusion and destruction of Russia’s warfighting systems of manufacture, logistics, and communications, and to prepare networks of Resistance for the Russian invasion of Eastern Europe which Putin plans to begin with Moldova and Poland and whose objective is Berlin, coordinated with an Atlantic Campaign which begins with the Baltic and Scandinavia whose objective is London and the whole of the Arctic Circle, and a Danube Campaign which begins with the Romanian port of Constantia on the Black Sea whose objective is Prague.
Who would come to hear us, I wondered, witnesses to the horrors of war from a distant land few had ever seen, who had failed to save a city from annihilation and her people from slavery and genocide?
The descendants of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 remembered and came, from all over the world; representatives of governments and the intelligence and special operations community came, as well as Antifascists of all kinds came, the nation of Poland remembered the invasion of 1939 and came, the historical Allied nations of the Second World War remembered and came, Europe remembered the tyranny and terror of the war and Occupation and came, and a city flooded with Ukrainian refugees welcomed and united in solidarity with Russian peace and democracy activists and foreign volunteers like myself.
It was a glorious moment, wherein solidarity promised to redeem the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. What can be made of it remains to be seen, if placing our lives in the balance can tip the momentum of history toward democracy and away from fascism and tyranny, toward peace and not war, but the fact remains that we are unbroken, we humans, not subjugated by abjection and learned helplessness but united in the cause of our liberty and as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, and this gives me hope.
There are no Russians, no Ukrainians; only people like ourselves, and the choices we make about how to be human together.
April 20 2022 What is the Meaning of Mariupol? Address to the Volunteers in Warsaw
As we gather and prepare to take the fight to the enemy in direct action against the regime of Russia itself, against Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs and elites who sit at the helm of power and are now complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity both in Ukraine and her province of Crimea in the imperial conquest of a sovereign and independent nation and in Russia in the subjugation of their own citizens, and in the other theatres of this the Third World War, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Africa, and in the capture of the American state in the Stolen Election of 2016 which put Putin’s treasonous and dishonorable agent and proxy Donald Trump, Our Clown of Terror, in the White House to oversee the infiltration and subversion of democracy by the Fourth Reich, we are confronted with countless horrific examples of the future that awaits us at the hands of Putin’s regime, and we have chosen Resistance as the only alternative to slavery and death.
As we bring a Reckoning for tyranny, terror, and the horrors of war, in the crimes against humanity by Russia in Ukraine which include executions, torture, organized mass rape and the trafficking of abducted civilians, the capture of civilian hostages and use of forced labor, cannibalism using mobile factories, genocidal attacks, erasure of evidence of war crimes using mobile crematoriums which indicates official planning as part of the campaign of terror and proof that the countless crimes against humanity of this war are not aberrations but by design and at the orders of Putin and his commanders, threats of nuclear annihilation against European nations sending humanitarian aid, and the mass destruction of cities, we are become a court of last appeal in the defense of our universal human rights and of our humanity itself.
The Russian strategy of conquest as Total War as originated by Hitler and Franco and tested at Guernica and now Mariupol opens with sustained and relentless bombardment and destruction of hospitals, bomb shelters, stores of food, power systems, water supply, corridors of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of refugees; anything which could help citizens survive a siege. Once nothing is left standing, a campaign of terror as organized mass rape, torture, cannibalism, and looting begins, and any survivors enslaved or executed. This is a war of genocide and erasure, and to fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
In this war which is now upon us, Putin’s goal is to restore the Russian Empire in the conquest of the Ukraine and the Black Sea as a launchpad for the conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; but he has a parallel and far more dangerous purpose in the abrogation of international law and our universal human rights. The true purpose of the Fourth Reich and its puppetmaster Vladimir Putin in this war is to make meaningless the idea of human rights.
This is a war of tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil against democracy and a free society of equals, for the idea that we all of us have meaning and value which is uniquely ours and against enslavement and the theft of our souls.
Within the limits of our form, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, we struggle to achieve the human; ours is a revolution of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase meaning repair of the world which refers to our interdependence and duty of care for each other as equals who share a common humanity.
I’m sure all of us here know what Shlomo Bardin meant when he repurposed the phrase from the Kabbalah of Luria and the Midrash, but what do I mean by this?
There are only two kinds of actions which we human beings are able to perform; those which affirm and exalt us, and those which degrade and dehumanize us.
We live at a crossroads of history which may define the fate of our civilization and the future possibilities of becoming human, in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and between solidarity and division, and we must each of us choose who we wish to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
As you know, my friends and I come to you from the Siege of Mariupol, a battle of flesh against unanswerable force and horror, of solidarity against division, of love against hate, and of hope against fear.
Here, as in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which we celebrated yesterday, the human will to freedom is tested by an enemy who exults in the embrace of the monstrous, whose policies and designs of war as terror gladly and with the open arrogance of power instrumentalize utter destruction and genocide, a war wherein atrocities and depravities are unleashed as tactics of shock and awe with intent of subjugation through learned helplessness and overwhelming and generalized fear.
In Mariupol now as in Warsaw then, we affirm and renew our humanity in refusal to submit or to abandon our duty of care for each other. The Defenders of Mariupol who have sworn to die together and have refused many demands for surrender make their glorious Last Stand not as a gesture of defiance to a conqueror and tyrant, or to hold the port to slow and impede the Russian campaign in the Donbas now ongoing and prevent the seizure of the whole seaboard and control of the Black Sea, though these are pivotal to the liberation of Ukraine, but to protect the hundreds, possibly thousands, of refugees who now shelter in the tunnels of the underground fortress at the Azovstal and Ilyin Steel and Iron Works, especially the many children in makeshift hospitals who cannot be moved.
This is the meaning of Mariupol; we stand together and remain human, regardless of the cost. This is what it means to be human, how it is achieved, and why solidarity is important. Among our values, our duty of care for others is paramount, because it is instrumental to everything else, and all else is contingent on this.
To paraphrase America’s Pledge of Allegiance not as an oath to a nation but as the declaration of a United Humankind; We, the People of Earth, pledge ourselves to each other, as one humankind, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
This brings us to my purpose in speaking to you today, for one of you has asked a question which is central to our mission of the Liberation of Russia and Ukraine, and to the solidarity of the international community in this our cause; how can ordinary people like ourselves hope for victory over the unanswerable force and overwhelming power of tyranny, terror, and war?
There are two parallel and interdependent strategies of Resistance in asymmetrical warfare; the first and most important is to redefine the terms of victory. This is because we are mortal, and the limits of our form impose conditions of struggle; we must be like Jacob wrestling the angel, not to conquer this thing of immense power but to escape being conquered by it. We can be killed, imprisoned, tortured; but we cannot be defeated or conquered if we but refuse to submit.
Power without legitimacy becomes meaningless, and authority crumbles when met with disbelief. This is why journalism and teaching as sacred callings in pursuit of truth are crucial to democracy, and why the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
What of the use of police in brutal repression by carceral states? The social use of force is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disobedience. When the police are an army of Occupation and the repression of dissent, they can be Resisted on those terms; my point here is simply that victory against unanswerable force consists of refusal to submit.
Who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled becomes Unconquered and is free. This is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us.
Second is our strategy for survival against an enemy who does not regard us as human, and will use terror to enforce submission through learned helplessness. By any means necessary, as this principle is expressed in the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X.
In Mariupol I began referring to this in its oldest form, war to the knife. Its meaning for us is simple; those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none.
The question to which I speak today in reply intrigued me, because it was nearly identical to a line which sets up one of the greatest fictional military speeches in literature, Miles Vorkosigan’s speech to the Maurilacans in The Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold.
In this story, Miles has just led a mass prisoner of war escape, from a prison which like all fascist tyrannies is fiendishly designed to produce abjection, as described by Julia Kristeva in her famous essay, in circumstances of horror such as those which my friends here and I have just survived, and in which we now find ourselves like the Marilacans having achieved an army, and about to take the fight to the enemy on his own ground.
One of the volunteers says, ”The defenders of Mariupol had those crazy Cossack warriors, swearing an oath to die rather than surrender, professional mercenaries from everywhere, all of them elite forces and utterly fearless. We just can’t fight on those terms; its been seventy years since we fought a Total War of survival, and most of us here are professionals and university intellectuals. Poland is civilized, maybe too civilized for what’s coming our way.”
To this I answer with Miles; “Let me tell you about the defenders of Mariupol. Those who sought a glorious death in battle found it early on. This cleared the chain of command of accumulated fools.
The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win and win and win. And for whom nothing, not comfort nor security, not family nor friends nor their immortal souls, was more important than victory.
They were not supermen or more than human. They sweated in confusion and darkness.
And with not one half the resources Poland possesses, Ukraine remains unconquered. When you’re all that stands between liberty and tyranny, freedom and slavery, life and death, between a people and genocide, when you’re human, there is no mustering out.”
To this wonderful speech of a fictional hero who simply refuses to stay down to the fictional survivors of the very real horror of being held captive and powerless by a tyrant, whether as prisoners of war or citizens of an occupied city, I must add this; how if Poland and Ukraine stand together, with all of Europe and America united in Resistance?
And if you are telling me you could not today fight a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, this I do not believe. Nor would you do so alone, for during this Passover as the Jewish community remembers the story of the Exile, the world also remembers; we watch it in our news every day, enacted once again in Ukraine. This, too, is a Haggadah, in which all of humankind can share, and which yet again teaches us the necessity of our interdependence and solidarity.
As written by Alan Moore in V For Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
Here is a truth to which all of us here today can bear witness.
But there is a thing which tyrants never learn; the use of force and violence obeys the Third Law of Motion, and creates resistance as its own counterforce. And when the brutality and crimes against humanity of that force and violence are performed upon the stage of the world, visible to all and a history which cannot be erased, part of the story of every human being from now until the end of our species, repression finds answer in reckoning as we awaken to our interdependence and the necessity of our solidarity and duty of care for each other.
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet on that fateful day in 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, after we refused to surrender and about to be burned alive; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
An unusual fellow, but behind the concealment of his literary notoriety he remained the Legionnaire he had once been, and after spying on the Nazis in Berlin in 1939 had returned to Paris to make mischief for her unwelcome guests, and there in 1940 repurposed the oath of the Foreign Legion for what allies he could gather. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole.
My hope is that I have lived, and written, at the beginning of the story of humankind, and not at its end.
What is the meaning of Mariupol?
Here we may look to its precedents as Last Stands, battles, and sieges; Thermopylae, Malta, Washington crossing the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton, Gallipoli which I hope we can avoid refighting, Stalingrad, and its direct parallel the Siege of Sarajevo. Moments of decision wherein the civilization of humankind hung in the balance, and with it our future possibilities of becoming human.
Who do we want to become, we humans; slaves and tyrants or a free society of equals? And how much of our humanity are we willing to trade for the chance of such futures?
What of ourselves can we not afford to lose, without also losing who we are? How much of our humanity can we claw back from the darkness in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us, and in solidarity with each other?
We must each of us face our own Gate of Fire, as did the Spartans at Thermopylae, and choose.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, plunder, and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
Let us reply with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War and the conflict of dominion which immediately followed it between tyranny and democracy, first against fascism and then between the allies who defeated it as spheres of dominion and systems of economic and political organization but both for different dreams of a free society of equals, in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
Join us.
This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate
20 באפריל 2023 יום השנה לארגון מחדש של חטיבת אברהם לינקולן של אוקראינה למען מאבק השחרור ברוסיה בעקבות הבריחה שלנו ממריופול
בעוד החזית האוקראינית של מלחמת העולם השלישית מתמשכת, לפני שנה היום עמדתי מול קהל של המונים שענו לקריאתנו למתנדבים לקחת את הקרב מול האויב ולהביא חשבון לפשעי המלחמה של רוסיה באוקראינה, לשחרר את רוסיה מהעריצות כחברה חופשית של שווים ולהביא שלום לאירופה ולעתיד האנושות בברית וסולידריות עם רשת השלום בתוך הצבא הרוסי ותנועת ההמונים הדמוקרטית הנפוצה כעת בחברה שלה, להביא שלום על ידי בלבול ו השמדת מערכות הלחימה של רוסיה לייצור, לוגיסטיקה ותקשורת, ולהכנת רשתות התנגדות לפלישה הרוסית למזרח אירופה שפוטין מתכנן להתחיל עם מולדובה והמדינות הבלטיות.
מי יבוא לשמוע אותנו, תהיתי, עדים לזוועות המלחמה מארץ רחוקה שמעטים ראו אי פעם, שלא הצליחו להציל עיר מהשמדה ואת אנשיה מעבדות ורצח עם?
צאצאי מרד גטו ורשה של 1943 זכרו ובאו, מכל העולם; האומה של פולין זכרה את הפלישה של 1939 ובאה, מדינות בעלות הברית ההיסטוריות של מלחמת העולם השנייה זכרו ובאו, אירופה זכרה את העריצות והאימה של המלחמה והכיבוש ובאה, עיר מוצפת פליטים אוקראינים התקבלו בברכה והתאחדו בסולידריות עם פעילי שלום ודמוקרטיה רוסים ומתנדבים זרים כמוני.
זה היה רגע מפואר, שבו הסולידריות הבטיחה לגאול את פגמי האנושות שלנו ואת השבר של העולם. מה אפשר לעשות מזה נותר לראות, אם הצבת חיינו באיזון יכולה להטות את המומנטום של ההיסטוריה לכיוון דמוקרטיה ולהתרחק מפאשיזם ועריצות, לשלום ולא למלחמה, אבל העובדה היא שאנחנו לא נשברים, אנו בני האדם , לא כפופים על ידי סלידה וחוסר אונים מלומד אלא מאוחדים למען חירותנו וכערבים זה לזכויות האדם האוניברסליות של זה, וזה נותן לי תקווה.
אין רוסים, אין אוקראינים; רק אנשים כמו עצמנו, והבחירות שאנחנו עושים לגבי איך להיות בני אדם ביחד.
20 באפריל 2022 מה המשמעות של מריופול? כתובת למתנדבים בוורשה
בעודנו מתאספים ומתכוננים לקחת את המאבק אל האויב בפעולה ישירה נגד משטר רוסיה עצמה, נגד ולדימיר פוטין והאוליגרכים והאליטות שלו היושבים בראש השלטון וכעת שותפים לפשעי מלחמה ופשעים נגד האנושות אוקראינה ומחוז קרים שלה בכיבוש האימפריאלי של אומה ריבונית ועצמאית וברוסיה בהכנעת אזרחיהם, ובשאר התיאטראות של זה מלחמת העולם השלישית, סוריה, לוב, בלארוס, קזחסטן, נגורנו קרבאך , ובתפיסה של המדינה האמריקנית בבחירות הגנובות של 2016, שהכניסה את סוכנו ובוגדתו של פוטין וחסר הכבוד דונלד טראמפ, ליצן הטרור שלנו, בבית הלבן כדי לפקח על חדירתה וחתרנות הדמוקרטיה על ידי הרייך הרביעי, אנו מתמודדים עם אינספור דוגמאות מחרידות לעתיד המצפה לנו בידי משטרו של פוטין, ובחרנו בהתנגדות כאלטרנטיבה היחידה לעבדות ומוות.
כאשר אנו מביאים חשבון לעריצות, טרור וזוועות המלחמה, בפשעים נגד האנושות על ידי רוסיה באוקראינה הכוללים הוצאות להורג, עינויים, אונס המוני מאורגן וסחר באזרחים חטופים, לכידת בני ערובה אזרחיים ושימוש בכפייה עבודה, קניבליזם באמצעות מפעלים ניידים, התקפות רצח עם, מחיקת עדויות לפשעי מלחמה באמצעות משרפות ניידות המעידות על תכנון רשמי כחלק ממסע הטרור והוכחה לכך שאינספור הפשעים נגד האנושות של מלחמה זו אינם סטיות אלא בתכנון ובתכנון. פקודות של פוטין ומפקדיו, איומים בהשמדה גרעינית נגד מדינות אירופה ששולחות סיוע הומניטרי, והשמדה המונית של ערים, הפכנו לבית משפט של ערעור אחרון בהגנה על זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו ועל האנושות שלנו עצמה.
אסטרטגיית הכיבוש הרוסית נפתחת בהפצצה מתמשכת ובלתי פוסקת ובהרס של בתי חולים, מקלטים, מאגרי מזון, מערכות חשמל, אספקת מים, מסדרונות של סיוע הומניטרי ופינוי פליטים; כל דבר שיכול לעזור לאזרחים לשרוד מצור. ברגע ששום דבר לא נשאר עומד, מתחיל מסע טרור כמו אונס המוני מאורגן, עינויים, קניבליזם וביזה, וכל ניצול משועבד או מוצא להורג. זוהי מלחמה של רצח עם ומחיקה, ולפשיזם יכולה להיות רק תשובה אחת; לעולם לא שוב!
במלחמה זו אשר כעת עלינו, מטרתו של פוטין היא להחזיר את האימפריה הרוסית בכיבוש אוקראינה והים השחור כנקודת שיגור לכיבוש ושליטה של הים התיכון, אירופה, אפריקה והמזרח התיכון; אבל יש לו מטרה מקבילה ומסוכנת הרבה יותר בביטול החוק הבינלאומי וזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו. המטרה האמיתית של הרייך הרביעי ומנהל הבובות שלו ולדימיר פוטין במלחמה זו היא להפוך את רעיון זכויות האדם לחסר משמעות.
זוהי מלחמת עריצות ופשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה נגד הדמוקרטיה וחברה חופשית של שווים, על הרעיון שלכולנו יש משמעות וערך שהם ייחודיים שלנו ונגד שיעבוד וגניבת נפשנו.
בתוך גבולות הצורה שלנו, של פגמי אנושיותנו ושבירת העולם, אנו נאבקים להשיג את האדם; שלנו היא מהפכה של תיקון עולם, ביטוי עברי שמשמעותו תיקון העולם, המתייחס לתלות ההדדית ולחובת הזהירות שלנו זה לזה כשווים החולקים אנושיות משותפת.
אני בטוח שכולנו כאן יודעים למה התכוון שלמה ברדין כשחיזר את הביטוי מקובלת לוריא ומהמדרש, אבל למה אני מתכוון בזה?
ישנם רק שני סוגים של פעולות שאנו בני האדם מסוגלים לבצע; אלה שמאשרים ומעלים אותנו, ואלה שמבזים ומבטלים אותנו.
אנו חיים בצומת של היסטוריה שעשוי להגדיר את גורל הציוויליזציה שלנו ואת האפשרויות העתידיות להיות אנושיות, במאבק בין עריצות לחירות ובין סולידריות לפילוג, ועלינו כל אחד מאיתנו לבחור למי ברצוננו להיות, אנו בני אנוש; אדונים ועבדים, או חברה חופשית של שווים?
כפי שאתם יודעים, חברי ואני באים אליכם מהמצור על מריופול, קרב של בשר נגד כוח ואימה שאין להם מענה, של סולידריות נגד פילוג, של אהבה נגד שנאה ושל תקווה נגד פחד.
כאן, כמו במרד גטו ורשה שחגגנו אתמול, נבחן הרצון האנושי לחירות על ידי אויב המתמוגג בחיקם של המפלצתיים, שמדיניותו ותכנוני המלחמה שלו כטרור בשמחה וביהירות הגלויה של הכוח מכשירים באופן מוחלט. הרס ורצח עם, מלחמה שבה זוועות וקללות משתחררים כטקטיקות של הלם ויראה מתוך כוונה להכניע באמצעות חוסר אונים נלמד ופחד מוחץ ומוכלל.
Polish
20 kwietnia 2023 Rocznica reorganizacji Brygady Walk Wyzwoleńczych Ukrainy im. Abrahama Lincolna w Rosji po naszej ucieczce z Mariupola
Podczas gdy Front Ukraiński Trzeciej Wojny Światowej szaleje, rok temu dzisiaj stałem przed liczną publicznością, która odpowiedziała na nasze wezwanie ochotników do podjęcia walki z wrogiem i rozliczenia zbrodni wojennych Rosji na Ukrainie, uwolnić Rosję od tyranii jako wolnego społeczeństwa równych i zaprowadzić pokój w Europie i przyszłość ludzkości w sojuszu i solidarności z siecią pokojową w rosyjskim wojsku i masowym ruchem demokratycznym, który jest obecnie wszechobecny w jej społeczeństwie, zaprowadzić pokój przez zamęt i zniszczenie rosyjskich wojennych systemów produkcyjnych, logistycznych i komunikacyjnych oraz przygotowanie sieci ruchu oporu na rosyjską inwazję na Europę Wschodnią, którą Putin planuje rozpocząć od Mołdawii i krajów bałtyckich.
Zastanawiałem się, kto przyjdzie nas wysłuchać, świadków okropności wojny z odległej krainy, którą niewielu widziało, którzy nie zdołali ocalić miasta przed zagładą, a jego mieszkańców przed niewolnictwem i ludobójstwem.
Potomkowie powstania w getcie warszawskim z 1943 roku pamiętali i przyjeżdżali z całego świata; naród polski przypomniał sobie inwazję z 1939 roku i przybył, historyczne narody alianckie II wojny światowej przypomniały sobie i przybyły, Europa przypomniała sobie tyranię i terror wojny i okupacji i przybyła, miasto zalane uchodźcami ukraińskimi powitane i zjednoczone w solidarności z rosyjskimi działaczami na rzecz pokoju i demokracji oraz zagranicznymi wolontariuszami, takimi jak ja.
To była chwalebna chwila, w której solidarność obiecała odkupienie wad naszego człowieczeństwa i załamania świata. Co z tego da się zrobić, dopiero się okaże, czy umieszczenie naszego życia w równowadze może przechylić pęd historii w stronę demokracji, z dala od faszyzmu i tyranii, w stronę pokoju, a nie wojny, ale pozostaje faktem, że jesteśmy niezłomni, my, ludzie nie ujarzmionych poniżeniem i wyuczoną bezradnością, ale zjednoczonych w sprawie naszej wolności i jako gwarantów wzajemnych powszechnych praw człowieka, i to daje mi nadzieję.
Nie ma Rosjan, nie ma Ukraińców; tylko ludzie tacy jak my i wybory, których dokonujemy, dotyczące tego, jak być razem ludźmi.
20 kwietnia 2022 Co oznacza Mariupol? Adres do Wolontariuszy w Warszawie
Gdy zbieramy się i przygotowujemy do podjęcia walki z wrogiem w bezpośredniej akcji przeciwko reżimowi samej Rosji, przeciwko Władimirowi Putinowi oraz jego oligarchom i elitom, które zasiadają u steru władzy i są teraz współwinne zbrodni wojennych i zbrodni przeciwko ludzkości zarówno w Ukraina i jej prowincja Krym w imperialnym podboju suwerennego i niepodległego narodu, a w Rosji w ujarzmieniu własnych obywateli, a w innych teatrach tej III wojny światowej, Syrii, Libii, Białorusi, Kazachstanie, Górskim Karabachu , a także w zdobyciu państwa amerykańskiego w skradzionych wyborach 2016, które umieściły zdradzieckiego i niehonorowego agenta Putina i pełnomocnika Donalda Trumpa, naszego klauna terroru, w Białym Domu, aby nadzorować infiltrację i niszczenie demokracji przez Czwartą Rzeszę, my mamy do czynienia z niezliczonymi przerażającymi przykładami przyszłości, która czeka nas z rąk reżimu Putina, a my wybraliśmy Ruch Oporu jako jedyną alternatywę dla niewolnictwa i śmierci.
Kiedy wprowadzamy rozliczenie za tyranię, terror i okropności wojny, w zbrodniach przeciwko ludzkości dokonanych przez Rosję na Ukrainie, które obejmują egzekucje, tortury, zorganizowane masowe gwałty i handel uprowadzonymi cywilami, schwytanie cywilnych zakładników i użycie sił pracy, kanibalizm z wykorzystaniem mobilnych fabryk, ludobójcze ataki, wymazywanie dowodów zbrodni wojennych z wykorzystaniem mobilnych krematoriów, co wskazuje na oficjalne planowanie w ramach kampanii terroru i dowód, że niezliczone zbrodnie przeciwko ludzkości w tej wojnie nie są aberracją, ale celowo i na rozkazy Putina i jego dowódców, groźby nuklearnej zagłady narodów europejskich wysyłających pomoc humanitarną oraz masowe niszczenie miast, stajemy się ostatnim sądem apelacyjnym w obronie naszych uniwersalnych praw człowieka i samego naszego człowieczeństwa.
Rosyjska strategia podboju rozpoczyna się ciągłym i bezlitosnym bombardowaniem i niszczeniem szpitali, schronów bombowych, magazynów żywności, systemów zasilania, zaopatrzenia w wodę, korytarzy pomocy humanitarnej i ewakuacji uchodźców; wszystko, co mogłoby pomóc obywatelom przetrwać oblężenie. Gdy nic nie zostanie ocalone, rozpoczyna się kampania terroru, polegająca na zorganizowanych masowych gwałtach, torturach, kanibalizmie i grabieży, a wszyscy, którzy przeżyli, zostają zniewoleni lub straceni. To jest wojna ludobójstwa i wymazywania, a na faszyzm może być tylko jedna odpowiedź; Nigdy więcej!
W tej wojnie, która teraz nad nami, celem Putina jest przywrócenie Imperium Rosyjskiego w podboju Ukrainy i Morza Czarnego jako platformy startowej do podboju i panowania nad Morzem Śródziemnym, Europą, Afryką i Bliskim Wschodem; ale ma on równoległy i znacznie bardziej niebezpieczny cel, polegający na uchyleniu prawa międzynarodowego i naszych uniwersalnych praw człowieka. Prawdziwym celem Czwartej Rzeszy i jej marionetkowego mistrza Władimira Putina w tej wojnie jest uczynienie bezsensownej idei praw człowieka.
To jest wojna tyranii i faszyzmów krwi, wiary i ziemi przeciwko demokracji i wolnemu społeczeństwu równych, o ideę, że my wszyscy mamy sens i wartość, która jest wyłącznie nasza i przeciwko zniewoleniu i kradzieży naszych dusz.
W granicach naszej formy, wad naszego człowieczeństwa i zepsucia świata, walczymy o osiągnięcie człowieczeństwa; nasza jest rewolucją Tikkun Olam, hebrajskiego wyrażenia oznaczającego naprawę świata, które odnosi się do naszej współzależności i obowiązku troski o siebie nawzajem jako równych, którzy mają wspólne człowieczeństwo.
Jestem pewien, że każdy z nas tutaj wie, co miał na myśli Shlomo Bardin, gdy zmienił frazę z Kabały Lurii i Midraszu, ale co mam przez to na myśli?
Są tylko dwa rodzaje działań, które my, ludzie, jesteśmy w stanie wykonać; te, które nas utwierdzają i wywyższają, oraz te, które nas poniżają i odczłowieczają.
Żyjemy na skrzyżowaniu historii, które mogą określić los naszej cywilizacji i przyszłe możliwości stania się człowiekiem, w walce między tyranią a wolnością oraz między solidarnością a podziałem, i każdy z nas musi wybrać, kim chce się stać, ludzie; panowie i niewolnicy czy wolne społeczeństwo równych?
Ukrainian
20 квітня 2023 р. Річниця реорганізації бригади імені Авраама Лінкольна України для визвольної боротьби в Росії після нашої втечі з Маріуполя.
У той час, як Український фронт Третьої світової війни триває, рік тому сьогодні я стояв перед аудиторією з безлічі людей, які відгукнулися на наш заклик до добровольців прийняти бій з ворогом і відплатити за військові злочини Росії в Україні, звільнити Росію від тиранії як вільне суспільство рівних і принести мир Європі та майбутньому людству в союзі та солідарності з мережею миру в російській армії та масовим демократичним рухом, який зараз поширюється в її суспільстві, принести мир через плутанину та знищення російських бойових систем виробництва, логістики та зв’язку, а також для підготовки мереж Опору для російського вторгнення в Східну Європу, яке Путін планує розпочати з Молдови та країн Балтії.
Хто прийде послухати нас, — думав я, — свідків жахів війни з далекої країни, яку небагато коли-небудь бачили, які не змогли врятувати місто від знищення, а його людей — від рабства й геноциду?
Нащадки повстання у Варшавському гетто 1943 року згадали та приїхали з усього світу; нація Польщі згадала вторгнення 1939 року і прийшла, історичні країни-союзники Другої світової війни згадали і прийшли, Європа згадала тиранію та терор війни та окупації і прийшла, місто, заповнене українськими біженцями, зустрінуте та об’єднане в солідарності з російськими активістами миру та демократії та іноземними волонтерами, такими як я.
Це був чудовий момент, коли солідарність обіцяла спокутувати вади нашої людяності та зламаність світу. Що з цього можна зробити, ще невідомо, чи може постановка нашого життя на терези схилити імпульс історії в бік демократії та від фашизму та тиранії, у бік миру, а не війни, але факт залишається фактом: ми незламані, ми, люди , не підкорені відразою та навченою безпорадністю, але об’єднані у справі нашої свободи та як гаранти універсальних прав людини одне одного, і це дає мені надію.
Немає ні росіян, ні українців; лише такі люди, як ми самі, і вибір, який ми робимо щодо того, як бути людьми разом.
20 квітня 2022 Що означає Маріуполь? Звернення до волонтерів у Варшаві
Збираючись і готуючись до боротьби з ворогом у прямих діях проти режиму самої Росії, проти Володимира Путіна та його олігархів та еліт, які сидять біля керма влади і зараз є причетними до військових злочинів і злочинів проти людства як у Україна та її провінція Крим в імперському завоювання суверенної і незалежної нації і в Росії в підкоренні власних громадян, а на інших театрах цієї Третьої світової війни, Сирії, Лівії, Білорусі, Казахстану, Нагірного Карабаху , а також під час захоплення американської держави на викрадених виборах 2016 року, коли зрадницького й безчесного агента Путіна та довіреної особи Дональда Трампа, нашого клоуна терору, у Білий дім для нагляду за проникненням і підривом демократії Четвертим рейхом, ми ми стикаємося з незліченною кількістю жахливих прикладів майбутнього, яке чекає на нас від рук режиму Путіна, і ми обрали Опір як єдину альтернативу рабству і смерті.
Оскільки ми приносимо розплату за тиранію, терор і жахи війни, за злочини проти людства, зроблені Росією в Україні, які включають страти, катування, організовані масові зґвалтування та торгівлю викраденими цивільними особами, захоплення цивільних заручників та використання примусових праця, канібалізм з використанням пересувних фабрик, напади геноциду, знищення доказів військових злочинів за допомогою мобільних крематоріїв, що вказує на офіційне планування як частину кампанії терору та доказ того, що незліченна кількість злочинів проти людства цієї війни не є відхиленнями, а задумом і накази Путіна та його командирів, загрози ядерного знищення європейських країн, які надсилають гуманітарну допомогу, і масове знищення міст, ми стаємо останньою апеляційною інстанцією у захисті наших універсальних прав людини та нашого людства.
Російська завойовницька стратегія починається з постійних і невпинних бомбардувань і руйнувань лікарень, бомбосховищ, складів продовольства, енергосистем, водопостачання, коридорів гуманітарної допомоги та евакуації біженців; все, що могло б допомогти громадянам пережити облогу. Після того, як нічого не залишиться, починається кампанія терору як організовані масові зґвалтування, тортури, канібалізм та мародерство, а будь-які вижили поневолені або страчені. Це війна на геноцид і стирання, і на фашизм може бути лише одна відповідь; Ніколи знову!
У цій війні, яка зараз на нас, мета Путіна — відновити Російську імперію у завоювання України та Чорного моря як стартовий майданчик для завоювання та панування Середземномор’я, Європи, Африки та Близького Сходу; але він має паралельну й набагато більш небезпечну мету — скасування міжнародного права та наших універсальних прав людини. Справжня мета Четвертого рейху та його маріонетка Володимира Путіна у цій війні – позбутися сенсу ідеї прав людини.
Це війна тиранії та фашизму крові, віри та ґрунту проти демократії та вільного суспільства рівних за ідею, що всі ми маємо сенс і цінність, яка є унікальною, а також проти поневолення та крадіжки наших душ.
У межах нашої форми, вад нашої людяності та зламаності світу ми боремося за досягнення людського; наша – це революція Тіккуна Олама, єврейської фрази, що означає відновлення світу, яка стосується нашої взаємозалежності та обов’язку піклуватися один про одного як рівних, хто об’єднує спільне людство.
Я впевнений, що всі ми тут знаємо, що мав на увазі Шломо Бардін, коли переробив фразу з Каббали Лурія і Мідраш, але що я маю на увазі під цим?
Є лише два види дій, які ми, люди, здатні виконувати; ті, що стверджують і підносять нас, і ті, що принижують і дегуманізують нас.
Ми живемо на перехресті історії, яка може визначити долю нашої цивілізації та майбутні можливості стати людиною, у боротьбі між тиранією та свободою, між солідарністю та поділом, і кожен із нас має вибрати, ким хоче стати, ми люди; панів і рабів, чи вільне суспільство рівних?
Russian
20 апреля 2023 Годовщина реорганизации Бригады Авраама Линкольна Украины за освободительную борьбу в России после нашего побега из Мариуполя
В то время как бушует Украинский фронт Третьей мировой войны, ровно год назад я стоял перед аудиторией множества людей, которые откликнулись на наш призыв добровольцев принять бой с врагом и принести расплату за военные преступления России в Украине, освободить Россию от тирании как свободное общество равных и принести мир Европе и будущему человечества в союзе и солидарности с мирной сетью в российских вооруженных силах и демократическим массовым движением, которое сейчас проникает в ее общество, принести мир путем беспорядка и разрушение российских боевых систем производства, логистики и коммуникаций, а также подготовка сетей Сопротивления к российскому вторжению в Восточную Европу, которое Путин планирует начать с Молдовы и стран Балтии.
Кто придет послушать нас, думал я, свидетелей ужасов войны из далекой страны, которую мало кто когда-либо видел, кто не смог спасти город от уничтожения, а его народ от рабства и геноцида?
Потомки восстания в Варшавском гетто 1943 года помнили и приехали со всего мира; народ Польши вспомнил вторжение 1939 года и пришел, исторические союзные народы Второй мировой войны вспомнили и пришли, Европа вспомнила тиранию и террор войны и оккупации и пришла, город, наводненный украинскими беженцами, приветствовали и объединились в солидарности с российскими активистами мира и демократии и иностранными волонтерами, такими как я.
Это был славный момент, когда солидарность обещала искупить недостатки нашей человечности и сломленность мира. Что из этого можно сделать, еще предстоит увидеть, если балансировка наших жизней может склонить инерцию истории к демократии и от фашизма и тирании, к миру, а не войне, но факт остается фактом: мы не сломлены, мы, люди. , не порабощенные отвращением и ученой беспомощностью, но объединенные в деле нашей свободы и как гаранты универсальных человеческих прав друг друга, и это вселяет в меня надежду.
Русских нет, украинцев нет; только люди, подобные нам, и выбор, который мы делаем о том, как быть людьми вместе.
20 апреля 2022 Что такое Мариуполь? Обращение к волонтерам в Варшаве
Пока мы собираемся и готовимся принять бой с врагом в прямом действии против самого режима России, против Владимира Путина и его олигархов и элит, которые сидят у руля власти и ныне причастны к военным преступлениям и преступлениям против человечности как в Украина и ее провинция Крым в имперском завоевании суверенной и независимой нации и в России в подчинении собственных граждан, и на других театрах этой Третьей мировой войны, Сирия, Ливия, Беларусь, Казахстан, Нагорный Карабах , а также в захвате американского государства на украденных выборах 2016 года, когда изменнический и бесчестный агент и доверенное лицо Путина Дональд Трамп, наш клоун террора, попал в Белый дом, чтобы наблюдать за проникновением и подрывом демократии Четвертым рейхом, мы столкнулись с бесчисленными ужасными примерами будущего, которое ожидает нас от рук путинского режима, и мы выбрали Сопротивление как единственную альтернативу рабству и смерти.
Поскольку мы приносим расплату за тиранию, террор и ужасы войны, за преступления против человечности, совершенные Россией на Украине, включая казни, пытки, организованные массовые изнасилования и торговлю похищенными гражданскими лицами, захват гражданских заложников и применение насильственных труд, каннибализм с использованием передвижных заводов, акты геноцида, стирание доказательств военных преступлений с использованием передвижных крематориев, что указывает на официальное планирование как часть кампании террора и доказательство того, что бесчисленные преступления против человечности в ходе этой войны не являются отклонением от нормы, а являются преднамеренными и преднамеренными приказы Путина и его командиров, угрозы ядерного уничтожения европейским странам, отправляющим гуманитарную помощь, и массовое разрушение городов, мы становимся судом последней инстанции в защиту наших универсальных прав человека и самой нашей человечности.
Российская стратегия завоевания начинается с непрерывных и безжалостных бомбардировок и разрушений больниц, бомбоубежищ, складов продовольствия, энергосистем, водоснабжения, коридоров гуманитарной помощи и эвакуации беженцев; все, что может помочь гражданам пережить осаду. Как только ничего не остается, начинается кампания террора с организованными массовыми изнасилованиями, пытками, каннибализмом и грабежами, а все выжившие порабощаются или казнятся. Это война геноцида и стирания, и фашизму может быть только один ответ; Больше никогда!
В этой войне, которая сейчас надвигается, цель Путина состоит в том, чтобы восстановить Российскую империю путем завоевания Украины и Черного моря в качестве стартовой площадки для завоевания и господства в Средиземноморье, Европе, Африке и на Ближнем Востоке; но у него есть параллельная и гораздо более опасная цель в отмене международного права и наших универсальных прав человека. Истинная цель Четвертого рейха и его кукловода Владимира Путина в этой войне состоит в том, чтобы лишить смысла идею прав человека.
Это война тирании и фашизма крови, веры и почвы против демократии и свободного общества равных, за идею о том, что у всех нас есть смысл и ценность, которые принадлежат только нам, и против порабощения и кражи наших душ.
В пределах нашей формы, недостатков нашей человечности и разбитости мира мы боремся за достижение человеческого; наша — это революция Тиккун Олам, фразы на иврите, означающей восстановление мира, которая указывает на нашу взаимозависимость и обязанность заботиться друг о друге как о равных, разделяющих общую человечность.
Я уверен, что все мы здесь знаем, что имел в виду Шломо Бардин, когда он переделал фразу из Каббалы Лурии и Мидраша, но что я имею в виду под этим?
Есть только два вида действий, которые мы, человеческие существа, можем совершать; те, которые утверждают и возвышают нас, и те, которые унижают и дегуманизируют нас.
Мы живем на перекрестке истории, который может определить судьбу нашей цивилизации и будущие возможности стать людьми, в борьбе между тиранией и свободой, между солидарностью и разделением, и каждый из нас должен выбрать, кем мы хотим стать, мы люди; господа и рабы или свободное общество равных?
On this day of Easter in which the forces of light and darkness align in balance and signal the fertility of spring, I wish us all great happiness of our transformative rebirth, the awakening of creativity, and the reimagination of humankind.
Today we celebrate the renewal of the world as Easter, Ēostre in Old English, the ancient Germanic fertility rite of spring which honors the prolific Bunny Goddess, Ostara in Old High German, cognate of the Viking deity whose name in Old Norse, Austr, means dawn and who Shiva-like dances the ongoing creation of the world, and as a celebration of Resurrection from death was assimilated into the new faith of a sacrificial and redemptive man-god which exploded across the world two millennia ago, an appropriation and radical revision of Passover in Judaism by a Roman mystery cult. From this beginning it became more layered, assimilating local faiths and cultures wherever it propagated, as did our civilization as a whole. For myself, all of this is bound together with the figure of the Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland as an Orphic Guide of the Soul.
Always go down the Rabbit Hole, and through the Forbidden Door.
On this Down the Rabbit Hole Day, we celebrate a Gordian Knot of history which makes ambiguous and relative our multilayered and interdependent mimetic cueing systems of transformative rebirth and the reimagination of humankind, whose origins in the spring fire festival and planting season rites were revisioned with the idea of Christ as death transcendence and symbolized by the colored eggs we now hide for children, a near cultural universal with a history over sixty thousand years old in Africa which was transmitted through the early church in Mesopotamia to the Orthodox faith, and with the Roman Ritual of 1610 became associated with the Resurrection.
The divine re-enters and sacralizes the world, reanimates and makes new the material universe, and the dead rise up in glory and awaken from their discarded husks and the limits of their forms; it is an ancient idea, born of the primal fear of death and nothingness in a universe without any value or meaning other than that which we ourselves create, which echoes the first religion of humankind, the global neolithic cult of the Cave Bear whose return from hibernation after winter provided a metaphor for the existence, survival beyond death, and rebirth of the soul.
Like much of our cultural identity in America today and of the historical civilization of Europe, it is a complex structure of interdependent and diverse sources, at its roots born of the tumultuous mixing of peoples from which we ourselves arise.
Such recursive and chaotic processes of change and transformative rebirth are ceaseless and ongoing, creating new forms of primordial truths written in our flesh. Though Easter in its original form is primarily an orgiastic rite of affirmation of our life force, in which nothing is Forbidden, beyond all boundaries and limits as ecstasy, transgression, and self-reinvention, the Rites of Spring have long been Bowdlerized as a children’s holiday rather than one of the fertility of the earth as planting begins, and creating children who are the objects of celebration, in balance with Halloween as a celebration of the coming of winter, veneration of our ancestors, death as liberation from the limits of our form, transformation, and the embrace of our monstrosity.
The dance of life and death always contains its opposite force as a defining negative space.
Here I think of the genius of Jenna Ortega’s mating and hunting dance in Wednesday, which embodies the inherent polar forces of our existence performed to a song which was originally a queer cruising anthem in which headhunting and hunting for sex are unified as performances of ourselves and our monstrosity as figures of the wildness of nature.
Humans create themselves over time; through other humans who are different from themselves as well as those alike.
Humans create ideas as tools with which to organize and shape ourselves, and our rites of spring are similar because they meet universal needs, Ostara and its reimagination as Easter among countless others. What needs are so enormous and universal to us that we create festivals as annual reset buttons to restore us to our true selves and free us from the legacies of our history?
We honor our diversity on this day of Easter, and look to the reimagination of ourselves, our civilization, and the futures to come.
What emerges from the Easter egg are the unknown possibilities of becoming human, and the myriad selves and futures we may unfold.
Happy Easter and good hunting; may you find the best future self and humanity it is possible to envision, and the freedom, means, and will of action to become and live your true image and self.
Here follows one of the most beautiful and luminous Easter poems in the English language, T. S. Eliot’s East Coker, second of the matchless Four Quartets:
“I.
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotized. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not reflected, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.
In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
II.
What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hope for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebitude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.
III.
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again,
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
IV.
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
V.
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.”
Go Ask Alice Jefferson Airplane
Wednesday Dances
How if we must tell our stories, or be rewritten and falsified by others? I find it interesting that Jenna Ortega chose a queer cruising anthem for her signature dance, which confuses and conflates in ambiguous meanings the rituals of mating and hunting, as this Netflix series does as an extended metaphor and allegory of subversions of authorized identities of sex and gender and seizures of power as revolutionary struggle.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula: An escaped wolf in the cinematheque
“There is much to be learned from beasts”; dare to embrace the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and normality, and the limits of the human.
Today on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution We The People rise in resistance and revolutionary struggle with nationwide mass protests against the abominable and treasonous Trump regime which has captured the state and its nefarious designs in subversion of our democracy.
This we will not abide. This we will Resist. For this, we will bring a Reckoning.
And because of this, as Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief, Nazi revivalist, white supremacist terrorist, theocratic patriarchal sexual terrorist, and Russian agent tests and exposes the flaws of our system with relentless attacks upon the institutions of our democracy and violations of its values and ideals as Theatre of Cruelty, we must now begin the total reimagination and transformation of our nation and our society if we are to become a free society of equals wherein we are co-owners of the state as citizens and guarantors of each other’s inalienable and universal human rights.
As written in the mission statement for this weekend’s nationwide protest, from We (The People) Dissent:
“On April 19, 1775, colonists confronted the British at the Battle of Lexington and Concord—the shot heard round the world.
On April 19, 2025, millions of everyday Americans will rise to defend that for which they fought—freedom against tyranny.
This time, we carry not arms, but signs.
We will not raise a barricade;
instead, we must lift our voices.
Instead of marching to the tempo of drums,
we will march to the echo of our hearts crying for justice.”
Herein only one thing must I dispute; for the imposed conditions of struggle require that we now bear arms in our defense and that of any human being threatened with death or abduction and imprisonment without cause or trial in a foreign gulag.
This is a grave and terrible choice when state tyranny and terror leave us no other options in our duty of care for others, and if a man kneels on another’s neck, regardless of which one has a badge and a gun or who is white and who is black, that man is a murderer and our duty of care for others requires our intervention, By Any Means Necessary.
I am prepared at all times to fight to the death, and the Trump regime’s criminal and brutal repression of dissent leaves none of us any other choice but submission or resistance.
All Resistance is War to the Knife.
Let us not go quietly, friends, but unite in solidarity of action to seize our power and restore our nation and our liberty.
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her Substack newsletter ; “Tonight I had the extraordinary privilege of speaking at the anniversary of the lighting of the lanterns in Boston’s Old North Church, which happened 250 years ago tonight. Here’s what I said:
Two hundred and fifty years ago, in April 1775, Boston was on edge. Seven thousand residents of the town shared these streets with more than 13,000 British soldiers and their families. The two groups coexisted uneasily.
Two years before, the British government had closed the port of Boston and flooded the town with soldiers to try to put down what they saw as a rebellion amongst the townspeople. Ocean trade stopped, businesses failed, and work in the city got harder and harder to find. As soldiers stepped off ships from England onto the wharves, half of the civilian population moved away. Those who stayed resented the soldiers, some of whom quit the army and took badly needed jobs away from locals.
Boston became increasingly cut off from the surrounding towns, for it was almost an island, lying between the Charles River and Boston Harbor. And the townspeople were under occupation. Soldiers, dressed in the red coats that inspired locals to insult them by calling them “lobsterbacks,” monitored their movements and controlled traffic in and out of the town over Boston Neck, which was the only land bridge from Boston to the mainland and so narrow at high tide it could accommodate only four horses abreast.
Boston was a small town of wooden buildings crowded together under at least eight towering church steeples, for Boston was still a religious town. Most of the people who lived there knew each other at least by sight, and many had grown up together. And yet, in April 1775, tensions were high.
Boston was the heart of colonial resistance to the policies of the British government, but it was not united in that opposition. While the town had more of the people who called themselves Patriots than other colonies did—maybe 30 to 40 percent—at least 15% of the people in town were still fiercely loyal to the King and his government. Those who were neither Patriots nor Loyalists just kept their heads down, hoping the growing political crisis would go away and leave them unscathed.
It was hard for people to fathom that the country had come to such division. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War, Bostonians looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.
That euphoria faded fast.
Almost as soon as the French and Indian War was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.
In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.
But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury, and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.
Far more than money was at stake. The fight over the Stamp Act tapped into a struggle that had been going on in England for more than a century over a profound question of human governance: Could the king be checked by the people?
This was a question the colonists were perhaps uniquely qualified to answer. While the North American colonies were governed officially by the British crown, the distance between England and the colonies meant that colonial assemblies often had to make rules on the ground. Those assemblies controlled the power of the purse, which gave them the upper hand over royal officials, who had to await orders from England that often took months to arrive. This chaotic system enabled the colonists to carve out a new approach to politics even while they were living in the British empire.
Colonists naturally began to grasp that the exercise of power was not the province of a divinely ordained leader, but something temporary that depended on local residents’ willingness to support the men who were exercising that power.
The Stamp Act threatened to overturn that longstanding system, replacing it with tyranny.
When news of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston, a group of dock hands, sailors, and workers took to the streets, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They warned colonists that their rights as Englishmen were under attack. One of the Sons of Liberty was a talented silversmith named Paul Revere. He turned the story of the colonists’ loss of their liberty into engravings. Distributed as posters, Revere’s images would help spread the idea that colonists were losing their liberties.
The Sons of Liberty was generally a catch-all title for those causing trouble over the new taxes, so that protesters could remain anonymous, but prominent colonists joined them and at least partly directed their actions. Lawyer John Adams recognized that the Sons of Liberty were changing the political equation. He wrote that gatherings of the Sons of Liberty “tinge the Minds of the People, they impregnate them with the sentiments of Liberty. They render the People fond of their Leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.”
John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, who was deeply involved with the Sons of Liberty, recognized that building a coalition in defense of liberty within the British system required conversation and cooperation. As clerk of the Massachusetts legislature, he was responsible for corresponding with other colonial legislatures. Across the colonies, the Sons of Liberty began writing to like-minded friends, informing them about local events, asking after their circumstances, organizing.
They spurred people to action. By 1766, the Stamp Act was costing more to enforce than it was producing in revenue, and Parliament agreed to end it. But it explicitly claimed “full power and authority to make laws and statutes…to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.” It imposed new revenue measures.
News of new taxes reached Boston in late 1767. The Massachusetts legislature promptly circulated a letter to the other colonies opposing taxation without representation and standing firm on the colonists’ right to equality in the British empire. The Sons of Liberty and their associates called for boycotts on taxed goods and broke into the warehouses of those they suspected weren’t complying, while women demonstrated their sympathy for the rights of colonists by producing their own cloth and drinking coffee rather than relying on tea.
British officials worried that colonists in Boston were on the edge of revolt, and they sent troops to restore order. But the troops’ presence did not calm the town. Instead, fights erupted between locals and the British regulars.
Finally, in March 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd of angry men and boys harassing them. They wounded six and killed five, including Crispus Attucks, a Black man who became the first to die in the attack. Paul Revere turned the altercation into the “Boston Massacre.” His instantly famous engraving showed soldiers in red coats smiling as they shot at colonists, “Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Prey; Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.”
Parliament promptly removed the British troops to an island in Boston Harbor and got rid of all but one of the new taxes. They left the one on tea, keeping the issue of taxation without representation on the table. Then, in May 1773, Parliament gave the East India Tea Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. By lowering the cost of tea in the colonies, it meant to convince people to buy the taxed tea, thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose a tax on the colonies.
In Boston, local leaders posted a citizen guard on Griffin’s Wharf at the harbor to make sure tea could not be unloaded. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded three merchant ships. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped the valuable leaves overboard.
Parliament closed the port of Boston, stripped the colony of its charter, flooded soldiers back into the town, and demanded payment for the tea. Colonists promptly organized the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and took control of the colony. The provincial congress met in Concord, where it stockpiled supplies and weapons, and called for towns to create “minute men” who could fight at a moment’s notice.
British officials were determined to end what they saw as a rebellion. In April, they ordered military governor General Thomas Gage to arrest colonial leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had left Boston to take shelter with one of Hancock’s relatives in the nearby town of Lexington. From there, they could seize the military supplies at Concord. British officials hoped that seizing both the men and the munitions would end the crisis.
But about 30 of the Sons of Liberty, including Paul Revere, had been watching the soldiers and gathering intelligence. They met in secret at the Green Dragon Tavern to share what they knew, each of them swearing on the Bible that they would not give away the group’s secrets. They had been patrolling the streets at night and saw at midnight on Saturday night, April 15, the day before Easter Sunday, that the general was shifting his troops. They knew the soldiers were going to move. But they didn’t know if the soldiers would leave Boston by way of the narrow Boston Neck or row across the harbor to Charlestown. That mattered because if the townspeople in Lexington and Concord were going to be warned that the troops were on their way, messengers from Boston would have to be able to avoid the columns of soldiers.
The Sons of Liberty had a plan. Paul Revere knew Boston well—he had been born there. As a teenager, he had been among the first young men who had signed up to ring the bells in the steeple of the Old North Church. The team of bell-ringers operated from a small room in the tower, and from there, a person could climb sets of narrow stairs and then ladders into the steeple. Anyone who lived in Boston or the surrounding area knew well that the steeple towered over every other building in Boston.
On Easter Sunday, after the secret watchers had noticed the troop movement, Revere traveled to Lexington to visit Adams and Hancock. On the way home through Charlestown, he had told friends “that if the British went out by Water, we would shew two Lanthorns in the North Church Steeple; & if by Land, one, as a Signal.” Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.
The plan was dangerous. The Old North Church was Anglican, Church of England, and about a third of the people who worshipped there were Loyalists. General Thomas Gage himself worshiped there. But so did Revere’s childhood friend John Pulling Jr., who had become a wealthy sea captain and was a vestryman, responsible for the church’s finances. Like Revere, Pulling was a Son of Liberty. So was the church’s relatively poor caretaker, or sexton, Robert Newman. They would help.
Dr. Joseph Warren lived just up the hill from Revere. He was a Son of Liberty and a leader in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. On the night of April 18, he dashed off a quick note to Revere urging him to set off for Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock that the troops were on the way. By the time Revere got Warren’s house, the doctor had already sent another man, William Dawes, to Lexington by way of Boston Neck. Warren told Revere the troops were leaving Boston by water. Revere left Warren’s house, found his friend John Pulling, and gave him the information that would enable him to raise the signal for those waiting in Charlestown. Then Revere rowed across the harbor to Charleston to ride to Lexington himself. The night was clear with a rising moon, and Revere muffled his oars and swung out of his way to avoid the British ship standing guard.
Back in Boston, Pulling made his way past the soldiers on the streets to find Newman. Newman lived in his family home, where the tightening economy after the British occupation had forced his mother to board British officers. Newman was waiting for Pulling, and quietly slipped out of the house to meet him.
The two men walked past the soldiers to the church. As caretaker, Newman had a key.
The two men crept through the dark church, climbed the stairs and then the ladders to the steeple holding lanterns—a tricky business, but one that a caretaker and a mariner could manage—very briefly flashed the lanterns they carried to send the signal, and then climbed back down.
Messengers in Charlestown saw the signal, but so did British soldiers. Legend has it that Newman escaped from the church by climbing out a window. He made his way back home, but since he was one of the few people in town who had keys to the church, soldiers arrested him the next day for participating in rebellious activities. He told them that he had given his keys to Pulling, who as a vestryman could give him orders. When soldiers went to find Pulling, he had skipped town, likely heading to Nantucket.
While Newman and Pulling made their way through the streets back to their homes, the race to beat the soldiers to Lexington and Concord was on. Dawes crossed the Boston Neck just before soldiers closed the city. Revere rowed to Charlestown, borrowed a horse, and headed out. Eluding waiting officers, he headed on the road through Medford and what is now Arlington.
Dawes and Revere, as well as the men from Charleston making the same ride after seeing the signal lanterns, told the houses along their different routes that the Regulars were coming. They converged in Lexington, warned Adams and Hancock, and then set out for Concord. As they rode, young doctor Samuel Prescott came up behind them. Prescott was courting a girl from Lexington and was headed back to his home in Concord. Like Dawes and Revere, he was a Son of Liberty, and joined them to alert the town, pointing out that his neighbors would pay more attention to a local man.
About halfway to Concord, British soldiers caught the men. They ordered Revere to dismount and, after questioning him, took his horse and turned him loose to walk back to Lexington. Dawes escaped, but his horse bucked him off and he, too, headed back to Lexington on foot. But Prescott jumped his horse over a stone wall and got away to Concord.
The riders from Boston had done their work. As they brought word the Regulars were coming, scores of other men spread the news through a system of “alarm and muster” the colonists had developed months before for just such an occasion. Rather than using signal fires, the colonists used sound, ringing bells and banging drums to alert the next house that there was an emergency. By the time Revere made it back to the house where Adams and Hancock were hiding, just before dawn on that chilly, dark April morning, militiamen had heard the news and were converging on Lexington Green.
So were the British soldiers.
When they marched onto the Lexington town green in the darkness just before dawn, the soldiers found several dozen minute men waiting for them. An officer ordered the men to leave, and they began to mill around, some of them leaving, others staying. And then, just as the sun was coming up, a gun went off. The soldiers opened fire. When the locals realized the soldiers were firing not just powder, but also lead musket balls, most ran. Eight locals were killed, and another dozen wounded.
The outnumbered militiamen fell back to tend their wounded, and about 300 Regulars marched on Concord to destroy the guns and powder there. But news of the arriving soldiers and the shooting on Lexington town green had spread through the colonists’ communication network, and militiamen from as far away as Worcester were either in Concord or on their way. By midmorning the Regulars were outnumbered and in battle with about 400 militiamen. They pulled back to the main body of British troops still in Lexington.
The Regulars headed back to Boston, but by then militiamen had converged on their route. The Regulars had been awake for almost two days with only a short rest, and they were tired. Militiamen fired at them not in organized lines, as soldiers were accustomed to, but in the style they had learned from Indigenous Americans, shooting from behind trees, houses, and the glacial boulders littered along the road. This way of war used the North American landscape to their advantage. They picked off British officers, dressed in distinct uniforms, first. By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.
By the next morning, more than 15,000 militiamen surrounded the town of Boston. The Revolutionary War had begun. Just over a year later, the fight that had started over the question of whether the king could be checked by the people would give the colonists an entirely new, radical answer to that question. On July 4, 1776, they declared the people had the right to be treated equally before the law, and they had the right to govern themselves.
Someone asked me once if the men who hung the lanterns in the tower knew what they were doing. She meant, did they know that by that act they would begin the steps to a war that would create a new nation and change the world.
The answer is no. None of us knows what the future will deliver.
Paul Revere and Robert Newman and John Pulling and William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, and all the other riders from Charlestown who set out for Lexington after they saw the signal lanterns in the steeple of Old North Church, were men from all walks of life who had families to support, businesses to manage. Some had been orphaned young, some lived with their parents. Some were wealthy, others would scrabble through life. Some, like Paul Revere, had recently buried one wife and married another. Samuel Prescott was looking to find just one.
But despite their differences and the hectic routine of their lives, they recognized the vital importance of the right to consent to the government under which they lived. They took time out of their daily lives to resist the new policies of the British government that would establish the right of a king to act without check by the people. They recognized that giving that sort of power to any man would open the way for a tyrant.
Paul Revere didn’t wake up on the morning of April 18, 1775, and decide to change the world. That morning began like many of the other tense days of the past year, and there was little reason to think the next two days would end as they did. Like his neighbors, Revere simply offered what he could to the cause: engraving skills, information, knowledge of a church steeple, longstanding friendships that helped to create a network. And on April 18, he and his friends set out to protect the men who were leading the fight to establish a representative government.
The work of Newman and Pulling to light the lanterns exactly 250 years ago tonight sounds even less heroic. They agreed to cross through town to light two lanterns in a church steeple. It sounds like such a very little thing to do, and yet by doing it, they risked imprisonment or even death. It was such a little thing…but it was everything. And what they did, as with so many of the little steps that lead to profound change, was largely forgotten until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used their story to inspire a later generation to work to stop tyranny in his own time.
What Newman and Pulling did was simply to honor their friendships and their principles and to do the next right thing, even if it risked their lives, even if no one ever knew. And that is all anyone can do as we work to preserve the concept of human self-determination. In that heroic struggle, most of us will be lost to history, but we will, nonetheless, move the story forward, even if just a little bit.
And once in a great while, someone will light a lantern—or even two—that will shine forth for democratic principles that are under siege, and set the world ablaze.
As written by Robert B. Hubbell in his Substack newsletter; “On this day, two hundred fifty years ago, America began its long march toward independence at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The battles marked our nation’s first efforts to throw off the yoke of a foreign king. The battles marked “No Kings Day, Part I.”
On Saturday, millions of Americans will participate in “No Kings Day, Part II.” At root, the issues animating protests separated by two-and-a-half centuries are the same: The right to self-determination, liberty, democracy, and the rule of law—not subjugation to the ‘divine right of kings.”
Our ancestors risked everything in rising against the king, mutually pledging to each other “their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.”
We stand on their shoulders as inheritors of their revolutionary zeal and the steadfast efforts of every citizen, soldier, slave, civil rights marcher, organizer, and leader who redeemed democracy anew over the ensuing ten generations.
Our generation will not falter in passing the gift of “No Kings Day”—democracy—to the next generation. Democracy will endure so long as we do not give up. And in the words of Alexei Navalny, “You are not allowed to give up.”
We are not allowed to give up because the democracy we defend does not belong to us. It belongs to all people of America—past, present, and future. We are custodians of democracy until the next generation takes up the struggle as their own.
As we engage in mass resistance on “No Kings Day, Part II,” we should pause to reflect on our place in the long arc of a moral struggle that stretches behind and ahead of us.
America did not achieve independence when the battles of Lexington and Concord concluded. It would take eight years to defeat the British and yet another four years to adopt the Constitution. It would take seventy-five years and a civil war to expiate the sin of slavery embedded in the Constitution. It would take a century more to begin to deliver on the promises of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
In whatever way you choose to resist on “No Kings Day, Part II,” recognize that you, too, are pledging your sacred honor to the defense of democracy for however long it takes.
Like the Founders, our pledge is made to “each other”—a mutual endeavor for the common good. Take pride and comfort in knowing that the cause is bigger than any one of us and will outlast all of us because we will refuse to give up.
We will win. It is only a matter of time.
Godspeed to us all!”
When they come for us, as they always have and will, fascists of theocratic state terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and white supremacist terror, let them find not a people divided by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united as guarantors of each other’s humanity as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others; this, this this.
To the instruments of fascist tyranny in the pathology of disconnectedness and the terror of our nothingness, to division, abjection, learned helplessness, and despair in the face of overwhelming force, I make reply with Buffy the Vampire Slayer quoting the instructions to priests in the Book of Common Prayer in episode eleven of season seven, Showtime, after luring an enemy into an arena to defeat as a demonstration to her recruits; “I don’t know what’s coming next. But I do know it’s gonna be just like this – hard, painful. But in the end, it’s gonna be us. If we all do our parts, believe it, we’ll be the one’s left standing. Here endeth the lesson.”
Here Endeth the Lesson: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season seven, episode eleven
Each year we commemorate the eight Days of Remembrance of the Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust, in Israel with moments of silence as whole cities pause while air raid sirens warn of impending attack, lest we forget and think the danger is long past and we ourselves safe, and throughout the world those engaged in revolutionary struggle against brutal tyrannies and in resistance to the force and control of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil reflect on the example of our sacred dead and their glorious Last Stand in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which affirms our common human being, meaning, and value.
I wonder now, on the eighty second anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, if we have learned its lessons; of vigilance against fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and tyrannies of force and control, especially which may arise within ourselves as atavisms of instinct and fear shaped by submission to authority and systems of unequal power, of divisions of exclusionary otherness and belonging, and the existential threats of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and of solidarity in resistance and our duty of care for others.
We see the lines of fracture in our systems as we struggle to birth a true free society of equals and emerge from the legacies of our history and from elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and nowhere on earth are we free from our addiction to power and its manifold consequences. Yet we resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows, as the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet goes; and this is the hope of humankind.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
All over the world, those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, will remember and rise again to claw their way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand.
Who resists and refuses to submit to force cannot be conquered or subjugated. This is the great lesson of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and why we remember it; because we must if we are to remain human, owners of ourselves if nothing more, and free.
To disambiguate between our two days of remembrance, the United Nation’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27 marks the day in 1945 when the Soviet Red Army liberated the Auschwitz–Birkenau concentration camp; an achievement of liberation struggle and international solidarity, a good and noble cause to celebrate. But Israel and the United States have chosen the Yom HaShoah date of Nisan 27 on the Hebrew calendar for the 8-day DRVH commemoration something else entirely; the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Not the rescue of the Holocaust’s victims, but the resistance unto death and solidarity with each other of a people who refused to submit to unjust authority, tyranny, and state terror.
In Resistance we become Unconquered and free.
It began with a teenage girl who threw a Molotov cocktail at the Nazis as they marched into the Ghetto. One little girl, with no weapons and no training, who said no.
As described by the only surviving commander of the Uprising, Dr. Marek Edelman, author of Resisting the Holocaust: Fighting Back in the Warsaw Ghetto, who fought on as the city was burned around them, they fought against impossible odds not to escape, for there was nowhere to escape to in occupied Poland, nor to buy time, for no help was coming, but only “to pick the time and place of our deaths”.
This I dispute, for the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising did far more than to claim their own freedom in seizing ownership of their lives in challenge to authority and refusal to obey force and control; they showed the rest of us how to live, and how to become free.
In the words of Max Stirner; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
As written by Ben Cohen in the Jerusalem Press, in an article entitled ‘From Every Floor, From Every Window:’ Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; “Now something unprecedented took place. Three officers with lowered machine pistols appeared. They wore white rosettes in their buttonholes – emissaries. They desired to negotiate with the Area Command. They proposed a 15-minute truce to remove the dead and the wounded. They were also ready to promise all inhabitants an orderly evacuation to working camps in Poniatow and Trawniki, and to let them take along all their belongings. Firing was our answer. Every house remained a hostile fortress. From every floor, from every window, bullets sought hated German helmets, hated German hearts.”
There are many inspiring stories from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, the 80th anniversary of which is being marked this week, but the passage quoted above is probably the one that left the deepest impression upon me.
I first read it many years ago, when I picked up a copy of “The Ghetto Fights,” a memoir by Marek Edelman, who was a leader of the Bund, the pre-war Jewish Socialist party, and who participated in the uprising against the Nazi occupiers. Edelman was describing the aftermath of the epic battle that commenced on April 19, 1943, when the Germans attempted to liquidate the ghetto with columns of troops, armored vehicles and tanks, and with heavy artillery pieces placed outside its walls. But the Jewish resistance fighters inside had anticipated their arrival; in the ensuing combat, the Germans became trapped at the intersection of Mila and Zamenhofa Streets, with their intended path to a safe retreat fatally exposed to the guns wielded by the fighters of the ZOB and the ZZW, the two Jewish military organizations in the ghetto. “Not a single German left this area alive,” wrote Edelman.
At the same time, further German units were pinned down in Nalewki and Gesia streets. “German blood flooded the street,” Edelman recalled. “German ambulances continuously transported their wounded to the small square near the Community buildings. Here the wounded lay in rows on the sidewalk awaiting their tum to be admitted to the hospital.” By 2 p.m. that same day, the Jewish fighters realized that they had won a key battle over their oppressors.
The Germans returned to the ghetto walls 24 hours later and were again met with hails of bullets and deadly attacks using what we now call Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). It was at this point that the three German officers described by Edelman came begging for a ceasefire, in order to collect their dead and wounded. In that precise moment, the role of the Jew and the German, of the “Untermensch” and the “Aryan”—cemented over the previous decade by the growing power of the Third Reich—was utterly inverted. Every bullet fired at the Germans was a riposte to the grotesque slogan carved into the gates of Auschwitz, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Makes You Free”). And every German who fell while attempting to rescue his wounded comrades was a sign that the humanity of the Jews had not been extinguished—that they were real agents making real decisions, including the decision to deny the enemy any form of mercy or regard amid the heat of the fighting.
The energy and the intensity shown by the 700 poorly armed young Jewish fighters reflected the understanding, deep in their hearts, that the battle for the ghetto was not ultimately one in which they would prevail. “We knew we couldn’t win,” wrote Mira Fuchrer, just 21 years old, one of the women fighters who came from the ranks of the Labor Zionist Hashomer Hatzair organization.
“We fought so we could die with dignity.” For Fuchrer’s boyfriend, the 22-year-old commander of the ZOB, Mordechai Anielewicz, the sheer fact of the uprising was a fillip to Europe’s Jews in their darkest hour, and therefore in itself a victory. “The dream of my life has risen to become fact,” he reflected at the height of the fighting. “Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts! I have been a witness to the magnificent, heroic fighting of Jewish men of battle.”
Like other aspects of the Holocaust and World War II more generally, the details of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising have become richer and more complicated with further research over time. Critically, thanks largely to the painstaking work of the late Moshe Arens, a former Israeli cabinet minister, we now know that there was not just one—as was assumed for several decades—but two military groups in the ghetto. As well as the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), which drew supporters of the non-Zionist Bund and left-wing Zionists such as Dror and Hashomer Hatzair, there was the Jewish Military Union (ZZW), commanded by Pawel Frenkel and rooted in the Revisionist Zionist Betar movement of Vladimir Jabotinsky.
The political divide between these two organizations was unmistakable, as was the internal split within the ZOB between those leftists who supported the creation of a Jewish state and those who saw Zionism as a needless deviation from the proletarian class struggle (but not, I should emphasize, as a “racist,” “colonialist” project in the manner of those who define themselves as anti-Zionists today). Yet the imperative of defeating the Germans was overwhelming, and so the ZOB and the ZZW, Betarniks and Bundists alike, forged a strategic alliance. The ZOB distributed its fighters at different points around the ghetto while the ZZW concentrated its forces in Muranowska Square, flying a blue-and-white Zionist flag alongside a Polish one from its headquarters as it pushed back against the German advance.
The vicious urban fighting lasted for nearly a month before the Germans were able to declare victory. “The former Jewish Quarter in Warsaw is no more,” announced the SS Commander Jurgen Stroop in a May 16, 1943 cable to his superiors in Berlin.
In the event, the ghetto was razed, and most of the surviving fighters committed suicide rather than face capture and humiliation at the hands of the Germans. The 42,000 Jews who still remained in the ghetto two years after the Germans began the mass deportation of the community were transported either to the Majdanek concentration camp or the labor camps at Poniatow and Trawnicki. Most of them were murdered at those locations during a two-day mass shooting operation in November 1943.
“Never say that you are walking the final road/Though leaden skies obscure blue days,” the ghetto fighters would sing. “The hour we have been longing for will still come/Our steps will drum—we are here!”
Eighty years later, as their descendants wrestle with a resurgence of antisemitism (albeit in far more favorable circumstances—the existence of a Jewish state, full civil and political rights in most countries where Jews live) we should not only wish that their memory remains a blessing. Let it strengthen us, too.”
Montage From The Pianist film, set to music by Matt Maltese, As the World Caves In
19 באפריל 2025 לעולם לא עוד: ימי הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה
בכל שנה אנו מציינים את שמונת ימי הזיכרון לחללי הקדושים וגיבורי השואה, בישראל ברגעי דממה כאשר ערים שלמות עוצרות בזמן שסירנות תקיפות אוויר מזהירות מפני תקיפה צפויה, שמא נשכח ונחשוב שהסכנה עברה מזמן ואנחנו בעצמנו. בטוחים, וברחבי העולם העוסקים במאבק מהפכני נגד עריצות אכזרית ובהתנגדות לכוח ולשליטה של פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה משקפים את הדוגמה של המתים הקדושים שלנו ועמידתם האחרונה המפוארת במרד גטו ורשה. מאשר את האדם המשותף, המשמעות והערך שלנו.
אני תוהה עכשיו, במלאת 80 שנה למרד גטו ורשה, אם למדנו את לקחיו; של ערנות מפני פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה ועריצות של כוח ושליטה, במיוחד שעלולים להתעורר בתוכנו כאטביזם של אינסטינקט ופחד המעוצבים על ידי כניעה לסמכות ולמערכות של כוח לא שוויוני, של חלוקות של אחרות ושייכות מוציאות, ו האיומים הקיומיים של זיוף ודה-הומניזציה ושל סולידריות בהתנגדות וחובתנו לדאוג לזולת.
אנו רואים את קווי השבר במערכות שלנו כאשר אנו נאבקים להוליד חברה חופשית אמיתית של שווים ולצאת ממורשת ההיסטוריה שלנו ומהגמוניות עילית של עושר, כוח וזכות, ובשום מקום על פני כדור הארץ איננו חופשיים מההתמכרות שלנו. לכוח ולהשלכותיו הרבות. אולם אנו מתנגדים ואינם מפסיקים, ואינו נוטשים את חברינו, כפי שנאמרת שבועת ההתנגדות שניתנה לי על ידי ז’אן ז’נה; וזוהי התקווה של האנושות.
בסופו של דבר, כל מה שחשוב הוא מה אנחנו עושים עם הפחד שלנו, ואיך אנחנו משתמשים בכוח שלנו. תעשה משהו יפה עם שלך.
בכל רחבי העולם, אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי הארץ, חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והמחוקים, יזכרו ויקומו שוב כדי לצאת מהחורבות ולעשות עוד דוכן אחרון.
מי שמתנגד ומסרב להיכנע לכוח אי אפשר לכבוש או להכניע. זהו הלקח הגדול של מרד גטו ורשה, ומדוע אנו זוכרים אותו; כי עלינו להישאר אנושיים, הבעלים של עצמנו אם לא יותר, וחופשיים.
כדי לבלבל בין שני ימי הזיכרון שלנו, יום הזיכרון הבינלאומי לשואה של האו”ם, 27 בינואר, מציין את היום בשנת 1945 שבו שחרר הצבא האדום הסובייטי את מחנה הריכוז אושוויץ-בירקנאו; הישג של מאבק שחרור וסולידריות בינלאומית, מטרה טובה ואצילית לחגוג. אבל ישראל וארה”ב בחרו את תאריך יום השואה כ”ז בניסן בלוח העברי להנצחת DRVH בת 8 ימים משהו אחר לגמרי; יום השנה למרד גטו ורשה ב-1943. לא הצלת קורבנות השואה, אלא התנגדות למוות וסולידריות זה עם זה של עם שסירב להיכנע לסמכות בלתי צודקת, לעריצות ולטרור המדינה.
בהתנגדות אנו הופכים ללא כבש וחופשי.
זה התחיל בילדה מתבגרת שזרקה בקבוק תבערה לעבר הנאצים כשצעדו לגטו. ילדה אחת קטנה, בלי נשק ובלי הכשרה, שאמרה לא.
כפי שתיאר המפקד היחיד שנותר בחיים של המרד, ד”ר מרק אדלמן, מחבר הספר “התנגדות לשואה: נלחם בחזרה בגטו ורשה”, שנלחם בזמן שהעיר נשרפה סביבם, הם נלחמו כנגד סיכויים בלתי אפשריים לא לברוח, שכן לא היה לאן לברוח בפולין הכבושה, וגם לא לקנות זמן, כי שום עזרה לא הגיעה, אלא רק “לבחור את הזמן והמקום של מותנו”.
על זה אני חולק, שכן גיבורי מרד גטו ורשה עשו הרבה יותר מאשר לתבוע את חירותם בעצמם בכיבוש הבעלות על חייהם תוך אתגר לסמכות וסירוב לציית לכוח ולשליטה; הם הראו לכולנו איך לחיות, ואיך להיות חופשיים.
במילותיו של מקס סטירנר; “לא ניתן להעניק חופש; יש לתפוס אותו.”
Polish
19 kwietnia 2025 Nigdy więcej: Dni Pamięci o Męczennikach i Bohaterach Holokaustu
Każdego roku upamiętniamy osiem Dni Pamięci Męczenników i Bohaterów Holokaustu w Izraelu chwilami ciszy, gdy całe miasta zatrzymują się, podczas gdy syreny alarmowe ostrzegają przed zbliżającym się atakiem, abyśmy nie zapomnieli i nie pomyśleli, że niebezpieczeństwo już dawno minęło, a my sami bezpieczni, a na całym świecie ci, którzy angażują się w rewolucyjną walkę przeciwko brutalnej tyranii oraz w opór wobec siły i kontroli faszyzmu krwi, wiary i ziemi, zastanawiają się nad przykładem naszych świętych zmarłych i ich chwalebną ostatnią walką w powstaniu w getcie warszawskim, które potwierdza naszą wspólną istotę ludzką, znaczenie i wartość.
Zastanawiam się teraz, w 80. rocznicę powstania w getcie warszawskim, czy wyciągnęliśmy z niego wnioski; czujności wobec faszyzmu krwi, wiary i ziemi oraz tyranii siły i kontroli, zwłaszcza tych, które mogą powstać w nas jako atawizmy instynktu i strachu ukształtowane przez poddanie się władzy i systemom nierównej władzy, podziałom wykluczającej inności i przynależności oraz egzystencjalne zagrożenia fałszerstwem i dehumanizacją, solidarnością w oporze i naszym obowiązkiem troski o innych.
Widzimy linie pęknięcia w naszych systemach, gdy walczymy o narodziny prawdziwie wolnego społeczeństwa równych i wyłaniamy się z dziedzictwa naszej historii oraz z elitarnych hegemonii bogactwa, władzy i przywilejów, i nigdzie na ziemi nie jesteśmy wolni od naszego uzależnienia władzy i jej wielorakich konsekwencji. Jednak opieramy się i nie przestajemy, i nie opuszczamy naszych towarzyszy, jak mówi Przysięga Oporu dana mi przez Jeana Geneta; i to jest nadzieja ludzkości.
Ostatecznie liczy się tylko to, co zrobimy z naszym strachem i jak wykorzystamy naszą moc. Zrób coś pięknego ze swoim.
Na całym świecie ci, których Frantz Fanon nazwał Nędznikami Ziemi, bezsilni i wywłaszczeni, wyciszeni i wymazani, będą pamiętali i powstaną ponownie, by wydostać się z ruin i stoczyć kolejną Ostatnią Bastion.
Kto stawia opór i odmawia poddania się sile, nie może zostać pokonany ani ujarzmiony. To jest wielka lekcja powstania w getcie warszawskim i dlaczego ją pamiętamy; ponieważ musimy, jeśli mamy pozostać ludźmi, właścicielami samych siebie i wolnymi.
Aby ujednoznacznić nasze dwa dni pamięci, Międzynarodowy Dzień Pamięci o Holokauście ustanowiony przez ONZ, 27 stycznia to dzień wyzwolenia przez Armię Czerwoną obozu koncentracyjnego Auschwitz-Birkenau w 1945 roku; osiągnięcie walki wyzwoleńczej i międzynarodowej solidarności, dobry i szlachetny powód do świętowania. Ale Izrael i Stany Zjednoczone wybrały datę Yom HaShoah 27 Nisan w kalendarzu hebrajskim na 8-dniowe obchody DRVH na coś zupełnie innego; rocznica powstania w getcie warszawskim 1943 r. Nie ratowanie ofiar Holokaustu, ale opór aż do śmierci i wzajemna solidarność narodu, który nie poddał się niesprawiedliwej władzy, tyranii i państwowemu terrorowi.
W Ruchu Oporu stajemy się Niezwyciężeni i wolni.
Zaczęło się od nastolatki, która rzuciła koktajlem Mołotowa w nazistów maszerujących do getta. Jedna mała dziewczynka, bez broni i bez wyszkolenia, która powiedziała nie.
Jak opisał jedyny żyjący dowódca Powstania, dr Marek Edelman, autor Resisting the Holocaust: Fighting Back in the Warsaw Ghetto, który walczył dalej, gdy wokół nich płonęło miasto, walczyli z niemożliwymi szansami, by nie uciec, bo w okupowanej Polsce nie było dokąd uciec, ani kupić czasu, bo pomoc nie nadchodziła, a jedynie „wybrać czas i miejsce naszej śmierci”.
Kwestionuję to, ponieważ bohaterowie powstania w getcie warszawskim zrobili znacznie więcej niż tylko domaganie się własnej wolności, przejmując odpowiedzialność za swoje życie, rzucając wyzwanie władzy i odmawiając posłuszeństwa wobec siły i kontroli; pokazali reszcie z nas, jak żyć i jak stać się wolnymi.
Słowami Maxa Stirnera; „Wolności nie można przyznać; trzeba go przejąć”.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, a reading list
Resisting the Holocaust: Fighting Back in the Warsaw Ghetto, Marek Edelman,
Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Hanna Krall, Marek Edelman, Lawrence Weschler (Translator), Joanna Stasinska (Translator)
This is the anniversary of a tragic and glorious Last Stand the world must never forget, and I cannot.
Here follows my journal of the final day as Russian forces sealed off the city from aid or escape, and after making what mischief we could for the enemy my friends and I fled along the underground railroad to Warsaw to organize resistance and revolution within Russia, and bring a Reckoning for war crimes in Mariupol to her destroyers.
For fear of nuclear annihilation and other retaliation by and direct conflict with Russia, America and the world have avoided bringing a Reckoning to Putin’s regime for its crimes against humanity in Ukraine; we have not counter-invaded, liberated the Black Sea, destroyed the airfields, supply lines, and manufacture of war material, nor given Ukraine the means to do so for herself.
As the survival of humankind depends upon our abandonment of weapons of mass destruction and global nuclear disarmament, disengagement works on the existential level, but we know from Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” that appeasement does not. As the famous line from the film Darkest Hour that Churchill never said goes; “You can not reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
Between war with Russia and refusing our duty of care for others regardless of whose citizens they may be which entails the abandonment of our principles of universal human rights and the natural right of sovereignty of all human beings, there is a vast and enormous space of free play in which to act in solidarity and anticolonial struggle with those under threat of imperial conquest and dominion and all of the atrocities and horrors of war. This is true of Palestine as well as Ukraine, and far too many other failures of our humanity.
Let us bring regime change to Russia, for this is the only way Putin’s mad quest to re-found the Russian Empire, which now unfolds in ten theatres of war including Ukraine and Vichy America in the puppet regime of Traitor Trump, will truly end; when the people of Russia liberate themselves. I can say the same for America and for the Gaza War and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; it ends when the people of Israel liberate themselves from the Netanyahu settler regime and bring true democracy to Israel in abandoning the re-enactment of Auschwitz which is the Occupation, and unite with the people of Palestine as fully equal citizens in one nation wherein fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are renounced for ideals of equality, diversity, inclusion, and a secular state.
When I originally wrote this commemoration of the anniversary of the Last Stand of Mariupol, legislation awaited a vote in our Congress which Janus-like offered us a chiaroscuro of good and evil; funds to combat tyranny and terror for Ukraine, and funds to enforce tyranny and terror for Israel. We can see how well that worked out, as our abandonment of the principle of universal human rights sabotaged the Restoration of America through division of the Democratic Party and produced the second Trump regime.
What would a foreign policy based on universal human rights applied equally to all human beings and the nations which represent them look like?
Our policy in Israel must be to silence the bombs of genocide, break the blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and bring regime change.
For Ukraine we must do far more than fund resistance; we must bring the fight to the enemy on his own ground, in solidarity with the people of Russia versus the regime and in alliance with the democracy movement now pervasive throughout civil society and the antiwar movement within the Russian military. This is how we brought a Reckoning to Prigozhin as a war criminal, in partnership with the slave soldiers he sent to conquer a free people, and it is how we will bring a Reckoning to Putin and his regime, and to Trump and all who are complicit in his subversion of democracy, theft of our citizenship and our rights and freedoms, and the white supremacist state terror of ICE and its campaign of random abductions and imprisonment without cause or trial in foreign gulags.
Yes, it is all one revolutionary struggle for our humanity versus tyranny and state terror and one war with many theatres as World War Three.
But while the forces arrayed against us may seem unstoppable as the tides both in America under a captured state and in Ukraine before the savage and ferocious assaults of the Putin regime whose war crimes and atrocities define the limits of the human, in Syria we proved that the enemy can be defeated. If we all unite in solidarity of action as guarantors of each other’s liberty and universal human rights.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
April 18 2022 Last Stand at Mariupol: Fight at the Steel Works
Fighting at the Azovstal and Ilyin Iron and Steel Works remains ongoing; among the vast warrens and maze of tunnels here, with its arsenals, hospitals, communications centers, and routes of resupply as in other underground fortresses in Mariupol and elsewhere, Resistance to the Russian Occupation may be waged for years if necessary. A machinist and leader of the steelworkers who armed themselves in defense, called Big Yuri, has even jury rigged an arms factory which can manufacture rifles and ammunition indefinitely. This, unfortunately, is not the same as holding the ground.
We are the Spartans; our lives buy time for our civilization to awaken to its peril and the threat of fascist tyranny and imperial conquest by Russia in this the Third World War.
For Mariupol and far too many of the people of Ukraine, this will come too late; no one is coming to help, and many of her defenders have nothing left to fight with on this forty seventh day of the Siege of Mariupol which began on the second of March, and of the Battle which began February 24th.
But it is not too late for you and yours, whomever you may be or wherever you may live. This truth must suffice, as the hope for our future.
I speak herein as a witness of history who has been in Mariupol from March 22, and offer this testimony on behalf of our universal human rights in any Reckoning brought to the perpetrators of this vast and horrific war crime.
This has been from its beginning a battle of aerial and artillery bombardment against the city itself and the civilian population, of tanks against riflemen, of flesh against unanswerable force and horror, of division against solidarity, of hate against love, and of fear against hope.
Here the human will to freedom is tested by an enemy who exults in the embrace of the monstrous, whose policies and designs of war as terror gladly and with the open arrogance of power instrumentalize utter destruction and genocide, a war wherein atrocities and depravities are unleashed as tactics of shock and awe with intent of subjugation through learned helplessness and overwhelming and generalized fear.
Here as in Nanking and countless other places, this produces not submission but resistance. Politics is about fear as a basis of exchange, and in the Calculus of Fear, where limited state terror against its own citizens in concert with total control of information may be useful internally in the manufacture of consent to be governed, provided the legitimacy of authority remains unquestioned by those in whose name it claims to act, in war what is uncontrollable and unimaginable creates conditions in which there is nothing more to lose.
Such are my people, all those with nothing left to lose, here and in all times and places throughout history and among all humankind, and when we stand in solidarity with each other we are Unconquerable and beyond any force of subjugation or control.
Too much or too little fear, and where and how it is used, can destabilize totalitarian regimes. When law becomes meaningless and is replaced by power and force, authority is delegitimized, the consent to be governed is lost, and order becomes chaos.
Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, episode seven The World to Come, has a scene in which two young successors to leadership of traditionally rival factions find themselves in love and in need of allies in a subplot which reimagines Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; the rebellious hellion Jonah Breakspear asks his Machiavellian lover Sophie Longerbane, “Who is chaos good for?” To which she replies, “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
As Jean Genet said to me in Beirut nearly forty years ago as we were surrounded by soldiers in a house they had set on fire and about to be burned alive; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
Resistance has always been a war to the knife. Curious phrase, that; among the few words and whole phrases which come into modern English unchanged from the original Norse; krig på kniven. Its meaning for us is simple; those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none.
By any means necessary, as this principle is expressed in the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X.
Why is this terrible war happening, in Mariupol a campaign of terror which includes executions, torture, organized mass rape and the trafficking of abducted civilians, the capture of civilian hostages and use of forced labor, cannibalism using mobile factories, genocidal attacks, erasure of evidence of war crimes using mobile crematoriums which indicates official planning as part of the campaign of terror and proof that the countless crimes against humanity of this war are not aberrations but by design, threats of nuclear annihilation against European nations sending humanitarian aid, and the mass destruction of cities?
The Russian strategy of conquest as Total War, designed by Franco and Hitler and tested at Guernica, opens with sustained and relentless bombardment and destruction of hospitals, bomb shelters, stores of food, power systems, water supply, corridors of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of refugees; anything which could help citizens survive a siege. Once nothing is left standing, a campaign of terror as organized mass rape, torture, cannibalism, and looting begins, and any survivors enslaved or executed. This is a war of genocide and erasure, which has no parallel in modern Europe other than the Siege of Sarajevo; and here I speak as a witness of history to both.
Why? What could possibly be worth purchasing with your humanity and that of your nation and people?
Russia wants to conquer Ukraine for the same reason Japan invaded Manchuria; because it is an industrial heartland from which the conquest of the world may be launched, and the warm water ports of Mariupol and Odesa are key to this imperial plan of dominion, as well as to control of a land corridor to Crimea.
The sixty-five ports of the Black Sea connect Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine, and all of these with the Mediterranean, dominion of which Russia has long disputed with Turkey in Libya and Syria. If Russia intends to follow the conquest of Ukraine with that of Eastern Europe, the capture of Romania’s Port of Constanta would open the whole of the Danube region to invasion. The Black Sea remains as crucial to the dominion of the Mediterranean, and of Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, as it was when Mithridates VI of Pontus contested for it in his wars with the Roman Empire, or at the Battle of Gallipoli which we seem doomed to refight in Crimea.
At stake in the fight at the steelworks in Mariupol is the major regional industrial plant and the strategic resource of keeping a fleet alive, decisive in diverting Russian troops and resources from the Donbas campaign and in preventing Russia from fully colonizing Crimea and coastal Ukraine. Denying Russia the ability to refit and repair its ships from local resources may be key to defeating the invasion of the Ukrainian seaboard and the Mediterranean.
The Azovstal and Ilyin Iron and Steel Works are also a vast and labyrinthine fortress from which the defense of Mariupol may be waged, like Fort St Elmo from which the Knights of Malta made their heroic Last Stand.
What is happening in Mariupol now, among the confusion and devastation of a city of ghosts wherein the Russian army has given free rein to the depravity of war?
As Ukraine seizes the initiative in the north and drives Russia back across the border, and begins to contest and retake the Black Sea with the stunning victory of crippling the Moskva, flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet to which the defenders of Snake Island gave famous reply, savage fighting for the port and the steelworks continues though Russia has claimed a thousand Ukrainian Marines surrendered, with the implication that Mariupol itself has also surrendered.
To this disinformation aimed at the will of the Ukrainian people to refuse to submit and remain Unconquered I say; First, that Mariupol is without question under Occupation and in enemy hands, but the city has not surrendered nor ever will. Suicide teams who have volunteered to remain and harry the enemy as opportunities arise will see to that, and networks of Resistance among her citizens await the hour of Liberation.
The Russians have published their estimate of the forces gathered here at the steel works as twenty five hundred Ukrainians and four hundred foreign volunteers of the International Legion, including the independent Abraham Lincoln Brigade which I founded here, we Americans who named ourselves after the legendary unit of the Spanish Civil War. Others still hold the port itself under Ukrainian control, a fact to the advantage of any such force of Liberation who may bring a fleet to this fight.
Second, there is nothing dishonorable in surrender if it means you live to fight another day, and the 36th Marines Brigade who have on the forty sixth day of their heroic defense of Mariupol declared in their last message to the world, days ago now, that they have nothing left to fight with, no ammunition, water, anything, and that they are either captive or dead, bear only honor with them into a future which must now be chosen by others.
I have never seen a Ukrainian surrender. Casually stroll into an enemy checkpoint and pull the pin on a grenade, laughing, to open the way for a hospital truck to rescue others, yes. Share a bottle of poisoned vodka with an enemy sentry and die together while refugees are escorted through the lines, yes.
Such people cannot be conquered. The use of force and violence is fragile and power is hollow when it has no legitimacy but only brutal repression to sustain it; for all such things fail at the point of disobedience and disbelief.
Whosoever refuses to submit becomes Unconquered, and is free. This is a kind of victory against which no tyranny or terror can win.
I have seen a fierce bearded fellow attack a pair of Russian tanks with an ax, running from cover to leap onto the turret and behead the commander, and vanish into the ruins like a shadow of wrath summoned by the city’s pain, grief, and fear. Called The Headsman, in him Ukraine has found an avenger. The remaining tank crewmen bailed out and ran in panic, the commanding officer in the second tank opened fire on the deserters and actually shot one of them, and he was shot in turn by a fellow Russian soldier who emerged behind him from the tank, put a gun to his head, and then simply walked across the street with hands raised and changed sides. The soldier who chose our common humanity over nationalism and solidarity over division is now the commander of that tank, but with the Ukrainian flag painted on it. Saint Andrei, they are calling him.
Putin has sent slaves to conquer a free people. He forgot to wonder, what happens when the slaves join together with their fellow victims of tyranny whom they were sent to conquer, in solidarity of action to liberate themselves?
While the Russian army has an active peace movement and networks of solidarity working with their Ukrainian counterparts, and many incidents of desertion and mutiny including fragging officers, the Ukrainians, often frozen, starving, and out of ammunition like the founders of America who crossed the Delaware with Washington on that fateful Christmas Day in 1776, remain defiant and Unconquered.
There is also the legend of the Wolf of Mariupol, a girl who tore out her attacker’s throat like a wolf. A myth of war, possibly; but I saw what was left of the Russian soldier in question. It is said she now leads a team of women who rescue others from the Butterfly Collectors, the soldiers capturing women for abduction to Russia and trafficking as a criminal syndicate within the Russian military. In her Ukraine has found a Harriet Tubman.
A group of Ukrainian Marines has last week broken through to link up with elements of the Azov National Guard, very stubborn fellows who have held the steel works in grim conditions; but several zones of conflict are unfolding and rapidly changing. Russian officers have tried to compel surrender using civilian hostages in a different incident, but not to my knowledge with success.
The war crimes of the Russians have awakened a resistance of victory or death; like the defenders at the Siege of Malta in 1565 or George Washington who coined that phrase as a password at the Battle of Trenton, the Ukrainian soldiers, civilian partisans including steelworkers and others who armed themselves when Russia attacked, and international volunteers I have witnessed swearing an oath to die in place rather than surrender anything to a conqueror will not go quietly.
What happens next? As Lenin asked in his essay that founded a political party and a Revolution which was destined to transform the world, What is to be done?
Today the Russian Occupation forces impose passports of travel required of all persons on the streets, begin capturing civilians and sending them to processing centers to choose some for forced labor camps and others for summary execution, and all access to the world beyond Mariupol and from the world to here cordoned off entirely. Mariupol is to be emptied, the population totalized as dead or enslaved, and remaining persons systematically hunted to extinction.
Putin intends to leave us nothing to defend and nowhere from which to fight. And in so doing he has freed us to begin the next phase of struggle, and take the fight to the enemy.
Sometimes I think he doesn’t know how to play this game at all.
Fortunately for us, being a KGB Colonel is not precisely the same as being a professional revolutionary, and seems to have made of Putin a truncated and misshapen thing, of limited intellect and no morals whatever, no visionary evil genius nor embodiment of Hegelian world-historical forces but merely an overseer of the carceral state. Vladimir Putin is much like Adolf Eichmann, as described by Hannah Arendt in her historic work on the Nuremberg Trials.
As I consider my goals and objectives regarding the war to be obvious to anyone, I don’t mind outlining them for you here.
First and beyond all other priorities, for only this will truly end the threat of war, we must act in solidarity with the Russian peoples to help bring regime change and the Liberation of Russia from the tyranny of Vladimir Putin and his oligarchy.
Second, we must bring a direct and personal Reckoning to Putin, his oligarchs, high command, political allies and minions, and all those complicit in war crimes in Ukraine.
Third, we must bring destruction to Russia’s ability to wage this war, especially the artillery and airfields which reduce whole cities to ruin in the opening phase of any such enemy assault.
Fourth, we must seize control of the Black Sea or prevent Russia from doing so, to deny its use as a launching pad for the imperial Russian conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
We’re going to need a pirate fleet for that last bit, and I know just where I can find one.
Herein the overarching strategic reality which must drive our decisions is the fact that World War Three has now been ongoing for some time, whose theatres of war include Russia, America, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and now Ukraine inclusive of her province Crimea.
Should we fail to stop this war of imperial conquest and dominion here in Ukraine where all our humanitarian values and international laws are violated with brutal savagery, and allow it to become a general global war between liberty and tyranny, my fear is that the world may enter an age of tyranny and centuries of war which humankind will not survive.
For Putin’s hand rests on the button of our nuclear annihilation and extinction, and it calls to him, whispering; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
”圮地則行；圍地則謀；死地則戰“; as written by Sun Tzu in Chapter Eleven of The Art of War, “In death ground, fight.”
This principle of action was once demonstrated for me in Angola, during the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988, in a tactical situation similar to ours here in Mariupol. While the spectacle of this grand final battle in a decades long liberation struggle against colonialism and Apartheid was unfolding, I was making mischief behind enemy lines in the bush. Here I discovered a lost unit, mainly Zulu though with Soviet and Cuban volunteers, which was encircled by Apartheid forces.
After reporting what I knew of the area to the command group and a brief conference in several languages, an old fellow who had heretofore been silent stood up from the shadows of the tent, whose shirtless form displayed a fearsome and magnificent scar from a lion’s claws, and said; “We are surrounded and outnumbered with no ammunition and worse, no water, and no one is coming to help us. We must attack.”
The sergeant smiled at this as if he had been given a marvelous gift, strode outside, and gave the order which if you are lucky you will never hear; “Fix bayonets!”
And the men about to die erupted in song. “Usuthu! Umkhonto wami womile!” “My spear is thirsty”, that last.
We too can emerge victorious from our war of survival against even an immensely more vast and powerful foe, as did the heroes of Cuito Cuanavale, if we unleash the full will and force of our nations against an emergent Russian Empire, as a United Humankind; especially if we do so against its weak spots and lines of fracture.
Ukraine is such a weak spot of imperial ambition, while she yet resists and remains Unconquered. And the Russian invasion of Europe can be derailed by political action in Russia through the democracy and peace movements which have challenged Putin’s tyranny.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity goes the motto of the Revolution which birthed democracies in America and France; the first two parts of which proclaim universal principles of human being, and the third part, which refers to what we call solidarity, interdependence, and our duty of care for others, is instrumental to the realization of our liberty and equality as a free society of equals.
We can be victorious in the triumph of democracy over tyranny, of solidarity over division, and of love over hate. But there is only one way this works; we must act as one United Humankind.
As written by Tom Bateman of the BBC; “Russian troops started their encirclement of Mariupol in early March, gradually tightening the noose.
There are growing signs Russia could be on the brink of fully capturing Mariupol, the besieged southern port city which has suffered a devastating, six-week assault.
Officially, Ukraine’s armed forces say they are sustaining its defence and are in “continuous contact” with their troops on the ground. But they concede it is likely Moscow will try to take full control of the city, while a regional Russian-backed separatist leader claims Mariupol is close to falling.
Ukrainian troops have said they are running out of ammunition, and are believed to have been pushed back into two isolated pockets adjoining the coastline.
The city’s fate is likely to be critical for the next phase of the war. In Russian hands it would provide control of a clear swathe of territory connecting Moscow’s two fronts in the south and east. It would release large numbers of forces to redeploy, and provide President Vladimir Putin with a moment of strategic “victory” after a lethally shambolic first stage to his invasion.
It would mark a huge loss, if by now an expected one, for Ukraine’s leadership which has described Mariupol as “the heart of this war today”.
It is believed Ukraine’s forces have been forced back to the port area and the Azovstal iron and steel plant.
Russian troops started their encirclement of Mariupol in early March. The siege has killed thousands of civilians and unleashed an appalling struggle for survival for trapped residents who remain.
Thousands of people have escaped further north, risking a deadly journey through the front line. Here, in Zaporizhzhia, I have watched civilians arrive day after day, describing how they have witnessed the obliteration of their city.
In recent days Russian forces are thought to have pushed in further by dividing the remaining holdout of Mariupol’s defenders, according to think tank the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
It’s believed Ukraine’s forces have been forced back to the port area and the Azovstal plant, a massive iron and steel works from where they had launched counter-attacks for weeks.
Videos have emerged of fighters apparently from the 36th marine brigade vowing not to surrender their positions.
“We are holding on to every bit of the city wherever possible,” says one in a video posted to social media channels on Tuesday.
“But the reality is the city is encircled and blocked and there was no re-supply of ammunition or food,” he adds. Part of the footage shows him alongside several other marines in a room that looks like a basement shelter. One of the men has crutches leaning against his chair.
A post on Monday on the brigade’s Facebook page described the situation as “the last battle… It is death for some of us, and captivity for the rest,” it said, adding they had been “pushed back” and “surrounded” by Russian troops.
Ukrainian analysts differed over whether the post could be relied on as genuine, with some claiming the page had been hacked. But more than 36 hours later the post remained on the site.
The siege and a resulting collapse in communications in Mariupol mean it is difficult to independently verify reports about changes on the ground.
There is little doubt Ukrainian forces have been desperate for new supplies of weapons, ammunition, food and water.
Mariupol – home to more than 400,000 people before the war – has been virtually wiped out by weeks of heavy Russian shelling.
Ukraine’s military reportedly managed over the weeks to resupply troops with kit including night and thermal vision goggles, portable battery charging packs and even anti-tank munitions; but it became increasingly hard.
“Ultimately, the city was surrounded so soon into the invasion that there was never a chance to build up supplies,” says Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at defence think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
“They’ve already held out far, far longer than any external analysis would have predicted possible. So it’s difficult to say how much longer they can go on,” he says, adding that they have “achieved extraordinary results with very little”.
Ukrainian attempts to rotate forces or evacuate the wounded also became much more high risk as Russia tightened its siege.
In his video address to the nation late on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said: “The future of Ukraine directly depends on the strength of our resistance in all its forms. The future of us all, each of our cities, each of our villages.
“And I am grateful to everyone who understands this. Who does not stop resisting even when it seems that the result is very far. Because the darkest time is always before dawn.
“I want to separately address those heroes who are having a very hard time. Those who defend Mariupol. A marine battalion of the 36th marine brigade, Azov special operations detachment, 12th operational brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine. Subdivisions of the State Border Guard Service. Volunteers of the “Right Sector”. The 555th military hospital and National Police employees.”
The full capture of the city could see significant numbers of Russian troops, so far used to contain and prevent resupply in Mariupol, reconstituted and moved elsewhere, particularly in other parts of the eastern Donbas region, where Moscow is gearing up for a major offensive.
It could also see Moscow consolidate its progress north of Mariupol, which is one of the reasons the Ukrainians were finding it so hard to relieve the city, according to Mr Bronk.
The forces could also be used to bolster Russian-occupied Kherson, where Ukrainian troops have been attempting to retake ground with some success.
President Zelensky continued his metaphor that Mariupol is the heart of the war. “If it stops beating then we will be… weaker,” he said.”
20 Days In Mariupol documentary film
Churchill’s speech in Darkest Hour: You cannot Reason With a Tiger When Your Head Is In Its Mouth
Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
This is my theme song for Last Stands, which I posted as I embarked for Mariupol in March 2022 and for Afghanistan in August 2021 after the Fall of Kabul.
18 квітня 2024 р. Друга річниця останнього стоянки на металургійному заводі в Маріуполі
Це річниця трагічної та славетної Останньої битви, яку світ ніколи не повинен забувати, а я не можу.
Ось мій щоденник останнього дня, коли російські війська блокували місто від допомоги чи втечі, і після того, як завдали ворогу скільки могли, ми з друзями втекли підземною залізницею до Варшави, щоб організувати опір і революцію в Росії, і принести відповідальність за військові злочини в Маріуполі її руйнівникам.
Через страх ядерного знищення та іншої помсти з боку Росії та прямого конфлікту з нею Америка та світ уникають розплати режиму Путіна за його злочини проти людства в Україні; ми не проводили контрвторгнення, не звільняли Чорне море, не знищували аеродроми, лінії постачання та виробництво військової техніки, не давали Україні для цього засобів.
Оскільки виживання людства залежить від нашої відмови від зброї масового знищення та глобального ядерного роззброєння, розмежування діє на екзистенціальному рівні, але ми знаємо з «Миру в наш час» Чемберлена, що умиротворення не діє. Як звучить відомий рядок із фільму “Найтемніша година”, про який Черчилль ніколи не говорив; «Не можна міркувати з тигром, коли твоя голова в його пащі».
Між війною з Росією та відмовою від нашого обов’язку піклуватися про інших, незалежно від того, чиїми громадянами вони можуть бути, що тягне за собою відмову від наших принципів універсальних прав людини та природного права на суверенітет усіх людей, існує величезний і величезний простір вільного гра, в якій діяти в солідарності та антиколоніальній боротьбі з тими, хто перебуває під загрозою імперського завоювання та панування, а також усіх звірств і жахів війни. Це стосується і Палестини, і України.
Давайте принесемо зміну режиму в Росії, бо це єдиний спосіб, яким справді закінчиться шалений пошук Путіна відновити Російську імперію, який зараз розгортається на десяти театрах війни, включаючи Україну та Америку на наших виборах; коли народ Росії звільниться. Я можу сказати те саме про війну в Газі та ізраїльсько-палестинський конфлікт; це закінчується, коли народ Ізраїлю звільняється від режиму поселенців Нетаньяху та приносить справжню демократію в Ізраїль, відмовляючись від реконструкції Освенціма, який є окупацією, і об’єднується з народом Палестини як повноправні громадяни в одній нації, в якій фашизм кров, віра та земля відмовляються заради ідеалів рівності, різноманітності, інклюзії та світської держави.
Законодавство тепер чекає на голосування в нашому Конгресі, який, як Янус, пропонує нам світлотінь добра і зла; кошти на боротьбу з тиранією та терором для України та кошти на посилення тиранії та терору для Ізраїлю.
Наша політика в Ізраїлі має полягати в тому, щоб заглушити бомби геноциду, прорвати блокаду гуманітарної допомоги в Газу та змінити режим.
Для України ми повинні зробити набагато більше, ніж фінансувати опір; ми повинні вести боротьбу з ворогом на його власній території, солідарно з народом Росії проти режиму та в союзі з демократичним рухом, який зараз поширений у громадянському суспільстві, та антивоєнним рухом у російській армії. Так ми розплатилися Пригожину як військовому злочинцю, так ми розплатимося Путіну та його режиму.
Бо нас багато, ми спостерігаємо, і ми майбутнє.
Russian
18 апреля 2024 Вторая годовщина последней битвы на металлургическом комбинате в Мариуполе
Это годовщина трагической и славной Последней битвы, которую мир никогда не должен забыть, а я не могу.
Здесь следует мой дневник последнего дня, когда русские войска изолировали город от помощи или побега, и, причинив врагу весь вред, который мы могли, мы с друзьями бежали по подземной железной дороге в Варшаву, чтобы организовать сопротивление и революцию внутри России, и принести расплату за военные преступления в Мариуполе ее эсминцам.
Опасаясь ядерного уничтожения и других возмездий со стороны России и прямого конфликта с ней, Америка и весь мир избегают расплаты режиму Путина за его преступления против человечности на Украине; мы не осуществили ответное вторжение, не освободили Черное море, не разрушили аэродромы, линии снабжения и производство военной техники и не предоставили Украине средств сделать это для себя.
Поскольку выживание человечества зависит от нашего отказа от оружия массового уничтожения и глобального ядерного разоружения, размежевание работает на экзистенциальном уровне, но из книги Чемберлена «Мир в наше время» мы знаем, что умиротворение этого не делает. Как гласит знаменитая фраза из фильма «Темные времена», которую Черчилль никогда не говорил; «Невозможно рассуждать с Тигром, когда твоя голова у него во рту».
Между войной с Россией и отказом от нашей обязанности заботиться о других, независимо от того, чьими гражданами они могут быть, что влечет за собой отказ от наших принципов универсальных прав человека и естественного права суверенитета всех людей, существует огромное и огромное пространство свободы. игра, в которой нужно действовать в духе солидарности и антиколониальной борьбы с теми, кто находится под угрозой имперского завоевания и владычества, а также всех зверств и ужасов войны. Это справедливо как для Палестины, так и для Украины.
Давайте осуществим смену режима в России, поскольку это единственный способ действительно положить конец безумному стремлению Путина заново основать Российскую империю, которое сейчас разворачивается на десяти театрах военных действий, включая Украину и Америку на наших выборах; когда народ России освободится. Я могу сказать то же самое о войне в Газе и израильско-палестинском конфликте; он закончится, когда народ Израиля освободится от поселенческого режима Нетаньяху и принесет Израилю истинную демократию, отказавшись от реконструкции Освенцима, который является оккупацией, и объединится с народом Палестины как полностью равные граждане в одной нации, где фашизм кровь, вера и почва отвергаются ради идеалов равенства, разнообразия, инклюзивности и светского государства.
Законодательство теперь ожидает голосования в нашем Конгрессе, которое, подобно Янусу, предлагает нам светотени добра и зла; фонды для борьбы с тиранией и террором в Украине и фонды для насаждения тирании и террора в Израиле.
Наша политика в Израиле должна заключаться в том, чтобы заставить замолчать бомбы геноцида, прорвать блокаду гуманитарной помощи Газе и добиться смены режима.
Для Украины мы должны сделать гораздо больше, чем просто финансировать сопротивление; мы должны начать борьбу с врагом на его собственной земле, в знак солидарности с народом России против режима и в союзе с демократическим движением, которое сейчас широко распространено в гражданском обществе, и с антивоенным движением в российских вооруженных силах. Вот как мы принесли расплату Пригожину как военному преступнику, и так мы принесем расплату Путину и его режиму.
Reading List for a Future History of the Battle and Siege of Mariupol, To Be Written
Such a history begins thus; Herein is my witness of history and truth telling in this, the first general history of World War Three. As with all things human, it is also fiction except when it is not, myth when it can be, poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and of our limitless future possibilities of becoming human.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
There are no Ukrainians, no Russians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
Ukrainian
Список для читання майбутньої історії битви та облоги Маріуполя, який буде написаний
Така історія починається так; Ось моє свідчення історії та правди в цій першій загальній історії Третьої світової війни. Як і все людське, це також вигадка, за винятком тих випадків, коли це не так, міф, коли він може бути, поетичне бачення та переосмислення і трансформація людського буття, сенсу й цінності та наших безмежних майбутніх можливостей стати людьми.
Хіба ми не ті історії, які розповідаємо про себе, собі та іншим?
Завжди залишається боротьба між масками, які ми робимо для себе, і тими, які роблять для нас інші.
Це перша революція, в якій ми всі повинні боротися; боротьба за володіння собою.
Немає ні українців, ні росіян; тільки такі люди, як ми, і вибір, який вони роблять щодо того, як бути людьми разом.
Russian
Список литературы для будущей истории битвы и осады Мариуполя, которую нужно написать
Такая история начинается так; Вот мой свидетель истории и правды в этой, первой общей истории Третьей мировой войны. Как и все человеческое, это также вымысел, за исключением случаев, когда это не так, миф, когда он может быть, поэтическое видение и переосмысление и трансформация человеческого бытия, смысла и ценности, а также наших безграничных будущих возможностей стать людьми.
Разве мы не истории, которые рассказываем о себе, себе и другим?
Всегда остается борьба между масками, которые мы делаем для себя, и масками, которые делают для нас другие.
Это первая революция, в которой мы все должны сражаться; борьба за право собственности на себя.
Нет ни украинцев, ни русских; только такие люди, как мы, и выбор, который они делают о том, как быть людьми вместе.
18 квітня 2022 року Останній бій у Маріуполі: бій на металургійному заводі
Бойові дії на «Азовсталі» та «Ільїнського металургійного комбінату» тривають; серед величезних лабіринтів і лабіринтів тунелів тут, з його арсеналом, госпіталем, центром зв’язку та маршрутами постачання, як і в інших підземних фортецях у Маріуполі та інших місцях, опір російській окупації можна вести роками, якщо буде потрібно. Машиніст і керівник металургійних робітників, які озброїлися для захисту, на ім’я Великий Юрій, навіть присяжні сфальсифікували збройовий завод, який може виробляти гвинтівки та боєприпаси необмежений час. Це, на жаль, не те саме, що тримати землю.
Ми спартанці; наше життя дає час для нашої цивілізації, щоб пробудитися до її небезпеки та загрози фашистської тиранії та імперського завоювання.
Для Маріуполя та дуже багатьох жителів України це станеться надто пізно; ніхто не йде на допомогу, а багатьом її захисникам нема з чим битися в цей сорок сьомий день облоги Маріуполя, що розпочалася 2 березня, і битви, що розпочалася 24 лютого.
Але ще не пізно для вас і ваших, ким би ви не були і де б ви не жили. Цієї правди має бути достатньо, як надії на наше майбутнє.
Я говорю тут як свідок історії, який перебував у Маріуполі з 22 березня, і пропоную це свідчення від імені наших універсальних прав людини в будь-якій розплаті винуватцям цього величезного та жахливого військового злочину.
З самого початку це була битва повітряних та артилерійських бомбардувань самого міста та цивільного населення, танків проти стрільців, плоті проти невідповідної сили та жаху, поділу проти солідарності, ненависті проти любові та страху проти надії. .
Тут людська воля до свободи випробовується ворогом, який радіє в обіймах жахливих, чия політика та задуми війни як терору з радістю та з відкритою зарозумілістю влади інструментують повне знищення та геноцид, війну, в якій розв’язуються звірства та розбещення. як тактика шоку і благоговіння з наміром підкорення через вивчену безпорадність і непереборний і загальний страх.
Тут, як і в Нанкіні та багатьох інших місцях, це викликає не підкорення, а опір. Політика стосується страху як основи обміну, а в Обчисленні страху, де обмежений державний терор проти власних громадян у поєднанні з повним контролем інформації може бути корисним для внутрішнього виробництва згоди на керування, за умови легітимності влади. залишається беззаперечним для тих, чиє ім’я вона претендує на дію, у війні те, що є неконтрольованим і немислимим, створює умови, в яких втрачати більше нічого.
Занадто великий або занадто малий страх, а також те, де і як він використовується, може дестабілізувати тоталітарні режими. Коли закон втрачає сенс і замінюється владою і силою, влада делегітимізується, втрачається згода на керування, а порядок стає хаосом.
Гільєрмо дель Торо у своїй чудовій епосі про міграцію та расову рівність Carnival Row, сьомий епізод «Світ, що прийде», містить сцену, в якій двоє молодих наступників лідерства традиційно ворогуючих фракцій опиняються закоханими та потребуючими союзників у сюжеті, який переосмислює «Ромео і Джульєтту» Шекспіра; бунтівний геліон Джона Брейкспір запитує свою кохану-макіавеллістську Софі Лонгербейн: «Кому хаос корисний?» На що вона відповідає: «Хаос корисний для нас. Хаос — велика надія безсилих».
Як сказав мені Жан Жене в Бейруті майже сорок років тому, коли ми були оточені солдатами в будинку, який вони підпалили і ось-ось спалили заживо; «Коли немає надії, ми вільні робити неможливі речі, славні речі».
Опір завжди був війною на ножа. Цікава фраза, що; серед небагатьох слів і цілих фраз, які приходять до сучасної англійської мови незмінними від оригінальної скандинавської мови; krig på kniven. Його значення для нас просте; ті, хто хоче нас поневолити і хто відмовляється від усіх законів і будь-яких обмежень, не можуть ховатися ні за ким.
У будь-якому разі, оскільки цей принцип виражений у знаменитому сентенції Сартра у його п’єсі «Брудні руки» 1948 року, цитованої Францом Фаноном у його промові 1960 року «Чому ми використовуємо насильство» і зробленій безсмертним Малькольмом Ікс.
Чому відбувається ця страшна війна, у Маріуполі проводиться кампанія терору, яка включає страти, катування, організовані масові зґвалтування та торгівлю викраденими цивільними, захоплення цивільних заручників та використання примусової праці, канібалізм з використанням пересувних заводів, напади геноциду, знищення докази військових злочинів із використанням мобільних крематоріїв, що вказує на офіційне планування як частину кампанії терору та доказ того, що незліченні злочини проти людства у цій війні є не відхиленнями, а задумом, загрозою ядерного знищення європейських країн, які надсилають гуманітарну допомогу, і масою руйнування міст?
Російська завойовницька стратегія починається з постійних і невпинних бомбардувань і руйнувань лікарень, бомбосховищ, складів продовольства, енергосистем, водопостачання, коридорів гуманітарної допомоги та евакуації біженців; все, що могло б допомогти громадянам пережити облогу. Після того, як нічого не залишиться, починається кампанія терору як організовані масові зґвалтування, тортури, канібалізм та мародерство, а будь-які вижили поневолені або страчені. Це війна на геноцид і стирання, яка не має аналогів у сучасній Європі, крім облоги Сараєво; і тут я виступаю як свідок історії для обох.
Чому? Що може бути варте того, щоб придбати з вашою людяністю та людськістю вашої нації та народу?
Росія хоче завоювати Україну з тієї ж причини, чому Японія вторглася в Маньчжурію; тому що це промисловий центр, з якого можна почати завоювання світу, а тепловодні порти Маріуполя та Одеси є ключовими для цього імперського плану панування, а також для контролю над сухопутним коридором до Криму.
Шістдесят п’ять портів Чорного моря з’єднують Румунію, Болгарію, Грузію, Молдову, Туреччину, Росію та Україну, і всі вони із Середземним морем, домінування якого Росія довгий час спорила з Туреччиною в Лівії та Сирії. Якщо Росія має намір продовжити завоювання України разом із завоюванням Східної Європи, захоплення румунського порту Констанца відкриє для вторгнення весь Дунайський регіон. Чорне море залишається таким же важливим для панування в Середземному морі, Східній Європі, Північній Африці та Близькому Сході, як і тоді, коли Мітрідат VI Понтійський змагався за нього у війнах з Римською імперією або в битві при Галіполі, з яким ми, здається, приречені на боротьбу в Криму.
На кону в боротьбі на металургійному заводі в Маріуполі стоїть головний регіональний промисловий завод і стратегічний ресурс підтримки флоту, який вирішальний у відверненні російських військ і ресурсів від кампанії на Донбасі та у запобіганні повної колонізації Росією Криму та прибережної України. Відмова Росії в можливості переобладнати та ремонтувати свої кораблі з місцевих ресурсів може стати ключем до перемоги над вторгненням на українське узбережжя.
«Азовсталь» та «Ільїнський металургійний комбінат» також є величезною фортецею-лабіринтом, з якої можна вести оборону Маріуполя, як форт Святого Ельмо, з якого мальтійські лицарі зробили свій героїчний Останній бій.
Що зараз відбувається в Маріуполі, серед сум’яття і розрухи міста привидів, де російська армія дала волю розбещеності війни?
Коли Україна перехоплює ініціативу на півночі й штовхає Росію назад через кордон, а також починає змагатися та відвоювати Чорне море з приголомшливою перемогою, пошкодивши Москву, флагман російського Чорноморського флоту, якому захисники Зміїного острова дали славу Відповідь, жорстокі бої за порт і металургійний завод тривають, хоча Росія заявляла про капітуляцію тисячі українських морських піхотинців, маючи на увазі, що сам Маріуполь також здався.
На цю дезінформацію, спрямовану на волю українського народу відмовитися підкоритися і залишитися Нескореним, я кажу; По-перше, що Маріуполь безперечно знаходиться під окупацією і в руках ворога, але місто не здалося і ніколи не здалося. Команди самогубців, які добровільно зголосилися залишитися і боротися з ворогом, коли з’являться можливості, подбають про це, а мережі Опору серед її громадян чекають години Визволення.
Росіяни опублікували свою оцінку сил, зібраних тут на металургійному заводі: двадцять п’ятсот українців і чотириста іноземних добровольців Міжнародного легіону, включаючи бригаду Авраама Лінкольна, американців, які назвали себе на честь легендарного підрозділу громадянської війни в Іспанії. Інші досі тримають сам порт під контролем України, що вигідно будь-якій такій силі визволення, яка може привести флот до цієї боротьби.
По-друге, немає нічого безчесного в капітуляції, якщо це означає, що ви живете, щоб воювати ще один день, а 36-та бригада морської піхоти, яка на сорок шостий день героїчної оборони Маріуполя, оголосила в своєму останньому посланні світові, кілька днів тому, що їм нема з чим битися, ні боєприпасів, ні води, ні чого, і те, що вони або полонені, або мертві, несуть із собою лише честь у майбутнє, яке тепер мають вибрати інші.
Я ніколи не бачив капітуляції українців. Невимушено зайдіть на ворожий контрольно-пропускний пункт і, сміючись, потягніть шпильку на гранату, щоб відкрити шлях лікарняній вантажівці, щоб врятувати інших, так. Поділіться пляшкою отруєної горілки з ворожим сторожем і помріте разом, поки біженців супроводжують через ряди, так.
Таких людей неможливо перемогти. Застосування сили та насильства є крихким, а влада порожньою, коли вона не має легітимності, а лише жорстокі репресії для її підтримки; бо всі такі речі зазнають непокори й невіри.
Кожен, хто відмовляється підкоритися, стає Нескореним і вільний. Це свого роду перемога, проти якої не може перемогти жодна тиранія чи терор.
Я бачив, як лютий бородатий хлопець атакував пару російських танків із сокирою, бігаючи з укриття, щоб стрибнути на вежу і відрубати голову командиру, і зникав у руїнах, як тінь гніву, викликана болем, горем і страхом міста. . Називається Головою, в ньому Україна знайшла месника. Решта танкістів вирвалась і в паніці побігла, командир другого танка відкрив вогонь по дезертирам і фактично застрелив одного з них, а його по черзі застрелив російський побратим, який вийшов за ним з танка, поклав пістолет йому в голову, а потім просто пішов через вулицю з піднятими руками й перейшовши на бік. Солдат, який вибрав нашу спільну людяність, а не націоналізм і солідарність, а не розкол, тепер є командиром того танка, але з намальованим українським прапором. Святий Андрій, його кличуть.
Путін послав рабів, щоб підкорити вільний народ. Він забув поцікавитися, що станеться, коли раби об’єднаються зі своїми побратимами-жертвами тиранії, яких їх послали завоювати, на знак солідарності, щоб звільнитися?
У той час як російська армія має активний рух за мир і мережі солідарності, які працюють зі своїми українськими колегами, а також багато випадків дезертирства та заколотів, у тому числі підривних офіцерів, українці, часто заморожені, голодні й позбавлені боєприпасів, як засновники Америки, які перетнули Делавер з Вашингтоном у той фатальний Різдво 1776 року залишаються зухвалими і Нескореними.
Існує також легенда про Маріупольського Вовка, дівчину, яка, як вовк, розірвала своєму нападникові горло. Можливо, міф про війну; але я бачив, що залишилося від російського солдата. Кажуть, що зараз вона очолює команду жінок, які рятують інших від колекціонерів метеликів, солдатів, які захоплюють жінок для викрадення в Росію та торгівлі людьми як злочинний синдикат в російських військових. У ній Україна знайшла Гаррієт Табмен.
Минулого тижня група українських морських піхотинців прорвалася, щоб зв’язатися з елементами Азовської Національної гвардії, дуже впертими хлопцями, які тримали металургійний завод у похмурих умовах; але кілька зон конфлікту розгортаються і швидко змінюються. Російські офіцери намагалися змусити здатися з використанням цивільних заручників у іншому інциденті, але, наскільки мені відомо, не вдалося.
Військові злочини росіян пробудили опір перемоги чи смерті; як захисники під час облоги Мальти в 1565 році або Джордж Вашингтон, який придумав цю фразу як пароль у битві при Трентоні, українські солдати, цивільні партизани, включаючи сталеварів та інших, які озброїлися під час нападу Росії, і міжнародні добровольці, свідками яких я був, як лаялися клятва померти на місці, а не здати щось завойовнику не пройде спокійно.
Що буде далі? Як запитав Ленін у своєму есе про створення політичної партії, якій судилося змінити світ, що робити?
Сьогодні російсько-окупаційні війська встановлюють паспорти проїзду, необхідні для всіх людей на вулицях, починають захоплювати мирних жителів і відправляти їх у центри обробки, щоб вибирати одних у табори примусової праці, а інших для розстрілу, а також доступ у світ за межами Маріуполя та з Світ тут повністю оточений. Маріуполь має бути спустошений, населення узагальнено як мертве чи поневолене, а решта особи систематично вимирають.
Путін має намір не залишити нам нічого, щоб захищати і ні звідки воювати. І тим самим він звільнив нас, щоб ми розпочали наступну фазу боротьби і перенесли боротьбу з ворогом.
Іноді мені здається, що він взагалі не знає, як грати в цю гру.
На наше щастя, бути полковником КДБ – це не те саме, що бути професійним революціонером, і, здається, зробив з Путіна урізану та деформовану річ, обмеженого інтелекту та будь-якої моралі, ні прозорливого злого генія, ні втілення гегелівського світу… історичні сили, а лише наглядач за карцерською державою. Володимир Путін дуже схожий на Адольфа Ейхмана, як описала Ханна Арендт у своїй історичній роботі про Нюрнберзький процес.
Оскільки я вважаю свої цілі та завдання щодо війни очевидними для всіх, я не проти окреслити їх тут.
Перш за все, і крім усіх інших пріоритетів, оскільки тільки це по-справжньому покінчить із загрозою війни, ми повинні діяти солідарно з російськими народами, щоб допомогти змінити режим і звільнити Росію від тиранії Володимира Путіна та його олігархії.
По-друге, ми повинні принести пряму та особисту розплату Путіну, його олігархам, верховному командуванню, політичним союзникам і прихильникам, а також усім, хто причетний до військових злочинів в Україні.
По-третє, ми повинні знищити здатність Росії вести цю війну, особливо артилерію та аеродроми, які руйнують цілі міста на початковій фазі будь-якого такого нападу ворога.
По-четверте, ми повинні взяти контроль над Чорним морем або перешкодити Росії зробити це, заперечити його використання як стартовий майданчик для імперського завоювання і панування в Середземному морі, Європі, Африці та Близькому Сході.
Для цього останнього нам знадобиться піратський флот, і я знаю, де його знайти.
Тут всеохоплюючою стратегічною реальністю, яка повинна керувати нашими рішеннями, є той факт, що вже деякий час триває Третя світова війна, театри якої включають Росію, Америку, Сирію, Лівію, Білорусь, Казахстан, Нагірний Карабах, а тепер і Україну включно. її губернії Крим.
Якщо ми не зможемо зупинити цю війну імперського завоювання і панування тут, в Україні, де всі наші гуманітарні цінності та міжнародні закони порушуються з жорстоким дикістю, і дозволимо їй перетворитися на загальну глобальну війну між свободою та тиранією, я боюся, що світ може вступити в епоху тиранії та століть воєн, яких людство не переживе.
Бо рука Путіна лежить на кнопці нашого ядерного знищення й вимирання і кличе його, шепоче; «Звільни мене, і я зроблю тебе могутнім».
”圮地則行；圍地則謀；死地則戰“; як написав Сунь Цзи в одинадцятому розділі «Мистецтво війни» «На землі смерті боріться».
Цей принцип дій був мені колись продемонстрований в Анголі, під час битви при Куіто-Куанавале в 1988 році, в тактичній ситуації, подібній до нашої тут, у Маріуполі. Поки розгорталося видовище цієї грандіозної останньої битви в десятирічній визвольній боротьбі проти колоніалізму та апартеїду, я робив зло в тилу ворога в кущах. Тут я виявив загублений загін, переважно зулуський, але з радянськими та кубинськими добровольцями, який був оточений силами апартеїду.
Після доповіді про те, що я знав про місцевість, командній групі та короткої конференції кількома мовами, старий хлопець, який досі мовчав, піднявся з тіні намету, на обличчі якого без сорочки був страшний і чудовий шрам від кігтів лева. , і сказав; «Ми оточені та перевершені, без боєприпасів і, що ще гірше, без води, і ніхто не йде нам на допомогу. Ми повинні атакувати».
Сержант посміхнувся на це, ніби отримав чудовий подарунок, вийшов надвір і віддав наказ, якого, якщо пощастить, ви ніколи не почуєте; «Поправити багнети!»
І чоловіки, які ось-ось померли, вибухали піснею. «Усутху! Umkhonto wami womile!» «Мій спис спраглий», останнє.
Ми також можемо вийти переможцями в нашій війні на виживання проти навіть набагато більшого й могутнього ворога, як це зробили герої Куіто Куанавале, якщо ми випустимо повну волю та силу наших націй проти Російської імперії, що виникає, як об’єднане людство; особливо якщо ми робимо це проти його слабких місць і ліній зламу.
Україна є таким слабким місцем імперських амбіцій, а вона все ще чинить опір і залишається Нескореною. А російське вторгнення в Європу може бути зірвано політичними діями в Росії через рухи за демократію та мир, які кинули виклик тиранії Путіна.
Свобода, рівність, братерство – девіз революції, яка породила демократії в Америці та Франції; перші дві частини яких проголошують універсальні принципи людського буття, а третя частина, яка стосується того, що ми називаємо солідарністю, взаємозалежністю та нашим обов’язком піклуватися про інших, є інструментом для реалізації нашої свободи та рівності як вільного суспільства. рівних.
Ми можемо перемогти у тріумфі демократії над тиранією, солідарності над розколом і любові над ненавистю. Але це працює лише одним способом; ми повинні діяти як єдине об’єднане людство.
Russian
18.04.2022 Последняя битва под Мариуполем: бой на металлургическом заводе
Бои на Азовстали и металлургическом комбинате имени Ильина продолжаются; среди обширных лабиринтов и лабиринтов туннелей здесь, с его арсеналом, госпиталем, узлом связи и путями снабжения, как и в других подземных крепостях в Мариуполе и других местах, Сопротивление русской оккупации может вестись годами, если это необходимо. Машинист и лидер сталеваров, вооружившихся для обороны, по имени Большой Юрий даже присяжными устроил оружейный завод, который может бесконечно производить винтовки и боеприпасы. Это, к сожалению, не то же самое, что удерживать землю.
Мы спартанцы; наши жизни выигрывают время, чтобы наша цивилизация проснулась перед опасностью и угрозой фашистской тирании и империалистического завоевания.
Для Мариуполя и слишком многих жителей Украины это произойдет слишком поздно; никто не идет на помощь, и многим ее защитникам нечем сражаться в этот сорок седьмой день осады Мариуполя, начавшейся второго марта, и битвы, начавшейся 24 февраля.
Но еще не поздно для вас и ваших близких, кем бы вы ни были и где бы вы ни жили. Эта истина должна быть достаточной, как надежда на наше будущее.
Я говорю здесь как свидетель истории, который был в Мариуполе с 22 марта, и предлагаю это свидетельство от имени наших всеобщих прав человека в любой расплате, привлеченной к виновным в этом огромном и ужасном военном преступлении.
С самого начала это была битва воздушных и артиллерийских бомбардировок против самого города и гражданского населения, танков против стрелков, плоти против неопровержимой силы и ужаса, разделения против солидарности, ненависти против любви и страха против надежды. .
Здесь человеческая воля к свободе испытывается врагом, ликующим в объятиях чудовищного, чья политика и замыслы войны как террора с радостью и с открытым высокомерием власти превращают в инструмент полнейшее разрушение и геноцид, войну, в которой развязываются зверства и разврат. как тактика шока и трепета с намерением подчинения посредством выученной беспомощности и подавляющего и всеобщего страха.
Здесь, как и в Нанкине, и во множестве других мест, это вызывает не подчинение, а сопротивление. Политика — это страх как основа обмена, и в Исчислении страха, где ограниченный государственный террор против собственных граждан в сочетании с полным контролем информации может быть полезен внутри страны для производства согласия на управление при условии легитимности власти. не подвергается сомнению со стороны тех, чье имя претендует на то, чтобы действовать, на войне то, что является неконтролируемым и невообразимым, создает условия, в которых больше нечего терять.
Слишком много или слишком мало страха, а также то, где и как он используется, могут дестабилизировать тоталитарные режимы. Когда закон теряет смысл и заменяется властью и силой, власть утрачивает легитимность, теряется согласие на то, чтобы ею управляли, а порядок превращается в хаос.
Гильермо дель Торо в великолепной эпопее о миграции и расовом равенстве «Карнивал Роу», в седьмом эпизоде «Грядущего мира», есть сцена, в которой двое молодых преемников во главе традиционно соперничающих фракций оказываются влюбленными и нуждаются в союзниках в сюжетной линии, которая переосмысливает «Ромео и Джульетту» Шекспира; мятежный геллион Джона Брейкспир спрашивает свою макиавеллиевскую возлюбленную Софи Лонгербейн: «Кому полезен хаос?» На что она отвечает: «Хаос полезен для нас. Хаос — великая надежда бессильных».
Как сказал мне Жан Жене в Бейруте почти сорок лет назад, когда мы были окружены солдатами в доме, который они подожгли и собирались сжечь заживо; «Когда нет надежды, мы свободны делать невозможные вещи, славные вещи».
Сопротивление всегда было войной на нож. Любопытная фраза, что; среди нескольких слов и целых фраз, которые вошли в современный английский язык без изменений из оригинального норвежского языка; криг для ножа. Его смысл для нас прост; те, кто хочет поработить нас и кто отказывается от всех законов и всех ограничений, не могут ни за кем спрятаться.
Любыми необходимыми средствами, как этот принцип выражен в знаменитом изречении Сартра в его пьесе 1948 года «Грязные руки», процитированном Францем Фаноном в его речи 1960 года «Почему мы используем насилие» и увековеченном Малкольмом Икс.
Почему происходит эта страшная война, в Мариуполе кампания террора, которая включает в себя расстрелы, пытки, организованные массовые изнасилования и торговлю похищенными гражданскими лицами, захват гражданских заложников и использование принудительного труда, каннибализм с использованием передвижных заводов, геноцидные нападения, стирание доказательства военных преступлений с использованием мобильных крематориев, что указывает на официальное планирование как часть кампании террора и доказательство того, что бесчисленные преступления против человечности в этой войне являются не отклонением от нормы, а намеренно, угрозы ядерного уничтожения европейским странам, отправляющим гуманитарную помощь, и массовое разрушение городов?
Российская стратегия завоевания начинается с непрерывных и безжалостных бомбардировок и разрушений больниц, бомбоубежищ, складов продовольствия, энергосистем, водоснабжения, коридоров гуманитарной помощи и эвакуации беженцев; все, что может помочь гражданам пережить осаду. Как только ничего не остается, начинается кампания террора с организованными массовыми изнасилованиями, пытками, каннибализмом и грабежами, а все выжившие порабощаются или казнятся. Это война геноцида и стирания, которая не имеет аналогов в современной Европе, кроме осады Сараево; и здесь я говорю как свидетель истории обоим.
Почему? Что может стоить покупки с вашей человечностью и человечностью вашей нации и народа?
Россия хочет завоевать Украину по той же причине, по которой Япония вторглась в Маньчжурию; потому что это промышленный центр, из которого может быть начато завоевание мира, а тепловодные порты Мариуполя и Одессы являются ключом к этому имперскому плану господства, а также к контролю над сухопутным коридором в Крым.
Шестьдесят пять портов Черного моря соединяют Румынию, Болгарию, Грузию, Молдову, Турцию, Россию и Украину, и все они со Средиземным морем, господство над которым Россия давно оспаривает с Турцией в Ливии и Сирии. Если Россия намерена после завоевания Украины завоевать Восточную Европу, захват румынского порта Констанца откроет для вторжения весь Дунайский регион. Черное море остается столь же важным для господства в Средиземноморье, Восточной Европе, Северной Африке и на Ближнем Востоке, как это было, когда Митридат VI Понтийский боролся за него в своих войнах с Римской империей или в битве при Галлиполи, которые мы, похоже, обречены отыграть в Крыму.
На карту в битве на сталелитейном заводе в Мариуполе поставлено крупное региональное промышленное предприятие и стратегический ресурс для поддержания жизни флота, решающего в отвлечении российских войск и ресурсов от кампании на Донбассе и в предотвращении полной колонизации Россией Крыма и прибрежной Украины. Лишение России возможности переоборудовать и ремонтировать свои корабли за счет местных ресурсов может стать ключом к отражению вторжения на украинское побережье.
Металлургический комбинат «Азовсталь» и Ильинский металлургический комбинат — это также обширная и запутанная крепость, из которой можно вести оборону Мариуполя, подобно форту Святого Эльма, из которого мальтийские рыцари сделали свой последний героический бой.
Что происходит сейчас в Мариуполе, среди суматохи и разрухи города-призрака, где русская армия дала волю разврату войны?
Поскольку Украина перехватывает инициативу на севере и оттесняет Россию через границу, она начинает бороться и отвоевывать Черное море с ошеломляющей победой, выводя из строя «Москву», флагман российского Черноморского флота, которому защитники Змеиного острова дали знаменитую Ответ: ожесточенные бои за порт и сталелитейный завод продолжаются, хотя Россия заявила о сдаче в плен тысячи украинских морских пехотинцев, подразумевая, что сдался и сам Мариуполь.
На эту дезинформацию, направленную на волю украинского народа отказаться подчиниться и остаться непокоренным, я говорю; Во-первых, что Мариуполь, несомненно, находится под оккупацией и в руках врага, но город не сдался и никогда не сдастся. Об этом позаботятся отряды самоубийц, которые вызвались остаться и изводить врага, когда представится возможность, а сети Сопротивления среди ее граждан ждут часа Освобождения.
Русские опубликовали свою оценку сил, собранных здесь, на сталелитейном заводе, в двадцать пятьсот украинцев и четыреста иностранных добровольцев Интернационального легиона, включая бригаду Авраама Линкольна, американцев, которые назвали себя в честь легендарного подразделения гражданской войны в Испании. Другие до сих пор держат сам порт под украинским контролем, что выгодно любой силе Освобождения, которая может привлечь флот для этой битвы.
Во-вторых, нет ничего постыдного в капитуляции, если это означает, что вы будете жить, чтобы сражаться в другой день, и 36-я бригада морской пехоты, которая на сорок шестой день своей героической обороны Мариуполя заявила в своем последнем послании миру, несколько дней назад, что им не с чем сражаться, нет боеприпасов, воды, чего угодно, и то, что они либо пленники, либо мертвы, несет с собой только честь в будущее, которое теперь должны выбрать другие.
Я никогда не видел капитуляции Украины. Случайно зайдите на вражеский контрольно-пропускной пункт и, смеясь, вытащите чеку из гранаты, чтобы открыть путь для госпитального грузовика, чтобы спасти других, да. Поделитесь бутылкой отравленной водки с вражеским часовым и умрите вместе, пока беженцев провожают через строй, да.
Таких людей невозможно победить. Применение силы и насилия хрупко, а власть бесполезна, когда у нее нет легитимности, а только жестокие репрессии для ее поддержания; ибо все подобные вещи терпят неудачу в момент непослушания и неверия.
Тот, кто отказывается подчиниться, становится Непокоренным и свободен. Это своего рода победа, против которой не может победить ни тирания, ни террор.
Я видел, как свирепый бородач напал на пару русских танков с топором, выбежал из укрытия, прыгнул на башню, обезглавил командира и исчез в руинах, как тень гнева, вызванная городской болью, горем и страхом. . По прозвищу Палач, в нем Украина нашла мстителя. Остальные танкисты выскочили и в панике побежали, командир второго танка открыл огонь по дезертирам и фактически застрелил одного из них, а его в свою очередь застрелил однополчанин русский солдат, выскочивший за ним из танка, положил пистолет к голове, а затем просто перешел улицу с поднятыми руками и перешел на другую сторону. Солдат, который предпочел нашу общность человечности национализму и солидарность дивизии, теперь командир этого танка, но с нарисованным на нем украинским флагом. Святой Андрей, его зовут.
Путин послал рабов покорять свободный народ. Он забыл спросить, что происходит, когда рабы объединяются со своими собратьями-жертвами тирании, которых они были посланы завоевывать, в знак солидарности действий ради собственного освобождения?
В то время как в российской армии есть активное движение за мир и сети солидарности, работающие со своими украинскими коллегами, и много случаев дезертирства и мятежа, включая фраги офицеров, украинцы, часто замерзшие, голодные и без боеприпасов, как основатели Америки, которые пересекли Делавэр с Вашингтоном в то судьбоносное Рождество 1776 года остаются дерзкими и непокоренными.
Существует также легенда о мариупольской Волчице, девушке, которая, как волк, разорвала нападавшему глотку. Возможно, миф о войне; но я видел, что осталось от рассматриваемого русского солдата. Говорят, что теперь она возглавляет команду женщин, которые спасают других от Коллекционеров бабочек, солдат, захвативших женщин для похищения в Россию и торговли ими в качестве преступного синдиката внутри российской армии. В ней Украина нашла Гарриет Табман.
На прошлой неделе группа украинских морских пехотинцев прорвалась, чтобы соединиться с частями Национальной гвардии «Азов», очень упрямыми ребятами, которые удерживали сталелитейный завод в тяжелых условиях; но несколько зон конфликта разворачиваются и быстро меняются. Российские офицеры пытались заставить сдаться, используя гражданских заложников в другом инциденте, но, насколько мне известно, безуспешно.
Военные преступления русских пробудили сопротивление победы или смерти; как защитники при осаде Мальты в 1565 году или Джордж Вашингтон, придумавший эту фразу в качестве пароля в битве при Трентоне, украинские солдаты, гражданские партизаны, включая сталелитейщиков и других, которые вооружились, когда Россия напала, и международные добровольцы, которых я видел ругающимися клятва скорее умереть на месте, чем отдать что-либо завоевателю, не пройдет спокойно.
Что происходит дальше? Как спрашивал Ленин в своем сочинении об основании политической партии, которой суждено было изменить мир, что делать?
Сегодня российские оккупационные силы вводят проездные документы, необходимые всем лицам на улицах, начинают захватывать мирных жителей и отправлять их в центры обработки для отбора одних в исправительно-трудовые лагеря, других для суммарной казни, а также полный доступ в мир за пределами Мариуполя и из мир здесь оцеплен полностью. Мариуполь должен быть опустошен, население подсчитано как мертвое или порабощенное, а оставшиеся люди систематически истреблены.
Путин намерен оставить нам нечего защищать и не от чего воевать. И тем самым Он освободил нас, чтобы начать следующую фазу борьбы и дать бой врагу.
Иногда мне кажется, что он вообще не умеет играть в эту игру.
К счастью для нас, быть полковником КГБ — это не совсем то же самое, что быть профессиональным революционером, и, кажется, Путин превратился в усеченного и уродливого, с ограниченным интеллектом и без всякой морали, не визионерского злого гения и не воплощения гегелевского миросозерцания. исторические силы, а всего лишь надзиратель за карцеральным государством. Владимир Путин очень похож на Адольфа Эйхмана, как описала Ханна Арендт в своей исторической работе о Нюрнбергском процессе.
Поскольку я считаю свои цели и задачи в отношении войны очевидными для всех, я не возражаю изложить их здесь для вас.
Прежде всего и помимо всех других приоритетов, поскольку только это действительно положит конец угрозе войны, мы должны действовать солидарно с русскими народами, чтобы способствовать смене режима и Освобождению России от тирании Владимира Путина и его олигархии.
Во-вторых, мы должны привлечь к прямой и личной ответственности Путина, его олигархов, высшее командование, политических союзников и приспешников, а также всех причастных к военным преступлениям на Украине.
В-третьих, мы должны разрушить способность России вести эту войну, особенно артиллерию и аэродромы, которые превращают в руины целые города в начальной фазе любого такого нападения противника.
В-четвертых, мы должны захватить контроль над Черным морем или помешать России сделать это, чтобы лишить его возможности использовать его в качестве стартовой площадки для империалистического российского завоевания и господства в Средиземноморье, Европе, Африке и на Ближнем Востоке.
Для этого нам понадобится пиратский флот, и я знаю, где его найти.
Здесь всеобъемлющей стратегической реальностью, которая должна определять наши решения, является тот факт, что уже некоторое время продолжается Третья мировая война, театры военных действий которой включают Россию, Америку, Сирию, Ливию, Беларусь, Казахстан, Нагорный Карабах, а теперь и Украину. ее губернии Крым.
Если мы не сможем остановить эту войну империалистического завоевания и господства здесь, в Украине, где все наши гуманитарные ценности и международные законы нарушаются с жестокой жестокостью, и позволим ей превратиться во всеобщую глобальную войну между свободой и тиранией, я боюсь, что мир может вступить в эпоху тирании и столетий войн, которых человечество не переживет.
Ибо рука Путина держится на кнопке нашего ядерного уничтожения и вымирания, и она зовет его шепотом; «Освободи меня, и я сделаю тебя сильным».
”圮地則行；圍地則謀；死地則戰“; как писал Сунь-Цзы в одиннадцатой главе «Искусства войны»: «На земле смерти сражайся».
Этот принцип действия мне когда-то продемонстрировали в Анголе, во время битвы при Куито-Куанавале в 1988 году, в тактической ситуации, похожей на нашу здесь, в Мариуполе. Пока разворачивалось зрелище этой грандиозной финальной битвы за многолетнюю освободительную борьбу против колониализма и апартеида, я творил зло в тылу врага в кустах. Здесь я обнаружил потерянный отряд, в основном зулусский, хотя и с советскими и кубинскими добровольцами, который был окружен силами апартеида.
После доклада командной группе того, что я знал об этом районе, и краткого совещания на нескольких языках из тени палатки встал старик, который до сих пор хранил молчание, чье тело без рубашки демонстрировало устрашающий и великолепный шрам от когтей льва. , и сказал; «Мы окружены и в меньшинстве, без боеприпасов и, что еще хуже, без воды, и никто не идет нам на помощь. Мы должны атаковать».
Сержант улыбнулся при этом, как будто ему был дан чудесный подарок, вышел наружу и отдал приказ, который, если вам повезет, вы никогда не услышите; «Крепить штыки!»
И люди, собиравшиеся умереть, разразились песней. «Усуту! Умконто вами вомиле!» «Мое копье хочет пить», последнее.
Мы тоже можем выйти победителями из нашей войны за выживание против даже гораздо более обширного и могущественного врага, как это сделали герои Куито-Куанавале, если мы высвободим всю волю и силу наших народов против зарождающейся Российской империи, как Единое Человечество; особенно если мы делаем это против его слабых мест и линий перелома.
Украина – такое слабое место имперских амбиций, а она еще сопротивляется и остается Непокоренной. И российское вторжение в Европу может быть остановлено политическими действиями в России через движения за демократию и мир, которые бросили вызов путинской тирании.
Свобода, Равенство, Братство — вот девиз Революции, породившей демократии в Америке и Франции; первые две части которого провозглашают универсальные принципы человеческого бытия, а третья часть, в которой говорится о том, что мы называем солидарностью, взаимозависимостью и нашим долгом заботиться о других, способствует реализации нашей свободы и равенства как свободного общества. равных.
Мы можем одержать победу в триумфе демократии над тиранией, солидарности над разделением и любви над ненавистью. Но это работает только одним способом; мы должны действовать как единое человечество.
Trump’s Reign of Terror moves us to the edge of a Constitutional Crisis as he relentlessly tests the limits of his power, the values and ideals of democracy, and the stability of our institutions.
Among the violations of freedom, equality, truth, justice, and the American Way perpetrated against our citizenship and our humanity by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief, Nazi revivalist, and Russian agent and his clown show of treasonous and dishonorable freaks in his criminal subversions of democracy we are now confronted in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia with a test of the regime’s power to violate the Constitution, abduct, and imprison in a foreign gulag without cause or trial any random person and all of us.
ICE has raided Native American reservations and left without prisoners only because the people locked arms, blocked the abduction vehicle, and called the legitimate police who happened to be Tribal Police with very little humor or tolerance regarding the kidnapping of their citizens by white men. This is exactly what we all of us must do; refuse to let anyone be taken.
This, this, this.
Our interdependence and duty of care for each other are more important in such situations than any other except the battlefield; but of course Trump has made all of civilian society in America a battlefield, and we must meet the imposed conditions of struggle on their own terms.
All Resistance is War to the Knife, and who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
ICE is sending kidnapping teams without badges or warrants to abduct people, and this is nothing but a criminal white supremacist kidnapping syndicate. If you know you or others are going to be abducted illegally without trial and imprisoned in a foreign death camp, there is nothing to be gained from surrender; and if you cannot escape you can still be victorious in refusal to submit and denial of their power over you if you go down fighting. This I have chosen now more times than I can truly remember, recently in Last Stands at Mariupol in Ukraine, Panjshir in Afghanistan, and actions in Palestine, and here I am; as Jean Genet said to me in Beirut 1982 as the Israeli soldiers were about to burn us alive in our cafe for refusing to surrender; “When there is no hope, one can do impossible things, glorious things.”
Resist to the death; hopefully not your own, and this is where solidarity of action and organized networks of resistance become very useful.
So once again I offer all of you the Oath of the Resistance he created in Paris 1940 repurposed from his oath as a Legionnaire as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of death and terror, when even in the midst of all this we were able to claw something of our humanity back from the darkness through solidarity and refusal to submit; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.
As written by Léonie Chao-Fong in The Guardian, in an article entitled Who is Kilmar Ábrego García, the man wrongly deported to El Salvador?; “The ongoing legal saga of Kilmar Ábrego García, a man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, has become a flashpoint as Donald Trump tests the limits of his executive power and continues with his plans for mass deportations.
On Tuesday, a federal judge sharply rebuked the Trump administration for taking no steps to secure Ábrego García’s release despite a supreme court order last week ordering the administration to facilitate his return to the US.
The administration previously conceded Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error”, but it has since refused to bring him back and dug in on its contention that it should not be responsible for his repatriation.
Here’s what to know about the case.
Who is Kilmar Ábrego García?
Ábrego García, 29, is a Salvadorian immigrant who entered the US illegally around 2011 because he and his family were facing threats by local gangs.
In 2019, he was detained by police outside a Home Depot in Maryland, with several other men, and asked about a murder. He denied knowledge of a crime and repeatedly denied that he was part of a gang.
He was subsequently put in immigration proceedings, where officials argued they believed he was part of the MS-13 gang in New York based on his Chicago Bulls gear and on the word of a confidential informant.
A US immigration judge granted him protection from deportation to El Salvador because he was likely to face gang persecution. He was released and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) did not appeal the decision or try to deport him to another country.
Ábrego García was living in Maryland with his wife, a US citizen, and has had a work permit since 2019. The couple are parents to their son and her two children from a previous relationship.
Why was he deported?
Ábrego García was stopped and detained by Ice officers on 12 March and questioned about alleged gang affiliation.
He was deported on 15 March on one of three high-profile deportation flights to El Salvador. That flight also included Venezuelans whom the government accuses of being gang members and assumed special powers to expel without a hearing.
Ábrego García is currently being detained in the Center for Terrorism Confinement (Cecot), a controversial mega-prison in Tecoluca, El Salvador, known for its harsh conditions.
The US is currently paying El Salvador $6m to house people who it alleges are members of the Tren de Aragua gang for a year.
His wife, Jennifer Vásquez Sura, said she has not spoken to him since he was flown to El Salvador and imprisoned.
What have the courts said?
The US district judge Paula Xinis directed the Trump administration on 4 April to “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Ábrego García, in response to a lawsuit filed by the man and his family challenging the legality of his deportation.
The supreme court unanimously upheld the directive on 10 April. In an unsigned decision, the court said the judge’s order “properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Ábrego García’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador”.
However, the supreme court said the additional requirement to “effectuate” his return was unclear and may exceed the judge’s authority. It directed Xinis to clarify the directive “with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs”.
Xinis admonished the government in a hearing on 11 April, saying it was “extremely troubling” that the administration had failed to comply with a court order to provide details on Ábrego García’s whereabouts and status.
On Saturday, the Trump administration confirmed Ábrego García was alive and confined in El Salvador’s mega-prison, Cecot.
Xinis once again, on Tuesday, criticized justice department officials for not complying with the supreme court’s order, saying “to date, nothing has been done”. She gave the government two weeks to produce details of their efforts to return Ábrego García to US soil.
What has the US government said?
The White House has cast Ábrego García as an MS-13 gang member and asserted that US courts lack jurisdiction over the matter because the Salvadoran national is no longer in the US.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration acknowledged that Ábrego García was deported as a result of an “administrative error”. An immigration judge had previously prohibited the federal government from deporting him to El Salvador in 2019 regardless of whether he was a member of the MS-13 gang.
The justice department has said it interpreted the court’s order to “facilitate” Ábrego García’s return as only requiring them to “remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here”.
The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, has characterized the court’s order as only requiring the administration to provide transportation to Ábrego García if released by El Salvador.
“That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s up to them,” Bondi said. “The supreme court ruled that if El Salvador wants to return him, we would ‘facilitate’ it, meaning provide a plane.”
Justice department lawyers have argued that asking El Salvador to return Ábrego García should be considered “foreign relations” and therefore outside the scope of the courts.
But the administration’s argument that it lacks the power to return Ábrego García into US custody is undercut by the US paying El Salvador to detain deportees it sends to Cecot prison.
What have his lawyers said?
Ábrego García’s attorneys have said there is no evidence he was in MS-13. The allegation was based on a confidential informant’s claim in 2019 that Ábrego Garcia was a member of a chapter in New York, where he has never lived.
Ábrego García had never been charged with or convicted of any crime, according to his lawyers. He had a permit from the Department of Homeland Security to legally work in the US, his attorneys said.
The Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, traveled to El Salvador on Wednesday where he hopes to visit Ábrego García. He said the government of El Salvador had not responded to his request to visit Cecot.
Van Hollen told the Guardian: “This is a Maryland man. His family’s in Maryland, and he’s been caught up in this absolutely outrageous situation where the Trump administration admitted in court that he was erroneously abducted from the United States and placed in this notorious prison in El Salvador in violation of all his due process rights.”
What has El Salvador said?
Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, has said that he would not order the return of Ábrego García because that would be tantamount to “smuggling” him into the US.
During a meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Monday, Bukele was asked whether he would help to return Ábrego García. “The question is preposterous,” he replied.
“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it.” He added that he would not release Ábrego García into El Salvador either. “I’m not very fond of releasing terrorists into the country.”
Attorney general dodges question on Trump proposal to jail US citizens in El Salvador
In the Stormy Daniels hush money trial of our Rapist and Whoremonger In Chief, Traitor Trump, a shifting constellation of evils is displayed before the stage of the world; sin and depravity, secrecy and the catch and kill system of bent journalism as subversion of our elections, criminality in service to power, and the manufacture of false identity and history as idolatry; yet the bottomless depths of Trump’s perversions and use of sexual terror neither begin nor end here.
Beginnings are such curious things; the origins of the Trump family fortune in the trafficking of Native American women during the Klondike gold rush, which finds reflection in Trump’s use of the modeling and beauty pageant system he once owned to exploit and globally traffic teenage girls, like the crimes of his buddy Epstein but industrialized on a mass scale.
Often have I wondered if Trump hired Stormy Daniels to prove to the world and his donors that he has normal sexual identity, in the wake of the loss of the beauty and modeling network amid exposure of his peeping at young girls, the exposure and fall of the Epstein trafficking network, of his rape of E Jean Carroll, and of his public use of his daughter from childhood as an erotic proxy. And these are only the perversions we know about.
Imagine the family dynamics created by the kind of crimes possible when only fear and power are real and have meaning; did the Trump Patriarch commit acts including the raiding and burning of villages, abduction, and mass enslavement of women kept in chains like livestock in the Trump string of brothels over a century ago, tortured and horsewhipped into submission and sometimes exhibited like trained animals in grotesque circus acts? Here I merely question, for I was not there nor do I possess historical documents of witnesses; but how if such horrors form the basis of the Trump family crime syndicate as a multigenerational cult of sexual terror?
When the Republicans speak of family values, this is what they really mean; the right of a man to do anything imaginable to women as patriarchal sexual terror and the dehumanization of women authorized by theocracy.
And remember, friends, you can always tell the secret name of a Republican; it’s their act of treason plus their sex crime.
As I wrote of the iconic mug shot which defines the character of Traitor Trump and the meaning of his criminal regime in our history in my post of
August 27 2023, Behold the Monster: Trump Surrenders to Justice; Here is a Mirror of Dorian Grey wherein America may behold the monster of our soul which lives beneath the mask of normality, in the mug shot of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. Here the nadir of our atrocities, perversions, amoral nihilism, degenerate brutality and atavisms of animal instinct glare back at us with the malign and savage rage of a baboon, and like Nietzsche’s Abyss we must beware lest our shadow capture us in the mirror of its gaze.
Half our nation remains under its spell, while those still free mock and poke the beast with a stick. Trump has surrendered to justice with no mass protests by loyal followers despite his threats and plots of coup, terror, and civil war, and we rejoice in his pathetic diminishment and humiliation, yet the danger has not passed.
Both the Fourth Reich which has infiltrated the state and Trump as its figurehead are still fundraising off of hate speech, possess a largely intact and unimpeded propaganda network, and control not only the Republican Party but also much of the state through their agents in the legislative and judicial branches of government as well as its security services, all primary targets of infiltration and subversion for the Party of Treason and its Russian paymasters.
In this moment, under the glare of the police photographer’s lights, the orders of a judge, and the scrutiny of history, Trumps thinks of himself as a doomed king at bay, like King Kong, a film which is an allegory of fascism as a flawed response to the fall of civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, an American version of the Wagnerian end in fire with which Hitler was obsessed and ended in his suicide in an underworld labyrinth.
What remains to be determined is whether America sees Trump as its tragic savior, cast in the part of Cyrus the Great in a myth of Exile as our new faith of QAnon has him, and chooses to fall with him and bring two thousand years of democracy as a dream of liberty and equality crashing down into fascist tyranny.
While most of us are hoping that being sent to prison for treason and espionage will remove the threat of a second Trump Presidency, many among the Party of Treason, Patriarchal Theocracy, and White Supremacist Terror will and are using the indictments and lawsuits to escalate commitment among those already decided, and abandoning overtures to swing voters and independents in recognition of a totally polarized political and cultural moment wherein few persuadable voters remain. After all, prison did not prevent Trump’s role model Adolf Hitler from becoming the Fuhrer; why should it derail rather than help Trump’s capture of the state and subversion of democracy?
Then there is the image with which Trump has chosen to identify himself, a version of the Kubrick Stare, like a malevolent evil baboon ululating his mad idiot threats and litanies of woe and wailing his lies among chasms of darkness. The semiotics of such performances of identity are curious, for Trump is a Hollow Man without any kind of soul or humanity and utterly consumed by the depravities and bizarre fantasies which rule him as a worshipper of Moloch, demon of lies, a mirror of our nation’s degradation and a historical construction of surfaces, echoes, and reflections as a pastiche of his own propaganda and Fox News, and though we are unfortunately familiar with the gestural components of his clown show modeled on the speeches of Hitler, this Evil Baboon Face of Trump’s and image of glowering brooding threat bears questioning. Perhaps he wishes us to fear him because he knows he is ridiculous.
Why is it cute and adorable when Jenna Ortega does the Kubrick Stare as Wednesday Addams, and repulsive when Trump does it? Wednesday doesn’t drop her chin to present glowering menace, a pose Trump carefully copies from Jack Nicholson in The Shining because he intends it as a threat and a demonstration of power; Jenna’s Wednesday faces us directly as total openness and honesty, a Nietzschean yes to life, to its horror and depravity as well as its exaltation and beauty, which denies nothing; an Otherness which accepts and affirms all otherness as equal. She challenges us to risk saying yes to ourselves and those truths written in our flesh; while Trump desires only our subjugation. Herein is the true difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties.
Trump’s chosen mask is also a figural symbol of the limits of the human as criminality and madness.
As written by Robbie Collin in The Telegraph, in an article entitled Why Trump’s ‘Kubrick Stare’ mugshot is straight out of the horror film playbook
For his mugshot the former President has mastered the Kubrick Stare: the cinematic pose made famous by Jack Nicholson and Malcolm McDowell; “Take a good, hard look at the Kubrick Stare: a fixture of the films of Stanley Kubrick, and one of cinema’s most recognisable shots. How does it work?
Well, for a topical example, consult the recently released police mugshot of Fulton County Jail inmate number P01135809, AKA former US President Donald J Trump. The face is angled downwards rather than up, emphasising the brow, and the eyeline not directed at something far out of shot, but angled uncomfortably close to the viewer’s own.
It’s Vincent D’Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket, just before he shoots R. Lee Ermey, then himself. It’s Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, smirking from under the brim of his bowler hat. It’s Jack Nicholson in virtually every scene in The Shining – and, in all honesty, the rest of the time too.
Like the Spielberg Gaze – an upturned face aglow with wonder – the Kubrick Stare is also implicatory. Perhaps incriminating is a better word, since the onlooker is being made party to the subject’s bubbling derangement.
“You know what’s going on here,” it seems to say. “And I know you know. And I know you don’t like it. And I like that you don’t.” So as expressions you might choose for your police mugshot go, it’s quite the flex.
Versions of the stare have appeared in Kubrick’s work since at least 1964’s Dr Strangelove, and in other directors’ oeuvres even before that. (Anthony Perkins’s climactic leer to the camera in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, from 1960, is as Kubrick Stare-y as close-ups get.) But it was McDowell’s unhinged chief droog, Alex DeLarge, in Kubrick’s own A Clockwork Orange from 1971, who definitively pinned down the look.
In a 2014 interview, McDowell revealed that Kubrick had asked him to come up with an expression he could use as the character’s reaction to a deafening blast of Beethoven’s 9th. “So I was doing various things,” he recalled. “[My] eyes were kind of up and glazed over, and [my] mouth kind of took on a weird look. And when he started to laugh, we knew we had it.”
Actors and filmmakers have been deploying it with skin-crawling success ever since. Anthony Hopkins smiling in his cell in The Silence of the Lambs might be the most chilling Kubrick Stare that Kubrick didn’t direct. Joaquin Phoenix delivered a particularly upsetting one as the young Emperor Commodus in Gladiator, with flecks of blood on his face. And for Heath Ledger, it was understandably the go-to expression for the Joker in The Dark Knight.
Given the highly constructed nature of the shot, it’s always especially fun when a Kubrick Stare is spotted out in the wild. Trump’s mugshot now seems likely to dominate this lively sub-genre, though other recent notable examples include a number of Madonna’s recent Instagram selfies, including an eyebrow-twisting corker from February 2020, and a January 2022 appearance by Elmo from Sesame Street, in which the fluffy red Muppet listens to his friend Zoe sing a song about Rocco, her pet rock. The brink of madness is closer than we might like to think.”
What does Trump’s mugshot and the polarized reactions to it tell us about America and the moment we now live in? As written by Chris McGreal in The Guardian, in an article entitled Belligerence and hostility: Trump’s mugshot defines modern US politics; “Mugshots define eras.
Bugsy Siegel peering malevolently from beneath his fedora in a 1928 booking photo summed up the perverse romance of gangsters in the prohibition age.
Nearly half a century later, mugshots of David Bowie, elegantly dressed but dead-eyed after his arrest for drug possession, and a dishevelled Janis Joplin, detained for “vulgar and indecent language”, spoke to the shock waves created by 1960s counterculture.
Now comes what Donald Trump Jr described as “the most iconic photo in the history of US politics” before the booking picture of his father glaring into the camera was even taken. But whether deeply divided Americans view the first ever mugshot of a former president as that of a gangster or a rock star is very much in the politics of the beholder.
Trump’s hostility shines through as he turns his eyes up toward the camera above him and in his taut, downturned mouth as he is booked into the Fulton county jail on charges of trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. Dressed in a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, he makes no attempt to put on a smile like some of his co-defendants in their mugshots.
The picture does not flatter but it does convey the message many of Trump’s supporters want to hear – belligerence.
The six-pointed star of the Fulton county sheriff’s office badge and the name of the sheriff, Patrick Labat, sits in the top left hand corner of the picture. But some will be disappointed that Trump is not seen in the classic pose holding a board in front of his chest with his name and date of arrest.
Still, the mugshot will now enter the pantheon of famous-name booking photos, alongside Frank Sinatra looking unperturbed after his arrest in 1938 for “carrying on with a married woman”, and Hugh Grant after he was found with a sex worker on Sunset Boulevard. Trump has some way to go to catch up with the American actor Lindsay Lohan’s eight-year run of mugshots for theft, drugs and driving offences.
The former president’s supporters are already embracing the booking photo as a badge of honour and defiance. It will be held up as evidence that their man will not give up the fight against a system his followers see as ever more determined to bring him down and prevent him returning to the White House.
Far-right congresswoman Lauren Boebert led the way with a tweet proclaiming: “Not all heroes wear capes.”
The president’s detractors, on the other hand, will see the booking photo as evidence that even a man who was once the most powerful person in the land cannot escape the might of the justice system. Some will welcome anything that makes him look even a little bit more criminal as a confirmation that sooner or later he is going to prison. The accused may be presumed innocent until a plea or a jury says otherwise but mugshots can have a way of conveying guilt.
For Trump though, the picture is likely to prove yet another money spinner. Within hours, his campaign fundraising website was advertising T-shirts, bumper stickers and coffee mugs glorifying a martyred Trump with the booking photo above the words “never surrender!”. Sales are likely to be brisk given the enthusiasm with which the former president’s supporters now treat each public humiliation as an accomplishment.
Two impeachments and four sets of indictments, from financial fraud to a slew of charges over the 2020 election, have done little to damage Trump’s standing among the true believers, and have only bolstered his run for the Republican presidential nomination. Such is the strength of that belief that a recent CBS poll showed Trump voters trust him more than their own family members and religious leaders.
Ordinary Americans have already got creative in response to the flood of indictments by mocking up pictures of the former president in an orange jump suit a la Guantánamo prison and in printing T-shirts with Trump in various states of detention with slogans declaring “Trumped up charges”, “Guilty AF”, “Guilty of winning” and “Legend”.
There will be plenty who will challenge Don Jr’s claim that the mugshot has instantly become the most iconic photo in US political history. Pictures of John F Kennedy’s assassination or Martin Luther King Jr leading the march for freedom or a host of other historic moments will surely prove more enduring.
But as with the gangsters and rock stars, Trump’s booking photo may come to define an era – one of unusual political turmoil that has yet to resolve whether his next mugshot is as an inmate.”
What would Trump’s imprisonment mean for the future? As written by Martin Kettle in The Guardian, in an article entitled America on trial: the charges against Trump will decide the fate of a nation; “History teaches us few wider lessons. But there are rare exceptions. One of these is that for a nation to put its former leaders on trial is never straightforward. Although such cases are rare, when they do occur they frequently involve the pushing of pre-existing legal boundaries and the reshaping of constitutional norms and assumptions. The evolution of the doctrine of crimes against humanity after the Nuremberg trials in 1945 is the most significant modern example of this.
Both at the time they occur and subsequently, the arguments that surround trials of this kind are almost inescapably political to a significant degree. That was true of the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, an event that divided England then; and some of those divisions of the 17th century can still be felt today. But it will unquestionably also be true of the trials of the former US president Donald Trump, of which the latest step is due to be taken in Atlanta on Thursday.
It is important to see that this stubborn political reality applies just as much in the Trump cases as in Charles I’s. In part, this is because many will go out of their way to deny it. Trump’s prosecutors – and many of his political critics – will undoubtedly argue that Trump is simply a defendant like any other, and that their cases are designed to show that no one, not even a former president and commander-in-chief, is above the law. They will be adamant that this is not a political trial, and that it is not Joe Biden’s revenge.
In some very fundamental senses, they are right about that. The law is not being altered in order to prosecute Trump. The investigations have followed long-established rules. The verdicts are not foregone conclusions. This is neither a witch-hunt nor a show trial. Yet, however true these points and however honourably such claims are made, they cannot be quite the whole story. The two cases are very different, yet in both 1649 and 2023, the indictments against the king and the president take a stand on behalf of a conception of the nation against a leader set on subverting it.
Four separate cases against Trump are now on course for trial. The first three sets of allegations cover: falsification of business records in the Stormy Daniels hush money case; withholding of classified federal documents in his Florida home; and attempting to prevent the US Congress from validating Biden’s 2020 election. This week’s case alleges that Trump tried to interfere with the counting and validation of Georgia’s vote for Biden. All four cases are due in court in the first half of 2024, before the presidential election in which Trump aims to be a candidate.
All of these cases also contain multiple allegations. Two – the Florida document cases and the US Congress case – will be heard in federal courts. The others have been brought at state level by New York and Georgia. All the charge sheets are extremely detailed. In the documents case, for instance, the indictment now stretches to 60 pages, with Trump facing 40 separate charges. In the 6 January case, the indictment stretches to another 45 pages, and centres on four separate charges.
Like it or not, though, these carefully crafted cases take the US into new legal territory. That is not simply because Trump is the first serving or former American president in the nation’s history to face criminal charges. Nor is it even because, being Trump and still running for office, he will treat the courtroom as a political platform. It is also because a large number of the charges, and the way in which the judges and juries will be asked to test them, relate umbilically to his roles as head of state and upholder of the constitution. These cases are a test of the constitution and, in the broadest sense, of the nation.
All of these points repeatedly echo aspects of cases from the past. The Trump cases are still, in the end, an attempt to hold a past leader to account and judge him for the way he handled his office. That was also what the cases against earlier rulers were ultimately about too. The indictments against Charles I for his “crimes and treasons” or against Louis XVI of France for having “plotted and formed a multitude of conspiracies to establish tyranny in destroying liberty” are maybe not a world away from those against Trump, after all.
Nor is it a world away from the much more recent example of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s trial for treason after the liberation of France in 1945. Pétain was charged with treason for his role as head of the collapsing French government in 1940, when he signed an armistice with Hitler’s invaders, and then as head of the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Germans until the allied victory in 1945. Pétain was tried and convicted in Paris that same summer. His death sentence was immediately commuted to life imprisonment by Charles de Gaulle.
As described in Julian Jackson’s masterly recent book, France on Trial, the Pétain case has many differences from those facing Trump, but also some similarities. Pétain was put on trial after a war, not an election. His was an unashamedly political trial. The jury was stacked against him, and the outcome a foregone conclusion.
But at the same time it was also the trial of a nation, its recent history, its dilemmas and its sense of itself. It was, in the end, a moment of catharsis for postwar France. It was a trial that had to happen, and it was vitally important for the future of France that the former leader in the dock was not acquitted. For all the many differences between the two cases, the exact same applies to the US on the eve of the Trump trials.”
Who is Donald Trump? Glowering, feral, with the dead eyes of a cornered but dangerous animal, his fake blond hair, fake history of success, and fake identity? Traitor Trump has been the cuckoo in our nest, ambush predator and pathological liar, rapist and enemy agent, worshipper of Moloch, Demon of Lies, and disciple of Adolf Hitler.
As I wrote in my post of August 7 2019, Psychopathy and the Nature of Evil: the Parallel Cases of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; How are monsters created, and how does evil arise as a shaping force which grants them the power to change the topography of human souls and the course of history?
While sorting through Trump’s tweets and speeches by keyword looking for answers, I was reminded of another such project, the now-classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which I read enthusiastically the year of its publication while a junior in high school. I had just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, which led me to an interest in the origins and consequences of evil, the route by which I developed a serious interest in psychology and its intersections with history, philosophy, and literature.
The parallels between Hitler and Trump are amazing and instructive, both in terms of the personal and political origins, shaping forces, and consequences of madness and evil.
Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator.
I’ve said it as a joke, but its quite true; how do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Actually, Donald Trump is very easy to understand, because literature provides a ready portrait of him in Frankenstein’s monster, which I have described in my celebration of Mary Shelly and her luminous novel as the figure of an abandoned and tormented child, “a vessel of rage and vengeance, with the merciless iron will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others.”
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and narcissistic need for attention into a governance of Nuremburg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and Hitler as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2023, We Celebrate the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets; 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 this night 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 assault 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 hope that Shakespeare was right about us when he wrote in Henry V; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner”, but I fear our humanity is already too degraded, our morality and duty of care for others blurred and broken, and our ideas about human being, meaning, and value captured by lies and propaganda in the Wilderness of Mirrors.
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. Who will listen to the fears of these angry young men, whose marginalization and impoverishment as the losers of globalization and waste products of capitalism has been weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us through division, mirages of patriarchal theocratic sexual power and white supremacist power, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and speak directly to that fear?
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 three 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 racist and 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 flag 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 and modeling 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 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.
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
Were 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.
Official Portrait of Trump the Evil Baboon, wailing his lies
Keep back from the cage, children; the President grabs
Trump’s models in the Kubrick Stare
Why Trump’s ‘Kubrick Stare’ mugshot is straight out of the horror film playbook
For those who wish to study Our Clown of Terror as an example of the failure of humanity and the subversion of democracy, how monsters are shaped by the depravities and moral collapse of racism and patriarchy as illnesses of power and how our inner and outer worlds inform, motivate, and shape one another, here is my reading list:
Fear: Trump in the White House, Rage, by Bob Woodward
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Siege: Trump Under Fire,
by Michael Wolff
Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen
Fascism: A Warning, by Madeleine K. Albright
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley
Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder
Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers, by John W. Dean, Bob Altemeyer
How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt
What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era,
by Carlos Lozada
Trump Is F*cking Crazy: (this Is Not a Joke), by Keith Olbermann
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L. Trump
Trump on the Couch, Dr Justin Frank
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, by Bandy X. Lee
Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers, Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior, by Jerrold M. Post
The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, by Steven Hassan
Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, by Rick Reilly
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America, by Philip Rucker
All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, by Barry Levine
Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus, by Matt Taibbi
The Mueller Report, by The Washington Post
Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation, by Andrew Weissmann
True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump, by Jeffrey Toobin
A Case for the American People: The United States v. Donald J. Trump, by Norman Eisen
Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America, Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump’s International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy, Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump, by Seth Abramson
The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America,
by Jim Acosta
American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, by Tim Alberta
Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President,
by Michael S. Schmidt
Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, by Peter Bergen
The Best People: Trump’s Cabinet and the Siege on Washington, by Alexander Nazaryan
American Nero: The History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump Is the Worst Offender, by Richard Painter
Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever, by Rick Wilson
Official Portrait of President Trump which hangs in the White Man’s House, secret altar room of demonic abominations, as he dreams of violations, depravities, and monstrous acts to inflict on us all in his Theatre of Cruelties; he is thinking of them right now.
Sudan, where roving bands of tribal and warlord armies savage each other over the carrion of a nation and apex predators of foreign empires hunt each other among the ruins.
And in the background, like shadow puppets in a theatre of darkness, a vast humanitarian failure of atrocities, war crimes, famine, and refugees speaks to us of the distance we have fallen in our duty of care for one another.
For two years as of today atrocities which define the limits of the human have been committed here on a mass scale, with intent and by design, wherein our dehumanization is industrialized by tyrants to enforce the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. Sadly, this is far from unique in human history, and we know where this leads.
No matter where authority begins with narratives of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, we always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine; symptoms of the same disease, now ongoing and appended to an endless litany of woes. Here I must signpost that the Sudan War is but one of several related conflicts in the African Theatre of World War Three as Putin attempts to re-found the Russian Empire versus the Arab-American Alliance. This is why the RSF is supplied with weapons from Russia’s client state in Libya, and why Ukrainian and other independent European special forces now fight alongside American and Arab Alliance troops versus Russian regular forces and their allies and clients, including the Wagner Group’s Africa Corps, Chinese mercenaries, and fighters of the Iranian Dominion including the remnants of the Assad regime’s army in Sudan.
But the situation is not as simple as a civil war become a great powers proxy war; the United Arab Emirates are the primary arms supplier of the RSF, and the RSF has long been the primary supplier of soldiers to the UAE in its multifront African wars.
This means that the RSF, a criminal army of Arab ethnic nationalism and Islamization which funds itself by slavery and is perpetrating ethnic cleansing and genocide against Christian Black peoples, is a proxy of both America and Russia. This is why the RSF has been difficult to defeat. And Russia has used the Wagner Group’s Africa Corps fighting alongside the RSF to leverage its opponent, the government of Sudan, to make good on the previous regime’s promise of a Russian port on the Red Sea, in effect also playing both sides as are we. This has been Russia’s playbook in her conquest of Africa; manufacture Islamist forces to threaten a target nation, then sell protection in the form of mercenary soldiers and forces of occupation in exchange for a cut of the mineral and other wealth they guard.
For the most part IS is unaware it is an employee or pawn of Russia in the Great Game; certainly the Sudanese al Qaeda and Chadian Islamic State West Africa elements now cooperating within RSF fight with great savagery and fanaticism against any colonial power as well as any democracy or even fellow Muslims who interpret their faith differently or represent rival factions and ethnicities.
Two interdependent but separate wars are being fought here; the Great Powers Proxy War which is a theatre of World War Three and the Sudan Civil War which is an ethnic and religious conflict of the RSF’s Arab Muslims backed by the UAE and transnational Islamization versus the Black Christian government.
Who is on the side of the people and our humanity?
As Alan Moore teaches us in the great film V For Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away.”
As I wrote in my post of November 28 2023, The Failure of Empathy and the Fall of Human Civilization: the Case of Sudan; To remember, and bring a Reckoning; such is our duty of care for each other, without which we cease to be truly human and degenerate as atavisms of instinct in parallel and interdependent with processes of civilizational collapse.
A wise friend of mine, the poetess Aasifa Reshi has written; “Sudan has died, and nobody wrote the obituary.”
Here as in so many places we may see the abandonment of our humanity and of our empathy as a limit beyond which we may not pass without losing who we are, and a vision of the future which awaits us all if we cannot reverse course and act in solidarity to affirm our universal human rights.
Among the many horrors of the civil war in Sudan, become a theatre of World War Three now as Ukrainian and Russian special forces battle each other for the dominion or liberation of Sudan, is the apathy with which the world witnesses some of the most terrible atrocities of the twenty first century with none of the mass protests and peace marches which have made the Gaza War part of the lives of all of us and the history of the world. Some of this is because the global Jewish and Palestinian diasporas are enormous and so many people are personally involved through people who are part of our lives, often on both sides; some of it is simple racism.
Why are so many willing to immolate themselves on the funeral pyre of human civilization over the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the moral collapse and delegitimation of the state of Israel and of America along with her, and so few placing their lives in the balance with the peoples of Sudan?
What can this tell us about the systems of unequal power in which we are ensnared, and how we might free ourselves and each other?
So I wrote a year and a half ago of the boundaries and interfaces between elite belonging and exclusionary otherness when identities of race and faith are weaponized as division in service to power by those who would enslave us, and of the degradation of our humanity and loss of our solidarity and guarantorship of each other’s universal human rights.
What is the situation in this war now?
As written in an editorial in The Guardian entitled The Guardian view on Sudan’s war: borders can’t contain a devastating, destabilising crisis: The rest of the world has largely ignored the horror of this conflict, but will find its effects ripple outwards; “As Sudan approaches its third year of civil war, the dynamics are suddenly shifting. Sudan’s military, which launched a major offensive against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in September, made swift progress in Gezira state, and in recent days has abruptly and unexpectedly regained ground in Khartoum.
Whether it has truly turned the tide – as key backers appear to believe – has yet to be seen. Even if the capital can be fully retaken and secured, reconstructing the devastated city would be an immense task. The RSF might well entrench themselves elsewhere; this may further spur their ferocity in the western region of Darfur. Meaningful negotiations between the warring parties look even more distant. There is still less prospect of a return to civilian politics, overthrown in a coup by the partnership of the army chief, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF leader, Lt Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – known as Hemedti – before they turned on each other.
It is hard to fully capture the brutality of that shift from hopes of a brighter future to the horror of this conflict. Atrocities have been committed by both sides, but especially the RSF, with the US formally declaring that they have committed genocide in Darfur – as their progenitors, the Janjaweed militias, did two decades ago.
Yet the international community’s indifference to the suffering of Sudanese civilians is also deeply shocking. With its gaze fixed on the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, it has largely ignored what António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has described as “a nightmare of violence, hunger, disease and displacement”. Half of Sudan’s population – almost 25 million people – face high levels of acute food insecurity, with a third of those facing an emergency or famine-like situation.
Both the warring parties have used the denial or destruction of food as a weapon. But this is not just about the problems of delivery. The UN’s humanitarian appeal remains appallingly underfunded. Sudanese people who have fled to Ethiopia, Chad, South Sudan and Uganda are receiving only 30%-60% of a full food ration. No one expects help from the new US administration – Elon Musk’s announcement of the shutdown of USAid has seen crucial drugs abandoned in Sudanese warehouses. But many other countries are failing Sudan too. Multiple parties have fed the conflagration to further their own interests. Too few want to deal with the consequences.
Already there are growing concerns that the war could capsize South Sudan. Though the fragile 2018 truce has so far held in the world’s newest nation, Sudan’s conflict has brought hundreds of thousands of refugees, soaring food prices and a devastating, months-long halt to oil exports, which account for 80%-90% of the government budget. There is also mounting unease about Chad. The Chadian government’s alliance with the United Arab Emirates, which backs the RSF, has caused anger, and there are worries that the influx of refugees may be destabilising intercommunal relations.
Sudan’s location – between the Sahara, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel and the Red Sea – means that what happens within its borders has profound implications beyond them. Even if Europe would prefer to pretend that this crisis is not happening, it is also desperate to limit migration and contain the growth and impact of violent extremism in the Sahel. To ignore this catastrophe is not only inhumane but, even in terms of self-interest, unwise.”
As written by Rachel Savage in The Guardian, in an article entitled Sudan in ‘world’s largest humanitarian crisis’ after two years of civil war: NGOs and UN say country is ‘worse off than ever before’ with wide-scale displacement, hunger and attacks on refugee camps; “ Sudan is suffering from the largest humanitarian crisis globally and its civilians are continuing to pay the price for inaction by the international community, NGOs and the UN have said, as the country’s civil war enters its third year.
The UK is hosting ministers from 20 countries in London on Tuesday in an attempt to restart stalled peace talks. However, diplomatic efforts have often been sidelined by other crises, including the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Two years to the day since fighting erupted in Khartoum between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, hundreds of people were feared to have died in RSF attacks on refugee camps in the western Darfur region in the latest apparent atrocity of a war marked by its brutality and wide-scale humanitarian impact.
The consequences for Sudan’s 51 million people have been devastating. Tens of thousands are reportedly dead. Hundreds of thousands face famine. Almost 13 million people have been displaced, 4 million of those to neighbouring countries.
“Sudan is now worse off than ever before,” said Elise Nalbandian, Oxfam’s regional advocacy manager. “The largest humanitarian crisis, largest displacement crisis, largest hunger crisis … It’s breaking all sorts of wrong records.”
There were “massive-scale” violations of international humanitarian law in the conflict, said Daniel O’Malley, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Sudan. “All of the civilian population, irrespective of where they are in the country, have basically been trapped between one, two or more parties. And they have been bearing the brunt of everything. The sheer numbers are just mind-boggling.”
Last month, Sudan’s military recaptured the highly symbolic presidential palace in Khartoum and it has retaken most of the capital. But in much of the country, the conflict rages on. Sources cited by the UN reported that more than 400 people had been killed in recent attacks by the RSF in Darfur, where the group is trying to seize El Fasher, the last state capital in the region not under its control.
Since late last week, the RSF has launched ground and aerial assaults on El Fasher itself and the nearby Zamzam and Abu Shouk displacement camps. A UN spokesperson told Agence France-Presse that the UN’s rights office had verified 148 killings and received reports from “credible sources” that the total number of dead exceeded 400.
Reuters reported that data from the UN’s International Organization for Migration suggested that up to 400,000 people had been displaced from the Zamzam camp alone since the weekend.
In a statement the UN rights chief, Volker Türk, said the “large-scale attacks … made starkly clear the cost of inaction by the international community, despite my repeated warnings of heightened risk for civilians in the area”.
He added: “The attacks have exacerbated an already dire protection and humanitarian crisis in a city that has endured a devastating RSF siege since May last year.”
El Fasher is one of several areas of Darfur where a famine, affecting about 637,000 people, has been declared. Almost half the 50-million population of Sudan – 24.6 million people – do not have enough food.
Leni Kinzli, the World Food Programme’s head of communications for Sudan, said the other conflicts, as well as a lack of access for journalists, and Sudan’s relative international isolation since the days of the regime of the ousted dictator Omar al-Bashir all meant Sudan was not getting the attention it needed.
“We don’t see the level of international attention on Sudan as we do for other crises,” she said. “There should not be a competition between crises. But unfortunately we’re seeing with everything going on in the world, other conflicts, other humanitarian crises and other things making headlines, that unfortunately Sudan is – I wouldn’t even call it forgotten – it’s ignored.”
The origins of the war can be traced to late 2018, when popular protests broke out against the Sudanese dictator Bashir. Sudan’s army leader, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, allied with the RSF chief, Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a former warlord known as Hemedti, to oust Bashir in a coup in April 2019.
They then allied again in 2021 to depose a civilian government meant to transition Sudan to a democracy. However, Hemedti had long coveted ultimate power for himself, and the friction between the two spiralled into full-on war less than two years later.
The RSF, a paramilitary force that grew out of the Janjaweed Arab militias accused of committing genocide in the Darfur region in the mid-2000s, made rapid gains in the first weeks and months, as the fighting spread beyond Khartoum.
In Darfur thousands of people died in the first year of the war, in well-documented attacks by the RSF and allied militias on non-Arab Masalit and other ethnic groups. Masalit refugees who had fled west to Chad recounted women and girls being targeted for gang rapes and boys shot in the street. Militia fighters said they would force women to have “Arab babies”, according to a UN report released in November 2024.
The RSF and the army have both been accused of committing war crimes in the course of the conflict.
In January of this year the US formally declared that the RSF had committed genocide, marking the second time in less than 30 years that genocide had been perpetrated in Sudan.
The United Arab Emirates has been accused of fuelling the conflict by arming the RSF. Emirati passports allegedly found on the battlefield last year point to potential covert boots on the ground. The UAE has denied all involvement in the war.”
As written by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian, in an article entitled The siege of Khartoum has lifted. Left behind are scenes of unimaginable horror: Sudan’s capital has been hollowed out and stripped for parts, its people trampled beneath a conflict that is far from over; “ Ten days ago, in a major turning point in almost two years of war, the Sudanese army reclaimed the capital city from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia which took it over in 2023. What little we know so far paints a picture of a city ravaged by unimaginable horror.
The war has sent Sudan hurtling into the largest humanitarian disaster in the world, triggering genocide in the west of the country, and starvation there and in other areas. Previously allies in power, the RSF – formalised and expanded from the remnants of the Janjaweed militia – and the Sudanese military went to war when their partnership fell apart. The victims have been the Sudanese people, whose lives were trampled beneath. Khartoum’s centrality in the war, both in its prosperity and in terms of what it represents for the RSF as the seat of power, has meant the city has been subjected to a particularly intense and vengeful campaign: the RSF seized it and then proceeded not to govern the city, but strip it and terrorise its inhabitants.
Those hesitantly leaving their homes to greet the Sudanese armed forces’ (SAF) soldiers are hollowed out with hunger, thirst, disease and fear. They recount a siege of theft and murder, as a trigger-happy RSF militia shot those who resisted their demands. Afraid to carry their dead to graveyards, people buried those killed in shallow graves in their own streets and back yards. Elsewhere, corpses have been left to decompose where they fell. Widespread sexual violence against the civilian population has been reported from the early days of the war. It is an indication of the total siege that Khartoum was under that there isn’t yet a reliable estimate of the death toll.
In the areas of the city where the fighting was most intense, civilians fled, leaving behind a ghost town. The scenes are apocalyptic. Khartoum’s buildings and iconic landmarks are reduced to burned out shells, its streets overgrown with weeds and vegetation. In a striking encapsulation of the arterial severing of the country, the airport, functional until the very first hours of the war, with flights preparing for takeoff, was burned to a black shell. Pieces of those planes grounded by the war remain on the runway.
Khartoum airport’s rapid destruction speaks to the most remarkable feature of this war – how precipitous it was. How quickly Sudan was snatched from normality and plunged into a war that didn’t escalate over time, but exploded overnight. Millions grabbed whatever they could and fled as the RSF advanced. What they left behind was swiftly claimed. What occurred in Khartoum is the biggest looting of an African city, if not any capital city, in modern history. From the country’s cultural heritage to the belongings of its people, nothing escaped. Sudan’s National Museum, housing precious artefacts from Nubian and Pharaonic civilisations, has been emptied. What could not be carried away was destroyed. Homes and businesses were ransacked, with everything from furniture to personal belongings carted away. Even electric wiring was not spared: dug up and stripped to be sold. Images from the city feature the remains of cars, all with their wheels and engines removed.
The scale of the heist and destruction that is emerging marks the end of the siege of Khartoum as both a jubilant and profoundly sad moment. To be released from the pain of a brutal occupation is cause for relief and celebration, but the measure of the losses, of what is required to rebuild, is immense and goes to the foundations of the city’s physical and administrative capacities. The restoration not just of people’s homes and livelihoods, but the capital’s very infrastructure would be a vast endeavour for any country, let alone one still in the throes of war. What becomes apparent now is that so much of what has been lost is gone for ever.
And then there is the matter of nation building and bringing an end to the war in the whole country. Sudan has unravelled along military lines, and people have rallied behind the SAF to restore the country’s territorial integrity and deliver them from the RSF. But a question about ejecting all military bodies from governance, a demand thwarted by the SAF-RSF partnership after the 2019 revolution that removed Omar al-Bashir, has become suspended in the process, pushing Sudan further into militarised rule and consolidation under the SAF. Proxies and mercenaries and arms suppliers have been drawn in, most prominently the United Arab Emirates, which has backed the RSF. These players have extended the life of the war and sunk so much cost in the conflict that their involvement will probably render large victories by the SAF indecisive in the short term. The international community has all but abandoned Sudan to its fate, with hundreds of millions of dollars in pledged aid that never materialised and abysmal political engagement.
The RSF militia has now decamped to a stronghold in the west of the country, where it controls almost every major city. The scale of the violence there against racial groups and tribes not aligned with the RSF has amounted to the sort of ethnic cleansing and mass murder that echoes the genocide of the 00s, and the SAF, with its deadly bombings, is responsible for numerous civilian casualties and has its own share of accusations of crimes against humanity. What has ended in Khartoum and eastern Sudan continues to rage, with even more intensity, elsewhere. The RSF may have lost its jewel in the crown, but the war is far from over.
In the meantime, being in a position to count the losses, rather than be actively experiencing them, is the best one can ask for. And what losses they are, not just for its inhabitants, not just for Sudan, but for a world that has lost a beautiful, historic, storied city. Khartoum was taken apart and its pieces scattered across Sudan. What remains resides in the hearts of its people.”
How did the first year of this conflict unfold?
As written on the first anniversary of the Sudan Civil War by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian, in an article entitled For a full year, the bodies have piled up in Sudan – and still the world looks away; “One year ago today, Sudan descended into war. The toll so far is catastrophic. Thousands are dead, and millions are displaced, with hunger and disease ravaging all in the absence of aid. The UN has called the situation “one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent history”, afflicting about 25 million people. The Sudanese people are suffering what has become the largest displacement crisis in the world.
The war was both sudden and a long time coming. The short history is that of a country where, following a promising 2019 revolution that overthrew the dictator Omar al-Bashir, the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful militia, ejected civilians from a power-sharing agreement between the three parties and then could not come to an agreement themselves. Their partnership broke down in April last year, and the RSF moved quickly, taking over the capital city, Khartoum, in an unprecedented moment in the country’s history. It then spread through the rest of the country, looting, assaulting and murdering civilians.
The army – and here is the long history – which established the RSF in the first place from remnants of the infamous Janjaweed troops it partnered with in Darfur to help it savagely suppress rebellion in the region – has so far been unable to prevail against its own creation. The result is a fluid situation, with gains and losses for both parties, no discernible frontline, and millions of Sudanese people caught in the middle.
It’s not so much a civil war as it is a war against civilians, whose homes, livelihoods and very lives have been the collateral damage so far. It is two tragedies overlaid. The first is of a country that until last year, although beset with conflict and dictatorship, had managed to maintain its integrity – and with it a sense that there was a way through its troubles, after which it could achieve its potential.
The war, despite all that led up to it, was not inevitable, was not the foreseeable fate of a country where ethnic differences necessitated conflict. It was the result of an economic model of centralisation where dominant parties in the centre preyed on, and extracted from, the periphery. One of the largest countries in Africa, with a sparkling coast along the Red Sea, fertile land across the Nile River, and the sort of cultural and ethnic diversity that could be harnessed into a powerhouse of Arab and African convergence, Sudan was always held back by an entitled few who wouldn’t share.
Added to the loss of what could have been are all the personal losses spread now throughout the country. The war unfolded and spread so rapidly that a mass dispossession took place, and with it an odyssey of displacement. Everyone I know in the country of my birth is scattered to different degrees, either within Sudan – sheltering, sometimes for the third or fourth time, with friends or relatives as the war reaches them – or outside of it. All, including my family, have left their homes, sometimes grabbing what they could before the RSF stormed in and took over their properties.
Even though it has been a year, there is still a sense of whiplash, of disbelief that it has actually happened, is actually happening. Every development expands the theatre of war and makes a return to peace more remote. Writing these words is a halting, painful process, like stepping on shards of broken glass. Something similar plays out on an almost daily basis, where one tries, and fails, to trace and keep track of all the individual and national tolls.
And more jarring is that the world has gazed with indifference upon this crucible of war. The “forgotten war” is what it’s called now, when it’s referenced in the international media. Little is offered by way of explanation for why it is forgotten, despite the sharpness of the humanitarian situation, the security risk of the war spreading, and the fact that it has drawn in self-interested mischievous players such as the United Arab Emirates, which is supporting the RSF, and therefore extending the duration of the war.
One of the reasons for this is Gaza and the escalating Middle East conflict, and how they have monopolised global attention and diplomatic bandwidth for the past six months. And another is that for those reporting within Sudan and the few who manage to get in, doing so is difficult and fraught with danger, limiting the output of images and details that can be broadcast consistently to galvanise attention. But the rest, I suspect, is down to what to most will seem unremarkable: this is just another African country succumbing to intractable conflict.
This is a different war from the one waged in Darfur, which drew in celebrities, politicians and even the international criminal court in previous years. And it is different from the war between the north and south, which also attracted so much advocacy and political pressure that a peace agreement and secession was secured. It is not, as in the past, a conflict resonantly framed as Muslims against Christians, or Arabs against Africans, stirring sympathy and outrage. It is the challenge of a new configuration of political and economic entrepreneurs who wish to displace the old military cluster of ruling parties – but with no experience and even less interest in actually running parts of the state captured in the meantime.
On a political level Sudan falls, and has always done, low on the list of priorities for power brokers in the west, who have few interests in the country. They either crudely isolated it through sanctions or, after the revolution, naively and hastily tried to marshal the two armed parties to agreement and a de-facto return to a militarised, centralised status quo.
This is the point where I would usually suggest some potential way through it all. But one year on there is nothing but mourning. There is comfort though, as infrastructure has collapsed, in how the Sudanese people have pooled their few resources and opened up their homes to each other, in how volunteers have set up community kitchens, and how resistance committees, local civil disobedience units that were set up before and thrived during the 2019 revolution have been repurposed to provide medical aid, food and shelter. In these acts, there is still a reminder that a country is not a place but a spirit. Not only is that very much alive, but it has proved to be, in even the most extreme circumstances, impossible to extinguish.”
What is to be done, as Lenin asked in the essay that began the Russian Revolution?
As written by Kate Ferguson in The Guardian, in an article entitled The RSF are out to finish the genocide in Darfur they began as the Janjaweed. We cannot stand by; “As conflict in Sudan escalates, it is becoming clear that the Rapid Support Forces has returned to Darfur to complete the genocide it began 20 years ago. The RSF is the Janjaweed rebranded, the “devils on horseback” used by the Sudanese government from 2003 to implement widespread and systematic crimes against non-Arab communities across Darfur. The RSF was, and still is, commanded by Gen Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo.
In recent weeks, what we knew was coming has been confirmed. Yale University’s Conflict Observatory, which uses a combination of satellite imagery, Nasa thermal-detection data and open-source analysis, found evidence of the “targeted destruction of at least 26 communities” by the RSF between 15 April and 10 July. Mass graves have been discovered, and satellite imagery shows entire urban neighbourhoods and villages have been burned down.
Sexual violence is once again an evident component of RSF strategy. Facilities necessary for survival are being deliberately destroyed, from homes, schools and hospitals to water, electricity and communications infrastructure.
What has been reported in Darfur is the first wave of a strategy that will become more extreme if left unchecked.
This is what you do when you want to permanently remove a people. And terrible as this evidence is, the public reports and verified cases will still represent a massive undercount of what is actually taking place.
This hellish trajectory will gather momentum, and there is a real risk the RSF will now take aim at larger targets, such as the town of El Fasher, where there are at least 600,000 displaced people now largely housed in three camps.
The RSF appears to be taking advantage of an international response to the crisis that is prioritising resolution between the warring generals – Hemedti and Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of Sudan’s armed forces – but so far is proving unable or unwilling to respond to the mass violence being unleashed across Darfur.
From the second world war and the Holocaust to the wars of Yugoslav succession and genocide against Bosnia’s Muslims, this deeply flawed assumption that ending armed conflict will also end campaigns of identity-based mass violence has meant catastrophic failures to protect vulnerable people and prevent massive losses of life. Failure to acknowledge these distinctions in Sudan will likewise be devastating for Darfur.
The deliberate violence in Darfur requires an urgent response. However, doing so confers no legitimacy on Sudanese armed forces, which have been committing human rights violations elsewhere in Sudan in pursuit of reimposing Islamist authoritarian rule.
What has been reported in Darfur should be seen as the first wave of a strategy that will become more extreme if left unchecked. The RSF command is watching what the world will do before it escalates. We have the narrowest of windows in which to act.
The nature, intent and perpetrators of atrocities must be named and condemned. Last week the UK’s development minister, Andrew Mitchell, said crimes against humanity was “entirely right” to describe what is taking place. It is surprising that other countries – in particular the US, which has an established mechanism to do so – have yet to follow suit. Global condemnation can give perpetrators cause to hesitate; this buys time, which saves lives.
The roles played by state leaders via back-channel diplomacy, and in leveraging bilateral and personal relationships, often make the greatest difference amid such delicate tipping points. Leadership from the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, along with Mitchell, in publicly condemning mass atrocities in the strongest possible terms – and getting on the phone to urge their counterparts to do the same – is therefore critical.
The glare of the international spotlight allows perpetrators fewer places to conceal their crimes. As current president of the UN security council, the UK should be using every forum and mechanism to bring attention, investigation, documentation and media coverage. Impunity thrives in the shadows.
The UK must listen far more to the people who know and understand this violence best. I told the House of Commons foreign affairs select committee last month that the UK made a catastrophic error in trusting the men with guns rather than listening to the people who were feeling increasingly unsafe. It would be a graver mistake still to assume now that designing protective strategies is the singular purview of military experts in western capitals.
The UK needs to establish urgently an emergency communications channel between Whitehall and experts in Sudan, Darfur, Chad and the Darfuri community here in the UK, who will be among the first to know when the RSF advance or alters course.
Ultimately, as the chairs of both the international development and foreign affairs select committees have repeated, a protective wedge must be placed between people at risk and the RSF. The full spectrum of protective options must be fully considered, including but not limited to the rapid deployment of high-level international observers, the presence of UN political and human rights experts as “eyes and ears” on the ground, and peacekeeping forces that can protect civilians.
None of these options is easy – we know the UN security council is broken, and securing permission for access will be a diplomatic feat on its own – but difficulty cannot become an excuse not to persevere when any kind of international presence will help to pause attacks and buy time.
We knew the spectre of identity-based mass violence was returning to Sudan. We knew it when Hemedti instigated a massacre in Khartoum after the people’s revolution in 2019; we knew it when Burhan led the military coup in 2021.
If the UK’s policy is indeed “to maximise our ability to take effective action to prevent and respond to atrocities”, comprehensive action must be taken now. Otherwise, we will have to accept that we stood by 20 years after genocide began in Darfur, allowing the very same perpetrators to complete the crime.”
As I wrote in my post of July 15 2023, Genocide as a Symptom of Social and Political Collapse in Failed States: the Case of Sudan; Genocide can be read as a symptom of both social and political collapse; the hollowing out of values and relationships which sustain our humanity and the degradation of nations into regimes of authoritarian tyranny and state terror as they become delegitimized.
It is the ultimate crime, and the end state of authorized national identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of the weaponization of fear and faith in service to power through divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness.
In Sudan a civil war rages and devolves into the horrors of genocide, a war which is also a proxy Great Powers conflict between the Arab-American Alliance and Russia for dominion in this theatre of World War Three. Here the past swallows the future and cannibalizes our hope for a humankind united as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights.
Sudan is a classic example of the problems of faith as national identity and of the Double Minority as in Northern Ireland or Israel and Palestine, wherein both historically Islamic and Christian identities have been deployed in service to power. This is now compounded by having become a wishbone of empires.
Herein we play two bad choices against each other in hope of creating a free space of play for liberation and democracy, and at risk of either side consolidating power as a tyrannical regime, while whole peoples die.
The strategy and goal of the Arab-American Alliance is simple; overthrow the regime of Russia’s client state with our champion Hemedti, a key regional ally whose child soldiers enforce our power in Yemen and elsewhere, who also happens to be a warlord, slave raider, and mining robber king whose wealth and power are built on the lives of indigenous Black people. This means that we need him in the Great Game and cannot disavow him, but also that his campaign of genocide against the Black Christian peoples has destabilized the whole region, abetted Islamization and brought America into alignment with forces inimical to our political interests and long range goals, and subverted our goal in Sudan of a secular and multiethnic democracy.
Here is a parallel of why America abandoned Afghanistan; we needed the Taliban as a buffer state and counterforce to Iran, more than we needed the wealth from control of its heroin fields.
The use of social force is subversive of its own values in the enforcement of virtue.
For myself, I would dearly love to break the power of the Russian Empire and liberate Africa and the world from Putin’s colonialist tyranny and terror, but not at the cost of a genocide.
In Sudan we must change our strategy, envision a new path to a free society of equals, and bring the Chaos.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, but in liberation struggle only.
No matter where you begin with songs of the Elect and Others, of purity and contamination, virtue and monstrosity, obedience and transgression, identification of the Infinite with those who claim to speak in his name and enforce our submission to their will, with the idea that some of us are better and truly more human than others on the basis of any of this, with subjugation to those who claim to speak in our name and would enslave us defined as good and freedom from systems of force and control as evil, and with the use of social force in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
And this we must Resist, and give reply with the words found written on its death chambers after Liberation; Never Again!
As written by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled China, Myanmar and now Darfur … the horror of genocide is here again: Each time it happens, the world insists: ‘never again’. But the political and moral blindspots that allow these atrocities will persist until the lessons of history are learned; “
It’s happening again. In Darfur, scene of a genocide that killed 300,000 people and displaced millions 20 years ago, armed militias are on the rampage once more. Now, as then, they are targeting ethnic African tribes, murdering, raping and stealing with impunity. “They” are nomadic, ethnic Arab raiders, the much-feared “devils on horseback” – except now they ride in trucks. They’re called the Janjaweed. And they’re back.
How is it possible such horrors can be repeated? The world condemned the 2003 slaughter. The UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigated. Sudan’s former president, Omar al-Bashir, was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity along with his principal allies. The trial of one suspect, known as Ali Kushayb, opened last year. Yet Bashir and the guilty men have evaded justice so far.
It’s a familiar story. Throughout history, genocide, the most heinous of crimes, has often gone unpunished. The UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention defined it as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. It is universally proscribed. States are legally bound to prevent it. Yet there’s a tendency to look away. In Xinjiang, Myanmar and elsewhere, the convention’s “odious scourge” rages unchecked.
For its part, Sudan goes from bad to worse. The Janjaweed are allied to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – paramilitaries warring with the army for control of the country. The RSF commander, known as Hemedti, was a Janjaweed leader in 2003. Like others, he has never faced justice. The UN warns with growing urgency that “crimes against humanity” are being committed in Darfur. It seems only too obvious where this is headed.
Genocide, typically, is a “never again” event. So terrible and long-lasting are its effects that survivors insist it cannot ever be repeated. The Holocaust – the murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany – is the supreme, modern example of genocidal evil. Yet even that abomination has not dispelled a more general amnesia (or deliberate forgetting) about the past, nor deterred present-day emulators. “Never again” never works.
The denial of recognition and justice to genocide’s historical victims helps explain today’s political and moral blindspots. In a powerful essay in the New York Review of Books last month, Ed Vulliamy, a former Guardian and Observer Bosnian war correspondent, highlights one such case of “invisibility”: the 19th-century drive to exterminate California’s Native American tribes.
“They were totally deprived of land rights. They were… treated as wild animals, shot on sight… enslaved and worked to death… Their life was outlawed and their whole existence was condemned,” an official report later admitted. Nowhere were efforts to destroy Indigenous peoples’ lives and culture more “methodically savage” than in California, Vulliamy writes. Yet who remembers now? Who even knew?
To his credit, the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has sponsored a California Truth and Healing Council to collect descendants’ testimony and formulate proposals for recognition, recompense and restorative justice. Newsom is clear about what happened. “It’s called genocide… No other way to describe it,” he said when setting up the council. Such candour is rare.
Most European countries, Britain especially, formerly exhibited genocidal tendencies. Australia, too. The genocide of the Herero, Nama and other Aboriginal peoples by early 20th-century German settlers in what is now Namibia is another instance of obliterated history recently brought painfully to light. Thousands were machine-gunned by the colonists. Pornographic photographs of sexually-abused women were sent home as postcards. Foreshadowing Nazi atrocities, macabre medical experiments were conducted on prisoners.
In 2021, a belatedly apologetic Germany agreed reparations with Namibia’s government. But the deal is on hold. Victims’ groups object, saying they were not consulted. As in other historical genocides, like that suffered by Ottoman-era Armenians in 1915-17, facts are disputed, responsibility is repudiated, and reconciliation remains elusive. Referred pain is just too powerful.
Genocide prosecutions make gradual advances. Last week, a court in Paris jailed for life a Rwandan military policeman, Philippe Hategekimana, for his role in the slaughter of 800,000 people, mostly minority ethnic Tutsis, in 1994. Following the Bosnian war, former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and the Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, were tried for genocide.
But national courts in Germany and France exercising “universal jurisdiction”, the much-undermined ICC (the US, Russia and China reject its authority), special courts (as in Sierra Leone) and ad hoc, Yugoslavia-style international tribunals, such as that urged for Ukraine, are struggling to keep up with the sheer scale of atrocious behaviour around the world.
Why, for example, is Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, not prosecuted for attempted genocide of Kurdish and Sunni groups under the terms of the 1948 convention? Russia’s Vladimir Putin should surely face similar action over Ukraine – in addition to the ICC’s war crimes warrant. Last week’s pizza restaurant bombing in Kramatorsk could be exhibit A, though in truth there are not enough letters in the alphabet to list all Putin’s crimes.
Treating genocide as a rare, usually historical occurrence is nonsense. It’s happening today in Darfur. It’s happening in Myanmar, where minority Rohingyas are persecuted and displaced by a vicious military junta. And it’s happening in China with the documented mass detention, forced labour, involuntary sterilisation, family separation and religious persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
As the US government says, such cruelty exactly fits the definition of genocide with intent. So why not indict President Xi Jinping? The UN Human Rights Council’s shameful vote to ignore its own damning Xinjiang investigation shows why this suggestion is impractical to the point of absurdity. It shows the depth of the problem with genocide denialism that the world still faces.
It’s why impunity rules. It’s why the killers keep killing. It’s why the Janjaweed ride again.”
As I wrote in my post of April 16 2023, Chaos Is the Great Hope of the Powerless: the Case of Sudan; In Sudan the legacies of our history return to savage us with terror and cruelty, as consequences of the Darfur War and the tyranny of the monstrous Omar al-Bashir, for though he has been brought a Reckoning as the figurehead of atavistic forces of fascisms of faith and race and the nihilistic wanton capitalism of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, the forces which created him live on after he is fallen, conserving inequalities of power.
All use of social force and violence obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and creates its own resistance. This is both an existential threat to be feared, and an opportunity for transformative change to be desired.
Such are the true aims and means of politics as the art of the possible; to dream and make real visions of fear and desire, belonging and otherness.
Sudan began the Arab Spring, and was among its victims as failure of vision and the persistence of evil as unequal power.
In this moment the Rapid Support Forces led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, remnants of Omar al-Bashir’s army of madness and criminality, challenges the government of Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who has repressed the democracy movement with great brutality.
The fall of tyrants and seizures of power are goals and objectives of revolution, but we must also bring change to unjust systems if we are to free ourselves from the legacies of history and dream new and better ways to be human together. As proof of my thesis I offer you the case of Sudan, where warlords struggle for dominion in the wake of the collapse of the hope of democracy.
And this moment of chaos is also one of opportunity, for as Guillermo del Toro has written in his great telenovela Carnival Row, “Who is Chaos good for? Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
Let us use the enemies of liberty against each other, and bring to Sudan a free society of equals who act as each other guarantors of universal human rights.
Let us bring the Chaos.
As written by Adam Fulton in The Guardian, in an article entitled Sudan conflict: why is there fighting and what is at stake in the region?
Power struggle between military factions erupted after faltering transition to civilian-led government; “Clashes between Sudan’s military and the country’s main paramilitary force have left at least 56 dead, while control of the presidential palace and the international airport in Khartoum is in doubt after disputed claims from both sides, in fighting that threatens to destabilise Sudan and the wider region.
What’s behind the fighting?
The clashes erupted amid an apparent power struggle between the two main factions of Sudan’s military regime.
The Sudanese armed forces are broadly loyal to Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the country’s de facto ruler, while the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a collection of militia, follow the former warlord Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti.
The power struggle has its roots in the years before a 2019 uprising that ousted the dictatorial ruler Omar al-Bashir, who built up formidable security forces that he deliberately set against one another.
When an effort to transition to a democratic civilian-led government faltered after Bashir’s fall, an eventual showdown appeared inevitable, with diplomats in Khartoum warning in early 2022 that they feared such an outbreak of violence. In recent weeks, tensions have risen further.
How did the military rivalries develop?
The RSF was founded by Bashir to crush a rebellion in Darfur that began more than 20 years ago due to the political and economic marginalisation of the local people by Sudan’s central government. The RSF were also known by the name of Janjaweed, which became associated with widespread atrocities.
In 2013, Bashir transformed the Janjaweed into a semi-organised paramilitary force and gave their leaders military ranks before deploying them to crush a rebellion in South Darfur and then dispatching many to fight in the war in Yemen, and later Libya.
The RSF, led by Hemedti, and the regular military forces under Burhan cooperated to oust Bashir in 2019. The RSF then dispersed a peaceful sit-in that was held in front of the military headquarters in Khartoum, killing hundreds of people and raping dozens more.
A power-sharing deal with the civilians who led the protests against Bashir, which was supposed to bring about a transition towards a democratic government, was interrupted by a coup in October 2021.
The coup put the army back in charge but it faced weekly protests, renewed isolation and deepening economic woes. Hemedti swung behind the plan for a new transition, bringing tensions with Burhan to the surface.
Hemedti has huge wealth derived from the export of gold from illegal mines, and commands tens of thousands of battle-hardened veterans. He has long chafed at his position as official deputy on Sudan’s ruling council.
What are the faultlines?
A central cause of tension since the uprising is the civilian demand for oversight of the military and integration of the RSF into the regular armed forces.
Civilians have also called for the handover of lucrative military holdings in agriculture, trade and other industries, a crucial source of power for an army that has often outsourced military action to regional militias.
Another point of contention is the pursuit of justice over allegations of war crimes by the military and its allies in the conflict in Darfur from 2003. The international criminal court is seeking trials for Bashir and other Sudanese suspects.
Justice is also being sought over the killings of pro-democracy protesters in June 2019, in which military forces are implicated. Activists and civilian groups have been angered by delays to an official investigation. In addition, they want justice for at least 125 people killed by security forces in protests since the 2021 coup.
What’s at stake in the region?
Sudan is in a volatile region bordering the Red Sea, the Sahel region and the Horn of Africa. Its strategic location and agricultural wealth have attracted regional power plays, complicating the chances of a successful transition to civilian-led government.
Several of Sudan’s neighbours – including Ethiopia, Chad and South Sudan – have been affected by political upheavals and conflict, and Sudan’s relationship with Ethiopia, in particular, has been strained over issues including disputed farmland along their border.
Major geopolitical dimensions are also at play, with Russia, the US, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other powers battling for influence in Sudan.
The Saudis and the UAE have seen Sudan’s transition as an opportunity to push back against Islamist influence in the region. They, along with the US and Britain, form the “Quad”, which has sponsored mediation in Sudan along with the UN and the African Union. Western powers fear the potential for a Russian base on the Red Sea, which Sudanese military leaders have expressed openness to.”
As I wrote in my post of February 12 2020 Sudan: Justice for the Victims of the Darfur War; Pandora’s Box has been opened once again in Sudan today, this time signaling not the escape of evils but the rediscovery of hope as yesterday the government agrees to surrender the monster and outcast former tyrant Omar al-Bashir to the International Criminal Court to be tried for genocide and war crimes during the Darfur War.
Both slave revolt and revolutionary struggle by Black African tribal peoples against oligarchic Arab elites who traditionally have used them as a herd for slave labor, the Darfur War became a war of survival against the genocidal and horrific campaign of repression and ethnic cleansing which was the government’s response. It was a war of race and class marked by the worst aspects of both kinds of conflict, ending in April 2019 with the overthrow and arrest of the tyrant, first success of our Revolution in the Year of the Reckoning.
In the words of Annum Masroor writing in Huffpost; “In the Darfur conflict, rebels from the territory’s ethnic central and sub-Saharan African community launched an insurgency in 2003, complaining of oppression by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum.
The government responded with a scorched-earth assault of aerial bombings and unleashed militias known as the Janjaweed, who are accused of mass killings and rapes. Up to 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were driven from their homes.”
As written by Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall in The Washington Post’s newsletter, in an article entitled Behind chaos in Sudan is a broader global power struggle; “The battles that have raged for three days in Sudan have all the markings of a potential civil war. Dueling armed factions — the country’s military, led by Sudanese president and top commander Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and a major paramilitary force known as the Rapid Support Forces, led by Vice President Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — clashed in the capital of Khartoum and other cities.
The fighting, triggered apparently by disputes over how to integrate the RSF into the military, has even involved airstrikes against rival targets and has impacted dense urban areas, leading to the deaths of more than 180 people, according to a U.N. official, with the toll expected to rise. It has also claimed the lives of three Sudanese people working for the U.N.’s World Food Program, while there were reports Monday evening of assaults on Western diplomats.
The two feuding generals have cast a long shadow over Sudanese politics. They both built their careers waging a brutal counterinsurgency against an uprising in the country’s western Darfur region that began in 2003; the atrocities carried out against the rebellion are seen as acts of genocide. Dagalo, known universally as Hemedti, came to the fore as the leader of a notorious pro-government Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, which later morphed into the RSF.
After being part of the military establishment that decided in 2019 to oust long-ruling dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Burhan and Hemedti would later collaborate in bringing down a fragile civilian-led government in 2021. All the while, their soldiers intimidated and brutalized Sudanese pro-democracy activists and dissidents and a constellation of foreign powers cultivated both as assets in their own regional games.
Warlords in a country long-riven by militias and insurgencies, the two are now locked in a classic internecine conflict. “Both sides have bases across the country,” said Alan Boswell, head analyst for the Horn of Africa at the International Crisis Group think tank, to the Financial Times. “Both see this fight in existential terms. This is a pure power struggle for who will control Sudan.”
Burhan and Hemedti were supposed to be stewards of a political transition back toward democracy, but they appear to have for their own reasons balked on that process. “The failure to form a government and the deterioration of the economic and security situation in the country, prompted the various military and civilian parties to sign a framework agreement in December 2022, which was widely accepted by civilians and important and influential parties from the international and regional communities,” explained a story in Asharq Al-Awsat, an influential Arabic-language daily.
Instead, unable to come to terms with the forging of an apolitical army, the two leaders came to blows. Boswell said that “this war is already dashing any hopes for the quick restoration of civilian rule,” and added that it “risks sucking in many outside actors and spilling across Sudan’s borders if not arrested soon.”
“Now, fighting could turn into a protracted conflict, with many fearing that the war could drag in regional patrons and neighbors such as Chad, Egypt, Eritrea and Ethiopia. In the end, nobody knows if the RSF or army will vanquish the other, but their quest could upend the region,” wrote Mat Nashed in New Lines magazine.
While it may ripple across borders, the chaos in Sudan also is fueled, in part, by outside players. The interim regime dominated by Burhan and Hemedti has been propped up by billions of dollars in Emirati and Saudi financing. Egypt has stepped up its support of Burhan’s forces, while Russia, and in particular the influential Wagner Group mercenaries, has developed apparent ties and contacts with Hemedti’s forces. Sudanese fighters, particularly from Darfur, have ended up on the front lines of both the Saudi- and Emirati-led war effort in Yemen, as well as the conflict in Libya, where a thicket of regional powers, including the UAE, Qatar, Libya and Russia, were all involved.
Various regional powers eye Sudan’s Red Sea coast including Russia, which has a potential deal in place to set up a naval base in Sudan that would give Moscow a path into the Indian Ocean. So, too, the UAE, which “hopes to protect its long-term strategic interests in Sudan, including the ability to project military and economic power into Yemen and the Horn of Africa from ports and other installations there,” noted a policy brief from the Soufan Center, a global security think tank. “In December 2022, coinciding with the Sudan framework agreement, the UAE and Sudan signed a $6 billion agreement for two UAE firms to build a new port on Sudan’s Red Sea coast.”
Hemedti’s RSF reportedly control the bulk of Sudan’s lucrative gold mines, which has given him an apparent independent line of financing fueled by an illicit trade of smuggled ore that analysts say winds its way through the UAE and into Russian hands. Western analysts fear the expanding footprint of Wagner, which has cultivated ties with coup-plotting regimes in Mali and Burkina Faso, and carried out counterinsurgency operations in the Central African Republic. French officials, in particular, have warned of the Kremlin’s growing clout in the restive Sahel.
“In the post Ukraine invasion-world, Hemedti’s more obvious relationship with Russian mercenary group Wagner has put him in the cross-hairs of international machinations across the Sahel,” wrote Kholood Khair, a Khartoum-based analyst. “For Cairo, the prospect of eliminating Hemedti is too good an opportunity to pass up, and the timing is right with western attention coalescing around halting the domino effect of former French colonies turning their backs on Paris in favor of Moscow.”
Egypt, which has in recent years supported Saudi and Emirati regional initiatives, is a more conspicuous supporter of Burhan, who Cairo sees as a bulwark of stability and a potential ally in geopolitical squabbles with Ethiopia over the construction of a major dam on the Nile. On Monday, there were reports of Hemedti’s forces detaining a contingent of Egyptian soldiers deployed in Sudan, a move that risks further expanding the arc of the conflict.
A host of foreign governments, including the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, urged a cessation in hostilities. But both generals have vowed to crush the other and show little sign of backing down. “Western nations have little leverage right now. Sudan has been largely isolated since Hemedti and Burhan seized power in a coup in 2021 that ended a short-lived civilian government,” my colleagues explained. “The debt-laden Horn of Africa nation desperately needs tens of billions of dollars to shore up its moribund economy, but deals are unlikely as long as the two men remain in power and fighting each other. Sudan’s economy tanked after the oil-rich south gained independence in 2011, and hyperinflation fed frequent street protests.”
Bashir’s ouster led to Sudan, Africa’s third-largest nation, coming somewhat out of the cold. The U.S. State Department removed it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, while both Burhan and Hemedti carried out tours of various world capitals. But Khair and other figures in Sudanese civil society argue that, in the current desperate context, neither military ruler should be backed as a figure to stabilize the situation.
“All the activists and civilians have been saying the whole time, do not trust these two. They are killers; they have been killing for 30 years,” Dallia Mohamed Abdelmoniem, a Khartoum resident and former journalist, told my colleagues. “This is who the international community has been placating.”
As I wrote in my post of May 27 2022, Theatres of World War Three: West Africa, the Sahel, and Lake Chad Regions; Here I offer insight and policy guidance into what I hope will be the last of the Theatres of World War Three; West Africa, the Sahel, and Lake Chad regions. Mali is the primary conflict now, but a general conflict rages throughout the whole region as Islamic State insurgencies contest with nations under the hammer of famine and drought, and Russia’s mercenaries exploit opportunities to seize dominion in defense of elite wealth and power.
Sudan is a pivot point and interface between bounded realms of sub-Saharan Africa as discussed here, and Libya with whose fate it is closely aligned. To disambiguate the Sudan and Libyan Civil Wars from the general regional conflict, Libya being a unique war of colonial European interests as a wishbone pulled between Russia and Turkey for dominion of the Mediterranean, where sub-Saharan Africa, including Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and Nigeria, is not yet a Great Powers proxy war and civil war but a struggle for power between variants of Islamic State Jihadist groups and the nations which control the resources they covet, with Russia leveraging this into regional dominion through the use of Wagner Group mercenaries as deniable assets.
It is now the presence of the Wagner Group defending elite interests in fighting Islamic State insurgencies and operating the mines for the governments which have become their proxies and front organizations which defines this theatre of war.
And it is the Wagner Group we must interrogate for insight into Russia’s plans and methods of world conquest and dominion when as in Syria there are willing surrogates to open the door of empire.
All of this is possible because France has abandoned her former colonies to their fate, because of the brilliant and visionary Islamic State strategy of delegitimation through provocation and implication in war crimes, some real and some false flag operations by elite IS units in French uniforms in coordination with infiltration agents inside actual French entities, and skillful propaganda. In parallel with blackening the reputation of France, ISGS has been successfully building a viable trans-national state in the region.
This means that the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, an independent operational arm of Islamic State West Africa Province created in 2015 with al-Sahrawi’s oath of allegiance to IS and split from al-Qaeda, and despite continued factional fighting between the two organizations, is now providing central Command, Intelligence, and Communications to jihadist insurgencies generally in its sphere of influence, as an emergent dominion to which Russia is the only balance. I describe this historical movement as the Syrianization of the conflict.
There are other possibilities for future Africas without foreign empires and their proxy regimes of brutal and kleptocratic tyrants and endless violence for control of resources, and in the long game this requires the free and open sharing of resources among her peoples and states which are guarantors of our universal human rights and secular democracy as a counterforce to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
To win the liberty of the peoples of Africa one must begin with food, water, medical aid, and safety; the first requirements of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The political follows the humanitarian. Freedom from hunger, disease, violence, and labor exploitation; liberate a people from these, and tyranny will find no point of leverage.
Beyond this prescription I must give warning here; let us send no armies to enforce virtue, for the most likely result of challenging Russian influence in the region is another Great Powers war of imperial dominion between Russia and France which replicates that of Russia and Turkey in Libya. This will fail, because it plays directly into the hands of ISGS.
If you fight an insurgency with conventional forces, you will lose. ISGS has demonstrated a genius for this kind of war, and in large part it is not the kind of war our armies are designed to fight. In this arena, victory on the battlefield is irrelevant, because the victory you must win is within the human soul. And here we win love and loyalty by standing with, not against, our fellow human beings. We must offer the better alternative in meeting the needs of the people, both material and otherwise.
And in this arena we have clear advantage, for democracy is better than tyranny, equality as diversity and inclusion is better than tribalism, racism, and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, truth is better than the lies and illusions of propaganda, justice is better than rule by the wealthiest robber baron or the most brutal and amoral bandit king, and a secular state is better than tyrannies of the authorized interpreters and enforcers of divine will, for who so ever stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
A common enemy of humankind is the weaponization of fear by authority in service to power, especially as identity politics and divisions of faith. Gott Mit Uns; it is our most ancient and terrible battle cry, for it permits anything.
As Voltaire teaches us in his 1765 essay Questions sur les miracles; “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
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As we celebrate the triumph of democracy over tyranny and equality over institutional white supremacist terror in the anniversary of the 2023 return of Representatives Pearson and Jones to the Tennessee legislature, victories shadowed by the systemic destruction of our democracy, our freedoms, and our humanity by the criminal Trump regime, we are confronted with a horrific example of the future to which we may be headed in the legacies of history and systems of unequal power from which we struggle to emerge in the one hundred fifty-first anniversary of the Colfax Massacre.
Theft of citizenship as vote suppression and as genocidal murder, white supremacist state terror, and police gun violence are among the hungry ghosts who bedevil us still, and should there remain any question of the existential active threat of racist terror and the necessity of resistance by any means necessary, we may look to such examples.
No matter where you begin with divisions of identitarian politics in service to elite wealth, power, and privilege, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
To this let us give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As written by Gwendolyn Midlo-Hall and Keri Leigh Merritt in Jacobin, in an article entitled The 1873 Colfax Massacre Was a Racist Attack on Black People’s Democratic Rights: The worst episode of Reconstruction Era violence occurred 150 years ago today in northern Louisiana. The 1873 Colfax Massacre saw white supremacists slaughter 150 African Americans, brutally thwarting their hopes for autonomy and self-governance.; “The Civil War did not end in the Deep South in 1865. The proslavery, pro-Confederate legacies powerfully persisted, shaping the telling of our history and knowledge about people, places, and events: our perception of reality.
This is precisely why many Americans have never heard of one of the most important episodes of mass murder in US history: the racist, bloody Colfax Massacre of April 13, 1873 — exactly one hundred fifty years ago today — when white supremacists slaughtered over one hundred fifty black men in the northwest corner of Louisiana.
Colfax
Located in the heart of the Red River Valley, Colfax was a highly prosperous area in the global cotton economy prior to the Civil War. But flush times for planters ended abruptly after secession. New Orleans fell to the US Army early, in April 1862. After Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed those enslaved in Confederate-occupied territory in 1863, the US Army conducted a ten-day raid up the Red River to Alexandria, where the Confederate governor of Louisiana, Thomas Moore, owned a large plantation.
During the Civil War, the US Army enlisted nearly two hundred thousand armed black men — an astonishing 10 percent of all troops who served. Composed of formerly enslaved men, refugees, and free blacks, these soldiers were tasked with maintaining order, ensuring peace, and protecting polling places.
But when former enslavers began complaining about the black occupation troops, President Andrew Johnson quickly removed them. By the fall of 1867, the number of soldiers in Louisiana had dwindled to only twenty thousand men. The US government decided to redirect its military might toward western colonization, resulting in the murderous removal of indigenous people.
The US government had abandoned the region, as well the people in it, leaving political, judicial, and police power up for grabs.
In the Red River Valley, too few troops meant chaos and contention, as there was no longer a functioning home guard, military patrol, or military commission. The US government had abandoned the region, as well the people in it, leaving political, judicial, and police power up for grabs.
The character of wealth changed, as access to goods and supplies became paramount. Within this shifting landscape, a new group of merchants emerged, competing through violent, insurrectionary means. The Red River Valley transformed into a highway of militarized desperados and warring factions, with no clearly established governmental authority. Murder, gun violence, and terror became the order of the day.
Louisiana’s new constitution, enacted in 1868, created an enclave of Republican power along the Red River, an area that was majority-black and deeply divided. Grant Parish was carved out of Rapides and Winn Parishes and named triumphantly for President Ulysses S. Grant. The parish seat, Colfax, took the surname of his vice president, Schuyler Colfax, Jr.
Yet with so few troops to counterbalance the power of former enslavers and their kin, laws enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments — providing citizenship and the right to vote to all men — were applied timidly and to little effect. Federal election supervisors in rural areas had no police power and were reduced to poll watchers.
That same year, to help keep peace, the Louisiana state legislature established a five-thousand-man militia, half white and half black. The white troops were mainly Confederate veterans; the black troops, Union veterans. During bitter struggles over control of the state government, the militia fragmented along racial lines, with one sector becoming the military arm of a terrorist organization called the White League after 1873. The boundary line between these white supremacists and black Republicans was Bayou Darrow, located seven miles north of Colfax.
Freedmen voting in New Orleans, Louisiana, 1867. (Wikimedia Commons)
Violence quickly enveloped the region. The brutality was primarily carried out by the Knights of the White Camelia, a white supremacist organization akin to the better-known Ku Klux Klan.
During the wave of terror unleashed before the 1868 election, the political assassination rates among both black and white Louisianans had been staggering. As an 1875 congressional report later revealed, there were 1,081 politically motivated murders, 137 shootings, and 507 other verified outrages in the state alone.
Still, as brutal as the 1868 election had been in Louisiana, the 1872 election and its aftermath were even deadlier. Not only was the gubernatorial election disputed, but several of the local elections were, too. Like four years earlier, the real political strife seemed to center in the Red River Valley, with Grant Parish the eye of the storm. In tiny Colfax, the county seat, the local elections were hotly contested. A group of armed black Republicans began occupying the county courthouse, claiming political victory.
Then everything exploded on Easter Sunday, 1873.
Massacre
The power struggle in Colfax had first turned deadly earlier in April, when a band of white supremacists murdered a black man in his front yard. Union veteran William Ward, who served as a black state representative, local Radical leader, and militia captain, ordered his company to muster immediately.
Historian LeeAnna Keith estimates that about three hundred black militiamen, along with their families, flocked to Colfax’s town center, occupying the courthouse (which, in the war-torn rural South, was a “repurposed” plantation stable). Ward, who had grown up enslaved as a carpenter in Virginia, began drilling the men openly in the town’s streets, organizing watches to keep families safe. Armed with guns, they quickly dug entrenchments, erected breastworks, and “posted sentries” around their commandeered area.
Judge William Phillips, a white “scalawag” from Alabama who earned a reputation by openly fathering a child with a black woman and by rallying black voters through promises of land, horses, and tools as part of reparations for slavery, joined forces with the black guards. Under the joint leadership of the white Phillips and the black Ward, local African Americans coalesced around what historian Joel Sipress has deemed “a new type of militant Black politics.”
White supremacists in the Red River Valley used these events to incite as much racial fear as possible. Over the next few days, three hundred white men poured into Colfax from Grant and surrounding parishes, forming an all-white paramilitary counterforce. Under the leadership of C. C. Nash, a former captain of the Confederate Army, they ordered the black militia and their families to leave Colfax under threat of violence. With more manpower and weaponry than the Republicans (they even had a small cannon, a relic from the war), white Democrats began the battle just after noon on Easter.
After hours of skirmishing, the former Confederates found a gap in the levee on the riverbank and positioned their single cannon there. While the weapon fired continuously upon the black freedom fighters, a former plantation overseer led a group of thirty whites in a direct attack against the black militia. One group of black Republicans instantly surrendered and was taken prisoner. Although Nash promised to free the men in the morning, a younger band of white terrorists executed them in cold blood, under the cowardly cover of the night.
Roughly sixty Republicans flooded the courthouse, exchanging fire with the white militia, who finally compelled a black captive to set fire to the courthouse roof. Some of the black Radicals perished in the fire. The men who tried to surrender, numbering between fifty and seventy, were ultimately shot to death. As a steamer pulled into Colfax the night of the massacre, one of the terrorists climbed on board, “armed to the teeth,” offering to give the passengers a tour of “dead n—–s . . . for there were a hundred or so scattered over the village and the adjacent fields.”
Nearly all the dead were brutally slain after they had surrendered.
Only three white Democrats perished during the attack, but the number of African Americans murdered is much more difficult to ascertain. Most of the witnesses were slaughtered. Evidence was lost because bodies were buried in the trenches in front of the courthouse in mass graves or dumped into the Red River.
What we do know is that nearly all the dead were brutally slain after they had surrendered and that almost fifty human beings were callously murdered after being held as political prisoners for hours. We know that not one scintilla of evidence was presented that any of the black men who defended the Colfax courthouse ever committed a single crime. They were simply freedom fighters, assassinated during their quest for independence and political power.
Colfax remains the single largest massacre in Louisiana history. It also spurred one of the worst legal decisions in Supreme Court history, United States v. Cruikshank (1875), which gave control of constitutional amendments and civil rights laws back to the white Confederates that had seceded from the Union. The ruling effectively ended Radical Reconstruction by prohibiting the use of the Enforcement Act of 1870 to prosecute white supremacist terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan. Cruikshank nearly erased the myriad black political gains won after emancipation, re-empowering local white oligarchs — former enslavers.
Legacy
White supremacy has long been an effective tool for US elites to maintain their place at the top of society. Stoking racism and hatred, they have prevented lasting interracial working-class coalitions and managed to keep most black Americans at the bottom of society.
Reactionary forces have likewise been successful at whitewashing history, including that of the Colfax Massacre. Contrary to the historical marker that served as the only headstone for the murdered — erected over half a century later — Colfax was never a riot. As the worst instance of white supremacist violence during Reconstruction, Colfax brutally thwarted black citizens’ hopes for autonomy and self-governance.
One hundred fifty years later, we recognize Colfax for what it really was: a racist massacre and a violent political message to potential black voters throughout the South. And we honor the heroic dead, vowing to continue their fight for democracy.”
Torch of Liberty 