In Cecot prison and the campaign of ethnic cleansing in our streets perpetrated by the ICE white supremacist terror force we see a future America as the Trump regime and the Republican Party envision it; a white ethnostate of tyranny and terror which abandons our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and as human beings. This we must avoid, by any means necessary, a phrase coined by Sartre in his 948 play Dirty Hands and made famous by the magnificent Malcolm X.

     The capture of the state by a Fourth Reich of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing we must resist, both within our system of government to reclaim the institutions of state in electoral, legislative, and judicial struggle, and beyond as Resistance and Revolution to bring change to systems of oppression such as racism and patriarchy from which fascisms of blood, faith, and soil emerge; but how exactly?

     And if we are to restore the balance and bring the moral regeneration of an America founded on liberty, equality, testable truth, and impartial justice for all, a free society of equals in which we are guarantors of each other’s rights as a Band of Brothers and a beacon of hope to the world, we must also bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us, and purge our destroyers from among us as we did at Nuremberg and the hunt for Nazi war criminals which came after.

      Herein there may be a boundary and interface realm between the justice which Trump and all his voters, donors, apologists, enforcers, and co-conspirators merit, that of Mussolini at the hands of an angry mob which provided a clear and decisive break with the past fascist regime but also confuses any possible new social order with moral ambiguity, and that which is possible if we are to re-establish the rule of law.    

      I would like to see Trump achieve his true nature by being fed to dogs and transformed into dog shit. Wouldn’t it be a lovely display in a glass case exhibited in a museum of holocausts, atrocities, and crimes against humanity? Let his monument read thus:

     Here lies Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, in his true form, most terrible enemy democracy has faced since Alcibiades betrayed Athens, most dangerous foreign agent to ever attack America even including Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, who subverted our ideals and sabotaged our institutions, and nearly enacted the fall of civilization as the figurehead of the Fourth Reich and herald of an age of fascist tyranny and state terror.

     Yet here he lies, nothing but a pile of dog shit. Look upon the rewards of tyranny, you who are mighty, and despair.

     For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.

     We can but wish. Beyond such fantasies, exclusion is a just balance for crimes of treason, disloyalty, and betrayal, in the forms of loss of citizenship, the most terrible punishment any nation can inflict, and exile and erasure.

    To be clear, all participants in the January 6 Insurrection, and all who conspired in this crime, had knowledge aforehand but did not sound an alarm,  or acted subsequently to conceal, abet, or deny and excuse its perpetrators and its nature including all legislators who voted not to investigate it, the Justice department which sabotaged its investigation and trial, and all who became conspirators after the fact in voting for Trump in our last election, bear responsibility in its crimes and should be repaid with loss of citizenship, forfeitures of assets, exile, and erasure. 

     Exile as the natural consequence of treason was explored in the short story “The Man Without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale, first published in The Atlantic in December 1863.  It is a story of a traitor who comes to understand the true meaning of his crime; the renunciation of his social contract, connection and interdependence with other human beings, and membership in a national identity.

     As described in Wikipedia; “It is the story of American Army lieutenant Philip Nolan, who renounces his country during a trial for treason, and is consequently sentenced to spend the rest of his days at sea without so much as a word of news about the United States.

    The protagonist is a young US Army lieutenant, Philip Nolan, who develops a friendship with the visiting Aaron Burr. When Burr is tried for treason (that historically occurred in 1807), Nolan is tried as an accomplice. During his testimony, he bitterly renounces his nation and, with a foul oath, angrily shouts, “I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” The judge is completely shocked at that announcement and, on convicting him, icily grants him his wish. Nolan is to spend the rest of his life aboard US Navy warships in exile with no right ever to set foot on US soil again and with explicit orders that no one shall ever again mention his country to him.

     The sentence is carried out to the letter. For the rest of his life, Nolan is transported from ship to ship, lives out his life as a prisoner on the high seas, and is never allowed back in a home port.”

      So for Exile; now also for Erasure. As I wrote in my post of January 7 2021, Treason and Terror: Trump’s Brownshirts Attack Congress; This leaves the ringleader and chief conspirator of treason, sedition, insurrection, and terror to be removed from power and denied a platform from which to spread madness and violence like a plague; our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. I believe we must remove, impeach, deplatform, and prosecute him for his many crimes against America; Trump must be exiled from public life and isolated from his power to destroy us.

     Roman law called this damnatio memoriae, the erasure of public forgetting, and coupled with the Amish practice of shunning provides a useful model of minimum use of social force in safeguarding ourselves from threats, without the brutality of torture and prison to which we have become addicted. A fascinating  article by the classical scholar Alexander Meddings examines its use in the cases of Trump’s nearest Imperial parallels, Caligula and Nero.

     Exile and Erasure; neither prison nor violence or the use of force and fear. Let us simply cast out those who would destroy us from among us, and forget them.

     How is this relevant to ideas of justice? Because we must not become our enemies in the use of social force, even to guarantee our universal human rights.

   Remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”

    We must escape the maelstrom of dehumanization which is the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force if we are to free ourselves from the disfiguring and crippling legacies of our history. To do this we must abandon power over others and the social use of force; but first we must seize our power over ourselves from those who would enslave us.

     How do we seize our power?

     As I wrote in my post of July 25 2025, Plan 2028 A Platform For Change Part Three: No Humans Are Illegal; Before all else must come the tactics and strategy of Resistance in the moment we now face, always the only moment we have and a Rashomon Gate of possible futures; as both Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such very different answers, What is to be done?

      The atrocities and crimes against humanity of the ICE terror force now being called Los Diablos, The Devils in Spanish, and the federal troops occupying sanctuary cities in a campaign of white supremacist state terror and ethnic cleansing, which recalls to me the horrors of the Serbian regime I fought half a lifetime ago at Sarajevo, are an immediate threat we must confront daily, but far from a unique one.

      The Fourth Reich of the Trump regime is trying to subjugate us through division and terror, and to this let us give the only reply it merits; Never Again!

        In America we are at war with our own government, a captured state of fascist tyranny, and all Resistance is War to the Knife, for who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.

       To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence. And no mater where you begin with authorized political identities of otherness and belonging, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.

      As I wrote in my post of February 10 2025, Resist ICE By Any Means Necessary; If They Come For One Of Us, Let Them Be Met With All Of Us; If you see ICE agents, send up a general warning. Photograph and publish their identities. Track them to their lair, picket their homes, flash mob them, set false trails and load the sites they raid with protestors.

     Never let police take anyone alone; they are both infiltrated by white supremacist terrorists and coordinating actions with them as deniable assets like the Oathkeepers, and in addition to the official ICE terror force of Homeland Security which pays six figure salaries to the most brutal psychopathic thugs and racist fanatics gathered from our prisons and security services, states are now hiring bounty hunters with no security clearances or training and paying one thousand dollars per human deported, and that means anyone nonwhite, citizen or not, a policy which has hit the Native American Tribes as racist state terror.

     One armed thug with a badge cannot abduct a target when three of us intervene; one hundred enforcers of racist state terror cannot overcome a thousand who Resist.

         Men without badges, wearing masks, without warrants and who offer no rights of trial as we our guaranteed by our founding documents, who abduct people at random and send them to secret foreign prisons without probable cause or evidence of any kind, without Miranda rights or hearing the evidence against them in a court of law; such teams as ICE now employs are not police of any kind but extrajudicial crime syndicates of racist terror. Resist to the death abduction of yourself or others.

     In the words of the character Mick Rory in Legends of Tomorrow, episode Turncoat; “You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re outcasts, misfits, and proud of it. If the enemy attacks in formation, we pop em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, we raid their camp in the night. And if they’re going to hang you, you fight dirty. And we never surrender.”

      How shall we resist? By any means necessary, as Sartre wrote in his play of 1948 Dirty Hands, and was made famous by Malcolm X. All Resistance is War to the Knife, for who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.

      I am prepared at all times to fight to the death, but this does not mean taking unnecessary risks. One must study the possibilities like a problem in chess, have plans for everything you can imagine, and spring the trap only when it is properly set.

     The first lesson of the Art of War is diversion and surprise; and the last lesson is the same as the first, diversion and surprise. Who achieves surprise wins; and who can predict enemy actions also wins. On the modern battlefield any threat that can be seen or identified can be destroyed; so don’t tip your hand.

       In the context of Resistance against ICE kidnapping teams, your enemy has military weapons, armor, and communications, and possibly some training; if Trump calls in the National Guard to support them as he has threatened today, they will unquestionably be trained to work as a team in ways far superior to that of any pickup team you may be able to put together, even if your team has better skills individually. Have you trained together as a team all day every day for like missions, and have gamed out and tested all possible contingencies which can arise once your mission is in play? If so you may have force parity with the enemy, if they can be isolated from support and coordination even momentarily by controlling the timing, arena of combat, or taking control of their communications and surveillance; but no Resistance cell can match regular forces in direct battle when enemy Command, Control, and Communications remain operational, the destruction or corruption with false messages and intelligence of which is a major objective.

       This also means you must avoid direct confrontation; you must be clever, unpredictable, strike anonymously from the shadows when the enemy is off guard and at their weakest in ways which cannot be countered, and never use the same trick twice.

       Of course, you want to train as a team as much as possible, and as broadly as possible which among other things means cross training in each other’s disciplines exactly as all military forces do.

       This brings us to one of the crucial and decisive factors in any conflict; the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce such as Resistance, so the reaction must be part of its design if one is to use force to shape the future.

       Another such principle is that in the Calculus of Fear, too little invites Chaos and social disorder, and too much galvanizes Resistance. I’d have thought the world would have learned this at Nanking, but its something tyrants never truly learn. People who have nothing left to lose are uncontrollable and dangerous, like ourselves.

     Herein a word of caution; do not meet force with force, fear with fear, terror with terror. Leave evil to the evildoers. This I advise not as a moral principle, but as a strategic one when the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle include a nominally democratic state which may be brought into alignment with its constitutional ideals of the equality of all human beings under the law and of the co-ownership of the state by its citizens, through mass action, solidarity, and performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen: Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.

      The great secret of authority as power, force, and control is that it is hollow and brittle, and becomes meaningless without legitimacy.

      The Fourth Reich and its figurehead Traitor Trump and the Party of Treason are counting on losing some of their enforcers to mob violence as a pretext for the occupation of America by federal troops under martial law, a trick they tried four times during the Black Lives Matter protests using police provocateurs and campaigns of arson, looting, and random violence to delegitimize the protests against racist police violence and seize the narrative. In this the enemy failed; during months of mass protests in over fifty cities throughout our nation, only one act of violence by anyone other than police and their co-conspirators happened,  and that was when our Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl returned fire when fired upon when confronting a motorcade of 600 armed fascists on August 29 2020 in Portland Oregon, and was assassinated by a police death squad days later.

     The goal of authority in centralizing power is to win legitimacy, and our goal as revolutionaries is to delegitimize authority and seize the moral high ground. We now find ourselves in a similar situation to that of Gandhi versus the British Empire, and his very elegant solution which tipped the balance was the Salt Tax Protest, during which hundreds of nonresisting Indians were systematically beaten with clubs by police on camera and before the stage of history, reported to the world with the words; “The British Empire has lost any claim to the moral high ground in India.”     

     Always the question of the social use of force remains central to any action versus or interrogation of evil in its origins as fear, power, and force in recursive processes of the Wagnerian Ring of Power, and any seizures of power in liberation struggle against systems of oppression and unequal power and the state as embodied violence, especially under imposed conditions of struggle which include brutal repression of dissent and thought control by enforcers of the carceral state and its elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.

     This goal of delegitimation of authority does not override our duty of care for others; if a man kneels on another’s neck he is a murderer and we are obligated to stop him by any means necessary, and if a man points a gun at another let a hundred guns reply.

     Everything devolves to fear, power, and force, a maelstrom which only love can free us from, and we who hunt monsters must be very careful not to become so ourselves. As Nietzsche warned; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”

     In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.

     ICE and the federal occupation of sanctuary cities and general campaign of ethnic cleansing and white supremacist terror are our direct threat and must be purged from our society, but this is also a symptom of more general issues of white supremacy as a system of oppression and unequal power designed to create and enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and white privilege, and of the centralization of power to a carceral state of force and control and the state as embodied violence.

      For what purpose have we a border? We have drawn a line in the sand to exploit disparity and create illegal migrant labor; an invisible resource of those with no legal existence to whom we can do anything without reprisal, and whose cheap labor fuels vast industries of agriculture, hospitality, caretaking, and manufacture.

     Migrant labor is slave labor.

     This is a system of oppression which creates and enforces elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which we must we must destroy utterly if we are to truly become a free society of equals.

      As I wrote in my post of December 18 2024 International Migrants Day: “There Is No Migration Crisis; There Is a Crisis of Solidarity”; We celebrate today the human will to become, to explore, to discover new worlds and create new possibilities of becoming human, in the iconic figure of the migrant as the epitome and driving force of civilization.

     Often the migrant also enacts the symbol, archetype, and allegory of the Stranger as well, with all of the ambiguities, dangers, and opportunities for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value implicit in the themes of this primary universal psychodrama.

     Often has Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, quoted the book he kept on his nightstand for years in place of a Bible, Mein Kampf, to cheering crowds during an election rally in reference to migrants; “They’re poisoning our blood.”

     No matter where you begin with ideas of otherness as a threat to identity, the origin of all fascism, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.

     Let us give to fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!

     The wave of fascism sweeping the world these past few years originates in a primal fear of otherness as loss of the self; this is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, becomes divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, racism, patriarchy, nationalism, and all of this coheres into authorized identities and a savage and cruel identity politics.

    The Other is always our own mirror image, and we cannot escape each other. This is why fascism and tyranny are inherently unstable and always collapse in depravity and ruin; when we project what we dislike about ourselves onto others, as objects to abuse as if exorcising our demons, we dehumanize ourselves as well as them. And such denial fails as a strategy of transformation and adaptation to change, aggrandizing ossified institutions and systems until they become threats rather than solutions, and the whole edifice collapses from the mechanical failures of its contradictions as is happening now in America and throughout human civilization.

     This is why the embrace of our own darkness and monstrosity is crucial to liberation struggle; how else can we bring change to systems of oppression if we cannot confront it in ourselves? Especially we must hold close and interrogate feelings like disgust, revulsion, rage, and other atavisms of instinct which we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail with the recognition that nothing we feel is either good or evil, but only how we use them in our actions toward others.

      In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.

     Against this Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force we must set a counterfire of solidarity and love, for only this can set us free. We must speak directly to that fear of otherness as loss of identity and of power if we are to turn the tide of history toward a free society of equals and not fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, toward democracy and a diverse and inclusive United Humankind and not carceral states of force and control, toward love and not hate.

    We are stronger together than alone, as Benjamin Franklin demonstrated with his bundle of arrows in reference to Ecclesiastes 4:12 and the Iroquois Great Peacemaker called in some contexts Deganawidah. A diverse and inclusive society makes us more powerful if in different ways, wealthier, more resilient and adaptive, offers unknown joys and opens new vistas and possibilities of becoming human.

    Change need not mean fear and loss; for it also offers limitless new wonders. We must be agents of change and bringers of Chaos, if we are to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.

     The idea of human rights has been abandoned by its former guarantor nations, with whole peoples in Palestine and Ukraine being erased in wars of ethnic cleansing and genocide as exhibits of atrocities and crimes against humanity, and because of this and many other systems failures civilization is collapsing; ephemeral and illusory things like wealth and power are meaningless in the shadow of our degradation and the terror of our nothingness in the face of death.

     A reader’s comment on my post of December 8, The Fall of America as a Guarantor of Democracy and Human Rights, contained the phrase “more hopeful of the good in most people”.

     Here follows my reply; I too believed in things like human goodness once, but after forty years of wars, revolutions, resistance, and liberation struggle throughout the world I cannot. What I trust and hope for, if not believe in, is solidarity of action in struggle against systems of oppression and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. Such is my faith; the universality and equality of human needs and the necessity of our unity in seizures of power to create a free society of equals.

     As written by Jean Genet, who swore me to the oath of the Resistance and set me on my life’s path during the Siege of Beirut in 1982; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”

     How shall we welcome the Stranger?

     As I wrote in my post of June 7 2025, A Battle For the Soul Of America and the Freedom of the World: ICE Versus The People; In the streets of Los Angeles and throughout Vichy America, the People rise in mass action and solidarity to do battle with Homeland Security’s army of occupation and white supremacist terror, ICE.

      Is this not the beauty of human beings, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows? This is the primary act of becoming human which defines us, this refusal to submit to authority, or to betray our duty of care for others.

      Here also is our victory, for who cannot be ruled or controlled, who disobeys and disbelieves the lies of those who would enslave us, becomes Unconquered and free, and this is a power that cannot be taken from us.

      This is now the fifth time Trump has tried to terrorize America into submission through use of secret armies of federal occupation; and each of these previous campaigns of repression of dissent, which loosed looting, arson, and random violence under the direction of Homeland Security on our cities to delegitimize the Black Lives Mater protests and seize control of the narrative in service to the centralization of power and authority to the carceral state, each and every such action has failed.

      The sole result of all of this state terror and repression of dissent was the defeat of the Homeland Security army in the Battle of Portland and the articles of surrender published by the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf and their joint declaration of New York, Seattle, and Portland as Autonomous Zones beyond control of the federal state. To my knowledge, we Antifa are the only force to defeat the federal government of the United States in open battle on ground within her borders since Little Bighorn.

      We have been victorious over forces like that of ICE which the Trump regime sends against us now; it can be done, friends, and we all of us can do it again, here and now.

     When the enemies of liberty come for us, as they always have and will, let them find not an America divided by propaganda of otherness and defeated by learned helplessness, abjection, and despair, but a United Humankind of Living Autonomous Zones and the Unconquered, citizens who refuse to become subjects, and a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights.

     And if we all stand together and the circle is unbroken, we will be victorious.

      For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.

       As I wrote in my post of January 23 2021, Inclusion and the Embrace of Otherness is the Test of Democratic Societies: On Immigration; Our new President Biden and his government seem committed to ideals of equity and fairness, in our system of immigration and in all things, which I celebrate and will help in any way I can; but in this area of policy I believe we need a few things more.

     Inclusion and the embrace of Otherness is the test of democratic societies.

     We need a version of the English Slave Act; anyone who sets foot on American soil is free, safe, and under our protection.

     We need a borderless state with citizenship by declaration; if you accept the responsibilities of membership in our nation and agree to live in accord with our principles and agreements with one another, you are an American. If you’re crazy enough to want to be one of us, who are we to say no?

      We need to reimagine and transform our security services and repurpose Homeland Security and the Border Patrol to provide safe passage to our shores and a humane landing which welcomes new Americans with food, medical attention, and education.

     The horrific ethnic cleansing and systematic torture and abuse of the Trump regime did not emerge from nothing, but from an ancient injustice by which our nation created wealth and elite power and privilege for white supremacy; we have drawn a line in the sand to weaponize disparity and generate mass cheap exploitable labor which fuels agriculture, hospitality, childcare, and other markets and industries; the question of a just society is; Who will do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us, and at what cost?

     Illegal migrant labor is slave labor.

     Let us emancipate our workforce so that everyone working here has the same rights and legal protections as citizens, no worker can be used against another, and all share in the wealth and benefits of their labor.

      So, the Eight Principles of the Art of War as I practice it.  

     The first lesson of the art of war is Diversion and Surprise. This involves a cornucopia of misdirection, illusion, concealment, and the arts of ambush and improvising channels, traps, and arenas to escape pursuit. Regardless of all else, who achieve surprise wins, in general.

     The second lesson is to Be Unpredictable, and use your enemy’s routines against him to create windows of opportunity. Change your patterns and routines, your playbook, rules, strategies and tactics. Never use the same trick twice. Surprise yourself, and the enemy too will be surprised.

     The third lesson is to Seize the Rules; never play someone else’s game, on their terms or by their rules, but on ground and at a time of your choosing. If you become trapped in such a game, change the rules and make it yours.

     The fourth lesson is to Seize Initiative and Control through continuous attack and patterns of action; make the enemy react to you and you will tie up his resources in defense which may otherwise be free to threaten and attack you. Plan ahead of the enemy’s moves, and use patterns and expectations to create dilemmas, openings, ambushes, and traps. Establish norms and expectations, then violate them to set up a victory.

    The fifth lesson is to Seize the Timing, or wrongfooting the enemy. No one can be everywhere at once with equal force, and one must gather maximum force and strike where least expected and where the enemy is weakest. This means luring the enemy into being where you want him to be, such as massing forces where they are useless while exposing strategic targets.

     The sixth lesson is to Seize the Momentum and point of balance when attacked; defend nothing, but neutralize greater force and power through evasion and redirection. The principles of simultaneous counterattack to seize control as momentum, and of continuous attack as conservation of momentum, work together in this as a Doctrine of No Defense or pure counterattack and ambush. Why be reactive and controlled, when you could be unpredictable and unstoppable? Why defend, when you can savage the enemy and teach him to fear you to seize power and dominance?

      The seventh lesson is to Embrace Your Fear and use your pain. Why defend when you can counterattack and teach the enemy to fear you? As my father said; “Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?”

     Take their power; this is about the use of fear and pain to establish control. This is why we attack with utmost ferocity to inflict shock and awe, and we must always take what the enemy loves first.

      The eighth lesson is to Seize the Narrative of the conflict, for all conflict is theatre. Here we instrumentalize history as narratives of identity, famously described by CIA Chief of Counter Intelligence Angleton as the Wilderness of Mirrors.

     Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I disambiguate in comparison with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, racism, and capitalism, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.

     James Angleton, on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.

     Our goal in revolutionary struggle is to seize the legitimacy and authority of the enemy, to take their power, by claiming the moral high ground, shaping opinion through narratives of victimization and solidarity by championing the people against those who would enslave us. For who stands alone, dies alone; and who stands in solidarity with his fellows becomes unstoppable as the tides.

      The last lesson is the same as the first; diversion and surprise.

      All else is the will to resist and refusal to submit or stay down, beyond victory or even survival.

      The Art of Revolution goes beyond the Art of War, for here we struggle against systems of oppression as well as the enforcers of elite wealth, power, and privilege, and the states of force and control which create and maintain them. In this our goal is the delegitimation of Authority through disbelief and disobedience, and by solidarity of action.

        History, memory, identity; our symbols and holidays are a ground of struggle, which open and close doors to possible futures.

      Who do we want to become, we humans? This is the question which drives and organizes our interrogations of the past and the future possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; not our addiction to power and wealth which the family storyteller of my youth William S. Burroughs called the Algebra of Need in his reimagination of Marx nor the processes of dehumanization of capitalism, imperialism, and carceral states of force and control which my friend Jean Genet described as necrophilia in his famous 1970 May Day speech at Yale in support of the Black Panther Party. These too are crucial to understanding why we are rushing blindly to our extinction, as we are falsified, commodified, and dehumanized by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, force, and power.

     In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.

       Such questions illuminate the interdependence of our social and material systems, and the bidirectionality of forces of action and reaction. For our politics reflects and echoes our relationship not only with ourselves and each other, but with nature itself; our fear or embrace of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.

     Here is my witness of history regarding how I learned the principles of revolutionary struggle at the age of nine; I spent recess at school during fifth grade either playing chess with the Principal or experimenting with the chemistry set in the classroom, which doubtless seemed odd, unfriendly, and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals marked as poison with the skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing ball at recess would get a dose. That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. I told my father about it that night.

    To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear and power as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.

     Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and fear becomes a lever you can use to seize power and win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?”

      Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.

 become exalted beyond ourselves in a liberty which cannot be taken from us.

     As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession and Letter to a Suicide Squad; Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.

     Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.

     What if we teachers told our students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all except whatever meaning we can bring to it, and the best you can do is survive another day and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the darkness since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.

      Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have sometimes forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.

     Refusal to submit is the primary human act. We can be killed, tortured, starved and imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated so long as we refuse to obey. This is our victory, in which we seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, and nothing can take this from us.  In our refusal to submit, disobedience, and defiance of authority we become unstoppable as the tides, for force fails at the point of disobedience and authority has no power which is not granted to it by those it claims, and once questioned, mocked, exposed, and challenged as illegitimate the illusions with which it seduces us vanish into the nothingness from which they came.

     Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

     Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?

     Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another Last Stand, there is hope.

     And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the Unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.

      Such is the only possible response to the terror of our nothingness and its weaponization by those who would enslave us; the roar of defiance, as lions who are masterless and free.

     To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again. And to the tyranny and terror of those who would enslave us, let us give reply with the immortal words of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, the play which Nelson Mandela used as a codex to unify resistance against Apartheid among the political prisoners of Robben Island; Sic Semper Tyrannis, Ever Thus to Tyrants.

    Known as the Robben Island Bible, this copy of Shakespeare was passed around as the key to a book code for secret messages which referred to page and line; it was also underlined. On December 16th 1977, Nelson Mandela authorized direct action by underlining this passage from Julius Caesar;

“Cowards die many times before their deaths.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear,

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.”

     Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.

Notes on Letter to a Suicide Squad

     I wrote this as guidance and general principles of Resistance to tyranny, Antifascist action, and Revolutionary struggle; but also as a letter to a suicide squad who had volunteered to hunt the hunters and rescue their victims, in the confusion of mass action during the Black Lives Matter protests of the Summer of Fire in 2020 which became a moving street fight in hundreds of cities with forces of repression, which the government of the United States of America used as concealment for Homeland Security death squads to abduct, torture, and assassinate innocent civilians at random as state terror to repress dissent through learned helplessness.

      My suicide teams were among many reasons why we Antifa as a whole became to my knowledge the only force to defeat the federal government of the United States in open battle within her borders since Little Bighorn, as the Triumvirate of President Trump, Attorney General Barr, and Acting Director of Homeland Security Wolf announced articles of surrender ceding federal control of the New York, Seattle, and Portland Autonomous Zones to the People.

     This I count as a victory with the fall of Apartheid and the Berlin Wall; it is possible to be victorious against vast and seemingly unstoppable force, if one disbelieves the lies of Authority and disobeys those who would enslave us.

           A state which sacrifices its legitimacy for control has doomed itself; if its actions can be exposed and its fig leaf stolen. Such is a primary goal of revolutionary struggle; but the people must also be protected, and publicly witnessed to be so, by those who would liberate them. As Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth says; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.” 

Becky G – Bella Ciao (From the Netflix Series “Casa de Papel”)

Walk Through the Fire, song from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode Once More With Feeling

what Republicans want to turn America into; our future white supremacist tyranny in miniature

Suicide Squad  film trailer  

     My teams loved this film, the first of which released in 2016.                

A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, Lauren Markham

Empire of Borders: How the US is Exporting its Border Around the World, by Todd Miller

http://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/10/todd-miller-empire-of-borders-immigration-trump

January 17 2025 Origins of Our Migrant Crisis: Echoes and Reflections of American Imperialism and Operation Condor in Latin America’s Destabilized Nations

July 24 2022 In a Free Society of Equals. Who Confers Citizenship? Abolish Borders and Enact Citizenship By Declaration

      What I learned from my father in his fencing salle, and the kind of fencing which shaped me   

      As I wrote in my post of August 1 2021, Freedom and Revolution as an Art of Fear and Pain; A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free,” so John Stuart Mill exhorts us in Principles of Political Economy, which I once paraphrased in reply to Jean Genet, and I am thinking of this in terms of the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle and the primary strategic problem of how to delegitimize authority and demonstrate the meaninglessness of its power, how to seize power against impossible odds and in the face of twin threats of force and control, the brutal repression of dissent and massive military resources of state tyranny and terror and the pervasive surveillance and thought control of propaganda, lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls.

     My father once said to me; ‘Never play someone else’s game. Whoever sets the terms and the rules of a game wins, so this is what you must seize first, and change the rules.” This wisdom was imparted as an observation of the differences between sports of personal combat, which have rules, and combat in war, which has none. In this it is like the distinction between politics and revolutionary struggle.

      There is a beautiful allegory of this principle in the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, as Kirk defeats the unwinnable scenario Kobayashi Maru by changing the rules of the game and applies this strategy to defeating Khan.

     As my father was a fencing coach, whose right arm was magnificently adorned with scars from actual duels, who taught both privately at our home and as a club at our high school where he also taught Forensics, English, and Drama, it was inevitable that I would have participated to some degree, but I loved saber and was reasonably good at it. How I came to discover this, and what it came to mean to me in time, is a story relevant to my understanding of freedom and the art of revolution as its praxis.

       It was the Incident of the Bubble Gum which brought the disciplines of fencing and martial arts into my life, and changed how I was raised and who I became as a scholar and warrior.

      As a nine year old I spent recess at elementary school either playing chess with the Principal in his office, reading in the library, or experimenting with the chemistry set in the lab, which doubtless seemed unfriendly and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals in bottles marked with a skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing would get a dose. That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. I told my father about it that night. 

    To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear and power as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.

     Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and you can use it as a lever to win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?

     Fear, power, and the use of social force are balanced with the need to belong. Membership, too, is a means of exchange. Sometimes its best to do what others do to fit in, but it isn’t always best, and it can be very wrong.

     Best is to discover what’s best for you, no matter how different that is, and find belonging on your own terms and no one else’s. Even if you have to create that community yourself.

     What you need is a way to confront people directly when you’re upset with them that doesn’t cause more harm than it solves.”

      So my father described to me Sartrean authenticity and freedom as an escape from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as a philosophy of total Resistance.

      From this time I was engaged in the study of martial arts and fencing. Martial arts is a vast subject, and I also trained in a number of fighting arts with swords, but competitive saber fencing is a game with a very specific set of conditions which are directly relevant to actual combat, because like politics and war it is an art of pain and fear.

      Precisely what did I train in as my father’s student under the name of fencing?

      All modern Olympic rules fencing is built on the foil and epee, thrust-only sport forms of Smallsword dueling, near identical with the Chinese Jian scholar’s sword, which replaced the rapier as firearms obsolesced swords in war during the 18th century. The historical genesis of the art reached its final form in France and was codified in 1891 as an Olympic sport, now called Classical fencing. If you study Olympic Fencing anywhere on earth, this is what you learn. Its simply more efficient than anything else you can do with an edged and pointed sword, once firearms made armor obsolete. This I used both right and left handed, being naturally ambidextrious, and I advise all fighters to train with both hands as dominant.

      My father had organized fencing into a syllabus of techniques using motivational colored sleeve stripes like karate belts, his own innovation influenced by years of taking me to martial arts lessons. This I studied through my teens and taught with him in my twenties as part of the curriculum at the business I founded to put myself through university, Lale’s Kung Fu Academy of Sonoma.

      We also practiced Spanish rapier and dagger or la verdadera destreza which is fought in a circle using lateral evasion and angles of attack rather than on a strip like Olympic competitive fencing, and later during high school I studied the Filipino espada y daga derived from it.  Where the primary weapon dominates the enemy through presence or reach, the secondary is used to savage an enemy inside the guard of a long pointy sword like a rapier, a problem which the sabre with its continuous cutting edges does not have; closing against a cutting weapon is a death sentence. A dagger or any knife can countercut and also entrap a weapon or be used as a lever for armlocks and disarmaments, but it does not parry, and its best at unpredictable angles of attack when you are slammed right into the enemy, body to body which is usually in tight enclosed spaces and is like maneuvering an opponent into the ropes in boxing, or to gut them like a fish when grabbed from behind. That last use case renders many grappling arts near-obsolescent; you cannot take an enemy’s back if they have a knife, and the karambit is designed for exactly this kind of fight.

     Here I should note that from my teens onward I also practiced Close Quarters Combat with the Applegate-Fairbairn knife whose grip and techniques are derived from foil fencing as the legacy of a time when all gentlemen and members of the officer class were assumed to have been raised with fencing, the wonderfully versatile tanto which can be used as a primary or secondary weapon in either hand and both point forward and reverse gripped, and the Chinese Snake style’s signature dagger, near identical in blade form with the AF or any double edged combat knife, which I also studied in my thirties in Malaysia at the Snake Temple in Georgetown on the isle of Penang from which I sailed as a home port, a style based on the pit viper which weds grappling to the assassin’s knife. So my knife fighting is influenced by foil fencing and the Applegate-Fairbairn CQB derived from it, the Spanish sword and dagger style that preceded modern fencing and the Filipino art derived from it, the Japanese tanto, the Chinese Snake dagger, and the karambit which is the reverse gripped weapon of the Raja Harimau art I studied in Sumatra, used like a tiger’s dew claw.

      The sabre has an entirely different historical origin and genesis, as a cavalry weapon designed for mounted horse combat and influenced by the Persian shamshir and the later Pan-Islamic scimitar which dates from the ninth century, though the ur-source may be the curved sword named Dhu’l-Fiqar used in battles by the Prophet Mohammed himself Peace Be Upon Him, and was assimilated and dispersed by everyone they fought for or against, much like the similar Mongol sword which influenced that of the Russian Cossacks in their long war against the Golden Horde, especially during the Crusades, the last of which was in Hungary in 1716. It was in Hungary during the centuries of conflict between the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires that the sabre reached its final form, and by the Napoleonic Wars had come to be universalized in Europe as the prestige weapon of hussars and its fighting art codified into a syllabus, with national variations in both form and use, as this light, fast cutting weapon replaced thrusting swords in war. The officer’s dress sword of the US Marine Corps is a Mameluke scimitar adopted in 1825 after the Barbary War; as is the British General Staff sword adopted after the Egyptian Campaign versus Napoleon. Add a handguard and the unique sabre ground edge and you have the modern sabre used from the Napoleonic Wars through the American Civil War and into World War One. In Europe national styles persist; the fearsome Polish crosscut style is still a living national art, which I had the honor of studying while we organized Resistance operations versus the Putin regime and the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Warsaw.

     As previously noted, the sabre is sharp along the curving front and a third of the way down the back, meaning one can attack from any angle and at any distance. Actual battle sabres differ from competition fencing in being far heavier and less flexible, meaning one must conserve angular momentum and strike through targets, seeking a beheading or gutting hit, instead of tap tap tapping for points or recovering to guard after each strike. This also changes how one parries and ripostes; because in actual combat you must do so in one continuous motion, often circular. It’s the same difference between kendo sparring and use of an actual samurai katana, which like the sabre is a cutting weapon which can also thrust.

     To be clear, these are arts of power as intimidation, subjugation, and dominion through inflicting pain and terror, and freedom won through discipline in embracing it. A fencing saber is a flexible steel whip with which we inflict pain to establish dominance; fencers run at each other and deliver punishing hits that feel like real cuts, a white hot brand so intense it can disrupt consciousness.

      On the first pass I preferred trading hits to counterattack or any defense; why defend and be reactive and controlled when you can teach your enemy to fear you? On the second pass a weak opponent will hesitate, ruled by the pain his flesh remembers, and be lost. If he embraces his pain and is without fear we meet as equals in the second and third engagements, and the game becomes one of chess like multilayered strategies, diversion and surprise, timing, precision, and control through continuous assault and patterns of attack and entrapment which set up a multi-staged opening by making the opponent react in defense to establish habits and expectations of action as norms and misdirection, which one then violates with an unpredictable surprise.

     Regardless of anything else, whoever achieves surprise wins. And one thing more wins fights; not staying down.

      I love saber because it is primarily a contest of will and only secondarily of skill, in which ferocity in attack and willingness to eat pain to achieve victory are decisive, though guile, deception, concealment of intent, and an ability to think moves ahead of one’s opponent improvisationally in a fluid, time compressed, and dynamic situation define greatness in this arena.

     So also with the arts of revolution as both war and political struggle.

     To be beyond control by pain and fear is to be free from subjugation by authority, for who cannot be compelled becomes Unconquered. As Jean Genet said to me when we were trapped by Israeli soldiers in a burning house, moments before we expected to be burned alive having refused to come out and surrender, “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”

     The martial arts which shaped me, and influenced my Eight Principles of War

        I don’t write about martial arts much, for someone who grew up shaped by its practice and has continued to learn whatever I could from anyone at all wherever I have lived, traveled, and fought in over fifty years since I began study, arts tested and refined in Resistance, revolution, wars, and liberation struggle, my whole adult life counting from the summer before I began high school when I hunted police death squads who were hunting abandoned street children through the warrens of Sao Paulo Brazil, at first alone and later as a member of the Matadors founded by the great and terrible Pedro Rodrigues Filho after they rescued me from execution with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”

     What have I learned in all of this? Herein I set the stage on which my praxis of the Eight Principles is performed by telling the story of how I came to this way of life as revolutionary struggle and resistance to tyranny.

      Here follows the stories of the arts I learned from two teachers over ten years from the age of nine; one Chinese and the other American, Sifu Long and Big Al Moore. There was a third, Joel Hagen with whom I studied Renbukan, whom I now presume to have been one of Donn Draeger’s merry band of scholar-warriors who traveled the world together as a group to learn traditional arts before they vanished and create a universal science of personal combat, but he was also an archeologist and left to work on a Viking longship dig before I entered high school.

     Chinese Kung Fu & Japanese Traditional arts, as taught by the Dragon

       How I met my teacher happened like this; during the first weeks of fifth grade I spent recess at school either playing chess with the Principal or experimenting with the chemistry set in the classroom, which doubtless seemed odd, unfriendly, and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals marked with the skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them coat and pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing would get a dose.

      This is how division, otherness, and disconnectedness escalate into war, and why interdependence, solidarity, and communication can restore the balance of peace when things begin to fall apart. One must cultivate these things to forge membership and belonging, and never allow oneself to be cut out of the herd by exclusion, otherness, or self imposed oppression; join big tent groups, and ones which confer social power. As the line in the film Gladiator goes; “If we stay together, we survive.”

     That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. I told my father about it that night. 

    To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear as the basis of human exchange. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.

     Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, because people fear what they cannot control. and you can use it as a lever to win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?

     Fear, power, and the use of social force are balanced with the need to belong. Sometimes its best to do what others do to fit in, but it isn’t always best, and it can be very wrong. Best is to discover what’s best for you, no matter how different that is, and find belonging on your own terms and no one else’s. Even if you have to create that community yourself.

     What you need is a way to confront people directly when you’re upset with them that doesn’t cause more harm than it solves.”

     I embraced this opportunity to learn martial arts with great enthusiasm, and also immediately put my father’s principle of action into practice by telling my classmates, who knew I had something to do with making them throw up in retaliation for the disrespect of putting gum on my chair but not how, I had put a curse on them. Not the use of force, but control through fear grants us power and freedom from control by others.

     From this moment onward I was involved in martial arts, fencing which my father taught, and wilderness survival. Among the martial arts schools I explored the first two of them became lifelong sources and enthusiasms throughout my teenage years, and my teachers mentors and father figures; one was a fifteen minute drive away in the nearest town of Modesto and whom I studied with almost daily for nearly ten years, Albert Moore Senior who taught Ed Parker’s Chinese Kenpo Karate and traditional Jiu Jitsu, which he rebranded as Shou Shu in 1974; the other an hour away in San Francisco’s Chinatown, who is the subject of my essay here regarding the Eight Principles of the Art of War.

      This was 1969 and my father arranged for me to study with a scholar of traditional arts who had just escaped arrest during the Cultural Revolution in China, who also happened to have been among the first students of the Whampoa Military Academy summoned by Sun Yat Sen to Pearl Island on June 16 1924, where he met his lifelong friend and ally Zhou En Lai. He claimed to have captured Beijing with Feng Yuxiang in October 1924, defended Shanghai when Chang Tsung-chang captured it in 1925 with a hundred thousand Cossack and Czarist Russian cavalry, and fought the Japanese since 1937. He had grown up in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo before and during World War One with both Chinese kung fu and Japanese traditional arts, multilingual in the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, the Wu dialect of Shanghai, later the official Mandarin which he learned during the Northern Expedition of 1926 to 1928 against Tso Lin in Manchuria and other warlords which reunified China, Japanese, and very British English, a useful skill set as a Chinese soldier and intelligence agent during the Second World War who could pass as Japanese, and for over twenty five years tested his arts of war in some of the most ferocious conflicts in human history and witnessed much, of which he told amazing stories. 

     I called him Sifu Long because of a story he told on the day we met, a version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave; I had been startled by the sudden fluid movement of his enormous shadow, like a flight of silent birds, in the still room of his study through moon gate doors which like a gaping mouth opened into the chasms of darkness of a gorgeous pillared temple illuminated only by the many incense sticks which glowed like eyes of fire. And I asked, “Why is your shadow so huge? And it moves.”

      “Once we were dragons,” he began, “we were vast, without end or beginning, and we filled the universe. But when humans came there was no place for them, and they could not see us all at once; so we became small, lost our greatness, and found ways to share our world. We abandoned eternity and the rapture of the heavens for the stewardship of humankind, who insist on living in boxes from which they refuse to venture out and discover what lies beyond their boundaries.

     But you can see me because your cage has not yet been built, and because we are alike in our powers of vision and illusion, to see the true selves of others and set them free. This suggests possibilities. So I will teach you how to fight as you wish, but also how to grow beyond your limits and find your greatness.” 

    Form follows function, and the purpose and objective of war is the same as that of any revolutionary or liberation struggle; to seize power from the enemy. Take Their Power is the master strategy which unites the Eight Principles of the art of war as a system of tactics and strategies as I now understand it, within the personal historical context as it was taught to me by Sifu Long. This aligns with the Eight Trigrams of the Book of Changes, though he didn’t refer to it as Ba Gua from which it deviates greatly, which as a Taoist priest informed and shaped his thinking and mine as well; I do call myself a bringer of Chaos, and Taoism is about leveraging Chaos and change as the adaptive range of a living system just as the ideology of socialism and revolutionary struggle is at its heart about changing the balance of power in the world.

       Regarding the martial arts I was raised with and later taught; first there were the traditional Chinese and Japanese arts of Sifu Long, taught as he had learned them since the 1920’s, and unified by Zen practice and the game of go. The Japanese component included kenjutsu and its sparring form kendo, jiu jitsu and its sparring form judo, and iaijutsu.

     Sifu Long simply called the Chinese half of these arts kung fu because it literally means “hard work” and wished to describe it as labor performed in solidarity with fellow workers for the common good and in revolutionary struggle as opposed to any kind of elite membership or artifact of high culture. The man was a lifelong personal friend of Zhou En Lai, and since 1931 sometimes an operative of Kang Sheng, head of Chinese Communist Party Intelligence and key ally of Zhou; his kung fu was an art of the people.

     This consisted of the traditional Shaolin Five Animal styles, depicted so well in the telenovela series Kung Fu, and elements of other traditional arts, but revised and adapted for use in military combat with an emphasis on small unit tactics, escape and evasion, ambush and counter ambush, assassination by stealth, general principles of fire and movement as near universal to all militaries, and mass attack based on the premise that if you are unarmed, you are on a mission such as infiltration where arms cannot be carried and are being ambushed by a team of captors or assassins.

      This unique premise among martial arts, that personal combat occurs against and often with armed and multiple opponents and comrades trained to fight as a team, rather than a single challenger in a duel or at worst case a melee in a bar, and part of general small unit warfare, special operations, and intelligence, shaped our arts and were adapted to actions which would be familiar to any military Close Quarters Battle team, as Applegate originated it in 1925 in Shanghai from many of the same sources used by Sifu Long and others at Whampoa Military Academy to create a fighting art for the Chinese Army, which has now evolved into Wushu and its sparring form Sanshou. Shanghai in the Roaring Twenties had a community of tournament fighters from Japan, the Philippines, and globally including Europeans as well as Chinese martial artists, who competed and trained with each other, which formed a transcultural basis for revolutionizing traditional kung fu into a new national art.

     Sanshou was invented at Whampoa Military Academy by Chinese martial artists under the direction of Soviet advisors; Wushu from both the Wudang and Shaolin constellations of arts in March 1928 in Nanjing at the founding of the Kuomintang’s Central Wushu Academy under General Zhang Zhijiang, which gathered some four hundred martial artists under the instruction of Fu Zhensong, founder of Fu Style Baguazhang,  Sun Lu-t’ang who founded  Sun-style tʻai chi chʻüan and taught xingyiquan (hsing-i ch’uan), Wu (Hao)-style taijiquan (t’ai chi ch’uan) and baguazhang (pa-kua chang), Yang Chengfu who taught his family Yang-style tʻai chi chʻüan, Wan Laisheng who taught the Shaolin Six Harmonies style, Gu Ruzhang who taught Northern Shaolin or Bak Siu Lum and the Iron Palm method of Qigong with which he had once put down a rampaging circus horse by breaking its spine with an open palm strike, and the warlord of Tianjin Li Jinglin, Vice President of the National Martial Arts Academy, called China’s First Sword, who taught the second major group of arts other than Shaolin, Wudangquan which includes the Wudang straight longsword, taijiquan (t’ai chi ch’uan), xingyiquan (hsing-yi ch’uan) and baguazhang (pa kua chang), and Bajiquan.

      In 1929 a second academy was opened by General Li Jinglin as the Southern Kuoshu Institute with the Five Tigers as teachers, Baguazhang master Fu Chen Sung; Shaolin Iron Palm master Gu Ruzhang; Six Harmony master Wan Laishen; Tan Tui master Li Shanwu; and Chaquan master, Wang Shaozhao.   

     My kung fu contains elements and techniques from many arts, but looks nothing like anything else; being a confluence of sources from all of these traditional arts through Sifu Long and from my other primary teacher Albert Moore Senior, founder of Shou Shu which hybridizes the Chin Family kung fu he grew up with and arts he learned after serving in World War Two, traditional Judo and Jiu Jitsu, Ed Parker’s Chinese Kenpo Karate, and kung fu learned in Tianjin at what was possibly, judging from the mix of Northern Shaolin tiger, dragon, snake, crane and leopard with inclusion of Mantis which is a source of Wing Chun and paring snake with Mongoose or lateral evasion and whirling attacks, a survival, relative, or offshoot of Li Jinglin’s Kuoshu Institute or one of the Chin Woo academies.

     Big Al’s Shou Shu looks like Kajukenbo with which it shares sources and remained structured around Kenpo techniques; Sifu Long’s kung fu and Japanese arts remained unhybridized and traditional in that sense. Both of my cherished teachers sought to balance Chinese and Japanese arts, in very different ways, and both were fanatical about sparring.

     Improvisation, evasion, movement, redirection of force, ferocity of attack and unpredictable change defined our fighting under Sifu Long’s guidance, driven by military endurance drills and both of my teachers held single and mass attack round robin sparring, bareknuckle light contact fights with only face claws, throat or neck strikes or chokes, or kicks to the knee disallowed. This I did weekly for ten years; the primary objective of our formal techniques was to disrupt and confuse an ambush or escape arrest and capture an enemy’s gun. Among the scenarios I trained for was to walk unarmed into an enemy checkpoint and use diversion and surprise to capture it.

     As I have often said to my students; we have many techniques, but techniques don’t win fights, tactics win fights. Regardless of all else, whoever achieves surprise wins. And I would add two other principles to this. Never Stay Down, no matter what, also wins fights; the capacity to welcome and use pain and fear. And third, solidarity and teamwork are more important than individual skill; who stays together stays alive.

     Beyond martial arts, Sifu Long taught me languages and inkbrush calligraphy, the game of Go of which he wrote a manual for me in Chinese, Japanese, and English, the literatures and methods of the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism, and those of Taoism as a priest of the Quanzhen Longmen Lineage of the Fung Ying Seen Koon temple in Hong Kong.

      Shou Shu, Al Moore’s rebranded variant of Ed Parker’s Chinese Kenpo Jiu-Jitsu syncretized with elements of Northern Shaolin kung fu    

     Sifu Dragon is not identical with a very different teacher of mine during a nearly contiguous period, Albert Moore Senior, who was a generation younger and an American citizen who spoke no Chinese and to my direct knowledge had no contact with Chinese martial arts other than through me, though his claims of studying in Tianjin after the Second World War seem credible to me, possibly including Chin Woo, Wudang, and Shaolin arts, as I read the history of their influence in his forms and techniques with which I am now directly familiar from other sources among the many styles I have sought out and studied in the decades since.

      I was Big Al’s first student and first junior instructor, his champion in challenge matches, and I taught and managed a school of his in Stockton from the summer of 1975 before my sophomore year of high school; I sometimes slept in a loft above it. There was an old man nearby who played a Chinese lute sometimes, and I would sit on the roof at night in the moonlight above the winding canals of Chinatown, listening.

     As he told it, his story is that he had studied Chin Family kung fu in Oakland California for five years beginning in 1938 with the grandfather of his boyhood friend Jimmy Chin, the Dai Lo Lu Chin.

      The Second World War was also lived differently by my teachers, the elder of whom had already been fighting throughout the warlord period from 1924 for years before the Japanese invasion.

      In 1943 at the age of 16 Mr Moore enlisted in the United States Navy and served as a Gunners Mate. Between the end of the war in 1945 and the expulsion of foreigners from China in 1949, he trained in Tianjin, possibly at a satellite school of the Chin Woo Academy founded by Huo Yuanjia and Chen Qimei in 1910 in Shanghai with Zhao Lianhe of the Shaolin Mizong Style, Eagle Claw master Chen Zizheng, Seven Star Praying Mantis master Luo Guangyu, Xingyiquan master Geng Xiaguang, and Wu Jianquan, the founder of Wu-style taijiquan. 

     Tianjin is also home to Shuai jiao wrestling, and the Wudang group of internal arts Hsing-I, Ba Gua, Qigong, and Tai Chi, and since before the First World War had a tournament fighting community as it had been a city of Ming Dynasty military clans. Also, the city of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion of the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists against foreign colonialism, possibly the most famous revolution by an alliance of martial artists other than the Indian Mutiny and the Spartacus Revolt.

      Mr Moore described this academy to me as having teachers of the traditional Shaolin Five Animals, Tiger, Crane, Leopard, Snake, and Dragon, with the Mantis, Mongoose, and Xing Yi Quan’s Eagle-Bear hybrid form. This matches what he taught as Shou Shu or Ways of the Animals after 1974; for the first five years he taught only traditional Jiu Jitsu, its sparring form judo, and Ed Parker’s Chinese Kenpo Karate, which he and his two brothers had learned from Parker and his successors the Tracy brothers, and from their students Steve LaBounty and Richard Lee in the early 1960s. A number of the Shou Shu techniques are exactly the same as in Kenpo, which itself has a complex history originating in Shaolin kung fu interpreted through and blended with Okinawan karate and Japanese Jiu Jitsu and hybridized again with Hung Ga and its central Tiger-Crane Paired Form. 

     It is possible this was all he ever knew, but equally possible that this parallelism results from the common origins of Kenpo and Shou Shu in Shaolin animal styles. Mr Moore was a joy to spar with and a cornucopia of ever-changing challenges; he could shift from one to another style at will, and it was like fighting a whole different person. This ability to achieve surprise by performatively and improvisationally changing the terms of the fight is the whole art of Shou Shu as an integrated system of strategies of which animals are figures and metaphors.

      I don’t know why he never claimed credit for inventing Shou Shu, as Americans generally care nothing for lineage and successorship which is central to Asian ideas of legitimacy and authority, because that’s exactly what he did in 1974, and suddenly without warning in response to changes in Ed Parker’s organization and an opportunity to buy an Al Tracy school which he rebranded.

     One day I was wearing a karate gi and a third degree brown belt, with a Chinese Kenpo Karate Association patch, and the next a Chinese collar jacket with the same belt, and Big Al was calling himself Shifu, a Mandarin version of the Cantonese Sifu or teacher which he had used til then, and what we did Shou Shu, a unique term of his own invention with no history of previous existence, though it could be a mishearing of Kuoshu by a man who spoke not a word of Chinese. Nothing in the five years I had spoken and trained with him, near daily and personally, before suggested any of this. I couldn’t have cared less; what mattered to me was that everything he taught was relentlessly tested in light contact simulations and sparring, and then adapted and personalized to individual student’s strengths.

     Shou Shu retained the legacies of this reinvention as a Japanese karate belt system in a Chinese uniform with reassigned terms and names of techniques. When I asked him about his title Shifu, he shrugged and said “it just means teacher.” Nor did he ever, not once in ten years, ever make claims about being a master of anything; he said he was a Senior Instructor in Jiu Jitsu and Black belt in Chinese Kenpo Karate, and as to whatever he actually learned in China he said; “I never learned the language, so the guys they had teaching different styles, whose names I never knew, would just come and hit me with something, lightly, and I’d do that till I had it memorized.”

     The legitimacy of Shou Shu, with its obviously invented name and an inventor who couldn’t name his teachers in China and clearly wasn’t there long enough to master anything, has often been dismissed as a simple rip off of Ed Parker’s Chinese Kenpo Karate; but the truth is more complex.

     I’m pretty sure he got the characters for “Magic Hands” he used in his patch and business logo from a massage parlor sign. And his tall tales of China during the Second World War were ribald versions of the comic strip Terry and the Pirates; then again, he actually was a World War Two US Navy veteran of the Pacific Theatre, so maybe.

      And the art he synthesized from everything he had learned was brutal, efficient, not a sport and intended to help predict enemy actions and achieve surprise in combat.

     Where did this reimagination of Kenpo as Shou Shu come from? He could have excavated it from the historical layers of revision within Kenpo itself, which had been radically reimagined with every generation since its invention; he could have once again hybridized it with the arts he learned in Tianjin, and he could have learned it from watching and training with myself and other students in our collaborative practice, many of whom were highly skilled in other styles and who were encouraged to constantly reinvent ourselves and our art.

     Kenpo as I learned and practiced it for my first five years of martial arts was a close relative of Hawaiian Kajukenbo, both collaborative efforts by a number of experts in diverse arts originating in “hard style” Okinawan and Japanese arts and moving over time toward “soft style” Chinese influences, through constant testing and reinvention.

     To become a Shou Shu black belt we all had to invent our own signature kata and syllabus of techniques; a unique personal style developed through years of sparring and sharing what we knew and learned with each other. Mine is the Snake style, the art of giving no warning, of ambush and the silent kill, and based on Shao Lin Snake as taught by both my teachers, by Big Al as a paired form of cobra and mongoose, and further refined years later in study at the Snake temple in Georgetown in the Malaysian Sultanate of Penang based on grappling arts of the pit viper.

     This requirement of self creation and uniqueness along with the idea of training as students teaching each other as peers in balance with a traditional student-teacher relationship with a primary model was unique to his system, and a brilliant innovation. Every student was also a peer teacher and learning partner for others.

     Other than Big Al with whom I studied near daily in private lessons, I studied and practiced mainly with a fellow student of Mr Moore’s called The Tiger, a short and massive rhino of a man who was a master of the Tiger style and of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Doyle Isch, from my fifteenth year; he was among those who signed my black belt certificate with Mr Moore. Over a decade later I continued my study of the Tiger as Raja Harimau Silat in Sumatra. 

      Another was The Crane, Jim Clark, a wiry near giant with enormous reach and the balance of a ballet dancer, who began study in 1972, three years after I did, and was Big Al’s chosen successor. Together he and Isch reconstructed a whole art from the Hung Gar Tiger Crane paired form, with myself as their eager student.

     The famous Shou Shu emphasis on mass attack Big Al got from me as a source of contact with kung fu as practiced by the People’s Liberation Army which I leaned from Sifu Dragon who was among its founders, possibly also the idea of his appropriation of Mandarin terms, and restoration of the premises of martial arts as practiced in America from a tournament sport with usefulness in personal defense to its original purpose as survival in a military context.

     My graduation test for my black belt on turning 18 was an Escape and Evasion course, with others to pursue me through a forest after I escaped, whom I divided and ambushed.

     We invented Shou Shu together as an open exchange of ideas and methods between his Kung Fu, jiu jitsu, judo, and Kenpo Karate and my Close Quarters Battle oriented Kung Fu and traditional Zen influenced Japanese martial arts. And not only between he and I, but between us both and many other martial artists from all kinds of traditions; from this praxis was Shou Shu born, and I am one of its many co-creators.

     And this was why I loved him, this embrace of all things as self-invention in a space of free creative play.

     What made Big Al nearly unique in the martial arts world was not the complex layers of history and reinvention his techniques and methods represented, nor the opacity and ambiguity of that history, for these things are near-universal after more than a century of tumultuous change, adaptation, and hybridization of traditional sources, but that he was a mechanical engineer who thought of humans as dynamic systems in motion according to the laws of physics, and applied scientific method and rigor to martial arts in the constant process of rule-breaking and discovery, testing and failure analysis, and adaptation and reimagination.

     Like him I’ve studied what I could where ever I went in the world, and I’ve never found any martial art so totally devoted to questioning, testing, improvising, and personalizing everything as an expression of our own uniqueness as Shou Shu, nor often ones as focused on survival and victory in the most grim and brutal conditions.

The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng-The Evil Genius Behind Mao and His Legacy of Terror in People’s China, John Byron, Robert Pack