Valentine’s Day is a holiday we can celebrate as an unambiguous good, without conflicted historical legacies; named in honor of a man who was executed on February 14 278 AD for performing gay marriages in defiance of Imperial law, adelphopoiesis or brother-making which refers to his marrying Roman soldiers not to their girlfriends but to one another, the wedding of same sex couples legal at the time under Christian law which Emperor Claudius II forbid as related by John Boswell in his Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.
The modern custom of sending messages to one’s lover, whether a forbidden love or not, originated in 1415, with a message sent by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
So we have in one holiday defiance of authority, transgression of the Forbidden, and the injunction to seize the gates of our prisons and be free.
But this holiday is far more ancient, dating from the sixth century BC and encoding the historical memories of primordial rites of fertility called Lupercalia, the Festival of the Wolf. Rites which echo through our flesh and find form not only as Valentine’s Day as a celebration of the uncontrollable and liberating power of love which exalts us like a madness, but also as a form of the Wild Hunt which we know as the story of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf.
Angela Carter got it nearly right in The Company of Wolves; so also with season two, episode three of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Midnight approaches, and as I ready my wolfskin for the sacred Hunt I think not of the ravishment of our passion but of the redemptive and transformative power of love, of its unique function as a force of healing and reconnection, and of transgression of the Forbidden and defiance of authority as a seizure of power over the ownership of oneself.
Of this I have written a spell of poetic vision, awakening, and transformation, which I share with you here. Good hunting to you all.
Love Triumphs Over Time
When first I learned of love,
And realized that in loving others we humans were not merely escaping
the boundaries of our lives and the flags of our skins
As transcendence, rapture, and exaltation
But discovering ourselves and those truths written in our flesh
And the limitless possibilities of becoming human
Among the unknown topologies of being marked Here Be Dragons
In the empty spaces of the maps of our Imagination
Beyond the doors of the Forbidden
Where truths are forged,
And in the years since I have always known this one true thing;
We are more ourselves when we are with others
Because humans are not designed to be alone
For we are doors which open one another
And restore each other to ourselves in an indifferent world
When we are savaged and broken and lost;
Love is the greatest power of all the forces
which shape, motivate, and inform living things
Love creates, love redeems, love transforms,
Love triumphs over the pathology of our disconnectedness
From Beauty, from the Infinite, and from the community of humankind;
Love triumphs over Time.
Idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty and identity live at the origins of our redemptive power of love and the forms it takes in our lives; If my female side could perform our truth on the stage of the world as songs, without any limits whatever, what would we sing?
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina | Straight to Hell Music Video Trailer | Netflix; because I love this version of Persephone’s myth. How if we must seize our power or be subjugated to that of others?
Little Red Riding Hood – Amanda Seyfried’s cover of the song; in a fragile voice filled with such anguish, loneliness, and the absurdity of hope. This is possibly what is most human in us as our best selves; the sacred wounds and faultiness of our humanity in a universe where love cannot redeem anything, yet lives on to torment us but also opens us to the pain of others.
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
So for the anima; what of the animus? Who speaks for me?
Lucifer’s Song of Love: Cover of Wicked Game by Ursine Vulpine & Annaca
“Monster” – Imagine Dragons (cover by Runaground on youtube)
With film montage of Marvel’s Loki
David Bowie sings of resistance, beyond hope of victory or survival: Shoshanna prepares for German Night in the film Inglorious Basterds, a song I normally post to signal a Last Stand; that I am about to do something from which I see no possible chances of survival. This I have done more times that I can now remember, yet I remain to defy and defend. Love too is a total commitment beyond reason, a glorious mad quest to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
And though I have failed many times, and cities which I could not save have died in my wake, yet I have been victorious in refusal to submit and against impossible odds have now and then been victorious also against those who would enslave us; recently in Syria, but also in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Apartheid.
There are things which should be true even if they never were, and if we act as though they are true we may win in the long run, though dead and pain will be our companions all the while. But death and pain are part of the human condition and with us always; there is no escape from our humanity and the limits of our form as imposed conditions of struggle, so Resistance is as reason able a strategy as submission, and better for the general condition.
A Special Report from The White Man’s House in honor of Valentine’s Day, and in commemoration of the transgressive relationship of our ruling couple, the King of Fools Traitor Trump and the Troll King Elon Musk.
What you didn’t see on the news report; Musk saddled up Trump and rode him around the White House like a pony. “Giddiup!” Musk chortled in his joy, spanking the Clown’s elephantine ass with a riding crop.
Trump laughed and gave a Rebel Yell. “Crazier than a Russian Toilet Whore!”
It is unclear which of them Trump was describing, himself or Musk; I think it describes both of them.
What is this thing of rapture and despair, wonderful and terrible like immersion in the Infinite, more precious and fundamental to our humanity than any other, more dread than hope as a gift and curse which offers redemption and healing when all else fails and also threatens with beautiful illusions from which we cannot escape, full of numinous powers of reimagination and transformation in the face of our nothingness, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world?
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
We can parse the meaning of the word love in terms of its origins, as does Professor Babette Babich writing in The Philosophical Salon of the Los Angeles Review of Books; “I was trying to go beyond the four in question, to xenia, the rights of a guest, a key notion for a political theorist. It refers to the love of the stranger, which is crucial today in an age of migrant crises and which entails the hospitality we owe the guest. The principle of hospitality is important in the Bible, where Abraham hosts strangers who turn out to be Jehovah and his angels. It is also related in Greek myth, where an old couple, Philémon und Baucis, sacrifice all they have to host two vagabonds, offering kindness to gods in disguise: Zeus and Hermes, the god who mediates all encounters between the mortal and the divine.
The classical list, as C.S. Lewis and others detail it, is: storgē, love of the home or the family; philia or friendship, which we hear in philosophy as love of wisdom; eros which is what we’re most interested in — taking us back to the #metoo movement, including questions of men and women in love. (One of the reasons we continue to find Alan Rickman’s betrayal of Emma Thompson in the 2003 Love, Actually so disquieting is that this is a compound betrayal of storgē/philia/eros.) — And then there is agapē, a pure, specifically selfless love, in contrast to eros, which is anything but selfless. Agapē is anticlimactic, and even St. Augustine, praying for grace, prayed to be perfect but, as he famously wrote, not yet.
The hierarchy of kinds of love mirrors — to tell a fanciful, proto-evolutionary story — the story of our lives. We’re born into storgē, family love, the love of home and hearth. That can be conflicted to be sure, as Robert Frost reminds us: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’
Thus, we’ve just gone through the holiday season dedicated to storgē, as also reflected in Love, Actually and the 1946, It’s a Wonderful Life. Philia, friendship, is included in marriage, as well as at school. Then, there is the theme of love matters at university, and eros—hence, the connection to St. Valentine’s day. Finally, some of us reach agapē, pure love, love for its own sake, love of god especially.
I emphasized, as Plato and Augustine do, that we all want love, and it is love that draws us upward as Goethe notes, improving everything about the world and about ourselves. I also pointed to the sharper, darker sides of love: that it can break us, or bend us down, to use Hölderlin’s language for love’s near and future danger to us.
Falling in erotic love is like falling into a maelstrom of intoxication, and there are always low points: the Greek poet, Anacreon compares it to being knocked flat by a blacksmith’s hammer, as Anne Carson cites him in her book, Eros, the Bittersweet. ‘Sweetbitter’ is the Greek glukúpikron in Sappho’s poem to Eros: a word order inverting our English convention and so much truer to life: glukú sweet, pikron, bitter. Thus, the Greeks emphasized the negativity or visceral disaster that is the impact of love. As Archilochus writes: it rips your lungs out. Actually.
And we’re all for it: we long for it, we want it. Eros undoes us, and the same lyric where we encountered the word, glukúpikron, we find lusimélēs, limbs dissolved, mingling one into another. The song originally recorded by the Big Bopper, Chantilly Lace in 1958, and featured in several films, including the 1973, American Graffiti, rhymes the intoxication effected by Chantilly, her walk, her laugh — the Greeks have the same enthusiasms — and the results that ‘make the world go round,’ transforming the singer, unhinging him, lusimélēs, the modern poet’s phrase make me feel real loose, indeed, make me act so funny, make me spend my money, punctuated. And that is the point of it: that’s what I like.
Eros is dangerous, Plato tells us. He is the oldest god, he is the youngest god, and everything about him is dyadic, despite, or more accurately, because of the dangers. Michel Foucault wrote about dietetics and strategies that might enhance the positive and reduce the negative, but, in the end, Cupid’s arrow is an engine of death, and talking of that takes us to Freud.
I looked to philia to highlight what love actually does, and I spoke of Nietzsche on love as a hermeneutic tactic along with one of Fordham’s teachers from a few decades before my time, Dietrich von Hildebrand, because, in addition to ideals closer to agapē, he spoke of intentio benevolentiae to highlight the generosity Nietzsche emphasized. This is the generosity we can bring to everything we want to understand whether books, events, or people.
When we love, we give the other the benefit of the doubt, cut them all kinds of breaks. When we fail to love, we lack generosity and what is more, we are prone to resentment, disdain, anger. Love is about generosity. It is about not minding faults, and the love of wisdom, philosophy, is or can be, beyond analytic anger, hermeneutically generous in the same way: faults and all.”
So classical philosophy teaches us, as we are reminded here by Professor Babich, and the origins of words and ideas are important as they reveal to us the hidden archeology of ourselves as embodiments of historical processes of consciousness. But functional definitions can tell us how such processes create us as shaping, informing, and motivating sources.
What does love do? Love sublimes us into a unitary being, erases our limits as individuals defined by our form and liberates us from the event horizon of our flesh.
Love also reveals to us our true selves; a lover has the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves. To love is to transform others by the power of our vision to see who they truly are and set them free.
A lover is both a Pythian seer of truths who like Michelangelo can free us as images captive within the forms of our bodies and our material and social context, who in naming us like Adam naming the beasts defines our truth, and an inverted figure of Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze and transforms it into the power to see others true selves and release them to be free, and to mutually assimilate the qualities of the other and transform them both.
Love is a divine madness which defiles and exalts, reveals truths and confers authenticity, and the redemptive power of love can make glorious and beautiful the flaws of our humanity and bring healing to the brokenness of the world and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
So we come to the final category of our interrogation of love, desire; its parallel and interdependent realm of human being and the dyadic counterforce of death as eros and thanos. The most important thing to know about human sexuality as a dimension of experience is that it involves the whole person. Whereas a personality test can tell you who you are, and who others are or wish to represent themselves as, it cannot tell you who or what you desire. Desire remains ambiguous, and that is its great power as a force of liberation and autonomy.
The second is that desire is uncontrollable as the tides, an inherently anarchic and chaotic force of nature which is nonvolitional and for which we cannot be held responsible, unlike our actions toward others.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must claim our truths and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, forgotten causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
The quality of our humanity is not fixed, but always in motion, like the turbulent systems da Vinci studied in his fountain and which later with new mathematics came to be described as chaos theory. Identity is a process which is fluid, and our emotions are instruments with which it creates itself.
We create ourselves over time, through our history of defining moments; human being is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation over vast epochs of time. What we call our self or our soul is no different in kind from the exoskeleton of an insect or the shell of a sea creature.
And we create ourselves through our interdependence with others, our relationships, friends, families, communities, and the systems of signs thereof.
Human being has in this schema three orders of relationships; persona, history, and interdependence, and all of it is in motion, dynamic and inherently unstable.
Impermanence is the defining quality of nature and the material universe; so also is the controlling metaphor and condition of human nature, being, and identity our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’ fragmented mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, reveals endless possibilities of becoming human; the inward and outward halves of the cosmos also create and define each other in mutual coevolution, like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
Humans are naturally polyamorous and are enculturated to be otherwise; we are shaped by sociohistorical forces in the sphere of gender identity and sexual orientation to limit and deny our true nature; to love others regardless of their forms. It is normality which is deviant, and from which misogyny, the system of Patriarchy, and other destructive illnesses of the spirit arise.
As Goethe wrote in Faust; “Let us extend our lives through our bodies in all directions possible”.
For me the origin of human evil is in unequal relationships and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, pathologies of violence and dominion which require the renunciation of love as their price; not in the violation of taboos, the transgression of the Forbidden, or the defiance of Authority, three things I count as sacred acts in pursuit of the truth of ourselves, but in the systemic and structural injustices and inequalities of hegemonic elites, their lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls, and the state tyranny and terror of brutal force and control which we must resist, that we may as the primary human act become autonomous and free as self- created and self-owned beings; for power and force are meaningless when met with disobedience and disbelief, and in the moment of our refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free.
I say again; human sexual orientation is not a spectrum with endpoint limits, but a Moebius Loop of infinite possibilities, and we are born and exist by nature everywhere along it at once. All else is limitation and control imposed artificially as dominion, captivity, and falsification by authorized identities, or a seizure of power and self-ownership in revolutionary struggle against such narratives, hierarchies, and divisions.
Writing of love in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka gives us this witness; “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your door in Vienna, and say, Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.
Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
Here is the true origin of Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return as a test and praxis of Authenticity, and it recalls to me something I once said to Jean Genet. He had sat down at my table after my friends and I made our morning race against death, crossing a sniper alley to reach a cafe in Beirut that had the best strawberry crepes in the world.
“I’m told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To which I replied, “It’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said,” I agree”; this was the beginning of our conversations at breakfast in the days of the terrible siege, which would reset the path of my life.
We saw each other, Genet and I; and when this is true nothing else matters.
I have been fortunate that this was far from the first or last of my true friendships, a category which subsumes everything from ephemeral moments which offer illumination, meeting others as equals in a free space of play as scholars questioning human being, meaning, and value, as allies in Resistance and revolutionary struggle, or simply finding joy in a universe which offers little to balance the terror of our nothingness, to sharing transformational Defining Moments as did Genet and I in the Siege of Beirut when he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance and set me on my life path of liberation struggle, and finally to grand romance beyond the limits of time and our flesh, thinking of my partner Dolly in that last case.
Her words upon my mother setting me in her arms as a newborn baby on my first day home from the hospital; “Can I keep him?” And here we are sixty five years later, in our home we built together on a hill from where we can see the place we first kissed, on a hayride in the snow in a wagon with other children pulled by her father driving a tractor; she was twelve, I was a very precocious eight.
My wish for all of us is that we may find such friends and partners who can reveal to us our true selves and offer figural spaces into which to grow; such is my functional definition of love.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
As written by Alana Mohamed in The Atlantc, in an article entitled Where to Turn When You Feel ‘at Odds With Being Human’: Two recent books find, in the fluidity and endurance of marine life, respite from a world that expects conformity; “The sea has long tugged at the human imagination, inspiring stories of hubristic individuals seeking to tame the inhabitants of that seemingly endless expanse. The ocean has also borne the consequences of excessive modern consumption—commercial fishing, microplastics—paradoxically transforming many of its dwellers into martyrs, pet causes to be championed and protected.
Yet an emergent narrative complicates both these perspectives, positing instead a deep, co-equal bond between humans—particularly those who feel discomfort with rigid taxonomies, or who exist at the margins of society—and sea creatures of the deep. In the new essay collection Voice of the Fish, Lars Horn wonders “how common [it is] to feel completely at odds with being human,” and uses a long-standing fascination with marine life to reimagine the body’s potential. And in the 2020 book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals, the poet and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs argues that the lives of marine mammals such as dolphins and whales offer helpful models for resisting exploitation. Aligning herself with these put-upon creatures, she writes, “I am related to all those in captivity.” Though the collections tackle their subjects differently, they would seem to be in conversation with each other, finding in the endurance and fluidity of sea life liberation from human control.
Voice of the Fish attempts to undo ideas of what is “normal” or “natural” by teasing out the expansiveness of marine life. As a child questioning not only their gender but also more existential matters of the body and soul, Horn found comfort in enumerating facts about fish—for example, that some fish species change their sex, or that a particular type of jellyfish can revert to earlier stages of development and reproduce asexually. “Science [has] so often reserved the animalistic for those who fall outside of a society’s dominant ideologies,” Horn notes, alluding to medical experiments on Black men and women, forced sterilization of women with disabilities, and the erasure of transness as a mental disorder. Studying the world of fish, they write, has “helped dissolve a world I found too hard, too strict in how it required me to live within it.”
Finding terms like dysphoria “too clinical, too sterile,” Horn instead seeks to understand their body (an “otherworldly” being) through mystical stories about fish across a variety of disciplines, including ancient myth, the Bible, and the work of classical taxonomists such as Pliny the Elder and Linneaus. In Naturalis historia, for example, Pliny describes sacred eels, adorned with jewelry, that were said to have oracular powers. In 19th-century Japan, watching goldfish in their bowls was thought to cool people down in summer. Tilapia were believed to be protectors of the sun god Ra. Taken by these ethereal tales, Horn wonders, “Maybe this is the nearest we come to the divine?”
Aquariums become, for Horn, both spaces of communion and, paradoxically, reminders of human cruelty. Waiting out a storm at the Georgia Aquarium one day, they find solace in the display of a lone eel. Its presence allows Horn to reflect on the morphological dexterity of the European eel (which changes color and features several times throughout its life) and its general refusal to conform to scientific knowledge. Only moments later, Horn, in turn, is put on display, deemed a “pervert” by a passing family.
The feeling of being exposed, for Horn, dates back to childhood, when their eccentric artist mother had them pose next to dead squids, or in full-body plaster casts. These activities compounded the physical unease Horn felt. But through these and other experiences, they become fascinated by the mutability of their body—as when their ailing foot is mysteriously healed by an animal breeder or when they, for a time, seem to lose the ability to speak, read, or write. Like the fish they admire, Horn observes their body appearing to adhere to a logic more ancient than science alone can explain.
While Horn finds affinity in the strangeness of sea creatures, Gumbs sees them as relatives of a sort, describing her subjects with a startling intimacy. Considering the resilience of family ties, she recounts the story of Tokitae, one of the last survivors of a group of orcas taken from their home in the Salish Sea.
Because orcas care for their young communally, Gumbs imagines Tokitae as a mother figure and wonders at her own response: “What does it mean to love someone who has seen her children taken and, at the risk of capture, stayed to witness and scream?” She then directly addresses both the reader and Tokitae: “I love you with a love of screams. I love you with a love of witness.”
Gumbs’s meditations are poetic and inquisitive, often diving beyond anecdotes to tease out what goes unsaid. A heartwarming story of a dolphin mother singing to her child, for example, leads Gumbs to ruminate on the hundreds of women who give birth per year in U.S. prisons. In stories of animal-human interaction, she reads a secret life of marine activism—or perhaps they’re simply acts of survival. As the population of endangered Hawaiian monk seals begins to rebound, including on two islands where U.S. military bases have closed, she optimistically deems their reappearance an act of reclamation. Similarly, when a tropical whale swallows a tour operator (“Not long enough to kill him, just long enough to change his outlook”), she wonders whether it’s an act of protest against human encroachment, rather than a simple accident, as it’s been widely reported to be (“I’m not saying you can’t trust those reports. I’m just saying that they come from the tourist industry, something we also know something about in the Caribbean”).
In the exploitation of these sea dwellers, Gumbs sees an eerie parallel with the transatlantic slave trade, which she argues produced not survivors but “the undrowned,” who breathe “in unbreathable circumstances.” The ability to survive underwater becomes, to Gumbs, a metaphor for human resistance to oppressive institutions, both past and present. The stories of baby seals whose mothers coax them into the ocean before they understand that they can survive in water, mirror, for her, the human potential to meet unexpected challenges. In the “gigantic breathing” of whales, she sees the power of the collective. She cites a 2010 study on whaling and the ocean carbon cycle, which estimated that if whale populations were restored to pre-whaling numbers, they’d be able to store as much carbon as 110,000 hectares of forest. She also uses the blacktip reef shark to push back on the myth of the lone predator that dominates capitalist societies. To Gumbs, their communal nature and sense of play show that “our survival need not make us into monsters.”
At one point, Gumbs addresses both sea creatures and readers with the passion of prayer: “Our kinship is the kind of salve that heals whole oceans.” Horn, too, feels this soulful connection, wondering at the ability of fish to swim “beyond” their body “into some other, mythic, imagined space.” As we continue to face the material consequences of our rising seas, both Horn and Gumbs ultimately turn to a different, more spiritual plane to reimagine the dichotomies between human and animal. In the process, they challenge us to think anew about the way our bodies can, or might be able to, move through the world.”
My Octopus Teacher film: love beyond the limits of our flesh
Of the quality of our humanity, the nightmares and dreams of our histories, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human yet undreamed; for each of us, faces of darkness and light.
For over forty years now I have lived as a maker of mischief for tyrants, myself a monster who is also a hunter of monsters, among the unknown spaces of our topologies of human being, meaning, and value. Here also the shadows of my history which like all human beings I drag behind me like an invisible reptilian tail become negative spaces which threaten to subsume us or detach and act independently like the tulku I once practiced creating as a Vajrayana Buddhist monk of the Kagyu order of Dream Navigators, or like Dracula’s shadow which has a life of its own in the great film starring Anthony Hopkins and Winona Ryder; metaphors and allegories of our capture and falsification by the personae and identities we perform.
As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night; “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
I dream of the Jar of Eyes in Sarajevo, of the horrors of Mariupol, the Third Intifada, the defense of Panjshir in Afghanistan, and countless other Last Stands and forlorn hopes, as if dying and being reborn, or being destroyed and recreated as the line in David Cronenberg’s film The Fly has it, a reimagination of Frankenstein as an allegory of degradation and monstrosity in which I find reflection, more times now than I can remember, and each version of myself more distant from the original as I began; and of the sacred dead who inhabit my memories, literally as embodied history in the case of our DNA, who each represent a lost connection with a previous self.
As the line in The Fly of the mad scientist who has unwittingly transformed himself into a monster goes; “You’re afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren’t you’? You’re afraid to be destroyed and recreated, aren’t you? I’ll bet you think you woke me up about the flesh, don’t you? But you only know society’s straight line about the flesh. You can’t penetrate beyond society’s sick, grave, fear of the flesh. Drink deep, or taste not, the plasma spring. Y’see what I’m sayin? And I’m not just talking about sex and penetration, I’m talking about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh. A deep penetrating dive into the plasma pool.”
Herein is an echo and reflection of Nietzsche’s Toad he feared to swallow, passed to William S. Burroughs and from he to me, misshapen as it crosses bottomless chasms of darkness beyond the limits of the human, to find glorious and terrible forms in the unknown places on our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons; where I have lived so very long, here among the dragons.
Grief, despair, and fear, the trauma of loss, the torment of loneliness, and the guilt of survivorship; our darkness whispers to us of such things, and we must find balance and the will to claw our way out of the ruins yet again, and make another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival.
As Nietzsche warned I have looked too long into the darkness, and it has begun to look back at me.
During my many wonderful years as a debate coach and teaching Forensics at Sonoma Valley High School, I began the first day of class every year with a demonstration I call Becoming a Fulcrum. On my desk I would set a balance and say; “This is a fulcrum.” Across it I put a second object, saying; “It balances a lever. When your parents ask what you are learning in Forensics class, tell them you are learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.”
In this mad quest which is my life mission I must now also pursue the restoration of balance within myself, just as our nation and the world pursues the restoration of democracy and our universal human rights, battered by tidal forces of fascism and tyranny among fathomless chasms of darkness.
In 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.
Long ago I lost count of Last Stands; these have become truths written in my flesh, and I bear such marks without number. How do we find the will to do these things?
The truth is we need nothing beyond ourselves and our moment of decision to do such things; no great universal principles, not even the negative space of a heroic figure to inhabit and perform before the stage of the world. All we need is this; that others who rely on us will die if we do not.
This is what makes us human, and its something we must continue to affirm no matter what the cost; our duty of care for others.
There may be one more thing that can help us in such moments of decision; if we remember who we are, and not how others imagine us.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
History, memory, identity; we are a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation across vast gulfs of time, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
How shall we answer death and the terror of our nothingness? Let us challenge and defy such death, and while it waits to claim us with its cold hand of entropy and unraveled time we must seize and shake our shadow and secret twin of longing to become, transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and perform our best selves, our hopes and our desires, as a guerilla theatre of identities upon the stage of the world in fearless grandeur, and let nothing be lost or remain untested among the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us answer death as Bringers of Chaos and Transformation, and make of our world and humankind a thing of beautiful, terrible truths written in our flesh, and of our dreams and nightmares a brave new world.
In The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto describes this as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans; defined by Encyclopedia Britannica as “a mystery before which humanity both trembles and is fascinated, is both repelled and attracted.”
All true art defiles and exalts.
May we all of us find beauty to balance the brokenness of the world, hope in struggle with the legacies of our history and terror of our nothingness, vision with which to perform the reimagination and transformation of the world and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and love to heal the flaws of our humanity.
Song: “Monster” – Imagine Dragons (cover by Runaground on youtube)
During this liminal time, I question the idea, meaning, and value of Love, and its praxis in social and personal spheres, especially in terms of the relationships between intimacy and politics, and the interdependence of and titanic struggle between eros and thanos.
Sorry, this is as romantic as I get on this subject. To me, love is a defining and innate capacity which makes us human, and confers adaptive or survival value in the face of grief, horror, fear, loneliness, meaninglessness, and despair.
In a universe where these things define our imposed conditions of struggle, we need anything we can get which grants us survival and resilience.
To be an Antifascist is to belong to a tradition which originates with the Italian Resistance to Mussolini during the fascist March on Rome in 1922, the Antifaschistische Aktion direct action forces of the German Democratic Socialists from whom we inherit our name and the legacy of its iconic heroine Rosa Luxemburg, the Paris Commune, the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, and the Resistance of the Second World War.
This history I have arranged as a three act play, the first act a tale of the Antifa of Resistance now, the second act in five parts describing the legacies of our history as members of the Antifascist Resistance, and the third act my Eight Principles of the Art of War, which I hope may be useful in creating our future.
Here we must disambiguate between two very close terms and ideas, ones which may be interdependent, relative, parallel, recursive, and dynamic as causes and adaptive processes in changing contexts and imposed conditions of struggle; Resistance and Revolution.
In America now we find ourselves with a captured Vichy state much like Occupied France in the Second World War, whose fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and centralization of power to authority as a police state of force and thought control we must Resist, by any means necessary. All Resistance is War to the Knife, beyond all laws and all limits, for those who respect no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
Revolution engages systems of oppression and unequal power as elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, seizures of power, and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value.
In both Resistance and Revolution our goal is to take the enemy’s power. But Revolution is more general, aimed at changing the balance of power not merely between a state and its citizens or subjects, but between all human beings as transformation of social and personal relations.
Resistance is often directed against an intrusive force from outside, to liberation from a foreign Occupation, invasion, or colonial power, in struggles involving independence and sovereignty, though it can also mean engagement with the enforcers of a tyrant.
Revolution is often directed toward regime change within one’s own nation, involving identity and justice, seizures of power from elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege whom an authoritarian state services, and for ourselves most especially struggle against theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror.
In Revolution we take their power by delegitimation of authority; through disobedience and disbelief.
In Resistance we take their power by demonstrating that we cannot be controlled or subjugated; through refusal to submit.
We now find ourselves in imposed conditions of struggle which define our actions against the aberrant regime of Trump and his dishonorable and treasonous deplorables as both Resistance and Revolution, for we oppose both the dismantling of the institutions of our liberty and the subversion of democracy.
Act One: The Antifascist Resistance Now
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 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.
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.
Scene 2: The Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades
February 24 2021, Echoes of the 1936-1939 Civil War in Barcelona: Free Speech and Independence Ignite a Revolt
Spain erupted in free speech protests this week over the arrest of Pablo Hasel for the crime of writing poetry. When they dragged him out of his barricades at Lledia University in Barcelona, he shouted a final message; “You will never defeat us! You will never overcome us, we will resist until we are victorious.”
As with Franco’s assassination of Federico Garcia Lorca or the Nazi persecution of Picasso, it is not the first time the transformational power of poetic vision has been feared by a Spanish government as subversive to its authority and hegemony of power and privilege, and met with brutal repression of dissent.
The autonomy of Catalonia and its capitol Barcelona was bombed into a ghost of liberty by Mussolini as a centre of Republican organizing and the legendary International Brigades during the Civil War, but it was never conquered and driven into abject submission by the fascists.
The firestorm of protest raging in the streets for the past week are an echo of that historic conflict, though our own International Brigades have no George Orwell or Ernest Hemingway to immortalize and inspire their struggle against state terror and tyranny, some of the young radicals at the barricades may one day become a new generation’s Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, or Octavio Paz, all of whom saw action at the front over seventy years ago, and they have both an eminence grise in the great auteur Pedro Almodovar and a heroic unifying figure in Pablo Hasel.
Who is Pablo Hasel, and why would the arrest of a rapper plunge a nation into chaos?
Hasel was imprisoned for his statements of solidarity with the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups or GRAPO, a major Spanish direct action organization of the Communist Party of Spain since 1975 which hunts fascist infiltrators in the police and other security forces of state repression in the wake of the collapse of Franco’s regime, whom I regard as brothers in a sacred cause. There can be but one reply to fascism; Never Again.
Other revolutionary causes and torchbearers which he has championed through his poetry include the Catalonian independence group Terra Lliure, the Basque separatist ETA, and Germany’s Red Army Faction or Baader–Meinhof Group. As many of those he lionizes have long vanished from the stage of history, they may be intended as examples of resistance and refusal to submit to tyranny and authority, though the revolutionary struggle for the liberation and independence of Catalonia for which he was imprisoned and then denied work for a decade is very much alive.
Catalonia is distinct from Spain in its language, culture, and history, sharing equal parts of all three between France and Spain as a legacy of its membership in the empire of Charlemagne. It was autonomous before Franco seized it, and many of them want to reclaim their independence.
In the context of the Spanish resistance to fascism and the historical legacy of the International Brigades, this week’s protests bear a unique weight of history, for this was a forge of Antifascism and among the primary shaping forces of the Resistance of the Second World War, as it exists today throughout the world, and as I have lived it in the 39 years since I was sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet in Beirut.
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
Remember always that we who challenge and defy unjust authority, and who refuse to obey and to submit to force and control, cannot be subjugated, dehumanized, and mastered, for in resistance we become free. We can be killed but not defeated; imprisoned but not enslaved, deceived but not falsified, for force cannot win against disobedience and control cannot survive exposure of the truth.
Who cannot be compelled is free.
Freedom means seizure of the ownership of our identity and liberation within ourselves, and from this inviolable citadel of being and fulcrum of change we reach out to unite in solidarity with others against the force and control of those who would enslave us to change the balance of power in the world and engage in revolutionary struggle for the liberation of humankind.
We are the Unconquered, each of us an Autonomous Zone; join us.
Resist and be free.
April 26 2024 Guernica: the Horror of War
On this day we remember the anniversary of the destruction of Guernica in 1937 by the Nazis, vividly commemorated by Picasso as a witness of history, and situated within the special context of the Spanish Resistance, and of the Humanist values of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man which the atrocity violated, but also a universal testament, lament, and cry of defiance against the horror of war.
The horrors of the Nazi annihilation of the civilization of Europe is being recapitulated today in the destruction of Ukraine by Russia and of Palestine by Israel, with Mariupol and Gaza echoes and reflections of Guernica, as it will whenever we forget the lessons of our history and are doomed to repeat it.
When I founded the Abraham Lincoln Brigades of Ukraine and Palestine with my fellow American volunteers in liberation struggle, it was not only to recall the glorious International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War as our true forebears, but also in recognition that both Putin’s Russia and Netanyahu’s Israel have modeled their obscene and criminal wars of imperial conquest and dominion on Guernica and the idea of Total War as developed in the Spanish Civil War by the fascist regimes of Hitler and Franco; and that we must reply to them as Resistance and by any means necessary.
All Resistance is war to the knife.
Evil never sleeps, nor must our vigilance in guardianship of each other.
War is an evil born of many things, including fear and the dehumanization of others, and of the pathology of disconnectedness and failure of empathy. It is also an instrument of government and authority which exists because it is enormously profitable for those in power.
The family fortune of the Bush dynasty was made by the first President Bush’s grandfather, who personally handed Adolf Hitler the cash to finance the Beer Hall Putsch. Why? He was the exclusive New York banker for Thyssen-Krupp, the arms manufacturer of Germany, and there was profit to be made as a Nazi agent. The American invasion of Iraq as an instrumentalization of the 911 terror attack in imperial conquest and dominion and the centralization of power to a carceral state with the counterinsurgency model of policing becomes horrifically clear in its design when considered as a seizure of power by multigenerational Nazi ideologists of the Fourth Reich.
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us to beware of the military-industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address, he diagnosed the cause of our enslavement by wealth and power, and a primary subversive threat to democracy.
To the horror of war, as to fascism, there can be but one reply; Never Again.
In the words of Cal Winslow writing in Jacobin; “Guernica represented the first instance of a new kind of war. The Blitz followed it, then Dresden and the firebombing of Tokyo. Then Hiroshima. The “saturation” bombing of Vietnam — a nation virtually defenseless from the air — left millions dead. Now we have watched Fallujah and Aleppo and Mosul, while today the United States bombs seven countries simultaneously: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya.
And so Guernica remains, alas, timely, timeless, universal. A decade ago, T. J. Clark concluded his magisterial Picasso and Truth with this tribute to Picasso’s “astounding feat”:
Life, says the painting [Guernica], is an ordinary, carnal, entirely unnegotiable value. It is what humans and animals share. There is a time of life, which we inhabit unthinkingly, but also a time of death: the two may be incommensurable, but humans especially — from the evidence of Paleolithic burials it seems a human defining trait — structure their lives, imaginatively, in relation to death. They try to live with death — to keep death present, like the ancestors whose bones they exhume and re-enter.
But certain kinds of death break that human contract. And this is one of them, says Guernica. Life should not end the way it does here. Some kinds of death, to put it another way, have nothing to do with the human as Picasso conceives it — they possess no form as they take place, they come from nowhere, time never touches them, they do not even have the look of doom. They are a special obscenity, and that obscenity, it turns out, has been a central experience for seventy years.”
Scene 3: Antifa Founded with the Italian Resistance to Mussolini
August 23 2024 Anniversary of the 1922 Founding of Antifa: the Barricades of Parma and L’Ardito del Popolo
Over hundred years ago this August, the antifascist resistance of Guido Picelli and L’Ardito del Popolo fought a glorious battle for the soul of humankind and the fate of the world against the tide of fascism and Mussolini’s blackshirts in Parma, prelude to the Fascist March on Rome which opened the door to the Holocaust and World War Two, so very like our own January 6 Insurrection which threatens us still with the return of fascism as the Fourth Reich.
Now as then, and in every generation of humankind, we are defined by how we face those who would enslave us and the darkness within ourselves which threatens to consume us, the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world; in solidarity as a band of brothers and a United Humankind, or subjugated through hierarchies and divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, as a free society of equals or with fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
For Antifa and the Resistance the Arditi are an important historical ancestor, but also for all who love Liberty, where ever men hunger to be free.
Here also is a cautionary tale, of the necessity of Solidarity and the dangers of ideological fracture, for the Arditi failed to defeat fascism at its birth for the same reasons Rosa Luxemburg and the Social Democrats of Germany were unable to counter the ascendence of Hitler. This is a lesson we must take to heart and remember in this election as liberty and fascist tyranny play for the soul of America and the fate of the world in the choice between Kamala Harris and Traitor Trump, as factional infighting and ideological fracture threaten to divide and steal the power of the only credible force of resistance to the Fourth Reich and recapture of the state.
There is a time for debate, the reimagination and transformation of policy and our national identity, and for mau-mauing the flak catchers as Tom Wolfe phrased it; now is not that time. Now is the time for All Hands On Deck, Solidarity, and an Indivisible United Front against the fascist capture of the state, because if we do not win this fight, there be no more political debate and change, only the dictatorship of the gun.
This I say to my brothers and sisters in struggle for the liberation of Palestine who may withhold the power of their vote without an official policy statement of the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party making the BDS of Israel, regime change in Israel, support of the US for the trial of Netanyahu and his regime as war criminals, and ending seventy years of arming and funding Israeli terror and imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors part of the question in our election, all policies I support but will not hold a gun to the head of the Restoration of Democracy in America over.
For over forty years I have fought for our universal human rights imperiled in Palestine, and we must win what we can for her people and end our complicity in their genocide, but if America falls we will win neither the liberation of America nor of Palestine from fascist tyranny.
We must first be victorious over the enemy and those who would enslave us, and then use the power we have seized to liberate humankind from fascist tyranny.
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
In Parma, the Working Class Defeated the Fascists on the Barricades
Scene 4: Rosa Luxemburg and the German Social Democrats
January 15 2025 Anniversary of the Assassination of Rosa Luxemburg, Visionary and Icon of Our Future Possibilities of Becoming Human, and a Cautionary Tale Regarding Ideological Fracture and the Necessity of Solidarity
Heroes hold up a mirror of our best selves; among myriads of future possibilities of becoming human, such figures provide spaces to grow into. Like our friends, we choose them as instruments of our self creation because they represent who we wish to become. Beyond their usefulness as informing, motivating, and shaping sources, those we have chosen to help us become who we wish to be also reveal to us our values, and the things we wish to make real.
Rosa Luxemburg is a voice from our past, but one which speaks to our future, and to the choices each of us must face in our lives now.
Today we remember the anniversary of her January 15 1919 assassination, who saw what others could not and died for the chance to make it real.
May we one day redeem that hope for a better humankind.
What is the historical significance of her assassination?
A few days from now, America inaugurates the figurehead of the Fourth Reich as our President, a consequence of both Russian election rigging through propaganda and dark money and of ideological fracture within the Democratic Party which abandoned the whole of its Left elements, universal healthcare, abolition of police, the Green New Deal, and our universal human rights with complicity in the genocide of the Palestinians, to shift center-right in the vain attempt to win Republicans who do not love Trump and all he represents as white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror. I warned of the dangers of ideological fracture and of the uselessness of appeasement and collaboration throughout the election, but America and the Democratic Party did not choose to listen.
How is this relevant to the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg?
Because it is exactly what happened in Germany when the Left was divided over the issue of peace and World War One, removing the only blocking force to the rise of fascism.
As Mark Jones, “assistant professor at University College Dublin and a leading expert on the German revolution of 1918-19 that culminated in the murders” is quoted in an article in The Guardian covering the 100th anniversary of her murder by the German state in Berlin; “Of course, the brutal and sudden end to her story raises the question of what would have happened if she had survived,” said Jones. “At its most advanced and powerful, the Rosa Luxemburg myth claims that had she lived, National Socialism may have never taken control of Germany.”
That was a view held by many at the demonstration. “I do believe the Nazis might not have come to power and history might well have taken a different turn had Rosa been able to fulfil her wishes,” said Kit Aastrup, a retired social worker who had taken a bus from Aarhus in Denmark to join the march. She wore a Russian ushanka ear-flap hat, embossed with a hammer and sickle.”
Many and strange are the Rashomon Gate Events of history, and the possible futures which they destroy and create. This event is also an example of the dangers of ideological fracture; like the destruction of the IWW in America, wherein the First World War and the question of peace also divided and brought to ruin the only blocking force to the rise of fascism though here only temporarily, a strategy of counter-revolution later used against many social reform movements during the Vietnam War in America including the Students For A Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, the Black Planters, and really anyone who questioned and challenged elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
As I warned in my post on this anniversary last year;, This process is now repeating itself under the hammer of the Gaza War and Biden making us all complicit in ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity; like myself, anyone who cannot vote for such a war criminal is a vote lost to opposing Trump’s recapture of the state in our next election which now seems inevitable.
How can we escape the consequences of this dilemma? If we disavow Israel and use Boycott, Sanction, and Divestiture to end this humanitarian crisis, and with it our pathetic and ruinous abandonment of the ideas of democracy and universal human rights, and our historic role as a guarantor of our humanity and liberty, this future may change, and with it the centuries of war and tyranny to come.
So I wrote a year ago today, and we all know how that worked out as the Democratic Party first removed Biden from the election, not as a war criminal but as an imbecile, then replaced him with overseer of the police state Harris who maintained the Party’s Wall of Silence on the question of Gaza and the genocide of the Palestinians. One would think Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” would have put the final nail in the coffin of appeasement and collaboration, but here we are, days from the inauguration of a man who modeled himself on Hitler, literally as he aped his gestures from newsreels of Nazi rallies and according to an ex wife slept with Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible.
Under such imposed conditions of struggle, what can we learn from Rosa Luxemburg?
She taught us something through her actions about how to be human; I refer not to the courage of her resistance to subjugation by authority, nor to the magnificent fearlessness of her role as a truth teller in the questioning, exposure, mocking, and challenge of authority, though these things are also true; but to the selflessness of her compassion in revolutionary struggle for the liberation of humankind and of the redemptive power of love.
None of us are too powerless to seize and shake the mighty and cast them down from their thrones, too voiceless to cry havoc and fill the chasms of emptiness with defiance and songs of resistance, too flawed and broken to lift others up.
We humans are beautiful not in spite of our flaws, but because of them. This is the great secret of the power of transformation; it is the flaws of our humanity, the brokenness of the world, and the wounds of our survival which open us to the pain of others and confers transformative vision, reconnection, and change as rebirth.
Each of us who in refusal to submit become Unconquered and free are Autonomous Zones, wherein nothing is Forbidden. We cherish and reverence figures of liberty like Rosa Luxemburg because they show us the way through the gates of our prisons into freedom and the ownership of ourselves; and we become such figures for others in our turn. Thus the tide of our history becomes unstoppable, a chain of lives reaching into the future which changes and liberates whomever it touches.
What does it ask of us, this interdependence and force of history, as agents of Change and Transformation? Here I return to my Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty:
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, normality with transgression, and division with solidarity.
Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.
Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious inclusion and diversity, as a democratic and a free society of equals.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As written by Rosa Luxemburg on the eve of her assassination; “The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built…Order reigns in Berlin! You stupid henchmen! Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already ‘raise itself with a rattle’ and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I shall be!”
As Rosa Luxemburg wrote from prison in a letter to Mathilde Wurm on December 28, 1916; “To be human is the main thing, and that means to be strong and clear and of good cheer in spite and because of everything, for tears are the preoccupation of weakness. To be human means throwing one’s life “on the scales of destiny” if need be, to be joyful for every fine day and every beautiful cloud—oh, I can’t write you any recipes how to be human, I only know how to be human … The world is so beautiful in spite of the misery and would be even more beautiful if there were no half-wits and cowards in it.”
As written by Marcello Musto in Jacobin; “In August 1893, when the chair called on her to speak at a session of the Zurich Congress of the Second International, Rosa Luxemburg made her way without hesitation through the crowd of delegates and activists packed into the hall. She was one of the few women present, still in the flush of youth, slight of build, and with a hip deformity that had forced her to limp since the age of five. The first impression she gave to those who saw her was of a frail creature indeed. But then, standing on a chair to make herself better heard, she soon captivated the whole audience with the skill of her reasoning and the originality of her positions.
In her view, the central demand of the Polish workers’ movement should not be an independent Polish state, as many had maintained. Poland was still under tripartite rule, divided between the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires; its reunification was proving difficult to achieve, and the workers should set their sights on objectives that would generate practical struggles in the name of particular needs.
In a line of argument that she would develop in the years to come, she attacked those who concentrated on national issues and warned that the rhetoric of patriotism would be used to play down class struggle and to push the social question into the background. There was no need to add “subjection to Polish nationality” to all the forms of oppression suffered by the proletariat, she argued.
Against the Current
The intervention at the Zurich Congress symbolized the whole intellectual biography of a woman who should be considered among the most significant exponents of twentieth-century socialism. Born a hundred fifty years ago, on March 5, 1871, in Zamość in Tsarist-occupied Poland, Rosa Luxemburg lived her whole life on the margins, grappling with multiple adversities and always swimming against the current. Of Jewish origin, suffering from a lifelong physical handicap, she moved to Germany at the age of twenty-seven and managed to obtain citizenship there through a marriage of convenience.
Being resolutely pacifist at the outbreak of the First World War, she was imprisoned several times for her ideas. She was a passionate enemy of imperialism during a new and violent period of colonial expansion. She fought against the death penalty in the midst of barbarism. And – a central dimension – she was a woman who lived in worlds inhabited almost exclusively by men.
She was often the only female presence, both at Zurich University, where she obtained a doctorate in 1897 with a thesis entitled The Industrial Development of Poland, and in the leadership of German Social Democracy. The party appointed her as the first woman to teach at its central cadre school — a task she performed in the years between 1907 and 1914, during which she published The Accumulation of Capitalism (1913) and worked on the uncompleted project Introduction to Political Economy (1925).
These difficulties were supplemented by her independent spirit and her autonomy — a virtue that often leads to trouble in left-wing parties too. Displaying a lively intelligence, she had the capacity to develop new ideas and to defend them, without awe and indeed with a disarming candor, before such figures as August Bebel and Karl Kautsky (who had had the formative privilege of direct contact with Engels).
Her aim was not to repeat Marx’s words over again, but to interpret them historically and, when necessary, to build further on them. To voice her own opinion freely and to express critical positions within the party was for her an inalienable right. The party had to be a space where different views could coexist, so long as those who joined it shared its fundamental principles.
Party, Strike, Revolution
Luxemburg successfully overcame the many obstacles facing her, and in the fierce debate following Eduard Bernstein’s reformist turn she became a well-known figure in the foremost organization of the European workers’ movement. Whereas, in his famous text The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy (1897–99), Bernstein had called on the party to burn its bridges with the past and to turn itself into a merely gradualist force, Luxemburg insisted in Social Reform or Revolution? (1898–99) that during every historical period “work for reforms is carried on only in the direction given it by the impetus of the last revolution.”
Those who sought to achieve in the “chicken coop of bourgeois parliamentarism” the changes that the revolutionary conquest of political power would make possible were not choosing “a more tranquil, surer and slower road to the same goal,” but rather “a different goal.” They had accepted the bourgeois world and its ideology.
Her aim was not to repeat Marx’s words over again, but to interpret them historically and, when necessary, to build further on them.
The point was not to improve the existing social order, but to build a completely different one. The role of the labor unions — which could wrest from the bosses only more favorable conditions within the capitalist mode of production — and the Russian Revolution of 1905 prompted some thoughts on the possible subjects and actions that might bring about a radical transformation of society.
In the book The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Union (1906), which analyzed the main events in vast areas of the Russian Empire, Luxemburg highlighted the key role of the broadest, mostly unorganized, layers of the proletariat. In her eyes, the masses were the true protagonists of history. In Russia the “element of spontaneity” — a concept that led some to accuse her of overestimating the class consciousness of the masses — had been important, and consequently the role of the party should not be to prepare the mass strike but to place itself “at the helm of the movement as a whole.”
For Luxemburg, the mass strike was “the living pulse-beat of the revolution” and, at the same time, “its most powerful driving wheel.” It was the true “mode of movement of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in the revolution.” It was not a single isolated action but the summation of a long period of class struggle.
Moreover, it could not be overlooked that “in the storm of the revolutionary period,” the proletariat was transformed in such a way that “even the highest good, life — not to speak of material well-being — ha[d] little value in comparison with the ideals of the struggle.” The workers gained in consciousness and maturity. The mass strikes in Russia had shown how, in such a period, the “ceaseless reciprocal action of the political and economic struggles” was such that the one could pass immediately into the other.
Communism Means Freedom and Democracy
On the question of organizational forms and, more specifically, the role of the party, Luxemburg was involved in another heated dispute during those years, this time with Lenin. In One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904), the Bolshevik leader defended the positions adopted at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, putting forward a conception of the party as a compact nucleus of professional revolutionaries, a vanguard whose task it was to lead the masses.
Luxemburg, by contrast, in Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy (1904), argued that an extremely centralized party set up a very dangerous dynamic of “blind obedience to the central authority.” The party should not stifle but develop the involvement of society, in order to achieve “the correct historical evaluation of forms of struggle.” Marx once wrote that “every step of the real movement is more important than dozens of programs.” And Luxemburg extended this into the claim that “errors made by a truly revolutionary labor movement are historically infinitely more fruitful and more valuable than the infallibility of the best of all possible central committees.”
This clash acquired still greater importance after the Soviet revolution of 1917, to which she offered her unconditional support. Worried by the events unfolding in Russia (beginning with the ways of tackling the land reform), she was the first in the communist camp to observe that “a prolonged state of emergency” would have a “degrading influence on society.”
In the posthumous text The Russian Revolution (1922 [1918]), she emphasized that the historical mission of the proletariat, in conquering political power, was “to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy — not to eliminate democracy altogether.” Communism meant “the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, unlimited democracy,” which did not look to infallible leaders to guide it. A truly different political and social horizon would be reached only through a complex process of this kind, and not if the exercise of freedom was reserved “only for supporters of the government, only for the members of one party.”
Luxemburg was firmly convinced that “socialism, by its nature, cannot be bestowed from above”; it has to expand democracy, not diminish it. She wrote that “the negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the positive, the building up, cannot.” That was “new territory,” and only “experience” would be “capable of correcting and opening new ways.” The Spartacist League, founded in 1914 after a break with the SPD and later to become the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), explicitly stated that it would never take over governmental power “except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany.”
Though making opposite political choices, both Social Democrats and Bolsheviks wrongly conceived of democracy and revolution as two alternative processes. For Rosa Luxemburg, on the contrary, the core of her political theory was an indissoluble unity of the two. Her legacy has been squeezed on both sides: Social Democrats, complicit in her brutal murder at the age of forty-seven at the hands of right-wing paramilitaries, fought her over the years, with no holds barred for the revolutionary accents of her thought, while Stalinists steered clear of making her ideas better known because of their critical, free-spirited character.
Against Militarism, War, and Imperialism
The other pivotal point of Luxemburg’s political convictions and activism was her twin opposition to war and agitation against militarism. Here she proved capable of updating the theoretical approach of the Left and winning support for clear-sighted resolutions at congresses of the Second International, which, though disregarded, were a thorn in the side of supporters of the First World War.
In her analysis, the function of armies, the nonstop rearmament and the repeated outbreak of wars were not to be understood only in the classical terms of nineteenth-century political thinking. Rather, they were bound up with forces seeking to repress workers’ struggles and served as useful tools for reactionary interests to divide the working class. They also corresponded to a precise economic objective of the age.
Capitalism needed imperialism and war, even in peacetime, in order to increase production, as well as to capture new markets as soon as they presented themselves in the colonial periphery outside Europe. As she wrote in The Accumulation of Capital, “political violence is nothing but a vehicle for the economic process” — a judgment that she followed up with one of the most controversial theses in the book, that rearmament was indispensable to the productive expansion of capitalism.
Communism meant ‘the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, unlimited democracy,’ which did not look to infallible leaders to guide it.
This picture was a long way from optimistic reformist scenarios, and to sum it up Luxemburg used a formula that would resonate widely in the twentieth century: “socialism or barbarism.” She explained that the second term could be avoided only through self-aware mass struggle and, since anti-militarism required a high level of political consciousness, she was one of the greatest champions of a general strike against war — a weapon that many others, including Marx, underestimated.
She argued that the theme of national defense should be used against new war scenarios and that the “War on War!” slogan should become “the cornerstone of working-class politics.” As she wrote in The Crisis of Social Democracy (1916), also known as The Junius Pamphlet, the Second International had imploded because it failed “to achieve a common tactic and action by the proletariat in all countries.” From then on, the “main goal” of the proletariat should therefore be “fighting imperialism and preventing wars, in peace as in war.”
Without Losing Her Tenderness
A cosmopolitan citizen of “what is to come,” Rosa Luxemburg said she felt at home “all over the world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” She was passionate about botany and loved animals, and we can see from her letters that she was a woman of great sensitivity, who remained at one with herself despite the bitter experiences that life held for her.
For the cofounder of the Spartacist League, the class struggle was not just a question of wage increases. She did not wish to be a mere epigone and her socialism was never economistic. Immersed in the dramas of her time, she sought to modernize Marxism without calling its foundations into question. Her efforts in this direction are a constant warning to the Left that it should not limit its political activity to bland palliatives and give up trying to change the existing state of things.
The way in which she lived, and her success in wedding theoretical elaboration with social agitation, still stands as a beacon to the new generation of militants who have chosen to take up the many battles she waged.”
Rosa Luxemburg, a reading list
The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, by Rosa Luxemburg, Peter Hudis, Kevin B. Anderson (Editors)
March 18 2024 Anniversary of the Founding of the Paris Commune
We celebrate today the one hundred fifty second anniversary of the founding of the Paris Commune, a glorious legacy of resistance in which all humankind shares. It conjures for me visions of the Bacchantes, a society of women revolutionaries who printed tickets with an image of the god of ecstasy and poetic vision on one side and the address of an enemy of the people on the other, bearing the legend “good for burning”. Distribution of the lottery tickets was through street runners as if it were an illegal gambling ring, something of no real interest to the police; teams bearing axes and torches would converge on the target as a flash mob.
An ancestor of mine was one of them, called the Red Queen in reference to the character in Alice in Wonderland due to her signature method of assassination, a friend of figures of the Commune including Karl Marx, Gustave Courbet, Arthur Rimbaud, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and a comrade of Louise Michel; she was among the members of the Garde Militaire of the Commune who later immigrated to San Francisco as an intact unit, with their banners and uniforms.
The secret society of revolutionaries descended from the original Garde Militaire of the Commune throughout the world remains among the most influential of covert military organizations independent from and not authorized by any nation, though clearly not unique in this. I have always enjoyed the splendid irony that many of the world’s criminal syndicates originate exactly as the intelligence and special operations communities which are their counterparts and opposing forces do, as a final court of appeal of the people against tyrants and systems of oppression; crime and law enforcement, revolution and tyranny, the secret policeman and the rebel, arise together and are interdependent. As I have often written, the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce of resistance.
As her descendent and successor in revolutionary struggle, the Red Queen provides me with an informing, motivating, and shaping source; among her principles of action are, always go for the enemy leadership and decapitate the bosses, always strike without warning and anonymously with overwhelming force when the enemy is weakest, and never use the same trick twice.
I imagine her as a combination of Helena Bonham Carter’s Eudoria Holmes in Enola Holmes, which depicts the key figures of Suffragette history Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Sylvia, Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns.
When you dream of ur-sources of historical identity and archetypal figures who can act as guardians and guides of the soul and provide spaces to grow into, dream big.
Sustained and relentless waves of liberation actions and revolutionary struggle continue to hammer the world’s tyrannies of authoritarian force and control and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil with massive protests and electoral activism, and as we did in the Autonomous Zones of Seattle, Portland, and New York and hundreds more throughout the world, we will emerge victorious from the fight against unequal power and oppression because whosoever refuses to submit to force and defies authority and those who would enslave us becomes Unconquered and free. Each of us is a Living Autonomous Zone, ungovernable as the tide, uncontrollable as the wind; we are wild things, who serve no masters.
The Black Flag flies from the barricades in al Quds-Jerusalem, Moscow, Hong Kong, Atlanta, and dozens of other cities in every continent of earth, and its primary meaning has not changed since its use by the First International and by Louise Michel, veteran of the Paris Commune entitled the Red Virgin of Montmartre, who first flew it as an anarchist banner when she led the Paris worker’s revolt of March 9 1883; freedom versus tyranny, refusal to submit to authority, the abolition of state terror, surveillance, and control, resistance to nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and abandonment of fear as the basis of human exchange and the social use of force as a principle of human organization.
With this bold signal the people declare: we shall be ruled by none.
Vive la Commune!
The Paris Commune, a reading list
Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune, Rupert Christiansen
This Memorial Day weekend of celebrations and family visits to graves of the fallen we contemplate the victories of the past in the cause of our liberty and equality and its terrible costs, in the shadows of World War Three.
Of revolutionary struggle, principles of resistance, the ideals of a free society of equals and the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force I have written much; today I wish to interrogate violence and the use of social force on the personal and individual level from which such tidal forces arise.
What general principles can be applied at all levels of liberation struggle, from wars, revolutions, and resistance under unequal systems of power as imposed conditions of struggle, and to the personal contests of power and dominion through which we create hierarchies of belonging and membership from childhood on and in political action as we choose how to be human together?
I wish to share with you the Eight Principles of the Art of War as I have imagined and relentlessly tested them, which apply equally to revolutionary struggle and other seizures of power.
I don’t write about martial arts much, for someone who grew up shaped by its practice and has continued to learn whatever I could from anyone at all wherever I have lived, traveled, and fought in over fifty years since I began study, arts tested and refined in Resistance, revolution, wars, and liberation struggle, my whole adult life counting from the summer before I began high school when I hunted police death squads who were hunting abandoned street children through the warrens of Sao Paulo Brazil, at first alone and later as a member of the Matadors founded by the great and terrible Pedro Rodrigues Filho after they rescued me from execution with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
When next I fought it was against the Israeli Siege of Beirut in 1982, when Jean Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance he had rephrased in Paris 1940 from the one he took as a Legionnaire; he said it was the finest thing he ever stole.
From this Defining Moment and Last Stand unfolded all the others; the end of Apartheid in the glorious Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola, the tragic defense against the Mayan Genocide in Guatemala, bringing down the Berlin Wall, Sarajevo and the limits of the human, the Revolution in Nepal and the Resistance in Kashmir, and most recently forlorn hopes in the battle for Panjshir in Afghanistan, the Siege of Mariupol in Ukraine, the horrors of the Third Intifada which began with the defense of al Aqsa, the fight for human rights against genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and Palestine, and the victories in bringing a Reckoning to Prigozhin, the Red Sea Campaign to counter blockade Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid, and the liberation of Syria. So many more; more than I can now recount.
What have I learned in all of this?
The first lesson of the art of war is Diversion and Surprise. This involves a cornucopia of misdirection, illusion, concealment, and the arts of ambush and improvising channels, traps, and arenas to escape pursuit.
Concealment is better than confrontation when force and power are unequal. In battle whatever can be seen, located, identified, predicted can be destroyed; be anonymous, unpredictable, unanswerable. Stealth offers no target to the enemy, gives no warning, leaves no signs, strikes from ambush and returns to the shadows
The second lesson is to Be Unpredictable, and use your enemy’s routines against him to create windows of opportunity. Change your patterns and routines, your playbook, rules, strategies and tactics. Surprise yourself, and the enemy too will be surprised.
The third lesson is to Seize the Rules; never play someone else’s game, on their terms or by their rules, but on ground and at a time of your choosing. If you become trapped in such a game, change the rules and make it yours.
The fourth lesson is to Seize Initiative and Control through continuous attack and patterns of action; make the enemy react to you and you will tie up his resources in defense which may otherwise be free to threaten and attack you. Plan ahead of the enemy’s moves, and use patterns and expectations to create dilemmas, openings, ambushes, and traps.
The fifth lesson is to Seize the Timing, or wrongfooting the enemy. No one can be everywhere at once with equal force, and one must gather maximum force and strike where least expected and where the enemy is weakest. This means luring the enemy into being where you want him to be, such as massing forces where they are useless while exposing strategic targets.
The sixth lesson is to Seize the Momentum and point of balance when attacked; defend nothing, but neutralize greater force and power through evasion and redirection. The principles of simultaneous counterattack to seize control as momentum, and of continuous attack as conservation of momentum, work together in this as a Doctrine of No Defense or pure counterattack and ambush.
The seventh lesson is to Embrace Your Fear and use your pain. Why defend when you can counterattack and teach the enemy to fear you? As my father said; “Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?”
The eighth lesson is to Seize the Narrative of the conflict, for all conflict is theatre. Here we instrumentalize history, famously described by CIA Chief of Counter Intelligence Angleton as the Wilderness of Mirrors.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I disambiguate in comparison with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, racism, and capitalism, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
Our goal in revolutionary struggle is to seize the legitimacy and authority of the enemy, to take their power, by claiming the moral high ground, shaping opinion through narratives of victimization and solidarity by championing the people against those who would enslave us. For who stands alone, dies alone; and who stands in solidarity with his fellows becomes unstoppable as the tides.
The last lesson is the same as the first; diversion and surprise.
All else is timing.
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
If you see ICE agents, send up a general warning. Photograph and publish their identities. Track them to their lair, picket their homes, flash mob them, set false trails and load the sites they raid with protestors.
Never let police take anyone alone; they are both infiltrated by white supremacist terrorists and coordinating actions with them as deniable assets like the Oathkeepers, and states are now hiring bounty hunters with no security clearances or training and paying one thousand dollars per human deported, and that means anyone nonwhite, citizen or not, a policy which has hit the Native American Tribes as racist state terror.
One armed thug with a badge cannot abduct a target when three of us intervene; one hundred enforcers of racist state terror cannot overcome a thousand who Resist.
Herein a word of caution; do not meet force with force, fear with fear, terror with terror. Leave evil to the evildoers. This I advise not as a moral principle, but as a strategic one when the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle include a nominally democratic state which may be brought into alignment with its constitutional ideals of the equality of all human beings under the law and of the co-ownership of the state by its citizens, through mass action, solidarity, and performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen: Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
The great secret of authority as power, force, and control is that it is hollow and brittle, and becomes meaningless without legitimacy.
The Fourth Reich and its figurehead Traitor Trump and the Party of Treason are counting on losing some of their enforcers to mob violence as a pretext for the occupation of America by federal troops under martial law, a trick they tried four times during the Black Lives Matter protests using police provocateurs and campaigns of arson, looting, and random violence to delegitimize the protests against racist police violence and seize the narrative. In this the enemy failed; during months of mass protests in over fifty cities throughout our nation, only one act of violence by anyone other than police and their co-conspirators happened,, and that was when our Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl returned fire when fired upon when confronting a motorcade of 600 armed fascists on August 29 2020 in Portland Oregon, and was assassinated by a police death squad days later.
The goal of authority in centralizing power is to win legitimacy, and our goal as revolutionaries is to delegitimize authority and seize the moral high ground. We now find ourselves in a similar situation to that of Gandhi versus the British Empire, and his very elegant solution which tipped the balance was the Salt Tax Protest, during which hundreds of nonresisting Indians were systematically beaten with clubs by police on camera and before the stage of history, reported to the world with the words; “The British Empire has lost any claim to the moral high ground in India.”
Always the question of the social use of force remains central to any action versus or interrogation of evil in its origins as fear, power, and force in recursive processes of the Wagnerian Ring of Power, and any seizures of power in liberation struggle against systems of oppression and unequal power and the state as embodied violence, especially under imposed conditions of struggle which include brutal repression of dissent and thought control by enforcers of the carceral state and its elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
This goal of delegitimation of authority does not override our duty of care for others; if a man kneels on another’s neck he is a murderer and we are obligated to stop him by any means necessary, and if a man points a gun at another let a hundred guns reply.
Everything devolves to fear, power, and force, a maelstrom which only love can free us from, and we who hunt monsters must be very careful not to become so ourselves. As Nietzsche warned; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
As I wrote in my post of September 3 2024, Anniversary of the Assassination of Antifascist Comrade Michael Reinoehl: Violence, Responsibility, the Social Use of Force, and Our Duty of Care For Others; On this terrible day we mourn the extrajudicial and political assassination by police, ultimately under the command of the Fourth Reich Triumvirate of the President of the United States Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad, four years ago of a committed fellow antifascist and brother in the great struggle against white supremacist terror and the carceral state of the Fourth Reich, Michael Reinoehl, who has in a live broadcast interview publicly claimed responsibility for killing in self defense a member of a violent racist terror organization on August 29 2020 in Portland.
To whom does responsibility in such a tragedy belong? First responders are immune from prosecution for trying to save lives because of the doctrine of our duty of care for others; does this not also apply as a general humanitarian principle to intervention to prevent our own death and that of others? Who perpetrates the threat or use of deadly force, displays or fires guns at others to intimidate or kill them, is responsible for the harm their actions cause; so also with organizations of terror which arm, train, fund, and provide communications and logistics support for them, regardless of whether they are a deniable asset of state terror such as the Patriot Prayer group which fielded the perpetrator, police who hide behind the immunity and authority of their badges to enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and authorize others in the commission of acts of terror, or those who provide ideology and authorization, logistics and communication, and other organizational infrastructure for them as a conspiracy of white supremacist terror, even if it originates from the White House.
I now wish to clarify publicly and irrevocably that I neither endorse violence nor the avoidance of responsibility for our actions; anyone who reads my writing will realize that I believe violence is a result of unequal power and of fear, and this informs and motivates everything else. We have a right to defend ourselves and others from harm, but not to compel virtue by force. My abhorrence of the social use of force is the basis for my opposition to law and order, prisons, police, surveillance, tyranny, state force and control, normality and other people’s ideas of virtue or idealizations of beauty, state authorization of identities, and violations of our rights of conscience and of bodily autonomy. I envision a society free of the use of social force and without violence.
As to public confrontations as theatre; I understand the value of public image and presence and of protest in raising awareness of a cause, and especially in the four primary duties of a citizen in the face of unjust authority to question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, and the inviolable principle of solidarity which means that if they come for the marginalized and the oppressed we come for them, and in my world you stand with those who stand with you, but this does not imply an endorsement of ridiculous macho posturing, the fetishization of guns and other male jewelry, or the valorization of warlike displays of toxic masculinity which may become preconditions and incitements to violence. This is especially true where guns are involved; their power is seductive and malign. The fetishization of instruments of violence normalizes and precedes violence.
Who bears arms bears death, has chosen to bear death among us and has degraded every human relationship and interaction to a kill or no kill decision.
Choose life.
But never let this stay your hand in defense of the lives and liberty of yourself or of others; for who respects no laws and no limits can hide behind none. To fascism I give the only reply it merits; Never Again! And to tyranny I say; Sic Semper Tyrannis.
I am a monster and a hunter of monsters, and mine is a hunter’s morality; I have no use for anything which limits our ability to confront and destroy threats such as fascist terror and tyranny, which must be met on its own ground, beyond all laws and all limits.
War to the knife; and we must be very cautious that our actions serve the cause of liberty and not tyranny, and bring hope.
What is the great lesson of Michael Reinoehl, murdered by police assassins for the murder of a fascist terrorist?
Here endeth the lesson; or maybe not. For I have used a word throughout my witness of history and eulogy for a comrade which is itself a ground of struggle; Antifascist. A word that cuts slices, polarizes, incites, damns or grants permission, identifies friend or foe, confers nobility of purpose, and engulfs the world in the fires of transformation and rebirth symbolized in the stolen fire of the gods of our Torch of Liberty.
As I wrote in my post of July 31 2020, A Useful Past: What is Antifa?; What do we mean when we say we are Antifascists? What do our enemies mean when they use the term? These mirror reverse meanings face us Janus-like in dialectical contradiction as negative spaces of each other like Escher’s Drawing Hands, and while factions struggle to control the narrative in the media I don’t see much direction provided by anyone speaking as an Antifa-identified voice. I’m changing that, for I speak to you today as the founder of Lilac City Antifa.
In calling Antifa a terrorist group, Trump has inverted its values and libeled every American serviceman, from those who fought in World War II to our entire military services today, for they have been the primary force against fascism and tyranny throughout the world. I am an American patriot and an Antifascist; and if our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us.
The Second World War has been much studied, filmed, and written about; but of course what we mean when we speak of Antifa today proceeds from the history of those whose public service of vigilance in exposing and confronting fascism developed from the partisans of that conflict and from the Allied military and intelligence services sent to assist them in the liberation of Europe, from the Resistance and from those who hunted escaped Nazis after the war.
To begin with, both the OSS which became the CIA and the Jedburgh teams which became the Green Berets or US Special Forces originate as antifascist forces, and this is true generally of the European intelligence and special operations forces and community born and forged in the war against fascism.
One may discover strange and unlikely allies in the Antifascist community because of this history; and we may say the same of enemies. Both our allies and our enemies are partners in a dance, wherein we choose our futures and how to be human together.
A very specific historical context and tradition informs and motivates those who, like myself, use the term Antifascist as a descriptor of identity; I have appended some articles on this useful past, but Antifa is a personal choice to work against fascism and may sometimes be a component of an ideology or belief system but is not an organization. No one calling themselves Antifa speaks for or answers to anyone else; it is a nonhierarchical and mutualistic network of alliances. This is intentional, as it makes our network of alliances impossible to infiltrate, and though we contain members of many nations security and military services, no one can give orders to anyone else. There is no special tie nor fraternal handshake; membership is by declaration.
To claim you are Antifa is to be Antifa. This means whatever we intend when we say it.
For myself, to be an Antifascist is to belong to a tradition of resistance which originates in the Second World War, a war that has never ended but went underground. I look also to the American Revolution against imperial tyranny and colonial inequality and to the Second American Revolution and the great crusade of Abolition against slavery that was the Civil War, to the Paris Commune and the Garde Militaire which survives it, and to our direct origins in the Italian Arditi del Popolo, the Antifaschistische Aktion direct action forces of the German Democratic Socialists from whom we inherit our name, the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, and the Resistance, for antecedents and inspiration. For the principles which I feel are consistent with Anti-fascism, see my repost below of the original proclamation with which I founded Lilac City Antifa.
Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa: Resistance Against Fascism and Tyranny
We, the People of Lilac City and of America, being of all imaginable varieties of historical origin, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual personae, faith and the lack thereof, class and status, and all other informing and motivating sources of becoming human and frames of identity as yet undiscovered, declare our independence from fear and from authorized identities, boundaries of the Forbidden, images and narratives of ourselves made for us by others as instruments of subjugation, the tyranny of false divisions and categories of belonging and exclusionary otherness among us.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
We stand united as human beings whose universal rights depend on no government but on the inherent nature of our humanity, and as American citizens and co-owners of our government in a free society of equals, inclusive of all who so claim and declare as heirs of the legacy and idea of Liberty and of America as an historical expression and manifest form of its ideals and values, among these being freedom and the autonomy of individuals, equality as an absolute structural principle in law and ideal in social relations, truth and its objectivity and testable nature and our right to seek and verify and to communicate it which includes freedom of the press and the right of access to information and from surveillance and all forms of thought control, justice and its impartiality, and a secular state in which freedom of conscience is absolute and there can be no compulsion in matters of faith.
We are a web of human lives which connect us with one another and anchor us to our Liberty, to our history and to our future, and we are resolved to our common defense as human beings and as Americans, and to the mutual safety and freedom of ourselves and of others from fascist violence and intimidation, coercion and the social use of force, in the performance of our identities and in our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We are American patriots and heirs to the glorious tradition of resistance by those who stood for Liberty at the balance points of history, at Saratoga and Yorktown, Gettysburg, Normandy, and many others, against the three primary threats of tyranny, inequalities of race and gender and slavery in all its forms, and fascism which combines and expands them, as we must always do against the atavistic forces of barbarism and the nightmares of totalitarian force and control which threaten our nation and our civilization, against what madness and evil may together do.
We must unite together as free citizens who will not be broken by fear, but instead embrace our differences as a strength and a heritage purchased for us all by the blood of our sacred dead in countless wars throughout our history.
To all those who have offered their lives in our service, members and veterans of the military and other security services: join us. If our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us. For America is a Band of Brothers, sworn to one another and to the defense of our union, with liberty and justice for all.
To all enemies of America and a free society of equals: We are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Join us in resistance, who answer fascism and tyranny with equality and liberty.
I am an American patriot and an Antifascist. Pledge thus with me:
I swear zero tolerance for racism or the supremacy of any persons by categories of identity, racist violence and white supremacist terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, hate and its symbols and speech, for all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for all inequalities and divisions of exclusionary otherness and victimization of the dispossessed and the powerless.
I will make no compromise with evil.
As you have sworn to challenge and confront fascism, therefore I offer you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut in 1982 by Jean Genet; here is the story of how it happened, and of my true origin.
During the summer before my undergraduate senior year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Feral bands of soldiers were roaming the streets, committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, and more joined us. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.
A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”
To which I replied, “We have nothing but moments stolen from death; these alone belong to us, and set us free. It’s a poor man who has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before his capture, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path of struggle for liberty against tyranny and autocracies of state force and control, for equality against racist violence and injustice, and against the fascism which combines both state tyranny and racist terror.
He introduced himself as a former Legionnaire by the name of Jean, was mischievous, wise, immensely learned in classical scholarship and possibly had once been educated as a priest, and filled with wild stories about the luminaries of modern European culture. I was stunned when I discovered days later that my strange new friend was one of the greatest literary figures of the century. I had quoted The Thief’s Journal in refutation of something he said, which he found hilarious, while we were discussing Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as compared to that of Georges Bataille, a conversation which remained unfinished as he couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually he sputtered, “I myself am Jean Genet.” To me he remains a Trickster figure and part of my historical identity and personal mythology.
There came a day when the barricades were overrun and our neighborhood along with it, one of our last days together. With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers running amok in a sack of murder, arson, and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, our house set on fire and about to be burned alive as the soldiers called for us to come out and surrender, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with a very Gallic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”
We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all.
Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’
To which I replied, “No.”
“Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.
We escaped capture that day because we were led through the checkpoints of the encirclement by an unlikely ally, a figure who materialized out of the background at the far end of the alley and walked over to us grinning. This was the sniper whom my friends and I had been playing our games with for two weeks, who had been utterly invisible and had outwitted every attempt to track, trap, ambush, or identify him, and who had in fact besieged the city from within. He held out his hand to me and I shook it as he said, “Well played, sir. I’ve tried to kill you every day for fourteen days now, but the Israelis have occupied the city, and this changes everything. We have a common enemy, and they don’t know that, so I’m in a position to help you. But I can’t fight them alone. Want a partner?”
So began a great adventure and friendship, which I share with you now in the context of the nature of antifascist resistance because it illustrates something which can never be forgotten by anyone who does this kind of work; human beings are not monsters, are deserving of human doubt, and are never beyond redemption.
The struggle between good and evil in the human heart often pivots and balances on the differences between the purpose of the use of force; to punish transgression when inflicted by authority as an act of subjugation and repression against the powerless, or to seize power and to protect the powerless as a duty of care. Be very sure you know which cause your actions serve.
The end goal of Antifascism, and of revolutionary struggle and liberation, is to achieve a democratic society of true equality, diversity, and inclusion in which we can abandon the social use of force.
Such a day will not be easily won, nor quickly, even with seizures of power, for the systems of oppression in which we are embedded also inhabit our flesh as living stories, and we must escape the legacies of our history if we are to create ourselves anew in a free society of equals. Of our histories, memories, identities let us remember always this; there are those we must escape and those we must keep and remember, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
As I wrote in my post of January 14 2025, A Curse Upon Traitor Trump and All Who Voted For Him Or Celebrate His Inauguration; In less than a week’s time a man who modeled himself on Hitler will be Inaugurated as President of the United States, to the hooting and champing of his dishonorable and treasonous Deplorables who celebrate his white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror because they want permission to do the same.
This event of fracture and disruption calls for rituals of grief and healing for our shared public trauma, but also for solidarity in Resistance and performances of acts of refusal to submit and bringing a Reckoning.
If I had enough hands, and windows into their private spaces, I would flay their white skins and mount them on my wall, I would douse them in gasoline while they sleep and drop the match, I would visit horrors on them and give reply to their violations, atrocities, tyranny and terror with those of my own as they merit; but I do not because I would not become as they, and we must never allow our enemies to become our teachers.
Look to Israel, a nation which learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis, and to the genocide of the Palestinians if you require a scrying glass into our future should we choose the path of force and violence without embracing the humanity of our enemies regardless of their otherness and monstrosity; and we must also embrace our own if we are to free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and its systems of oppression.
The enemy are monsters because they have transgressed the limits of the human, and we must not join them in the place of unknowns. I have lived in this place, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human, for forty three years now since the Siege of Beirut, and as Nietzsche warned the Abyss has begun to look back at me.
Imposed conditions of struggle may require seizures of power by force, but in so doing we must not forget to see others as fellow human beings, even if we must meet them in battle as brother warriors to find the truths of ourselves.
When the Matadors rescued me from the police death squad in Brazil over fifty years ago, the leader said; ”You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.” This principle serves well enough for Resistance, but the moment we are now living in requires both Resistance, always War to the Knife without law or limit, and Revolution as reimagination and transformative change. Revenge is a weakness we cannot afford if we are to build a better future than we have the past.
Herein I offer all of you a curse upon our enemies, betrayers of our humanity and of our nation; join me in invoking a Reckoning and in Solidarity of action to make it real.
A Curse Upon Our Enemies: Traitor Trump and All Who Voted For Him Or Celebrate His Inauguration
I invoke death and horror upon all who voted for Traitor Trump or celebrate his Inauguration, Rapist In Chief, Russian agent, and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, and ruin upon all their works. May all they love and dream come to nothing and be destroyed.
By the beard of the Ice King of Entropy and the poison songs of the Queen of Lies,
By the dead eyes of the Faceless Ones and the Wailing in the Darkness,
By the Abyss and the terror of our Nothingness,
May our enemies and all who celebrate today the Inauguration of Traitor Trump live loveless and die unmourned,
May their bodies be prisons of illness and pain, and their souls consumed by their cruelties.
In annotation of the text, I refer in my poem and conjuration here to the old and true forces of our universe, which I sometimes call the Giants of Frost and Old Night to convey something of the wonder and terror of a universe free from any meaning or value except for that we ourselves create, but also as symbols of Defining Moments which I have lived.
In my imagination I give form and force to The Wailing in the Darkness as an incident in the defense of Mariupol, hours crawling in utter darkness through the bloody remains of the dead in a partially collapsed tunnel filled with the voices of the dying whom I could not help as Russian bombs shook the earth. They are with me still, my companions in darkness at the edge of life and death, and they whisper things in my dreams; of horror and despair, loneliness and abandonment, of being shattered into countless fragments of myself under the hammer of mass trauma to which I can bring no healing and give no answer as to why humans do such things to each other.
At the time this bothered me not at all; I have survived worse and more terrible, as no doubt I will again. But I spent days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when I discovered what the Russians were doing with the children they abducted, who could not even call for help that was not coming from the torture brothels on army bases far away in Russia, and this silencing and erasure is another form of Wailing in the Darkness.
When I speak of the dead eyes of the Faceless Ones, I am thinking of the Jar of Eyes.
Of Sarajevo I shall speak here not of the monstrous acts of those who would be conquerors, nor of the courageous resistance of their intended victims who held true to their faith and to each other in the face of death and torture, nor even of the valor and compassion of the volunteers of the International Brigade who placed themselves between hammer and anvil, but of a small horror which has come to symbolize for me the unimaginable horrors of war; the Jar of Eyes.
On the desk of a commander of death squads sat a jar full of eyes, and beside it an ice cream scoop which he would toy with, stroking its stainless smoothness with an absentminded and sensual languor while interrogating prisoners.
This he did in imitation of the Roman Emperor Basil the Second the Bulgar Slayer, who after the battle of Kleidion in 1014 Christianized Bulgaria by blinding the army he had defeated, and leaving one man in one hundred with a single eye to guide the others home and terrify the nation into submission.
How do I know this, and what were we to each other, this monster and I? Herein I recall and speak as a witness of history a Defining Moment in which we played a game of chess with the life of a prisoner of his as the prize.
Having materialized at his gate and asking to see the commander, itself unusual and a curious thing to a man with his fearsome reputation, I came bearing the gift of a recording of an opera I knew he loved and could not attend due to his duties and the price on his head as a war criminal, Leoš Janáček’s House of the Dead set in a Serbian prison and based on the Dostoevsky novel, with the promise of more music in trade for a prisoner he held and did not know the value of. He agreed to the bargain, but with one condition; we would play three games of chess after dinner in the following days, and demanded I must win or force a draw once.
We had three meetings over three days of an hour each, over dinner and chess, during which we conversed of the historical civilization he was fighting to defend, a fight which had made him a monster; music, philosophy, art, literature. Once a prisoner was brought in, seated and held fast by guards like a third companion at dinner whom he tortured while we sipped tea and spoke of the scene between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky‘s The Brothers Karamazov. I think he was lonely.
Within the jar the eyes would float randomly, hypnotic, reflective, capturing ones will to resist with a Medusa-like gaze of objectification and dehumanization appropriated from their tormentors, a talisman of transference of power. A jar of silent screams, erased lives, and the lost witness of history; how can we accuse our destroyers when we have no mouths?
Here among the dragons, where the rule of law cannot reach and our maps of meaning and value have given way to tantalizing empty spaces which beckon with the siren call of the Forbidden, where the only currency is fear and the only relationships those of power and dominion, we challenge and define by their absence and contrary the limits of what is human.
For we are all trapped in the Jar of Eyes, and if we are to reawaken and assume our true forms we must find a means of escape.
Thousands protest against Trump’s war on immigrants after Ice raids: ‘Fight for our neighbors’
In light of Trump II’s first 18 days of mayhem — including his and Musk’s coup against our system of government — many are asking: “What can I do now?” Here’s a revised and expanded list, in rough order of importance.
1. Protect vulnerable members of your communities who are undocumented or whose parents are undocumented.
This is an urgent moral call to action. As Trump’s ICE begins roundups and deportations, many good people and their families are endangered and understandably frightened.
One of Trump’s executive orders allows ICE to arrest undocumented immigrants at or near schools, places of worship, health care sites, shelters, and relief centers — thereby deterring families from sending their kids to school or getting help they need, and threatening the health and well-being of entire communities.
Urge your governor and state legislature, and your mayor or city manager, to block ICE. Get your local and state lawmakers to seek federal court injunctions. Check in with their offices to see what they are doing to protect vulnerable families in your community. Join others in voluntary efforts to keep ICE away from hospitals, schools, and shelters.
Meanwhile, you should order these red cards from Immigrant Legal Resources Center and make them available in and around your community: Red Cards / Tarjetas Rojas | Immigrant Legal Resource Center | ILRC. You might also find these of use: Immigration Preparedness Toolkit | Immigrant Legal Resource Center | ILRC.
2. Protect LGBTQ+ members of your community.
Trump is trying to make life far more difficult for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other people through executive orders, changes in laws, alterations in civil rights laws, or changes in how such laws are enforced.
His election and his rhetoric might also unleash hatefulness by bigoted people in your community.
Work with others in being vigilant against prejudice and bigotry, wherever it might break out. When you see or hear it, call it out. Join with others to stop it. If you trust your local city officials, get them involved. If you trust your local police, alert them as well.
3. Help protect public officials whom Trump and his administration are targeting for vengeance.
Some may be low-level officials, such as election workers. If they do not have the means to defend themselves legally, you might help them or consider a GoFundMe campaign. If you hear of anyone who seeks to harm them, immediately alert local law-enforcement officials.
Other endangered people are Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on the January 6 and Mar-a-Lago classified papers cases. You can help protect them by making sure you know what Trump’s Justice Department is trying to do to them (here’s one good source), and spreading the word. Urge your senators and House members (assuming they’re with you on this) to intervene on their behalf, hold hearings, and spread the alarm.
4. Contact your Democratic senators and urge them to block all Trump nominations.
This week, several Senate Democrats helped confirm Trump’s energy secretary. Bad move.
There’s simply no excuse for Senate Democrats to confirm any of Trump’s nominees for any agency while Trump’s power grab continues. These nominees have repeatedly stated their loyalty to Trump and his agenda — it’s the No. 1 thing he looks for in a Cabinet official.
Democrats should place “blanket holds” on all Trump’s nominees until his power grab is ended. [The phone number of the Capitol switchboard operator is (202) 224-3121.]
5. Urge your Democratic senators to continuously demand quorum calls and object to unanimous consent, to deny Senate Republicans the ability to enact Trump initiatives.
The Senate may not conduct official business unless a majority of senators (51 if all seats are filled) are present. This is called a quorum, and it’s the foundation of Senate procedure. If a quorum isn’t present, the Senate grinds to a halt.
Senate Democrats should use their power in the minority to call for a quorum and constantly demand quorum calls on any and all Trump initiatives.
Blocking unanimous consent forces roll-call votes, debates, and delays on even the most basic motions, and it will consume hours (or days) of floor time. It would also kill Trump’s fast-track confirmations.
Many of Trump’s judicial nominees sailed through last time because Democrats didn’t force votes on each one. This must end. No more rubber-stamping. [Again, the phone number of the Capitol switchboard operator is (202) 224-3121.]
6. Urge Democratic House members to vote against all Republican initiatives.
Republicans maintain control over the House by the smallest margin in almost a century. If Elise Stefanik is confirmed as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as expected, Republicans’ House majority will drop from 218 to 217 (compared to 215 Democrats).
This tiny margin gives Democrats enormous power, if they stick together. Make sure your Democratic representatives know you’re counting on them to do so.
Another thing you can do: Push governors to delay special elections to fill seats of representatives Trump has picked for his regime. For example, lawmakers in New York are readying a bill to give Gov. Kathy Hochul until the summer to fill Stefanik’s seat.
7. Write to your senators and members of Congress about the constitutional crisis we are in, urging them to stop all confirmation votes, stop hearings, and reclaim their appropriations authority.
Senator or Congressman (or Congresswoman) [XXX]
Re: Constitutional Crisis
Dear Senator or Congressman (or Congresswoman) [XXX]:
We are in a constitutional crisis. The president has usurped Congress’s authority, including freezing the use of appropriated funds. It is time to act now.
Stop all confirmations. Put holds on every Trump nominee. No more hearings or confirmation votes.
Get back your appropriations authority, whether through litigation or investigations. Allowing Musk’s DOGE access to all payments information enables them to decide who gets money Congress appropriated and designated.
Sincerely,
xxx
8. Contact your state’s attorney general and urge them to file complaints, injunctions, and restraining orders against Elon Musk and his tech goons for committing identify theft, violating the Privacy Act, and riding roughshod over Congress’s spending power in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
You can find your state attorney general here.
9. Join with others in your community to take on other initiatives in your locale and state.
Local and state governments retain significant power. Join groups that are moving your city or state forward, in contrast to regressive moves at the federal level. Lobby, instigate, organize, and fundraise for progressive legislators. Support progressive leaders. You can find your nearest Indivisible group here.
10. Organize or participate in boycotts of companies that are enabling the Trump regime, starting with Elon Musk’s X and Tesla and any companies that advertise on X or Fox News.
Never underestimate the effectiveness of consumer boycotts. Corporations invest heavily in their brand names and the goodwill associated with them. Loud, boisterous, attention-getting boycotts can harm brand names and reduce the prices of corporations’ shares of stock.
Here’s a place to begin.
11. To the extent you are able, fund groups that are litigating against Trump.
Much of the action over the next months and years will be in the federal courts. The groups initiating legislation that I know and trust include the American Civil Liberties Union, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, Public Citizen, Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Defense Fund, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Common Cause.
You can track the federal cases against the Trump regime here.
12. Spread the truth.
Get news through reliable sources, and spread it. If you hear anyone spreading lies and Trump propaganda, including local media, contradict them with facts and their sources.
Here are some of the sources I currently rely on for the truth: Democracy Now, Business Insider, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, The Atlantic, Americans for Tax Fairness, Economic Policy Institute, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, The Guardian, ProPublica, Labor Notes, The Lever, Popular Information, Heather Cox Richardson, and, of course, this Substack.
13. Urge friends, relatives, and acquaintances to avoid Trump propaganda outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, X, and, increasingly, Facebook and Instagram.
They are filled with hateful bigotry and toxic and dangerous lies. For some people, these propaganda sources can also be addictive; help the people you know wean themselves off them.
14. Encourage worker action.
Most labor unions are on the right side — seeking to build worker power and resist repression. You can support them by joining picket lines and boycotts and encouraging employees to organize in places you patronize.
Encourage union pension funds to divest stock in Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla shares have been held by funds such as the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the New York State Common Retirement Fund, which serve public employees and some unionized workers. As of June 2024, CalPERS owned nearly 9.2 million Tesla shares, valued at over $2 billion.
Private-sector union pension funds, such as those managed by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters or the United Auto Workers (UAW) Retiree Medical Benefits Trust, may have Tesla stock through index funds or direct investments.
15. Take care of yourself and your loved ones.
Please do not become so obsessed by what Trump and Musk are doing that you neglect your own well-being. It’s important that you take time for yourself, read a good book or watch an absorbing TV series. See friends. Find something to laugh at every day. Get enough exercise.
And hold your loved ones tight.
We will get through this, and we will prevail. But it will require confidence, courage, and tenacity. We need to stay healthy for this fight. We need to be fortified by those we care about. And we need to be there for those we love.
16. Finally, and not the least, keep the faith.
Do not give up on America. Do not fall into the traps of cynicism and defeatism. Remember, Trump won the popular vote by only 1.5 points. By any historical measure, this was a squeaker. In the House, the Republicans’ lead is the smallest in almost a century. In the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive races, including in four states Trump won.
America has deep problems, to be sure. Which is why we can’t give up on it — or give up the fights for social justice, equal political rights, equal opportunity, democracy, and the rule of law.
The forces of Trumpian repression and neofascism would like nothing better than for us to give up. Then they’d win it all. We cannot allow them to.
Now and then I poke sleeping dragons with a stick, among them my own normalities; its why I travel when I write about a place and its current events, to disrupt my own expectations and ideas as I act to bring change to systems of oppression.
A maker of mischief, I.
Today’s post in my daily journal Torch of Liberty marks the one year anniversary of my debut on the writer’s and reader’s community and newsletter platform Substack, during which I have also planted my flag on the anti-X BlueSky, an event which calls for the questioning of my ends and means; why do I write, and why am I writing to all you here, in the nakedness of my life, my voice, and my truth, in this moment of tidal change as a Fallen Vichy America begins her Last Stand against fascism as a captured state of the Fourth Reich?
As I re-evaluate my mission of the Restoration of democracy, the Antifascist Resistance, and actions as a guarantor of our universal human rights both in America and globally, and its praxis as revolutionary struggle against tyranny, state terror, and systems of oppression and unequal power, I reflect on the path which brought me here and the Defining Moments of my history.
First among these traumatic events of destruction and re-creation which revealed to me my true self and life mission, Bloody Thursday 1969 in People’s Park, Berkeley when the police at the order of then-governor Reagan opened fire on student protestors, and I at nine years of age holding my mother’s hand in the front line as I was driven out of my body by the force wave of a police grenade, and in that brief awareness beyond time as I lay dead in her arms beheld our myriad possible futures; overwhelmingly those of centuries of tyranny and wars of imperial dominion ending with the extinction of human beings. I’ve been trying to warn others in hope of changing our future ever since, and I am failing.
Second my near execution by police who were bounty hunting abandoned street children in Sao Paulo Brazil where I was training as a fencer the summer before I began high school in 1974, when I refused to step aside between them and a boy with a twisted leg who could not run. I was rescued by the Matadors, something between vigilantes, revolutionaries, and criminals who brought a Reckoning to the wealthy and powerful beyond the law or who were the law, founded by the great and terrible Pedro Rodrigues Filho the year before, who welcomed me into their ferocious brotherhood with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
Third was the Siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982, when my culinary tour of the Mediterranean before my senior year at university in San Francisco was interrupted by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Israeli soldiers had set fire to two children and were laughing and making bets on how far they could run before collapsing into ruin, and I found myself fighting them as the children screamed in agony and horror burning to death. Others joined me, more joined us, and from that day I was part of the defense of the city.
There was a café on the far side of a sniper alley that served the best strawberry crepes in the world, and my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across it for breakfast. One morning an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and said in French; ”I am told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To this I replied; “Yes; moments stolen from death are all we truly own, and set us free. It’s a poor man who has no joys worth dying for.”
He smiled and said “I agree”; so began our conversations at breakfast, until the day came when Israel overran the barricades. The IDF were asking for surrender, blindfolding the children of those who came out and using them as human shields, and setting fire to the homes of those who refused. When they set fire to our house, and our discovery that our only weapon was the bottle of champagne we had just finished, he asked; Will you surrender?” and I said no.
“Neither will I” he replied, and stood. “As I offer you now, offer others at need; this is the Oath of the Resistance which I invented in Paris 1940 after spending much of the previous year spying on the Nazis in Berlin, reworded from my oath as a Legionnaire in 1918. It’s the finest thing I ever stole. Say with me; We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Thus was I set on my life path by the great Jean Genet, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of fear and horrors, with the Oath of the Resistance which I now offer all of you.
And he gave me a principle of action that day, by which I have lived now for over forty years, among the unknown spaces on our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, where there are no rules, and now recommend to you; “When there is no hope, one can do impossible things, glorious things.”
What is Torch of Liberty? A voice of democracy and the Antifascist Resistance, as the banner of my periodical declares, whose intent is to incite, provoke, and disturb.
A journal of my witness of history and current events, and their meaning for strategy, intelligence, and policy for antifascists, revolutionaries, democracy activists, and allies of liberation struggle of all kinds, wherein I interpret events as they occur using lenses of history, literature, psychology, and philosophy. It’s a method I developed from Robert G.L. Waite’s multidisciplinary study The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, which I read as a high school senior and also motivated me, along with Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, to choose the origins of evil and its actions as war, genocide, violence, state tyranny and terror, and the social use of force as my field of study.
Six years ago I founded Torch of Liberty and Lilac City Antifa together, a network of action and its community publication, to work through our shared public trauma during the Trump regime, most effective foreign agent to ever attack America and the creepiest public figure in our national history, and forge a coherent ideology of liberation struggle and its praxis in the context of real world events and actions, and to reveal the meaning and consequences of current events as they happen. Herein I struggle to find answers to two primary existential questions.
Who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
What is to be done, as Lenin and Tolstoy asked with such different answers and results? How do we find the vision and the will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival?
If we are to inhabit the perspectives of others and transform boundaries into interfaces, we must be willing to embrace otherness as diversity and inclusion but also as truths written in our flesh, the witness of history, and what Foucault called truthtelling; writing is a sacred calling in pursuit of truth, which frees us from the flags of our skin and from authorized identities as an imposed condition of struggle.
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 the ownership of ourselves.
As Virginia Woolf teaches us, “If we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, we cannot tell the truth about others.”
So for my ars poetica as a praxis of revolutionary struggle. But I do not write to you today as an apologetics for poetic vision as the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, nor for chaos as the adaptive range and change potential of systems, nor to give warning as we pass through Rashomon Gate Events of history under multiple threats of civilizational collapse and the extinction of our species and on its reverse face the limitless possibilities of becoming human, nor of the joy of total freedom which balances the terror of our nothingness.
No, friends and those I hope may become friends, herein I write to you to invite your help and insights in questioning our truths, that together we may perform the Four Primary Duties of Citizens; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, as seizures of power, allyship, and solidarity in liberation struggle and bringing change to systems of oppression and unequal power, as guarantors of each other’s humanity and universal human rights in refusal to submit to authority and those who would enslave us through commodification, falsification, and dehumanization, in this time of the Last Stand Against Fascism as it unfolds in America and throughout the world.
Hope, solidarity, the witness of history, and truthtelling; such are my motives and purposes in writing to you as an open letter to humankind in this pivotal moment and to future generations.
And last but most important of all among my motives and purposes in writing, like Hope hidden in Pandora’s Box once the evils have escaped, herein I write to find healing for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world in sharing our journeys toward becoming human and in the reimagination and transformation of how we choose to be human together.
I hope to have lived, and written, not at the end of the story of humankind, but at its beginning.
And all of this tumultuous and traumatic chaotization and unraveling as human civilization falls from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions and is reborn, either to an Age of Tyranny or a United Humankind as our choices about how to be human together unfold across the next several centuries.
We now face threats of war and imperial conquest and dominion by two colossal empires, Russia and China, the subversion of democracy by theocratic tyranny and fascism in America and throughout the world, and the end of the earth’s capacity to sustain life and our own species extinction as a consequence of our addiction to power and control of nature.
Ours is an America forever changed by our complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, our abandonment of the idea of universal human rights, and the limits of our compassion, mercy, empathy, love, and all that makes us human.
Among the lines of fracture of this large scale transformative process is the Third World War now ongoing in ten theatres of conflict as Russia attempts to re-found her empire; first in the democracy and peace movements within Russia itself to bring regime change, second the Russian capture of the state in America under the puppet regime of Trump who is also the primary figurehead of the Fourth Reich of patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, and theocratic Christian Identity tyranny, and our subversion and capture as a Vichy state and Russian colony, third in the Russian conquest of Ukraine and Russian atrocities and crimes against humanity during the invasion, and in related conflicts, wars, and revolutions in Russian client states Belarus, and Kazakhstan, and conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya, and throughout Africa.
Set against this colossal and seemingly all-conquering wave of imperial conquest and dominion as Russia reclaims her empire is the swift and stunning liberation of Syria, in which I am proud to have opened the gates of Damascus to the victorious rebel forces led by Ahmed al-Sharaa. The illusion of Russian invincibility is shattered; the enemy can be defeated.
And since last October as the Gaza War became a regional theatre of World War Three as a theatrical performance in three dimensions; first the seventy years of anticolonial struggle of Palestine versus America and her colony of Israel which has gradually degenerated into a mirror image of the Nazi society it was designed to protect us all from, second the broader conflict between the Arab-American Alliance and the Dominion of Iran including Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen and until recently Syria which is driven by the historical sectarian Sunni-Shia division, and third its dimensions as World War Three as Iran’s ally Russia attempts to re-found her Empire versus that of Turkey for control of the Mediterranean and the Middle East and in proxy wars with America, and all of this as civilizational collapse and rebirth in the titanic struggle between forces of liberation and imperial state terror and tyranny as a theatre of cruelty.
We also face the coming Chinese Conquest of the Pacific Rim and the Occupation of all cities with a Chinatown under the Overseas Chinese policy of the CCP, which declares all persons of Chinese blood to be their citizens and subject to their laws, though the invasion of Taiwan and the seizure of control of shipping in the South China Sea through the artificial archipelago of island fortresses built on the carcasses of coral reefs are the next steps in Xi Jinping’s grand strategy of dominion. We need only look to the vast laboratory of thought control and ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang or to the repression of dissent and freedom in Hong Kong to see what that future would look like.
Third among our primary existential threats is the tide of fascism in America championed by Trump and the Republican Party which was captured by the Fourth Reich in 1980 under the guise of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, together with Nazi revivalism in Europe and the emerging new global order of fascism and totalitarian states of blood, faith, and soil. This includes Orban’s Hungary, the capture of Italy by the original Fascist Party, and the political fronts which have become the opposition parties to governments founded on the principle of Humanism and democracy in France, Spain, and elsewhere, but also fascist states beyond the limits of Nazi ideology arising from similar forces of identity politics and the centralization of power to carceral states of force and control which include the BJP’s capture of India under Modi, Myanmar, and the Netanyahu regime of Israel.
Israel learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis, and have recreated the conditions of Auschwitz they once escaped throughout Palestine and beyond. To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence; and regardless of where one begins with ideas of belonging and otherness, hierarchies of masters and slaves, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Let us give to tyranny and fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!
Who am I? By way of introduction, here follows my usual social media profile:
I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.
Chaos autonomizes; Order appropriates. Law serves power, and there is no just Authority.
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.
I am a writer and former counselor, high school debate coach and forensics teacher, and English teacher with a lifelong interest as a scholar in the nexus of literature, psychology, history, and philosophy, my chosen field of study being the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and its consequences as unequal power and systems of oppression and the social use of force as tyranny and terror.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
What is the praxis of my values? My purpose as a democracy activist is to realize a free society of equals in which we are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights, as a revolutionary to bring change to tyrannies of force and control, as an antifascist to bring a Reckoning to elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness and to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and as a human being to place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
In this cluster of causes, democracy, revolution, antifascism, and solidarity with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, I travel and write, speak, teach, and organize liberation struggle.
I practice the Way of believing six impossible things before breakfast, as Lewis Carroll teaches us, but only those I myself have chosen or created.
When you begin to question the boundaries and interfaces between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of no rules, of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery.
Thank you for sharing this journey with me, and may the new truths we create together bring all of us joy.
Michael Sheen performs ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ by Dylan Thomas
Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, by Michel Foucault
Once you open the door to theocratic tyranny and terror, there is no going back; we must go through it, and reach our liberation on the other side.
Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief Traitor Trump wishes to erase the Palestinians and in their place build a Riviera and playground of wealthy fools and hegemonic elites as a new crusader kingdom, dazzled by fantasies of limitless wealth and a power base independent from the limits of the American political system. This aligns with the historical forces at work which drive the global embrace of authoritarian regimes and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, as capitalism in its terminal stage seeks to free itself of democracy as its host political system.
We have see this dream of madness and cruelty before, during the Crusades which continued from 1096 with the capture of Jerusalem to 1718 in the Austro-Turkish War; the central conflicts involved in the idea of colonial empires authorized by the Infinite as war, plunder, and amoral rapacity versus the ideals of chivalry and the social use of force as defense of the innocent and the powerless are beautifully interrogated in the film Kingdom of Heaven.
If Trump and Netanyahu are permitted to realize their dreams of imperial conquest and dominion through the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians, we will witness the re-enactment of the horrors and travesty of the Crusades, as Vichy America establishes a colony of Christian Identity-Zionist elites beyond the reach of all law by which to destabilize and capture Europe and much else.
And the world will enter a new dark ages as democracy and civilization falls to an Age of Tyrants and wars of imperial dominion fought with weapons of unimaginable horror, possible for seven or more centuries as were the Crusades, and ending with the extinction of humankind.
This we must resist, by any means necessary.
As I wrote in my post of November 24 2021, Thanksgiving as a Ground of Struggle: Fundamentalism and Authoritarian Exclusionary Religion Are Gateway Drugs to Tyranny and Fascism; Among my earliest memories is watching the burning cross my town set on fire on the front lawn of newlyweds, a Dutch Reformed Church man and a Swiss Calvinist girl, which the town was calling a mixed marriage because they were members of different Protestant churches. It was like a carnival; I asked a neighbor boy why they were setting fires and he said “We’re punishing the bad people”.
Then I asked my mom, “Are they bad people?”
She said no, and pointed at the crowd with torches, “These are the bad people.”
My next question was, “Why are they bad?”
And she forever simplified a complex set of issues for me with her answer; “Because they want to make everyone the same.”
As we enter this time of the ancient harvest festival which has been reimagined as Thanksgiving in service to political power by our nation, a holiday anchored in the false history of an origin story as Puritan fundamentalist zealots which authorizes a white supremacist Christian Identity myth of America, let us remember instead why the Puritans fled Europe in the wake of centuries of religious wars and inquisitions as a cause and example of why our founders designed America as a secular state, and why we must resist devolution into theocracy.
Gaza provides another such example of why state religion is a terrible idea, and of its consequences as the most evil force in human history.
State religion produced centuries of war, genocide, colonialism, imperialism, Crusades, Inquisitions, assimilation and enslavement, the horrors of the Divine Right of Kings and of the Conquest. The Dark Ages were not a lost golden age to which we should long to return, but a time of rapacity, ignorance, brutality, and the supremacy of the most vicious criminals as priests and kings. Our world was ever thus, since the emergence of tyrants and priests, cities, nations, armies, and gods in whose name to conquer and rule with the invention of agriculture and the need for mass slave labor.
Authority, carceral states of force and control, divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite membership and wealth, power, and privilege, imperialism and colonialism, patriarchal sexual terror and racist terror all begin with a man in a golden robe who speaks for the gods and who has deceived others into doing the hard and dirty work, who anoints kings and sends armies to enforce virtue and keep the slaves in the fields.
Gott Mitt Uns is the most terrible battle cry in human history, because it permits anything, authorizes any atrocity, any genocide, any conquest. As Voltaire wrote; ““Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
As I wrote in my post of November 24 2024, A Stain of Cruelty On Our Armour: America’s Complicity In the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians; There’s a stain of cruelty on our armour, my fellow Americans, to paraphrase the line from Hamlet and Star Trek in season one, episode 13, The Conscience of the King; and the twistings and turnings of time and fate which have brought us to this place are many and strange indeed.
An aphorism from my youth promises us that hurricanes are born with the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings; soon we may have opportunity to test that proposition.
We have answered terror and death with terror and death, and this is both tragic and shameful. Force cannot answer force, nor heal the flaws of our humanity.
On this day and all too often, the Promethean Fire of the Torch of Liberty which illuminates the gates of our nation in New York Harbor did not reach across the wild seas to foreign shores. This is a great tragedy, and it is a tragedy which is ours and for which we must answer.
In Palestine and Lebanon our taxes buy the deaths of children.
Let us return to First Principles with a simple question; Who is suffering and in need of mercy? It is a similar question to the one I ask to determine when and how to use force and violence, Who holds power?, but with a very different direction as to the unfolding of our future.
Here in a Holy Land divided by the sectarian particulars of how to be human together in accord with the will of the Infinite as universal brotherhood and love, crimes which define the limits of the human are perpetrated against our most innocent, utterly powerless, and incapable of threatening anyone; children. Children whom the enemy of our humanity, the state of Israel and its sponsors including America, either brutalize and kill with glee in the hysteria of power or refuse to see and recognize in complicity. And our history surfaces one figure to represent all of the children sacrificed to power and hate, and doomed by the complicity of silence.
I ask you now, all of humankind, to abandon the path of our dehumanization and renounce genocide, ethnic cleansing, wars of conquest and dominion, and crimes against humanity.
I ask, I beg, I demand; I ask you in the name of Anne Frank.
As I wrote in my post of May 21 2024, Abjection Despair Horror: Surviving the Terror of Our Nothingness in the Mirror Of Gaza; In the mirror of Gaza the Abyss looks back at us, and we are captives of the distorted funhouse images of Israel and America, vestiges of dreams as refuge of the outcasts and guarantor of our universal human rights, and the monsters we have now become.
I can recognize nothing in the figures which confront us, and though I hurl defiance at the endless chasms of darkness my words find no limit and return no echoes, as if devoured by the Nothing.
Yet I am neither defeated by the overwhelming force and terror of Authority nor subjugated by despair and learned helplessness, for this is the space where I live, this horror, this joy, this freedom.
As Jean Genet said to me in 1982 during the Siege of Beirut, in a lost cause, in a burning house, in a time of great darkness; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
I hope that this remains true, for all of us as we struggle to emerge from the legacies of our history and seize our power from systems of oppression, for this is the great task of becoming human, in general and in this Rashomon Gate Event now unfolding in Rafah and elsewhere; to dream impossible things and make them real.
There are some things which should be true even if they never were, even if Keats was wrong and finding a thing beautiful does not make it so, even if Thomas Mann was right and love cannot redeem anything, even if as Tolkien feared we have arrived at the Black Gate with no bonds of brotherhood to unify us, even if as did Camus we must claw our way out of the ruins to make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
There are no Israelis, no Palestinians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
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?
What is Israel, if not a refuge for the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, among them the most demonized and persecuted people of human history, the Jews?
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 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.
As written by Jason Burke in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s Gaza plan could amount to war crime, say experts: Academics fear US president’s lack of reference to international law could lead to global breakdown of peace and security; “Donald Trump’s proposal to permanently move millions of Palestinians out of Gaza to allow its reconstruction under US “ownership” could amount to a war crime or crime against humanity, experts in international law have said.
The experts said the US president’s framing of his plan without any reference to international law set a dangerous precedent that would encourage other world leaders to do similarly and contribute to a global breakdown of peace and security.
“I was shocked as a scholar, a teacher of international law and as a human being,” said Dr Maria Varaki, a lecturer in international law at the department of war studies at King’s College London. “A head of state who makes no reference to international law … That’s very dangerous.”
The two most obvious codes potentially breached by the Trump plan are the Geneva conventions – international treaties agreed in 1949 governing the treatment of civilians and military personnel during conflicts – and the 1998 Rome statute, which established the international criminal court to bring to justice individuals suspected of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide where states either cannot or will not do so themselves.
Under both codes, the arbitrary and permanent forcible transfer of populations is a crime.
The International court of justice, the United Nations’ highest court, which adjudicates disputes between states, said in July that Israel met the definition of an occupying power in Gaza and so was bound by obligations set out under the fourth Geneva convention as well as its obligations under international human rights law.
There is provision, in some very specific circumstances and only when there is either military necessity or an imperative to protect their lives, for the temporary displacement of civilians, but not outside occupied territory and for the shortest time possible, said Sarah Singer, professor of refugee law at London University.
Under the Rome statute, which draws on the Geneva conventions, deportation or forcible transfer of a population is a crime, especially when committed as part of a wider or systematic attack on civilians.
Trump claimed that Palestinians in Gaza would be happy to leave. If true, this would have great legal significance, even if this is unlikely to have been one of the president’s primary concerns. However, the claim is systematically contradicted by Palestinians in the territory and elsewhere.
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, on Wednesday called for the UN to “protect the Palestinian people and their inalienable rights”, saying that what Trump wanted to do would be “a serious violation of international law”.
In addition, Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, an associate professor at the University of Warwick, said that by describing Gaza as a “demolition site” and so a place where human life could not be sustained, Trump had made an implicit admission that Israel had violated principles of discrimination and proportionality during its offensive in Gaza.
The Israeli offensive reduced swaths of the territory to rubble, destroying schools, homes, roads, clinics, sanitation systems, farms and much more. Huge areas of ruins are contaminated by chemicals and unexploded bombs.
Lemberg-Pedersen said Trump’s vocabulary had been revealing, and historic given his office and the implications of his statement.
“Trump referred to Gaza as a demolition site and said that those who go back there would die … That appears to be an admission that the Israeli offensive has resulted in the destruction of civilian infrastructure to the point where it cannot sustain people,” Lemberg-Pedersen said.
The Geneva conventions and Rome statute forbid attacks which do not distinguish between military targets and civilians or civilian homes and infrastructure, unless absolutely necessary for military operations. Collective punishment, including mass displacement and targeting of entire communities, is strictly prohibited.
Singer said that in the ICJ’s July 2024 advisory opinion, forcible transfer included coercion where civilians had no choice but to leave because to remain would put their lives at risk.
“So you have to leave because you have no options, when the alternative would be starvation, for example,” Singer told the Guardian.
Trump said current residents of Gaza would be moved and resettled “permanently” to be replaced by “the world’s people” who would inhabit an “international, unbelievable place”, though he added that many people including Palestinians would live there.
Volker Türk, UN high commissioner for human rights, said on Wednesday that the right to self-determination was a fundamental principle of international law and must be protected by all states.
Critics have said Trump’s plan “amount[s] to ethnic cleansing”, which the UN has defined as “… rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.”
The term was first used during the 1990s conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, but is not recognised as a crime in itself in international law.
“In legal terms, there is no code or international agreement with the words ethnic cleansing,” said Elena Katselli, of the Newcastle University law school.
But ethnic cleansing frequently includes a collection of criminal practices such as murder, rape, torture, arbitrary arrest or deliberate attacks on civilians, which could be war crimes, crimes against humanity or, in some circumstances, genocide.
“It is clear to me that powerful states want to rewrite the laws,” Katselli said.
Varaki decried Trump’s “absolute silence on the fundamentals of the international order”.
“We have no norms at all, so all the things that have been achieved since the second world war are threatened,” she said.”
As written by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, in an articled entitled Lethal fantasies of driving people from their land haunt the Middle East. Trump is fuelling them: Rarely has a US president proposed an idea more repugnant than this Gaza plan, with its appeal to old enmities; “The shock and awe continues and it only gets more shocking and more awful. These past few days, Americans have watched an unelected tech billionaire destroy large chunks of the federal government – Elon Musk bragged that he was feeding the life-saving USAid international development agency “into the wood chipper” – and yet that was not even the most outrageous event of the week.
That honour went instead to Donald Trump and his proposal to “just clean out” the Gaza Strip, by removing its people, bulldozing it and then redeveloping it as “the Riviera of the Middle East” under permanent US ownership. It was so staggering that it succeeded in dominating attention, at home and abroad, for several days rather than, as has become the norm in the less than three weeks since Trump returned to the White House, a meagre few hours before some new shocker took its place.
Initial reaction inside the US confirms how the US political classes, and what passes for the opposition, have been left numbed and punch drunk by the speed of events since 20 January and how far Trump has widened what was once quaintly referred to as the Overton window. He’s not just opened that window, but smashed the glass, knocked out the frame and taken out the wall that used to hold it. Now everything is thinkable and, therefore, permissible.
So domestic criticism of Trump’s Gaza plan focused largely on his suggestion that US troops be deployed on the ground in Gaza to enforce US ownership. Bad idea, said the Democrats and Republican senator Lindsey Graham: that would put Americans in harm’s way, recalling the 241 US marines who were sent to Beirut by Ronald Reagan, only to be killed in 1983 by a Hezbollah bomb.
Rahm Emanuel, who served as Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff, told me this week that to have the US seize Gaza would be to repeat both the Beirut calamity and the “hubris” of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, “the worst foreign policy mistake ever in United States history”. Indeed, it would be “Iraq and Lebanon on steroids”. Trump was meant to pull Americans out of Middle East wars, not plunge them into the oldest and bitterest of them all.
Others have faulted Trump for his timing. Just as negotiations were meant to begin on the second phase of the fragile ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, the US president has not so much destabilised the process as upended it. Israeli families waiting for loved ones held captive in Gaza for nearly 500 days now fear that Hamas has lost all incentive to continue releasing hostages or observing the ceasefire. Why would they stick with a deal brokered by a US whose ultimate plan is to empty Gaza of its population and turn it into a US-owned beach resort?
Plenty offer the now familiar advice that it’s unwise to take Trump too literally. This, they hope, is nothing more than a classic Trump negotiation tactic. You threaten the other party with a fate so awful they happily accede to the more modest request that was your true objective. So you threaten Canada with annexation as the 51st state, or 25% tariffs, and then get the trade or border concessions you actually want.
In this case, runs the logic, Trump announces a wholesale US takeover of Gaza and thereby pushes Saudi Arabia to do a deal with Israel on terms it would previously have rejected – stripped of a Palestinian state, say – just to avert that nightmare prospect, giving Trump the prize of a diplomatic breakthrough. Trump has form in this area. Recall how he put pressure on the UAE, Bahrain and others to agree the so-called Abraham accords with Israel in 2020 by threatening that the alternative would be US approval for Israeli annexation of the West Bank (a threat that, incidentally, Trump seems set to revive, hinting this week that he will announce his view of the West Bank’s future in the next month).
All these analyses and critiques have their merits, but they miss the big, ugly point. In rushing to assess the impact, they skip over the great wrong. This is not just another foreign policy proposal. This is a US president calling for his country to steal the land of another people 6,000 miles away by means of ethnic cleansing, and to do it for the sake of a lucrative real estate opportunity.
Such a move would leave international law in tatters, with only the law of the jungle in its place. That prospect delights Trump, which is why he announced sanctions on the international criminal court on Thursday. He relishes a world in which might is right, because the US has might.
But the Trump plan is not merely illegal. Trump has forever legitimised the messianic fever dreams of the Israeli ultranationalist far right, the likes of the thuggish Itamar Ben-Gvir and the fanatic Bezalel Smotrich, who oppose the ceasefire with Hamas because they want to rebuild Jewish settlements in Gaza to fulfil some warped notion of holy destiny. There is, moreover, an extra repugnance in seeing Trump and his acolytes eyeing up a piece of land that belongs to Palestinians, and that should be an integral part of a future independent state of Palestine, chiefly because it has investment potential.
Listen to David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel during his first term, who was asked who would live in Gaza after the envisaged 15-year rebuild is complete. It would be a “market-driven process,” he told the New York Times. “I know I’m sounding like a real estate guy,” he added, but just imagine the possibilities presented by “25 miles of sunset-facing beachfront”.
Trump said he had to empty Gaza of its people because the Strip had become uninhabitable. No one could possibly live there until it had been levelled and rebuilt. It was “hell,” “a demolition site”, every building flattened or at risk of collapse. Next to him sat a smirking Benjamin Netanyahu, the same Netanyahu who for 15 months insisted his bombardment of Gaza was targeted and discriminate.
Looking down on them both was the portrait, restored by Trump to the Oval Office, of one of his favourite predecessors, Andrew Jackson, the man who signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, an act of ethnic cleansing that expelled tens of thousands of native Americans from their ancestral homelands and left thousands dead.
Trump says Palestinians in Gaza will be delighted by the prospect of being “relocated” to another country and perhaps some, driven to despair by Israeli airstrikes and nearly two decades of Hamas oppression, will grab the chance to get out. But many won’t. They have an attachment to the land that will not be bought off by the promise of a condo far away.
And you know who should understand that better than most? Jews. They too were offered various alternatives back in the day, from Uganda to Madagascar to Alaska to a corner of Russia, but none ever gained serious traction, because there was only one place Jews ever regarded as their ancestral homeland. It is the same, small piece of land the Palestinians see exactly the same way. That is the tragedy of both peoples.
Each may fantasise about the land empty of the other, so they can have all of it to themselves, from the river to the sea. But those are dangerous fantasies, and a US president has no business fuelling them. Instead, both peoples are fated to share that land, one way or the other. Even the most powerful man in the world cannot wish them away.”
How will this threat of ethnic cleansing and imperial conquest and dominion to build a playground for white plutocrats be understood by the Palestinians?
As written by Yara Hawari in The Guardian, in an article entitled Palestinians have a clear message for Donald Trump over Gaza: ‘We are here, we won’t leave’: People have fought tooth and nail against killings, incarceration and displacement from their homeland. They will not give up; “Donald Trump’s first few weeks in office have sent a clear message: that he will support Benjamin Netanyahu’s vision for the permanent expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
This was evident even before his incoherent press conference on Tuesday with the Israeli prime minister, the first foreign leader to visit the US since the president’s inauguration. As usual, Trump began his speech by listing all his so-called achievements in the region – many illegal under international law – of his previous term, including the moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognition of Israel’s unlawful annexation of the Syrian Golan, and the Abraham Accords. Once he finished bestowing accolades upon himself, he presented his administration’s future plans for Gaza.
What followed was a stream of contradictions: he claimed that there would be no rebuilding in Gaza and also claimed that the US would lead the efforts in rebuilding; he claimed that Palestinians would have to leave and then said that the US would create jobs there for all people, not “just a specific group of people” and that Palestinians would continue to live there. The cognitive dissonance was palpable, and there were moments when even Netanyahu seemed confused. Trump also put forward the idea of US “ownership” over Gaza – whether or not that would mean the deployment of US troops was not confirmed. The ambiguity surrounding this statement reflects Trump’s usual incoherent rhetoric, but it also reflects his recently expressed desires to expand US territory, including to Canada and Greenland.
Within a week of the inauguration, the Americans were putting pressure on Egypt and Jordan to take in forcibly displaced Palestinians, in order to “clean out” Gaza. While some commentators and journalists in the mainstream media have expressed outrage at what amounts to a proposal for ethnic cleansing, they are conveniently forgetting that at the beginning of the genocide, the Biden administration was also floating the idea of expelling Palestinians to the Egyptian Sinai, in addition to consistently supplying the Israeli regime with weapons that aided the killing of more than 60,000 Palestinians. This kind of selective outrage over what Trump says versus what the Biden administration actually did is undoubtedly one we will see on repeat in the coming years.
However, crucially, it is essential to understand this not simply as a declaration of ethnic cleansing but also as a desire to continue the genocide the Israeli regime has been committing against Palestinians in Gaza for the past 16 months. It is equally essential to acknowledge how this genocide has expanded in the West Bank, where the Israeli army is razing refugee camps to the ground and displacing thousands of Palestinians. Jenin refugee camp, which has been enduring a weeks-long invasion by the army, has seen all of its residents forcibly expelled, dozens killed including children, and entire neighbourhoods blown up. This assault is clearly an assault on Palestinian life itself, and the aim is quite simple: to rid the land of as many Palestinians as possible.
In the face of all of this, Palestinians have not been passive actors – just as they never have been. Over the past 16 months, Palestinians in Gaza have also shown us what resistance to genocide looks like. They have refused to leave their homeland after massive destruction – the likes of which we have not seen in our lifetime. After Trump’s comments, Palestinians in Gaza have defiantly taken to social media to tell the leader of the most powerful country in the world that they will not leave their land. For example, the Gaza-based journalist Abubaker Abed wrote: “How can my future be decided by someone else? … We are here. And we won’t leave.”
This is hardly surprising. For more than seven decades, the Palestinian people have endured systematic killing, incarceration and displacement from their ancestral homeland by the Israeli regime. Yet they have fought their erasure tooth and nail. So while Trump’s comments are alarmingly genocidal, it is clear that he underestimates the Palestinian determination to stay on their land.”
Speaking as someone who has been defined by my resistance struggle against the Israeli Siege of Beirut in 1982 and for a future in which all human beings are equal and share the same universal human rights, throughout the world and ever since, where ever men hunger to be free, including Palestine, I will fight on to resist our dehumanization by state tyranny and terror and by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil like that of Netanyahu’s Israel and Trump’s Vichy America, and those who follow in my wake will fight on for a thousand years if necessary.
We can be killed, tortured, imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated.
In this context I paraphrase the iconic speech from Hunger Games; I have a message for Presidents Trump and Netanyahu. “You can torture us and bomb us and burn our nations to the ground. But do you see that? Fire is catching… And if we burn… you burn with us!”
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1; Fire Catches
Kingdom of Heaven trailer
Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate
This is who Trump and Netanyahu want to erase. I can’t abide it; can you abide it?
We witnessed this week the seizure of our federal and private data including social security, medicare, and tax records, our lives and retirement now held hostage against our subjugation to the Fourth Reich and its program of dismantling the institutions of the state and subversion of democracy, white supremacist terror, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, and the centralization of power and authority to a corporate model tyranny of force and control.
In this the Party of Treason’s coup from the top led by Traitor Trump and his paymaster the Troll King Elon Musk, in pursuit of dreams of the destruction of America and our remaking into a Nazi-Confederate state in the case of Trump and a Nazi-Apartheid regime in the case of Musk, our enemies weaponize faith, disparity, and white male grievance in service to power through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
This we must Resist By Any Means Necessary.
From where does this idea arise?
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
As written by Jean-Paul Sartre in his play of 1948 Dirty Hands: act 5, scene 3; “I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary. “
As Frantz Fanon said in his 1960 Address to the Accra Positive Action Conference, “Why we use violence”, and published in his book Alienation and Freedom: part 3, chapter 22; “Violence in everyday behaviour, violence against the past that is emptied of all substance, violence against the future, for the colonial regime presents itself as necessarily eternal. We see, therefore, that the colonized people, caught in a web of a three-dimensional violence, a meeting point of multiple, diverse, repeated, cumulative violences, are soon logically confronted by the problem of ending the colonial regime by any means necessary.”
As Malcolm X said in the speech of 1965; “We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”
While all of this remains true, and especially for those who pass through the Arch d’ Triumph and find themselves masters of the systems they wagered their lives to overthrow; we must 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.”
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled It is Elon Musk who is now running the United States. Not Donald Trump: An unelected billionaire is running the state through a shadow government without formal checks – the constitutional order, now, is largely window dressing; “It’s one of the humiliations of our historical moment that the constitutional order has been destroyed by such stupid and unserious people. On the trail with Donald Trump, the billionaire Elon Musk, who financed Trump’s campaign to the tune of about $250m, pledged to cut $2tn from the federal budget, a project that promised to wreck the economy, destroy the nation’s credit, eliminate programs and institutions that structure people’s lives and create an international economic and leadership vacuum into which America’s rivals – namely, China – could step.
This would have been ominous enough on its own. But because Musk is a narcissist and a nerd – because he insists on discarding solemnity and being ostentatiously irreverent and carefree as he destroys people’s lives – he named his new project the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, a juvenile reference to a years-old internet meme featuring a shiba inu.
It is under this idiotic banner that Musk has upended the American system of government, seizing an unprecedented, unelected and seemingly wholly unaccountable degree of personal power. Less than three weeks into the Trump restoration, Doge is well under way.
The group is not a government department; Musk is not a cabinet member and has not been subjected to a Senate confirmation process. But he now reportedly has an office in the West Wing, along with one in the Eisenhower executive office building across the street. At his direction, a small group of coders and engineers – men reported to be aged between 19 and 25 years old – are fanning out across federal agencies, seizing control of their sensitive data and making proposals for massive cuts.
Just days after Trump’s inauguration, Musk reportedly sent an email to all 2 million federal employees – subject line Fork in the Road – encouraging them to resign ahead of anticipated mass firings. Musk reportedly offered workers a buyout of seven months’ pay; it’s doubtful whether any of those who take him up on the offer will ever receive it.
Musk and his young followers have moved to shutter specific programs that they deem wasteful – including those whose funds have been allocated by Congress – and to shutter whole departments. He has declared the closure of USAid, America’s foreign aid agency, and is reportedly looking to eliminate much of the Department of Education and the Department of Labor, along with privatizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He has seized control of the treasury, and specifically the treasury’s payment system, granting himself a personal line-item veto on all government spending. He also has gained access to reams of private and sensitive data and has reportedly downloaded much of it on to private servers. He can access bank accounts, medical histories, income and debt records. If he cared to, he could look up your social security number.
No one elected Musk and very little of what he is doing is legal. It is Congress, not some random rich guy, who is granted the power of the purse, because the citizens deserve to have a say, through their elected representatives, in how the government spends their tax dollars. Federal civil servants are protected by law from purges, because the federal bureaucracy is supposed to serve the people of the United States, not to merely function as courtiers and enforcers of whim for some entitled billionaire who nobody has ever voted for.
There is a chance that Musk will be told to stop his unconstitutional dismantling of the federal government by a court order, one he might even obey; there is a chance that he will get scared, declare a hasty victory and back off. But that chance looks more and more remote. Musk, now, has seized control of many of the organs of state. There also does not seem to be any way to stop him.
Trump critics have long predicted an oncoming rift between Musk and Trump, but it’s not clear, exactly, that it is from Trump that Musk is deriving his power: his gutting of federal agencies and slashing of federal expenditures seems to be coming from his own preferences and impulses, not as any direction from the man who is nominally the president.
It may be Trump, that is, who sits in the Oval Office, and it may be Trump who takes to television every few days to sign yet another executive order seeking to punish and humiliate trans people. But it is Musk who controls government operations and federal spending, and so it is Musk who is running the country. The constitutional order, now, is largely window dressing. The reality is that a billionaire is running the state through a shadow government, and that his power has no formal check.
Another humiliation of our era: that to merely state what is happening sounds hyperbolic, even unhinged. Musk, after all, is such a morally small man – so transparent in his corrupt self-interest, so childish in his peevish self-regard – that it is hard to countenance him as such a profound agent of history.
He represents not so much the banality as the imbecility of evil: how shallow and vacuous it is. Yet Musk’s personal, private seizure of state power has thrown real doubt on whether the US constitution is still in effect. How can it be, if he upends its demands so heedlessly, and with such impunity? How can it be, if the power of the people’s elected representatives can simply be wished away by a man rich enough to buy anyone?
For a long time now, it has been clear that America was slipping out of a liberal democratic mode of governance and into something more vulgar and less accountable, something more like a privatized racket for the rich that extracts from and punishes the people, but never responds to their will. We knew this was coming. I just didn’t expect it to be so embarrassing.”
There is a gathering counterforce of Resistance to this, both in the streets and in legal and legislative spheres of action.
As written by Michael Sainato in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Constitutional emergency’: senior US Democrat demands inquiry into Musk’s government blitz: Exclusive: Bobby Scott sounds alarm over ‘void of oversight’ as Doge accesses sensitive data within US agencies; “Elon Musk’s blitz through the US federal government has triggered a “constitutional emergency”, a senior Democrat has warned, demanding the launch of an impartial investigation into billionaire tycoon’s access to sensitive data.
Robert C “Bobby” Scott, ranking member of the House committee on education and workforce and the Democratic leader on the committee, sounded the alarm over a “void of oversight” as the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), led by the world’s richest man, accesses information within a string of agencies including the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services.
In a letter seen by the Guardian, Scott demanded that the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog agency, launch an immediate investigation into “interventions” by Musk and his team into the departments’ IT systems, the legality of such moves and what it means “for children and vulnerable workers”.
“This is a constitutional emergency,” he wrote. “Insofar as the Inspectors General of the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services have been fired by President Trump, there is now a void of oversight for a very young and inexperienced team and their leader, the world’s richest man … as they gain dangerously broad powers.”
Scott calls for the agency to provide answers into the legality and impacts of Doge infiltrating private and sensitive data at these federal departments.
It comes after senior Democrats on the House oversight committee demanded an investigation into potential national security breaches by the unit.
Since Donald Trump took office for his second term, Musk and his staff have roiled government agencies in forcing access to servers and sensitive information, lacking congressional authority or oversight on their actions and prompting numerous lawsuits.
The letter noted public reports of the unit’s “infiltration” of Department of Education, which include private information of federal student aid recipients; the Department of Labor servers, which include sensitive information on workplace investigations and whistleblowers; and payment systems within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which include the personal health and financial information of millions of Americans.
On Thursday, the federal government reached an agreement with a judge to block the access of Doge to Department of Labor servers until the judge issues a ruling on a temporary restraining order on Friday. An immediate review “is still necessary”, wrote Scott, “given the uncertainty of any outcome in litigation”.
He asked the Government Accountability Office to assess whether the executive order the president used to formally establish Doge put in place “any controls” over its access classified information, or compliance with data protection standards. “Please use all authority at your disposal to undertake this review and complete it as quickly as possible.”
“The nation needs answers immediately about the scope of those powers; any laws, regulations, or other policies regarding access to these data and systems which may be implicated by DOGE’s infiltration; and the integrity of government programs on which schoolchildren and working families depend for their lives and livelihoods,” wrote Scott.”
President Musk, The Lincoln Project
Seth Meyers
Stephen Colbert
Jimmy Kimmel
Trump officials made bogus claims about what Musk’s DOGE team could do at Treasury: WIRED reporter Vittoria Elliott joins MSNBC’s Ali Velshi to discuss her reporting exposing the young, inexperienced members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team who are wreaking havoc in several agencies and gaining access to sensitive data, including one DOGE engineer who had access to Treasury’s payment systems when the White House said he did not.
We rejoice in the glorious Resistance which arose yesterday in mass actions and protests throughout America, against Traitor Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and shuttering of US Aid, and against Musk the Troll King’s monkeywrenching and sabotage of our nation’s social security, medicare, tax, and other financial records, a federal bank heist, espionage, and information warfare performed by his troupe of fascist child soldiers.
In the space of a few days we organized marches on every state capital in America as well as key federal sites in Washington DC, a broad spectrum of alliances and interests which united in solidarity of action to challenge and confront the criminal seizure of our government by the Republican Party, front organization of the Fourth Reich, a liberation movement which parallels legislative and legal actions and theatres of war.
For war is precisely the word for what is now upon us.
America now faces her “fight them on the beaches” moment; though we have been a theatre of the Third World War since the Stolen Election of 2016. But we have never before fought a war of survival against our own captured state.
In this great cause of liberty, equality, truth, and justice for all, of the American Way as a free society of equals wherein we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and rights as citizens who are co-owners of the state, I offer us all the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of darkness and terror; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to Resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
He wrote it in Paris 1940 for the new Resistance, rephrased from the oath of the French Foreign Legion he took in 1928; he said it was the finest thing he ever stole. And we now find ourselves in a parallel situation to that of Vichy France, and must engage the imposed conditions of struggle by the same means and strategies as then; hopefully we have learned a few new tricks since then. But Solidarity is the keystone, with Disbelief and Disobedience on either side.
This, this, this.
When they come for one of us, let them be met with all of us.
As written by AP in NBC News in an article entitled Protesters across the U.S. decry Trump administration policies; “Demonstrators gathered in cities across the U.S. on Wednesday to protest the Trump administration’s early actions, decrying everything from the president’s immigration crackdown to his rollback of transgender rights and a proposal to forcibly transfer Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
Protesters in Philadelphia and at state capitols in California, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, Indiana and beyond waved signs denouncing President Donald Trump; billionaire Elon Musk, the leader of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency; and Project 2025, a hard-right playbook for American government and society.
“I’m appalled by democracy’s changes in the last, well, specifically two weeks — but it started a long time ago,” Margaret Wilmeth said at a protest outside the Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. “So I’m just trying to put a presence into resistance.”
The protests were a result of a movement that has organized online under the hashtags #buildtheresistance and #50501, which stands for 50 protests, 50 states, one day. Websites and accounts across social media issued calls for action, with messages such as “reject fascism” and “defend our democracy.”
Outside the state Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, a crowd of hundreds gathered in freezing temperatures.
Catie Miglietti, from the Ann Arbor area, said Musk’s access to Treasury Department data was especially concerning. She painted a sign depicting Musk puppeteering Trump from his outraised arm — evoking Musk’s straight-arm gesture during a January speech that some have interpreted as a Nazi salute.
“If we don’t stop it and get Congress to do something, it’s an attack on democracy,” Miglietti said.
Demonstrations in several cities piled criticism on Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency.
“DOGE is not legit,” read one poster on the state Capitol steps in Jefferson City, Missouri, where dozens of protesters gathered. “Why does Elon have your Social Security info???”
Members of Congress have expressed concern that DOGE’s involvement with the U.S. government payment system could lead to security risks or missed payments for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. A Treasury Department official says a tech executive working with DOGE will have “read-only access.”
Trump has signed a series of executive orders in the first couple of weeks of his new term on everything from trade and immigration to climate change. As Democrats begin to raise their voice in opposition to Trump’s agenda, protests have multiplied.
Demonstrators strode through downtown Austin, Texas. They assembled in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park for a march to Georgia’s state Capitol and gathered outside California’s Democratic-dominated Legislature in Sacramento. In Denver, protests coincided with nearby operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and an unspecified number of people detained. Protesters in Phoenix chanted “deport Elon” and “no hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here.”
“We need to show strength,” said Laura Wilde, a former public school occupational therapist in Austin. “I think we’re in a state of shock.”
Thousands protested in St. Paul, Minnesota, where 28-year-old Hallie Parten carried a Democratic presidential campaign sign, revised to read “Harris Walz Were Right.” The Minneapolis resident says she was motivated by fear.
“Fear for what is going to happen to our country if we don’t all just do something about it,” Parten said.
At Iowa’s Capitol in Des Moines, protesters who joined the anti-Trump movement went inside to counter a registered event by the conservative parental rights group Moms for Liberty. The anti-Trump protesters shouted over the speakers in the rotunda for about 15 minutes before law enforcement pushed them outside, removing four demonstrators in handcuffs.
In Alabama, several hundred people gathered outside the Statehouse to protest actions targeting LGBTQ+ people.
On Tuesday, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey promised to sign legislation declaring that there are only two sexes, male and female — echoing Trump’s recent executive order for the federal government to define sex as only male or female.
“The president thinks he has a lot of power,” the Rev. Julie Conrady, a Unitarian Universalist minister, told the crowd. “He does not have the power to determine your gender. He does not have the power to define your identity.”
As written in The Guardian in an article entitled What is USAid and why does Trump dislike it so much?: The US agency distributes tens of billions of dollars’ worth of aid every year and is a key tool to promote soft power around the world; “Donald Trump’s administration has confirmed plans to merge the US international aid agency USAid into the state department in a major revamp that would shrink its workforce and align its spending with Trump’s priorities.
The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, declared himself the acting administrator of the agency and employees have been locked out of its Washington DC headquarters, while others have been suspended.
Trump has entrusted Elon Musk, the billionaire heading his drive to shrink the federal government, to oversee the project. On Sunday, Trump said USAid had “been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out”, while Musk called it “a criminal organization” without providing any evidence and said it was “time for it to die”.
What is USAid and how is it funded?
USAid was established in 1961 by Democratic president John F Kennedy at the height of the cold war with the aim of better coordinating foreign assistance, already a key platform of US foreign policy in countering Soviet influence.
It now administers about 60% of US foreign assistance and disbursed $43.79bn in the 2023 fiscal year. According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report this month, its workforce of 10,000, about two-thirds of whom serve overseas, assisted about 130 countries. USAid is funded by Congress, based on administration requests.
The CRS said USAid helps “strategically important countries and countries in conflict; leads US efforts to alleviate poverty, disease, and humanitarian need; and assists US commercial interests by supporting developing countries’ economic growth and building countries’ capacity to participate in world trade”.
Its top aid recipients in 2023 were Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan and Syria.
How much does the US spend on aid and how does it compare with other countries?
While the US gives more official government aid than any other country, its contribution as a percentage of national income is at the bottom of the list for wealthy countries in 2020, according to figures from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
In 2023, Norway topped the list at 1.09% of gross national income, while the US lagged at 0.24%, along with Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Spain.
In recent years, according to a Brookings Institution report from September, US aid spending has been about 0.33% of gross domestic product. It peaked at 3% of GDP in the 1950s with the Marshall plan program to rebuild Europe after the second world war. During the cold war, it ranged from 1% to a little less than 0.5%.
Nevertheless, in the 2023 fiscal year, the US as a whole disbursed a total of $72bn in assistance worldwide, and about 42% of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024. The funds covered everything from women’s health in conflict zones to access to clean water, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work.
Why does Trump oppose the agency’s work?
In an executive order on 20 January, Trump announced a 90-day pause in most of foreign aid, saying the “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.
“They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries,” it said.
In a memo, the administration urged USAid workers to join the effort to transform how Washington allocates aid in line with Trump’s “America First” policy and threatened disciplinary action for ignoring the orders. The actions rang alarm bells from refugee camps in Thailand to Ukraine war zones with humanitarian organizations and UN agencies saying they could face drastic curbs on their ability to distribute food, shelter and healthcare.
A source with knowledge of USAid’s workings said folding it into the state department would be a big departure. USAid has in the past been able to provide humanitarian assistance to countries with which Washington has no diplomatic relations, including Iran and North Korea. This has sometimes helped build bridges, the source said, and the benefit could be lost if its operations were purely tied to political objectives.
Is support for foreign aid bipartisan?
According to Brookings, Democratic administrations and lawmakers have historically been more supportive than Republicans, but every postwar president, whether Democrat or Republican, has been a strong proponent of foreign aid – apart from Trump.
It noted that proposals by the first Trump administration to cut the US international affairs budget by a third were rejected, as were attempts to delay congressional consideration of supplemental foreign aid legislation in 2024. And in a bipartisan vote in June, 80% of the members of the Republican-led House of Representatives rejected an amendment to eliminate foreign assistance from the fiscal 2025 budget.”
As written by Andrew Roth in The Guardian, in an article entitled Doge v USAid: how Elon Musk helped his acolytes infiltrate world’s biggest aid agency; “USAid security personnel were defending a secure room holding sensitive and classified data in a standoff with “department of government efficiency” employees when a message came directly from Elon Musk: give the Doge kids whatever they want.
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration last month, a posse of cocksure young engineers answering to Musk have stormed through Washington DC, gaining access to government computer systems as part of what Senator Chuck Schumer has called “an unelected shadow government … conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government”.
The young men, who are all under the age of 26 and have almost no government experience, have tapped into the treasury department’s federal payment system and vacuumed up employment histories at the office of personnel management (OPM). Roughly 20 Doge employees are now working out of the Department of Education, the Washington Post has reported, and have gained access to sensitive internal systems there too. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported they had infiltrated the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and accessed key systems as well.
The young engineers, whose identities have been confirmed to the Guardian, wanted the same at USAid. One of them, Gavin Kliger, was a 25-year-old techie who has defended the failed attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz as a victim of the “deep state” and claimed he had left behind a seven-figure salary to join Doge and “save America”. Another, Luke Farritor, 23, was a former SpaceX intern who had been given top-level clearances to USAid systems and had requested similar to Medicare and Medicaid. A third, Jeremy Lewin, was an AI specialist also reportedly assigned to the General Services Administration. A superior planned to lobby the CIA for a clearance for him after he failed to gain access to a secure area.
Some US officials had begun calling the young engineers the “Muskovites” for their aggressive loyalty to the SpaceX owner. But some USAid staff used another word: the “incels”.
The Guardian has identified three calls by Musk to USAid’s political leadership and security officers in which he demanded the suspensions of dozens of the agency’s leading officials, and cajoled and threatened senior USAid officials to give his acolytes private data and access to restricted areas. At one point, he threatened to call in the US Marshals Service.
One USAid employee said that the calls by Musk, two of which have not been previously reported, showed he had effectively usurped power at the agency even from the Trump administration’s political leadership. “Who is in control of our government?” the person said. “[Doge] basically showed up and took over.”
In the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, USAid had been presented as a pilot test for a large-scale overhaul of the federal government that would downsize agencies and arbitrarily move federal employees to looser contracts that made them easier to fire.
“If the Trump administration is successful here, they’re going to try this everywhere else,” said Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, a former USAid employee who came to protest alongside fired and furloughed workers outside the agency’s headquarters on Monday. “This is just the beginning.”
But it has also been a primer on how Doge operatives have inserted themselves into federal agencies and cajoled and bullied their way to access their most sensitive systems. This account of Doge’s infiltration of USAid is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former USAid, state department and other officials briefed on the events of the last week.
Security staff initially rebuffed the engineers’ efforts to talk their way into the secure rooms, called sensitive compartmented information facilities (Scifs), because they didn’t have the necessary security clearances. But that evening, Musk phoned a senior official at USAid to demand access for his subordinates, the first of numerous calls to officials and employees of Doge at USAid that have continued into this week.
Inside the building, chaos reigned. Areas that were once declared restricted, with limitations on electronics such as phones and watches, suddenly loosened their security protocols to allow in uncredentialed outsiders. Doge employees were said to obscure their identities to prevent online harassment, a tactic that was repeated at other agencies. And Peter Marocco, the controversial new director of foreign assistance at the state department, was stalking the halls and meeting in private with the Doge employees.
By Friday, things had gone further downhill. After a tense all-hands meeting with senior staff, and outsiders in the sixth-floor conference room, the young engineers rushed around the offices with their laptops, plugging cords into computers and other electronics as they gathered data from the agency.
After the meeting, Matt Hopson, a Trump appointee for USAid chief of staff, abruptly resigned. Jason Gray, the acting administrator, was removed from his position. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was soon to announce that he was the new administrator of USAid and appoint Marocco as his deputy. Musk was closing in on his goal.
The Doge employees had open access to rooms throughout the sixth floor, including the offices of the administrator’s suite. But the Scifs were still off limits.
At USAid, a newly installed leadership was formally in charge. But the real power lay with Marocco and Doge, which was plotting how to wind down the agency, a plan that Trump endorsed on Tuesday afternoon as he confirmed that teams were backed by the White House. That evening, USAid announced it would put all its direct-hire personnel around the world on administrative leave, a decision that would affect thousands of employees and their families.
Inside of USAid, the operation to shut down the decades-old operation was being run by Marocco, four engineers in their early 20s and the Doge leadership that contacted them by phone.
“It’s all being driven through Doge right now,” said a current USAid official, adding that Doge engineers in USAid headquarters continued to field calls from Musk and Marocco on Monday. “The folks in the building are turning the system off for [USAid employees], they’ve kept a small number of people from the different bureaus to help understand what programs will be kept and not kept, what the footprint will look like.”
The tension at USAid headquarters came to a head on Saturday evening, when Doge employees demanded access to the Scif on the agency’s sixth floor. They were stopped by the agency’s top security officer, John Voorhees.
Among those present was Steve Davis, according to one current and one former USAid official. Davis, a Musk deputy, has worked with the billionaire for more than 20 years at SpaceX and the Boring Company. He reportedly sometimes slept in the Twitter offices to help Musk slash costs there after he acquired it in 2022.
The argument over access to the Scif had grown verbally heated and senior Doge staff threatened to call in US marshals to gain access to it. During that standoff, according to one account made to the Guardian, a call was again made to Musk, who, as Bloomberg first reported, repeated the threat to involve the US Marshals Service.
Shortly after, Voorhees was placed on administrative leave and the Doge staffers entered the Scif. They took over the access control system and employee records. Within hours, the USAid website went down. Hundreds of employees were locked out of the system that weekend, and many still don’t know their status. (The Guardian has seen emails in which USAid administrators admit they do not know the employment states of current USAid officials.)
“I’ve been furloughed, I guess?” said one contractor with 15 years of experience for the bureau for humanitarian assistance, where she had helped coordinate urgent responses in Ukraine, Gaza, Somalia and Latin America. “I don’t know what my status is but I don’t think I work here right now.”
By Monday, Kliger wrote an email to all staff at 12.42am to tell them not to bother coming into the building that day.
The incident has illustrated how Doge employees with Musk’s backing were able to override USAid leadership and bypass government procedures for accessing restricted areas with classified materials, fueling criticism that his agency is a national security risk.
“Did Secretary Rubio allow this kind of access by Musk’s employees?” asked Kim. “It worries me about USAid but if it’s happening here, I’m guessing it’s probably happening at all these other national security agencies.”
Formally, Rubio has delegated responsibility to Marocco, who has been pressed by congressional staffers to give details of the changes affecting USAid and the $40bn in foreign aid it manages each year.
“The question at hand is: who’s in charge of the state department?” Senator Brian Schatz told the Guardian. “So far the answer has been Pete Marocco.”
Doge did not respond to questions about what security clearances, if any, the engineers held. “No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances,” wrote Katie Miller, a Doge spokesperson, on social media.
But Scifs are regulated by a strict protocol and it is unclear who could have verified the Doge employees’ credentials and filed the necessary paperwork to allow them to enter.
Inside the building, staffers said that Doge cultivated a culture of fear.
“It’s an extreme version of ‘who do you trust, when and how?’” said Kristina Drye, a speechwriter at the agency, who watched dozens of senior colleagues escorted out of the building by security. “It felt like the Soviet stories that one day someone is beside you and the next day they’re not.”
People started meeting for coffee blocks away because “they didn’t feel safe in the coffee shops here to even talk about what’s going on”, she added.
“I was in the elevator one morning and there was an older lady standing beside me and she had glasses on and I could see tears coming down under her glasses and before she got off her elevator she took her glasses off, wiped her eyes, and walked out,” she said. “Because if they see you crying, they know where you stand.”
As written by Glenn David in reference to the podcast Lights On With Jessica Denson; “Dear Congressman, I am so disappointed in you and the rest of your colleagues for not speaking up doing the right thing on January 6 and making sure that the worst domestic terrorist in the history of our country would not occupy our White House. I hope you know by now that it is clear that the election was a fraud. I hope you know by now that Kamala Harris actually won the election. I’m not sure why you continue to attempt to think that we have a democracy at this point. Our democracy ended on January 6, 2021. The coup attempt on that day came to a successful completion on January 6, 2025. You had a hand in that successful coup. Everything that has happened since the phony inauguration day for an illegally occupying president was so predictable and so avoidable had you done the right thing. Now we are looking at a complete fascist takeover and a complete dissolution of our constitution. There have been so many impeachable offenses in the last two weeks and still no action from you or your colleagues to the point where it makes a difference. Talk is cheap and actions speak volumes. What has to happen before you actually do something of value for this country? Please listen to the attached video as I hope that you have heeded all of the information I have sent you previously. The people of this country do not want an insurrectionist, malignant narcissist, pathological lying dictator who wants to take everything from the bottom 98% and give it to the already sickeningly wealthy. We are doing our part to resist fascism and defend our constitution, I think it is time our elected officials do so as well.”
Lights On with Jessica Denson
Lights on! Americans answered the call for a 50-state 50-protest (50501), and are flooding the streets to demand action against the hostile takeover by illegitimate president Trump and his foreign national controller Elon Musk. Jessica Denson, who spearheaded the #14thNOW movement to block Trump’s illegal presidency, is joined by friends and activists across the country, as well as former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter to discuss the criminal and civil actions that must be taken now. Jessica reports, LIVE.
Torch of Liberty 