Throughout America and the world courageous students protest and occupy their universities in refusal to be silenced or made complicit in genocide, either by institutional profiteering on crimes against humanity through investments or by state sponsorship of war, tyranny, and terror.
Much of this rage is directed at Traitor Trump now as it was at Genocide Joe on this day last year, both of whom betrayed us and abandoned our ideals of universal human rights as our tax dollars buy the deaths of children, doctors, journalists, and other civilians in Israel’s Gaza War and imperial conquest of her neighbors.
But American complicity in Israeli war crimes and state terror and tyranny did not begin with Trump and Biden’s sock puppet Netanyahu in games of imperial dominion with Iran and Russia; it began generations ago in the wake of the Holocaust at the founding of the nation which was intended to protect us all from fascism, and has now has come round to become all that it once feared, reproducing the conditions of Auschwitz and the concentration camps throughout Israel itself and wherever its power can reach.
Tonight the tyrants Trump and Netanyahu and their co conspirators and apologists of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, imperial conquest and dominion, kleptocracy, abandonment of our universal human rights, and dehumanization will laugh and congratulate each other on the mad and criminal scheme to exterminate the Palestinians and build a riviera of casinos and luxury hotels on their graves, while in Gaza real human beings will die horribly in cities become vast crematoriums.
In the words of the magnificent character of Lt Aldo Raine in Inglorious Basterds; “I can’t abide it. Can you abide it?”
Hope and a Prayer
This Passover, stand against genocide.
This Passover, stand with the children.
This Passover, turn not the Stranger from your door.
This Passover, chose love and not hate.
Trump-Netanyahu Gaza Plot: A Riviera on the graves of the Palestinians
Can You Abide It? Inglorious Basterds final scene
Bernie Calls Out Netanyahu On Genocide
(In stark contrast with Genocide Joe and Traitor Trump, here is an American politician with heart, moral vision, and the courage to speak truth to power. Who will stand with us?)
Mr. Netanyahu, antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to millions.
Do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government. pic.twitter.com/CnM6oOrHKd
I was nine years old, holding my mother’s hand in the front line of the divestiture protest against the University of California’s sponsorship of Israeli state terror and crimes against humanity in the Occupation of Palestine when Reagan ordered the police to open fire on the students on Bloody Thursday May 15 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley, the most terrible incident of state terror in American history since Wounded Knee.
Fifty six years, and we have learned nothing, changed nothing. There is but one rule in American politics; nobody messes with the grift.
Only Resistance and Revolution can bring the kind of change we need to free us from the legacies of our history and systems of oppression.
2 באפריל 2025 בפסח הזה, עמוד נגד רצח עם. בפסח הזה, עמוד עם הילדים: המחאות והכיבושים של השלום וההסרה
ברחבי אמריקה והעולם סטודנטים אמיצים מוחים וכובשים את האוניברסיטאות שלהם בסירוב להשתיק או להיות שותפים לרצח עם, אם על ידי רווח ממוסד על פשעים נגד האנושות באמצעות השקעות או על ידי חסות מדינה למלחמה, עריצות וטרור.
חלק גדול מהזעם הזה מופנה לטראמפ הבוגד עכשיו כפי שהיה לרצח העם ג’ו ביום הזה בשנה שעברה, ששניהם בגד בנו ונטש את האידיאלים שלנו של זכויות אדם אוניברסליות, כאשר כספי המס שלנו קונים את מותם של ילדים, רופאים, עיתונאים ואזרחים אחרים במלחמת עזה של ישראל ובכיבוש האימפריאלי של שכנותיה.
אבל שותפות אמריקאית בפשעי מלחמה ישראלים ובטרור ועריצות המדינה לא התחילה עם בובת הגרב של טראמפ וביידן נתניהו במשחקי שליטה אימפריאלית עם איראן ורוסיה; היא החלה לפני דורות בעקבות השואה עם הקמת האומה שנועדה להגן על כולנו מפני הפשיזם, וכעת הפכה לכל מה שפחדה ממנה, משחזרת את תנאי אושוויץ ומחנות הריכוז ברחבי ישראל עצמה ובכל מקום שכוחה יכול להגיע.
הלילה הרודנים טראמפ ונתניהו ושותפיהם הקושרים ומתנצלים של רצח עם, טיהור אתני, פשעי מלחמה, כיבוש ושליטה אימפריאלית, קלפטוקרטיה, נטישת זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו ודה-הומניזציה יצחקו ויברכו זה את זה על התוכנית המטורפת והפושעת של בתי הקזינו והקברות שלהם, תוך השמדת בתי הקזינו והקברות שלהם. בעזה בני אדם אמיתיים ימותו בצורה נוראית בערים שיהפכו למשרפות עצומות.
במילותיה של דמותו המפוארת של סגן אלדו ריין ב-Inglory Basterds; “אני לא יכול לעמוד בזה. אתה יכול לעמוד בזה?”
תקווה ותפילה
בפסח הזה, עמוד נגד רצח עם.
בפסח הזה, עמדו עם הילדים.
בפסח הזה, אל תפנו את הזר מדלתכם. חג הפסח הזה, בחר באהבה ולא בשנאה
Here in five acts as in a theatrical performance of myself do I offer my thoughts on Poetry Day, with an autobiography in poems, best poetry lists, and an example of my writing process.
Do write a poem of one’s own to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, every day if possible; it’s a tool for processing the experience of life and for creating meaning and connection.
Act One
A definition of terms, or What is Poetry?
First before all must be the true names of things.
Words matter. They can divide us, and they can unite us. Words can exalt and defile; they can shape our images and possibilities of becoming human and create or limit the worlds to which we can aspire, they can replace stones we hurl at one another and heal the pathology of our disconnectedness.
Always treasure words, for they represent the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and harbour imaginal creative power. We bear them forward as memories, histories, identities, like the shells of fantastic sea creatures; sounds which are analogies of form or what Gaston Bachelard called coquilles au parole.
So also do they bear us forward, and await their moment of wakefulness as seeds of becoming.
Act Two
Being an Apology for my digressive ars poetica; my writing style is idiosyncratic and strange, but so am I.
Once I sailed on the Lake of Dreams, was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision; and in such visions I fell into a sea of words, images, songs, histories, layered and interconnected with one another like a web of reflections and the echoes of voices lost in time, a wilderness of mirrors which capture and distort and extend ourselves infinitely in all directions.
Here is a shadow self of our histories which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tale and tail, legacies from which we must emerge to create ourselves anew and those which we cannot abandon without losing who we are.
Here my intertexts are manifest, seize and shake me with tumultuous voices and untrustworthy purposes, for where do our histories end and we begin?
We cannot escape each other, my shadows and I.
Act Three
An offering, ephemeral as memories borne by perfume and soaring on the wind, up into the gaps of reality through the gates of our dreams, to the Infinite, free from the flags of our skin, of which only echoes and reflections remain, etched upon our histories by the lightning of illumination to balance against the terror of our nothingness.
Sounds and Echoes
Once there was a sound
Without a shell to echo it
Not the vast roar and thunder
Of the sea
And her moonstruck tides
Chaos and the birth of universes
Undulating with the splendor of life
In all our thousands of myriads
Limitless possibilities of becoming
Dance with the Impossible in rapture and terror
Hope and despair, faith in each other as solidarity of action
Versus the pathology of our disconnectedness
And the lightning shatters us with fracture and disruption,
Sublimes the chasms of darkness we are lost in
A negation which is also a gift
Opening spaces of free creative play
Such is the embrace of death as liberation
From the limits of our form,
The flaws of our humanity,
And the brokenness of the world.
We escape the spirals of our shell
Soar among celestial spheres
Become exalted and defiled
Free and nameless as wild things
I am sound and echo
Abandoning the shell I have sung myself free from
Where am I now?
Act Four
Manifestoes of Action; poetry as revolutionary struggle.
As I wrote in my post of October 14 2021, On Art as Poetic Vision, Transgression, Seizure of Power, Reimagination, and Transformation: a Manifesto; Why do I write?
I offer here a manifesto of art as poetic vision, reimagination and transformation in the contexts of the performance of identities and in the guerilla theatre of political action and revolutionary struggle.
Art is transgressive when it challenges and violates our ideas of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, it is a seizure of power and refusal to submit to authorized identities which confers freedom and autonomy through becoming self-created and self-owned, Unconquered and beyond subjugation by force and control, and it is poetic vision as Surrealist reimagination and transformation when it depicts and guides our passage through the labyrinth of time, history, memory, and the falsification of our captured and distorted images in the wilderness of mirrors, lies, and illusions, to enact our rapture and exaltation, our transcendence into realms of dream and of vision wherein rules do not apply and when it seizes us with truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Art is intended to question and transform the rules and substance of human being, meaning, and value; to discover within the boundaries and interfaces, the silent and empty places of change and the limitless adaptive potential of systems, of unknowns, disconnects, misaligned juxtaposition and strange angles of view, new possibilities of becoming human.
I first understood the power of the unknown as a force of liberation as a boy whose bedroom wall was a collage of Bosch prints, curious and strange, which I would project myself into as dream gates. William S. Burroughs, beatnik friend of my father the counterculture theatre director, would show up for dinner without warning and tell weird fairytales into the night; he also drew curious figures into the collage of heavens and hells, and here was a definition of art and of its purpose; transformation of the possibilities of becoming human through reimagination and ecstatic poetic vision.
This is why I claim as the purpose of my writing to incite, provoke, and disturb; change and growth originate in disruption, fracture, and chaotization, and in the four primary duties of a citizen; to question, mock, expose, and challenge authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
This free space of play, of the unknown as unclaimed space and the adaptive potential of a system, whose boundaries like the known shores on our maps of becoming human frame the range of choices and act as authorized identities and an intrinsic limit on freedom as future possibilities, remains outside and beyond all limits and systems of knowledge, like Gödel’s Theorem; no matter how much we learn and shift the boundaries of the known universe, the Infinite remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance.
If so the task of becoming human involves Bringing the Chaos; reimagination and transformation, the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
As I wrote in my post of December 21 2022, We Are the Toys of Santa’s Workshop, and We Are Made of Words; On this day of winter solstice, darkest of all our days, and possibly as democracy itself begins to die from lack of faith as Tinkerbell warns us with the ritual command to clap our hands lest the faeries die, as Russia and China test our will and threaten to unleash global nuclear war and the fall of civilization, as the survival or extinction of our species hangs in the balance under threats of war, pandemic, and ecological catastrophe, as the Pentagon on this day only one year ago issued rebukes without accountability as tacit authorization to the fascist infiltrated and subverted military units on the brink of mutiny and civil war, it is good to remember who we are, who we have chosen to be, and who we wish to become.
Now is the time to rage against the dying of the light.
When those who would enslave us come for any one of us, let them find an America and a humankind not subjugated with learned helplessness or divided by exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united in solidarity and resistance.
And in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free.
Owning our stories as the songs of ourselves is a primary human act in which we become autonomous and self-created beings; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
The first question we must ask of our stories is this; whose story is this?
If we imagine the processes of our construction as a vast workshop like that of Santa’s elves, I believe that the parts of our assemblage are words and the rules for using them to create meaning as grammar.
As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake, a work which he began in 1922 with the German publication of the TLP and which occupied the rest of his life, as a response like that of Yeats in The Second Coming and of T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland to the collapse of civilization in three successive waves of mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
He envisioned a united humankind wherein war is no longer possible, a world without emperors and kings or the carceral states and colonialist empires they rule with their silly little flags and terrible divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game.
Joyce was a master of languages and chose this as his instrument for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and for the rebirth of civilization.
And this love of languages as free creative play in which we ourselves are the artifact and product of our art is what caught my attention and created my teenage identification with Joyce. For I love languages and had grown up with three voices; English as my primary and home language, though shaped by immersion in the rhythms and phrases of the King James Bible and the Dutch language of the Reformed Church which surrounded me in the town where I was raised. Languages are a hobby of mine, often grounded in reading books which have immeasurably shaped my own writing and speaking style and turn of phrase.
Chinese is my second language from the age of nine, study which included Traditional Chinese inkbrush calligraphy and conversation with my teacher of martial arts, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and much else, who spoke, in addition to superb British English full of Anglo-Indian and Shanghailander idiom, the Wu dialect of Shanghai and the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, as well as Mandarin, Japanese, and other languages, having served in the Chinese military from 1920 when he joined the Whampoa Military Academy through the Second World War, escaping the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in 1969 when my father arranged for him to teach me. He was a window into other worlds and times to me, was Sifu Dragon.
As my third language I studied French in school rather than English from seventh grade through high school. This Defining Moment bears interrogation; during seventh grade I took the AP English test given to high school seniors for university credit and tested out of English classes through senior year of high school. This was among tests arranged by my parents and teachers who conspired to force me into high school two years early, and had tried with math the previous year, which I absolutely refused but for one class, where I traded seventh grade English for Freshman French literature and language, a chance I fell upon with ravenous delight.
The French teacher was a blonde goddess, and here imagine the reporter Rita Skeeter played by Miranda Richardson who corners Harry Potter in the broom closet in The Goblet of Fire, who motivated her students by offering a trip to Paris, with her, after graduation from high school for the best senior French student each year; competition for this honor was fierce, and I was a very, very good student. Thanks for the soft landing in high school, Miss Starring.
Brazilian Portuguese was my fourth language, though limited to conversational proficiency, legacy of a formative trip in the summer of my fourteenth year just before starting high school.
It was during that summer, my first solo foreign travel, to train as a fencer with a friend from the tournament circuit for the Pan American Games planned to be held there the following year, that I witnessed a crime against humanity, the massacre of street children who had swarmed a food truck, a trauma and disruptive event followed by weeks in which I helped them evade the police bounty hunters who ruled the streets as apex predators.
From the moment I saw what the guards were shooting at beyond the walls of the palace in which I was a guest, I chose my side, and I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
We all seek paths of healing from trauma, and of hope and the redemptive power of love in transforming the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. I found such paths in literature as poetic vision, and in our languages and our stories as instruments with which we can operate directly on our psyche and take control of our adaptation and the evolution of human consciousness as an unfolding of intention. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and for this primary insight I owe the effects of reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions. I had begun my search for meaning and my Freshman year of high school by reading Anthony Burgess’ Napoleon Symphony, a novel which questioned my hero Napoleon and illuminated two of my other heroes Beethoven and Klimt, then turned to the study of language itself; S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, and Wittgenstein’s TLP, before discovering Joyce.
James Joyce’s linguistics scholarship was immense; he took Italian as his third academic language, taught himself Dano-Norwegian as a teenager to read his adored Ibsen in the original, and his modern languages degree cites Latin, Italian, French, German, and Norwegian. He loved languages and studied them as a game, as do I; his adult fluency included Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Russian, Finnish, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Modern Greek.
All of this went into his masterpiece Finnegans Wake, written in a private language filled with games and experiments of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety according to the principle of Wittgenstein that because all rules are arbitrary they can be reimagined and changed at will and ourselves with them, a language densely layered with literary allusions and references, loaned and invented words, and of signs with multiple meanings like the paths of a labyrinth. You need a working knowledge of several languages to get the jokes; no wonder I loved him.
I’m not sure it’s intended to communicate anything, so coded and laden with puzzles is his new language; like the notation for the principles of a system by which to create and order the universe. He spent the rest of his life searching for the lost runes able to break and reforge the oaths and bindings of existence, to renew ourselves and our world; perhaps he found them.
Though I may claim no such realization of a guiding vision of our limitless possibilities of becoming human nor Quixotic quest to create and affirm that which is human in us as he, Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake demonstrated for me a great truth which has illuminated my understanding ever since; we are made of our ideas and of our stories, and forged with our words and our languages.
We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?
Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?
Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2020, The Transformative Power of Art: a Manifesto; The transformative power of art, its ability to reframe our ideas about self and other, to shift boundaries, reassign values, reclaim history and identity from silence, erasure, marginalization, and the authorization of inequalities of power and divisions of exclusionary otherness; these are among the vital functions which make art a primary human and social activity.
Art as poetic vision precedes and parallels politics as a means of changing our civilization and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; it represents a power held by autonomous individuals and communities against the tyranny of state force and control. Politics is a social art which is primary to our interdependent human nature and processes of becoming human. Through our words, images, and performance we can question, mock, expose, and challenge authority and incite, provoke, and disturb others in bringing transformational change to the systems and structures within which we are embedded, and I hope liberate us from them.
Art is life, for it involves us personally and directly in processes of adaptive growth and in renegotiation of our social contracts and relationships with others, both personal and political, and informs and motivates the performance of our identities.
If we are caught in a rigged game, we must change the rules and terms of struggle. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, authority delegitimized, traditional systems and structures interrogated, limits transgressed, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities of becoming human discovered.
We must question, expose, mock, subvert, transgress, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. For there is no just authority.
Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As I wrote in my post of December 30 2021, The Year in Review; In these last days of 2021, my thoughts turn to the year in review; to Defining Moments, both for myself as a witness of history and for the world as informing, motivating, and shaping forces of human being, meaning, and value and of memory, history, and identity, the stories of which we are made, and to the causes I have championed and the threats to our future possibilities of becoming human which remain.
Herein I write as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and in the role Foucault described as a truth teller in reference to parrhesia and the four primary duties of a citizen; to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty proclaims, my intent is to provoke, incite, and disturb, and I hope that you have found my daily journal useful as a resource for international antifascist action and resistance, revolutionary struggle, liberation and democracy movements, forging networks of allyship and solidarity, founding autonomous zones, and seizures of power both personal and political.
During my years as a Forensics teacher and debate coach, I began the first day of each new year with a demonstration of purpose. On my desk I would place a solid base with the words; “This is a fulcrum”. Across it I would set a teeter totter saying; “It balances a lever.” And finally; “When your parents ask you what you’re learning in Forensics, tell them you’re learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.” Such is my hope now for us all.
Truth telling as an ars poetica is about the regenerative and transformational power of truth in the sense that Keats used when he spoke of beauty, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”
But truth telling is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky. On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
Act Four
A benediction
May yours be days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
Act Five
A coda in the form of Modern American and World Literatures reading lists, which like all reading lists that claim to represent a canon of literature is nothing less than a set of authorized identities.
Here I have disambiguated Modern American Poetry from authors who cannot be represented among the six ethnicities to make it easier for people to find authors who speak for them and offer spaces to grow into, as the original purpose of my lists, which eventually included 27 national literatures, was for choice reading for high school students free from state and school board control or any criteria other than quality.
Here also I offer an autobiography in poems, entitled The Grief of Influence, my choices of best poetry of the last couple years, and an explication on my writing process with examples.
The Grief of Influence: an autobiography in poems
We may tell our stories through the works we have cherished and the circumstances we discovered and made them our own, as voices in which we share and which can speak both to and for us; identity is a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation to change across time.
This is especially true regarding works in which the thoughts of others across vast epochs of time, cultural schema, paradigms and topologies of human being, meaning, and value have become our own through reading, described so deliciously in the title of the foundational book by Heather Clark on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Grief of Influence.
First was Gary Snyder’s Smokey the Bear Sutra, a talisman of protective magic sung by my mother and others when police fired on student protestors in the most terrible incident of state terror since the Civil War, Bloody Thursday People’s Park Berkeley 1969. I was nine, holding my mother’s hand, when I was hurled from my body by the concussive force wave of a police grenade and Most Sincerely Dead for moments while I stood outside of time and beheld myriads of possible futures. I returned to the sideral universe from my Awakening in my distraught mother’s arms and said; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but awakening from an illusion.”
Second must be the poem that fired my imagination and anchored how I constructed identity through romantic love with my partner Dolly, The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. I cast us into the roles of the tragic lovers as a past life when I discovered the poem at the age of twelve, as things began to change in my feelings about our relationship during a sixth grade year mostly devoted to reading the classic study of folklore, Frasier’s Golden Bough. We created an elaborate backstory for our romance of shared lives across centuries from shared dreams and historical research to verify them. Above all was the idea that we transcend our moment in time and the limits of our form, grounded in the discovery that we shared the same dreams.
Third was a mysterious book which appeared on our doorstep during my seventh grade year, bound in leather and hand written in strange inks in Chinese, Japanese, and English, of classical Taoist and Zen poetry annotated as a book of strategy for a game I later discovered was Go, almost certainly written by my teacher of martial and other arts whom I called Sifu Dragon. I began studying with him when I was nine until 1986 when he went into seclusion at the age of 84, and though I had many other teachers he was a second father to me and the poetry he introduced me to remains a primary influence; that summer I went to Japan to walk Basho’s Narrow Road and see where he wrote his poems.
Fourth is Nietzsche’s beautiful epic poem of rebellion against authority, Thus Spake Zarathustra, which I adopted in eighth grade as a counter-text to the Bible. It was an unspeakable joy to discover at long last someone who spoke for me, and in my Dutch Reformed Church town lost in time an hour’s drive from San Francisco, ruled by a church allied with the South African Apartheid regime and where I witnessed what I hope was the last witch burning in America as a child, I used to quote Zarathustra to fellow school children who quoted the Bible to me. No gods and no masters, indeed.
Fifth was the poem I recited to my peers at as a Freshman in high school, Invictus by William Ernest Henley. At the first assembly of the new school year members of the incoming class were asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle.
Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; “I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I’m hoping we can be friends.
The poem I’ve chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
and yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.“
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
Sixth is James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, designed as a labyrinth of transformation to forge a new humankind. As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake. In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game. In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions in World War One. Languages are a hobby of mine, and I have tried to inhabit the thoughts of others through their languages wherever I go, though like Joyce I have not yet found the code of meaning which unifies humankind and may be able to help us escape the flags of our skin and the legacies of our history.
If we can call the plain speech of our everyday lives poetry as I learned from my friend Susan Sontag, here I signpost the influence of Shakespeare on my language as I spent most of my Freshman year at university speaking in iambic pentameter, and spent much of the next two summers as an actor at the Renaissance Faire at Blackpoint Forest half an hour from my home in Sonoma; The Tempest remains my favorite, after Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare I regard now as the Humanist half of modern English with the theocratic tyranny of William Tyndale’s beautiful King James Bible in which I was immersed as a child in a town of people whose mouths were full of thees and thous, and its rhythms and curious turns of phrase have stayed with me.
Last among my influences I count the visionary poetry of Blake, and then Rumi as reimagined by Coleman Barks which was my gateway to scholarship of Sufi poetry as I turned thirty. In Srinagar, Kashmir that was, where I sailed on the Lake of Dreams and was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision.
Here follows my very personal lists of best poetry for American and World literatures; but this is an absurd idea, for a poem which is useful to one person may not be useful to another, and will bear a weight of different dreams, meanings, and values.
Any text, including the stories of our lives, history, memory, identity, is a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, ephemeral and in constant and recursive processes of change.
By what possible criteria, then, can we establish normalities and standards which cross the immense boundaries between us to become interfaces?
In this I can speak only to what has been useful to myself in the construction of identity over my lifetime.
Each of us must choose and create such lists of immortal classics and life changing informing and motivating sources.
One might begin such a search from here, with the works which have become truths written into my flesh.
Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, Jim Perlman (Editor)
Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein
Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, Lisa Cole Ruddick
Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, James R. Mellow
The Poetry of Robert Frost, Robert Frost, Latham ed
Robert Frost: A Life, Jay Parini
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (edited by Thomas H. Johnson), Emily Dickinson
The Passion of Emily Dickinson, by Judith Farr
Complete Poems, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition 8 Volume Set (Ronald Schuchard Editor), T.S. Eliot
Dove Descending: A Journey into T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Thomas Howard
T.S. Eliot’s the Waste Land (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations), Harold Bloom
T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Lyndall Gordon
The Complete Poems 1927-1979, Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, Susan McCabe
W.H. Auden; poems selected by John Fuller
W.H. Auden: a commentary, John Fuller
Collected Poems, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (Bloom’s Major Poets) Harold Bloom ed
Opus Posthumus, Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Harold Bloom
Collected Poems, 1912-1944, Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion, Helen in Egypt, Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall and Advent, HERmione, Palimpsest, White Rose and the Red, The Sword Went Out to Sea: Synthesis of a Dream, (as Delia Alton), H.D.
The H.D. Book, Robert Duncan
The Dream Songs, John Berryman
A, Complete Short Poetry, Le Style Apollinaire: The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire, Bottom: On Shakespeare, Prepositions +: the Collected Critical Essays, Louis Zukofsky
Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, Mark Scroggins
The Collected Poems, The Bell Jar, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
(Karen V. Kukil Editor), Sylvia Plath
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Heather Clark
Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Judith Kroll
Selected Poems, 1945–2005, Robert Creely
Collected Poems 1947-1997, Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems, Deliberate Prose – Essays 1952 to 1995, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996, The Fall of America Journals, 1965–1971, Alan Ginsberg
The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, Jason Shinder ed
I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, Bill Morgan
Revolutionary Letters 50th Anniversary Edition, Spring and Autumn Annals, The Poetry Deal, Diane di Prima
Mountains and Rivers Without End, The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, Gary Snyder
A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems, I Praise My Destroyer: Poems, Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire, Diane Ackerman
Selected Poems, Michael McClure
The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton: A Biography, Diane Wood Middlebrook
The Maximus Poems, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems (George F. Butterick Editor), Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews, Charles Olsen
What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson’s “The King-Fishers”, Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography, Ralph Maud
The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition, Stephen Fredman
Ground Work I: Before the War, Ground Work II: In the Dark, Selected Poems, Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan
Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, Bertholf editor
Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness, Peter O’Leary
On Opening the Dreamway, James Hillman
A Poet’s Mind: Collected Interviews with Robert Duncan 1960-1985, Wagstaff
An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle, Michael Duncan
The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, Amy Clampitt
The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons: Volume 1 (1955-1977), Volume 2 (1978-2005), Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues, A.R. Ammons
The Collected Poems, New & Selected Essays, Tesserae: Memories & Suppositions, Denise Levertov
A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov, Donna Hollenberg
The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia
Hypodermic Light: The Poetry of Philip Lamantia and the Question of Surrealism, Steven Frattali
The Dead and the Living, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002, Stag’s Leap: Poems, Arias, Sharon Olds
Selected Poems, Robert Bly
Collected Poems: 1950-2012, Adrienne Rich
The Problem of the Many, Timothy Donnelly
Averno, The Triumph of Achilles, Faithful and Virtuous Night, Proofs and Theories, American Originality, Louise Gluck
The Lost Spells, Robert Macfarlane
Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015, Just Kids, M Train, Year of the Monkey, Devotion, Patti Smith
Best World Poetry
Germany
The Novices of Sais, Novalis, Paul Klee (Illustrator)
Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche
The Lost Gold of Exploded Stars: complete poems, Georg Trakl
Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, Paul Celan
Conjurations: poems of Sarah Kirsch
Britain & Ireland
The King James Bible, William Tyndale
The Tempest, Midsummer Nights Dream, Shakespeare
Complete Poems and Selected Letters, John Keats
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Kublai Khan, Coleridge
Complete William Blake
Lord Byron: The Major Works, McGann ed
John Milton: The Major Works, Goldberg & Orgel eds
Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, James Joyce
Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996, Seamus Heaney
Selected Poems & Three Plays, Yeats, Rosenthal ed.
Selected Poems, Prose Occasions 1951-2006, Thomas Kinsella
Crow, Tales From Ovid, Cave Birds: an Alchemical Romance, Birthday Letters, Howls & Whispers, Gaudette, The Oresteia, Prometheus on his Crag, Ted Hughes
Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, Ali Smith
China
Bright Moon, White Clouds: Selected Poems of Li Po, Li Po, J.P. Seaton
(Translator)
The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, Du Fu, David Hinton (Translator)
Eastern Europe
Chanson Dada: Selected Poems, Tristan Tzara
New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, Czesław Miłosz
France
The Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire
Rimbaud: complete works, Rimbaud, Schmidt ed
Treasures of the Night: collected poems, Jean Genet
Verlaine: Selected Poems
Pierre Reverdy, Caws ed
Selected Writing, Apollonaire
Mallarme: Prose and Poetry, Caws ed
Stone Lyre: Poems of Rene Char, René Char, Nancy Naomi Carlson (Translator), The Word as Archipelago The Word as Archipelago, René Char, Robert Baker (Translator), Selected Poems, René Char, Mary Ann Caws (Editor)
India
Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems, Mīrābāī, Robert Bly & Jane Hirshfield (Translators)
Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, Miller trans
Collected Poems, Jeet Thayil
Golden Gate, Vikram Seth
Islamic Peoples
Concerto al-Quds, Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs, Adonis
Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, Mahmoud Darwish
Rumi: the Big Red Book, Coleman Barks
The Rub’ai yat of Omar Khayyam, Stubb & Avery eds
Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths: Poems, Sholeh Wolpé
The Book of Mansur Hallaj: Selected Poems & The Tawasin, Mansur al-Hallaj,
Paul Smith (Translator)
Iraqi: Selected Poems, Iraqi, Paul Smith (Translator)
Divan of Hafez Shirazi, Hafez, Paul Smith (Translation)
Divan of Sadi, Saadi, Paul Smith (Translator)
Japan
Basho’s Narrow Road, Sato trans
Matsuo Bashō, Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa, The Path of Flowering Thorn: The Life and Poetry of Yosa Buson, Makoto Ueda
The Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda, Sumita Oyama
River of Stars: Selected Poems, Yosano Akiko
I Wait for the Moon: 100 Haiku of Momoko Kuroda, Momoko Kuroda, Abigail Friedman (Translator)
Jewish People
The Fullness of Time: Poems by Gershom Scholem
The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Alter ed
Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch
Poems 1962-2020, Louise Glück
Latin America
Selected Poems, Jorge Borges
Five Decades: 1925-1970, Pablo Neruda
Selected Poems, Octavio Paz
Poems of Cesar Vallejo
Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 – 1972, Alejandra Pizarnik
Russia
Collected Poetry, Alexander Pushkin
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Scandinavia
Journeys in Dream and Imagination: The Hallucinatory Memoir of a Poet in a Coma, Artur Lundkvist, Carlos Fuentes (Introduction)
Selected Poems, Tomas Transtromer
Spain
The Selected Poems, Federico García Lorca
How I Write
Here’s an example of my three step writing process; record observations, gather intertexts, relevant quotes, associations that spring to mind, and found objects as interpretive tools, assemble like a collage.
I have kept daily journals from my freshman year of high school, which combine drawing and writing and look like a naturalist’s field book or a storyboard for a film, inclusive of travels and dreams; I have also composed using images I create or find modeled on a detective’s forensic crime board. For myself, the relationships between things reveal hidden orders of meaning, taxonomies of being, and hierarchies of value expressed in time.
Collage has been a method and controlling metaphor as an ars poetica for me since childhood, taught to me by my father’s beatnik friend William S. Burroughs along with the Jesuit report dialectical journal form. I constructed an entire wall of my bedroom, originally with images of Hieronymus Bosch art as a ten year old, which I called my Dream Gates wall, portals into other realities; Uncle Bill would add weird characters to it when he visited, and tell stories about them as the fire burned low after dinner and we were swallowed by the gathering darkness.
This became an enthusiasm for Surrealism and the occult as a teenager, Jungian studies and Joseph Campbell’s comparative mythology at university, and later my time as a Dream Navigator of the Kagu Vajrayana order of Tibetan Buddhism in Nepal and scholarship of Sufism in Kashmir as a member of the Naqshbandi order.
Herein I attach an example of my writing process which includes ink sketches of a subject, being rabbits observed in the desert south of Tucson Arizona in the mid nineties from horseback, when I worked as a counselor for teenage felons at Vision Quest, things it recalled and inspired, and the final poem.
Order appropriates, law serves power, and there is no just Authority.
Politics is the Art of Fear, as my father taught me, and there is a Calculus of Fear whereby states rise or fall; too little and unity of purpose and social cohesion evaporate, too much and it loses all power to compel obedience when there is nothing left to lose.
The recursive engine of centralization of power in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force drives the legitimation of authority as a protection racket, but security is an illusion and all the emergence of carceral states of force and control can achieve is the transfer of wealth, power, and privilege from those who create it to the hegemonic elites who become their masters. Thus are birthed the terrors of class, authorized national identities, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
The use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance, Resistance like that of the Hands Off mass protests which have seized our nation in over 1300 protests involving three and a half million American citizens galvanized to action by the economic instability of Trump’s foolish tariffs and trade wars, by the monkeywrenching of the institutions of democracy by Musk’s teams of juvenile hooligans and especially fears of loss of social security and medicare, by the horrors of our complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians as our tax dollars buy the deaths of children, journalists, and doctors, and by the state terror of ICE and the abduction without trial and deportation to foreign gulags of just about anyone including our citizens, tourists, political dissidents, and nonwhite folks with tattoos of their mama or a football team.
Part of what is happening is that capitalism in its terminal stage wherein all wealth and power goes to the top one percent is attempting to free itself from its host political system, democracy; another source of destabilization is that the Trump regime is composed of conflicting ideologies.
As written by Ben Davis in The Guardian, in an article entitled Two visions within Trump world are battling for primacy. Which will win? The second Trump administration was backed and is staffed by two major – and widely differing – ideological projects; “The start of the second Trump administration has been chaotic, to put it mildly. It is difficult for Americans to understand what exactly the administration is trying to do and how it will affect them. It has been simultaneously a colossal remaking of the US state and the entire global order, but also seemingly haphazard, with significant policy decisions such as spending cuts and tariff rates clearly made with little thought or preparation. Analysts and commentators of all stripes have speculated on the motives and strategy behind the Trump administration’s huge overhaul of society. But what is the Trump administration’s plan for the US?
The primary moves the administration has made are major cuts to federal government capacity through the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and now an unprecedented tariff regime that has sent financial markets into a free fall. Some view these changes as part of a grand overarching strategy to rebuild some version of an imagined past America: globally hegemonic and able to exercise power nakedly over other countries, economically self-sufficient with a large manufacturing base, and a reassertion of the previous social norms and order around gender, race, and sexuality. But a deeper dive into the Trump administration’s explanation of their policies and vision reveals that rather than a single, coherent ideological project, the Trump administration is sclerotic and being used as a vehicle for more than one competing ideological project.
While the first Trump administration had no real ideological project, with Donald Trump’s surprise win being based on a personalist coalition without the backing of an organized movement, and different factions within the administration battling for control over policy and favor from the president, the second Trump administration was backed and is staffed by two major ideological projects, representing different segments of capital: the oft-discussed “national conservatism” of the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, and tech capital, which has used Trump as a vehicle for its own priorities.
These two overarching political projects and visions both see Trump as able to advance their goals, but these projects are competing with each other. Both have accepted that Republicans will lose the midterms in 2026, as the president’s party nearly always does, and are thus trying to radically reshape society in that time in ways that can’t easily be reversed. They have deeply different visions for the future, and whether one wins out or both of their incompatible sets of policies are carried out will have enormous implications for the lives of Americans and people around the globe.
On tariffs, the administration has offered multiple, mutually exclusive visions: with some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to rebuild US manufacturing by incentivizing producers to build in the US; some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to raise revenue, cut the deficit, and in the long-term replace the income tax entirely; and some viewing tariffs primarily as a negotiating tool to force countries to make concessions to the US on a variety of issues.
Trump personally has suggested that the US become an autarky, with no trade of any kind with the outside world. It’s unclear which of these will be the plan because they each have dramatically different implications for how the tariffs are structured in the long-term, how long they will last, and their effects on US workers.
In the first two views, the tariffs are a part of the national conservative project of returning the US to a previous social order. They view the nation-state as the primary actor in a zero-sum anarchic global order of competing nation-states seeking to dominate each other. Tariffs are then a way of reasserting US national power relative to other states. This fits in with Trump’s rhetoric about the US, taking the country back and reasserting American nationhood, and is the primary way analysts and commentators have viewed the administration.
The tech capital that oversees Doge, however, has a different project entirely. Elon Musk, who has personally overseen the large-scale slashing of the federal government, rejects tariffs entirely. The Doge project and the tariff project are at odds. The Doge project is cloaked in the rhetoric of retro America First nationalism that would seem on its face (and is understood as by its supporters) to be precisely the opposite of what it is in practice: the outmoding of the nation-state entirely.
It’s notable that the first target for Doge’s cuts were not the New Deal programs conservatives have long wanted to cut, but instead the cold war-era nodes of American state power: scientific research, funding for education and the arts, foreign aid, and other programs that were created to allow the US to outcompete the Soviet Union and other countries. Musk does not care about American great power competition, such as with China, as Trump does. Indeed, Musk has close ties with the Chinese state.
For Musk and his cohorts, the US must progress past the nation state model – where the state exist to project power against other nation states and part of this bargain is keeping a certain social compact of living standard with citizens – to the vendor state model where international firms are paramount and states exist instead to compete for their favor. The Doge project of Silicon Valley technolibertarianism aims to sublimate the state to capital entirely and to outsource state capacity to transnational tech firms. This is, rather than an end of globalization as the national conservatives want, the final conclusion of globalization, where international capital exists above and beyond the bounds of the nation-state.
This is the reason large swathes of tech capital reversed course on Trump during the Biden administration and became his biggest financial backers. For them, Trump exists as a vehicle for their overall project.
Both of these projects are disastrous for the American people on their own, but both being partially implemented in opposing ways is even worse and will lead to disaster for US workers and our society’s basic capacity to function.
While the tariffs by themselves are devastating to US consumers and could lead to a major economic crisis, the Doge cuts strip state capacity that would be needed to implement the most positive vision of tariffs returning manufacturing jobs. While tariffs drive up prices on things like semiconductors or electric vehicles, the government is simultaneously slashing the programs designed to encourage these goods to be manufactured domestically. And while the Doge cuts have slashed the state and led to the direct capture of swathes of the state by tech capital, their overall project of global tech hegemony cannot progress in a world where international trade has broken down completely.
Trump and the national conservative’s dream of a return to a pre-financialization manufacturing-based economy, where the US has security through economic self-reliance, and the tech right’s commitment to creating shareholder value at all costs, and whose entire model is based entirely on the result of financialization, are incompatible and on a collision course. Different sections of capital – tech on the one hand, and the revanchist small capital class who form national conservatism’s base on the other – have different and competing interests and control of different sections of administration policy. The consequences of this intranecine competition are enormous, but either way, the next four years look dire for the American working class. The damage may take generations to fix.“
Yet there is a silver lining in this cloud of our doom and the fall of civilization; the personal humiliation of Trump and the loss of credibility of his regime and his treasonous and dishonorable minions in the Party of Treason, and the fracture and incipient collapse of the whole agenda of Trump and the Fourth Reich in the subversion of democracy.
As written by Robert Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s about-face on tariffs reveals chaos at the core of his presidency: Time will tell how much damage has been inflicted on the credibility of Trump’s economic policy and administration; “Donald Trump’s climbdown on Wednesday from the most draconian aspects of his tariff regime has uncovered a damning picture of chaos at the heart of his presidency without necessarily alleviating their most painful effects.
The president’s landmark “liberation day” unveiling of tariffs in the White House Rose Garden on 2 April was supposed to be symbolic gateway to his promised “golden age of American greatness”; instead, it triggered a cascade of global market crashes that prompted warnings of a recession, or even a 1930s-style depression, while Trump brushed it all off as temporary “disruption”.
Time alone will tell how much damage has been inflicted on the credibility of Trump’s economic policy and indeed his entire administration by the ditching of nearly 80 years of US economic and free trading architecture, only to be followed by a sharp, if partial, U-turn.
The president’s sudden and unheralded retreat from a signature policy that he has advocated for more than four decades has placated Wall Street and international bond markets, which rallied at the news of his 90-day pause on tariffs that rose to above 50% on the goods from some countries deemed to have been “ripping off” the US in their trade practices.
But left untouched was a 10% across-the-board duty levied on all foreign imports – not to mention a further tariff hike on all goods from China – meaning that higher consumer prices are on the way for Americans, no matter how relieved the masters of the universe on Wall Street and other international trading centers are feeling.
“Most Americans care less about the spin and more about the fact that his 10% across-the-board tariff will still cost families an average of $2,600 more annually,” Matt McDermott, a Democratic pollster, posted on Bluesky.
The market mayhem unleashed by Trump’s “liberation day” tariff rollout is reminiscent of the reaction to the attempt by the British prime minister, Liz Truss, to stage a radical reordering of UK economic policy in 2022.
The constitutional niceties of the America’s political system will no doubt save the president from the fate of the hapless Truss, who was memorably outlasted by a head of lettuce and driven from Downing Street within 50 days of taking office as international markets rejected her policies as non-credible.
No such mechanism exists for removing a US president whose policies trigger market turmoil at home and abroad.
Perhaps buoyed up by that knowledge, Trump’s closest aides and acolytes tried to present his political backflip as a sign of strategic genius that had always been part of a brilliant plan.
“This was his strategy all along. President Trump created maximum negotiating leverage for himself,” said Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, who had been locked in urgent discussions with the president onboard Air Force One on Sunday about the effect of last week’s “liberation day” tariffs, according to the New York Times.
“Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here,” explained the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who a day before had said that Trump was not considering a delay to putting the tariffs into effect.
Yet the depiction of a carefully plotted strategy going perfectly to plan was undermined by Trump himself, who gave a strikingly blunt explanation for his volte-face.
“Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line,” he said. “They were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.”
It seemed a graphic portrayal of a loss of nerve – all the more so given that Trump had told Republicans that “I know what the hell I’m doing” and urged his followers to ignore the plunging markets and “BE COOL” on a post on his Truth Social network just hours earlier. “Everything is going to work out well,” he insisted.
That remains to be seen.
So too does the strength of Trump’s determination to plough ahead with a tariff policy which, even in its diluted iteration following Wednesday’s announcement, threatens to lumber Americans with higher living costs – an outcome at odds with the president’s campaign promise to reduce prices “on day one”.
Writing in the Washington Post, Aaron Blake noted that Wednesday’s decision was Trump’s second tariff climbdown since taking office without gaining anything in return, having previously backed away from duties on Mexico and Canada with only minor concessions.
Rather than being strategic, as Bessent, Leavitt and others claimed, he wrote, there was “reason to believe that this is indeed another example of Trump caving. And a big one at that.”
Trump has marketed his leadership on a message of strength, which has communicated itself to congressional Republicans, who – with a few notable exceptions – have fallen publicly into line with his tariff policies, whatever their qualms.
But having seen the president apparently buckle to market pressure, the question now arises over whether more of them will find the courage to push back. It is a question that could acquire added urgency as next year’s midterms loom into view, presenting an opportunity for voters to punish the GOP at the ballot box if inflation surges.’
Two visions within Trump world are battling for primacy. Which will win?
On April 9 in 1865 Confederate General Lee raised the white flag and surrendered to Union General Grant at Appomattox, though the fighting continued until other rebel forces surrendered and President Johnson declared the end of the Civil War on Aug. 20th, 1866. It was the end of the most terrible conflict and the most shameful age in American history, and it is a conflict we have not yet won and an original sin we have not yet expiated and redeemed.
Nor is the enemy of our humanity and of all humankind yet defeated in final Reckoning, for its figurehead Traitor Trump has recaptured the state to enact vengeance on his enemies, evade responsibility for his many crimes, and complete his mission of the subversion of our democracy, the re-enslavement of Black Americans and authorization of white supremacist terror, and the dehumanization and commodification of women as chattel slaves and authorization of patriarchal-theocratic sexual terror.
This we must resist to the last, as Chamberlain held the line at Gettysburg and Sherman demonstrated how to answer white supremacist terror on his March Through Georgia.
We must not wait for the moment of our destruction; we must bring the fight to the enemy, and purge them from among us.
Of this epochal event I wrote in my post of two years ago:
In joyous echo of this historic triumph we also celebrate the return to the legislature of Tennessee by acclamation of the people of the magnificent Justin Jones, who with his fellow Representative Pearson placed their lives in the balance with those of the victims and survivors of gun violence and white supremacist terror in challenging the plutocratic gun lobby which provides the preconditions of mass murder as an organization of racist terror.
That the people stood with them in return and brought the machine of death and elite hegemony to a standstill is the most hopeful thing I have witnessed in electoral American politics in a long time.
The tide may have just turned in America from tyranny to democracy.
There is now a possibility, fractional and delicate as a candle in the darkness, bearing our hope of liberty and equality into an unknown future, of avoiding a second Civil War.
This too I celebrate, in fear and loathing as Hunter S. Thompson unforgettably described America’s inversion of our founding ideals by the powerful.
At one hundred fifty eight years remove, the meaning of the Civil War as the Second American Revolution is clear, as is the necessity of ceaseless and ongoing revolutionary struggle to achieve and maintain a free society of equals.
We celebrate the victory of equality over slavery and solidarity over division, of liberty over the tyranny of aristocratic and capitalist elites and of love over hate. On this day we the people, created equal and endowed with inalienable human rights, triumphed over the most terrible obscenity and injustice to ever rear its monstrous head in our nation; a human trafficking syndicate which declared itself a nation.
We must never cease to search out and destroy the legacies of slavery, racism, and hierarchies and ideologies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness. To be an American is to believe that no one is better than any other by condition of birth. Those who cannot affirm this principle merit only exile and revocation of citizenship, for they have chosen to deny membership in our society.
The Black Lives Matter protests and George Floyd trial electrified the world in part because an endemic and pervasive evil is finally being called to a reckoning. Police must be stripped of their immunity from prosecution for racial violence, but this is only the beginning. We must eradicate and enact restitution for the legacy of slavery and white supremacist terror, of systemic and structural racism in our society, of inequalities and injustices which create and maintain hierarchies of belonging and otherness and hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege.
From the iconography of our public spaces in the place names and monuments to the stories we tell about ourselves in our history, whose stories are told and who owns the narratives of our identities, to the equal share of decision making power which defines democracy and the equal share in the benefits of membership in our society to which we must aspire, America is emerging from the shadows of a past which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail to discover the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
This is only the beginning of our story; let us dream great dreams into which we can grow.
Chamberlain’s Charge on Little Round Top – “Gettysburg”
Chamberlain’s Speech “In the end, we’re fighting for each other”
Why the Civil War Actually Ended 16 Months After Lee Surrendered
We celebrate National Library Week this year in a context of open hostility to education, a word from the Greek educatus which means to draw forth potential human being, meaning, and value rather than to stuff in facts, and which models and teaches not obedience but questioning, not falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the factory model of education as industrial production, but its opposite; citizenship in a democracy as the art of asking questions and testing answers.
Let us build citizens and not subjects.
There are historical reasons why our democracy was born in the Enlightenment and the scientific model of reason wherein we test claims of truth and take no authority at its word, and why tyranny is often a product of theocratic subjugation to authority.
If we are to be a free society of equals, wherein citizens are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights, universal education in which nothing is Forbidden as an area of experiment, inquiry, and debate is crucial; democracy requires freedom of information and communication including those of free speech and a free press.
In a time of darkness, book bans and burning, politization of school boards as subversion of democracy and repression of dissent, the forbidding of inquiry in areas which may threaten elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, we must write, speak, teach, and organize democracy as Resistance to fascist tyranny and as revolutionary struggle.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks made for us by others and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
And our job as teachers and parents is to help, model, and guide our children in their ongoing self creation and choices about how to be human together and become citizens, not slaves.
We do not need to post and recite the Ten Commandments, pledge allegiance to gods or masters, or trade value with money which proclaims In God We Trust; because none of this is about our relationship with the Infinite, and everything to do with a state which wants to claim our obedience as its interpreter. Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
We do need to learn as a nation and as a species to cherish our uniqueness and that of others, in solidarity and not division. And if we are to be a democracy, we need an education system founded on the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in literature and history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
To this end I offer here updated versions of the reading lists I used throughout my years of teaching AP and other English classes in high school, as supplementary choice reading lists for American Literature and World Literature as our education system has structured classes, to stand alongside and apart from the limits of government and school board approval and control, both of curriculum and of our human possibilities.
This was the key to empowerment and self actualization, happiness, and stellar academic achievement among my students and to success later in life; a free space of play in which to discover and create themselves. If we offer only this to our students, children, and future generations of citizens, a free space of play in the creation of themselves bearing many possible authorized identities without hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, we have done our job as caretakers of the future. Each of us has one problem in common which we must solve in order to grow up and become ourselves; we must reinvent how to become human.
Find your bliss, as Joseph Campbell exhorts us to do; but first something must catch spark and engage our interest, provoke us to question and explore.
This is the role of literature, and why the canon is central to the project of civilization.
The canon represents nothing less than an authorized set of possible identities; this is why it must adapt and change with time, and why it is absolutely crucial that the canon be diverse and inclusive enough to reflect those who read it. If a student or reader cannot see themselves in the models of being human which are offered to them as possibilities of future selves, that work is worthless to them as a tool of identity construction and a forge of human being, meaning, and value.
I organized Modern American Literature as core lists by fiction, poetry, drama, science and other fictions, and also literature of the American South, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American, and Jewish American, and Hawaiian categories, as well as a nonfiction list I entitled A Useful Past: Contexts and Sources for Constructing an American Identity, part of which is the American Presidents Histories and Biographies list included here as I later abandoned attempts at sciences, art, and music.
The sciences component of the Contexts list is too large and changes too rapidly to do justice to so I long ago stopped updating it, though I taught annual Socratic seminars through the Gifted and Talented Program on Batesonian Holism, Chaos Theory, Godel’s Theorem, Fuller’s Synergetics, and Quantum Theory. Art and music have similar problems of scope, with issues of tribalization.
As Gertrude Stein invented the modern world after our civilization destroyed itself in World War One, my list begins with her. Where possible, superlative critical works accompany the primary sources from authors of world-historical significance.
World Literature is represented by 28 lists, including special universal studies lists for Feminism and Women’s Literature, Fairytales, Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology, Existentialism, and lists of National Literatures including Australia, New Zealand, & Canada, Austria, Germany, & Switzerland, Africa, Britain & Ireland, the Caribbean, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe, France, Greece, India, Iran, Islamic Peoples, Italy, Japan, Jewish People, Latin America, Netherlands, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, Scandinavia, and Spain.
Here I wish to signpost that nothing on my reading lists is chosen by any criterion other than quality as I so judge; in contrast to official reading lists chosen for reading level and objectives by grade and also appropriate age level content, because values are always negotiated truths and a ground of struggle, and in America the Texas Board of Education controls through purchasing power and ideological influence the publication of all textbooks nationally and is highly political and moreover falsified by the network of fundamentalist churches it represents, including the Pentecostal Church which is a propaganda organization of theocratic terror. Ever wonder why our history text books make no mention of slavery as a cause of the Civil War?
How do we use reading lists as teachers, parents, readers exploring unknowns, ourselves, and the boundaries of our maps of becoming and of human being, meaning, and value?
One ongoing project which I ran for many years using these lists in high school may also be useful for private reading or home study, groups, partners, and getting to know one’s neighbors; I asked students to choose the list of a group with which they identify and then choose partners from a different group, then select two books, one from each other’s list, to read together and give a presentation as partners about each book to the class.
This project, which I called Becoming Human Through Literature, has three goals; to develop a broad personal culture, to discover maps of how to become human, and to operate transcontextually as a global family member.
As an activity for partners in any stage of a relationship, reading books together and discussing them as you progress makes a wonderful way to explore each others values and ideas. You may surprise and delight one another; you may also surprise and reimagine yourself.
For all of these lists I began with immortal classics and added whatever I thought merited inclusion on the basis of quality alone; this is how I found myself teaching a broad and inclusive curriculum. Yes, this means I’ve read all of the books listed, many in their original languages, and with some the major critical works and essays about them; and often taught, discussed, scored student critical essays and written about them for many years. It also means that if your favorite book is not on a list, I may simply not have read it yet.
I am a product of a Great Books of the Western World education, a set of works published by Encyclopædia Britannica based on the great Mortimer J. Adler’s course at the University of Chicago, which I read entirely through during my high school years, a second time while I was at university as an undergraduate, and a third during my graduate studies in literature, Jungian psychology, history, and philosophy. It is a practice which I recommend to everyone as both a starting point and a lifelong journey. This and Harold Bloom’s list in The Western Canon formed my starting point; as a teenager I began keeping lists of books I liked with notes, and the current version, in constant revision during the last forty years, I call Jay’s Revised Modern Canon.
On these lists are the finest books I’ve discovered over a lifetime of reading, and I hope they will bring joy to your life as they have mine.
Why is a diverse and limitless field of reading and study necessary to creating ourselves and our identities as we grow up? How does our education shape our political and social decisions about who we are and how to be human together?
As I wrote in preface to my Becoming Human project, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature for 2022; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As I wrote in my post in celebration of Juneteenth, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, of submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, beauty, and constructions of identity, and from the force and control of the state, especially in this context as falsification, rewritten histories, lies, and illusions which serve the power of those who would enslave us.
What is this freedom? What does it mean for us as we grow up and create ourselves?
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves as interdependent partners who exalt one another as guarantors of each others rights and humanity.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?”
As I wrote in my post of September 21 2020 History, Memory, Identity: Whose Story Is This?; Whose story is this? This question must be the beginning of a new pedagogy of education in history, and remain central to the project of its study. True education asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries and testing our ideas in experiment and debate; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America; this and all else we must always question. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790, Ritchie Robertson
A Useful Past: Contexts and Sources for Constructing an American Identity
Yes, I once attempted to synthesize all knowledge and historical memory of our civilization specific to America under this banner as a resource for my high school students, including arts and sciences. I didn’t get as far as did Diderot with his Encyclopédie, all 23 volumes of it. I may have been influenced in this mad Quixotic quest by reading through our family Encyclopædia Britannica several times in my teens and twenties; ah, the folly of youth. I wasn’t trying to learn everything; I was trying to remember everything, the universe whole and entire, as the emergence of ideal forms and potentialities hidden within us.
The great mystery of Being in Time is not that universals connect us, but that our memory and history allow us to conserve our identity while in constant processes of adaptation and change.
We need both conserving forces which buffer us from the shock of the new and as a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation across vast epochs of time without damage to our morphology of human being, meaning, and value, but also we need revolutionary or innovational forces which allow us to meet new threats and capitalize on chaos.
This is the only list of context readings I have been able to complete; my studies of art and music being arbitrary or determined by the circumstances in which I encountered them, and those of sciences changing too fast since the 1980’s for a definitive sum of knowledge.
Regarding art, I grew up with Chinese inkbrush calligraphy and Japanese Zen sumi-e, from my teenage years an enthusiast of French Surrealist literature and film as my parents let me run amok on my own all over Berkeley and San Francisco and in my twenties once spent a glorious summer attempting to make a film I had written. During university I painted that I might learn to see better; and studied Monet’s Impressionist techniques, Egon Schiele’s watercolors, and the Chinese landscapes of C.C. Wang from his magnificent studio book of forms published as Mind Landscapes: The Paintings of C. C. Wang, Jerome Silbergeld, Chi-Ch’ien Wang.
As to music, I grew up with the shakuhachi or Zen bamboo flute and enjoyed making strange instruments from things in nature like a Sea Horn from cured and formed seaweed.
I’ve spent my whole life enchanted by my partner Dolly’s beautiful piano music; she can play anything she hears, and when twelve returned from seeing Lawrence of Arabia at the theatre and played the entire score from memory. She has been a professional musician for over fifty years from the age of seventeen, playing piano and keyboards and singing; we reconnected and began building Dollhouse Park twenty three years ago now, and all the while I have been part of her musical world. So music has always been part of who I am, through my partner.
In terms of influence, I did not attend a full performance of Wagner’s Ring operas until I was at university and did not understand it til much later, but I would never have come to my analysis of the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force without it.
One day I may curate lists for film, music, and art; for now its just books about our Presidents.
But with literature I am on my own ground of struggle, publish in over a dozen languages and can speak with authority on both Modern American and World literatures.
Harold Bloom’s magisterial list which follows below has for me some glaring limitations, both as a best books list and as representations of authorized identities and imaginal spaces to grow into and beyond.
First it excludes everything not central to the Western European Canon as historically construed.
Second it dismisses nearly all works by women and nonwhite authors as inferior in quality and a waste of time to study, something which by the mid 20th century should have been transparently biased and long abandoned.
Third it misunderstands modern American literature from World War One onward, ignores masterpieces of literature and includes irrelevant and ridiculous choices no one reads or needs to know.
Harold Bloom wrote the finest critical work on Shakespeare ever, and is reasonably trustworthy on works including the classics, British Romantics, and American Transcendentalists; but here his world ends, as do his maps of becoming human.
This is where we must begin, all of us, in the reimagination and transformation of the Canon and of our limitless possibilities of Becoming Human.
Harold Bloom’s List in The Western Canon, from the appendices:
“The Theocratic Age
Here, as in the following lists, I suggest translations wherever I have derived
particular pleasure and insight from those now readily available. There are
many valuable works of ancient Greek and Latin literature that are not
here, but the common reader is unlikely to have time to read them. As
history lengthens, the older canon necessarily narrows. Since the literary
canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical,
and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. I would
think that, of all the books in this first list, once the reader is conversant
with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial
work is the Koran. Whether for its aesthetic and spiritual power or the
influence it will have upon all of our futures, ignorance of the Koran is
foolish and increasingly dangerous.
I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary
texts, because of their influence on the Western Canon. The immense wealth
of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary
tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available
to us.
THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
Gilgamesh, translated by David
Ferry
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
The Holy Bible, Authorized King
James Version
The Apocrypha
Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke
Aboth), translated by R.
Travers Herford
ANCIENT INDIA (SANSKRIT)
The Mahabharata
There is an abridged
translation by William Buck,
and a dramatic version by
Jean·Claude Carriere,
translated by Peter Brook
The Bhagavad-Gita
The crucial religious section
of Mahabharata, Book 6,
translated by Barbara Stoler
Miller
The Ramayana
There is an abridged prose
version by William Buck, and
a retelling by R. K. Narayan
THE ANCIENT GREEKS
Homer
The Iliad, translated by
Richmond Lattimore
The Odyssey, translated by
Robert Fitzgerald
Hesiod
The Works and Days;
Theogony, translated by
Richmond Lattimore
Archilochos , Sappho, Aikman
translated by Guy Davenport
Pindar
The Odes, translated by
Richmond Lattimore
Aeschylus
The Oresteia, translated by
Robert Fagles
Seven against Thebes, translated
by Anthony Hecht and Helen
H. Bacon
Prometheus Bound
The Persians
The Suppliant Women
Sophocles
Oedipus the King, translated by
Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay
Oedipus at Co/onus, translated
by Robert Fitzgerald
Antigone, translated by Robert
Fagles
Electra
Ajax
Women of Trachis
Philoctetes
Euripides
(translated by William
Arrowsmith)
Cyclops
Heracles
Alcestis
Hecuba
The Bacchae
Orestes
Andromache
Medea, translated by Rex
Warner
Ion, translated by H. D. (Hilda
Doolittle)
Hippolytus, translated by Robert
Bagg
Helen, translated by Richmond
Lattimore
Iphigeneia at Aulis, translated by
W. S. Merwin and George
Dimock
Aristophanes
The Birds, translated by William
Arrowsmith
The Clouds, translated by
William Arrowsmith
The Frogs
Lysistrata
The Knights
The Wasps
The Assemblywomen (also called
The Parliament of Women)
Herodotus
The Histories
Thucydides
The Peloponnesian War
The Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus,
Empedodes)
Plato
Dialogues
Aristotle
Poetics
Ethics
HELLENISTIC GREEKS
Menander
The Girl from Samos, translated
by Eric G. Turner
“Longinus”
On the Sublime
Callimachus
Hymns and Epigrams
Theocritus
Idylls, translated by Daryl Hine
Plutarch
Lives, translated by John Dryden
Moralia
“Aesop”
Fables
Lucian
Satires
THE ROMANS
Plautus
Pseudo/us
The Braggart Soldier
The Rope
Amphitryon
Terence
The Girl from Andros
The Eunuch
The Mother-in-Law
Lucretius
The Way Things Are, translated
by Rolfe Humphries
Cicero
On the Gods
Horace
Odes, translated by James
Michie
Epistles
Satires
Persius
Satires, translated by W. S.
Merwin
Catullus
Attis, translated by Horace
Gregory
Other poems translated by
Richard Crashaw, Abraham
Cowley, Walter Savage Landor,
and a host of English poets
Virgil
The Aeneid, translated by
Robert Fitzgerald
Eclogues and Georgics,
translated by john Dryden
Lucan
Pharsalia
Ovid
Metamorphoses, translated by
George Sandys
The Art of Love
Epistulae heroidum or Heroides,
translated by Daryl Hine
Juvenal
Satires
Martial
Epigrams, translated by James
Michie
Seneca
Tragedies, particularly Medea;
and Hercules furens, as
translated by Thomas
Heywood
Petroni us
Satyricon, translated by William
Arrowsmith
Apuleius
The Golden Ass, translated by
Robert Graves
THE MIDDLE AGES: LATIN, ARABIC, AND THE VERNACULAR BEFORE DANTE
Saint Augustine
The City of God
The Confessions
The Koran
Al-Qur’ an: A Contemporary
Translation by Ahmad Ali
The Book of the Thousand Nights
and One Night
The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee
Hollander
Snorri Sturluson
The Prose Edda
The Nibelungen Lied
Wolfram von Eschenbach
Parzival
Chretien de Troyes
Yvain: The Knight of the Lion,
translated by Burton Raffel
Beowult translated by Charles W.
Kennedy
The Poem of the Cid, translated ·by
W. S. Merwin
Christine de Pisan
The Book of the City of Ladies,
translated by Earl Richards
Diego de San Pedro
Prison of Love
B.
The Aristocratic Age
It is a span of five hundred years from Dante’s Divine Comedy through
Goethe’s Faust, Part Two, an era that gives us a huge body of reading in
five major literatures: Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. In this
and in the remaining lists, I sometimes do not mention individual works by
a canonical master, and in other instances I attempt to call attention to
authors and books that I consider canonical but rather neglected. From this
list onward, many good writers who are not quite central are omitted. We
begin also to encounter the phenomenon of “period pieces,” a sorrow that
expands in the Democratic Age and threatens to choke us in our own
century. Writers much esteemed in their own time and country sometimes
survive in other times and nations, yet often shrink into once-fashionable
fetishes. I behold at least several scores of these in our contemporary literary
scene, but it is sufficient to name them by omission, and I will address this
matter more fully in the introductory note to my final list.
ITALY
Dante
The Divine Comedy, translated
by Laurence Binyon in terza
rima, and by John D. Sinclair
1n prose
The New Life, translated by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Petrarch
Lyric Poems, translated by
Robert M. Durling
Selections, translated by Mark
Mus a
Giovanni Boccaccio
The Decameron
Matteo Maria Boiardo
Orlando innamorato
Ludovico Ariosto
Orlando furioso
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Sonnets and Madrigals,
translated by Wordsworth,
Longfellow, Emerson,
Santayana, and others
Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince
The Mandrake, a Comedy
Leonardo da Vinci
Notebooks
Baldassare Castiglione
The Book of the Courtier
Gaspara Stampa
Sonnets and Madrigals
Giorgio Vasari
Lives of the Painters
Benvenuto Cellini
Autobiography
Torquato Tasso
Jerusalem Delivered
Giordano Bruno
The Expulsion of the
Triumphant Beast
Tommaso Campanella
Poems
The City of the Sun
Giambattista Vico
Principles of a New Science
Carlo Goldoni
The Servant of Two Masters
Vittorio Alfieri
Saul
PORTUGAL
Luis de Camoens
The Lusiads translated by
Leonard Bacon
Antonio Ferreira
Poetry, in The Muse Reborn,
translated by T. F. Earle
SPAIN
Jorge Manrique
CoplasJ translated by Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow
Fernando de Rojas
La CelestinaJ translated by
James Mabbe, adapted by Eric
Bentley
Lazarillo de TormesJ translated by
W. S. Merwin
Francisco de Quevedo
Visions, translated by Roger
L’Estrange
Satirical Letter of Censure, in
J. M. Cohen’s Penguin Book
of Spanish Verse
Fray Luis de Leon
Poems, translated by Willis
Barns tone
St. John of the Cross
Poems, translated by John
Frederick Nims
Luis de Gongora
Sonnets
Soledades
Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote, translated by
Samuel Putnam
Exemplary Stories
Lope de Vega
La Dorotea, translated by Alan
S. Trueblood and Edwin
Honig
Fuente ovejuna, translated by
Roy Campbell
Lost in a Mirror, translated by
Adrian Mitchell
The Knight of Olmedo,
translated by Willard F. King
Tirso de Molina
The Trickster of Seville,
translated by Roy Campbell
Pedro Calderon de Ia Barca
Life Is a Dream, translated by
Roy Campbell
The Mayor of Zalamea
The Mighty Magician
The Doctor of His Own Honor
Sor Juana Ines de Ia Cruz
Poems
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales
Troilus and Criseyde
Sir Thomas Malory
Le Marte D’Arthur
William Dunbar
Poems
John Skelton
Poems
Sir Thomas More
Utopia
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Poems
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Poems
Sir Philip Sidney
The Countess of Pembroke’s
Arcadia
Astrophel and Stella
An Apology for Poetry
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke
Poems
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
The Minor Poems
Sir Walter Ralegh
Poems
Christopher Marlowe
Poems and Plays
Michael Drayton
Poems
Samuel Daniel
Poems
A Defence of Ryme
Thomas Nashe
The Unfortunate Traveller
Thomas Kyd
The Spanish Tragedy
William Shakespeare
Plays and Poems
Thomas Campion
Songs
John Donne
Poems
Sermons
Ben Jonson
Poems, Plays, and Masques
Francis Bacon
Essays
Robert Burton
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Sir Thomas Browne
Religio Medici
Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall
The Garden of Cyrus
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
Robert Herrick
Poems
Thomas Carew
Poems
Richard Lovelace
Poems
Andrew Marvell
Poems
George Herbert
The Temple
Thomas Traheme
Centuries, Poems, and
Thanksgivings
Henry Vaughan
Poetry
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Poems
Richard Crashaw
Poems
Francis Beaumont and
John Fletcher
Plays
George Chapman
Comedies, Tragedies, Poems
John Ford
‘Tis Pity She’s a W hare
John Marston
The Malcontent
John Webster
The White Devil
The Duchess of Malfi
Thomas Middleton and
William Rowley
The Changeling
Cyril Toumeur
The Revenger’s Tragedy
Philip Massinger
A New Way to Pay Old Debts
John Bunyan
The Pilgrim’s Progress
haak Walton
The Compleat Angler
john Milton
Paradise Lost
Paradise Regained
Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor
Poems
Samson Agonistes
Areopagitica
john Aubrey
Brief Lives
Jeremy Taylor
Holy Dying
Samuel Butler
Hudibras
john Dryden
Poetry and Plays
Critical Essays
Thomas Otway
Venice Preserv· d
William Congreve
The Way of the World
Love for Love
jonathan Swift
A Tale of a Tub
Gulliver’s Travels
Shorter Prose W arks
Poems
Sir George Etherege
The Man of Mode
Alexander Pope
Poems
john Gay
The Beggar’s Opera
James Boswell
Life of Johnson
Journals
Samuel Johnson
Works
Edward Gibbon
The History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire
Edmund Burke
A Philosophical Enquiry into
. . . the Sublime and Beautiful
Reflections on the Revolution
in France
Maurice Morgann
An Essay on the Dramatic
Character of Sir John Falstaff
William Collins
Poems
Thomas Gray
Poems
George Farquhar
The Beaux’ Stratagem
The Recruiting Officer
William Wycherley
The Country Wife
The Plain Dealer
Christopher Smart
Jubilate Agno
A Song to David
Oliver Goldsmith
The Vicar of Wakefield
She Stoops to Conquer
The Traveller
The Deserted Village
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The School for Scandal
The Rivals
William Cowper
Poetical W arks
George Crabbe
Poetical W arks
Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders
Robinson Crusoe
A Journal of the Plague Year
Samuel Richardson
Clarissa
Pamela
Sir Charles Grandison
Henry Fielding
Joseph Andrews
The History of Tom Jones, a
Foundling
Tobias Smollett
The Expedition of Humphry
Clinker
The Adventures of Roderick
Random
Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
A Sentimental Journey through
France and Italy
Fanny Burney
Evelina
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
The Spectator
FRANCE
Jean Froissart
Chronicles
The Song of Roland
Francois Villon
Poems, translated by Galway
Kinnell
Michel de Montaigne
Essays� translated by Donald
Frame
Fran�ois Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel,
translated by Donald Frame
Marguerite de Navarre
The Heptameron
Joachim Du Bellay
The Regrets, translated by
C. H. Sisson
Maurice Sceve
De lie
Pierre de Ronsard
Odes, Elegies, Sonnets
Philippe de Commynes
Memoirs
Agrippa d’ Aubigne
Les Tragiques
Robert Gamier
Mark Antony, translated by
Mary (Sidney) Herbert,
Countess of Pembroke
The J ewesses
Pierre Comeille
The Cid
Polyeucte
Nicomede
Horace
Cinna
Rodogune
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Maxims
Jean de La Fontaine
Fables
Moliere
(translated by Richard Wilbur)
The Misanthrope
Tartuffe
The School for Wives
The Learned Ladies
(translated by Donald Frame)
Don Juan
School for Husbands
Ridiculous Precieuses
The Would-Be Gentleman
The Miser
The Imaginary Invalid
Blaise Pascal
Pensees
Jacques-Benigne Bossuet
Funerary Orations
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
The Art of Poetry
Lutrin
Jean Racine
(translated by Richard Wilbur)
Phaedra
Andromache
(translated by C. H. Sisson)
Britannicus
Athaliah
Pierre Cadet de Marivaux
Seven Comedies
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Confessions
Emile
La Nouvelle Heloise
Voltaire
Zadig
Candide
Letters on England
The Lisbon Earthquake
Abbe Prevost
Manon Lescaut� translated by
Donald Frame
Madame de La Fayette
The Princess of Cleves
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de
Chamfort
Products of the Perfected
Civilization, translated by
W. S. Merwin
Denis Diderot
Rameau’s Nephew
Choderlos de Lados
Dangerous Liaisons
GERMANY
Erasmus, a Dutchman living in
Switzerland and Germany,
while writing in Latin, is
placed here arbitrarily, but
also as an influence on the
Lutheran Reformation.
Erasmus
In Praise of Folly
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust� Parts One and Two,
translated by Stuart Atkins
Dichtung und Wahrheit
Egmont, translated by Willard
Trask
Elective Affinities
The Sorrows of Young Werther,
translated by Louise Bogan,
Elizabeth Mayer, and W. H.
Auden
Poems, translated by Michael
Hamburger, Christopher
Middleton, and others
Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Meister’s Years of
Wandering
Italian Journey
Verse Plays and Hermann and
Dorothea, translated by
Michael Hamburger and
others
Roman Elegies, Venetian
Epigrams, West-Eastern
Divan, translated by Michael
Hamburger
Friedrich Schiller
The Robbers
Mary Stuart
Wallenstein
Don Carlos
On the Naive and Sentimental
in Literature
Gotthold Lessing
Laocoon
Nathan the Wise
Friedrich Holderlin
Hymns and Fragments,
translated by Richard Sieburth
Selected Poems, translated by
Michael Hamburger
Heinrich von Kleist
Five Plays, translated by Martin
Greenberg
Stories
C.
The Democratic Age
I have located Vico’s Democratic Age in the post-Goethean nineteenth century, when the literature of Italy and Spain ebbs, yielding eminence to
England with its renaissance of the Renaissance in Romanticism, and to a
lesser degree to France and Germany. This is also the era where the strength
of both Russian and American literature begins. I have resisted the backward
reach of the current canonical crusades, which attempt to elevate a number
of sadly inadequate women writers of the nineteenth century, as well as
some rudimentary narratives and verses of African-Americans. Expanding
the Canon, as I have said more than once in this book, tends to drive opt
the better writers, sometimes even the best, because pragmatically none of
us (whoever we are) ever had time to read absolutely everything, no matter
how great our lust for reading. And for most of us, the harried young in
particular, inadequate authors will consume the energies that would be
better invested in stronger writers. Nearly everything that has been revived
or discovered by Feminist and African-American literary scholars falls all
too precisely into the category of “period pieces,” as imaginatively dated
now as they were already enfeebled when they first came into existence.
ITALY
Ugo Foscolo
On Sepulchres, translated by
Thomas G. Bergin
Last Letters of ]acopo Ortis
Odes and The Graces
Alessandro Manzoni
The Betrothed
On the Historical Novel
Giacomo Leopardi
Essays and Dialogues, translated
by Giovanni Cecchetti
Poems
The Moral Essays, translated by
Howard Norse
Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli
Roman Sonnets, translated by
Harold Norse
Giosue Carducci
Hymn to Satan
Barbarian Odes
Rhymes and Rhythms
Giovanni Verga
Little Novels of Sicily, translated
by D. H. Lawrence
Mastro-Don Gesualdo,
translated by D. H. Lawrence
The House by the Medlar Tree,
translated by Raymond
Rosenthal
The She-Wolf and Other Stories,
translated by Giovanni
Cecchetti
SPAIN and PORTUGAL
Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
Poems
Benito Perez Gald6s
Fortunata and Jacinta
Leopoldo Alas (Clarin)
La Regenta
Jose Maria de E�a de Queir6s
The Maias
FRANCE
Benjamin Constant
Adolphe
The Red Notebook
Francois-Auguste-Rene de
Chateaubriand
Atala and Rene, translated by
Irving Putter
The Genius of Christianity
Alphonse de Lamartine
Meditations
Alfred de Vigny
Chatterton
Poems
Victor Hugo
The Distance, The Shadows:
Selected Poems, translated by
Harry Guest
Les Miserables
Notre-Dame of Paris
William Shakespeare
The Toilers of the Sea
The End of Satan
God
Alfred de Musset
Poems
Lorenzaccio
Gerard de N erval
The Chimeras, translated by
Peter Jay
Sylvie
Aurelia
Theophile Gautier
Mademoiselle de Maupin
Enamels and Cameos
Honore de Balzac
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Louis Lambert
The Wild Ass’s Skin
Old Goriot
Cousin Bette
A Harlot High and Low
Eugenie Grandet
Ursule Mirouet
Stendhal
On Love
The Red and the Black
The Charterhouse of Parma
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary, translated by
Francis Steegmuller
Sentimental Education
Salammbo
A Simple Soul
George Sand
The Haunted Pool
Charles Baudelaire
Flowers of Evil, translated by
Richard Howard
Paris Spleen
Stephane Mallarme
Selected Poetry and Prose
Paul Verlaine
Selected Poems
Arthur Rimbaud
Complete Works, translated by
Paul Schmidt
Tristan Corbiere
Les Amours jaunes
Jules Laforgue
Selected Writings, translated by
William Jay Smith
Guy de Maupassant
Selected Short Stories
Emile Zola
Germinal
L ‘Assommoir
Nana
SCANDINAVIA
Henrik Ibsen
Brand, translated by Geoffrey
Hill
Peer Gynt, translated by Rolf
Fjelde
Emperor and Galilean
Hedda Gabler
The Master Builder
The Lady from the Sea
When We Dead Awaken
August Strindberg
To Damascus
Miss julie
The Father
The Dance of Death
The Ghost Sonata
A Dream Play
GREAT BRITAIN
Robert Burns
Poems
William Blake
Complete Poetry and Prose
William Wordsworth
Poems
The Prelude
Sir Walter Scott
Waverley
The Heart of Midlothian
Redgauntlet
Old Mortality
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
Emma
Mansfield Park
Persuasion
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poems and Prose
Dorothy Wordsworth
The Grasmere Journal
William Hazlitt
Essays and Criticism
Lord Byron
Don juan
Poems
Walter Savage Landor
Poems
Imaginary Conversations
Thomas De Quincey
Confessions of an English
Opium Eater
Selected Prose
Charles Lamb
Essays
Maria Edgeworth
Castle Rackrent
John Galt
The Entail
Elizabeth Gaskell
Cranford
Mary Barton
North and South
James Hogg
The Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a justified
Sinner
Charles Maturin
Me/moth the Wanderer
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poems
A Defence of Poetry
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Frankenstein
John Clare
Poems
John Keats
Poems and Letters
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Death’s ]est-Book
Poems
George Darley
Nepenthe
Poems
Thomas Hood
Poems
Thomas Wade
Poems
Robert Browning
Poems
The Ring and the Book
Charles Dickens
The Posthumous Papers of the
Pickwick Club
David Copperfield
The Adventures of Oliver Twist
A Tale of Two Cities
Bleak House
Hard Times
Nicholas Nickleby
Dombey and Son
Great Expectations
Martin Chuzzlewit
Christmas Stories
Little Dorrit
Our Mutual Friend
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Poems
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Poems and Translations
Matthew Arnold
Poems
Essays
Arthur Hugh Clough
Poems
Christina Rossetti
Poems
Thomas Love Peacock
Nightmare Abbey
Gryll Grange
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Poems and Prose
Thomas Carlyle
Selected Prose
Sartor Resartus
john Ruskin
Modern Painters
The Stones of Venice
Unto This Last
The Queen of the Air
Walter Pater
Studies in the History of the
Renaissance
Appreciations
Imaginary Portraits
Marius the Epicurean
Edward FitzGerald
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
Autobiography
John Henry Newman
Apologia pro Vita Sua
A Grammar of Assent
The Idea of a University
Anthony Trollope
The Barsetshire Novels
The Palliser Novels
Orley Farm
The Way We Live Now
Lewis Carroll
Complete W arks
Edward Lear
Complete Nonsense
George Gissing
New Grub Street
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Poems and Letters
Charlotte Bronte
jane Eyre
Villette
Emily Bronte
Poems
W uthering Heights
William Makepeace Thackeray
Vanity Fair
The History of Henry Esmond
George Meredith
Poems
The Egoist
Francis Thompson
Poems
Lionel Johnson
Poems
Robert Bridges
Poems
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Collected Poems
The Man Who Was Thursday
Samuel Butler
Erewhon
The Way of All Flesh
W. S. Gilbert
Complete Plays of Gilbert and
Sullivan
Bah Ballads
Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone
The Woman in White
No Name
Coventry Patmore
Odes
James Thomson (Bysshe Vanolis)
The City of Dreadful Night
Oscar Wilde
Plays
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Artist as Critic
Letters
John Davidson
Ballads and Songs
Ernest Dowson
Complete Poems
George Eliot
Adam Bede
Silas Marner
The Mill on the Floss
Middlemarch
Daniel Deronda
Robert Louis Stevenson
Essays
Kidnapped
Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Treasure Island
The New Arabian Nights
The Master of Ballantrae
Weir of Hermiston
William Morris
Early Romances
Poems
The Earthly Paradise
The Well at the World’s End
News from Nowhere
Bram Stoker
Dracula
George Macdonald
Lilith
At the Back of the North Wind
GERMANY
Navalis (Friedrich von
Harden burg)
Hymns to the Night
Aphorisms
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Fairy Tales
Eduard Morike
Selected Poems, translated by
Christopher Middleton
Mozart on His Way to Prague
Theodor Storm
Immensee
Poems
Gottfried Keller
Green Henry
Tales
E. T. A. Hoffmann
The Devil’s Elixir
Tales
Jeremias Gotthelf
The Black Spider
Adalbert Stifter
Indian Summer
Tales
Friedrich Schlegel
Criticism and Aphorisms
Georg B iichner
Danton’s Death
Woyzeck
Heinrich Heine
Complete Poems
Richard Wagner
The Ring of the Nibelung
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Birth of Tragedy
Beyond Good and Evil
On the Genealogy of Morals
The Will to Power
Theodor Fontane
Effi Briest
Stefan George
Selected Poems
RUSSIA
Aleksandr Pushkin
Complete Prose Tales
Collected Poetry, translated by
Walter Arndt
Eugene Onegin, translated by
Charles 1 ohnston
Narrative Poems, translated by
Charles 1 ohnston
Boris Godunov
Nikolay Gogo)
The Complete Tales
Dead Souls
The Government Inspector,
translated by Adrian Mitchell
Mikhail Lermontov
Narrative Poems, translated by
Charles 1 ohnston
A Hero of Our Time
Sergey Aksakov
A Family Chronicle
Aleksandr Herzen
My Past and Thoughts
From the Other Shore
Ivan Goncharov
The Frigate Pallada
Oblomov
Ivan Turgenev
A Sportsman’s Notebook,
translated by Charles and
Natasha Hepburn
A Month in the Country
Fathers and Sons
On the Eve
First Love
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from the Underground
Crime and Punishment
The Idiot
The Possessed (The Devils)
The Brothers Karamazov
Short Novels
Leo Tolstoy
The Cossacks
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
A Confession
The Power of Darkness
Short Novels
Nikolay Leskov
Tales
Aleksandr Ostrovsky
The Storm
Nikolay Chernyshevsky
What Is to Be Done?
Aleksandr Blok
The Twelve and Other Poems,
translated by Anselm Hollo
Anton Chekhov
The Tales
The Major Plays
THE UNITED STATES
Washington Irving
The Sketch Book
William Cullen Bryant
Collected Poems
James Fenimore Cooper
The Deerslayer
John Greenleaf Whittier
Collected Poems
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature
Essays, first and second series
Representative Men
The Conduct of Life
Journals
Poems
Emily Dickinson
Complete Poems
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass, first edition
Leaves of Grass, third edition
The Complete Poems
Specimen Days
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
Tales and Sketches
The Marble Faun
Notebooks
Herman Melville
Moby-Dick
The Piazza Tales
Billy Budd
Collected Poems
Clare/
Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry and Tales
Essays and Reviews
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym
Eureka
jones Very
Essays and Poems
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
The Cricket and Other Poems
Henry David Thoreau
Walden
Poems
Essays
Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Two Years before the Mast
Frederick Douglass
Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, an
American Slave
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Selected Poems
Sidney Lanier
Poems
Francis Parkman
France and England in North
America
The California and Oregon Trail
Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres
Ambrose Bierce
Collected Writings
Louisa May Alcott
Little Women
Charles W. Chesnutt
The Short Fiction
Kate Chopin
The Awakening
William Dean Howells
The Rise of Silas Lapham
A Modern Instance
Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage
Stories and Poems
Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady
The Bostonians
The Princess Casamassima
The Awkward Age
Short Novels and Tales
The Ambassadors
The Wings of the Dove
The Golden Bowl
Harold Frederic
The Damnation of Theron Ware
Mark Twain
Complete Short Stories
The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn
The Devil’s Racetrack
Number Forty-Four: The
Mysterious Stranger
Pudd’nhead Wilson
A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court
William James
The Varieties of Religious
Experience
Pragmatism
Frank Norris
The Octopus
Sarah Orne Jewett
The Country of the Pointed Firs
and Other Stories
Trumbull Stickney
Poems
And here is the list of the volumes of The Great Books of the Western World do read them as I did beginning in eighth grade at the age of fourteen, using Adler’s Ten Year Plan which took me three to four years during the three times I read it in my teens, twenties, and thirties, using his ten volume synopticon of the Great Books, the Great Ideas Program Series.
I spent around one sixth of my life in this study, and wouldn’t trade a moment of it. I hope you too may find joy in this.
How to Think about the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization
“Comprised of the edited transcripts of the 1950s television series The Great Ideas produced by the Institute for Philosophical Research in San Fransisco, this book introduces laypeople to 52 great ideas of philosophy through dialogue between an interviewer and the philosopher Mortimer Adler.”
The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought, Mortimer J. Adler
“Mortimer Adler sat down at a manual typewriter with a list of authors and a pyramid of books. Beginning with “Angel” and ending with “World,” he set out to write 102 essays featuring the ideas that have collectively defined Western thought for more than twenty-five hundred years. The essays, originally published in the “Syntopicon,” were, and remain, the centerpiece of Encyclolpaedia Britannica’s “Great Books of the Western World.”
As written in Wikipedia; “Originally published in 54 volumes, The Great Books of the Western World covers categories including fiction, history, poetry, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, drama, politics, religion, economics, and ethics. Hutchins wrote the first volume, titled The Great Conversation, as an introduction and discourse on liberal education. Adler sponsored the next two volumes, “The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon”, as a way of emphasizing the unity of the set and, by extension, of Western thought in general. A team of indexers spent months compiling references to such topics as “Man’s freedom in relation to the will of God” and “The denial of void or vacuum in favor of a plenum”. They grouped the topics into 102 chapters, for which Adler wrote the 102 introductions. Four colors identify each volume by subject area—Imaginative Literature, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, History and Social Science, and Philosophy and Theology. The volumes contained the following works:
Volume 1
The Great Conversation
Volume 2
Syntopicon I: Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, and Love
Volume 3
Syntopicon II: Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World
Volume 4
Homer (rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler)
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Volume 5
Aeschylus (translated into English verse by G.M. Cookson)
The Suppliant Maidens
The Persians
Seven Against Thebes
Prometheus Bound
The Oresteia
Agamemnon
Choephoroe
The Eumenides
Sophocles (translated into English prose by Sir Richard C. Jebb)
The Oedipus Cycle
Oedipus the King
Oedipus at Colonus
Antigone
Ajax
Electra
The Trachiniae
Philoctetes
Euripides (translated into English prose by Edward P. Coleridge)
Rhesus
Medea
Hippolytus
Alcestis
Heracleidae
The Suppliants
The Trojan Women
Ion
Helen
Andromache
Electra
Bacchantes
Hecuba
Heracles Mad
The Phoenician Women
Orestes
Iphigenia in Tauris
Iphigenia in Aulis
Cyclops
Aristophanes (translated into English verse by Benjamin Bickley Rogers)
The Acharnians
The Knights
The Clouds
The Wasps
Peace
The Birds
The Frogs
Lysistrata
Thesmophoriazusae
Ecclesiazousae
Plutus
Volume 6
Herodotus
The History (translated by George Rawlinson)
Thucydides
History of the Peloponnesian War (translated by Richard Crawley and revised by R. Feetham)
Volume 7
Plato
The Dialogues (translated by Benjamin Jowett)
Charmides
Lysis
Laches
Protagoras
Euthydemus
Cratylus
Phaedrus
Ion
Symposium
Meno
Euthyphro
Apology
Crito
Phaedo
Gorgias
The Republic
Timaeus
Critias
Parmenides
Theaetetus
Sophist
Statesman
Philebus
Laws
The Seventh Letter (translated by J. Harward)
Volume 8
Aristotle
Categories
On Interpretation
Prior Analytics
Posterior Analytics
Topics
Sophistical Refutations
Physics
On the Heavens
On Generation and Corruption
Meteorology
Metaphysics
On the Soul
Minor biological works
On Sense and the Sensible
On Memory and Reminisence
On Sleep and Sleeplessness
On Dreams
On Prophesying by Dreams
On Longevity and Shortness of Life
On Youth and Old Age, On Life and Death, On Breathing
Volume 9
Aristotle
History of Animals
Parts of Animals
On the Motion of Animals
On the Gait of Animals
On the Generation of Animals
Nicomachean Ethics
Politics
The Athenian Constitution
Rhetoric
Poetics
Volume 10
Hippocrates
Works
The Hippocratic Oath
On Ancient Medicine
On Airs, Water, and Places
The Book of Prognostics
On Regimen in Acute Diseases
Of the Epidemics
On Injuries of the Head
On the Surgery
On Fractures
On the Articulations
Instruments of Reduction
Aphorisms
The Law
The Ulcer
On Fistulae
On Hemorrhoids
On the Sacred Disease
Galen
On the Natural Faculties
Volume 11
Euclid
The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements
Archimedes
On the Sphere and Cylinder
Measurement of a Circle
On Conoids and Spheroids
On Spirals
On the Equilibrium of Planes
The Sand Reckoner
The Quadrature of the Parabola
On Floating Bodies
Book of Lemmas
The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems
Apollonius of Perga
On Conic Sections
Nicomachus of Gerasa
Introduction to Arithmetic
Volume 12
Lucretius
On the Nature of Things (translated by H.A.J. Munro)
Epictetus
The Discourses (translated by George Long)
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations (translated by George Long)
Volume 13
Virgil (translated into English verse by James Rhoades)
Eclogues
Georgics
Aeneid
Volume 14
Plutarch
The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (translated by John Dryden)
Volume 15
P. Cornelius Tacitus (translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb)
The Annals
The Histories
Volume 16
Ptolemy
Almagest, (translated by R. Catesby Taliaferro)
Nicolaus Copernicus
On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
Johannes Kepler (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Books IV–V)
The Harmonies of the World (Book V)
Volume 17
Plotinus
The Six Enneads (translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page)
Volume 18
Augustine of Hippo
The Confessions
The City of God
On Christian Doctrine
Volume 19
Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologica (First part complete, selections from second part, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)
Volume 20
Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologica (Selections from second and third parts and supplement, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)
Volume 21
Dante Alighieri
Divine Comedy (Translated by Charles Eliot Norton)
Volume 22
Geoffrey Chaucer
Troilus and Criseyde
The Canterbury Tales
Volume 23
Niccolò Machiavelli
The Prince
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
Volume 24
François Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel, but only up to book 4.
Volume 25
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Essays
Volume 26
William Shakespeare
The First Part of King Henry the Sixth
The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth
The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth
The Tragedy of Richard the Third
The Comedy of Errors
Titus Andronicus
The Taming of the Shrew
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo and Juliet
The Tragedy of King Richard the Second
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Life and Death of King John
The Merchant of Venice
The First Part of King Henry the Fourth
The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth
Much Ado About Nothing
The Life of King Henry the Fifth
Julius Caesar
As You Like It
Volume 27
William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night; or, What You Will
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Troilus and Cressida
All’s Well That Ends Well
Measure for Measure
Othello, the Moor of Venice
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Timon of Athens
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Cymbeline
The Winter’s Tale
The Tempest
The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth
Sonnets
Volume 28
William Gilbert
On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
Galileo Galilei
Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences
William Harvey
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
On the Circulation of Blood
On the Generation of Animals
Volume 29
Miguel de Cervantes
The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha (translated by John Ormsby)
Volume 30
Sir Francis Bacon
The Advancement of Learning
Novum Organum
New Atlantis
Volume 31
René Descartes
Rules for the Direction of the Mind
Discourse on the Method
Meditations on First Philosophy
Objections Against the Meditations and Replies
The Geometry
Benedict de Spinoza
Ethics
Volume 32
John Milton
English Minor Poems
On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity
A Paraphrase on Psalm 114
Psalm 136
The Passion
On Time
Upon the Circumcision
At a Solemn Musick
An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester
Song on May Morning
On Shakespeare
On the University Carrier
Another on the same
L’Allegro
Il Penseroso
Arcades
Lycida
Comus
On the Death of a Fair Infant
At a Vacation Exercise
The Fifth Ode of Horace
Sonnets (I, and VII—XIX)
On the New Forcers of Conscience
On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester
To the Lord General Cromwell
To Sir Henry Vane the Younger
To Mister Cyriack the Skinner upon his Blindness
Psalms (I—VIII & LXXX—LXXXVIII)
Paradise Lost
Samson Agonistes
Areopagitica
Volume 33
Blaise Pascal
The Provincial Letters
Pensées
Scientific and mathematical essays
Volume 34
Sir Isaac Newton
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
Optics
Christiaan Huygens
Treatise on Light
Volume 35
John Locke
A Letter Concerning Toleration
Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
George Berkeley
The Principles of Human Knowledge
David Hume
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Volume 36
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels
Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Volume 37
Henry Fielding
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Volume 38
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
The Spirit of the Laws
Jean Jacques Rousseau
A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
A Discourse on Political Economy
The Social Contract
Volume 39
Adam Smith
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Volume 40
Edward Gibbon
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Part 1)
Volume 41
Edward Gibbon
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Part 2)
Volume 42
Immanuel Kant
Critique of Pure Reason
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
Critique of Practical Reason
Excerpts from The Metaphysics of Morals
Preface and Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics with a note on Conscience
General Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals
The Science of Right
The Critique of Judgement
Volume 43
American State Papers
Declaration of Independence
Articles of Confederation
The Constitution of the United States of America
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
The Federalist
John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
Considerations on Representative Government
Utilitarianism
Volume 44
James Boswell
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
Volume 45
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
Elements of Chemistry
Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier
Analytical Theory of Heat
Michael Faraday
Experimental Researches in Electricity
Volume 46
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Philosophy of Right
The Philosophy of History
Volume 47
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust
Volume 48
Herman Melville
Moby Dick; or, The Whale
Volume 49
Charles Darwin
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
Volume 50
Karl Marx
Capital
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Manifesto of the Communist Party
Volume 51
Count Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
Volume 52
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
Volume 53
William James
The Principles of Psychology
Volume 54
Sigmund Freud
The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis
Selected Papers on Hysteria
The Sexual Enlightenment of Children
The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy
Observations on “Wild” Psycho-Analysis
The Interpretation of Dreams
On Narcissism
Instincts and Their Vicissitudes
Repression
The Unconscious
A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
The Ego and the Id
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety
Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
Civilization and Its Discontents
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Second edition
The second edition of Great Books of the Western World, 1990, saw an increase from 54 to 60 volumes, with updated translations. The six new volumes concerned the 20th century, an era of which the first edition’s sole representative was Freud. Some of the other volumes were re-arranged, with even more pre-20th century material added but with four texts deleted: Apollonius’ On Conic Sections, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Joseph Fourier’s Analytical Theory of Heat. Adler later expressed regret about dropping On Conic Sections and Tom Jones. Adler also voiced disagreement with the addition of Voltaire’s Candide, and said that the Syntopicon should have included references to the Koran. He addressed criticisms that the set was too heavily Western European and did not adequately represent women and minority authors.[11] Four women authors were included, where previously there were none.[12]
The added pre-20th century texts appear in these volumes (some of the accompanying content of these volumes differs from the first edition volume of that number):
Volume 20
John Calvin
Institutes of the Christian Religion (Selections)
Volume 23
Erasmus
The Praise of Folly
Volume 31
Molière
The School for Wives
The Critique of the School for Wives
Tartuffe
Don Juan
The Miser
The Would-Be Gentleman
The Imaginary Invalid
Jean Racine
Bérénice
Phèdre
Volume 34
Voltaire
Candide
Denis Diderot
Rameau’s Nephew
Volume 43
Søren Kierkegaard
Fear and Trembling
Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
Volume 44
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America
Volume 45
Honoré de Balzac
Cousin Bette
Volume 46
Jane Austen
Emma
George Eliot
Middlemarch
Volume 47
Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit
Volume 48
Mark Twain
Huckleberry Finn
Volume 52
Henrik Ibsen
A Doll’s House
The Wild Duck
Hedda Gabler
The Master Builder
The contents of the six volumes of added 20th-century material:
Volume 55
William James
Pragmatism
Henri Bergson
“An Introduction to Metaphysics”
John Dewey
Experience and Education
Alfred North Whitehead
Science and the Modern World
Bertrand Russell
The Problems of Philosophy
Martin Heidegger
What Is Metaphysics?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations
Karl Barth
The Word of God and the Word of Man
Volume 56
Henri Poincaré
Science and Hypothesis
Max Planck
Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
Alfred North Whitehead
An Introduction to Mathematics
Albert Einstein
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
Arthur Eddington
The Expanding Universe
Niels Bohr
Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (selections)
Discussion with Einstein on Epistemology
G. H. Hardy
A Mathematician’s Apology
Werner Heisenberg
Physics and Philosophy
Erwin Schrödinger
What Is Life?
Theodosius Dobzhansky
Genetics and the Origin of Species
C. H. Waddington
The Nature of Life
Volume 57
Thorstein Veblen
The Theory of the Leisure Class
R. H. Tawney
The Acquisitive Society
John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
In our current moment of book burnings and bans, rewritten histories and authorized identities, silencing and erasure of the witness of history and the repression of dissent, thought control and the electoral infiltration, subversion, and capture of public institutions crucial to the mission of democracy and the manufacture of an informed electorate able to question authority as co-owners of the state, our interdependent public schools and libraries have become a frontline in the struggle between tyranny and liberty.
What is a library for?
Libraries share with public schools the purpose of creating citizens, of education in its original Greek meaning to bring out the truth of ourselves, together with two other primary and crucial functions in a democracy; to provide free access to learning as both rights of information and a free press, which also parallel equality as annihilation of class and access to opportunity as a seizure of power, and to provide inclusive and diverse representations of self as revolutionary struggle against authorized identities, divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of race, gender, faith, and nationality.
At the heart of this process of identity construction lies the curation of reading lists and a personal library which represents and defines us in ways we have chosen for ourselves.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
Memory, history, identity; the selves we choose among the limitless possibilities of becoming human. Here is a central problem of both libraries and the construction of ourselves as assemblages of stories; how shall we taxonomize, structure, and assign relative value to the texts we gather, in our personae and in our libraries as memory palaces? And in a realm of ideas and their consequences which is chaotic, shifting, ephemeral, impermanent, and full of dyadic opposites, relative truths, mutual interdependence and change?
Before all else, who decides? Public libraries and schools confront us with all of the issues about how to be human together which create, inform, motivate, and shape human societies, and democracies most especially as negotiated meaning and value.
This is why the curation of personal libraries and unauthorized reading lists are revolutionary acts, and a praxis of the values of democracy.
In aid of this process of decolonization and becoming autonomous I share with you now some ideas from writing in Aeon on How to Nurture and Grow a Personal Library, and a link to the wonderful community of librarians at LibraryThing.
As I wrote in preface to my reading lists, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others. Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?
As I wrote in my post of September 25 2024, Banned Book Week: Fighting Theocratic Fascist Terror and Tyranny In America; In a free society of equals, only we ourselves have the right to choose who we will become, and no one may authorize or limit our possible identities, for this is falsification, enslavement, and theft of the soul.
When subversive organizations of white supremacist terror, patriarchal theocratic sexual terror, and tyranny as the centralization of power to a carceral state of force and control with all its attendant evils and paraphernalia of thought control, surveillance, and repression of dissent infiltrate our institutions to enact book bans and other censorship, let us expose and challenge them for what they are; attempts to pervert education from the teaching of questioning to produce citizens who are co owners of the state and guarantors of each others rights into obedience to authority.
And remember children; they only ban books that can give you the power to see through the lies of those who would enslave us, and to free yourself from systems of oppression, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
For an example of how theocratic and fascist organizations pursue the subversion of democracy through book bans as part of a broad assault on our liberties and freedoms, we may look to the odious Moms For Liberty.
As written by Mark Romano in MSN, in an article entitled 10 Examples of How Moms for Liberty are the Real Threats to our Freedoms; “Moms for Liberty has positioned itself as a champion for parental rights and freedom in education, but their actions often tell a different story. This group, while claiming to advocate for liberty, promotes policies that restrict personal choice and challenge diverse perspectives in schools. Many parents and educators question how a movement that rallies against certain books and ideas can truly call itself a defender of freedom.
With chapters across 45 states, Moms for Liberty has gained visibility in education politics. Their push for influence in school districts raises concerns about the limits they want to place on curriculum and expression. This blog post explores ten notable examples that highlight how their agenda can contradict the very values of liberty and freedom they purport to support.
As this discussion unfolds, it becomes clear that the issues at stake go beyond educational choices. They touch upon broader themes of inclusivity, freedom of speech, and the diverse fabric of American society.
Defining ‘Liberty’ and ‘Freedom’
Liberty and freedom are often used interchangeably, but they have distinct meanings.
Liberty refers to the protection of individual rights and the absence of oppression. It’s about having the legal and social space to make choices.
Freedom, on the other hand, can mean the power to act, speak, or think without hindrance. It’s more about the ability to pursue personal desires.
In a democratic society, both are essential for human dignity.
Moms for Liberty positions itself as a champion of parents’ rights. Yet, their actions often contradict their claims about supporting true liberty and freedom for all.
By limiting access to certain books or topics in schools, they restrict the freedom of students to learn and explore. This creates a tension between their stated goals and the actual impact of their actions.
Understanding these terms helps clarify the debate around organizations like Moms for Liberty. It shows how their belief system can shape policies that may not align with broader definitions of liberty and freedom.
Educational Censorship
Educational censorship is a growing concern as different groups push to control what students learn. This movement often focuses on banning books and shaping classroom discussions, which can limit students’ exposure to diverse ideas.
Banning Books
Banning books has become a notable strategy. Groups like Moms for Liberty often target specific titles that address topics like race, gender, and sexuality. They argue that these subjects are inappropriate for students.
Many schools have faced pressure to remove certain books from libraries and reading lists. This action creates gaps in education. Students miss out on important discussions about society and history. For instance, classics that tackle civil rights issues may get pulled. This not only limits freedom of choice but also diminishes critical thinking skills in young readers.
Controlling Classroom Content
Controlling classroom content is another tactic used by Moms for Liberty. They advocate for removing lessons that introduce concepts related to social justice and identity. Their focus is often on ensuring that political views align with specific ideologies.
Teachers may find themselves restricted in how they address topics in class. This can lead to a watered-down curriculum that avoids important issues. For example, discussions about historical injustices might get minimized or skipped altogether. When educators cannot discuss various perspectives, students lose the chance to develop a well-rounded understanding of the world around them.
Opposition to Inclusive Policies
Moms for Liberty often challenges inclusive policies, focusing on LGBTQ+ rights and racial equity. Their stance leads to heated debates within communities, limiting the support for diversity in schools.
Resistance to LGBTQ+ Rights in Schools
Moms for Liberty has actively opposed policies that support LGBTQ+ students. This includes pushing back against discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation in classrooms.
They argue that these topics should not be part of school curriculums. Their campaigns often focus on banning certain books or materials that include LGBTQ+ narratives.
Many school board meetings see strong vocal opposition from Moms for Liberty members. Their influence raises concerns about students feeling safe and represented, as they push for a more traditional approach to education.
Challenging Racial Equity Initiatives
Moms for Liberty also opposes racial equity initiatives in schools. They argue that these programs create division.
Members often claim that teaching about systemic racism is anti-American or promotes “critical race theory,” even when such teachings are not part of the curriculum.
This opposition can lead to the rejection of programs aimed at promoting diversity and inclusion. They seek to eliminate discussions that highlight historical injustices, which can prevent students from understanding different perspectives.
This resistance can limit resources meant to support marginalized students, impacting overall school culture.
Parental Rights Overreach
Moms for Liberty often advocates for parental rights in ways that some see as overstepping boundaries. This can affect health and safety measures in schools and infringe upon the choices of other families. The implications of these actions are significant and raise questions about individual freedoms.
Health and Safety Measures
In their push for parental control, Moms for Liberty has challenged essential health and safety protocols in schools. One notable example is their opposition to mask mandates during health crises. They argue that parents should decide whether their children wear masks, but this stance can compromise the safety of the entire student body.
Additionally, this group has pushed back against vaccination requirements. By questioning established health guidelines, they risk creating environments where preventable diseases could spread. Their actions often ignore the broader public health implications, focusing solely on individual parental choice.
Infringing on Other Parents’ Choices
Moms for Liberty’s focus on parental rights can inadvertently affect other families’ rights. For instance, when advocating for book bans in schools, they impose their values on all students. This limits access to diverse perspectives and important topics, which can help shape young minds.
Moreover, their initiatives can place undue pressure on educators. Teachers may feel forced to avoid certain subjects to comply with parental demands, impacting the quality of education. In this way, the push for expanded parental rights can lead to a narrowing of educational content, which can harm all students.
Interference with Curriculum Development
Moms for Liberty often challenges curriculum decisions in schools. Their actions raise concerns about how their involvement affects educational choices.
Critique of Curriculum Experts
Moms for Liberty has taken steps to question the expertise of curriculum designers. They believe that parents should have a strong say in what children learn. This point of view often leads to dismissing input from educational professionals.
For example, when schools adopt certain materials, these parents might push back, labeling them as inappropriate. This can create tension between educators and parents.
The result? Educators may feel pressured to alter lesson plans to appease concerned parents. This interferes with the educational process.
Limiting Teacher Autonomy
Teacher autonomy can take a hit when groups like Moms for Liberty get involved. Teachers typically select materials and methods to suit their students’ needs. When parental groups pressure schools, it can limit educators’ choices.
For instance, teachers may shy away from diverse perspectives in literature or science due to fear of backlash. Instead of encouraging open discussions, they might stick to safer, less controversial topics.
This restricts students’ learning experiences. A narrow focus on certain viewpoints can limit critical thinking and understanding. It affects the overall educational environment, making it harder for students to explore complex issues.
Advocacy Against Evidence-Based Education
Moms for Liberty actively challenges the principles of evidence-based education. Their actions raise concerns about the reliance on established research and factual history in schools. Here’s a closer look at two significant aspects of this advocacy.
Rejecting Scientific Consensus
Moms for Liberty has been known to oppose scientific findings, especially those related to health and education. They tend to favor personal beliefs over the conclusions supported by experts.
For example, this group often questions the importance of mental health initiatives that rely on data-driven approaches. They argue against programs that highlight the impact of social and emotional learning, dismissing them as unnecessary. This kind of rejection can limit students’ understanding of crucial topics like mental health and wellness.
Promotion of Historical Misrepresentations
The group also promotes selective versions of history that misrepresent facts. In efforts to influence school curriculums, Moms for Liberty pushes for bans on teaching slavery and civil rights topics. They believe these subjects create discomfort for students and parents alike.
This advocacy can lead to an incomplete education. Omitting such key historical events prevents students from understanding the complexities of race and society. Instead, students may be presented with a sanitized view of history that ignores significant struggles and achievements.
Political Maneuvering
Moms for Liberty actively engages in political strategies to influence local education. They focus on targeting school boards and use emotional tactics to push policy changes.
Electioneering School Board Campaigns
Moms for Liberty aims to place their candidates on school boards across the country. They have launched campaigns to support candidates who align with their conservative values.
Their strategy involves grassroots efforts in communities, mobilizing parents and like-minded individuals. They organize events to drive voter turnout and raise awareness about school issues. This focus on local elections has made them a notable player in education politics.
With over 275 chapters in 45 states, they work to ensure representation that echoes their vision. This approach creates a network that can effectively challenge opposing views.
Policy-Making Through Fear
Another tactic employed by Moms for Liberty is using fear to influence policy decisions. They often highlight issues such as critical race theory and gender identity in schools. These topics can evoke strong emotions among parents.
Moms for Liberty calls for book bans and strict policies regarding curriculum content. By framing these actions as necessary for children’s safety, they gain support from concerned parents. This fear-based strategy is effective in achieving their goals.
Their messaging resonates with many who feel anxious about modern education. By capitalizing on these fears, they seek to reshape public education to fit their ideals.
Undermining Professional Educators
Moms for Liberty has been criticized for actions that challenge the authority and expertise of teachers. This approach can create a hostile environment for educators and diminish the quality of education students receive.
Dismissal of Teacher Expertise
Moms for Liberty often questions the qualifications and methods of professional educators. They argue that teachers are not to be trusted with sensitive topics, claiming these professionals push certain ideologies.
Teachers spend years studying and training to understand how to educate their students effectively. By undermining this expertise, the group can create a divide between parents and educators. This can lead to conflicts at school board meetings and an atmosphere of suspicion.
Such actions might result in teachers feeling unappreciated and undervalued. When teachers worry about their job security or reputation, it can lead to less effective teaching practices.
Encouraging Distrust in Educators
Moms for Liberty advocates for transparency in schools. While this sounds good, it often breeds distrust among parents towards educators.
By promoting ideas that teachers are responsible for indoctrinating students, they create fear and concern among parents. This makes parents more likely to challenge teachers’ decisions or methods without a clear understanding.
Such distrust can harm the classroom environment. Educators might feel the need to look over their shoulders, impacting their teaching style. Instead of focusing on learning, teachers may spend time justifying their choices to parents and school boards.
This breakdown in trust not only affects teachers but can also create a negative atmosphere for students trying to learn.
Stifling Student Expression
Moms for Liberty has faced criticism for actions that seem to limit student expression in schools. This includes restricting student speech and discouraging critical thinking. These actions raise concerns about how students engage with different ideas and perspectives.
Limiting Student’s Speech and Clubs
Moms for Liberty has been linked to efforts that restrict student speech. This includes challenges to student-organized clubs that promote diversity and inclusion.
For example, some schools have seen pushback against clubs that focus on LGBTQ+ issues. Members of these clubs often face strong opposition, limiting their ability to create a supportive environment.
Parents have voiced concerns about these clubs, saying they conflict with their values. Consequently, school administrators sometimes feel pressured to remove or limit these clubs.
This creates an environment where students may feel unsafe expressing their identities and beliefs. Many students cherish these clubs as their safe spaces to discuss important topics.
Discouraging Critical Thinking
Another concern is the trend of discouraging critical thinking in classrooms. Moms for Liberty promotes a certain viewpoint on various issues, often pushing back against curricula that include diverse perspectives.
For instance, they have challenged books and educational materials that present different historical viewpoints or explore complex social issues.
This can lead to a narrow understanding of important topics for students. It limits their ability to engage in discussions and form their own opinions.
When students are not exposed to a wide range of ideas, they miss out on essential skills needed for critical thinking. Encouraging curiosity and questioning is crucial for their development.
Promotion of Homogeneous Ideology
Moms for Liberty’s actions often reflect a consistent pattern of promoting a narrow set of beliefs. This approach can lead to a lack of diverse educational experiences for students. Here are two key areas where this ideology is evident.
Advocating for ‘One-Sided’ Learning
Moms for Liberty pushes for educational policies that favor specific viewpoints. This often means supporting curricula that highlight conservative perspectives while sidelining alternative ideas. For example, they have opposed lessons that include topics like critical race theory and sexual orientation.
This focus can create a limited view of history and social issues. When students only learn about one perspective, they might struggle to understand broader societal dynamics. Effective education thrives on presenting a variety of viewpoints.
Opposing Diverse Perspectives
The organization frequently challenges programs that aim to include diverse voices. They argue that introducing concepts related to race, gender, and LGBTQ+ identities threatens traditional values. For instance, Moms for Liberty has taken steps to block LGBTQ+ protections in schools, claiming these measures infringe on free speech.
Such actions can lead to an environment where students feel excluded or marginalized. By opposing a rich tapestry of perspectives, they limit students’ ability to engage with the world around them. This stance raises concerns about inclusivity and understanding in educational settings.”
As I wrote in my post of May 28 2022, On Libraries and Identity as a Ground of Struggle; “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” So Heinrich Heine has taught us, in his lyric drama of 1823, Almansor: A Tragedy. As described by Professor Shlomo Avineri in a lecture at CEU; “Almansor” is a tragic love story between an Arab man and Donna Clara, a Moroccan woman who’s forced to convert from Islam to Christianity. Taking place in Granada in 1492, the tragedy depicts the burning of the Qu’ran, the act that prompts the sentence now engraved in the ground of Berlin’s Opernplatz commemorating the horrifying book burning of 1933.
Heine’s lyrical poetry was well-loved in Germany, his most famous poem “Lorelei” even appeared in a collection of German folk songs, although the poet’s name was given as Anonymous. His books, together with the works of Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kastner, Karl Marx, Heinrich Mann and many other “un-German” authors, were also burned on May 10, 1933.”
Why was this early work of German Romanticism silenced and erased from the canon of literature for over a century? As a wiki article describes; “The performance turned into a fiasco and had to be canceled after tumultuous scenes in the auditorium. Since there are no immediate newspaper reports of the event, the trigger is not entirely clear and leaves room for speculation ranging from personal intrigue to anti-Semitism. According to Manfred Windfuhr, editor of the Düsseldorf Heine edition, the most likely explanation is the anecdote that the actor of Almansor Eduard Schütz later reported. According to this, a viewer asked about the author of the play during the last transformation towards the end of the performance and was whispered “Der Jude Heine” in response. In the erroneous assumption that an Israelite money changer of the same name from Braunschweig wrote the tragedy, he then exclaimed: “What? shall we listen to the silly Jew’s nonsense? We don’t want to tolerate that any longer! Let’s knock out the piece! ”And thus triggered the protests. simple confusion of names.”
Heine’s personal friends and influences included Goethe, Schlegel, Dumas, Hegel, and Marx, and his direct models were the world’s first historical novel Las Guerras de Granada by Ginés Pérez de Hita, which awaits translation into English, The Magic Ring by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, and the beautiful Arabic and Persian romance Layla and Majnoun which has been reimagined in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by the Afghan author Khaled Hosseini.
In Almansor, Heine writes in reference to the book burning of 1499 by the future Grand Inquisitor in the wake of the fall of Al-Andalus and the betrayal by the Catholic monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragón of the treaty which guaranteed freedom of religion for all, during which thousands of books were destroyed, including the Qu’ran and other works of Islamic, Jewish, and classical Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, history, and science, excepting only medical works from the flames. It seems they weren’t quite as crazy as our own science deniers and anti-vaccine Luddites, but nearly so, and the parallels do not end there.
And so, we come to this; the Republican Party, in public declaration of their origins and traditions in the Inquisition and the Nazis, have chosen to launch a national campaign of book burnings and bans and are waging a combined electoral and media campaign to monopolize public school and library boards to authorize identities and repress dissent. And only our public solidarity and will to resist subjugation stands between us and the year 2022 being remembered in history with those of 1499 and 1933.
As I wrote in my post of December 14 2021, Subversion of Democracy: Case of the Texas Book Ban;
Remaining on the Texas Public School Required Reading List:
Lynchings and Other Family Gatherings: the Joy of Community
Keep Your Pimp Hand Strong: Negotiating Gender Roles
Only Our Kind Are Truly Human: Why Values and Morals Only Apply To Us
Texas bans books from public schools and libraries in subversion of democracy and our values of freedom and equality of all humankind in an attempt to enforce imperiled hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege historically and systemically constructed along divisions of race and gender and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
The multifront assault on freedom of information and expression is about patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror under the fig leaves of Gideonite fundamentalist Christian Identity sectarianism and jingoistic nationalism, as it has always been.
The last time the state had the right to control its slave populations through access to learning civilization collapsed and was lost for a thousand years while the Church burned books which threated elite power, and we must be vigilant lest we give those who would enslave us the right and power to do so yet again, and cast the world into a Dark Age from which we may never recover.
As written by Ryan Cooper in The Week, in an article entitled The forgotten history of Republican book banning; “A conservative stock character is making a comeback: the book banner. For the past few years, Republicans have pretended they’re defending free speech and free inquiry in schools against censorious liberals with their safe spaces and trigger warnings. In reality, conservatives have a mile-long history of trying to suppress the teaching of books they find uncomfortable.
That record has resurfaced in the Virginia gubernatorial race, where Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin recently ran an ad in which a woman named Laura Murphy complained about not being able to dictate what was taught at her local high school. Murphy describes the issue as explicit material being shown to children without parental sign-off, but there’s much more to the story than the ad let on: Back in 2013, Murphy told The Washington Post that her son Blake (now an associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee) had night terrors after being required to read Toni Morrison’s book Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Beloved.
Murphy isn’t the only Republican with this censorious impulse. The American Library Association maintains an incomplete list of attempted book-banning events in recent history, and in the large majority of cases for which a motivation is explained, it is conservative: Right-wing parents in Columbus, Ohio, tried to ban Catcher in the Rye in schools in 1963 because it was “anti-white.” Other parents challenged The Grapes of Wrath in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1991 because it invoked God and Jesus in a “vain and profane manner.” Slaughterhouse-Five was suppressed in Oakland County, Michigan, in 1972, in a case in which a circuit judge called the book “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” Those are just three of dozens of examples.
Now, liberals have done the same thing on occasion, typically targeting books which contain racial slurs, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But the bulk of book banning incidents — parents complaining about sexual content, violence, skepticism of Christianity, cursing, or the history of racism and slavery — are straight out of the Moral Majority politics of the 1980s and 1990s. That habit seemed to vanish for awhile when Republicans nominated a thrice-divorced, credibly accused rapist for president. Now it’s coming back.
In recent months, Republican legislatures have passed de facto prohibitions of teaching the history of racism across the country. As a result, a Tennessee teacher was fired for assigning Ta-Nehisi Coates, while a Texas school board recently apologized for instructing teachers to present “opposing” views on the Holocaust while trying to obey a Republican law on curriculum content. Don’t let the brief reprieve fool you: They were always like this.”
As written by Amy Brady in Lithub, The History (and Present) of Banning Books in America: On the Ongoing Fight Against the Censorship of Ideas; “Like small pox and vinyl records, book banning is something many Americans like to think of as history. But according to the American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE), the practice persists. ABFE, which from its headquarters in White Plains fights book banning across the country, keeps a list of books challenged each year by American public libraries and schools. In 2016, that list includes Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Emily M. Danworth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Most of the titles are by LGBTQ authors and authors of color who write about life beyond white, straight, middle-class America.
One way ABFE fights book banning is to partner with other organizations in the publishing industry (including their parent organization, the American Booksellers Association) to host Banned Books Week, a seven-day celebration that takes place in bookstores and libraries all over the United States. This year, the event runs from September 25th to October 1st with a focus on “diversity,” a factor behind many book challenges. “There were over 300 book challenges in 2015,” said Chris Finan, Director of ABFE, in an interview. “And themes of race, ethnicity, and sexual preference have been a large part of why those books got challenged.”
On its website, ABFE acknowledges that diversity is difficult to define. One definition that has informed their thinking comes from the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom: Diversity includes “non-white main and/or secondary characters; LGBT main and/or secondary characters; disabled main and/or secondary characters; issues about race or racism; LGBT issues; issues about religion, which encompass in this situation the Holocaust and terrorism; issues about disability and/or mental illness; non-Western settings, in which the West is North America and Europe.”
Historically, other reasons for banning books include: sexual imagery, violence, and any content considered obscene. Indeed, arguments over obscenity—how its defined and how that definition relates to the First Amendment—have been at the heart of banned-book controversies throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Many historians point to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the first book in the United States to experience a ban on a national scale. The Confederacy barred the book from stores not only for its pro-abolitionist agenda, but because it aroused heated debates about slavery (some historians argue that the book catalyzed the Civil War).
A decade after the war, a carping moralist government official named Anthony Comstock convinced the United States Congress to pass a law prohibiting the mailing of “pornographic” materials. His definition of the term was murky at best. Anatomy textbooks, doctors’ pamphlets about reproduction, anything by Oscar Wilde, and even The Canterbury Tales were deemed too sexy to send through the mail.
These bans, or “comstockery,” as the practice became known, continued into the new century. But by the 1920s, shifts in politics and social mores led booksellers to see themselves as advocates for people’s right to read whatever they wanted. Then, in 1933, an influential court case—The United States v. One Book Called Ulysses—helped usher in a new era of legal interpretation of the First Amendment.
In that court case, Judge John M. Woolsey overturned a federal ban of James Joyce’s Ulysses—the ban had been in effect since 1922, and court transcripts reveal that the judge who banned the book also remarked that it was “the work of a disordered mind.” Woolsey, who admitted to not liking the novel, found legal cause to challenge the previous judge’s definition of pornography—and by extension, his definition of art. He ultimately ruled that the depiction of sex, even if unpleasant, should be allowed in serious literature. His final edict is at once hilarious and evident of a mind capable of separating legal philosophy from personal preference: “[W]hilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”
The case set an important precedent. However, Comstock Law remained on the books until 1957, when the Supreme Court tried Roth vs. The United States. The plaintiff was Samuel Roth, a writer and bookseller convicted for mailing pornographic magazines to subscribers. His trial forced the American legal system to once again reconsider its definition of obscenity. The Court’s final decision was bad for Roth: his conviction was upheld, and he remained in prison until 1961. But it was great for lovers of books: the definition was narrowed to apply to only that which is “utterly without redeeming social importance.” That narrowing made room for books depicting sex and violence. Even Judge Woolsey had found Ulysses to have social importance.
In the decades that followed, public officials would continue to challenge the Court’s 1957 definition of obscenity, including Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, whose personal definition famously began and ended with the declaration “I know it when I see it.” But in general, the 1960s and 70s witnessed a simultaneous drop in instances of book bans and rise in more explicit art. Artists and authors felt freer than ever to experiment. Consumers were more willing than ever to un-clutch their pearls and engage with racy material. Sex was mainstream in the novels of John Updike and Erica Jong. Then America elected Ronald Reagan.
“Reagan didn’t run on a campaign of anti-pornography,” Finan clarifies. “But he nevertheless ran an election that depowered those who fought for First Amendment freedoms. [His] election encouraged challenges by people who were unhappy with books in schools and libraries that were increasingly realistic in their depiction of life.” The number of challenges to books made by school boards and libraries rose dramatically: “Suddenly we were facing 700-800 challenges a year,” says Finan. In 1982, the ALA responded to this renewed culture of censorship with Banned Books Week. “The point of the event was to get people to understand that these books weren’t pornographic or excessively violent, but simply depicting the real world…and that many were classics of American literature,” Finan says. “Banned Books Week was the first real [American] celebration of the freedom to read.”
In those early days, Banned Books Week consisted almost entirely of libraries and bookstores hanging posters and displaying banned books. “Those displays were enormously effective communication tools,” says Finan, “because people would wander over and find out that the books they love had been challenged. Suddenly they understood that censorship isn’t just about fringe literature.” Today, those displays remain a centerpiece of Banned Books Week, but partnering sponsors are also seeking to involve readers in other ways. The Washington, DC Public Library, for example, hosts a city-wide scavenger hunt of banned books that began on September 1st and will continue until the end of the month. The books, which have been wrapped in black paper printed with words like “SMUT” or “FILTHY,” have been hidden on shelves in libraries and bookstores all over DC.
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), another sponsor of Banned Books Week, has published a handbook that lists which comic books have been censored and outlines what readers can do to fight censorship. “Since 2011, at least one graphic novel has been included on ALA’s annual list of the ten most frequently challenged books,” said Betsy Gomez, Editorial Director of CBLDF, in an interview. “In 2015, CBLDF fought more than 24 attempts to ban books, including the comics Drama, This One Summer, The Sandman, Fun Home, Persepolis, Palomar. So far, in 2016, CBLDF has defended a dozen books.” The handbook includes programming ideas for educators and libraries to engage their communities in discussions about banned books throughout the year.
Organizations with no official connection to Banned Books Week are also getting involved. Wordier Than Thou, an open mic storytelling group in Pinellas Park, Florida, began presenting last year an annual burlesque show inspired by selected banned books. “[The show] definitely gets people talking about literature,” wrote Tiffany Razzano, founder of Wordier Than Thou, in an email. “[Last year], throughout the night people would come up to me and tell me about their favorite banned book.” The show, which features area burlesque favorite Mayven Missbehavin’, makes thematic sense: “It’s supposedly offensive material [interpreted by] scantily clad women performing classic burlesque stripteases,” she writes. For the sake of surprise, Razzano wouldn’t disclose which books would be featured this year. But last year’s performance included Gone with the Wind, 1984, and The Scarlet Letter.
It’s rare today for a book banning case to make it to the federal courts, but many challenges to books are still taking place on the state and local levels. At the time of this writing, ABFE has joined a protest against the Chesterfield County Public Schools in Virginia, which seeks to remove Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park and other titles from students’ voluntary summer reading lists. The proposed removal is “particularly outrageous,” says Finan, because the books aren’t a part of the school’s required curriculum.
If school administrators are attempting to limit even elective reading, what does the future hold for students who want access to all books, classic and contemporary—books that might broaden their understanding of the world? “The problem of book banning hasn’t gone away, and it probably won’t,” Finan laments. “There are always going to be struggles over the proper limits to free speech.”
Fahrenheit 451 1966 Trailer | Oskar Werner
Sarah Jessica Parker and “The Librarians” discuss the fight against book banning
Being a librarian was already hard. Then came the Trump administration
Already facing burnout and book bans, librarians face a ‘catastrophe’ for institutions deemed central to democracy
Fifty one years ago this April, America launched Operation Condor, a global campaign to destabilize and repress socialist governments and movements, wage imperial conquest and dominion, impose and enforce capitalism as a hegemonic system of colonial oppression, and authorize and institutionalize its apex predators and its elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege.
This remains relevant to us today because it is the origin of many of the push forces driving waves of refugees to our border, and the horrific humanitarian crisis and test of our democracy created by American imperialism. So too with many European democracies, as migration is created and weaponized by fascists in service to power and the subversion of democracy.
Migration is a word which conceals both the conditions which trigger it and our own complicity in creating them as consequences of our decades long policies of colonialism, anticommunist military adventurism, and economic, political, and cultural warfare; ecological devastation with its drought, plagues, floods, and famine, the sixth age of extinction and the death of the seas, poverty, slavery, and social and political destabilization, an age of tyranny and state terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing, weaponized faith and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, and multigenerational wars.
In terms of refugees fleeing to America for safety and survival as well as liberty and equality we are mainly speaking of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, though the hell zone of Columbia and Venezuela now accounts for many, and with the collapse of central authority in Mexico and its degeneration into a region of warlords, oligarchs, and feudal crime syndicates we have refugees from Mexico itself as well as the traditional seasonal laborers.
Globally we have refugees of imperial wars of dominion, genocides, and civilizational collapse weaponized by tyrants to shift Europe toward fascist regimes, mainly by America’s key regional ally Turkey in Erdogan’s conflict with Russia for dominion of Syria and the Middle East and of Libya and the Mediterranean from which came the Third World War now ongoing in several theatres of conflict, a strategy established by the American model of Operation Condor which created conditions for the capture of the Republican Party in 1980 by a theocratic cabal under the crusader’s banner of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and then America with the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024 by the Fourth Reich.
Migrant labor is slave labor; this is the great truth America has never confronted and must now answer for in the suffering masses at our border. Entire sectors of our economy run on it; agriculture in which labor becomes a strategic resource as we starve without it, but also child and elder care, hospitality, and some manufacture. America’s wealth and power is created for us by others to whom we export the real costs of production, others who must remain invisible and exploitable as unregulated illegal labor to wring every ounce of value from them for our elites. Thus we weaponize economic disparity in service to power and privilege, and create and maintain hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and white supremacy.
In this crucial year of world-historical significance with the unrestrained sabotage of the institutions of the state by Traitor Trump and his clown show of freaks, white supremacist terrorists, theocratic patriarchal sexual terrorists, and amoral grifters, which I believe will determine the fate of humankind for the next several centuries and offers us possible futures of either an Age of Tyranny or a United Humankind, the issue of immigration will be among the binary choices which will continue to inform, motivate, and shape human being, meaning, and value.
Interests of elite hegemonies of wealth and power converge here with those of racial privilege and white supremacy in historic toxicity, in parallel with the rise of the carceral state and militarized police as an instrument for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor and the repression of the Civil Rights Movement, and have done so from their origins. One such origin point is America’s appropriation, concealment, and instrumentalization of Nazi war criminals in the repression of dissent and the conquest of the world.
The Fourth Reich of which Trump is a figurehead did not emerge from nothing like Athena from the head of Zeus, but was an invention of American imperialism. As such its history and character as a global threat to democracy can be studied in the crisis of refugees and migration to which it has given birth, and in the legacies of our nation’s use of fascism as an instrument of dominion in the Americas and everywhere on earth, for as we were using it to conquer others, it was using us to seize the United States of America and the world.
As I wrote in my post of February 18 2020, Guatemala: Our Heart of Darkness; As we abduct and lockdown refugees in concentration camps and secret prisons, and drive others back into a Mexico whose government is supine before the power of its criminal organizations which our gun industry has armed, we must reflect on the causes of this historic mass migration from Central America’s Dry Corridor of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; why is this happening, and what can be done to fix the problems which are driving it?
Drought and famine caused by global warming and climate change are clear immediate causes and triggering stressors of the current migration, as articulated by José García Escobar and Melisa Rabanales in The Guardian; “Martina García grinds just enough maize kernels to make a handful of tortillas which she serves to her children and grandson for breakfast with a sprinkling of salt.
García, 40, must ration the family’s last few sacks of tiny corncobs after drought and prolonged heatwaves linked to the climate emergency devastated crops across Guatemala.
As a result, record numbers of subsistence farming families are going hungry: health officials registered more than 15,300 cases of acute malnutrition in children under five last year – up nearly 24% from 2018. It’s the highest number of acute malnutrition cases since 2015, when a severe drought destroyed harvests across Central America.
Rural communities in the Dry Corridor – a region which stretches through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua – are bearing the brunt, with impoverished indigenous families like García’s in Jocotán, among the hardest hit.
“I’m lucky if I can find pumpkin flowers,” said the emaciated García. “But we mostly just eat tortillas.”
After an irregular rainy season and an unpromising harvest, almost 80% of maize grown in Guatemala’s highland region was lost, according to Oxfam. All that remains for many families are tiny corncobs studded with discoloured grains that look like rotten teeth.
In October 2109, a baby in a nearby community died after not eating for many days. At least 33,000 children need urgent medical treatment due to acute malnutrition, according to Oxfam Guatemala.
Central America is one of the world’s most dangerous regions outside a warzone, where a toxic mix of violence, poverty and corruption has forced millions to flee north in search of security.
Now, drought, famine and the battle for dwindling natural resources are increasingly being recognized as major factors in the exodus.
And it seems to be getting worse: 2019 was the driest year in a decade with only 65 days of rain, according to Guatemala’s National Institute of Seismology, Volcanology, Meteorology and Hydrology. Guatemala’s subsistence farmers depend on rainfall – which is increasingly erratic – and most lack alternative sources of water.
Around one million Guatemalans – 15% of the population – are currently unable to meet their daily food requirements, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).
Amid the growing threat of famine, almost 265,000 Guatemalans migrants searching for work, safety and food security were detained at the US southern border in 2019 – a 130% increase on the previous fiscal year.
Worsening hunger across the region is a factor in the rise in migrant caravans trying to reach the US overland, according to both analysts and migrants themselves.
The caravans have been met with repression and hostility by Mexican and American authorities who accuse the migrants and refugees of political subversion and criminality.
Hunger is not a new phenomenon in Guatemala: at least 60% of the population live in poverty, hundreds of thousands rely on food aid, and almost 50% of children suffer stunted physical and cognitive development due to chronic malnourishment.
But experts warn that the additional burden of extreme weather is overwhelming these communities, which have been long ignored and repressed by the government.
For García, the situation is desperate: food aid has yet to reach her canton, so once the maize runs out in March, she must find backbreaking work picking coffee – or else risk starvation. There’s no guarantee she’ll even find work, as a leaf-eating fungus known as roya – which thrives in warm conditions – has also devastated coffee crops.
García, who’s weak from chronic hunger, said: “I’ll get paid $4 a day. But if I pick less than 46kg, I won’t get paid.”
These conditions have worsened longstanding issues of endemic poverty and pervasive violence and criminality, legacies of historical colonialism and American imperialist and capitalist policies and interventions, which I have described in my post of September 4 2019; There is an interesting connection between the chaos we created in Central America which is driving a mass exodus of immigration to our borders and the conspiracy theory of Islamic replacement of Europeans which inspires white Christian Identity nationalism, our greatest terrorist threat today; many of the white supremacists who ruled Algeria as a colony of France, mainly former Nazi soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion after the end of World War Two, were after its fall in 1962 hired by the government of the United States to rule El Salvador and Guatemala as puppet regimes to protect our corporate profits.
With them came the same ideology and dream of a homeland and asylum for escaped Nazis, and a secure base of operations and launchpoint for the Fourth Reich, as with those who fled the fall of the colony of Algeria as a white ethnostate to France and blamed Charles de Gaulle for its abandonment, and whose descendants now form the core of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.
Among the direct effects of the secret partnership between America and our former Nazi adversaries include:
The 1954 seizure of Guatemala by Eisenhower’s CI.A., which replaced a Marxist who had seized land owned by United Fruit and redistributed it to Indian peasants with a furniture salesman from Honduras, Castillo Armas. During the course of this coup America bombed Guatemala City, killed 9,000 communists, disbanded the unions, drove off the squatters, drew up a blacklist of some 70,000 leftists, built death squads and secret prisons, gave torture and brigandage free reign, created an enduring political front, the MLN, and started making a profit from our plantations.
The 1961 seizure of Guatemala by C.I.A. officer Willauer leading 200 men, a Harvard lawyer who had flown as Chennault’s first officer with the Flying Tigers in China. Guatemala was the staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Throughout the 1960-63 period of a civil war which continued until 1996, America crushed a pro-Castro rebellion using six C.I.A. bombers, exiled Cuban shock troops, and Green Berets who used the opportunity to test counterinsurgency theories later used in Vietnam.
The 1974 accession of an officer of Armas named Alarcon to the Presidency of Guatemala, who institutionalized the MLN, declaring “I am a fascist, and I have tried to model my party on the Spanish Falange.” He was, of course, a C.I.A. agent. Nixon once brought him along on his annual pilgrimage to consult with what he called his spiritual advisor, the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.
The 1982 seizure of power and Presidency of Rios Montt, an evangelical Sunday school teacher and personal friend of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who suspended the constitution, replaced the courts with secret tribunals, escalated the scorched earth warfare, torture, and disappearances of his predecessors, and one thing more. During this the most terrible period of civil war throughout Central America, when Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were in fact a single nation ruled by remnants of the Nazis we had transplanted from French Algeria as American puppet regimes, and with the full authority of Ronald Reagan, Rios Montt weaponized Protestantism against encroaching Catholic Liberation theology.
During the 18 months of the Mayan Genocide, in which his death squads killed 3,000 people each month and annihilated 600 villages, he also instituted a system of forced labor in concentration camps modeled on the Apartheid system of South Africa and ruled by terror using former British police and Protestant Orange Militia units hired from Belfast, a mercenary force who had splendidly legal Hong Kong passports courtesy of the Thatcher government.
During over 35 years of civil war in Guatemala including Rios Montt’s genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native Indians, about half a million Indians were killed, over one million conscripted into military service and used against their own people, tens of thousands driven into Mexico as refugees, and most of the rest worked to death in the concentration camps. No American Army came to liberate them; they were not white, and no one cared so long as the profits flowed. Guatemala is America’s Belgian Congo; our heart of darkness.
I think of this every day as I eat my morning banana, for each one is the living form of a silent cry, the ghost of a tear, the memory of atrocity and horror, a thing like many others of fragile beauty and fleeting pleasure won by brutality and the theft of hope, pain and blood and death made manifest. For the dead and for wrongs past I can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged and the future that must be redeemed.
The 1981 founding of ARENA in El Salvador and the 1982-3 Presidency of Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, son of one of the original French Algerian OAS/Afrika Corps legionnaires and immigrants and leader of death squads since 1972, when he was trained at the US School of the Americas, often called a school for war criminals. During the peak of the civil war in 1983-84, about 8,000 people were killed every month in El Salvador.
The 1963-75 Honduran coup and military dictatorship of Arellano, for whose regime the term Banana Republic was coined, and of course the conduct of the Contra War beginning in 1980, which included the 1984 Honduran invasion of Nicaragua supported by 5,500 American troops.
Together Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were ruled for over a generation by America through our puppet tyrants and the ARENA and MLN parties we created. But there is more; much more, of which I will mention only four more brief examples here.
The 1964-85 rule of Brazil by the Arena Party and its legacy of torture and state terror which was ended by the total bankruptcy of the nation due to policies of privatization, deregulation, and corruption as exported by the Chicago Boys to Latin America generally as imperialist economic warfare.
The 1976 military coup in Argentina and the civil war which followed, during which some 20,000 persons were disappeared. Of our earlier involvements; Peron had been a protégé of Franco and Mussolini, and Evita was assassinated not by us but by Vatican Intelligence with radiation poisoning due to Peron’s campaign against the Church. The Vatican also ran the Swiss escape route used by Otto Skorzeny and other SS officers at the fall of the Third Reich whom we later hired. The most brazen flattery I have ever heard directed toward Oliver North was to compare him to Skorzeny.
The 1973 assassination of Allende in Chile and support of the monstrous Pinochet regime which killed as many as one in every hundred of its citizens.
Regarding Mexico, we long ago seized Texas and California, drew a line in the sand to weaponize disparity and create a mass resource of illegal and therefore exploitable quasi slave labor, and now call aliens everyone on the wrong side of it who comes here to pick the fruit, wash the dishes, and clean the toilets that our own nephews and nieces, children and grandchildren, would laugh in your face at the suggestion they get their hands dirty doing themselves.
Fascism is a sin of pride whose effects reverberate still, propagating outward in ever-widening circles as a force of contagion like the ripples of a stone cast into a pond. And we are all complicit in it, who call ourselves Americans.
We must make a better future than we have the past.
Operation Condor and the Pinochet regime, a reading list
The Condor Years: How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism To Three Continents, John Dinges
6 de abril de 2025 Cómo el imperialismo estadounidense creó nuestra crisis humanitaria en la frontera: consecuencias de la Operación Cóndor
Este abril se cumplen cuarenta y nueve años de que Estados Unidos lanzó la Operación Cóndor, una campaña global para desestabilizar y reprimir gobiernos y movimientos socialistas, emprender la conquista y el dominio imperial, imponer y hacer cumplir el capitalismo como sistema hegemónico y autorizar e institucionalizar a sus principales depredadores y sus jerarquías de élite. de riqueza, poder y privilegios.
Esto sigue siendo relevante para nosotros hoy porque es el origen de muchas de las fuerzas de empuje que impulsan oleadas de refugiados hacia nuestra frontera, y de la horrible crisis humanitaria y prueba de nuestra democracia creada por el imperialismo estadounidense.
Migración es una palabra que oculta tanto las condiciones que la desencadenan como nuestra propia complicidad en crearlas como consecuencia de nuestras décadas de políticas de colonialismo, aventurerismo militar anticomunista y guerra económica, política y cultural; devastación ecológica con su sequía, plagas, inundaciones y hambrunas, la sexta era de extinción y muerte de los mares, pobreza, esclavitud y desestabilización social y política, una era de tiranía y terror estatal, genocidio y limpieza étnica, fe armada y su terror sexual patriarcal y guerras multigeneracionales.
En términos de refugiados que huyen a Estados Unidos en busca de seguridad y supervivencia, así como de libertad e igualdad, estamos hablando principalmente de Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua, aunque la zona infernal de Colombia y Venezuela ahora representa a muchos, y con el colapso de la región central autoridad en México y su degeneración en una región de señores de la guerra, oligarcas y sindicatos del crimen feudal, tenemos refugiados del propio México, así como trabajadores estacionales tradicionales.
A nivel mundial tenemos refugiados de guerras imperiales de dominio, genocidios y colapso de civilizaciones, armados por tiranos para hacer que Europa se dirija hacia regímenes fascistas, principalmente por Turquía, el principal aliado regional de Estados Unidos, en el conflicto de Erdogan con Rusia por el dominio de Siria y Libia, del que surgió la Tercera Guerra Mundial. Ahora en curso en diez teatros de conflicto, una estrategia establecida por el modelo estadounidense de Operación Cóndor que creó las condiciones para la captura del Partido Republicano en 1980 y luego de Estados Unidos con las Elecciones Robadas de 2016 por el Cuarto Reich.
El trabajo migrante es trabajo esclavo; Esta es la gran verdad que Estados Unidos nunca ha enfrentado y por la que ahora debe responder ante las masas que sufren en nuestra frontera. Sectores enteros de nuestra economía funcionan con él; agricultura en la que la mano de obra se convierte en un recurso estratégico mientras nos morimos de hambre sin ella, pero también el cuidado de niños y ancianos, la hospitalidad y algunas manufacturas. La riqueza y el poder de Estados Unidos son creados para nosotros por otros a quienes exportamos los costos reales de producción, otros que deben permanecer invisibles y explotables como mano de obra ilegal no regulada para exprimirles hasta el último gramo de valor para nuestras elites. De esta manera utilizamos la disparidad económica como arma al servicio del poder y los privilegios, y creamos y mantenemos jerarquías de alteridad excluyente y supremacía blanca.
En este año electoral crucial de importancia histórica mundial, que creo determinará el destino de la humanidad durante los próximos siglos y nos ofrece posibles futuros de una Era de Tiranía o de una Humanidad Unida, la cuestión de la inmigración estará entre las cuestiones binarias elecciones que continuarán informando, motivando y dando forma al ser humano, su significado y su valor.
Los intereses de las hegemonías de riqueza y poder de las élites convergen aquí con los del privilegio racial y la supremacía blanca en una toxicidad histórica, en paralelo con el surgimiento del estado carcelario y la policía militarizada como instrumento para volver a esclavizar a los ciudadanos negros como trabajadores penitenciarios y la represión del Movimiento por los Derechos Civiles, y lo han hecho desde sus orígenes. Uno de esos puntos de origen es la apropiación, el ocultamiento y la instrumentalización por parte de Estados Unidos de los criminales de guerra nazis en la represión de la disidencia y la conquista del mundo.
El Cuarto Reich del que Trump es una figura decorativa no surgió de la nada como Atenea de la cabeza de Zeus, sino que fue una invención del imperialismo estadounidense. Como tal, su historia y su carácter como amenaza global a la democracia pueden estudiarse en la crisis de refugiados y migraciones que ha dado origen, y en los legados del uso del fascismo por parte de nuestra nación como instrumento de dominio en las Américas y en todas partes del mundo. la tierra, porque así como la usábamos para conquistar a otros, ella nos estaba usando a nosotros para apoderarnos de los Estados Unidos de América y del mundo.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 18 de febrero de 2020, Guatemala: Nuestro Corazón de Tinieblas; Mientras secuestramos y encerramos a refugiados en campos de concentración y prisiones secretas, y expulsamos a otros de regreso a un México cuyo gobierno está inactivo ante el poder de sus organizaciones criminales, debemos reflexionar sobre las causas de esta histórica migración masiva desde el Corredor Seco de Guatemala en Centroamérica. , El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua; ¿Por qué sucede esto y qué se puede hacer para solucionar el problema?
¿Problemas que lo están impulsando?
La sequía y la hambruna causadas por el calentamiento global y el cambio climático son causas inmediatas claras y factores estresantes desencadenantes de la migración actual, como lo expresaron José García Escobar y Melisa Rabanales en The Guardian; “Martina García muele suficientes granos de maíz para hacer un puñado de tortillas que sirve a sus hijos y a su nieto en el desayuno con un poco de sal.
García, de 40 años, debe racionar los últimos sacos de diminutas mazorcas de maíz de la familia después de que la sequía y las prolongadas olas de calor relacionadas con la emergencia climática devastaran los cultivos en toda Guatemala.
Como resultado, un número récord de familias de agricultores de subsistencia pasan hambre: los funcionarios de salud registraron más de 15.300 casos de desnutrición aguda en niños menores de cinco años el año pasado, casi un 24% más que en 2018. Es el número más alto de casos de desnutrición aguda desde 2015, cuando Una grave sequía destruyó las cosechas en toda Centroamérica.
Las comunidades rurales del Corredor Seco –una región que se extiende a lo largo de Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua– son las más afectadas, y las familias indígenas empobrecidas como la de García en Jocotán se encuentran entre las más afectadas.
“Tengo suerte si puedo encontrar flores de calabaza”, dijo el demacrado García. “Pero la mayoría de las veces solo comemos tortillas”.
Según Oxfam, después de una temporada de lluvias irregular y una cosecha poco prometedora, casi el 80% del maíz cultivado en la región montañosa de Guatemala se perdió. Lo único que les queda a muchas familias son pequeñas mazorcas de maíz salpicadas de granos descoloridos que parecen dientes podridos.
En octubre de 2109, un bebé de una comunidad cercana murió después de no comer durante muchos días. Al menos 33.000 niños necesitan tratamiento médico urgente debido a la desnutrición aguda, según Oxfam Guatemala.
Centroamérica es una de las regiones más peligrosas del mundo fuera de una zona de guerra, donde una mezcla tóxica de violencia, pobreza y corrupción ha obligado a millones de personas a huir al norte en busca de seguridad.
Ahora, la sequía, la hambruna y la batalla por los menguantes recursos naturales se reconocen cada vez más como factores importantes del éxodo.
Y parece estar empeorando: 2019 fue el año más seco en una década con solo 65 días de lluvia, según el Instituto Nacional de Sismología, Vulcanología, Meteorología e Hidrología de Guatemala. Los agricultores de subsistencia de Guatemala dependen de las precipitaciones –que son cada vez más erráticas– y la mayoría carece de fuentes alternativas de agua.
Según el Programa Mundial de Alimentos (PMA), alrededor de un millón de guatemaltecos (el 15% de la población) actualmente no pueden satisfacer sus necesidades alimentarias diarias.
En medio de la creciente amenaza de hambruna, casi 265.000 migrantes guatemaltecos que buscaban trabajo, seguridad y seguridad alimentaria fueron detenidos en la frontera sur de Estados Unidos en 2019, un aumento del 130% con respecto al año fiscal anterior.
El empeoramiento del hambre en la región es un factor en el aumento de las caravanas de migrantes que intentan llegar a Estados Unidos por tierra, según analistas y los propios migrantes.
Las caravanas han sido recibidas con represión y hostilidad por parte de las autoridades mexicanas y estadounidenses, que acusan a los migrantes y refugiados de subversión política y criminalidad.
El hambre no es un fenómeno nuevo en Guatemala: al menos el 60% de la población vive en la pobreza, cientos de miles dependen de la ayuda alimentaria y casi el 50% de los niños sufren un retraso en su desarrollo físico y cognitivo debido a la desnutrición crónica.
Pero los expertos advierten que la carga adicional del clima extremo está abrumando a estas comunidades, que durante mucho tiempo han sido ignoradas y reprimidas por el gobierno.
Para García, la situación es desesperada: la ayuda alimentaria aún no ha llegado a su cantón, por lo que una vez que se acabe el maíz en marzo, deberá encontrar un trabajo agotador recogiendo café, o correr el riesgo de morir de hambre. No hay garantía de que encuentre trabajo, ya que un hongo que se alimenta de hojas conocido como roya, que prospera en condiciones cálidas, también ha devastado los cultivos de café.
García, que está débil por el hambre crónica, dijo: “Me pagarán 4 dólares al día. Pero si recojo menos de 46 kg, no me pagarán”.
Estas condiciones han empeorado problemas de larga data de pobreza endémica y violencia y criminalidad generalizadas, legados del colonialismo histórico y de las políticas e intervenciones imperialistas y capitalistas estadounidenses, que describí en mi publicación del 4 de septiembre de 2019; Existe una conexión interesante entre el caos que creamos en Centroamérica, que está provocando un éxodo masivo de inmigración a nuestras fronteras, y la teoría de la conspiración del reemplazo islámico de los europeos que inspira nuestra mayor amenaza terrorista hoy; Muchos de los supremacistas blancos que gobernaron Argelia como colonia de Francia, principalmente ex soldados nazis que se unieron a la Legión Extranjera después del final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, fueron contratados después de su caída en 1962 por el gobierno de los Estados Unidos para gobernar El Salvador y Guatemala como regímenes títeres para proteger nuestras ganancias corporativas.
Con ellos vino la misma ideología y el mismo sueño de una patria y asilo para los nazis fugitivos, y una base segura de operaciones y punto de lanzamiento para el Cuarto Reich, como ocurre con aquellos que huyeron de la caída de la colonia de Argelia como etnoestado blanco a Francia y culparon a Charles de Gaulle por su abandono, y cuyos descendientes ahora forman el núcleo del Frente Nacional de Jean-Marie Le Pen. .
Entre los efectos directos de la asociación secreta entre Estados Unidos y nuestros antiguos adversarios nazis se incluyen:
La toma de Guatemala en 1954 por la CIA de Eisenhower, que reemplazó a un marxista que se había apoderado de tierras propiedad de la United Fruit y las redistribuyó entre campesinos indios con un vendedor de muebles de Honduras, Castillo Armas. Durante el curso de este golpe, Estados Unidos bombardeó la ciudad de Guatemala, mató a 9.000 comunistas, disolvió los sindicatos, expulsó a los ocupantes ilegales, elaboró una lista negra de unos 70.000 izquierdistas, construyó escuadrones de la muerte y prisiones secretas, dio rienda suelta a la tortura y el bandolerismo, creó una sociedad duradera. frente político, el MLN, y empezamos a sacar provecho de nuestras plantaciones.
La toma de Guatemala en 1961 por la C.I.A. El oficial Willauer al frente de 200 hombres, un abogado de Harvard que había volado como primer oficial de Chennault con los Flying Tigers en China. Guatemala fue el escenario de la invasión de Bahía de Cochinos a Cuba. A lo largo del período 1960-63 de una guerra civil que continuó hasta 1996, Estados Unidos aplastó una rebelión pro Castro utilizando seis agentes de la CIA. bombarderos, tropas de choque cubanas exiliadas y boinas verdes que aprovecharon la oportunidad para probar teorías de contrainsurgencia utilizadas más tarde en Vietnam.
El ascenso en 1974 de un oficial de Armas llamado Alarcón a la Presidencia de Guatemala, quien institucionalizó el MLN, declarando “Soy un fascista y he tratado de modelar mi partido según la Falange Española”. Era, por supuesto, un agente de la CIA. agente. Nixon lo llevó una vez a su peregrinación anual para consultar con lo que llamó su consejero espiritual, el infame criminal de guerra nazi Josef Mengele.
La toma del poder y la presidencia en 1982 de Ríos Montt, un maestro evangélico de escuela dominical y amigo personal de Jerry Falwell y Pat Robertson, quien suspendió la constitución, reemplazó las cortes por tribunales secretos, intensificó la guerra de tierra arrasada, la tortura y las desapariciones de sus predecesores y una cosa más. Durante este, el período más terrible de la guerra civil en toda Centroamérica, cuando Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras eran de hecho una sola nación gobernada por restos de los nazis que habíamos trasplantado de la Argelia francesa como regímenes títeres estadounidenses, y con la plena autoridad de Ronald Reagan y Ríos Montt utilizaron al protestantismo como arma contra la invasión de la teología católica de la liberación.
Durante los 18 meses del genocidio maya, en el que sus escuadrones de la muerte mataron a 3.000 personas cada mes y aniquilaron 600 aldeas, también instituyó un sistema de trabajos forzados en campos de concentración inspirados en el sistema de apartheid de Sudáfrica y gobernados por el terror utilizando a antiguos británicos. unidades de policía y de la Milicia Naranja Protestante contratadas en Belfast, una fuerza mercenaria que tenía pasaportes de Hong Kong espléndidamente legales, cortesía del gobierno de Thatcher.
Durante más de 35 años de guerra civil en Guatemala, incluida la campaña genocida de limpieza étnica de Ríos Montt contra los indios nativos, alrededor de medio millón de indios fueron asesinados, más de un millón fueron reclutados para el servicio militar y utilizados contra su propio pueblo, y decenas de miles fueron expulsados a México. como refugiados, y la mayoría del resto trabajó hasta morir en los campos de concentración. Ningún ejército americano vino a liberarlos; no eran blancos y a nadie le importaba mientras las ganancias fluyeran. Guatemala es el Congo belga de Estados Unidos; nuestro corazón de oscuridad.
Pienso en esto todos los días mientras como mi plátano matutino, porque cada uno es la forma viva de un llanto silencioso, el fantasma de una lágrima, el recuerdo de la atrocidad y el horror, algo como muchos otros de frágil belleza y fugaz placer conquistado. por la brutalidad y el robo de la esperanza, el dolor, la sangre y la muerte se manifiestan. Por los muertos y por los agravios del pasado nada puedo hacer; son los vivos quienes deben ser vengados y el futuro el que debe ser redimido.
La fundación de ARENA en El Salvador en 1981 y la presidencia entre 1982 y 1983 de Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, hijo de uno de los legionarios e inmigrantes originales del Cuerpo Africano/OEA argelino francés y líder de escuadrones de la muerte desde 1972, cuando fue entrenado en el Escuela de las Américas de Estados Unidos, a menudo llamada escuela para criminales de guerra. Durante el pico de la guerra civil en 1983-84, alrededor de 8.000 personas fueron asesinadas cada mes en El Salvador.
El golpe de estado hondureño de 1963-75 y la dictadura militar de Arellano, para cuyo régimen se acuñó el término República Bananera, y, por supuesto, la conducción de la Guerra de la Contra a partir de 1980, que incluyó la invasión hondureña de Nicaragua en 1984, apoyada por 5.500 tropas estadounidenses.
Juntos, Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras fueron gobernados durante más de una generación por Estados Unidos a través de nuestros tiranos títeres y los partidos ARENA y MLN que creamos. Pero hay más; mucho más, de los cuales mencionaré aquí sólo cuatro breves ejemplos más.
El gobierno de Brasil de 1964-85 por el Partido Arena y su legado de tortura y terror estatal que terminó con la bancarrota total de la nación debido a las políticas de privatización, desregulación y corrupción exportadas por los Chicago Boys a América Latina en general como Guerra económica imperialista.
El golpe militar de 1976 en Argentina y la guerra civil que le siguió, durante la cual desaparecieron unas 20.000 personas. De nuestras participaciones anteriores; Perón había sido un protegido de Franco y Mussolini, y Evita fue asesinada no por nosotros sino por la Inteligencia del Vaticano con envenenamiento por radiación debido a la campaña de Perón contra la Iglesia. El Vaticano también dirigió la ruta de escape suiza utilizada por Otto Skorzeny y otros oficiales de las SS durante la caída del Tercer Reich a quienes contratamos más tarde. El halago más descarado que he oído jamás dirigido a Oliver North fue compararlo con Skorzeny.
El asesinato de Allende en Chile en 1973 y el apoyo al monstruoso régimen de Pinochet que mató a uno de cada cien de sus ciudadanos.
En cuanto a México, hace mucho tiempo nos apoderamos de Texas y California, trazamos una línea en la arena para convertir la disparidad en un arma y crear un recurso masivo de mano de obra cuasi esclava ilegal y, por lo tanto, explotable, y ahora llamamos extranjeros a todos los que están en el lado equivocado y vienen aquí a elegir. la fruta, lavar los platos y limpiar los baños que nuestros propios sobrinos y sobrinas, hijos y nietos, se reirían en tu cara ante la sugerencia de que se ensucien las manos haciéndolo ellos mismos.
El fascismo es un pecado de orgullo cuyos efectos todavía reverberan, propagándose hacia afuera en círculos cada vez más amplios como una fuerza de contagio como las ondas de una piedra arrojada a un estanque. Y de ello somos cómplices todos los que nos llamamos americanos.
A list of everything about Trump and his aberrant regime which is subhuman, degenerate, villainous, ridiculous and horrific would be an endless litany of woes and lamentations, a song of how far a man can fall from the limits of the human into bottomless chasms of darkness.
Trump begins as a thing consumed utterly and hollowed out by vices of pride and vanity, depravities and perversions, psychotic rages driven by Nazi ideologies of hate, and shaped by amoral nihilism and strange obsessions.
All of this and so much more is enacted now by his regime of sycophantic minions and grifters, like a freak show ruled by an evil clown which can be represented by JD Vance the Bearded Lady and Fake Jethro who believes in nothing and wishes only to gather the scraps of wealth and power like a remora riding a shark and who is willing to lie and show his belly to his master like Trump’s dog as are so many of the Party of Treason’s members of Congress, Pete Hegseth the Tattooed Man and Christian Identity nationalist who wishes to perform the Inquisition in America and the Crusades beyond our shores, and Elon Musk the Troll King who intends to destroy the state entirely and replace it with a fascist corporate hegemony free from ideas of humanity and the good in a Dark Enlightenment regime of profits before people. Then there are the Deplorables who are their voters, who may be represented by the zombified Kennedy who claims his brain was eaten by a worm and whose lunatic delusions decide our national healthcare policy; a mad idiot whose Pythian pronouncements determine the life or death of his mad idiot followers.
Today we seize the streets of our nation in over 1300 mass protests and the direct actions which will unfold in their shadows, in protest against the Trump regime and its mission of the subversion of democracy and theft of our citizenship and our humanity.
To the Trump regime and the Party of Treason’s Theatre of Cruelty we say No!
Let us give to fascist tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!
January 23 2025 We Have Our First Hero Of The Resistance To The Second Trump Regime, Now Called The Enshittification, Truth Teller Bishop Mariann Budde
January 30 2025 Anniversary of The Return of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Most Successful Russian Agent to Ever Attack America, Figurehead of the Fourth Reich in the Global Subversion of Democracy, and Now Once Again Our Rapist In Chief, Who Began His 2024 Presidential Campaign on this the Anniversary of His Idol Hitler’s Seizure of Power as Chancellor of Germany
February 6 2025 We Rise and Resist: We Seize the Streets In Mass Actions and Protests Throughout America Against Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and Closure of US Aid, Against Musk the Troll King’s Information Warfare, and Against Capture and Dismantling of the State By the Fourth Reich
February 7 2025 Troll King Elon Musk and the Great American Bank Robbery: the Theft of Our Private Records As Hostage Taking, Information Warfare, and Subversion of Democracy
February 8 2025 Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians
February 17 2025 Among the Best and the Worst of Us: Our Presidents as Symbols and Figures of the American Soul, and Our Glorious Mass Actions and Protests In All Fifty Of Our State Capitals On This Day Against the Trump Regime’s Campaign To Destroy Our Democracy
February 23 2025 How It All Began; World War Three, the Capture of America and the Subversion of Democracy by Traitor Trump and the Fourth Reich, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and the Fall of Civilization
February 28 2025 On this Day of National General Boycott of Trump Co Conspirators In Fascist Tyranny and Terror and the Subversion of Democracy, Let Us Bring A Reckoning To Those Who Would Enslave Us In Honor Of Mangione the Avenger
March 4 2025 Anniversary of Our Supreme Court Putting Trump, An Insurrectionist, Russian Agent, and Nazi Revivalist Who Conspired In the Murders of Police Officers and Attempted Hanging and Guillotining of Members of Congress, On Our Election Ballots
March 19 2025 Tyrants Attack In Campaign Of Genocide: Netanyahu Bombs Civilian Aid Corridor In Gaza To Divide It Into Bantustans As Trump Bombs Yemen To Break Our Counter Blockade of the Israeli Blockade of Humanitarian Aid
On this anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King by agents of the American government, we re-evaluate how we can honor the truths he revealed and bore witness to, and bring meaning to the sacrifices of our martyred sacred dead.
For myself and possibly for us all, the meaning of this as a signifier of our shared history which binds us together as a nation has been forever changed by its connection with one of the most important trials in American history, which links Martin Luther King with George Floyd and with every Black American murdered, tortured, re-enslaved as prison labor, and marginalized, silenced, and erased by the carceral state and its forces of repression and white supremacist terror.
How can we bear forward his message and live the truth he taught us?
America watched aghast and hypnotized at the litany of evils exposed by the George Floyd trial, our shock, grief, and rage at the complicity of our police in racist violence comparable to that of the Nuremberg Trial, as a secret truth becomes horrifyingly clear; our America, our government and its institutions and structures, and our broader sociocultural systems which form their context, has become the enemy America was founded to defend us from.
And while this national reckoning plays out, the Party of Treason enacts laws to silence the voices of the people with vote suppression in a panicked and last-ditch effort to maintain an elite hegemony of white power and privilege, and the killology of the police proceeds unimpeded.
A Kafka-esque absurdity of the trial of George Floyd’s murderer, a policeman whose family name gave us the word chauvinism, is the claim of the defense that the authorization of kneeling on the breathing passage of handcuffed prisoners in the official training manual of the police absolves police of murder in its use. It is instead damning proof of institutional torture and murder, and all police officers who have accepted employment under the direction of a torture and murder manual are complicit in its crimes, as are all bureaucrats, administrators, and elected officials who have with these rules and procedures authorized and legitimized a culture of racist killology and sciences of death and terror.
Our police are a cult of death, a criminal syndicate, and an instrument of white supremacist terror.
Within our police, criminal syndicates and networks of white supremacist infiltration rule our cities in feudal dominion, acting from within the shield of immunity which has made police an unaccountable and independent force of repression of dissent, racist violence, and state terror since the origins of police forces in slavecatching and the founding of the carceral state as a system for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor.
Abolition and disarmament of the police, prison abolition and justice system reform, and control of gun violence are three linked issues of racial justice and equality, which we can honor the memory of Martin Luther King in action to achieve.
Let this be the last year in which the police and other forces of state terror and tyranny can assassinate and murder our citizens with authorized immunity as instruments of elite wealth, power, and privilege.
Who bears arms bears death, and who does so with badges and the authorization of the state as its enforcers of inequality and tyranny also bears terror.
Choose life, and a free society of equals.
As I wrote in my post of April 4 2020, America’s Racist Death Squads: How Prosecutors and the Police Enact Ethnic Cleansing; On this the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, iconic figure of liberty and Gandhian nonviolent resistance, my thoughts turn to the distance we have yet to go to achieve his dream of a just society undivided by race.
There is no betrayal of public trust more terrible than that of those with whom we entrust our security and justice; police shootings, the unchecked power of the Prosecutor’s office in the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor, and a racialized system of justice designed to enact white supremacist terror and ethnic cleansing runs on and on, undisturbed by mass protests and national political action.
The school to prison pipeline itself is prejudicial and an innate public harm, corrupting and subverting key institutions of public service into a malign shadow state through the counterinsurgency model of policing, which enculturates officers to respond to any disturbances of civil order as if all criminals were terrorists.
By such means has our vast bureaucracy of courts, police, Homeland Security, and other assets armed with guns and legal writs been turned from the cause of our protection from unequal power to that of our subjugation to it, from a guarantor of our democracy and equality to an instrument of state terror, and to the insidious, pervasive, and endemic evil of the re-enslavement of our Black citizens.
Among the recursive forces at work in the disaster now unfolding are the consequences of the death struggle of capitalism in its terminal phase, when all wealth flows to the apex predators in the top one percent, as capitalism begins to collapse from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions and attempts to free itself from its host political system, which fuels the subversion of democracy as it transforms into totalitarian forms of autocracy and tyranny.
This explains the Trump regime, but also the political, social, and economic trajectory of the whole death phase of democracy since the capture of the Republican Party in 1980 by the theocratic Christian Identity nationalism of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and its figurehead Ronald Reagan.
Here I must signpost that this period of our death spiral, which in some ways parallels that of the late Roman Republic before it became an empire, includes the disaster of the Patriot Act and the Third Imperial Phase of American history as hegemonic elites weaponized the 911 tragedy to centralize all power to a police state through militarization and the counterinsurgency model of policing leveraged by technology as pervasive surveillance, big data, propaganda and information warfare waged by the state against its own citizens.
Together our twin disasters of centralization of wealth and power to the ruling class and the state have combined horrifically to produce the aberrant Trump regime which conspires to utterly destroy the institutions of democracy, and the situation we now face, balancing on an ever-narrower wall on the edge of an Abyss.
And as Nietzsche warns, the Abyss has begun to look back at us.
As written by Callum Jones in The Guardian in an article entitled Liberation from what? Trump promised lower prices – his tariffs risk the opposite; “For weeks, Donald Trump and his aides sought to brand Wednesday as “liberation day” in America. Many in the US could be forgiven for wondering what exactly they’ve just been liberated from.
After much hype, the president unveiled his plan for a new era in global trade: a blanket 10% tariff on goods imported into the US starting Saturday, and higher “reciprocal” tariffs (of up to 49%) on countries taxing US exports starting next Wednesday.
“April 2nd 2025 will be forever remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again,” according to Trump.
Historians will be the judge of that. But before anyone writes this chapter, millions of Americans need to navigate the present.
Trump was re-elected last November after years of heightened inflation, and upward pressure on the cost of living. On the campaign trail he pledged, repeatedly and unambiguously, to rapidly liberate the nation from higher prices.
But tariffs, his administration has conceded, risk doing the opposite. The treasury secretary recently dismissed cheap goods as “not the essence of the American dream” after acknowledging that costs may rise as a result of Trump’s aggressive trade strategy: music to the ears of anyone seeking liberation from lower prices.
Anyone sitting in the White House Rose Garden might be reassured. “Prices are way down,” the president has claimed, since his return to office.
Anyone who has visited a grocery store in that time might feel differently. Most prices have, in fact, not fallen since January; inflation is still rising well above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2% per year.
“Now it’s our turn to prosper,” he proclaimed. But many US firms are bracing for problematic, not prosperous, effects of this action: higher costs they warn will be passed on to their customers.
“What we have heard from business of all sizes, across all industries, from around the country is that these broad tariffs are a tax increase that will raise prices for American consumers and hurt the economy,” said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the US Chamber of Commerce, the corporate lobby group.
Trump likes to present the world as black and white. The US is either winning or losing. A policy, deal or plan is the best or the worst. A person, country or company is supporting or screwing you.
There is rarely space for nuance, time for complexity or tolerance for inconvenient facts. The simplicity of this narrative is its power.
By Trump’s telling, the US is about to raise trillions of dollars for the federal government by taxing the world, not its citizens: a typically black-and-white choice.
But reality is often more complex than rhetoric. There are myriad shades of grey.
Import tariffs are not paid by other countries. They are paid by importers – in this case, US firms and consumers – buying goods from overseas. These costs often trickle down through the economy, raising prices at every clink in the chain.
Trump promised lower prices. He is betting his tariffs won’t raise them too high, for too long.
“This is going to be a big moment,” he said on Wednesday. “I think you’re going to remember today.”
He may well be right.”
As written by Graham Russell in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s tariffs – five key takeaways: Donald Trump has upended decades of US foreign policy by bringing in a vast array of tariffs that threaten to disrupt international trade. Here are some initial key points; “Countries across the world are racing to absorb the new way of doing business with the US, after Donald Trump unveiled tailored tariffs that looks set to ignite a global trade war.
Trump has made clear the goals he wants to accomplish through the tariffs: bring manufacturing back to the US; respond to unfair trade policies from other countries; increase tax revenue; and incentivise crackdowns on migration and drug trafficking.
However, the EU and China have promised countermeasures, while South Korea has vowed an “all-out” response. The damage done at a political level with allies such as the UK may also carry its own cost, as billions are wiped off economic growth.
Here are some early points to note in the wake of Wednesday’s wideranging announcement:
1. Firms are bracing for what ‘liberation’ means
The US president sold the idea of global tariffs with a celebratory air, making good on his campaign trail promise to liberate the nation from higher prices. The president has claimed “prices are way down” since his return to office but anyone who has visited a grocery store in that time might feel differently.
And US firms are apprehensive about the wider effect of this move: higher costs, they warn, will be passed on to their customers. “What we have heard from business of all sizes, across all industries, from around the country is that these broad tariffs are a tax increase that will raise prices for American consumers and hurt the economy,” said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the US Chamber of Commerce, the corporate lobby group.
2. The China link?
China has been hit particularly hard by the new tariffs, which take the total levy on Chinese imports to over 50%, as well as struggling nations in South-east Asia, including war-torn and earthquake-hit Myanmar.
One theory being put forward is that countries linked to sizeable Chinese investments are being targeted. Dr Siwage Dharma Negara, a senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, said: “The [Trump] administration thinks is that by targeting these countries they can target Chinese investment in countries like Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Indonesia. By targeting their products maybe it will affect Chinese exports and the economy,” he said.
“The real target is China but the real impact on those countries will be quite significant because this investment creates jobs and export revenue.”
The tariffs comes as many countries in South-east Asia are already grappling with the fallout from the cuts to USAid, which provides humanitarian assistance to a region vulnerable to natural disasters and support for pro-democracy activists battling repressive regimes.
3. Key trade partners Canada and Mexico are spared – but will still feel the pain
Canada and Mexico have been exempted from the latest round of tariffs, but, as prime minister Mark Carney and business leaders reminded everyone, 25% tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, as well as on automobiles, came into effect hours after Wednesday’s announcement.
Carney warned that while Trump had preserved key elements of the bilateral relationship, the global tariffs announced earlier in the day “fundamentally change the international trading system”.
The two countries have been hit by previously declared 25% tariffs on many goods over border control and fentanyl trafficking issues, the White House said in a fact sheet.
Mexico president Claudia Sheinbaum said on Wednesday that her country would not pursue a “tit-for-tat on tariffs” but would rather announce a “comprehensive program” on Thursday.
4. This is a big gamble
Trump himself appears prepared for the announcement to spark a lot of turbulence in markets across the world, saying recently: “There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big.” The universal tariffs come into effect on 5 April, and the reciprocal ones on 9 April, so countries around the world now have a very short space of time in which to choose their path. Some may try to cut a deal with Trump, others may respond with retaliatory tariffs, but a continuing theme will be uncertainty.
5. Absolutely nowhere is immune
Heard Island and McDonald Islands are some of the most remote places on Earth, inhabited only by an array of wildlife, yet they are among the “external territories” of Australia listed separately for a 10% tariff.
Norfolk Island, which lies just of Australia’s east coast, was slugged with a tariff of 29% – or 19 percentage points higher than the rest of Australia, prompting Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese to say on Thursday: “I’m not quite sure that Norfolk Island, with respect to it, is a trade competitor with the giant economy of the United States, but that just shows and exemplifies the fact that nowhere on earth is safe from this.”
As written in The Guardian editorial entitled The Guardian view on Trump’s tariffs: a monstrous and momentous act of folly: The US president has expelled his own country from the rules-based global trade system that America itself created; “or the world’s already embattled trading system, it is as though an asteroid has crashed into the planet, devastating everyone and everything that previously existed there. But there is this important difference. If an asteroid struck the Earth, the impact would at least have been caused by ungovernable cosmic forces. The assault on world trade, by contrast, is a completely deliberate act of choice, taken by one man and one nation.
Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on every country in the world is a monstrous and momentous act of folly. Unilateral and unjustified, it was expressed on Wednesday in indefensible language in which Mr Trump described US allies as “cheaters” and “scavengers” who “looted”, “raped” and “pillaged” the US. Many of the calculations on which Mr Trump doled out his punishments are perverse, not least the exclusion of Russia from the condemned list. The tariffs mean prices are certain to rise in sector after sector, in the US and elsewhere, fuelling inflation and perhaps recession. Mr Trump will presumably respond as he did when asked about foreign cars becoming more expensive: “I couldn’t care less.”
The tariffs – a minimum of 10% on all imports to the US, with higher levies on 60 nations that Mr Trump dubbed the “worst offenders” – throw a grenade into the rules-based global trading order. These are large hikes, not small ones, even for nations like Britain that have escaped the higher tariffs. They are indiscriminate between sectors, but highly discriminatory against nations, all of them, even to the extent of penalising uninhabited islands in Antarctica.
They overturn the trading system established – under US leadership – at Bretton Woods after the second world war. In effect, the nation that has underpinned the global economy for the last 80 years has expelled itself from the trading system it always led. That system’s cardinal principle – that countries in the World Trade Organization should treat one another equally – was blown apart on Wednesday.
The announcement ceremony conveyed the thrill Mr Trump derives from bullying and domination. A month after shutting down US development aid, his punishment list embodies special contempt for the world’s poor – 47% tariffs on Madagascar, the world’s ninth poorest country, for instance, or 44% on devastated Myanmar. While much pre-announcement rhetoric was directed at China, some of the toughest tariffs have been inflicted on countries such as Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Laos. The impact on US soft power is likely to be devastating.
The British government is trying to keep calm and carry on. Like its trustworthy trading allies, Britain must do what it can to maintain the rules-based trading system. But economic war is clearly beckoning. The trade secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said on Thursday that even the UK is now preparing a list of reciprocal tariffs on US goods. It is particularly vital that Britain defends its interests in food and health systems, and against digital tech giants.
Any idea that Britain is a kind of winner in these circumstances, thanks to Brexit, is nonsensical. This country’s supposedly closest ally, the US, has just hiked the cost to British exporters by 10%, with an even greater rise of 25% in the case of steel, aluminium and cars. The consequences of Mr Trump’s tariffs will not be restricted to world trade but will impact on the global economic system more generally. This is a macro moment. It will require macro responses.”
Liberation from what? Trump promised lower prices – his tariffs risk the opposite
Torch of Liberty 