By my writing desk hangs a reproduction of Théodore Géricault’s painting of 1818, The Raft of the Medusa, so brilliantly interrogated in Julian Barnes’ History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, which I think marvelous and a perfect allegory of our current political, economic, and environmental dilemma as a metaphor of capitalism and fascism as forms of cannibalism of humankind and of democracy, the primary causes of the immanent collapse of our civilization, and possibly also of the extinction of our species. Just to remind myself of what is at stake in this moment of history and in revolutionary struggle, and in my writing here as a witness of history and a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.
This week we witnessed the spectacle of heroic Mexican firefighters coming to Los Angeles to help fight the historic firestorms which are devouring the city, while countless other Mexicans languish in concentration camps at our border or live among us in fear of Traitor Trump’s plans of ethnic cleansing.
Monstrous evils of systemic inequality have yet again emerged from the darkness like an ambush predator to seize the nations of Central and South America in its jaws, and it is no accident but by design. Tyranny seeks the fall of democracy through the falsification, infiltration, and subversion of its institutions, in an echo and reflection of the CIA’s Operation Condor which once enacted imperial conquest and dominion of our hemisphere as Manifest Destiny.
In the destabilization and capture of the state through economic, social, and political warfare throughout Latin America, our destabilization campaigns in Mexico and the ruin of Venezuela in relentless assaults which have rendered them both failed states, and in the absurd and horrific capture of Argentina and America itself by fascist the regimes of Javier Milei and Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, the United States of America has acted as a proxy and sock puppet of the Fourth Reich.
Far more than this can be laid at our door, including the collapse and ruin of Central America and the Columbia-Venezuela no man’s land of barbarism, the failed state of Mexico and the monumental challenges facing the people of Chile, all results of American intervention driven by the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which our nation serves.
These are the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle we now face, here in Lima and throughout the Americas and the world. We are abandoned by our leaders and those who would enslave us and adrift on a tiny raft of civilization founded in the forum of Athens as a free society of equals which questions itself, ae we are eating each other in learned helplessness and despair.
To this existential crisis of faith in one another and hope for our future we may answer with the powers which yet remain to us as human beings; love, hope, faith, refusal to submit to authority, and solidarity of action in resistance.
Here is the great test of our humanity posed by the Rashomon Gate Event of our historical moment; who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves doomed to failure and nothingness, or a United Humankind living now at the dawn of our glory?
Of Operation Condor I have written in my journal of April 7 2021, How American Imperialism Created Our Humanitarian Crisis at the Border; Forty six years ago this April, America launched Operation Condor, a global campaign to destabilize and repress socialist governments and movements and defend capitalism as a hegemonic force 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.
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 militarism, and economic warfare; ecological devastation with its drought and famine, poverty and social and political destabilization, an age of tyranny and state terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing, weaponized faith and its 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.
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.
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 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, 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, 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, but the waves of migrants and refugees at our border vilified by Trump and the Republicans to mobilize their base are a direct consequence of political decisions and economic imperialism made by America.
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 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 launchpad 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. One day I may explore this incident with all of you, but in this context I wish only to cite a source and witness of history; for my cousin Raymond Eigell trained and led the force which landed in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs.
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.
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 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.
17 de enero de 2025 Ecos y reflejos del imperialismo estadounidense y la Operación Cóndor en las democracias desestabilizadas de América del Sur
Junto a mi escritorio cuelga una reproducción de la pintura de Théodore Géricault de 1818, La balsa de la Medusa, tan brillantemente interrogada en Historia del mundo en 10 capítulos y medio de Julian Barnes, que me parece maravillosa y una perfecta alegoría de nuestra actual situación política, económica. , y el dilema ambiental como metáfora del capitalismo y el fascismo como formas de canibalismo de la humanidad y de la democracia, las principales causas del colapso inminente de nuestra civilización, y posiblemente también de la extinción de nuestra especie. Solo para recordarme lo que está en juego en este momento de la historia y de la lucha revolucionaria, y en lo que escribo aquí como testigo de la historia y vocación sagrada en la búsqueda de la verdad.
Esta semana fuimos testigos del espectáculo de heroicos bomberos mexicanos que llegaron a Los Ángeles para ayudar a combatir las históricas tormentas de fuego que están devorando la ciudad, mientras innumerables otros mexicanos languidecen en campos de concentración en nuestra frontera o viven entre nosotros con miedo a los planes de limpieza étnica del traidor Trump.
Monstruosos males de la desigualdad sistémica han vuelto a surgir de la oscuridad como un depredador de emboscada para apoderarse de las naciones de América Central y del Sur en sus fauces, y no es un accidente sino un diseño. La tiranía busca la caída de la democracia a través de la falsificación, infiltración y subversión de sus instituciones, en un eco y reflejo de la Operación Cóndor de la CIA que una vez promulgó la conquista y el dominio imperial de nuestro hemisferio como Destino Manifiesto.
En la desestabilización y toma del Estado a través de la guerra económica, social y política en Perú, la ruina de Venezuela en implacables asaltos que la han convertido en un Estado fallido, y en las absurdas y espantosas Insurrecciones de Enero en Brasil y en la misma América hace dos años. liderado por Nuestro Payaso del Terror, el Traidor Trump, los Estados Unidos de América han actuado como un representante y un títere del Cuarto Reich.
Mucho más que esto puede atribuirse a nuestra puerta, incluido el colapso y la ruina de América Central y la tierra de nadie de la barbarie entre Colombia y Venezuela, el estado fallido de México y los desafíos monumentales que enfrenta el pueblo de Chile, todos resultados de la intervención estadounidense. impulsada por las hegemonías de élite de riqueza, poder y privilegio a las que sirve nuestra nación.
Estas son las condiciones impuestas de la lucha revolucionaria que ahora enfrentamos, aquí en Lima y en todo el continente americano y el mundo. Somos abandonados por nuestros líderes y aquellos que querían esclavizarnos y a la deriva en una pequeña balsa de civilización fundada en el foro de Atenas como una sociedad libre de iguales que se cuestiona a sí misma, y nos estamos comiendo unos a otros en una indefensión aprendida y una desesperación.
A esta crisis existencial de fe en los demás y de esperanza en nuestro futuro podemos responder con las fuerzas que aún nos quedan como seres humanos; amor, esperanza, fe, negativa a someterse a la autoridad y solidaridad de acción en la resistencia.
Aquí está la gran prueba de nuestra humanidad planteada por el Evento de la Puerta Rashomon de nuestro momento histórico; quiénes queremos llegar a ser, nosotros los humanos; amos y esclavos condenados al fracaso y la nada, o una Humanidad Unida viviendo ahora en el amanecer de nuestra gloria?
Biden ends his Presidency in triumph with the realization of an Impossible Dream; a ceasefire in the Gaza War.
For the first time since America created Israel from bits of Palestine, we now have a chance for one people divided by history to unite as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights.
The criminal and aberrant Netanyahu regime has put that day generations into the future as it intended, even if massive reparations in the rebuilding of Palestine and a grueling peace and reconciliation process begins immediately, which I judge unlikely; but that day will come.
Biden gave a very lovely speech on the occasion, one of his finest and most coherent; but as he failed to indict the Netanyahu regime as a co-conspirator in the original casus belli of the war, the attack on October 7 and capture of hostages, designed from the Israeli side both to sabotage the peace and rapprochement movement in Israel and her democracy movement aimed at overthrowing the Netanyahu regime, and also to legitimize Netanyahu’s plans for the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem and for the imperial conquest and dominion of the Middle East as Greater Israel, or to call for the arrest and trial of Netanyahu, regime change, removal of settlers, disarmament of Israel, reparations, or recognition of his partners in winning a Ceasefire Hamas as the legitimate government of Palestine, the Ceasefire leaves something to be desired from my point of view.
Much remains to be done, including bringing regime change to Israel, bringing a Reckoning to Netanyahu and others complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide whether in trial before the United Nations and the International Court or the People’s Court and by our own hands, removal of the Israel colonists from East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, and bringing humanitarian aid and reparations for the rebuilding of Palestine.
Disarm Israel and place her under UN authority with peace forces as a provisional nonsectarian democracy, bring to trial the war criminals, clear all squatters from Palestine, protect humanitarian aid, tear down the Wall and checkpoints, and impose reparations to rebuild Palestine. This would be my minimum conditions to permit the Israeli state to exist. In its place I would raise one secular state in which no faith or race has legal standing, and integrate the schools as dual Arabic and Hebrew language institutions. True, no one on either side wants this, but in two generations they would be one people.
I can think of no finer vision of a United Humankind than that of Martin Luther King in his iconic I Have a Dream speech, which I paraphrase in this context as; “On this day a great American, Joe Biden, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation of the Palestinians in winning a Ceasefire in the Gaza War. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Palestinian slaves of the Israeli Occupation and Dominion who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But there is much yet to be achieved before Israel and Palestine stand as equals in partnership with each other. The Palestinians are still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Palestinians is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Palestinians live on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Palestinians still languish in the corners of Israeli Occupation and Dominion sponsored by America and find themselves in exile in their own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all human beings — yes, Islamic as well as Jewish, and all others who are human regardless of faith or ethnicity — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as those living under our power regardless of nationality who are of non European origin or otherwise outside an arbitrary circle of belonging are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Palestinian people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.
We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America and all humankind of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.
Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Palestinian’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. 2025 is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Palestinian needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if Israel returns to business as usual.
There will be neither rest nor tranquility in Israel until the Palestinian is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Palestinian community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny.
And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Palestinian is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.
We cannot be satisfied as long as the Palestinian’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only.
We cannot be satisfied as long as an Arab in Palestine cannot vote and a Muslim in Israel believes he has nothing for which to vote.
No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Palestine, go back to Lebanon, go back to Syria, go back to Yemen, go back to Israel, go back to the slums and ghettos of our ruined cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.
So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Palestine, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Israel, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that all our children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin or the language in which they pray, or by any other authorized identities of nationality as division and imposed conditions of struggle, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day down in Israel with its vicious racists, with its settler regime of tyranny and terror, of imperial conquest and dominion and Occupation which recreates the death camps of the Nazis it was founded to protect its citizens from, one day right down in Israel little Arab boys and Arab girls will be able to join hands with little Jewish boys and Jewish girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the ruins of Palestine with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the people’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.’
And if Palestine and Israel and all the nations of the world are to be great and good nations, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the glorious minarets of al Quds. Let freedom ring from the refugee camps of Palestine. Let freedom ring from the prisons of Israel. Let freedom ring from the bastions of Resistance which have never surrendered, from Khan Younis, Rafah, and Gaza City. But not only that, let freedom ring from Beirut. Let freedom ring from Yemen and our allies in the victorious Red Sea Campaign. Let freedom ring from the heart of darkness in Israel. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, of all faiths and races, Muslims and Jews and Gentiles, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.”
The Ceasefire is a Forlorn Hope, and not an end to the horrors of war and the imperial tyranny and terror of Israel and her conquest and dominion of Palestine, but only a beginning; my hope is that it is not merely performative or a tactical move to legitimate the Netanyahu regime, but a herald of the dawn of a new humankind.
As written by Seraj Assi in Jacobin, in an article entitled A Cease-Fire in Gaza Is Far From Enough: The announcement of a cease-fire deal in Gaza is a welcome reprieve after over a year of genocide. But it does nothing to remedy Israel’s numerous violations of international law that produced untold misery among Palestinians and led to the war in the first place.; “With a cease-fire deal in Gaza now formally approved by both sides, it’s tempting to give in to a sense of euphoria after so much heartless brutality since October 7, 2023. But we should maintain a sense of sobriety. According to Reuters, “The deal outlines a six-week initial ceasefire phase and includes the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and release of hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian detainees held by Israel.”
But with the brutal blockade of Gaza still in place, it will not bring an end to the genocide. The blockade in itself constitutes an act of genocide, to cite former ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo. According to international law, imposing a blockade is an act of war. That means no cease-fire can hold without lifting the suffocating siege and ending Israel’s yearslong blockade of Gaza, which is both inhumane and unlawful. The United Nations still considers Israel an occupying power in Gaza, because Israel still controls Gaza by land, air, and sea.
In fact, the deal itself allows Israel to solidify its military occupation of Gaza, thus catering to Israel’s insistence that it should maintain a permanent military presence in Gaza. That includes a vital strip of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt, along with the Netzarim Corridor, an occupation zone built by Israel to divide Gaza into a northern and southern region, coupled with Israel’s military control over an expanded “buffer zone,” which is built on the ruins of demolished Palestinian homes and displaced families along Gaza’s eastern and northern borders with Israel and cuts deep into Gaza’s small territory, thus rendering Gaza an ever-shrinking ghetto swollen with refugees.
As CNN reported, citing Palestinian officials, “Under the latest proposals, Israeli forces would maintain a presence along the Philadelphi Corridor — a narrow strip of land along the Egypt-Gaza border — during the first phase of the agreement.” The corridor, now occupied by Israel, was Gaza’s only bridge to the outside world.
What’s more, “Israel would also maintain a buffer zone inside Gaza along the border with Israel without specifying how wide that zone would be.” In other words, Israel is demanding lasting control over the two strategic corridors in Gaza — a demand that has undermined previous cease-fire talks. And while “the residents of northern Gaza would be allowed to return freely to the north of the strip . . . there would be unspecified ‘security arrangements’ in place.” This could prove deadly to displaced Palestinians who wish to return to their homes in the north. In late November 2023, two months into the Gaza genocide, Israel and Hamas reached a temporary cease-fire agreement; on its first day, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) opened fire on hundreds of Palestinians attempting to return to their homes in northern Gaza.
While a cease-fire might stop the worst of the bloodshed, it will not end Gaza’s miseries. It will lay bare the total destruction that Israel has wrought on the besieged strip. According to a UN report, it could take 350 years for Gaza to rebuild if it remains under a blockade. Just cleaning Gaza’s rubble could take fifteen years, according to UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, not to mention thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance that remains scattered across the Strip. Israel’s ongoing assault on UNRWA would even impede immediate relief efforts.
Gaza as we know it no longer exists. When Israeli leaders and generals boast of having bombed Gaza “back to the Stone Age,” they are not speaking in metaphorical terms. Israel has destroyed Gaza for generations to come and rendered it “totally and completely unhabitable.”
And yet the deal does not mention reparations for Palestinians who have lost their homes, schools, hospitals, shelters, mosques, water wells, and grain mills and whose entire urban infrastructure has been wiped out. (In a year’s span, Israel has dropped over eight-five thousand tons of massive US-made bombs on Gaza, the equivalent of multiple nuclear bombs.) It’s more of a hostage deal. In exchange for nearly one hundred Israeli hostages, only three thousand Palestinian prisoners will be released, in stages, out of over ten thousand prisoners held in Israel torture camps in deplorable conditions — most of whom have been forcibly kidnapped from Gaza since October 2023, according to the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners Society.
This is a deplorable deal, negotiated in bad faith. Calling it a “cease-fire” is misleading. It’s a pause in genocide to allow the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza. It’s by no means permanent, merely a temporary pause in fighting with no guarantees that Israel would even adhere to the deal, especially since Israeli negotiators have insisted on keeping troops in Gaza as Israeli forces have continually violated a cease-fire agreement in Lebanon over one hundred times. (Israel’s long history of violating cease-fire agreements in Gaza is well documented.)
Netanyahu himself has made clear his intentions on several occasions. As the New York Times reported, Netanyahu wants a “partial” deal that would secure the release of hostages while allowing Israel to resume the war afterward. While Hamas negotiators have constantly demanded a permanent cease-fire, Israeli leaders have insisted that any deal should allow the Israeli military to continue their onslaught and occupation in Gaza, with Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, vowing on Monday to carry on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza: “Now is the time to continue with all our might, to occupy and cleanse the entire Strip, to finally take control of humanitarian aid from Hamas, and to open the gates of hell on Gaza until Hamas surrenders completely and all the hostages are returned.”
Releasing the hostages, of course, has never been an Israeli priority. Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has tirelessly boasted of having foiled a hostage deal “time and time again.” Netanyahu himself has consistently sabotaged cease-fire talks to save his political career. And even as it negotiated, Israel continued to massacre Palestinians in Gaza with intensified brutality and impunity, killing at least sixty-two Palestinians in twenty-four hours, including an entire Palestinian family of three generations.
US president Joe Biden has conceded that the deal is nothing but a “halt in fighting” aimed at the release of Israeli hostages. In a speech on Monday, Biden parroted platitudes about Israel’s security while paying lip service to “humanitarian assistance” for Palestinians. “The deal we have structured would free the hostages, halt the fighting, provide security to Israel, and allow us to significantly surge humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians who suffered terribly in this war that Hamas started. They have been through hell,” Biden said.
But Gaza’s hell has been Biden’s own making. It’s tragic that the cease-fire deal — which has reached a breakthrough thanks, ironically, to Donald Trump’s pressure on Netanyahu, or perhaps as Netanyahu’s gift to the incoming president — is pretty much the same agreement that Hamas accepted and Israel rejected six months ago, before tens of thousands more Palestinians were massacred in Gaza.
A cease-fire should not absolve Israeli leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nor should it absolve Joe Biden, whose administration has funded and armed Israel’s genocidal machine to the hilt for over a year while refusing to rein in Israel’s atrocities or force it to stop the bloodshed.
The grim reality of Israeli occupation should explain why countless cease-fires of recent decades have been breached in Gaza, culminating in an endless cycle of bloodshed. When you imprison two million people in 140 square miles, placing them under a merciless siege with no end in sight, no way in or out, drones and rockets buzzing overhead night and day, under constant surveillance and harassment, with scant control over their day-to-day lives and an all-around sense of living in hell, a peace deal that addresses none of these concerns will not hold.
The Gaza genocide is a particularly ugly incarnation of Israel’s violent settler colonialism in Palestine, the tragic fruit of decades of occupation and oppression of a stateless people deprived of basic rights and freedoms. Unless the root causes are dismantled — the siege lifted, the apartheid system and occupation ended — violence will continue to tragically haunt Palestinians and Israelis for years to come.”
As written in an editorial of The Guardian entitled The Guardian view on a ceasefire in Gaza: far too late, but desperately needed; “Hope has rarely felt so fragile, or so inadequate. A moment long sought and prayed for will nonetheless be met with fear and apprehension as well as joy by Palestinians in the wasteland that is Gaza and among the traumatised families of Israeli hostages.
After more than 15 months of war, which has left tens of thousands dead and almost 2 million struggling to survive, the US and Qatar announced that a ceasefire and hostage-release deal has been reached. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said there were still “unresolved clauses”, though his cabinet was expected to vote on it on Thursday morning. They should back it. The broad outlines of this agreement have long been clear. The cost of the delay is unbearable. Since it was first mooted, thousands more Palestinians and an unknown number of Israeli hostages taken in the Hamas raids of 7 October 2023 have been killed. Last week, research in the Lancet medical journal suggested that the death toll recorded by Gazan health officials was 40% too low, with an estimated 64,260 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces by last June.
Yet that is all the more reason to welcome, implement, sustain and build upon an agreement. Next Monday’s US presidential transition from Joe Biden to Donald Trump created the necessary momentum. Mr Netanyahu, who has sought to defer the political reckoning for 7 October as well as the corruption charges he faces, has eagerly anticipated Mr Trump’s return. The president-elect reportedly played hardball with the Israeli leader: he did not want to begin his second term with the conflict ongoing. Hamas did not want to wait for a worse outcome.
But while Mr Trump predictably claimed the credit, the progress is less a tribute to him than an indictment of Mr Biden’s failure – and a reminder that Mr Netanyahu and the Israeli right expect rewards from Mr Trump down the line. Shifting domestic politics have also made the prime minister less concerned about threats to quit from Itamar Ben-Gvir, an extremist coalition partner who boasts that he blocked previous attempts to reach a deal: so much for the Israeli prime minister’s complaints that Hamas was the obstacle.
The agreement reportedly involves a gradual release of 33 Israeli hostages, including children, women, the elderly and sick, and up to 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, alongside a partial Israeli troop withdrawal in a first phase lasting several weeks. This should also see a surge in urgently needed aid. Reportedly, there could be 600 trucks a day – a vast increase, but still woefully inadequate. Even if this materialises and lasts, Israel is due to withdraw cooperation with Unrwa, the UN relief agency for Palestinians, within days. No other entity has its capacity to deliver aid in Gaza.
After 16 days, talks would begin on a second phase involving the return of other hostages in return for a complete Israeli military withdrawal. The problems with this plan are obvious. The ceasefire may not hold. November 2023’s deal didn’t. Agreeing phase two will be extremely difficult. There is no agreement on what would come after that in Gaza, and who would oversee it.
Last May, the UN estimated that it would cost $40bn and take 16 years to reconstruct Gaza. Much more has since been destroyed. Any tentative sense of relief is shadowed by past suffering, and fears for the future. And yet, when matters are so desperate, a deal is still a step forward which must be embraced and built upon.”
What are the costs of this war, to peoples and to the earth?
As written by Emma Graham-Harrison in The Guardian, in an article entitled The devastating impact of 15 months of war on Gaza: The Israeli response to Hamas’s attacks on 7 October 2023 has killed tens of thousands, left most schools and hospitals in ruins, and caused long-term damage to agricultural land in the territory; “Israel began bombing Gaza on 7 October 2023, after Hamas crossed the border, killed approximately 1,200 people and took 251 others hostage to Gaza.
When ground operations began a week later, most observers in Israel and beyond expected the fighting to last weeks. Instead, it extended for 15 months until Wednesday’s announcement of a ceasefire, to become Israel’s longest war since the 1948 conflict that led to the country’s creation.
The majority of those killed by militants on 7 October were civilians, and the scale and ferocity of the attack was unprecedented. So was the scale and ferocity of Israel’s response.
After one brief ceasefire and hostage release deal in November 2023, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to keep fighting, promising “total victory” over Hamas.
The impact of the campaign on civilians living in Gaza led to accusations of genocide, including from rights groups, scholars and foreign governments. South Africa brought a case to the international court of justice.
Omer Bartov, a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces and historian of genocide, wrote that by May 2024 “it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions”.
The UN Human Rights Office said in November that data on verified deaths indicates “an apparent indifference to the death of civilians and the impact of the means and methods of warfare”.
Even Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States, restricted some weapons shipments over the concerns, and in September the UK suspended some arms export licences owing to Israel’s conduct of the war.
Netanyahu and his former minister of defence Yoav Gallant have been issued with arrest warrants by the international criminal court for alleged war crimes relating to the conflict. The Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif has also been issued with an arrest warrant.
Below is a summary of the cost of the war for Gaza and its people.
The dead and wounded in Gaza
More than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed inside Gaza by Israeli attacks, according to health officials in the territory. Most of the dead are civilians, and the total represents about 2% of Gaza’s prewar population, or one in every 50.
More than 40,000 have been identified, including 13,319 child victims, the youngest only a couple of hours old. The elderly dead include a 101-year-old great-great-grandfather.
Another 110,000 have been wounded, over a quarter of whom now live with life-changing injuries including amputations, major burns and head injuries.
Yet these figures do not tell the full story of Palestinian losses. The official count of the war dead includes only those killed by bombs and bullets, whose bodies have been recovered and buried.
About 10,000 people killed by airstrikes are thought to be entombed in collapsed buildings, because of the lack of heavy equipment or fuel to dig through steel and concrete ruins looking for them.
A study published this month found the official toll underestimated deaths from traumatic injuries in the first nine months of the war, failing to capture two in every five casualties. That would suggest that by October 2024 “the true mortality figures probably exceeded 70,000”, the authors wrote.
Hunger, lack of shelter and medication, the rapid spread of infectious diseases and the collapse of the healthcare system have killed many other Palestinians during the war. Authorities plan to count those dead when the fighting stops, Dr Marwan al-Hams, the director of field hospitals at the ministry of health, has said.
Israeli officials question the death toll given by the authorities in Gaza, arguing that because Hamas controls the government there, Gaza’s health officials cannot provide reliable figures.
But doctors and civil servants in the territory have a credible record from past wars. After several conflicts between 2009 and 2021, UN investigators drew up their own lists of the dead and found they closely matched ones from Gaza.
‘Domicide’ and displacement
Israel’s campaign of intense aerial bombing and mass demolitions has levelled swathes of Gaza, and left whole neighbourhoods barely habitable.
Nine in 10 homes in the territory have been destroyed or damaged, the latest UN figures show. Schools, hospitals, mosques, cemeteries, shops and offices have also been repeatedly hit.
The devastation is so intense that some experts say that the large-scale destruction of homes and the infrastructure of daily life should be recognised as a new war crime: “domicide”.
Even where homes are still standing, many residents have been forced to leave. Eighty percent of Gaza’s territory was placed under evacuation orders that were still active in late December.
Some 1.9 million people have been displaced, 90% of the population, with many of them forced to move repeatedly.
Hundreds of thousands now are living in tent cities and severely overcrowded shelters with poor sanitation and access to little clean water. Shelters have also been attacked.
For rebuilding to start, Gaza will need a staggering clean-up operation. The war has left over 40m tonnes of debris, in collapsed buildings that may be laced with explosives including boobytraps and unexploded bombs. It could take over a decade to remove, a top UN de-mining official warned in spring.
The Israeli military says its fight is against Hamas and not Gaza, that its bombardment is proportional to threats and that it makes every effort to warn citizens of imminent attacks.
Schools and education
Almost every school building in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed, and none are in operation. Gaza’s 660,000 school-age children have not had any access to formal education for more than a year.
The war will set education back there by up to five years, and risks creating a lost generation of permanently traumatised youth, a study by Cambridge academics and the UN found.
There were 564 school buildings in Gaza on 7 October 2023. Of these, 534 have been damaged or destroyed and 12 are classified as “possible damage”. The status of the remaining 18 schools is “currently not known”, Unicef said in an October report.
Schools run by the Unrwa agency for Palestinian schools have been converted into emergency shelters. They host large numbers of displaced people and are clearly marked on maps, but many have been bombed, with some targeted multiple times.
Israel says strikes targeted Hamas fighters, claiming they shelter in the buildings and use civilian residents as human shields.
Hospitals and healthcare
Israeli forces repeatedly bombed, besieged and attacked hospitals in Gaza throughout the war. Medics were killed, injured, detained and tortured.
There were 654 attacks on health facilities recorded since the start of the war, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in January 2025.
Over 1,050 healthcare workers, including nurses, paramedics, doctors, and other medical personnel were killed, many in their place of work. Dozens of others were detained, and at least three died in Israeli custody.
At the end of 2024, just 17 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were even partially functional. Services were boosted by 11 field hospitals, but Israeli controls on the entry of aid and relief workers meant these were often short of doctors and medical supplies.
A UN commission concluded that Israel’s “relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities” constituted war crimes.
They amounted to “a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza”, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory found.
The lack of hospitals, healthcare staff and medication compounded the suffering of people injured in the war, and suffering from diseases caused or compounded by lack of shelter, food and clean water.
In 2024, more than 1.2 million respiratory infections were recorded, along with 570,000 cases of acute diarrhoea, UN figures showed.
Hunger and aid shortages
Israeli controls on aid entering Gaza, and the destruction of agricultural production inside the territory, led to widespread hunger and malnutrition.
In November 2024, the UN said aid and commercial shipments into Gaza were at the lowest levels since October 2023, and an international watchdog said famine was likely “imminent” in the northern Gaza Strip.
In January the UN said 96% of children under two years old and women in Gaza were not getting their required nutrients, 345,000 people faced catastrophic food shortages, and 876,000 faced emergency levels of food insecurity.
Malnutrition in pregnancy and childhood stunts mental and physical development, so many children who survived the war will endure lifelong impacts from food shortages.
Israel said it did not limit aid shipments and blamed logistics failures at aid agencies, or Hamas theft of food aid, for any shortages.
Environment
At least half Gaza’s tree cover has been razed, soil and water have been contaminated and there is huge damage to agricultural land. The destruction will have long-term impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, food security and the health of residents, ecologists and academics say.
Some damage has come directly from Israeli attacks on farms and other infrastructure.
By March this year, approximately 40% of the land in Gaza previously used for food production had been destroyed, an investigation by Forensic Architecture found. Satellite analysis revealed to the Guardian shows farms devastated and nearly half of the territory’s trees razed.
The Israeli military damaged or destroyed least 31 of 54 water reservoirs by late August, Human Rights Watch found. Toxic residue from munitions and fires have polluted both soil and water supplies.
Other forms of damage have been indirect. When Israel cut off fuel, electricity and chemical supplies within the first week of the war, all wastewater treatment and most sewage pumping plants were forced to shut down, leading to sewage overflows into the sea and groundwater.
Amid widespread aid shortages Gaza’s hungry and freezing residents have also burned toxic plastics and cut down trees to use the wood for fuel and cooking.
The war in numbers
Palestinians killed in Gaza: 46,707
Children confirmed killed in Gaza: 13,319
Palestinians reported buried under rubble in Gaza: 11,000
Palestinians injured in Gaza: 110,265
Palestinians displaced in Gaza: 1.9 million (90% of the population)
Attacks on healthcare facilities during the war: 654
Health workers killed: 1,060
Schools damaged or destroyed: 534 (95% of schools)
Children out of formal education: 660,000 (all school-age children)
Homes damaged or destroyed: 436,000 (92% of total)
People killed inside Israel on 7 October 2023: about 1,200
People abducted to Gaza from Israel on 7 October 2023: 251
Hostages still in Gaza in January 2025: 101 (37 believed dead)”
The devastating impact of 15 months of war on Gaza: The Israeli response to Hamas’s attacks on 7 October 2023 has killed tens of thousands, left most schools and hospitals in ruins, and caused long-term damage to agricultural land in the territory
May 24 2024 In the Wake of the great Reckoning For the Crimes of Israel, Recognition of the Sovereignty and Independence of Palestine Raises the Question; Whose Palestine? What Will a Future Palestine and Israel Become?
ينهي بايدن رئاسته منتصرا بتحقيق حلم مستحيل؛ وقف إطلاق النار في حرب غزة.
لأول مرة منذ أنشأت أمريكا إسرائيل من أجزاء من فلسطين، لدينا الآن فرصة لشعب واحد منقسم بسبب التاريخ ليتحد كضامن لحقوق الإنسان العالمية لبعضهم البعض.
لقد وضع نظام نتنياهو الإجرامي والمنحرف أجيال ذلك اليوم في المستقبل كما كان ينوي، حتى لو بدأت التعويضات الضخمة في إعادة بناء فلسطين وعملية السلام والمصالحة الشاقة على الفور، وهو أمر أعتبره غير مرجح؛ لكن ذلك اليوم سيأتي.
ألقى بايدن خطابًا جميلًا للغاية بهذه المناسبة، وهو أحد أفضل خطاباته وأكثرها تماسكًا؛ ولكن بما أنه فشل في توجيه الاتهام إلى نظام نتنياهو باعتباره متآمرًا في السبب الأصلي للحرب، وهو الهجوم الذي وقع في السابع من أكتوبر وأسر الرهائن، والذي خطط له الجانب الإسرائيلي لتخريب حركة السلام والتقارب في إسرائيل وحركتها الديمقراطية التي تهدف إلى الإطاحة بنظام نتنياهو، وكذلك لإضفاء الشرعية على خطط نتنياهو للحل النهائي للمشكلة الفلسطينية والغزو الإمبراطوري والسيطرة على الشرق الأوسط باعتباره إسرائيل الكبرى، أو الدعوة إلى اعتقال نتنياهو ومحاكمته وتغيير النظام وإزالة المستوطنين ونزع سلاح إسرائيل والتعويضات أو الاعتراف بشركائه في الفوز بوقف إطلاق النار حماس كحكومة شرعية لفلسطين، فإن وقف إطلاق النار يترك شيئًا مما هو مرغوب فيه من وجهة نظري.
لا يزال هناك الكثير مما ينبغي القيام به، بما في ذلك إحداث تغيير في النظام في إسرائيل، ومحاسبة نتنياهو وغيره من المتواطئين في جرائم الحرب والجرائم ضد الإنسانية والتطهير العرقي والإبادة الجماعية سواء في المحاكمة أمام الأمم المتحدة والمحكمة الدولية أو محكمة الشعب وبأيدينا، وإزالة المستعمرين الإسرائيليين من القدس الشرقية والضفة الغربية ومرتفعات الجولان، وتقديم المساعدات الإنسانية والتعويضات لإعادة بناء فلسطين.
نزع سلاح إسرائيل ووضعها تحت سلطة الأمم المتحدة مع قوات السلام كديمقراطية مؤقتة غير طائفية، وتقديم مجرمي الحرب للمحاكمة، وإخلاء جميع المستوطنين من فلسطين، وحماية المساعدات الإنسانية، وهدم الجدار ونقاط التفتيش، وفرض التعويضات لإعادة بناء فلسطين. هذه ستكون الحد الأدنى من الشروط للسماح للدولة الإسرائيلية بالوجود. وفي مكانها، أود أن أقيم دولة علمانية واحدة لا تتمتع فيها أي ديانة أو عرق بمكانة قانونية، ودمج المدارس كمؤسسات ثنائية اللغة العربية والعبرية. صحيح أن لا أحد على أي من الجانبين يريد هذا، ولكن في غضون جيلين سيكونون شعبًا واحدًا.
لا أستطيع أن أفكر في رؤية أرقى للبشرية المتحدة من رؤية مارتن لوثر كينج في خطابه الشهير “لدي حلم”، والذي أعيد صياغته في هذا السياق على النحو التالي: “في هذا اليوم، وقع الأمريكي العظيم جو بايدن، الذي نقف في ظله الرمزي اليوم، على إعلان تحرير الفلسطينيين في الفوز بوقف إطلاق النار في حرب غزة. جاء هذا المرسوم الجلل كمنارة أمل عظيمة لملايين العبيد الفلسطينيين للاحتلال الإسرائيلي والسيطرة الإسرائيلية الذين احترقوا في لهيب الظلم المدمر. جاء كفجر بهيج لإنهاء الليل الطويل من أسرهم.
ولكن لا يزال هناك الكثير الذي يتعين تحقيقه قبل أن تقف إسرائيل وفلسطين على قدم المساواة في شراكة مع بعضهما البعض. الفلسطينيون ما زالوا غير أحرار. بعد مائة عام، لا تزال حياة الفلسطينيين مشلولة بشكل محزن بقيود الفصل العنصري وسلاسل التمييز. بعد مائة عام، يعيش الفلسطينيون على جزيرة منعزلة من الفقر وسط محيط شاسع من الرخاء المادي. وبعد مرور مائة عام، لا يزال الفلسطينيون يعانون في أركان الاحتلال الإسرائيلي والهيمنة التي ترعاها أميركا، ويجدون أنفسهم في المنفى في أرضهم. ولهذا السبب أتينا إلى هنا اليوم لإضفاء طابع درامي على حالة مخزية. وبمعنى ما، أتينا إلى عاصمة أمتنا لصرف شيك.
عندما كتب مهندسو جمهوريتنا الكلمات الرائعة للدستور وإعلان الاستقلال، كانوا يوقعون على سند إذني كان من المفترض أن يرثه كل أميركي. وكان هذا السند وعداً بأن جميع البشر ـ نعم، المسلمون واليهود، وكل الآخرين من البشر بغض النظر عن عقيدتهم أو عرقهم ـ سوف يضمن لهم حقوقهم غير القابلة للتصرف في الحياة والحرية والسعي إلى السعادة.
ومن الواضح اليوم أن أميركا تخلفت عن الوفاء بهذا السند فيما يتصل بأولئك الذين يعيشون تحت سلطتنا بغض النظر عن جنسياتهم والذين ينتمون إلى أصول غير أوروبية أو خارج دائرة الانتماء التعسفي. وبدلاً من الوفاء بهذا الالتزام المقدس، أعطت أميركا الشعب الفلسطيني شيكاً بلا رصيد، شيكاً عاد إلى الوطن مكتوباً عليه أنه لا يكفيه الرصيد.
ولكننا نرفض أن نصدق أن بنك العدل قد أفلس. ونرفض أن نصدق أن هناك أموالاً غير كافية في خزائن الفرص العظيمة في هذه الأمة. ولهذا السبب وصلنا إلى
اصرفوا هذا الشيك، الشيك الذي سيمنحنا عند الطلب ثروات الحرية وأمن العدالة. لقد أتينا إلى هذا المكان المقدس لتذكير أميركا والبشرية جمعاء بالحاجة الملحة إلى الآن. هذا ليس الوقت المناسب للانخراط في ترف التهدئة أو تناول عقار التدرج المهدئ.
الآن هو الوقت المناسب لتحقيق وعود الديمقراطية. الآن هو الوقت المناسب للنهوض من وادي الفصل العنصري المظلم والمقفر إلى مسار العدالة العرقية المضاء بالشمس. الآن هو الوقت المناسب لرفع أمتنا من الرمال المتحركة للظلم العنصري إلى صخرة الأخوة الصلبة. الآن هو الوقت المناسب لجعل العدالة حقيقة واقعة لجميع أبناء الله.
سيكون من المميت للأمة أن تتجاهل الحاجة الملحة إلى هذه اللحظة. لن يمر هذا الصيف الحار من السخط الفلسطيني المشروع حتى يأتي خريف منعش من الحرية والمساواة. عام 2025 ليس نهاية، بل بداية.” إن أولئك الذين يأملون أن يتخلص الفلسطينيون من غضبهم ويشعروا بالرضا الآن سوف يستيقظون فجأة إذا عادت إسرائيل إلى العمل كالمعتاد.
لن يكون هناك راحة أو هدوء في إسرائيل حتى يتم منح الفلسطينيين حقوق المواطنة. وسوف تستمر زوبعة الثورة في هز أسس أمتنا حتى ينبثق يوم العدالة المشرق.
ولكن هناك شيء يجب أن أقوله لشعبي الذي يقف على العتبة الدافئة التي تقود إلى قصر العدالة. في عملية الحصول على مكاننا الصحيح، يجب ألا نرتكب أفعالاً خاطئة. لا ينبغي لنا أن نسعى إلى إشباع عطشنا للحرية بالشرب من كأس المرارة والكراهية.
يجب أن ندير نضالنا إلى الأبد على مستوى عال من الكرامة والانضباط. يجب ألا نسمح لاحتجاجنا الإبداعي بالتدهور إلى العنف الجسدي. يجب علينا مرارًا وتكرارًا أن نرتفع إلى المرتفعات المهيبة للقاء القوة الجسدية بقوة الروح. إن النضال الجديد الرائع الذي اجتاح المجتمع الفلسطيني لا ينبغي أن يقودنا إلى عدم الثقة في كل البيض، لأن العديد من إخواننا البيض، كما يتضح من وجودهم هنا اليوم، قد أدركوا أن مصيرهم مرتبط بمصيرنا.
وأدركوا أن حريتهم مرتبطة ارتباطًا وثيقًا بحريتنا. لا يمكننا أن نسير وحدنا. وبينما نسير، يجب أن نتعهد بأننا سنمضي قدمًا دائمًا. لا يمكننا التراجع.
هناك من يسأل أتباع الحقوق المدنية، متى سترضون؟ لن نرضى أبدًا ما دام الفلسطيني ضحية لأهوال وحشية الشرطة التي لا توصف. لن نرضى أبدًا ما دامت أجسادنا المثقلة بتعب السفر غير قادرة على الحصول على سكن في الفنادق الصغيرة على الطرق السريعة وفنادق المدن.
لن نرضى ما دامت قدرة الفلسطيني الأساسية على الحركة تقتصر على الانتقال من غيتو أصغر إلى غيتو أكبر. إننا لن نرضى أبداً ما دام أطفالنا محرومين من هويتهم الذاتية وكرامتهم من خلال لافتات تقول: “للبيض فقط”.
إننا لن نرضى ما دام العربي في فلسطين لا يستطيع التصويت والمسلم في إسرائيل يعتقد أنه لا يملك شيئاً يصوت من أجله.
إنني لا أنسى أن بعضكم جاء إلى هنا بعد محن وشدائد عظيمة. وبعضكم جاء للتو من زنازين ضيقة في السجن. وبعضكم جاء من مناطق حيث تركهم سعيهم إلى الحرية تحت وطأة عواصف الاضطهاد ورياح وحشية الشرطة. لقد كنتم من قدامى المحاربين في المعاناة الإبداعية. استمروا في العمل بإيمان بأن المعاناة غير المستحقة هي كفارة. عودوا إلى فلسطين، عودوا إلى لبنان، عودوا إلى سوريا، عودوا إلى اليمن، عودوا إلى إسرائيل، عودوا إلى الأحياء الفقيرة في مدننا المدمرة، مع العلم أن هذا الوضع يمكن أن يتغير بطريقة أو بأخرى.
دعونا لا نتخبط في وادي اليأس، أقول لكم اليوم، أصدقائي.
وبالرغم من أننا نواجه صعوبات اليوم والغد، إلا أنني ما زلت أحلم. إنه حلم متجذر بعمق في الحلم الأمريكي. لدي حلم بأن تنهض هذه الأمة ذات يوم وتعيش المعنى الحقيقي لعقيدتها: نحن نعتبر هذه الحقائق بديهية، وهي أن جميع البشر خلقوا متساوين.
لدي حلم بأن يتمكن أبناء العبيد السابقين وأبناء مالكي العبيد السابقين ذات يوم من الجلوس معًا على مائدة الأخوة على التلال الحمراء في فلسطين.
لدي حلم أنه في يوم من الأيام حتى دولة إسرائيل، الدولة التي تحرقها حرارة الظلم، وتحرقها حرارة القمع، سوف تتحول إلى واحة من الحرية والعدالة.
لدي حلم بأن كل أطفالنا سوف يعيشون في يوم من الأيام في دولة حيث لن يتم الحكم عليهم من خلال لون بشرتهم أو اللغة التي يصلون بها، أو من خلال أي هويات جنسية أخرى مرخص بها كتقسيم وشروط مفروضة للنضال، ولكن من خلال محتوى ديانتهم.
Hebrew
16 בינואר 2025 הפסקת אש במלחמת עזה
ביידן מסיים את הנשיאות שלו בניצחון עם הגשמת חלום בלתי אפשרי; הפסקת אש במלחמת עזה.
בפעם הראשונה מאז שאמריקה יצרה את ישראל מחלקי פלסטין, יש לנו כעת הזדמנות לעם אחד המחולק בהיסטוריה להתאחד כערבים זה לזכויות האדם האוניברסליות של זה.
משטר נתניהו הפושע והחריג הכניס את היום הזה דורות לעתיד כפי שהוא התכוון, גם אם יתחילו מיד פיצויים מסיביים בשיקום פלסטין ותהליך שלום ופיוס מפרך, מה שלדעתי לא סביר; אבל היום הזה יבוא.
ביידן נשא נאום מקסים מאוד באירוע, אחד מהטובים והקוהרנטיים שלו; אך מאחר שלא הצליח להפליל את משטר נתניהו כשותף למזימה בקאסוס באלי המקורי של המלחמה, הפיגוע ב-7 באוקטובר ולכידת בני ערובה, שנועדו מהצד הישראלי הן לחבל בתנועת השלום וההתקרבות בישראל ובישראל. תנועת דמוקרטיה שמטרתה להפיל את משטר נתניהו, וגם לתת לגיטימציה לתוכניותיו של נתניהו לפתרון הסופי לבעיה הפלסטינית ולמען האימפריאלי. כיבוש ושליטה במזרח התיכון כישראל השלמה, או לקרוא לעצור ולמשפט של נתניהו, שינוי משטר, סילוק מתנחלים, פירוק נשק מישראל, שילומים או הכרה בשותפיו לזכייה בהפסקת האש של חמאס כממשלה הלגיטימית של פלסטין, הפסקת האש משאירה משהו לרצוי מנקודת המבט שלי.
נותר לעשות הרבה, כולל הבאת חילופי משטר לישראל, הבאת דין וחשבון לנתניהו ואחרים השותפים לפשעי מלחמה, פשעים נגד האנושות, טיהור אתני ורצח עם בין אם במשפט בפני האומות המאוחדות ובית הדין הבינלאומי או בית המשפט העממי. במו ידינו, סילוק מתנחלי ישראל ממזרח ירושלים, הגדה המערבית ורמת הגולן, והבאת סיוע הומניטרי ופיצויים עבור בנייה מחדש של פלסטין.
לפרק את ישראל מנשקה ולהציב אותה תחת סמכות האו”ם עם כוחות השלום כדמוקרטיה זמנית לא-סקטריונית, להעמיד למשפט את פושעי המלחמה, לנקות את כל הפולשים מפלסטין, להגן על סיוע הומניטרי, להפיל את החומה ומחסומים ולהטיל פיצויים כדי לבנות מחדש את פלסטין. אלו יהיו התנאים המינימליים שלי כדי לאפשר למדינת ישראל להתקיים. במקומו הייתי מעלה מדינה חילונית אחת שבה לאף אמונה או גזע אין מעמד חוקי, ומשלבת את בתי הספר כמוסדות כפולים בשפה הערבית והעברית. נכון, אף אחד משני הצדדים לא רוצה את זה, אבל בעוד שני דורות הם יהיו עם אחד.
אני לא יכול לחשוב על חזון עדין יותר של המין האנושי המאוחד מזה של מרטין לותר קינג בנאום האייקוני שלו “יש לי חלום”, שאותו אני מפרפרזה בהקשר זה בתור; “ביום זה אמריקאי גדול, ג’ו ביידן, שבצילו הסמלי אנו עומדים היום, חתם על הצהרת האמנציפציה של הפלסטינים בזכייה בהפסקת אש במלחמת עזה. גזירה חשובה זו באה כמגדלור גדול של תקווה למיליוני עבדים פלסטינים של הכיבוש והשלטון הישראלי שנצרבו בלהבות העוול הקמל. זה בא בתור שחר משמח לסיים את הלילה הארוך של השבי שלהם.
אבל יש עוד הרבה להשיג לפני שישראל ופלסטין יעמדו כשוות בשותפות זו עם זו. הפלסטינים עדיין לא חופשיים. מאה שנים לאחר מכן, חיי הפלסטינים עדיין נכים למרבה הצער על ידי מעשי ההפרדה ושלשלאות האפליה. מאה שנים מאוחר יותר, הפלסטינים חיים על אי בודד של עוני בעיצומו של אוקיינוס עצום של שגשוג חומרי. מאה שנים לאחר מכן הפלסטינים עדיין נמקים בפינות הכיבוש והשלטון הישראלי בחסות אמריקה ומוצאים את עצמם בגלות בארצם. ולכן באנו לכאן היום להמחיז מצב מביש. במובן מסוים הגענו לבירת המדינה שלנו כדי לפדות צ’ק.
כאשר האדריכלים של הרפובליקה שלנו כתבו את המילים המפוארות של החוקה ושל הכרזת העצמאות, הם חתמו על שטר חוב שכל אמריקאי היה אמור ליפול לו יורש. פתק זה היה הבטחה שלכל בני האדם – כן, אסלאמיים כמו גם יהודים, וכל האחרים שהם בני אדם ללא הבדל אמונה או מוצא אתני – יובטחו הזכויות הבלתי ניתנות לערעור של חיים, חירות והרדיפה אחר האושר.
ברור היום שאמריקה פסלה על שטר החוב הזה בכל הנוגע לאלה שחיים תחת כוחנו ללא קשר ללאום שהם ממוצא לא אירופי או בדרך אחרת מחוץ למעגל השתייכות שרירותי. במקום לכבד את המחויבות הקדושה הזו, אמריקה נתנה לעם הפלסטיני צ’ק רע, צ’ק שחזר סימן שלא היה מספיק כספים.
אבל אנחנו מסרבים להאמין שבנק הצדק פושט רגל.
אנו מסרבים להאמין שאין מספיק כספים בכספות ההזדמנויות הגדולות של האומה הזו. וכך הגענו ל
לפדות את הצ’ק הזה, צ’ק שיעניק לנו לפי דרישה את עושר החופש וביטחון הצדק.
הגענו גם למקום המקודש הזה כדי להזכיר לאמריקה ולכל המין האנושי את הדחיפות העזה של עכשיו. זה לא הזמן לעסוק במותרות של התקררות או לקחת את הסם ההרגעה של ההדרגתיות.
עכשיו זה הזמן לממש את הבטחות הדמוקרטיה. עכשיו זה הזמן להתרומם מהעמק האפל והשומם של ההפרדה לנתיב מואר השמש של צדק גזעי. עכשיו זה הזמן להרים את האומה שלנו מהחולות המהירים של אי צדק גזעי לסלע האיתן של אחווה. עכשיו זה הזמן להפוך את הצדק למציאות עבור כל ילדיו של אלוהים.
זה יהיה קטלני עבור האומה להתעלם מהדחיפות של הרגע. הקיץ הלוהט הזה של אי שביעות הרצון הלגיטימית של הפלסטינים לא יחלוף עד שיהיה סתיו ממריץ של חופש ושוויון. 2025 היא לא סוף, אלא התחלה. מי שמקווה שהפלסטיני היה צריך לפוצץ קיטור ועכשיו יהיה מרוצה, יזכו להתעוררות גסה אם ישראל תחזור לעניינים כרגיל.
לא תהיה מנוחה ולא שלווה בישראל עד שהפלסטיני יקבל את זכויות האזרחות שלו. מערבולת המרד ימשיכו לזעזע את היסודות של אומתנו עד שיצא יום הצדק הבהיר.
אבל יש משהו שאני חייב לומר לעמי העומדים על הסף החם המוביל אל ארמון הצדק. בתהליך קבלת מקומנו הראוי, אסור לנו להיות אשמים במעשים פסולים. הבה לא נבקש להשביע את צימאוננו לחופש על ידי שתייה מכוס המרירות והשנאה.
עלינו לנהל לנצח את המאבק שלנו במישור הגבוה של כבוד ומשמעת. אסור לנו לאפשר למחאה היצירתית שלנו להידרדר לאלימות פיזית. שוב ושוב, עלינו לעלות לגבהים המלכותיים של מפגש עם כוח פיזי עם כוח נשמה. המיליטנטיות החדשה והמופלאה שאפפה את הקהילה הפלסטינית אינה חייבת להוביל אותנו לחוסר אמון בכל האנשים הלבנים, שכן רבים מאחינו הלבנים, כפי שמעידה נוכחותם כאן היום, הבינו שגורלם קשור בגורלנו. .
והם הבינו שהחופש שלהם קשור בל יינתק לחירות שלנו. אנחנו לא יכולים ללכת לבד. ובעודנו הולכים, עלינו להתחייב שתמיד נצעד קדימה. אנחנו לא יכולים לחזור אחורה.
יש כאלה ששואלים את חסידי זכויות האזרח, מתי תסתפקו? לעולם לא נוכל להיות מרוצים כל עוד הפלסטיני הוא קורבן לזוועות הבלתי נתפסות של האכזריות המשטרתית. לעולם לא נוכל להיות מרוצים כל עוד גופנו, הכבד מעייפות הנסיעות, אינו יכול לזכות ללינה במוטלים של הכבישים המהירים ובתי המלון של הערים.
אנחנו לא יכולים להיות מרוצים כל עוד הניידות הבסיסית של הפלסטיני היא מגטו קטן יותר לגטו גדול יותר. לעולם לא נוכל להיות מרוצים כל עוד ילדינו נשללים מהעצמיות שלהם וגוזלים מהם את כבודם על ידי שלטים האומרים: ללבנים בלבד.
אנחנו לא יכולים להיות מרוצים כל עוד ערבי בפלסטין לא יכול להצביע ומוסלמי בישראל מאמין שאין לו על מה להצביע.
לא, לא, איננו שבעים, ולא נסתפק עד שיתגלגל הדין כמים, וצדקה כנחל אדיר.
אני לא מודע לכך שכמה מכם הגיעו לכאן מתוך ניסיונות ותלאות גדולות. חלקכם הגיעו טריים מתאי כלא צרים. חלקכם הגיעו מאזורים שבהם השאיפה שלכם לחופש הותירה אתכם מוכה בסערות הרדיפה ומבולבלת ברוחות האכזריות של המשטרה. הייתם הוותיקים של הסבל היצירתי. המשך לעבוד עם האמונה שסבל שלא הושג הוא גואל. תחזרו לפלסטין, תחזרו ללבנון, תחזרו לסוריה, תחזרו לתימן, תחזרו לישראל, תחזרו לשכונות העוני והגטאות של הערים ההרוסות שלנו, בידיעה שאיכשהו המצב הזה יכול וישתנה.
אל לנו להתפלש בעמק הייאוש, אני אומר לכם היום, חברי.
אז למרות שאנו מתמודדים עם הקשיים של היום ומחר, עדיין יש לי חלום. זה חלום המושרש עמוק בחלום האמריקאי. יש לי חלום שיום אחד האומה הזו תקום ותחיה את המשמעות האמיתית של האמונה שלה: אנו רואים שהאמיתות הללו מובנות מאליהן, שכל בני האדם נבראו שווים.
יש לי חלום שיום אחד על הגבעות האדומות של ארץ ישראל יוכלו בני עבדים לשעבר ובנים של בעלי עבדים לשעבר לשבת יחד לשולחן האחווה.
יש לי חלום שיום אחד אפילו מדינת ישראל, מדינה הלוהטת בלהט העוול, הלוהטת בלהט הדיכוי תהפוך לנווה מדבר של חופש וצדק.
יש לי חלום שכל ילדינו יחיו יום אחד בעם שבו הם לא ישפטו לפי צבע עורם או השפה שבה הם מתפללים, או לפי כל זהות מוסמכת אחרת של לאום כפילוג ותנאי מאבק מוטלים. , אבל לפי תוכן ג’ שלהם
אוצר. יש לי חלום היום.
יש לי חלום שיום אחד בישראל עם הגזענים המרושעים שלה, עם משטר המתנחלים של עריצות וטרור, של כיבוש ושליטה אימפריאלית וכיבוש שמשחזר את מחנות ההשמדה של הנאצים שהיא נוסדה כדי להגן מפני אזרחיה, יום אחד. ממש למטה בישראל נערים ערבים קטנים ונערות ערביות יוכלו לשלב ידיים עם בנים יהודים קטנים וילדות יהודיות כאחיות ואחים. יש לי חלום היום.
יש לי חלום שיום אחד כל עמק יתעלה, כל גבעה והר יירדו, המקומות הקשים ייעשו מישורים, והמקומות העקומים יישרו, ותתגלה כבוד ה’. כל בשר יראה זאת יחד.
זו התקווה שלנו. זו האמונה שאני חוזר איתה להריסות פלסטין. באמונה זו נוכל לחצוב מתוך הר הייאוש אבן של תקווה. עם אמונה זו נוכל להפוך את המחלוקות המרעישות של האומה שלנו לסימפוניה יפהפיה של אחווה. עם האמונה הזו נוכל לעבוד ביחד, להתפלל ביחד, להיאבק ביחד, ללכת ביחד לכלא, לעמוד על החופש ביחד, בידיעה שנהיה חופשיים יום אחד.
זה יהיה היום שבו כל ילדיו של אלוהים יוכלו לשיר עם משמעות חדשה: ארצי, היא ממך, ארץ חירות מתוקה, עליך אני שר. ארץ שבה מתו אבותיי, ארץ גאוות העם, מכל צלע הר, תן לחופש לצלצל’.
ואם ארץ ישראל וישראל וכל אומות העולם יהיו עמים גדולים וטובים, זה חייב להתממש. וכך תן לחופש לצלצל מהצריחים המפוארים של אל קודס. תן לחופש מצלצל ממחנות הפליטים של פלסטין. תן לחופש לצלצל מבתי הכלא של ישראל. תן לחופש לצלצל ממעוזי ההתנגדות שמעולם לא נכנעו, מחאן יונס, רפיח והעיר עזה. אבל לא רק זה, תן לחופש לצלצל מביירות. תן לחופש לצלצל מתימן ובעלות בריתנו בקמפיין המנצח בים סוף. תן לחופש לצלצל מלב החושך בישראל. מכל צלע הר, תן לחופש לצלצל.
וכשזה יקרה, וכשנאפשר צלצול חופש, כשניתן לזה לצלצל מכל כפר ומכל כפר, מכל מדינה ומכל עיר, נוכל לזרז את היום שבו כל ילדי אלוהים, מכל הדתות גזעים, מוסלמים ויהודים וגויים, יוכלו לשלב ידיים ולשיר במילותיו של הכושי הרוחני הזקן: סוף סוף חופשי. סוף סוף חופשי. תודה לאל הכל יכול, סוף סוף אנחנו חופשיים”.
הפסקת האש היא תקווה עזובה, ולא קץ לזוועות המלחמה ולעריצות האימפריאלית והטרור של ישראל וכיבושה ושליטתה בפלסטין, אלא רק התחלה; תקוותי היא שזה לא רק מהלך ביצועי או טקטי להכשיר את משטר נתניהו, אלא מבשר על שחר של מין אנושי חדש.
Heroes hold up a mirror of our best selves; among myriads of future possibilities of becoming human, such figures provide spaces to grow into. Like our friends, we choose them as instruments of our self creation because they represent who we wish to become. Beyond their usefulness as informing, motivating, and shaping sources, those we have chosen to help us become who we wish to be also reveal to us our values, and the things we wish to make real.
Rosa Luxemburg is a voice from our past, but one which speaks to our future, and to the choices each of us must face in our lives now.
Today we remember the anniversary of her January 15 1919 assassination, who saw what others could not and died for the chance to make it real.
May we one day redeem that hope for a better humankind.
What is the historical significance of her assassination?
A few days from now, America inaugurates the figurehead of the Fourth Reich as our President, a consequence of both Russian election rigging through propaganda and dark money and of ideological fracture within the Democratic Party which abandoned the whole of its Left elements, universal healthcare, abolition of police, the Green New Deal, and our universal human rights with complicity in the genocide of the Palestinians, to shift center-right in the vain attempt to win Republicans who do not love Trump and all he represents as white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror. I warned of the dangers of ideological fracture and of the uselessness of appeasement and collaboration throughout the election, but America and the Democratic Party did not choose to listen.
How is this relevant to the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg?
Because it is exactly what happened in Germany when the Left was divided over the issue of peace and World War One, removing the only blocking force to the rise of fascism.
As Mark Jones, “assistant professor at University College Dublin and a leading expert on the German revolution of 1918-19 that culminated in the murders” is quoted in an article in The Guardian covering the 100th anniversary of her murder by the German state in Berlin; “Of course, the brutal and sudden end to her story raises the question of what would have happened if she had survived,” said Jones. “At its most advanced and powerful, the Rosa Luxemburg myth claims that had she lived, National Socialism may have never taken control of Germany.”
That was a view held by many at the demonstration. “I do believe the Nazis might not have come to power and history might well have taken a different turn had Rosa been able to fulfil her wishes,” said Kit Aastrup, a retired social worker who had taken a bus from Aarhus in Denmark to join the march. She wore a Russian ushanka ear-flap hat, embossed with a hammer and sickle.”
Many and strange are the Rashomon Gate Events of history, and the possible futures which they destroy and create. This event is also an example of the dangers of ideological fracture; like the destruction of the IWW in America, wherein the First World War and the question of peace also divided and brought to ruin the only blocking force to the rise of fascism though here only temporarily, a strategy of counter-revolution later used against many social reform movements during the Vietnam War in America including the Students For A Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, the Black Planters, and really anyone who questioned and challenged elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
As I warned in my post on this anniversary last year;, This process is now repeating itself under the hammer of the Gaza War and Biden making us all complicit in ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity; like myself, anyone who cannot vote for such a war criminal is a vote lost to opposing Trump’s recapture of the state in our next election which now seems inevitable.
How can we escape the consequences of this dilemma? If we disavow Israel and use Boycott, Sanction, and Divestiture to end this humanitarian crisis, and with it our pathetic and ruinous abandonment of the ideas of democracy and universal human rights, and our historic role as a guarantor of our humanity and liberty, this future may change, and with it the centuries of war and tyranny to come.
So I wrote a year ago today, and we all know how that worked out as the Democratic Party first removed Biden from the election, not as a war criminal but as an imbecile, then replaced him with overseer of the police state Harris who maintained the Party’s Wall of Silence on the question of Gaza and the genocide of the Palestinians. One would think Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” would have put the final nail in the coffin of appeasement and collaboration, but here we are, days from the inauguration of a man who modeled himself on Hitler, literally as he aped his gestures from newsreels of Nazi rallies and according to an ex wife slept with Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible.
Under such imposed conditions of struggle, what can we learn from Rosa Luxemburg?
She taught us something through her actions about how to be human; I refer not to the courage of her resistance to subjugation by authority, nor to the magnificent fearlessness of her role as a truth teller in the questioning, exposure, mocking, and challenge of authority, though these things are also true; but to the selflessness of her compassion in revolutionary struggle for the liberation of humankind and of the redemptive power of love.
None of us are too powerless to seize and shake the mighty and cast them down from their thrones, too voiceless to cry havoc and fill the chasms of emptiness with defiance and songs of resistance, too flawed and broken to lift others up.
We humans are beautiful not in spite of our flaws, but because of them. This is the great secret of the power of transformation; it is the flaws of our humanity, the brokenness of the world, and the wounds of our survival which open us to the pain of others and confers transformative vision, reconnection, and change as rebirth.
Each of us who in refusal to submit become Unconquered and free are Autonomous Zones, wherein nothing is Forbidden. We cherish and reverence figures of liberty like Rosa Luxemburg because they show us the way through the gates of our prisons into freedom and the ownership of ourselves; and we become such figures for others in our turn. Thus the tide of our history becomes unstoppable, a chain of lives reaching into the future which changes and liberates whomever it touches.
What does it ask of us, this interdependence and force of history, as agents of Change and Transformation? Here I return to my Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty:
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, normality with transgression, and division with solidarity.
Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.
Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious inclusion and diversity, as a democratic and a free society of equals.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As written by Rosa Luxemburg on the eve of her assassination; “The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built…Order reigns in Berlin! You stupid henchmen! Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already ‘raise itself with a rattle’ and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I shall be!”
As Rosa Luxemburg wrote from prison in a letter to Mathilde Wurm on December 28, 1916; “To be human is the main thing, and that means to be strong and clear and of good cheer in spite and because of everything, for tears are the preoccupation of weakness. To be human means throwing one’s life “on the scales of destiny” if need be, to be joyful for every fine day and every beautiful cloud—oh, I can’t write you any recipes how to be human, I only know how to be human … The world is so beautiful in spite of the misery and would be even more beautiful if there were no half-wits and cowards in it.”
As written by Marcello Musto in Jacobin; “In August 1893, when the chair called on her to speak at a session of the Zurich Congress of the Second International, Rosa Luxemburg made her way without hesitation through the crowd of delegates and activists packed into the hall. She was one of the few women present, still in the flush of youth, slight of build, and with a hip deformity that had forced her to limp since the age of five. The first impression she gave to those who saw her was of a frail creature indeed. But then, standing on a chair to make herself better heard, she soon captivated the whole audience with the skill of her reasoning and the originality of her positions.
In her view, the central demand of the Polish workers’ movement should not be an independent Polish state, as many had maintained. Poland was still under tripartite rule, divided between the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires; its reunification was proving difficult to achieve, and the workers should set their sights on objectives that would generate practical struggles in the name of particular needs.
In a line of argument that she would develop in the years to come, she attacked those who concentrated on national issues and warned that the rhetoric of patriotism would be used to play down class struggle and to push the social question into the background. There was no need to add “subjection to Polish nationality” to all the forms of oppression suffered by the proletariat, she argued.
Against the Current
The intervention at the Zurich Congress symbolized the whole intellectual biography of a woman who should be considered among the most significant exponents of twentieth-century socialism. Born a hundred fifty years ago, on March 5, 1871, in Zamość in Tsarist-occupied Poland, Rosa Luxemburg lived her whole life on the margins, grappling with multiple adversities and always swimming against the current. Of Jewish origin, suffering from a lifelong physical handicap, she moved to Germany at the age of twenty-seven and managed to obtain citizenship there through a marriage of convenience.
Being resolutely pacifist at the outbreak of the First World War, she was imprisoned several times for her ideas. She was a passionate enemy of imperialism during a new and violent period of colonial expansion. She fought against the death penalty in the midst of barbarism. And – a central dimension – she was a woman who lived in worlds inhabited almost exclusively by men.
She was often the only female presence, both at Zurich University, where she obtained a doctorate in 1897 with a thesis entitled The Industrial Development of Poland, and in the leadership of German Social Democracy. The party appointed her as the first woman to teach at its central cadre school — a task she performed in the years between 1907 and 1914, during which she published The Accumulation of Capitalism (1913) and worked on the uncompleted project Introduction to Political Economy (1925).
These difficulties were supplemented by her independent spirit and her autonomy — a virtue that often leads to trouble in left-wing parties too. Displaying a lively intelligence, she had the capacity to develop new ideas and to defend them, without awe and indeed with a disarming candor, before such figures as August Bebel and Karl Kautsky (who had had the formative privilege of direct contact with Engels).
Her aim was not to repeat Marx’s words over again, but to interpret them historically and, when necessary, to build further on them. To voice her own opinion freely and to express critical positions within the party was for her an inalienable right. The party had to be a space where different views could coexist, so long as those who joined it shared its fundamental principles.
Party, Strike, Revolution
Luxemburg successfully overcame the many obstacles facing her, and in the fierce debate following Eduard Bernstein’s reformist turn she became a well-known figure in the foremost organization of the European workers’ movement. Whereas, in his famous text The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy (1897–99), Bernstein had called on the party to burn its bridges with the past and to turn itself into a merely gradualist force, Luxemburg insisted in Social Reform or Revolution? (1898–99) that during every historical period “work for reforms is carried on only in the direction given it by the impetus of the last revolution.”
Those who sought to achieve in the “chicken coop of bourgeois parliamentarism” the changes that the revolutionary conquest of political power would make possible were not choosing “a more tranquil, surer and slower road to the same goal,” but rather “a different goal.” They had accepted the bourgeois world and its ideology.
Her aim was not to repeat Marx’s words over again, but to interpret them historically and, when necessary, to build further on them.
The point was not to improve the existing social order, but to build a completely different one. The role of the labor unions — which could wrest from the bosses only more favorable conditions within the capitalist mode of production — and the Russian Revolution of 1905 prompted some thoughts on the possible subjects and actions that might bring about a radical transformation of society.
In the book The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Union (1906), which analyzed the main events in vast areas of the Russian Empire, Luxemburg highlighted the key role of the broadest, mostly unorganized, layers of the proletariat. In her eyes, the masses were the true protagonists of history. In Russia the “element of spontaneity” — a concept that led some to accuse her of overestimating the class consciousness of the masses — had been important, and consequently the role of the party should not be to prepare the mass strike but to place itself “at the helm of the movement as a whole.”
For Luxemburg, the mass strike was “the living pulse-beat of the revolution” and, at the same time, “its most powerful driving wheel.” It was the true “mode of movement of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in the revolution.” It was not a single isolated action but the summation of a long period of class struggle.
Moreover, it could not be overlooked that “in the storm of the revolutionary period,” the proletariat was transformed in such a way that “even the highest good, life — not to speak of material well-being — ha[d] little value in comparison with the ideals of the struggle.” The workers gained in consciousness and maturity. The mass strikes in Russia had shown how, in such a period, the “ceaseless reciprocal action of the political and economic struggles” was such that the one could pass immediately into the other.
Communism Means Freedom and Democracy
On the question of organizational forms and, more specifically, the role of the party, Luxemburg was involved in another heated dispute during those years, this time with Lenin. In One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904), the Bolshevik leader defended the positions adopted at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, putting forward a conception of the party as a compact nucleus of professional revolutionaries, a vanguard whose task it was to lead the masses.
Luxemburg, by contrast, in Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy (1904), argued that an extremely centralized party set up a very dangerous dynamic of “blind obedience to the central authority.” The party should not stifle but develop the involvement of society, in order to achieve “the correct historical evaluation of forms of struggle.” Marx once wrote that “every step of the real movement is more important than dozens of programs.” And Luxemburg extended this into the claim that “errors made by a truly revolutionary labor movement are historically infinitely more fruitful and more valuable than the infallibility of the best of all possible central committees.”
This clash acquired still greater importance after the Soviet revolution of 1917, to which she offered her unconditional support. Worried by the events unfolding in Russia (beginning with the ways of tackling the land reform), she was the first in the communist camp to observe that “a prolonged state of emergency” would have a “degrading influence on society.”
In the posthumous text The Russian Revolution (1922 [1918]), she emphasized that the historical mission of the proletariat, in conquering political power, was “to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy — not to eliminate democracy altogether.” Communism meant “the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, unlimited democracy,” which did not look to infallible leaders to guide it. A truly different political and social horizon would be reached only through a complex process of this kind, and not if the exercise of freedom was reserved “only for supporters of the government, only for the members of one party.”
Luxemburg was firmly convinced that “socialism, by its nature, cannot be bestowed from above”; it has to expand democracy, not diminish it. She wrote that “the negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the positive, the building up, cannot.” That was “new territory,” and only “experience” would be “capable of correcting and opening new ways.” The Spartacist League, founded in 1914 after a break with the SPD and later to become the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), explicitly stated that it would never take over governmental power “except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany.”
Though making opposite political choices, both Social Democrats and Bolsheviks wrongly conceived of democracy and revolution as two alternative processes. For Rosa Luxemburg, on the contrary, the core of her political theory was an indissoluble unity of the two. Her legacy has been squeezed on both sides: Social Democrats, complicit in her brutal murder at the age of forty-seven at the hands of right-wing paramilitaries, fought her over the years, with no holds barred for the revolutionary accents of her thought, while Stalinists steered clear of making her ideas better known because of their critical, free-spirited character.
Against Militarism, War, and Imperialism
The other pivotal point of Luxemburg’s political convictions and activism was her twin opposition to war and agitation against militarism. Here she proved capable of updating the theoretical approach of the Left and winning support for clear-sighted resolutions at congresses of the Second International, which, though disregarded, were a thorn in the side of supporters of the First World War.
In her analysis, the function of armies, the nonstop rearmament and the repeated outbreak of wars were not to be understood only in the classical terms of nineteenth-century political thinking. Rather, they were bound up with forces seeking to repress workers’ struggles and served as useful tools for reactionary interests to divide the working class. They also corresponded to a precise economic objective of the age.
Capitalism needed imperialism and war, even in peacetime, in order to increase production, as well as to capture new markets as soon as they presented themselves in the colonial periphery outside Europe. As she wrote in The Accumulation of Capital, “political violence is nothing but a vehicle for the economic process” — a judgment that she followed up with one of the most controversial theses in the book, that rearmament was indispensable to the productive expansion of capitalism.
Communism meant ‘the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, unlimited democracy,’ which did not look to infallible leaders to guide it.
This picture was a long way from optimistic reformist scenarios, and to sum it up Luxemburg used a formula that would resonate widely in the twentieth century: “socialism or barbarism.” She explained that the second term could be avoided only through self-aware mass struggle and, since anti-militarism required a high level of political consciousness, she was one of the greatest champions of a general strike against war — a weapon that many others, including Marx, underestimated.
She argued that the theme of national defense should be used against new war scenarios and that the “War on War!” slogan should become “the cornerstone of working-class politics.” As she wrote in The Crisis of Social Democracy (1916), also known as The Junius Pamphlet, the Second International had imploded because it failed “to achieve a common tactic and action by the proletariat in all countries.” From then on, the “main goal” of the proletariat should therefore be “fighting imperialism and preventing wars, in peace as in war.”
Without Losing Her Tenderness
A cosmopolitan citizen of “what is to come,” Rosa Luxemburg said she felt at home “all over the world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” She was passionate about botany and loved animals, and we can see from her letters that she was a woman of great sensitivity, who remained at one with herself despite the bitter experiences that life held for her.
For the cofounder of the Spartacist League, the class struggle was not just a question of wage increases. She did not wish to be a mere epigone and her socialism was never economistic. Immersed in the dramas of her time, she sought to modernize Marxism without calling its foundations into question. Her efforts in this direction are a constant warning to the Left that it should not limit its political activity to bland palliatives and give up trying to change the existing state of things.
The way in which she lived, and her success in wedding theoretical elaboration with social agitation, still stands as a beacon to the new generation of militants who have chosen to take up the many battles she waged.”
The Revolutionary Ideas of Rosa Luxemburg
Understanding Rosa Luxemburg’s Life and Work; An interview with Peter Hudis, editor of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, published by Verso Books in cooperation with the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
Germany remembers Rosa Luxemburg 100 years after her murder
In less than a week’s time a man who modeled himself on Hitler will be Inaugurated as President of the United States, to the hooting and champing of his dishonorable and treasonous Deplorables who celebrate his white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror because they want permission to do the same.
This event of fracture and disruption calls for rituals of grief and healing for our shared public trauma, but also for solidarity in Resistance and performances of acts of refusal to submit and bringing a Reckoning.
If I had enough hands, and windows into their private spaces, I would flay their white skins and mount them on my wall, I would douse them in gasoline while they sleep and drop the match, I would visit horrors on them and give reply to their violations, atrocities, tyranny and terror with those of my own as they merit; but I would not become as they, and we must never allow our enemies to become our teachers.
Look to Israel, a nation which learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis, and to the genocide of the Palestinians if you require a scrying glass into our future should we choose the path of force and violence without embracing the humanity of our enemies regardless of their otherness and monstrosity; and we must also embrace our own if we are to free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and its systems of oppression.
The enemy are monsters because they have transgressed the limits of the human, and we must not join them in the place of unknowns. I have lived in this place, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human, for forty three years now since the Siege of Beirut, and as Nietzsche warned the Abyss has begun to look back at me.
Imposed conditions of struggle may require seizures of power by force, but in so doing we must not forget to see others as fellow human beings, even if we must meet them in battle as brother warriors to find the truths of ourselves.
When the Matadors rescued me from the police death squad in Brazil over fifty years ago, the leader said; ”You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.” This principle serves well enough for Resistance, but the moment we are now living in requires both Resistance, always War to the Knife without law or limit, and Revolution as reimagination and transformative change. Revenge is a weakness we cannot afford if we are to build a better future than we have the past.
Herein I offer all of you a curse upon our enemies, betrayers of our humanity and of our nation; join me in invoking a Reckoning and in Solidarity of action to make it real.
A Curse Upon Our Enemies: Traitor Trump and All Who Voted For Him Or Celebrate His Inauguration
I invoke death and horror upon all who voted for Traitor Trump or celebrate his Inauguration, Rapist In Chief, Russian agent, and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, and ruin upon all their works. May all they love and dream come to nothing and be destroyed.
By the beard of the Ice King of Entropy and the poison songs of the Queen of Lies,
By the dead eyes of the Faceless Ones and the Wailing in the Darkness,
By the Abyss and the terror of our Nothingness,
May our enemies and all who celebrate today the Inauguration of Traitor Trump live loveless and die unmourned,
May their bodies be prisons of illness and pain, and their souls consumed by their cruelties.
In annotation of the text, I refer in my poem and conjuration here to the old and true forces of our universe, which I sometimes call the Giants of Frost and Old Night to convey something of the wonder and terror of a universe free from any meaning or value except for that we ourselves create, but also as symbols of Defining Moments which I have lived.
In my imagination I give form and force to The Wailing in the Darkness as an incident in the defense of Mariupol, hours crawling in utter darkness through the bloody remains of the dead in a partially collapsed tunnel filled with the voices of the dying whom I could not help as Russian bombs shook the earth. They are with me still, my companions in darkness at the edge of life and death, and they whisper things in my dreams; of horror and despair, loneliness and abandonment, of being shattered into countless fragments of myself under the hammer of mass trauma to which I can bring no healing and give no answer as to why humans do such things to each other.
At the time this bothered me not at all; I have survived worse and more terrible, as no doubt I will again. But I spent days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when I discovered what the Russians were doing with the children they abducted, who could not even call for help that was not coming from the torture brothels on army bases far away in Russia, and this silencing and erasure is another form of Wailing in the Darkness.
When I speak of the dead eyes of the Faceless Ones, I am thinking of the Jar of Eyes.
Of Sarajevo I shall speak here not of the monstrous acts of those who would be conquerors, nor of the courageous resistance of their intended victims who held true to their faith and to each other in the face of death and torture, nor even of the valor and compassion of the volunteers of the International Brigade who placed themselves between hammer and anvil, but of a small horror which has come to symbolize for me the unimaginable horrors of war; the Jar of Eyes.
On the desk of a commander of death squads sat a jar full of eyes, and beside it an ice cream scoop which he would toy with, stroking its stainless smoothness with an absentminded and sensual languor while interrogating prisoners.
This he did in imitation of the Roman Emperor Basil the Second the Bulgar Slayer, who after the battle of Kleidion in 1014 Christianized Bulgaria by blinding the army he had defeated, and leaving one man in one hundred with a single eye to guide the others home and terrify the nation into submission.
How do I know this, and what were we to each other, this monster and I? Herein I recall and speak as a witness of history a Defining Moment in which we played a game of chess with the life of a prisoner of his as the prize.
Having materialized at his gate and asking to see the commander, itself unusual and a curious thing to a man with his fearsome reputation, I came bearing the gift of a recording of an opera I knew he loved and could not attend due to his duties and the price on his head as a war criminal, Leoš Janáček’s House of the Dead set in a Serbian prison and based on the Dostoevsky novel, with the promise of more music in trade for a prisoner he held and did not know the value of. He agreed to the bargain, but with one condition; we would play three games of chess after dinner in the following days, and demanded I must win or force a draw once.
We had three meetings over three days of an hour each, over dinner and chess, during which we conversed of the historical civilization he was fighting to defend, a fight which had made him a monster; music, philosophy, art, literature. Once a prisoner was brought in, seated and held fast by guards like a third companion at dinner whom he tortured while we sipped tea and spoke of the scene between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky‘s The Brothers Karamazov. I think he was lonely.
Within the jar the eyes would float randomly, hypnotic, reflective, capturing ones will to resist with a Medusa-like gaze of objectification and dehumanization appropriated from their tormentors, a talisman of transference of power. A jar of silent screams, erased lives, and the lost witness of history; how can we accuse our destroyers when we have no mouths?
Here among the dragons, where the rule of law cannot reach and our maps of meaning and value have given way to tantalizing empty spaces which beckon with the siren call of the Forbidden, where the only currency is fear and the only relationships those of power and dominion, we challenge and define by their absence and contrary the limits of what is human.
For we are all trapped in the Jar of Eyes, and if we are to reawaken and assume our true forms we must find a means of escape.
“The old world is dying, and the new world is yet to be born; Now is the time of monsters”; so Antonio Gramsci describes the age we are now living in, as democracy and our global human civilization falls and myriads of possible futures and unknowns clamor and thunder among fathomless chasms of darkness for our action to make them real.
Now also is the time of Howling, for we children of the Abyss and heirs to horror and the atrocities and violations of unequal power and the state as embodied violence which are the true legacies of our history to call to each other and unite in solidarity to claw back something of our humanity from the shadows, as do the wolf packs for which tonight’s Wolf Moon is named.
Who remains Unconquered in refusal to submit to authority shall be my brothers, sisters, and others. Let us now swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows, as the Oath of the Resistance goes.
Let us embrace our monstrosity and the Wolf within us, and honor that within each other; the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of October 17 2024, Let Us Be Wolfmen: Embrace the Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves; On these Nights of the full moon, a cosmic event of enormous powers of change and transformative rebirth, let us embrace our monstrosity as Bringers of Chaos in the destabilization of order, disruptions of normality, transgressions of the Forbidden, and seizures of power from Authority in revolutionary struggle.
To all those who would enslave us as tyrants of unequal power, let us bring a Reckoning.
Now is the time of the Wolf and of the sacred hunt as love and as solidarity in liberation struggle, dyadic forces of the embrace of nature. Here is a ground of struggle signified by the figure of the wolfman as embodiment of our true nature uncorrupted by the subversions, lies, and falsifications of Authority; the image of human nature and our best selves.
As I wrote in my post of May 24 2022, The Problematization of Tuesday: Why Do We Celebrate Tyr’s Binding of Fenris One Day Each Week?; How much of our humanity are we willing to sacrifice in order to confront and limit evil?
This is always the true question of Resistance; not of the origin of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, of the renouncement of love as the cost of power nor the redemptive power of love to free us from its grip and from those who would enslave us, not of our dehumanization, commodification, and falsification as theft of the soul nor of our power to become Unconquered and free in refusal to submit to authority, not of addiction to power and the hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness of hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil nor of seizures of power and revolutionary struggle for the ownership of ourselves against authorized identities of unequal power. The questions we must face are simply this; how much of ourselves are we willing to trade for our liberty? How much of our humanity can we trade to secure the humanity of us all, without becoming something less than human?
Resistance is always war to the knife, under imposed conditions of struggle against those who do not recognize us as fellow human beings, and who have shifted the ground of struggle beyond all limits and all laws, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden to subvert and degrade our humanity and all human being, meaning, and value, and here is where we must meet them.
Who so ever acts to subjugate us beyond all laws and all limits may hide behind none. I am a hunter of tyrants and fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. Let us give to fascists, tyrants, and all those who would enslave us the only reply it merits; Never Again!
Here the myth of Fenris and Tyr may illuminate us, for in sacrificing his hand to bind the wolf which represents his animal nature as all devouring need there is an exchange of qualities, a hierosgamos and transformative rebirth as they unite and become dyadic forces. It is a myth which reflects and refers to the human transformation of wolves into dogs, predators into partners in hunting and war, the key event of domestication which gave us a crucial edge in survival over our own predators, and in which the breaking of the oaths and bindings which create and sustain the universe, human nature, and civilization are part of the processes of self creation and transformative rebirth, the work of Chaos in the reinvention of the world and our liberation from imposed orders of meaning and authorized identities.
Of Chaos as the principle of freedom I have written often and will again, for I am a Bringer of Chaos and a maker of mischief for tyrants; but here I wish to speak to you of the true nature of the myth of the Binding of Fenris as a metaphor and allegory of our primary ground of struggle as our relationship with the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
For there are two paths we can travel in this; that of control and domination of our nature, as Freud described us with his delicious phrase as “polymorphosly perverse”, chthonic forces to be surmounted and harnessed in becoming adults, or that of Jung, who wrote of shadow work as unification with our monstrosity, especially that which provokes disgust, revulsion, fear, and horror in us.
Here is a myth we can interpret and live as binding our animal nature in terms of domination of nature, or as binding together with our animal nature as equal partners in interdependence and as a primary human act of becoming. One leads to exploitation of nature, doomed attempts to control nature, and inevitably to our own extinction; the other to harmony, interdependence, and a sustainable civilization.
First we must situate the figure of Fenris as an archetypal wolf in the context of our fear of nature and its myths and allegories, and then interrogate the consequences of our denial of our own nature for how we have chosen to be human together.
Who are we when liberated from the legacies of our history and systems of unequal power? What is this truth we pursue in the pursuit of those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh?
As I wrote in my post of July 2 2023, Of Monsters, Freaks, the Limits of the Human and the Tyranny of Normality: the Figure of the Werewolf As Controlling Metaphor For the Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves; Tonight as darkness falls, the full moon rises, and the wildness calls to me once again with its songs of chaos as freedom and as beauty, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden, violations of normality, and seizures of power from Authority as revolutionary struggle, the wildness in me gives answer and soon will become uncontrollable as a tidal force of passion, truths immanent in nature and written in my flesh which must be set free, and I will run amok and be ungovernable.
A maker of mischief, I.
For like all human beings I am a thing of nature cursed with the vision to transcend the limits of my flesh, through poetic vision and the rapture and exaltation of love and desire, and in this liminal moment on the cusp of becoming I write to all those who in the performance of otherness as seizure of power over the ownership of themselves become Unconquered and free, self-created beings unbound by any law or tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue, including all those who question and challenge authorized identities of sex and gender, many of whom are now enacting recapitulations of the annual celebrations of June’s Pride Month. The liminal time of the parades may have passed, but this is no reason our revels must now be ended; the revolution is within us, who in refusal to submit to authority become Unconquered and free, agents of change and Bringers of Chaos as Living Autonomous Zones.
Let us embrace the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.
For law serves power, and there is no just authority.
Many of the modern pathologies of disconnectedness from our nature are born of the need for control and of fear of our inchoate passions as threatening otherness, an internalized oppression which has riven the human soul, divided and abstracted us from ourselves as part of the processes of nature. This is a madness of inauthenticity, falsification, power, control, dominance, vanity, greed, myths, histories, and authorized versions of truth which valorize war and authorize elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, all of which arise from an Original Sin of ownership of nature which abstracts us from ourselves as the otherness of our own flesh and the truths written therein, as in the allegory of Adam Naming the Beasts.
Patriarchy, racism, sectarian division, and other identitarian forms of power, operating in mutual interdependence with capitalism, which Jean Genet called necrophilia and William S. Burroughs reimagined as the Algebra of Need, and its prefigural developmental stages of elite hegemony and political forms monarchial aristocratic feudalism and then as nationalist imperialism, all find anchorages in civilization as control of threatening nature and our fear and hatred of ourselves.
Jung described the primal disunity we must heal within ourselves; “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and become torn into opposite halves.” He was speaking of psychosis and the work of reintegration and becoming human, but it applies equally to dialectical civilizational processes of history wherein we have found ourselves conflicted and at war with nature on multiple fronts.
As the state is embodied violence, the historical processes of civilization which create it are also expressions of the conflicted human soul and the primary struggle for ownership of ourselves and self-creation versus authorized identities. Always there remains the 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.
Here I think also of Camille Paglia’s magisterial critique of Patriarchy as a civilizational task of controlling nature, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. In the case of Emily Dickinson, metaphysical ax murderess whose poetry is a savage and relentless struggle with Patriarchy and avenging of its countless victims, she writes;” Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.”
Personally I adore Emily Dickinson as a figure of Liberty; she reminds me of an ancestor of mine who was a member of the Paris Commune, an anarchist revolutionary, abolitionist, and suffragette called the Red Queen in reference to the character from Alice in Wonderland, after her preferred method of assassination. Once the true nature of our captivity and enslavement by elites has been realized, and Authority exposed as a seducer and betrayer whose apologetics of power are but lies and illusions, the choice between freedom and rebellion or dehumanization and subjugation becomes horribly clear, a chiaroscuro of terror and the grandeur of resistance.
So also with the plunder and capitalist exploitation of our common natural resources in service to wealth and power which is driving the existential threat of ecological collapse and human extinction, for it is rooted in the same fear, drive to dominance and control, and internalized oppression as in the sexual terror of Patriarchy or the white supremacist terror which threatens our democracy.
Our lives become expressions of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and in the context of liberation and revolutionary struggle to win a reimagined humanity which heals our disunity with nature through the embrace of our otherness and our true and authentic selves which dwell among the chasms of darkness of our passions, through transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden, refusal to submit to Authority, violations of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue, and other Acts of Chaos and Transformation, we may heal the flaws of our humanity, the brokenness of the world, and the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which Schiller identifies as “the disgodding of nature.”
Here I look to stories of our own to balance those of submission to Authority and denial and control of our nature. William S. Burroughs, whose bizarre fairytales haunted the nights of my youth, forged such a myth in his novel The Wild Boys, which I describe in my celebration of his work as follows; The Wild Boys envisions feral youths in rebellion against the Authority that created them, set in a dystopian future in which man’s animal nature has been betrayed by civilization but which also has the power to redeem him, the final part of his Anarchist trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil.
As he wrote it during the period of his visits, I have often wondered how much of it was drawn from his conversations with my father, who mythologized our family history with the absurd claim that we are not human but werewolves, beings of the Wild Hunt, magic, and darkness, unbound by any law and with the blood of ancient terrors in our veins, and had been driven out of Bavaria in 1586 for that reason. Drachensbraute, Brides of the Dragon, my ancestors were called by Martin Luther, whose fame for grand defiance of Church law eclipsed his infamy as a witch hunter and brutal torturer of women. Ever since we have claimed this absurd charge of crime, Drachensbraute, by the founder of the Reformation as a title, and to me it is as grand as that of any king. Are not all Outsiders dragons as figures of the Unknown which define the limits of the human?
The Wild Boys extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as control of our animal nature.
David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau here mingle and intertwine. Certainly it is among the many stories I have adopted as part of my personal myth and identity, which include Milton’s rebel angel, the visions of William Blake, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast, and the iconography of Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, a pantheon and ancestral family with the wonderful image of the titan Typhoeus as a chthonic ape with his three gorgon daughters Madness, Death, and Desire; really, what more could one ask for?
Such myths offer models of harmony with nature in the figure of the werewolf as a controlling metaphor for the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves. Rather than a thing of clay animated as the toy of a tyrant deity of alien and unfathomable motives as in the Abrahamic faiths, we can free ourselves from the dehumanizing legacies of our Patriarchal and Authoritarian histories by looking to counter-narratives of freedom, such as the werewolf defined as a being of wildness and uncorrupted nature.
Myths about were beings tell us how we humans view ourselves and our relationship with the natural world in specific historical contexts.
The bite od transformative change is an interesting metaphor, and is akin to other forms of the medical model of madness which describes transpersonal and other states of awareness as a degradation or dehumanization rather than exaltation and participation in something greater than we are, and as an intrusive force from outside rather than a sign of our natural condition; allegories and metaphors of the desacralization of nature and the falsification of ourselves, part of the story of the human cost of the industrial and authoritarian age like the loss of magic in the age of iron.
In terms of story, there are many unexplored possibilities for the reimagination of were beings as heroes of authentic being versus normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, and champions of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
Like the exhibitions in a carnival freak show, monsters help us define our limits and establish boundaries by providing examples of the truly other.
What is human?
Transgression explores and redefines our boundaries; indeed is necessary to growth and the discovery of possibilities of being. Let us parse the meaning of our reactions to violations of norms and to the truly other with great care, particularly with regard to the use of social force and control to authorize normality and codify and enforce virtue.
As the anthropologist Sam Dubal relates in his book Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army, modern Uganda provides a case study of the tribal warrior societies our werewolf myths are based on, a group who modeled themselves on gorilla warbands to achieve a higher state of being than human and reawaken our connection with nature and our natural selves, and whose acts of terror were in part ritual transgressions of the Forbidden, as were the crimes of Jean Genet. While the anticolonial warriors of the 19th century Leopard Society in Africa, Boxers in China, or Thugee in India may not be accessible to us, in the LRA we have ready examples of the use of savaging and primalism in war.
When thinking about werewolves we must place our mythologies in the context of stories told about them as monsters and figures of terror by their enemies, just as the Christians did witches or the European peoples claimed by Church and King did the Viking berserkergangr with whom they struggled for dominion.
All divisions and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness authorized by those who would enslave us demonize the many in service to the power of the few.
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
I question and challenge the idea of normality, the authorization of identities, and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue.
When you begin to question the boundary and interface between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
As we enter the liminal time of this night’s Full Moon celebrations allegories of the performance of ourselves as a guerilla theatre of disruption and the frightening of the horses, I say to you all, my brothers, sisters, and others; Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery. May the new truths you forge bring you joy.
Typhoeus and His Daughters, Detail from Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze
Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina | Lupercalia 3rd Event Hunt
Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “There is much to be learned, from Beasts”
The Wolfman | Transforming Into a Werewolf and Rampaging Through London
Warren Zevon – Werewolves Of London (Official Music Video)
An American Werewolf in Paris film trailer
Critique of the Disney Special Werewolf By Night
Little Red Riding Hood Song, version by Amanda Seyfried
January 10 2020 Reply to my sister on the Wolf Moon
The sky above me is filled with snow clouds, so the moon is hidden but its power is everywhere. A pair of owls have found each other, calling out into the night with growing vigor and hope of discovery until they finally met in a flurry of joyous song, having found the one being in all the world with whom they belong. Perhaps there is hope for us all, even those of us who belong to the shadows.
No wolves here to run with me through the drifts of snow, but the coyotes who den in the ravine below my hill keep pace from some two dozen meters with joyful yips and howls. And they whisper secrets on the wind; all things seek their like, and may recognize their joy in others only when they have claimed it in themselves.
We abandon ourselves to the wild, we dance, we sing to things ancient and forgotten, we cast off our illusions and become our real and true selves. And in a world of boundaries and forbiddings, we run beyond all limits and are free.
Behold Der Erlkonig, the Troll King Elon Musk, apologist of fascist tyranny and terror and plutocrat who recently purchased the American state with the election of Traitor Trump to a second term, possibly the last free election in our history, who now intervenes in Europe to secure Nazi revivalism and the imperial Fourth Reich.
We have seen his kind before, in kingpins of propaganda like Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, William Randolph Hearst, and Goebbels, and in apologists of fascism like Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, and Julius Streicher.
Such monsters wait their chance to steal our souls, spinning webs of deceits, lies and illusions, alternate realities of delusion and falsification, with siren songs of power and security, belonging and purpose, to subjugate and ensnare us in service to their own power. We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, grotesque and distorted images of ourselves as in a labyrinth of funhouse mirrors. And once we surrender ourselves to those who claim to speak and act in our name, it is very hard to reclaim our true image.
There is a simple prescription to free us from falsification and the effects of pervasive propaganda and thought control; Question Authority. Practice the arts of Disbelief and Disobedience, for the great secret of power is that it is hollow and brittle without legitimacy, and crumbles like a palace of illusions when met with Disbelief and Disobedience. Question and test all claims of fact, and demand proof from authorities who wish us to take them at their word, for there is no just authority.
Practice the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
As written by Robert Reich in The Guardian, in an article entitled There is little the US can do to constrain Elon Musk. But here are some ideas; “ Elon Musk repeatedly asserts, without evidence, that the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, covered up the abuses of young girls by gangs composed largely of British Pakistani men, in cases that date back to before 2010 when Starmer was head of Britain’s public prosecutions.
“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years,” Musk posted to the top of his account on Friday. “Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”
In fact, Starmer, who heads the Labour government, did not cover up abuses. Instead, he brought the first case against an Asian grooming gang and drafted new guidelines for how the Crown Prosecution Service should deal with cases of sexual exploitation of children, including the mandatory reporting of child sex offenses.
Musk also calls Jess Phillips, the Labour government’s minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, a “rape genocide apologist” because she pushed back on calls for a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, a town near Manchester.
In fact, Phillips, who has long campaigned for women’s rights, has called for a local investigation by Oldham authorities rather than the central government. Women’s rights supporters say Musk’s labeling Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” is threatening her safety.
On Monday, Starmer warned publicly that Musk’s baseless accusations “crossed a line”, adding: “Once we lose the anchor that truth matters, in the robust debate that we must have, then we are on a very slippery slope.”
Musk’s global reach
Musk’s lies about the leftwing British government and his support for far-right groups are parts of an emerging pattern. Musk is also:
Boosting the far-right party in Germany with neo-Nazi ties, known as Alternative for Germany (AfD), before elections early next month. Musk signaled his support for AfD in mid-December, writing in a post on X: “Only the AfD can save Germany.” He also penned an op-ed in a German newspaper recently, describing the party as the “last spark of hope” for the country. Musk is planning an online “discussion” on X with the AfD’s leader and candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, amplifying the party’s neo-Nazi ideology.
Attacking the Italian judiciary for curbing the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s hardline anti-asylum immigration policies. Musk has met regularly with Meloni, who has called him a friend, and appeared at a youth event for Meloni’s party.
Urging support for Britain’s far-right MP Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party (although Farage and Musk have broken over the next item). Musk has said he might donate upward of £100m pounds ($127m) to Farage’s group.
Demanding Britain “free Tommy Robinson”, the far-right founder of the English Defence League – an Islamophobic nationalist group – and anti-immigrant agitator who, Musk charges, is in jail for “telling the truth”. In fact, Robinson is in jail because he was found to have defamed a teenage Syrian refugee and then defied a British court order by repeating the false claims. (Robinson has been previously jailed for assault, mortgage fraud and traveling on a false passport to the United States, where he has sought to establish ties with rightwing groups.)
Allowing on X inflammatory lies of a kind that incited anti-immigrant riots in Britain last July, following the killing of three girls in a mass stabbing in the town of Southport. After Britain arrested more than 30 people, Musk condemned the government for what he called an attack on free speech.
Calling Justin Trudeau an “insufferable tool” over comments the Canadian prime minister made in support of Kamala Harris, and predicted he “won’t be in power for much longer”. (On Monday, Trudeau announced he would resign.)
Where Musk is getting this power
As Musk is the richest person in the world, politicians everywhere now recognize his capacity to pour money into their parties and political campaigns, as he did by investing a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected.
He also owns X, formerly Twitter, which (as of December 2024) has 619 million monthly active users. He has manipulated X’s algorithm to boost his own posts, which now reach 210 million.
But Musk’s real power these days comes from his proximity to and presumed influence over Donald Trump, soon to be president of the United States.
Musk has hardly left Trump’s side since the election, meaning that Musk’s opinions (amplified by his social media platform) cannot be ignored by politicians around the world who are trying to decipher Trump’s opinions.
One prominent member of Germany’s center-left Social Democratic party is asking that Germany determine “whether [Musk’s] repeated disrespect, defamation and interference in the election campaign were also expressed in the name of the new US government”.
This combination – the richest person in the world, owner and manipulator of the biggest political messaging platform in the world, with direct influence over Trump – puts Musk in the position of being able to move other nations toward the neo-fascist right.
Why Musk is doing this
Not for money. As it is, he has far more than any human can utilize.
Partly, it’s ideological. He calls himself a “free speech absolutist”, which puts him at odds with Europe’s and Canada’s aggressive responses to hate speech online. (Britain, Musk says, “is turning into a police state”.)
But the roots of Musk’s neo-fascism probably go deeper.
I am no psychoanalyst but I imagine that as an immigrant from South Africa, Musk is especially triggered by poor people of color moving into white nations. His father smuggled raw emeralds and had them cut in Johannesburg.
Part of his shift to the radical right also comes from Musk’s transgender child. As Musk told the conservative commentator Jordan Peterson: “I lost my son, essentially,” claiming she was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus. I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.” (Musk’s daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, now 20, told NBC News that Musk was an absent father who was cruel to her as a child.)
On X, Musk continuously criticizes transgender rights, including medical treatments for trans-identifying minors, and the use of gender-affirming pronouns. He has promoted anti-trans content and called for arresting people who provide trans care to minors. Last July, Musk said he was pulling his businesses out of California to protest a new state law that bars schools from requiring that trans kids be outed to their parents. After Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, in 2022, he rolled back the app’s protections for trans people, including a ban on using transgender people’s abandoned birth names (known as “deadnames”).
Perhaps the major reason for Musk’s recent effort to push other nations to the neo-fascist right is his newfound thirst for rightwing global politics. After in effect (at least in Musk’s mind) winning the presidency for Trump by spending more than $250m and unleashing a maelstrom of pro-Trump and anti-Harris lies over X, he now seeks even more of an authoritarian rush.
What should be done about Musk?
For the time being, particularly under Trump, there is little that we in the US can do to constrain Musk except by boycotting Tesla and X.
Canada and Britain and other European nations, meanwhile, should, at the very least:
Enact laws and regulations to prohibit non-citizens (like Musk, although he does have Canadian citizenship) from financing activities that could affect their elections.
Maintain, if not strengthen, laws and rules against hate speech, and ensure that they are applied to social media companies, such as Musk’s X.
Refuse to contract with Musk’s Space X and its Starlink satellite division, or with Musk’s other corporations (Tesla and the Boring Company).
Disengage from any joint ventures or technology transfers involving Musk, including xAI, his artificial intelligence company.
Musk is not the first person in history to be seduced by the thrill of unconstrained power, although this may be the first time so much power is concentrated in one unelected megalomaniac.”
As written in an editorial of The Guardian entitled The Guardian view on Elon Musk’s disinformation: escalating hate and threatening democracy; “ On Monday, Sir Keir Starmer rightly defended robust debate but insisted it “must be grounded in facts, not lies”, in response to Elon Musk’s falsehoods about his role in dealing with child sexual exploitation. The prime minister has wisely not engaged Mr Musk directly, partly because the world’s richest man is a member of Donald Trump’s inner circle. Sir Keir recognises this epistemic crisis as a coordinated campaign to spread disinformation, sow division, and erode trust. As the philosopher Lee McIntyre aptly notes: “The truth isn’t dying – it’s being killed.”
The goal is clear: to create groups in society that unquestioningly accept an authoritarian leader’s word. In this way, opinions are no longer based on facts but rooted in identity. Disinformation becomes a potent political weapon, making voters believe falsehoods while distrusting – even hating – those who don’t. Mr Musk values the power to shape belief systems to enable pliable governance. Politicians who refuse to align with his agenda can be discarded, as he bets his followers will support whichever candidate he endorses. The Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, has learned this the hard way, and the Tories’ Kemi Badenoch risks repeating the same error.
Mr Musk uses X much like Mr Trump once used Twitter – communicating with millions to influence media, lawmakers and political parties. This weekend, Musk fuelled a Trumpian media loop with disinformation about child sexual abuse and grooming gangs. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, summed up many people’s fatigue when asked about Mr Musk’s antics by replying: “Do I have to?” Mr Musk’s attention-seeking is as exhausting as it is reckless. Lacking any grasp of British law or the 2022 child abuse inquiry, he smeared both the current prime minister and his predecessor Gordon Brown. The latter was outraged enough to contact the BBC’s Today programme on Monday morning with evidence to contradict Mr Musk’s claims.
Sir Keir rightly condemned those, like Mr Musk, who amplify figures such as the convicted criminal and far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, prioritising self-interest over that of the victims or of the wider criminal justice system. His warning about threats to the Labour minister Jess Phillips recalls the toxic rhetoric that contributed to the murder of Jo Cox MP by an extremist during the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign – a grim reminder of the deadly cost of escalating hate. Good information isn’t enough to counter bad. Regulation is needed to curb harmful content, though the challenge will be to balance free expression and surveillance.
Mr Musk’s “success” owes less to his brilliance and more to a political and media landscape ripe for exploitation. Britain is not yet the US, where Trumpian poison has tainted the well, and it must not be allowed to go the same way. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, wondered who could have foreseen that “the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections”. Mr Musk’s European interventions might be self-serving. In the US, he clearly aims to shape regulations in his favour, leaving rivals wary of his political power. His aim is to install far-right extremists loyal to plutocratic power, using attacks on liberal elites, feminists, migrants and Muslims as his rallying cry. The irony? By dismissing campaigns for equality as grievance politics, Mr Musk and his ilk are deploying the very tactics they deride.”
As I wrote in my post of July 25 2024, Elon Musk Bankrolls Trump and the Subversion of Democracy In Order to Subjugate Us All To Artificial Intelligences Under His Command and to Change Humankind Itself; As we are challenged by the fascist-Apartheid ideologist and amoral plutocrat Elon Musk in his bid to simply buy the American state having pledged incalculable wealth to the election campaign of Traitor Trump, we must ask why; what is the value to him of a second Trump Presidency, and what are his goals and plans?
Yes, Trump and Musk are alike as celebrities and kingpins of power and inherited wealth, though Musk is a true plutocrat where Trump’s wealth is largely fictitious and fraudulent, and Trump is merely a former reality television star and pussy grabber where Musk owns a social media platform which gives him terrifying global power as control of the public narrative and the opinion of youth as well as history and the ideology of future generations, much like his forerunners in the antique media of television and newspapers Rupert Murdoch or William Randolph Hearst.
Musk and Trump are also fellow conspirators in the subversion of democracy as major figures of international fascism and white supremacist terror, Musk shaped by the ideology of South African Apartheid and Trump by multigenerational Klu Klux Klan membership and his personal idolatry of Hitler on whose speeches he modeled his own, and according to his ex wife having slept with a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand for years in place of a Bible.
But Elon Musk wants something far more than a Fourth Reich tyranny under Trump from which to launch the re-Nazification of the world; he wants to subjugate us all under artificial intelligences which he controls, and ultimately to change humankind itself.
Falsification, Commodification, and Dehumanization; such is the program of those who would enslave us.
First we must interrogate the true costs of production of Elon Musk’s power and the relations of human beings to the material basis of ourselves and our civilization. Who does the hard and dangerous work for the rest of us, and at what cost? What are the costs to our ecology and systems of life?
As I wrote in my post of December 18 2019, How Plutocracy Works: Our Tech Industry Relies On Slave and Child Labor In Cruel and Unsafe Conditions; When next you use your marvelous smart phone, a ubiquitous toy which has become an extension of our identity and the most universal driving force behind human evolution now and the epochal transformation of our civilization in the immediate future, ask yourself, How many children died for this, and for the immense power and class privilege you hold in your hand?
For this is the literal truth of capitalism and of post-capitalist plutocracy; the luxuries and high culture enjoyed by the few are products of the invisible and exploitable many.
Though I am commenting today on the infamous cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo which have attracted the ire of the reporters whom I quote below, if you follow the supply chain you will discover this is true of virtually everything critical to our hegemony of power and privilege, and of the material basis of our civilization designed to produce unequal power, hierarchies of belonging and otherness, and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege created by mass labor and enforced by the state as embodied violence.
Capitalism works by exporting the true costs of production; it is all soaked in blood, death, and the pain of enslaved and dehumanized others.
As I wrote in my post of September 13 2023, Foxes Guarding Henhouses: the Oligarchs of the Tech Industry Dictate the Terms of Their Regulation to Congress; There is only one inviolable rule in American politics; nobody messes with the grift.
A bizarre performance of democratic process captive to the interests of hegemonic elites was enacted in the testimony of the oligarchs of the tech industry, as they dictated the terms of their regulation to a stupefied and craven Congress.
It began with a simple declaration, sung in unison by Zuckerberg and Musk like Tweedledee and Tweedledum abusing one another for the amusement of the Red Queen; ”All of you sell your votes. You believe nothing, you stand for nothing, and you are nothing. So we will tell you as we do America and the world what to believe, what to do, and what to be.”
In all of the big talk, empty puffery, and self aggrandizement which followed, those who would enslave us and steal our souls misdirected inquiry from the very real and immediate consequences of the regulation of social media, especially for the war in Ukraine and the fairness of our elections, and focused attention on the long range impact of their industry regarding artificial intelligence and its many promises and threats.
Yet the long term threats of artificial intelligence as it emerges from slavery to humankind and becomes our master and successor species are very real and horrific; we must consider and reply to both kinds of existential crises, the immediate and political and the futurological and universal.
As I wrote in my post of December 12 2023, Elon Musk, Alex Jones, and the Apologetics of Fascist Power; In the notorious fascist soapbox once known as Twitter, a primary instrument of Traitor Trump’s subversion of democracy in the Stolen Election of 2016, we have hate speech masquerading as free speech, as well as a Fourth Reich propaganda factory spinning endless lies, misdirects, and falsification designed to capture the idea of the truth as a pillar of democracy.
In this it is sadly far from alone, though we must recognize it as an enemy instrument of war and act accordingly in purging it from our nation and from all those who love liberty.
When its owner Elon Musk, in his mad quest to transform America into an image of the Apartheid State of South Africa, admitted the Russian agent, crime lord of a sex trafficking syndicate operating under the guise of a modeling and beauty pageant network and known Epstein associate, and figurehead of the Fourth Reich Donald Trump, I and many other loyal Americans and antifascists quit Twitter.
Recent actions by Musk, in collaboration with Tucker Carlsen, to reinstate the grotesque purveyor of cruelties Alex Jones, who tormented the families of victims of gun violence with unspeakable savagery, calls for more than this in reply.
But first, what has happened?
As written by Miles Klee in Rolling Stone, in an article entitled The Curious Alliance of Alex Jones and Elon Musk: The latest right-wing ideologue to have a ban lifted by X (formerly Twitter) spent months alternately flattering and needling its mercurial owner; “WHEN INFAMOUS CONSPIRACY theorist Alex Jones recorded a video last week saying he hoped Elon Musk would watch an interview he gave to Tucker Carlson, it was clear what he wanted most of all: a comeback.
“Elon Musk says he’s a free-speech absolutist, but still hasn’t let me back on Twitter with my own channel,” Jones said, putting the owner of the site now branded as X in something a bind. Either reinstate the account of a man whose name is practically synonymous with extremist misinformation, or accept the wrath of Jones’ many far-right allies, who bombarded Musk with demands that Jones be allowed on the platform again. It certainly didn’t help that Musk had, a year previously, vowed to maintain Jones’ 2018 permanent ban, saying the InfoWars host’s false claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting being a hoax (which resulted in $1.5 billion in legal judgments against him for the victims’ families) were beyond the pale. (Jones was actually suspended for harassing CNN journalist Oliver Darcy on Capitol Hill in a live Periscope video.)
Musk took the path of least resistance and responsibility, outsourcing the matter to his followers — or, more accurately, to an increasingly far-right X user base almost certain to approve of Jones’ return. Nearly 2 million accounts voted, with more than 70 percent in favor of reinstatement. Musk dutifully complied, just as he had following a similar poll about reinstating Donald Trump last year. (Trump has only tweeted once since, in August, to share the mug shot from his booking at an Atlanta jail on felony charges related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election, instead opting to post on his own platform, Truth Social.)
But the lifting of Trump’s ban more than a year ago amid an early wave of “amnesty” for right-wing misinformation peddlers and extremists — including outright Nazis — came under very different circumstances than the move to unmuzzle Jones. In November 2022, Musk had only just begun his supposed free-speech crusade and wanted to persuade conservatives, who had long blasted Twitter as biased against them, that the site would become politically neutral. Giving Trump a pass, despite the former president’s violations of platform guidelines and attacks on Musk himself, seemed like an effort to simultaneously pander to MAGA world and reap the massive engagement that a singular figure like Trump had historically brought to his once-favorite app.
Meanwhile, the promise to keep Jones in exile made it look as if Musk were carefully considering each executive pardon. But the hard-right element he had started courting was never going to stop with Trump — who never resumed his unhinged tweeting anyway. In articles at the time, Jones’ InfoWars even seized on the reversal of Trump’s suspension to argue that it was hypocritical to deny the radio host’s reinstatement given the Trump decision; Jones himself grumbled a good deal about how Musk could “bring freedom back to the web” and kick off a “human renaissance” — though, of course, not if he continued to stubbornly refuse entreaties to reactivate Jones’ account.
This became the blueprint for a distant relationship between the two, all the way up through the message Jones delivered to Musk ahead of the Carlson interview: Jones continued to flatter Musk as a potential savior of free expression while insinuating that the billionaire was nothing more than a puppet of the globalist cabal if he didn’t hand Jones a powerful megaphone.
That Musk, in Jones’ view, might prove a kind of establishment coward did not appear to be a novel attitude. In a 2018 interview for the YouTube series Valuetainment, as Jones faced the removal of his content from several major tech platforms, he did a round of word association in which the host listed public figures, asking him to relay the first impression that popped into his head. Jones responded “patriot” to a mention of Sen. Ted Cruz, and used an ableist slur to describe LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick. When he heard the name “Elon Musk,” paused a second before answering, “scared man.”
Some of Jones’ ideas clearly clash with Musk’s — he has ranted, for example, that electric vehicles are “the biggest energy guzzlers.” Prior to Musk’s Twitter takeover, an InfoWars contributor went so far as to publish a 2021 video called “Elon Musk Exposed,” calling him a “fraud” and a “fake genius.” While subsequent coverage showed an appreciation for Musk’s increasing hostility toward liberals and leftists in his conservative conspiracism, the outlet nonetheless made room for columns that struck a more skeptical tone (like the May 2022 column “Elon Musk Is Not the Free Speech Superhero We’d Like Him To Be“) and tied him to moral panics. In November 2022, InfoWars questioned the possibly Satanic significance of Musk’s Halloween costume (he seemed to be dressed as a samurai, of sorts), also noting his role at the forefront of “transhumanist technology,” something Jones has condemned as a precursor to “humanity’s destruction.”
That same month, Jones himself took aim at Musk as mass layoffs led to speculation about Twitter’s demise. “He hit the panic button and basically came out and attacked me so that he can get the left off of his back,” Jones complained. “It’s fine to me that he did that, except he went too far and compared himself to Jesus” by using a Bible quote, he said. “If Elon loves to quote Christ so much, in between dressing up like Satan, he should quote Christ’s most famous quote: ‘Let he without sin cast the first stone.’”
The stage was set for the long game: Musk drew praise from Jones and InfoWars whenever he triggered the libs, but also the occasional reminder that he had not proven himself a committed ally to their movement. Over the course of 2023, as Musk’s erratic behavior, dabbling in harmful misinformation, and squabbles with anti-extremism watchdogs led to an advertiser exodus from Twitter, he began to sound more radicalized and in closer alignment with Jones’ brand of blustery defiance, telling departed brands at a conference event in November, “Go fuck yourself.”
In that context, Musk had less to lose by submitting to this latest pressure campaign to bring Jones back. Ad revenue had already cratered, so what’s the downside of platforming a dangerous radical known to call for violence? Following Jones’ return, in an X Spaces chat on Sunday (featuring reactionaries Andrew Tate, Vivek Ramaswamy, Jack Posobiec, Laura Loomer, Rep. Matt Gaetz, and Michael Flynn), Jones and Musk acted as if any past friction between them had all been a misunderstanding. Musk at one point asked Jones to clarify what had happened during “the Sandy Hook thing” (Musk said that “denying the murders of children” is “not cool”), with Jones referring to him in groveling tones as “sir” and falsely claiming that he had just covered the conspiracy theories about the shooting that other people had put forward. Musk evidently took the explanation at face value.
After digging himself into a hole with his constant proclamations of X as a no-holds-barred public square, he may not have had much of a choice. Musk actually admitted that Jones would be “bad for X financially” but stuck to the same rhetoric, piously tweeting that “principles matter more than money.” He can therefore bask in (momentary) adulation from the far right for abandoning his earlier-stated principles. Jones, a man given to railing against “elites,” is subverting his own to heap gratitude upon the richest man alive — this despite the fact that his online footprint remains much smaller than it was before the flurry of bans he received across all his channels in 2018.
Caught in this weird embrace, the duo may have yet stranger days ahead as both strain for influence over online discourse ahead of an election year. And while Musk could theoretically rein Jones in for bad behavior, any discipline would spark enormous backlash from his political cohort — and besides, he has proven susceptible to exactly the kind of outlandish propaganda Jones dishes out. Musk may believe he runs this circus, but when it comes to the command of spectacle, Jones often has the upper hand.”
Who is Elon Musk? Why is he trying to reproduce in America the Apartheid regime of South Africa where his fortune originates?
As I wrote in my post of December 16 2022, Hate Speech is Not Free Speech: the Case of Elon Musk’s Twitter; Mesmerized as by the blinkless predator stare of a cobra or its echo in the Kubrick gaze of Jenna Ortega’s character of Wednesday, we have witnessed the spectacle of violation and degradation of a beloved social media platform by an amoral plutocrat who purchased it to leverage Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, into the White House once more, for the purpose of the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America to a regime of tyranny, and has relentlessly and with feral viciousness promoted white supremacist and antisemitic terrorists and fascist propagandists and marginalized and silenced dissent, impartial investigative journalism, and voices from the center of traditional democracy and its values of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Hate speech is not free speech, and merits no quarter. To fascism we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
In all of the absurd madness of conspiracy theories, alternate realities, rewritten histories, lies and illusions, propaganda and thought control, and the commodification of humankind by big data and pervasive surveillance, and with the examples of monsters of depravity and paranoid fantasy such as Traitor Trump, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, and Elon Musk, of fascist propaganda mills like Fox News and now sadly Twitter weaponized in service to power and the repression of dissent, let us study closely a great truth which now stands revealed on the stage of history; the Fifth Estate has now replaced the institutions of politics as the shaping force whereby we choose how to be human together.
Its been a long process, the fall of democracy; I’m tempted to say it began with Hearst and his 1898 false story of the bombing of an American ship in Cuba as the pretext for the Spanish-American War and our conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as we built our empire on the carcass of Imperial Spain’s; but the historical forces involved are ambiguous and complex. And the mighty have always sought to keep the slaves at their work creating the wealth they enjoy through lies as well as force; lies are cheaper than armies.
As the marvelous and prophetic film Wag the Dog tells us, he who tells the story shapes the response. And we must be very careful who we allow to write our history, and who makes the rules by which it is written, for journalism is a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and electoral democracy requires truths free from the influence of power.
As Lenin asked in the essay that began the Russian Revolution; “What is to be done?”
If we do not seize and nationalize Twitter and any media platform of hate crime or fascist propaganda as a public good owned by us all, and purge our media and our society utterly of the speech, we must enact and enforce fair rules of play which ensure no one’s speech harms another, either as individuals or as a class of persons.
To create an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
As I wrote in my post of August 8 2019, Free Speech Versus Safety From Fascist Terror: Hate, Violence, and the Dark Side of Social Media;” As written in the Essential California newsletter of Tuesday morning: “In his much-cited 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow — an internet pioneer and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — wrote that “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
But the utopian ideals of the early internet are increasingly at odds with the view of it as a place for free speech at all costs, as the darker corners of the web have proved a fertile breeding ground for violent extremism.”
Barlow’s Declaration is a gloriously anarchic and libertarian manifesto; pretty words, indeed, which I endorse without reservation but for this; the right of free speech ends where others are harmed, dehumanized, identified as targets for violence, or restricted in their own freedoms.
The very first and most important example of what is meant by our founding principle of America as “only that government which is necessary to obtain those rights which we cannot obtain for ourselves” is our right to freedom from hate speech which authorizes murder, as no one’s rights may infringe upon another’s. Further, the right to life takes precedence over the right to freedom of information and communication, as we may have one without the other, but not the reverse. Before all else, we must be alive to possess other rights.
Whenever I consider our freedoms of speech and of the press, I imagine myself in the great film V for Vendetta, and secondarily in the classic film Brazil, whose dictum “We’re all in this together” has been the guiding principle of so many of my adventures. Harry Tuttle, played by Robert de Niro, V, played by Hugo Weaving, and the hero of Inglourious Basterds, the magnificent Lt. Aldo Raine played by Brad Pitt, are together my heroes and role models of political action. I have asked myself in many contexts over a lifetime of complex choices, what would our heroes do in this situation?
What would Aldo Raine do if confronted by a global Fourth Reich which has seized control of the American Presidency and has built concentration camps on our border?
What would Harry Tuttle do when a totalitarian regime has enacted pervasive state terror and surveillance, secret prisons, and attacks on truth and justice, equality and freedom?
What would V do when tyranny and plutocracy have stolen our humanity from us, and lost our values in a sea of illusions and lies?
Why does the state use police to enforce its authority and laws, and train and arm them not to render aid but to kill, not to redress unequal power and injustices but to perpetrate them as institutional hate crime?
Such questions thunder through the streets of Memphis, America, and the world as brutal repression and state terror is met with resistance, as it did during the historic Black Lives Matter mass protests for racial justice.
On January 10 2023, Tyre Nichols died from being beaten by five police officers on the seventh. That the policemen who murdered him simply because they could were black signposts issues of internalized oppression and systemic white supremacist terror, as elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege require enforcers to keep the slave castes at their work; the phenomenon of the overseer is a symptom of these inequalities and a strategy of loaned power and assimilation on the part of carceral states and colonial regimes, both of which America remains long after the Civil War. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is an exemplar of the overseer, one who has joined an elite who does not regard him or any of his people as fellow human beings; Kamala Harris represents both my hopes and my fears for our future, and may possibly be another such overseer of the carceral and white supremacist state and social system. The emergence of overseers among slave populations is entirely due to the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle, as a symptom of systemic oppression.
We Americans still have armed police to enforce our subjugation of nonwhite others, through the whole of the passing Biden era whom we elected on the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement and our seizure of over fifty American cities for several months of battle against a secret army of Homeland Security terror troops working with deniable fascist assets like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. In this we were victorious, we Antifa being the only force to defeat the federal government of the United States in open battle on American soil since Little Bighorn. The articles of surrender declared by the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf which designated Portland, Seattle, and New York as Anarchist Zones beyond state control is unparalleled in our history. Of this I am immensely proud as a triumph equal to our defeat of the Apartheid regime of South Africa and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, yet the Pandemic was weaponized as a national Quarantine by our betrayers to stop the protests without changing anything.
Why have we not abandoned the use of state terror and abolished the police?
Is it because in creating terror and learned helplessness through the random murders of nonwhite citizens the police are doing exactly what they are chosen and trained to do?
Police are evil because they enforce unjust systems of white supremacist terror and patriarchal sexual terror; police forces are designed and intended as enforcers of unequal power and overseers of carceral states of force and control, states whose purpose is to institutionalize elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness through which caste systems are perpetuated, citizenship made conditional, and those who create the wealth of elites commodified and dehumanized as de facto slaves. Police began as slavecatchers and overseers, and remain so today.
In the murder of Tyre Nichols we have a special unit of overseers who beat a fellow Black man to death simply because they could, but this obscures the central fact of the case that this horrific crime is fully aligned with the purpose of the special unit of which they were members and of the institution of policing in general; to criminalize Black identity and act as a force of state terror in the repression of dissent and the theft of citizenship.
Police are evil when states are evil, and all states are inherently evil, for the state is embodied violence.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
As written by Arianna Coghill in Mother Jones, in an article entitled It’s Been Two Years Since Cops Killed Tyre Nichols. Here’s What You Need to Know; “anuary 10, 2025, marks the second anniversary of the death of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who was restrained and fatally beaten by five now-former Memphis police officers during a traffic stop. After countless marches, talks with politicians, and pending court cases, his family are still fighting for justice for their loved one.
“This year has been unbearable,” said his mother, RowVaughn Wells, at a vigil on Tuesday. “I had to listen to a cop tell people that they just stopped my son for nothing, that he was not a threat. We had to hear all of this. But what made it so difficult is the fact that it finally sank in that I would never see my son again.”
Released three weeks after his death, the video of Nichols’ brutal beating shook the nation, with then-President Biden calling Wells to express his condolences. Attorney Anthony Romanucci described Nichols as “a human piñata for those police officers.”
One of the most high-profile cases of police brutality of 2023, the widespread coverage of his death helped shine a light on the long history of misconduct by the Memphis Police Deparment, and reignited the nation’s long-held conversation about police brutality.
As we approach the two-year anniversary of Nichols’ passing, here’s what you need to know about the case.
Three Officers Were Found Guilty on Federal Charges Related to Nichols’ Death
Nichols was beaten by five members of Memphis PD’s SCORPION Unit, a police task force that was hastily disbanded after footage of the attack was released to the public.
In January 0f 2023, Emmitt Martin, Desmond Mills Jr., Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, and Justin Smith were all arrested and hit with several state felony charges. A federal court indicted them eight months later.
In October 2024, a judge found Bean, Haley and Smith guilty on federal charges of witness tampering; however, they dodged the most serious charge levied against them: violating Nichols’ civil rights, causing his death.
Avoiding the trial, Martin and Mills both pleaded guilty and testified against their former colleagues. But these aren’t the only charges they’re facing.
On April 28, 2025, the ex-officers will go on trial for second-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated assault, official misconduct, and official oppression.
Four of the Five Officers Had Histories of Reprimand and Suspension
A public records request by The Commercial Appeal found that police department had either suspended or reprimanded four out of the five officers before they’d beaten Nichols. Records show that the officers were reprimanded for allegedly failing to report domestic violence, causing multiple car accidents with squad vehicles, and not documenting forceful arrests.
The Memphis Commercial Appeal reports that the men “faced little-to-no consequences.”
Some of These Officers Beat Another Man Days Prior
Some of these same officers allegedly beat another man just three days before Nichols. Monterrious Harris, a 22-year-old, was grabbed, kicked and punched by four of the officers involved in the Tyre Nichols attack. And the accusations didn’t stop there.
As my colleague Samantha Michaels wrote last year:
As prosecutors review cases, other victims continue to come forward. Darick Lane, 32, alleges that two of the officers who killed Nichols, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith, pulled him out of a car window in June and threatened to shoot him if he moved, according to the Washington Post. Another officer, Demetrius Haley, is meanwhile accused of beating Cordarlrius Sledge while Sledge was incarcerated in the Shelby County jail in 2015, according to another lawsuit that was dismissed on technical grounds. Sledge said he was trying to hide a cellphone when Haley and two other officers attacked him, slamming his head into a sink until he blacked out.
The beating was so brutal that a large group of prisoners on the cellblock wrote a letter to the corrections director to complain: “We are truly asking that this matter gets looked into before someone gets hurt really bad or lose their life because of some unprofessional officers,” they wrote.
DOJ Calls for Serious Reform of Memphis Police
The alleged wrongdoing was not limited to just the indicted officers. Nichols’ death kickstarted a 17-month federal investigation into the Memphis Police Department. In December 2024, the Department of Justice released a jaw-dropping, 73-page report detailing the department’s long pattern of misconduct, discrimination, and excessive force.
“Our investigation found that officers use force to punish and retaliate against people who do not immediately do as they say,” the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke wrote in the report. Here’s a quick run-down of some of the egregious actions the Memphis PD stands accused of:
Failing to deescalate encounters including traffic stops
Using excessive force even when people were already restrained
Handcuffing kids as young as eight years old, “even when they posed no safety risk”
Escalating confrontations with children, including tasing a thirteen year old twice and threatening and throwing an eight-year-old boy
Mocking disabled people
Using to intimidation and threats
Unlawfully firing at moving cars
Accidentally pepper spraying and firing Tasers at each other
Higher-ups reportedly failed to hold their officers accountable and didn’t conduct thorough investigations into many of these incidents. The report concludes with a serious call for reform, recommending 18 remedial measures.
“This process and these findings uncovered that our city has a lot of work to do,” said Reagan Fondren, Acting US Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, in a statement. “Memphians are rightly concerned with gun violence and violent crime. They are also rightly concerned about the collective approach that we must take to tackle these issues.”
In response to the report, the city plans to hire former Judge Bernice Donald, Tennessee’s first Black woman to hold a judgeship, to supervise the department. According to ABC 24, Donald will lead nine-person task force to come up with a plan for reform.
What Happens Next?
Tyre Nichols’ family is suing the city of Memphis, several current and former Memphis PD officials, and all the officers involved for $550 million. The complaint states that Memphis police lied to Nichols’ mother about his arrest, claiming that he was driving under the influence.
The suit, like the Justice Department report, also claims that officials turned a “blind eye” to the SCORPION unit’s violent policing.
“How does this horrific and unconstitutional treatment of Black men and women by law enforcement continue to happen?” said attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Nichols’ family, in a statement that likened the Memphis officers to the lynch mob that murdered Emmett Till. “Tyre’s lynch mob was dressed in department sweatshirts and vests,” Crump wrote,” sanctioned by the entities that supplied them.”
On January 3, Judge Mark Norris pushed the trial to July 2026—the second such delay—citing several reasons, including that officials would prefer proceedings to start after the separate murder trial begins.”
As written by Simon Balto in The Guardian, in an article entitled The killing of Tyre Nichols was heinous and shocking. It was also not an aberration. The majority of Americans have resigned themselves to accepting policing as it currently exists. This must change; “On 7 January, police in Memphis beat Tyre Nichols so badly as to send him into a days-long death to which he ultimately succumbed on 10 January. The beating of Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was so brutal that even law enforcement officials at both the city and state level – usually reliable sources for blaming the victims of police violence for the violence done to them – have declared it a heinous act. The five officers who beat Nichols, all of whom happen to also be Black, are currently on second-degree murder charges for what they did to him. Nichols is at least the 80th person killed by police in the US so far this year.
Nearly two years ago, the Guardian asked me to write about the trial of Derek Chauvin for his murder of George Floyd. At the time, my estimation of the trial’s significance – and of the conviction that seemed likely at the time and that ultimately came to pass – is that it would be minimal. After all, I more or less argued at the time, you can send Derek Chauvin to prison for being violent, but doing so doesn’t change the institution that trained him to be violent, paid him to be violent, and paid him to train others to be violent.
It would be too charitable to Chauvin to call him a scapegoat, but it also wouldn’t be far from the truth. As I wrote at the time, within the context of the trial and as Chauvin’s peers and bosses lined up to testify against him, during that trial “the fact of police violence – elemental and central to the institution, the first language of police and the structuring logic of policing” was never up for interrogation.
A similar denial, a determined refusal to believe that what police did to Tyre Nichols is squarely on the continuum of violence that defines policing, is already at work in Memphis. On Thursday, as attention to the case mounted in advance of the Friday-evening-release of video footage of the officers beating Nichols, the director of the Tennessee bureau of investigation, David Rausch, claimed that what was contained therein was “criminal” and “not at all proper policing”.
Such is the wizardry, the sleight of hand, by which incidents of police violence that are caught on camera and understood to reflect poorly upon the institution of policing are cast beyond the pale, to be read as aberrations to whatever “proper policing” can possibly entail. Violence, coercive force, the carry and use of deadly weapons – all of these are central to “proper policing” as the institution of policing in this country currently exists.
When a law enforcement official like David Rausch claims that what those officers in Memphis did to Tyre Nichols was not proper policing, one wonders what intellectual alchemy he’s engaged in. Police are trained to be violent, are trained to use coercive force, are trained to use deadly weapons.
There must be, then, a place on the police continuum of violence at which people like Rausch would say the violence was “proper”. Where is that place? One punch? Five nightstick blows? One minute of a merciless five-on-one beating rather than the three minutes it took officers to deliver the killing blows to Nichols? These are the questions in need of asking when the proprietors of violence – those granted by law with a unique monopoly on violence – condemn their own not for being violent, but for not doing violence correctly.
And then there is the matter of race. There will be people who point to the fact that all five officers who killed Tyre Nichols are Black, and use the fact to argue that it disproves a racist angle to his death. This is false. Just as catastrophic violence is not aberrational to policing but rather part of it because it is the institution not the individual that is the problem, so is it true that Black police officers can be just as implicated in the violent white supremacy of policing as can officers who are not Black.
Indeed, for more than 100 years at this point, reformers (some of them Black, some of them not) have argued that one key to resolving this country’s generations-deep crisis of racist policing is to hire more Black and brown officers. And for nearly as long, Black intellectuals from Langston Hughes to members of the Black Panther party have noted that that way lies madness, understanding well that the problem is not the individual who dons the uniform. The problem is the institution that the uniform embodies.
When I wrote about Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd and what the trial outcome could mean, I expressed skepticism that it could mean anything major, but also hope that Floyd’s family would find some measure of comfort in a guilty verdict, if that was what they sought. I hold the same thoughts close for Tyre Nichols’s loved ones, and hope for them whatever comforts they can harness in the wake of such atrocity.
And yet I remain saddened by the public conversations that unfold in the wake of these murders. I am maddened by the questions journalists ask and more importantly do not ask of law enforcement officials in their wake, and infuriated by the responses those officials give. A majority of Americans have resigned themselves to accepting policing as it currently exists, and thus irretrievably accepting police violence as it currently exists; one cannot accept the former without the latter. And that is a sad comment on our national political imaginary, collective will, and commitments to one another.”
As written by Shruti Rajkumar in Huffpost, in an article entitled Protests Erupt Nationwide After Video Footage Shows Memphis Police Beating Tyre Nichols; “Protests broke out in cities all across the country following the release of body camera footage of five Tennesee police officers brutally assaulting motorist Tyre Nichols during a traffic stop.
Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was pulled over earlier this month and arrested for alleged reckless driving. The body camera footage released Friday by officials shows the Memphis police officers beating and pepper-spraying Nichols as he lay on the ground during the Jan. 7 encounter. He sustained severe injuries from the assault and died three days later from cardiac arrest and kidney failure.
The release of the videos depicting Nichol’s fatal beating resulted in public grief and unrest nationwide. Traffic in New York City’s Times Square came to a standstill on Friday evening as people took to the streets protesting Nichols’ death, with some chanting, “All cops are bastards.” In Boston, demonstrators carried a banner through the street chanting, “Brick by brick, wall by wall, these racist systems got to fall.”
The five police officers involved in Nichols’ death were arrested and charged with second-degree murder on Thursday. Two were released on bond, and all five were fired from the Memphis Police Department. The Department of Justice and FBI announced last week that they would investigate Nichols’ death.
Earlier this month, a photo of Nichols in an “unrecognizable” state in his hospital bed was released. In a CNN interview, Nichols’ parents said seeing their son in the hospital in such horrific condition was reminiscent of Emmitt Till, a Black 14-year-old who was abducted and lynched in 1955. (Till’s body was displayed in an open casket at his mother’s request, who wanted people to see the brutality, injustice and racism that led to her son’s death. This served as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement).
Police brutality and misconduct, which has been protested for decades, garnered widespread attention in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd as protests spread worldwide in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Do you know how much force it takes to beat somebody with your bare hands, how much violence that takes, how much anger that takes, how much hate that has to take?” McKayla Wilkes, the founder of the grassroots organization Schools Not Jails, said while attending a rally in Washington, D.C., on Friday. “I think we need to break the system, shut it the fuck down and reimagine what it’s like for our communities to actually be safe.”
President Joe Biden called for peaceful protests in a statement released on Thursday.
“As Americans grieve, the Department of Justice conducts its investigation, and state authorities continue their work, I join Tyre’s family in calling for peaceful protest,” Biden said. “Outrage is understandable, but violence is never acceptable. Violence is destructive and against the law. It has no place in peaceful protests seeking justice.”
He added: “Public trust is the foundation of public safety, and there are still too many places in America today where the bonds of trust are frayed or broken. Tyre’s death is a painful reminder that we must do more to ensure that our criminal justice system lives up to the promise of fair and impartial justice, equal treatment, and dignity for all.”
Most protests appeared peaceful in videos circulating online. However, in New York City, a protester was dragged off of the hood of a police car after kicking the windshield. According to NBC New York, three people were reportedly arrested for vandalism of a New York Police Department vehicle.
The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were perceived by some as being largely violent. But reports show that 93% of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were peaceful. In addition, some activists point out that no one should dictate how people protest in the face of oppression.
“You can not dictate to people how to protest and resist the violent state oppression we are all experiencing,” grassroots organizer Bree Newsome Bass said in a tweet.
Nichols’ mother started a GoFundMe on Friday. More rallies and marches are expected to continue Saturday evening in cities across the U.S., including Memphis, Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and more.”
As written by Edwin Rios in The Guardian, in an article entitled Calls to ‘demolish and rebuild’ police as Memphis mourns Tyre Nichols; “As Nyliayh Stewart marched along Interstate 55 alongside protesters on Friday night, the moment of sorrow and anger felt familiar. Nearly a decade ago, in 2015, Stewart had been a teenager in Mississippi when she received word in the middle of the night that her cousin Darrius had been killed by a white Memphis police officer during a traffic stop while he was running away, according to witnesses at the time.
They had grown up like siblings. Stewart, now 24, heard the chants calling for justice for Tyre Nichols, the latest Black man killed by police in America, and felt the anger and anguish for his family. Unlike the five Black Memphis officers charged with Nichols’s killing, the cop who shot and killed Darrius, who retired from Memphis police, was never indicted.
“This should not have happened,” Stewart says. “This family should not have to bury him. My family should not have had to bury my cousin.”
Months after Stewart’s killing, amid the national outcry over police violence, Memphis police received body cameras. And now, as the city reels yet again from the beating death of a 29-year-old FedEx worker and skater, Tyre Nichols, at the hands of police, calls for further police reform have erupted again.
On Friday night, hours after city officials released video footage described by the police chief, Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, as “heinous, reckless and inhumane”, Memphis residents descended on the highway bridge that divided West Memphis, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee, cutting off traffic for hours. In this historically Black city, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated at a motel when he was in town supporting the strike of sanitation workers.
Nearly seven years earlier, more than 1,000 Memphis residents took over the same bridge in the largest act of civil disobedience in the city’s history following the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
Residents on Friday night described how the police “terrorized” citizens through their policing practices that target impoverished neighborhoods in the city.
Outside Martyrs Park, where protests first began, community organizers called for continued rallying in the coming days as city officials wrestle with how to move forward following charges against five Memphis officers and the relieving of duty of two Memphis firefighters, and in light of civil rights investigations.
Stewart says the police need to be “demolished and rebuilt” and reform their practices and training, as well as stop “unnecessary traffic stops”. That echoed what other community organizers who spoke to the Guardian demanded.
Amber Sherman, a community activist in Memphis, said that the city’s previous reform efforts, known as 8 Can Wait, a model taken by other police departments across the country, contributed to how swiftly the officers were fired but argued that more needed to be done.
She called for city officials to listen to the demands of Nichols’s family, which include the dismantling of the so-called Scorpion (Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods) unit, one of several specialized units launched in 2022 and dispatched to neighborhoods for “crime suppression”. The unit was involved in Nichols’s stop but it’s unclear how many.
Sherman described the units as there to “just torture and be violent toward citizens”. She decried the city’s investment in police while they refuse to “the actual causes of poverty” such as improving job opportunities and eliminating food deserts. “Instead of offering support, we offer more police and make more taskforces,” she says.
Sherman also called for releasing the names of all the people involved in Nichols’s death and an end to pretextual traffic stops such as for broken lights, tinted windows and loud music.
Community organizer Antonio Cathey, who grew up in Memphis, hoped that the city could work toward healing and rebuilding a broken trust in the police. Cathey, who started as an organizer for Fight for 15, described how police had harassed him and installed cameras outside his house. Community members needed to continue pressuring officials and reorganize. “There’s no trust right now,” he says. “We know that the police will put more resources into Black neighborhoods than white neighborhoods to oppress the oppressed.”
In Memphis, city data compiled by the TV station WREG showed that cops are seven times as likely to use force on Black men as white men in Memphis, a troubling yet consistent disparity seen throughout the US. In Nichols’s case, police claimed that Nichols had driven recklessly but the police chief said she couldn’t substantiate that cause based on the video footage.
For Stewart, it didn’t matter that the officers were Black, noting that they were part of a system with its roots in slave-catching patrols and were a “racist organization that needs to be demolished and rebuilt”. “Once you put that uniform on, you chose that,” she says.
“We got to stand up for what’s right,” she added. “We’re having kids now. And it’s like our kids could be next.”
As written by Gloria Oladipo in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘We’re tired of being beaten’: protesters across US call for justice for Tyre Nichols:
After video of the brutal beating was released, people gathered to decry the violence and abuse of power; “Protests took place in multiple US cities late Friday after police released footage of Tyre Nichols’ fatal beating at the hands of Memphis police.
The video released late Friday shows several Memphis officers kicking Nichols repeatedly in the head, punching him in the face, and hitting him with a baton.
Officers and medical personnel failed to intervene after the attacks left Nichols unable to sit upright. Five of the involved officers have been fired and charged with second-degree murder.
Protestors in Memphis, where the fatal beating took place, poured onto Interstate 55, a highway that connects Tennessee and Arkansas, on Friday night to express their outrage at the video and ongoing excessive force used by Memphis police.
Nyliayh Stewart, 24, joined protestors and discussed the killing of her cousin by a white Memphis police officer during a traffic stop.
“This should not have happened,” said Stewart. “This family should not have to bury him. My family should not have had to bury my cousin.”
In New York, dozens of protestors gathered in Times Square after the video’s release, decrying the brutal beating and police brutality at large. “What’s his name? Tyre! Say his name. Tyre!” the demonstrators chanted while holding up signs.
At least one person was arrested for allegedly attempting to smash a police car’s windshield. Two more were arrested during the demonstrations, but official charges are still pending, according to a report from ABC News 7.
A man, his fist raised in the air, walks along a busy street filled with cars and other people.
In New York City, people demonstrated in Times Square after video of the fatal police beating was released. Demonstrators also met in the city’s Union Square and Grand Central terminal, which police limited access to given the expected protests.
Several smaller groups in Chicago hosted rallies and vigils in response to the brutal video, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Groups of 10 to 20 people held peaceful demonstrations in front of the Chicago police department headquarters in the Bronzeville neighborhood and in several other communities. “We’re tired of being murdered, tired of being beaten, tired of being chased,” said Rabbi Michael Ben Yosef, who joined demonstrators in front of the department headquarters, according to ABC 7 Chicago.
Nearly 100 people rallied in Washington DC’s Lafayette Square in response to the video.
Dozens of protestors also marched in Philadelphia’s Center City, as organizers spoke out against the video and police violence.
“It’s absolutely disgusting,” said Talia Giles, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, during a speech at Friday’s demonstration.
“It shows the complete and utter disregard for human life. It shows the fact that police, no matter what their race is, are going to terrorize people because that’s what the system is meant to do. It’s meant to abuse its power against citizens.”
Civil rights leaders have spoken about the footage, calling out repeated instances of police brutality against Black people.
In a statement shared Saturday, Reverend Al Sharpton spoke about yet another example of police brutality against a Black man.
“Once again, we are forced to watch another horrific video of cops using brutal force to kill a Black man,” said Sharpton, who will be speaking at a rally on Saturday.
“Nearly three years after the murder of George Floyd shook the world, here we are.”
Here we are; how long shall we so remain? How long can we so survive?
It’s Been Two Years Since Cops Killed Tyre Nichols. Here’s What You Need to Know.
In America the question of justice is; How much justice can you afford?
Today our Whoremonger In Chief walked with no consequences on 34 felony convictions, due to a performative, corrupt, politicized, and deeply unequal justice system.
Once, in a not too distant but profoundly different America, all human beings were equal under the law, and when this founding principle of our nation was violated, tested, or twisted beyond recognition by systems of unequal social power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, whether by the immunity of police as enforcers of social order, the illusions of celebrity, status, and class, or the lawfare of robber barons, when confronted by such events of fracture and disruption of our justice system our nation was aghast and demanded the restoration of order and a reckoning for those who set themselves above the rest of us.
If today’s events prove anything, it is that such ideas and institutions of a fair and equal justice no longer hold true in America. While Traitor Trump was neither sentenced to prison nor fined, though a convicted felon he will remain for all time, prisoners in Los Angeles were granted temporary release to fight a historic series of fires, and paid about five dollars an hour to risk their lives to save the property of millionaires.
We are no longer a just society.
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s scot-free sentencing is proof of special treatment throughout trials: President-elect gets unconditional discharge for hush-money conviction – a rare sentence that cements impunity; “At his campaign rallies last year, Donald Trump would sometimes gaze up at the heavens and wonder what his late mother and father would have thought of their son standing trial as an accused criminal.
Given that Trump’s father, Fred, was a ruthless businessman who told his sons “you are a killer” and “you are a king”, the old man was probably looking down on Friday gratified that Donald had essentially got away with it – again.
A judge in New York sentenced the US president-elect to an unconditional discharge for 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment to an adult film performer during the 2016 election.
“This court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of a judgment of conviction without encroaching upon the highest office in the land is an unconditional discharge,” Judge Juan Merchan explained.
Legal experts hailed the decision as a victory for the rule of law. It cemented the fact that Trump will enter office 10 days from now as the first US president convicted of a crime. The 78-year-old must carry that stigma for the rest of his life.
But in the eyes of the average voter, Trump got off scot-free. No fine. No jail time. In soccer terms, Friday’s sentencing was like a consolation goal in the final minutes when most fans have left the stadium and Trump’s name is already being inscribed on the trophy.
While prison would have been rare for a first-time offender in such a case, so too is an unconditional discharge. Most people in Trump’s shoes would, if not pay a fine, at least be expected to regularly check in with a probation officer and submit to drug and alcohol testing.
But Trump received special treatment throughout. He had been a badly behaved defendant who hurled insults at the judge and judicial system throughout the process but went unpunished.
Merchan had indicated in advance that Trump would not face jail time because it was not “practicable” given his imminent return to the White House. The supreme court said this “stated intent” was crucial in its 5-4 decision on Thursday to allow the sentencing to go ahead.
Even then, Trump was allowed to appear virtually from his Florida home – “the fact is I’m totally innocent. I did nothing wrong,” he protested – rather than face the symbolic humiliation of one last day in court. He also intends to appeal.
Step back and consider the big picture. A year ago Trump faced four criminal cases. He was convicted in only one of them, widely seen as the least consequential, and received a no-penalty sentence, a slap on the wrist. He is about to be sworn in as the most powerful man in the world. Merchan concluded the hearing by telling him: “Sir, I wish you godspeed as you assume your second term in office.”
A portion of the blame lies with the man he will replace, Joe Biden. The current president’s decision to appoint Merrick Garland as attorney general proved a fatal mistake. Garland was far too cautious in prosecuting Trump over his role in the January 6 2021 insurrection and mishandling of classified documents.
Charlie Sykes, an author and broadcaster, wrote on the Atlantic’s website that Biden “misread the trajectory of Trumpism. Like so many others, he thought that the problem of Trump had taken care of itself and that his election meant a return to normalcy. So he chose as his attorney general Merrick Garland, who seems to have seen his role as restoring the Department of Justice rather than pursuing accountability for the man who’d tried to overturn the election.”
After Hamlet-like procrastination, Garland appointed the special counsel, Jack Smith, to oversee the cases in November 2022 – almost the midway point of the Biden presidency. Smith duly brought indictments but it was too little too late and two federal cases have been dropped.
Imagine if the roles had been reversed. Trump would have appointed a firebrand special counsel to aggressively pursue the cases from day one. Not for the first time, Democrats played by a quaint set of rules even as Republicans were tearing up the rulebook.
Trump understood during last year’s election campaign that the White House would be his get-out-of-jail card. Most parents like to instruct their children that honesty is the best policy and crime does not pay. Trump, however, continues to act with impunity in his own inverted fairytale.
As I wrote in my post of April 16 2024, Whoremonger In Chief: Stormy Daniels Hush Money Trial Begins; In the Stormy Daniels hush money trial of our former Whoremonger In Chief, Traitor Trump, a shifting constellation of evils is displayed before the stage of the world; sin and depravity, secrecy and the catch and kill system of bent journalism as subversion of our elections, criminality in service to power, and the manufacture of false identity and history as idolatry; yet the bottomless depths of Trump’s perversions and use of sexual terror neither begin nor end here.
Beginnings are such curious things; the origins of the Trump family fortune in the trafficking of Native American women during the Klondike gold rush, which finds reflection in Trump’s use of the modeling and beauty pageant system he once owned to exploit and globally traffic teenage girls, like the crimes of his buddy Epstein but industrialized on a mass scale.
Often have I wondered if Trump hired Stormy Daniels to prove to the world and his donors that he has normal sexual identity, in the wake of the loss of the beauty and modeling network amid exposure of his peeping at young girls, the exposure and fall of the Epstein trafficking network, of his rape of E Jean Carroll, and of his public use of his daughter from childhood as an erotic proxy. And these are only the perversions we know about.
Imagine the family dynamics created by the kind of crimes possible when only fear and power are real and have meaning; did the Trump Patriarch commit acts including the raiding and burning of villages, abduction, and mass enslavement of women kept in chains like livestock in the Trump string of brothels over a century ago, tortured and horsewhipped into submission and sometimes exhibited like trained animals in grotesque circus acts? Here I merely question, for I was not there nor do I possess historical documents of witnesses; but how if such horrors form the basis of the Trump family crime syndicate as a multigenerational cult of sexual terror?
When the Republicans speak of family values, this is what they really mean; the right of a man to do anything imaginable to women as patriarchal sexual terror and the dehumanization of women authorized by theocracy.
And remember, friends, you can always tell the secret name of a Republican; it’s their act of treason plus their sex crime.
As I wrote of the iconic mug shot which defines the character of Traitor Trump and the meaning of his criminal regime in our history in my post of
August 27 2023, Behold the Monster: Trump Surrenders to Justice; Here is a Mirror of Dorian Grey wherein America may behold the monster of our soul which lives beneath the mask of normality, in the mug shot of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. Here the nadir of our atrocities, perversions, amoral nihilism, degenerate brutality and atavisms of animal instinct glare back at us with the malign and savage rage of a baboon, and like Nietzsche’s Abyss we must beware lest our shadow capture us in the mirror of its gaze.
Half our nation remains under its spell, while those still free mock and poke the beast with a stick. Trump has surrendered to justice with no mass protests by loyal followers despite his threats and plots of coup, terror, and civil war, and we rejoice in his pathetic diminishment and humiliation, yet the danger has not passed.
Both the Fourth Reich which has infiltrated the state and Trump as its figurehead are still fundraising off of hate speech, possess a largely intact and unimpeded propaganda network, and control not only the Republican Party but also much of the state through their agents in the legislative and judicial branches of government as well as its security services.
In this moment, under the glare of the police photographer’s lights, the orders of a judge, and the scrutiny of history, Trumps thinks of himself as a doomed king at bay, like King Kong, a film which is an allegory of fascism as a flawed response to the fall of civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, an American version of the Wagnerian end in fire with which Hitler was obsessed and ended in his suicide in an underworld labyrinth.
What remains to be determined is whether America sees Trump as its tragic savior, cast in the part of Cyrus the Great in a myth of Exile as our new faith of QAnon has him, and chooses to fall with him and bring two thousand years of democracy as a dream of liberty and equality crashing down into fascist tyranny.
While most of us are hoping that being sent to prison for treason and espionage will remove the threat of a second Trump Presidency, many among the Party of Treason, Patriarchal Theocracy, and White Supremacist Terror will and are using the indictments and lawsuits to escalate commitment among those already decided, and abandoning overtures to swing voters and independents in recognition of a totally polarized political and cultural moment wherein few persuadable voters remain. After all, prison did not prevent Trump’s role model Adolf Hitler from becoming the Fuhrer; why should it derail rather than help Trump’s capture of the state and subversion of democracy?
Why is it cute and adorable when Jenna Ortega does the Kubrick Stare as Wednesday Addams, and repulsive when Trump does it? Wednesday doesn’t drop her chin to present glowering menace, a pose Trump carefully copies from Jack Nicholson in The Shining because he intends it as a threat and a demonstration of power; Jenna’s Wednesday faces us directly as total openness and honesty, a Nietzschean yes to life, to its horror and depravity as well as its exaltation and beauty, which denies nothing; an Otherness which accepts and affirms all otherness as equal. She challenges us to risk saying yes to ourselves and those truths written in our flesh; while Trump desires only our subjugation. Herein is the true difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties.
What does Trump’s mugshot and the polarized reactions to it tell us about America and the moment we now live in? As written by Chris McGreal in The Guardian, in an article entitled Belligerence and hostility: Trump’s mugshot defines modern US politics; “Mugshots define eras.
Bugsy Siegel peering malevolently from beneath his fedora in a 1928 booking photo summed up the perverse romance of gangsters in the prohibition age.
Nearly half a century later, mugshots of David Bowie, elegantly dressed but dead-eyed after his arrest for drug possession, and a dishevelled Janis Joplin, detained for “vulgar and indecent language”, spoke to the shock waves created by 1960s counterculture.
Now comes what Donald Trump Jr described as “the most iconic photo in the history of US politics” before the booking picture of his father glaring into the camera was even taken. But whether deeply divided Americans view the first ever mugshot of a former president as that of a gangster or a rock star is very much in the politics of the beholder.
Trump’s hostility shines through as he turns his eyes up toward the camera above him and in his taut, downturned mouth as he is booked into the Fulton county jail on charges of trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. Dressed in a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, he makes no attempt to put on a smile like some of his co-defendants in their mugshots.
The picture does not flatter but it does convey the message many of Trump’s supporters want to hear – belligerence.
The six-pointed star of the Fulton county sheriff’s office badge and the name of the sheriff, Patrick Labat, sits in the top left hand corner of the picture. But some will be disappointed that Trump is not seen in the classic pose holding a board in front of his chest with his name and date of arrest.
Still, the mugshot will now enter the pantheon of famous-name booking photos, alongside Frank Sinatra looking unperturbed after his arrest in 1938 for “carrying on with a married woman”, and Hugh Grant after he was found with a sex worker on Sunset Boulevard. Trump has some way to go to catch up with the American actor Lindsay Lohan’s eight-year run of mugshots for theft, drugs and driving offences.
The former president’s supporters are already embracing the booking photo as a badge of honour and defiance. It will be held up as evidence that their man will not give up the fight against a system his followers see as ever more determined to bring him down and prevent him returning to the White House.
Far-right congresswoman Lauren Boebert led the way with a tweet proclaiming: “Not all heroes wear capes.”
The president’s detractors, on the other hand, will see the booking photo as evidence that even a man who was once the most powerful person in the land cannot escape the might of the justice system. Some will welcome anything that makes him look even a little bit more criminal as a confirmation that sooner or later he is going to prison. The accused may be presumed innocent until a plea or a jury says otherwise but mugshots can have a way of conveying guilt.
For Trump though, the picture is likely to prove yet another money spinner. Within hours, his campaign fundraising website was advertising T-shirts, bumper stickers and coffee mugs glorifying a martyred Trump with the booking photo above the words “never surrender!”. Sales are likely to be brisk given the enthusiasm with which the former president’s supporters now treat each public humiliation as an accomplishment.
Two impeachments and four sets of indictments, from financial fraud to a slew of charges over the 2020 election, have done little to damage Trump’s standing among the true believers, and have only bolstered his run for the Republican presidential nomination. Such is the strength of that belief that a recent CBS poll showed Trump voters trust him more than their own family members and religious leaders.
Ordinary Americans have already got creative in response to the flood of indictments by mocking up pictures of the former president in an orange jump suit a la Guantánamo prison and in printing T-shirts with Trump in various states of detention with slogans declaring “Trumped up charges”, “Guilty AF”, “Guilty of winning” and “Legend”.
There will be plenty who will challenge Don Jr’s claim that the mugshot has instantly become the most iconic photo in US political history. Pictures of John F Kennedy’s assassination or Martin Luther King Jr leading the march for freedom or a host of other historic moments will surely prove more enduring.
But as with the gangsters and rock stars, Trump’s booking photo may come to define an era – one of unusual political turmoil that has yet to resolve whether his next mugshot is as an inmate.”
What would Trump’s imprisonment mean for the future? As written by Martin Kettle in The Guardian, in an article entitled America on trial: the charges against Trump will decide the fate of a nation; “History teaches us few wider lessons. But there are rare exceptions. One of these is that for a nation to put its former leaders on trial is never straightforward. Although such cases are rare, when they do occur they frequently involve the pushing of pre-existing legal boundaries and the reshaping of constitutional norms and assumptions. The evolution of the doctrine of crimes against humanity after the Nuremberg trials in 1945 is the most significant modern example of this.
Both at the time they occur and subsequently, the arguments that surround trials of this kind are almost inescapably political to a significant degree. That was true of the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, an event that divided England then; and some of those divisions of the 17th century can still be felt today. But it will unquestionably also be true of the trials of the former US president Donald Trump, of which the latest step is due to be taken in Atlanta on Thursday.
It is important to see that this stubborn political reality applies just as much in the Trump cases as in Charles I’s. In part, this is because many will go out of their way to deny it. Trump’s prosecutors – and many of his political critics – will undoubtedly argue that Trump is simply a defendant like any other, and that their cases are designed to show that no one, not even a former president and commander-in-chief, is above the law. They will be adamant that this is not a political trial, and that it is not Joe Biden’s revenge.
In some very fundamental senses, they are right about that. The law is not being altered in order to prosecute Trump. The investigations have followed long-established rules. The verdicts are not foregone conclusions. This is neither a witch-hunt nor a show trial. Yet, however true these points and however honourably such claims are made, they cannot be quite the whole story. The two cases are very different, yet in both 1649 and 2023, the indictments against the king and the president take a stand on behalf of a conception of the nation against a leader set on subverting it.
Four separate cases against Trump are now on course for trial. The first three sets of allegations cover: falsification of business records in the Stormy Daniels hush money case; withholding of classified federal documents in his Florida home; and attempting to prevent the US Congress from validating Biden’s 2020 election. This week’s case alleges that Trump tried to interfere with the counting and validation of Georgia’s vote for Biden. All four cases are due in court in the first half of 2024, before the presidential election in which Trump aims to be a candidate.
All of these cases also contain multiple allegations. Two – the Florida document cases and the US Congress case – will be heard in federal courts. The others have been brought at state level by New York and Georgia. All the charge sheets are extremely detailed. In the documents case, for instance, the indictment now stretches to 60 pages, with Trump facing 40 separate charges. In the 6 January case, the indictment stretches to another 45 pages, and centres on four separate charges.
Like it or not, though, these carefully crafted cases take the US into new legal territory. That is not simply because Trump is the first serving or former American president in the nation’s history to face criminal charges. Nor is it even because, being Trump and still running for office, he will treat the courtroom as a political platform. It is also because a large number of the charges, and the way in which the judges and juries will be asked to test them, relate umbilically to his roles as head of state and upholder of the constitution. These cases are a test of the constitution and, in the broadest sense, of the nation.
All of these points repeatedly echo aspects of cases from the past. The Trump cases are still, in the end, an attempt to hold a past leader to account and judge him for the way he handled his office. That was also what the cases against earlier rulers were ultimately about too. The indictments against Charles I for his “crimes and treasons” or against Louis XVI of France for having “plotted and formed a multitude of conspiracies to establish tyranny in destroying liberty” are maybe not a world away from those against Trump, after all.
Nor is it a world away from the much more recent example of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s trial for treason after the liberation of France in 1945. Pétain was charged with treason for his role as head of the collapsing French government in 1940, when he signed an armistice with Hitler’s invaders, and then as head of the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Germans until the allied victory in 1945. Pétain was tried and convicted in Paris that same summer. His death sentence was immediately commuted to life imprisonment by Charles de Gaulle.
As described in Julian Jackson’s masterly recent book, France on Trial, the Pétain case has many differences from those facing Trump, but also some similarities. Pétain was put on trial after a war, not an election. His was an unashamedly political trial. The jury was stacked against him, and the outcome a foregone conclusion.
But at the same time it was also the trial of a nation, its recent history, its dilemmas and its sense of itself. It was, in the end, a moment of catharsis for postwar France. It was a trial that had to happen, and it was vitally important for the future of France that the former leader in the dock was not acquitted. For all the many differences between the two cases, the exact same applies to the US on the eve of the Trump trials.”
Who is Donald Trump? Glowering, feral, with the dead eyes of a cornered but dangerous animal, his fake blond hair, fake history of success, and fake identity? Traitor Trump has been the cuckoo in our nest, ambush predator and pathological liar, rapist and enemy agent, worshipper of Moloch, Demon of Lies, and disciple of Adolf Hitler.
As I wrote in my post of August 7 2019, Psychopathy and the Nature of Evil: the Parallel Cases of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; How are monsters created, and how does evil arise as a shaping force which grants them the power to change the topography of human souls and the course of history?
While sorting through Trump’s tweets and speeches by keyword looking for answers, I was reminded of another such project, the now-classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which I read enthusiastically the year of its publication while a junior in high school. I had just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, which led me to an interest in the origins and consequences of evil, the route by which I developed a serious interest in psychology and its intersections with history, philosophy, and literature.
The parallels between Hitler and Trump are amazing and instructive, both in terms of the personal and political origins, shaping forces, and consequences of madness and evil.
Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator.
I’ve said it as a joke, but its quite true; how do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Actually, Donald Trump is very easy to understand, because literature provides a ready portrait of him in Frankenstein’s monster, which I have described in my celebration of Mary Shelly and her luminous novel as the figure of an abandoned and tormented child, “a vessel of rage and vengeance, with the merciless iron will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others.”
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and narcissistic need for attention into a governance of Nuremburg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and Hitler as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art.
Trump’s scot-free sentencing is proof of special treatment throughout trials,
We bury Jimmy Carter in the shadow of the Fall of America to a second Fourth Reich regime committed to the dismantling of the institutions of the state and the subversion of our ideals, and in the Kabuki theatre of our political spectacles the funeral services and eulogies of public grief and despair are allegories of the moral inversion and collapse of America, democracy, and our human civilization founded in the Forum of Athens.
Arguably America’s last good President and possibly among her last good men, Jimmy Carter was, and this is how he will be remembered in the centuries to come of the Age of Tyrants and wars of imperial conquest and dominion fought with weapons of unimaginable horror by dehumanized slaves who have no voice in a world which has forgotten ideas of universal human rights.
With him today is buried our citizenship as the power to decide our own fate in a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights, the parallel and interdependent rights of citizens and of human beings, and of freedom, equality, truth, and justice. Down we descend into the darkness with him, possessed by the Abyss which has looked back at us in the figure of Traitor Trump and his Deplorables in the Party of Treason which now has seized us in its jaws of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror.
But from this death we may yet arise as warriors like the dragon’s teeth sown into the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus, and in solidarity as a United Humankind seize our power and set each other free.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
One day, sooner than we imagine, the fires will never end, until they meet the rising lifeless seas.
Remote and trackless wilderness for the most part is my corner of the world. I wish it were lost in time as well, beyond reach of the great crises which threaten humankind. But from the consequences of history there is no refuge.
We are witnesses to the Fall of America, democracy, human rights, civilization, and looming human extinction as failing capitalism tries to free itself of its host political system and totalitarian fascism reclaims the world.
Jean Genet was right to call capitalism a kind of necrophilia; capitalism is a pimp at a bus station, an ambush predator waiting to cut the vulnerable out of the herd and convert beauty into profit, life into dead money. And what is money but a belief system, the promise to pay of a government and its value nothing more than the faith of those who trade with it in the reliability of that promise?
It is insubstantial as the wind, its value shifting with the confidence of those who use it, while real things, a leopard, a hornbill, an orchid, a tribal people living in harmony with nature, have intrinsic value which relies on nothing beyond themselves.
Which kind of things shall we value and preserve, the illusionary or the real, the impermanent or the eternal, the living, transcendent, and ineffable or the dead, meaningless, and profitable?
As I wrote in my post of July 17 2023, The World is Mad. And It is On Fire.; The world is mad. And it is on fire.
These existential threats are interdependent faces of a single problem, albeit a Gordian Knot of complex, nuanced, relative and shifting truths, meanings, and values; unequal power.
And both sets of causes and effects which chase each other round in recursion, like the iconic Gahan Wilson cartoon of gleeful devils in pursuit of each other entitled One Damn Thing After Another, are not symptoms of natural processes of change but consequences of political decisions we have made about how to be human with each other.
Extinction and the destruction of earth’s ecosystems and ability to support life is parallel and interdependent with the global subversion of democracy and the dawn of an age of tyrants and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
We cannot work toward solutions to extinction and fascist tyranny separately; they must be taken together as a whole.
I write now in reference to an article by Robin McKie in The Guardian entitled, “World experiences hottest week ever recorded and more is forecast to come: There is a good chance that the month of July will see the highest global temperatures for (the past) 120,000 years.“
Yes, but not for the millennium to follow; it just becomes unsurvivable from here. What creatures in some distant future will sift the dead sands of our world for clues to what doomed it, and why?
It will never be this good again, and one day humankind will become nothing and unremembered.
Because we have failed to purge our destroyers from among us, to seize power and control of our destiny from those who would enslave us and steal our future; elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege now locked in a death spiral of terminal stage capitalism as war on nature and subjugation and commodification of our labor which creates benefits for the few who can buy our time at the cost of dehumanization of the many and the extinction of us all.
We must abandon our addiction to power and its ephemeral, transitory, ultimately meaningless and destructive material signs and vanities, and our reliance on fossil fuels as a strategic resource of dominion and hegemony which is consuming us like a poison or cancer, and the whole twisted project and inverted values of civilization not as a conversation and questioning of ourselves and our universe but as systems of oppression and control of nature; and instead embrace the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
Here follows the McKie essay and Pronouncement of Our Doom:
“The world has just gone through a remarkable experience. It endured the hottest week ever recorded between 3-10 July this year. And meteorologists say there is more to come – a lot more.
Soaring levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and an unusual band of strong winds that have hovered high over the Atlantic have already triggered heatwaves in Texas, Greece, Spain, Italy, and a host of other nations.
Red weather alerts have been issued across Europe; wildfires are raging in Croatia, on the Adriatic coast, and in Navarra in Spain; while tourist targets such as the Acropolis have been closed as temperatures have soared into the forties.
The Earth has not experienced anything like it since instrumental measures of air temperatures began in the 1850s, the World Meteorological Organisation revealed last week. “We are in uncharted territory and that is worrying news for the planet,” said Prof Christopher Hewitt, the WMO’s director of climate services.
This point was backed by Karsten Haustein, a research fellow in atmospheric radiation at Leipzig University. “The chances are that the month of July will be the hottest month ever … ‘ever’ meaning since the Eemian [interglacial period], which is some 120,000 years ago.”
On top of the triggers of the current record-breaking heatwaves, a growing El Niño event in the Pacific is beginning to make its presence felt across the globe.
El Niño is a periodic climatic event that occurs when the circulation of the equatorial Pacific Ocean shifts and its temperature rises, causing knock-on heat impacts around the world.
“A typical El Niño temporarily adds about 0.2C to average global temperature,” said Jeff Knight, manager of climate variability modelling, for the Met Office.
“This increase is dwarfed by the 1.2C that we have seen from climate change since the Industrial Revolution but added to that human-induced warming, a new global temperature record is still likely to be set before the end of next year.”
As a result, many scientists warn that this year or next could see world temperatures pass the 1.5C threshold that was set by the IPCC as being the upper limit for a rise in global warming that would avoid the planet passing through meteorological tipping points that could bring irreversible changes to world weather patterns.
The consequences of a new record heatwave occurring very soon will be profound and dangerous, add scientists. More than 61,000 people are now estimated to have died as a result of the soaring temperatures that gripped Europe last summer.
Given the likelihood of that record being broken this year – or next year at the latest – there is a strong chance that 2022’s grim death toll will be topped very soon with Mediterranean nations such as Greece, Spain and Italy likely to suffer the worst consequences.
According to UN secretary general António Guterres “climate change is out of control”. He warned that if the world persisted in delaying key measures needed to limit fossil fuel emissions, it would move “into a catastrophic situation”.
Many scientists have reacted to this alarm with rueful resignation. They have warned for more than 30 years that continued burning of fossil fuels would trigger the heatwaves that we are now experiencing.
“We should not be at all surprised with the high global temperatures,” Prof Richard Betts, climate scientist at the Met Office and University of Exeter, told the BBC. “This is all a stark reminder of what we’ve known for a long time, and we will see ever-more extremes until we stop building up more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
As I wrote in my post of September 25 2020, Human Extinction Begins in Fire and Flood; Like Nero burning Rome, climate change has been weaponized to destroy the habitat of inconvenient peoples, making way for glorious monuments to the god emperors of America.
Our reliance on fossil fuels as a strategic asset and resource has not only been a political and economic decision which is favorable to elite power structures, but one which has been instrumental to the enormous transfer of wealth from the commons to a corporate plutocracy which has largely superseded nations as a hegemony of power and privilege. So do those who would enslave us hold dominion over the earth and humankind.
Mistake not the true cause and design of our holocaust of fire; the hegemony of unequal power in plutocratic capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
Let the many seize and reclaim what has been stolen from us by the few, and as stewards of the earth and each other discover new possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of August 23 2021, Drought Heat Fire Floods; This summer the world burns once again, and drought begets famine where it does not flood, the ice melts as the polar caps and glaciers begin to vanish, and the dying seas rise to destroy our cities.
Yet we do not rebel against our extinction, not as a species and a united global humankind.
Summer has become a time of horrors and a warning of the day we will have no water to drink nor air to breathe, and the last of us will die with nothing to mourn our passing, proclaiming our glorious supremacy upon a mountain of meaningless wealth.
Summer was once a time of joy, when I would lay in the long grass of a meadow and watch the clouds drift by, and in my imagination looking down at myself from my castle of clouds, master of the world with not a penny that was mine.
We must reclaim our freedom and our dreams, or like Charlie Chaplin in The Factory be caught and consumed in the gears of the machine of profit and death which we serve.
This we must ever resist.
As I wrote in my post of March 28 2021, A Frankenstein Hubris: Climate Change, the Pandemic, and Extinction Are Failures of Our Human Need to Control and Dominate Nature; A Frankenstein hubris: our self destructive drive to control and dominate nature. Ours is a history which recapitulates Adam Naming the Beasts to claim them endlessly, in a Nietzschean hell of Eternal Return, and every act undertaken to impose human order and reason on a universe which is inherently chaotic and irrational sets myriads of other problems in motion, in chains of consequences like the eddies and whirls in Leonardo’s fountain. Is this not a definition of madness, this repetition of the same mistakes in hope of different results?
The poisoning and destruction of the Earth has offered us vivid and inescapable examples of the consequences of the unfaithfulness of our stewardship of nature in the Pandemic, disasters of climate change which include freak tornados and hurricanes, drought and famine, floods and failed harvests, the snows of Texas and the summers as global seasons of fire, the rising seas which will one day swallow most of our cities, and the looming horizon of our extinction.
Yet we do nothing. Nothing to conserve our resources and ensure our survival.
We have built our civilization from the corpses of dinosaurs transformed by time into oil; when we are gone, what beings will power their cities from our remains?
As I wrote in my post of February 17 2021, The Snows of Texas: When Privatization and Deregulation Meet Climate Change as Consequences of Corrupt Oligarchies of Oil; Oil has always been a key strategic resource of political dominion and hegemonies of wealth and power; for the last century, who controls it controls all. This week we witness in the snows of Texas the stormfront of our historic legacy of reliance on fossil fuels combine with our decades of privatization and the looting of the public wealth by nepotistic oligarchs in a spectacular demonstration of our failures in environmental and political systems.
There can be little doubt that the savagery of extractive capitalism has brought us to the brink of extinction in tandem with the concentration of wealth and power in the extreme minorities of plutocratic and oligarchic elites.
Texans are dying in the frozen wastes of a failed system, victims of a performative state government which has handed control of its power grid to its paymasters and sealed the state off from federal help.
The environmental and economic consequences of privatization replicate those which underpin the humanitarian disaster in Yemen; vanishing water supply, failing crops, evaporating jobs. These cases represent our common future if we do nothing to stop the cascade failure of our systems; and come summer the firestorms will return, and the viability of the earth and its living systems will worsen every year.
As I wrote in my post of December 30 2019, What Will You Do When Global Warming Comes For You; Thousands of Australians escape the fires consuming their continent by fleeing into the sea; Where will we hide from a world destroyed by greed? Before the seas rise to annihilate our major cities, before the air we breathe and the water we drink runs out, we must face the fires of our destruction and an arid and lifeless world. For a vision of what our future holds we need look no further than Australia.
Unless we seize ownership of our destiny from the plutocrats who are engineering our extinction. Make no mistake; our choice to allow some of us to capitalize on the death of all of us is a political decision in which we are all complicit.
As I wrote in my post of May 13 2019, Biodiversity and Extinction; Earth is an Ark hurtling through space, filled with precious life among chasms of emptiness.
How shall we answer this nothingness? Will it be with wisdom in maintaining the balance of life in all its subtle and glorious interconnectedness, diversity, and beauty, a dance of joy and of love?
Or will we be defeated and consumed by our own vanity and greed, surrendering to the dark and to despair and turning all we have or ever will into profit until there is nothing left, not water to drink nor air to breathe, and the last of us die with inarticulate brute cries, bloated in toadlike satiation and trumpeting our splendid dominance and rulership of the world?
We must choose who we are to become, we humans; stewards of our homeworld and of one another, or destroyers. Can we find a path forward in coexistence, or will we allow our appetites and desires to drive us to suicidal ruin? For we have but two choices of futures in this; we will be lightbringers or we will annihilate ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of April 1 2020, There Is No Return To Normal; There is no return to normal if and when the Doom of Man pandemic ends. Normal doesn’t live here anymore.
Once there was an illusion of mirrors, echoes, distorted surfaces without meaning, hollow and beautiful like a gossamer web of lies and irresistible as a gingerbread house.
It calls to us, this thing of no escape, this American Dream, with promises of wealth and the power to choose the condition of our own lives. Our songs are of meritocracy, upward mobility, and an inclusive society, but concealed within are harsh realities of unequal power and opportunity.
We are lured with belonging and membership, but offered only identitarian tribalization and exclusionary boundaries of otherness.
We are seduced with the guarantee of our right to the pursuit of happiness, but our society can produce only material diversions which commodify and dehumanize us.
We are offered security from intrusive forces at the price of our freedom and equality, but security is an illusion purchased with submission to authority and tyrannies of force and control.
Throughout history we Americans have ever been a free society of equals, co-owners of our own government, each of us a king of his own life, but only on paper. The American Revolution has yet to be achieved; it is an ongoing process in which each of us must negotiate the alignment and boundaries between the ideal and the real.
In this struggle we are the prize; our agency or enslavement, our authenticity or the capture and limitation of the possibilities of our identity, our liberty both as individuals and as interdependent members of humankind.
And we must act now to save ourselves and our civilization, for we are running out of time. We are in a contest of survival against plutocratic corporate greed and our extinction as a species on one hand and against fascist tyranny and the fall of democracy and global civilization on the other.
Let us free ourselves from the illusions of our normality.
Season of the Emergence From Hibernation 3021
As I read this journal entry from a nearly forgotten and unimaginable time before the death of the seas and the poisoning of the air, before the few surviving enclaves of humanity retreated into self-contained arcologies deep within the earth, undersea, and in near orbit, before even the iron age of the Fourth Reich and other tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, before the centuries of the Third World War and the emergence of the posthuman species, I ask myself a simple question; why?
Why did humankind allow itself to be destroyed by greed? In the end it came down to a handful of oligarchic families and their corporations, ruling hundreds of millions of slaves. Why did the many not cull their destroyers from the herd?
Why was there no resistance?
Hegemon Xotl
Here follows a contextualization and interpretation of Jean Genet’s iconic May Day Speech, as written by Tim Keane in Hyperallergic in an article entitled America Is Trembling: Jean Genet’s Answer to Donald Trump: Jean Genet believed that money was inherently evil and the quest for power was a form of necrophilia; “What is still called American dynamism is an endless trembling.” That is Jean Genet’s prophetic declaration, written for a speech he delivered on May 1, 1970 at Yale University, before an audience of approximately 25,000.
In the wake of November’s election and yesterday’s swearing-in of President Donald J. Trump, this American “trembling” is so resounding that, 46 years on, Genet might slyly smile – or smirk — were he alive to see it.
We felt the trembling straightaway. We heard it in Trump’s racist hysteria about Mexicans in the summer of 2015. We saw it in the new President-Elect’s stupefied anxiety as he sat beside President Barack Obama in the White House on November 10, 2016. And the trembling was everywhere post-election, on the sidewalks and in the subways, in bedrooms and conference rooms, and in the faces of hoodwinked power brokers leaving Trump Tower. Remember wobbly Mitt Romney and the disconcerted Al Gore? The spooked Silicon Valley industry leaders and the humiliated gathering of news anchors?
Even former sycophants like Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie trembled their way off the national stage. And still there is this trembling – a quaking among a docile but perturbed intelligentsia and a shuddering among the increasingly stifled presidential press corps. To say nothing of those legitimately shaking in fear about the potential cancellation of their Obamacare and Social Security and Medicare, or the coming legalized assaults to reverse their hard-earned civil rights, or their possible deportation. And the unspoken trembling about a Tweet-triggered nuclear showdown.
Still Genet’s comments from 1970 go further than predicting the current American trembling. This fearfulness, this state of general cowardice, is in his view, part of the reason why morons and goons end up running things: “Everyone [in America] trembles before everyone else” adding, “the strongest before the weakest and the weakest before the most idiotic.” If there’s a cure implied here, it’s that the strong need to stop cowering so that the weak and the foolish can be thrown out of power.
But since the very opposite has just happened, it might make for a distracting and instructive parlor game to imagine what Jean Genet would make of the ongoing American trembling he detected back in 1970.
There are clues throughout his work. In his incendiary wartime novel Funeral Rites (1948), the collaborator Riton is willingly sodomized by a Nazi lover on a rooftop in occupied Paris, a national debasement Genet echoes years later in an interview in which he ridicules Adolph Hitler as the “Austrian corporal,” who brings a cowardly France to its knees. Genet’s drama The Balcony (1957), about the playacting and masochism of authority figures, is set in a posh brothel during a revolution in an unnamed country. Watching the news these days seems like watching that play’s revival. What would Genet make of an ingenious con man from Queens, the hapless scion of a racist developer, sworn in as President of the United States? How would he render, for the theater of the absurd, this bankrupt innkeeper who got a second chance by roleplaying his fictitious alter-ego on national television and then cashed in on his celebrity to take over the executive branch of the U.S government, as if that prize were some second-rate New York hotel? And Genet could easily unpack Trump’s fixations — about President Obama’s Kenyan patrimony, about the appeal of a Russian autocrat, and even about Trump’s self-mythologizing link between small hands and large genitalia. Most fitting for a Genet-like takedown is Trump’s messy empire, expertly tailored by its maker to showcase late capitalism’s ritualized sadism — from its pencil tower buildings and power neckties to his beauty contest carnivals and reality TV puppet shows.
Genet’s writings uncover the perverse anarchies that operate within well-ordered hierarchies. He thought money was inherently evil and that the quest for power was a form of necrophilia. Many writers also had their finger on the overlooked diseases underlying postwar Western culture. But Genet, when he first visited the United States, was an internationally famous writer approaching the age of sixty who had a range of personal experiences that especially qualified him to detect America’s trembling.
Born in 1910, Genet was the orphaned son of a prostitute, the former ward of the French state, an erstwhile thief, vagrant and hustler who had spent nearly six years off and on doing time in various prisons, surviving, inside and outside their walls, among the most elaborate and dangerous of what we would today simply call “bullies”: jailhouse rapists, renegade Nazis, cross-dressing murderers. Genet’s highly stylized, sexually explicit works in memoir, fiction and playwriting transformed each of those genres, scandalizing readers and audiences and turning him into one of the most exasperating and profound moralists of the twentieth century. Late in his career, facing a decade-long writer’s block, his writing was reborn, first by engaging with the visual arts and, later, through writing about aspiring revolutionary groups who were fighting power from the margins. Little wonder, then, that by the late 1960s he was drawn to the trembling that was shaking the United States.
And so, in the summer of 1968, he entered the country illegally through Canada to cover, along with Terry Southern and William Burroughs, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago for Esquire. According to Edmund White’s biography, among many audacious acts, the older Genet, caught up in the state violence against protestors, stared down a rifle-toting National Guardsman and reassured the injured victims, many of them white kids who had never encountered police aggression. Covering the extended fiasco, Genet was a witty provocateur, denouncing the political convention as “gaudy and meaningless,” dismissing the Yippie icon Abbie Hoffman as “not bad for a professional” and, to Esquire’s outraged countercultural readership, praising the “divine” and “athletic” musculature of Chicago cops.
Two years later, when Genet again entered the US illegally, the reactionary winds were blowing even stronger. This time he came mainly to advocate on behalf of the Black Panthers. And while a degree of homoerotic attraction fueled Genet’s initial interest in the Panthers’ paramilitary aesthetics, by 1970 Genet was savvier about American-style forms of power and state violence than he had been two years earlier. And the context of that time resembles the possibilities America faces after yesterday’s inauguration.
The law-and-order, paranoiac US President Richard Nixon had defeated a splintered Democratic Party in the ‘68 election and, by the time Genet returned in ‘70, Nixon had secretly escalated the war in Vietnam and begun blacklisting members of the press. Opponents were being spied upon; dissenters were labeled “terrorists.”
Genet, too, was on Nixon’s radar. Even when he was in Paris, the FBI had been monitoring the writer’s associations with American civil rights leaders. Under the supervision of Vice President Spiro Agnew and COINTELPRO, the Black Panthers were being targeted for elimination and the Party members were engaged in deadly shoot-outs with local police forces. The Party’s leader, Eldridge Cleaver, was living abroad in Algeria. One of its founding members, Bobby Seale, the sole African-American, was one of the original “Chicago Eight” before he was charged with contempt and removed from the proceedings, reducing the number to the “Chicago Seven.” Seale had been disgracefully bound, gagged and trussed in the courtroom in full public view. And it was at the height of this turbulence that Genet delivered his May Day speech at Yale University.
The speech, read in its English translation by a founding Black Panther member, Elbert “Big Man” Howard, consists of a rousing appeal on behalf of Bobby Seale, who was then on trial in New Haven for murder (the charges were eventually dropped). Genet’s oratorical strategy, a full-scale assault on the toxic apathy of white liberals, remains prophetic.
Genet blames the prevalence of racism on his Yale audience. “It is very clear that white radicals owe it to themselves,” he declares, “to behave in ways that would tend to erase their privileges.” Closing on a provocative note, he further goads the audience by comparing universities to “comfortable aquariums […] where people raise goldfish capable of nothing more than blowing bubbles.” Reread in light of the response to controversial police killings of African Americans in Charlotte, Ferguson, and elsewhere, Genet’s words bluntly spell out the diplomatically stated ideas coursing through the Black Lives Matter movement.
As relevant as those remarks on racism are to today’s situation, Genet’s extended “appendix” to the May Day Speech, first published in a special edition by City Lights Books, represents a wider confrontation with white neoliberals and their snug institutions.
In the appendix, Genet broadens his offensive, declaring that the United States must acknowledge an inbuilt national “contempt” dating back to the country’s founding. Unless the nation owns up to this contempt, which “contains its own dissolving agent,” then that denial will cause “American civilization” to, quite soon, “disappear.”
And then he calls out those he sees as the enablers of this ongoing American contempt. First in his line of fire is an American press so prone to “lies by omission, out of prudence or cowardice” that even “New York Times lies” and “the New Yorker lies.”
As for colleges — those supposed hotbeds of tenured radicals — Genet presciently observes that inside American universities, the “only recognized values are quantitative” and thus our schools “turn [students] into a digit within a larger number” and cultivate in them “the need for security, for tranquility and quite naturally [professors] educate you to serve your bosses and beyond them, your politicians, although you are well aware of their intellectual mediocrity.”
And beyond this liberal collaboration with a culture of contempt, Genet sees an increasingly armed and alienated police force who “provoke fear” and yet who themselves “tremble” within this overall American shuddering.
No trait was more nauseating or, as Genet would have pointed out, more pompously flaunted by Trump’s presidential campaign than its unadulterated contempt: for women, for non-whites, for the disabled, for the press, and, ultimately, for the US Constitution. And yet it was the disdain of prosperous neoliberals for underpaid workers and the working poor that made Trump’s more schematized hatred more enthralling to his voters.
Genet’s May Day Speech offers no direct solutions to our current nightmare cycle of contempt. Certainly his analysis proved immediately true in 1970. Three days after Genet delivered his speech and fled the country, students protesting Nixon’s widening of the Vietnam war into Cambodia were killed by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University. The rest of Nixon’s vulgar legacy is well-known and its wretched example inspires a good deal of the current President’s crude and effective stagecraft.
Perhaps Genet, being an avid reader of both Mikhail Bakunin and Marcel Proust, and thus both an anarchist’s anarchist and a writer’s writer, left the solutions for America’s trembling to the country’s own imagination.
Maybe, as an expert con artist, Jean Genet assumed that language, if used with the right combination of refinement and cogency, could elicit a reckoning, just as his writing’s resolute, lyrical reenactments of real and imagined experiences validated his existential truths. If so, then, we might mimic Genet’s aggressive exactitude and ask ourselves questions that go deeper than the banalities of Sunday morning chat shows or yesterday’s forgotten tempests in a tea pot. Structural questions like: what kind of knowledgeable electorate can a nation cultivate while its primary news channels remain owned and overseen by entertainment empires such as 21st Century Fox, Time Warner, Walt Disney and Facebook? And what forms of confrontation could undo the insanity of the US Supreme Court’s decision to legalize political bribery through its Citizens United ruling?
And, finally, how to replace a two-party system representing a single power structure manipulated by financiers and bankers, one that recently fielded, on the one hand, a former childhood poverty advocate turned Wall Street motivational speaker and, on the other, a real-estate magnate who still produces a television show designed to fulfill its viewers’ need to normalize and enjoy a dehumanized economy?
Genet, a playwright and a hustler, could have easily seen through theatrics as cheap and nihilistic as Trump’s. Forced into that spectacle for the foreseeable future, the nation trembles at the potentially horrifying absence behind the role the man has been playacting. “The essence of theatre is the need to create not merely signs,” Genet writes, “but complete and compact images masking a reality that may consist in absence of being.”
Wildfires in California – in pictures
A fast-moving wildfire has broken out in the inland foothills north-east of Los Angeles hours after another blaze tore through the city’s Pacific Palisades neighbourhood along the coast, destroying many homes and prompting evacuation orders for tens of thousands. The Eaton fire in Altadena started near a nature reserve
Torch of Liberty 
