December 1 2024 The Defiance of Authority as Liberation and Transformation: Rosa Parks Ignites the Civil Rights Movement 67 Years Ago Today

     Many of the people I write about in my political daily journal Torch of Liberty  are Hegelian world-geniuses, polymaths whose transformative vision redefined what it means to be human and changed the possibilities of our becoming. Today we honor Rosa Parks, who did the same not because of unique gifts of intellect or the enormity and refinement of scholarship, but because of her moral genius and courage of action in the defiance of unjust authority and overwhelming force and control in the liberation of humankind and the transformation of our civilization and our being, meaning, and value.

     When Rosa Parks refused to obey the laws of racial segregation and inequality, she ignited the Civil Rights Movement and reshaped the systems and structures of racial oppression, our nation, and our world forever. One woman, with no allies around her, no special training in resistance nor ideology with which to plan strategies, neither a professor nor a combat veteran nor bearing the weight of historical narratives of heroic revolutionary struggle; not an avenging angel of righteousness but simply a woman who said no to authority and refused to submit.

    A single voice which came to speak for us all, and became a tidal wave of change as a voice of America, bearing with it new possibilities of becoming human.

     Today we celebrate the genius of ordinary people and of action, for each of us bears the hope of the world.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/01/us/rosa-parks-anniversary-2020-trnd/index.html

November 30 2024 A Holiday On Which to Mock and Subvert Authority: Black Friday

     This weekend while much of America indulges in an orgy of buying and the adulation of material goods, itself a repudiation of the sacral functions of Thanksgiving as an authorized narrative of national identity which echoes the historical origins of Black Friday as a public ritual Black Mass in which peasants throughout Europe mocked, parodied, and satirized authorities of Church and State, I will be honoring the subversive tradition of Black Friday in its most ancient form.

    This month of Saturnalia which began with our annual ritual hunt and harvest feast, now equally Thanksgiving and the National Day of Mourning on which we perform sacred acts of witness and truth telling to bring a Reckoning for our historical injustices and the Conquest, and a time of celebration of community and family as acts of healing from the pathologies of our disconnectedness and reaffirmation of our mutual interdependence and solidarity, and of the  reimagination and transformation of ourselves, America, and our civilization, this liminal time of reversals of order, violations of normality, and transgressions of the Forbidden, and the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen in the questioning, exposure, mocking, and defiance of authority, a season of celebration of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves which encompasses the whole span of midwinter through the reign of the Lord of Misrule we now call Christmas; on this day becomes an amok time of commodification, the orgiastic purchasing of symbols of status and class membership, and the display of finery to proclaim and secure our position as apex predators and hegemons of elite wealth, power, and privilege, beneficiaries of theocratic sexual terror and white supremacist terror, as masters and patriarchs.  

    As our culture has abandoned the sacred for commercial materialism and expanded Black Friday through the weekend into Cyber Monday and now beyond, a festival of status through displays of wealth like a reverse Potlach or Bonfire of the Vanities which also enables commodification and the theft of the soul, I will be celebrating an inversion of our social order and values by using the sacred to mock the profane.

     Let us begin with the basis of our society; what are you worth?

    Value is a function of time, scarcity, and desire as instrumentalized by elites in service to power and hierarchy and negotiated by authorized identities and narratives of belonging and otherness; a quality like the molecules of perfume which become electrochemical energy in the chambers of our noses as interfaces between the real and the ideational realms of being, whereupon it is carried to our brains and organized there by the schema of our history and memories into the aroma of our experience; transforms of energy caught in the mirror of our consciousness.

    The senses are transducers, changing one form of energy into another which propagate along neural pathways as chemical exchange and becomes abstract information about a world which is nothing more than an illusion created in our minds. It is a fiction, transitory and impermanent, a thing of surfaces, echoes, and reflections; why should we allow ourselves to be falsified and defined by such a thing?

     Behind this world lies another, a world which contains thousands of worlds, filled with beauty, and terror, you cannot imagine from here.

     Our enslavement, commodification, falsification, and dehumanization by the hegemons of elite power, white male privilege, and plutocratic capitalism begins with this; our seduction and captivity in the realm of the senses and the theft of our souls.

     Let us choose substance over surfaces, and embrace rebellion.  

     Kobo Abe takes tea at the Mad Hatter’s of an afternoon; Gogol has set his words on fire and is made of a holy light which is used in place of a chandelier, Kafka elicits squeals of delight from Alice with his hideous Gregor Samsa form, Klimt’s giant apelike Typhoeus and his gorgon daughters desire, madness, and death run amok in ecstatic Bacchic dance while Lovecraft tries to put something with tentacles back in its box.

     There is always an empty chair for you.

Jefferson Airplane – Go ask Alice

The hatter recites the jabberwocky poem

The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley

The Red Book, C.G. Jung

               Surrealism, a reading list

Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, René Daumal

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1056314.Mount_Analogue?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_96

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot (Introduction), Jeanette Winterson (Preface)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53101.Nightwood?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_12

Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12395.Journey_to_the_End_of_the_Night?ref=nav_sb_ss_4_57

Rhinoceros and Other Plays, Eugène Ionesco

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/323823.Rhinoceros_and_Other_Plays

The Adventures of Telemachus, Louis Aragon

Nights as Day, Days as Night, Michel Leiris

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/665936.Nights_as_Day_Days_as_Night?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_43

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, H.P. Lovecraft

The Western Lands, William S. Burroughs

https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-books-2024?ref=gca_nov_24_gcar2_eb

Psicomagia, Alejandro Jodorowsky

The Blood of a Poet film trailer, Jean Cocteau

      References

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/11/the-meaning-of-black-friday

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/03/capitalism-freedom-socialism-milton-friedman-hayek

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera

What Then Must We Do?, Leo Tolstoy

Capital and Ideology, by Thomas Piketty

Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard

The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/381440.The_Society_of_the_Spectacle?ref=rae_0

             Jung the Gnostic, a reading list

The Red Book, C.G. Jung

C.G. Jung: A Biography in Books, Sonu Shamdasani

The Gnostic Jung, C.G. Jung, Robert A. Segal (Selections)

The Search for Roots: C. G. Jung and the Tradition of Gnosis, Alfred Ribi

Turn of an Age: The Spiritual Roots of Jungian Psychology In Hermeticism, Gnosticism and Alchemy, Alfred Ribi

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49613642-turn-of-an-age

                        William Blake, a reading list

Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, by Northrop Frye

The Unholy Bible: Blake, Jung & the Collective Unconscious, by June K. Singer

A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, by S. Foster Damon, Morris Eaves

William Blake vs the World, by John Higgs

Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake, by Leo Damrosch

Encounter With the Self: A Jungian Commentary on William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, by Edward F. Edinger

Blake, by Peter Ackroyd

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67720.Blake

William Blake, by Kathleen Raine

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/443983.William_Blake

Blake and Antiquity, by Kathleen Raine

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3048820-blake-and-antiquity

The Human Face of God: William Blake and the Book of Job, by Kathleen Raine

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2627791-the-human-face-of-god

Golgonooza — City of Imagination: Last Studies in William Blake, by Kathleen Raine

Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning William Blake’s “The Four Zoas”, by Donald Ault

William Blake’s Jerusalem: Structure and Meaning in Poetry and Picture,

by Minna Doskow

William Blake’s “Jerusalem” Explained: The First Full-Scale Line By Line Analysis, by David Whitmarsh-Knight

Thomas Harris and William Blake: Allusions in the Hannibal Lecter Novels,

by Michelle Leigh Gompf

               Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a reading list

The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition, by J. Robert Barth

Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, by Gregory Leadbetter

Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos As Unifying Principle, by Mary Ann Perkins

Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time, by A.S. Byatt

The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels,

by Adam Nicolson

Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by Malcolm Guite

Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834,

by Richard Holmes

https://www.goodreads.com/series/102768-coleridge

Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature,

by Samantha C. Harvey

Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien, by Michael Tomko

Imagination and the Playfulness of God: The Theological Implications of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Definition of the Human Imagination, by Robin Stockitt, Christoph Schwobel

Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, by Reeve Parker

Coleridge and the Nature of Imagination: Evolution, Engagement with the World, and Poetry, by David Ward

                          Lewis Carroll, a reading list

The Making of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and the Invention of Wonderland, Peter Hunt

The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner

 (Introduction and notes), John Tenniel (Illustrator)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded: The Full Text of Lewis Carroll’s Novel with its Many Hidden Meanings Revealed, by David Day

Behind the Looking-Glass: Reflections on the Myth of Lewis Carroll,

Sherry L. Ackerman, Karoline Leach

November 29 2024 International Day of Solidarity With Palestine

On this International Day of Solidarity with Palestine, I write to apply the Occam’s Razor of simplification to the complex and emotionally charged issue of Palestinian-Israeli relations and the problem of the double minority by asking a question; what best serves the joy of humankind?

      So many other ways to construct such a question, especially as principles of becoming human through revolutionary struggle and seizures of power under imposed conditions of struggle which include falsification, commodification, and dehumanization as systems of oppression; of death, learned helplessness, abjection, horror, and divisions of authorized identities?

     How best to create a free society of equals as a United Humankind through secular democracy and universal human rights?

     How to balance our uniqueness as individuals within a diverse and inclusive society?

      How to level all hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness and annihilate all systems of unequal power?

      How to bring the Chaos, disruption, fracture, change, and democratization of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and escape the legacies of our history and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?

      How to reimagine and transform the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value?

      How to free ourselves and each other under imposed conditions of struggle which require violence and the use of social force in seizures of power, without becoming the authority we struggle against and using the state as embodied  violence to enforce our own ideas of virtue?

      Israeli atrocities and war crimes in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians has confronted us all with our complicity in evil, and the world is whiplashed in horror and abjection as our leaders betray us and abandon the principle of universal human rights by which our civilization is sustained, a civilization now in processes of collapse and subversion by fascism at the dawn of the Age of Tyrants. But this also means everything is in question, power can be seized, and new futures chosen, if we act in solidarity in times of chaos as a space of free creative play.

     As Guillermo del Toro teaches us in Carnival Row; “Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”

     Clearly we must have true equality if our rights and liberties are to remain universal in the shadow of state force and control. So also are freedom and equality possible only when we are free of authorized divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

     What prevents us, here in America and throughout the world, from seeing this humanitarian disaster as it is? First are elite interests of wealth and power, which have created an American colony and imperialist military giant for the purposes of dominance of the Middle East and control of the strategic asset of oil, of which Traitor Trump’s diplomatic campaign on behalf of recognition of the state of Israel by her neighbors is among the most recent forms of the historic and perfidious Arab-American Alliance, another is Genocide Joe’s hugging the war criminal Netanyahu and sending a Navy ship to help terrorize civilians rather than break the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid and silence the bombs of ethnic cleansing.

     Biden is not the first American President to have tried to me personally by direct order, that distinction belongs to then-Governor Reagan when he ordered police to open fire on student protestors against the University’s investment in Israeli military industry in what has been called the most terrible state terror incident in our history since the Civil War, but when Biden sent drone attacks against our positions in Yemen during the Red Sea campaign from which we counter blockaded the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, he became the only American President to attempt to kill me whom I actually voted for. Genocide Joe helped Israel use famine and denial of medical aid as weapons of war, and for this too we must bring a Reckoning.

     That we Americans have used the threat of Iranian influence and the ancient Sunni-Shia vendetta to divide and conquer the region, legitimize the conflicts in Yemen and Gaza as test cases of our hegemony, and destabilize democracy movements in Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran as well as perpetuate the disenfranchisement and ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine by Israel speaks to America’s true motives; not to champion peace and freedom, but to secure wealth and power through war and tyranny.

     I believe the secondary cause of our blindness to the injustices of the Palestinian-Israeli situation is a legacy of the Holocaust and how we process historical narratives of victimization. Once anointed as a victim, and crowned with a white hat of blameless innocence, that figure in our imagination becomes incapable of wrongdoing in any other way. We Americans think in terms of Good and Evil as a cosmic struggle of dichotomous forces, and of showdowns at high noon in the Westerns which are primary narratives of imperial colonialism and the apologetics of power, not in terms of the flaws of our humanity. Absolutes are simpler.

     Ambiguity and moral relativization disrupt authorized identities and systems of oppression; this is their great value in revolutionary struggle.

     We are all capable of both good and evil actions, of misunderstandings, conflicted and nuanced feelings and responses, and failures of compassion. And we tend to ignore rather than confront things like moral grey areas which make us uncomfortable; this is called cognitive dissonance reduction, and it means we tend to keep doing things we know are wrong if we have a good story to justify our actions and the belief that God is on our side. Gott Mitt Uns; the most terrible atrocities in history have been perpetrated in this way.

     Here I must say plainly that I support the creation of a secular democracy in which all human beings, Palestinian and Israeli alike, are exactly equal both in fact and under the law, that I support the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of the state of Israel and the liberation of Palestine from Occupation and Blockade, and that Israel as presently constituted is a fascist tyranny of state terror which is guilty of crimes against humanity in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people, for which we must bring a Reckoning.

     A post has typified the bifurcated and dichotomous dialogs which have attached themselves to the war in Gaza; it says “If you have the power to turn off your enemy’s food, water, and energy, and attack them at your leisure, you are the bad guy.”

     To this someone relied; “If you have the power to attack, rape and kidnap over 200 hostages, and hide them in a hospital, you are the bad guy.”

     Here follows my reply, in one paragraph; Yes, we are all bad guys here. The use of social force has no justifications; but as resistance struggle and revolution against imposed conditions of unequal power, it may be necessary. The violence of the tyrant, the conqueror, the occupier, or the slave master cannot be compared to the violence used by the slave to break his chains. What has happened here is that both Hamas and the Netanyahu regime have delegitimated themselves in war crimes and unforgivable acts of terror which violate our universal rights. Both seek to subjugate the people in whose name they claim to act to make them complicit, a primary strategy of fascism and other totalitarian state terror. And only love and solidarity of action against Hamas and the state of Israel by the people of Israel and Palestine together can overcome state tyranny and terror.

     This leaves us with the question asked by Tolstoy and Lenin in very different works, one which founded the principles of nonviolent resistance used by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the other which began the Russian Revolution; What is to be done?

     For myself and my comrades, we have a clear and simple mandate of action in three parts; Unite the Israeli and Palestinian peoples as equal citizens in a democratic secular state wherein faith and ethnicity have no legal standing, defend all civilian noncombatants, their universal human rights, and their access to humanitarian aid, and bring a direct and personal Reckoning to all war criminals on both sides.

     As a child in 1969 at an event with my mother that began as a protest against the Occupation of Palestine and American responsibility for its injustices by investment of the University of California and other state institutions, in People’s Park Berkeley, Bloody Thursday May 15, I was in the front line when the police opened fire on the crowd; this was my first death and rebirth, by which I mean Most Sincerely Dead and without life signs for some while, when for a moment I stood outside of time and beheld the possible futures, timelines, and alternate realities which propagated from that moment, the limitless possibilities of becoming human and the terrible chance of a coming age of fascist tyranny, war, the fall of civilization, and the extinction of humankind which may yet come to pass if we cannot reimagine and transform ourselves and our society, and find healing for the flaws of our humanity, the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and the brokenness of the world.

    Over fifty years later, I fought in the defense of al Aqsa and in the Third Intifada thereafter; will we still be fighting for our humanity and our liberty fifty years from now, or fifty thousand?

     In one night on May 10 2021, fighting not in the defense of al Aqsa, a world-historical stage of grandeur for the deaths of heroes, but for the lives of strangers attacked at prayer by Israeli soldiers among the ruins of a derelict antiquity, I was shot, bayoneted, blown up, and set on fire; yet I awoke the next morning reasonably sound as I so often have from adventures I should not have survived, to fight again in the streets of Sheikh Jarrah with such fedayeen as had gathered, for something I said to my comrades during the night, which was said to me in Brazil 1974 by the Matadors who rescued me from a police death squad, had gone out as a general call; We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.

     But at what cost to our humanity, this ceaseless violence? The centralization of power to authority, carceral states of force and control, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and systems of oppression are self-replicating as products of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, yet all obey Newton’s Third Law of Motion and create their own Resistance. And if we are to remain human and resist our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by such recursive forces of unequal power, if we are to become Unconquered in refusal to submit to authority, we must smash the machine which consumes us as the raw material of others who would enslave us.

     My hope is that our successors in future generations will have forged a free society of equals and abandoned the use of social force, will have no tyranny or state terror to resist, and can live their lives in joy and love and not in struggle as have I.  

     We must dream better dreams, and stand together in solidarity of action to make them real.

     Who do we want to become, we humans?

     Let us choose one another and not the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites, equality, diversity, and inclusion and not the divisions and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, liberty and not the centralization of power and authority to a carceral state owned by the wealthy, democracy and not tyranny, hope and not fear, love and not hate.

     As I wrote in my post of May 10 2021, The Defense of al Aqsa: Liberty versus Tyranny in Jerusalem; We may have witnessed the advent of a Third Intifada this night, in the Defense of al Aqsa and the street fighting in Gaza which followed, ignited by the perfidy and imperial conquest of a xenophobic and fascist state of Israel which regards no one but their own tribe and faith as truly human, and which has perpetrated an unprovoked and deadly attack as an act of state terror and a crime against humanity on the peaceful worshippers at one of the most sacred mosques in the Islamic world, a demonstration of power and dominion which follows weeks of provocations, assaults, and acts of propagandistic dehumanization against the people of Palestine.

      Like the Second or al Aqsa Intifada which lasted four years from 28 September 2000 to 8 February 2005, unresolved issues of an Occupation now in its fifty fourth year since the June 7 1967 Conquest of Old Jerusalem by Israel, which the State of Israel celebrated according to the Hebrew calendar as Jerusalem Day today by attacking al Aqsa, and a Catastrophe ongoing now for seventy three years since Nakba Day May 15 1948, have coalesced around the symbolic value of al Aqsa, which has a contested dual identity as the Temple Mount in Judaism.

     Chances of de-escalation and averting a war depend now not on local factors but on the response of the international community, for history has here become a trap which collapses to ensnare us in its jaws, and outside forces must liberate us from the failures of our system’s internal contradictions.

     Will America disavow and renounce its colony of Israel, Queen of her imperial policy in the Middle East and control of the strategic resource of oil? Can international unity and the pressure of Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction free us from the tyranny and terror of an Apartheid regime as it did in South Africa?

     Or is war the only reckoning humankind can offer, or will accept?

     As written by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post; “On Monday night, militants in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli military exchanged rocket fire and airstrikes amid a deadly escalation of violence. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, armed groups based in blockaded Gaza, launched a barrage of rockets that landed near Jerusalem and in parts of southern Israel, injuring at least one person. Israeli airstrikes in retaliation killed at least 20 people in Gaza, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, including nine children.

     Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the “terrorist groups” in Gaza had “crossed a red line” with their rocket attacks. But the latest explosion of hostilities has a long tail, following numerous aggressive actions by both Israeli security forces and far-right Jewish supremacist groups in Jerusalem. Two weeks ago, bands of Jewish extremists, including some settlers from the West Bank, marched through Palestinian-populated areas of the holy city, chanting “Death to Arabs,” attacking bystanders and damaging Palestinian property and homes. Israeli attempts to evict a number of Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah — a microcosm of what Palestinians view as part of a long history of dispossession and erasure at the hands of the Israeli state — had stirred Palestinian solidarity protests in various parts of the occupied territories and Israel proper.

     It also raised tensions ahead of the commemoration of Jerusalem Day on Monday, an official Israeli holiday celebrating the capture of the city during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. A planned annual march by far-right ultranationalist Israelis was called off after authorities rerouted its path at the last minute.    Large numbers still made their way to the Western Wall and sang an extremist vengeance song against Palestinians.

     “The Hamas rocket attacks, which included the first strikes against Jerusalem in several years, came after running clashes among Israeli police, Palestinian protesters and far-right Jewish Israelis around the Old City,” my colleagues reported. “Among the hundreds injured were seven who were hospitalized in serious condition, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. Video footage circulated on social media of Israeli police officers brutally beating a detained Palestinian man.”

      How can America support the state of Israel in tyranny and terror, conquest and plunder? It’s a question asked in tones of outrage, sorrow, and bafflement since the advent of the Nakba on May 15 1948, the Day of Catastrophe which began the Occupation of Palestine and the systematic enslavement and genocide of its people in the wake of the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem. How is this legitimized?

      A friend has recently reframed this question for me; “I loved and embraced the Jewish tradition, joining a synagogue and working alongside its Rabbi. When I witness the treatment of Palestinians by the Jewish government of Israel, I am overwhelmed by feelings of confusion and anger. Unable to reconcile this immorality, I question the very foundation of my faith. Where is the good and moral uprising of international Jewish voices condemning the government’s path? I’ve lost faith in being Jewish.”

     What is clear to me is that this crisis of faith is also an existential crisis of identity, a situation of utmost gravity and danger which also holds the potential for reimagination and transformative rebirth, a personal echo of a parallel civilizational crisis from which humankind and the global community of nations must find a way to emerge and free ourselves of the legacies of our history. Here is my reply:

     The state of Israel is not identical with the Jewish faith, though the fascist-imperialist faction which Netanyahu represents would like everyone to think so. 

    A nation based on the assignment of its citizens to a tribal identity, the sectarian weaponization of faith in service to power and an authorized national identity, a military society with universal compulsory service, and a reconstructed Hebrew language of national unity has used identity politics to subjugate its citizens to the centralized power of tyranny; Israel is a fascist state of blood, faith, and soil no less than that of the Nazis.

     Add to this toxic mix a kleptocratic regime which has propagandized narratives of historical victimization to legitimize massive theft and imperial conquest of other people’s nations and one thing is clear; Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis.

     You may know from my many references to the incident in my writing that I am an antifascist, sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet in 1982 in Beirut, during our fight against the Israeli invasion and siege. In the forty years after, I have been a hunter of fascists and a revolutionary engaged in struggle for the liberation of humankind against fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and against tyranny and authoritarian regimes of force and control, for democracy and its ideals of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, and for our universal human rights. In this cause I place my life in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.

      A Palestinian homeland, and justice for its people, has been among my goals since that summer so long ago. Like the goal of liberation of Ireland from British colonial rule, it remains to be achieved. In question is the idea of freedom and citizenship as the sovereignty and independence of peoples from foreign colonialism and authoritarian tyranny, and the primacy of a nonsectarian state free from divisions and hierarchies of faith, for who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.

     I also support the idea of an Israeli homeland, and see no reason these two states, Palestine and Israeli, should be mutually exclusive or antagonistic. Why must citizenship be bound by the limits of geography, or states by borders?

     Why must one people’s Return mean another’s Exile?

     To be clear, I am on the side of anyone threatened with hate crime regardless of any other factors; in riot and war my test for the use of force is simple; who holds power?

     I am on the side of all those whom Frantz Fanon named The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. This applies equally to Jews and Muslims, Israel and Palestine, and any other human beings regardless of who they are, and especially without any moral burden of merit as Shaw teaches us with the character of Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady.

     Let us send no armies to enforce virtue.

     Some Israelis who would disagree with me on the question of Palestine and militarism in imperial conquest and regional dominion have been allies in the cause of hunting Nazis, but are blind to their own complicity in this evil due to seeing themselves as victims and defenders of victims rather than perpetrators of crimes against humanity.

     This is about fear, and the destructive cycle of abuse and violence. Not membership in any group or authorized identities of belonging, hierarchies of the elite and the elect, and divisions of exclusionary otherness. The origins of violence and the social use of force are universal, historical, and systemic, and absolutely not in any mythical evil impulse, original sin, or inherent depravity of man.

     The Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force belongs to no one, but to apersonal systems of unequal power. I understand all too well how power makes us feel safe, the seductive beauty of weapons which make us arbiters of virtue, and how elite membership confers entitlement; this works the same for nations as for individuals, in the playground, prison yard, and contested public spaces like the Temple Mount which is also al Aqsa. 

     When faith is appropriated by authority for legitimation in identity politics, identity itself becomes confused and ambiguous. To become free, we must seize ownership of ourselves as self-created and autonomous beings.

     This is why the primary duties of a citizen are to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.

     Always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight.

     I think of the problem of human evil and its cycle of fear, power, and force in the case of states which become the tyrannies they fought to liberate themselves from, and this is true of anticolonial revolutionary states generally because of the historical legacies of victimization and the imposed conditions of struggle, in this way; victims often become abusers because their identity is organized around power as the only means of escape and survival in a world wherein no one can be trusted.

     When trust has been abrogated and proven empty and without meaning, when the capacity to bond with and feel the pain of others in empathy has been broken and one is without pity or remorse, when fear is overwhelming and generalized and has been shaped by authority to the service of power, victims learn that only power has meaning and is real. We must not allow our abusers to become our teachers.

     While every such issue has its own unique origins and history, the problem itself is universal, and relates to what one fears, and how that fear is shaped by authority as identity. From our perspective as Americans interpreting events in the classic problem of the double minority typified by Israel and Palestine, how we perceive issues has much to do with how they are framed by our informing and motivating sources.

      In the end we are defined by what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.

      The first question to ask of any story, and the most important, is simple; whose story is this?

      We are lost in a wilderness of mirrors, of lies and illusions, falsifications of ourselves, distorted images and reflections, echoes and authorized identities which disfigure, disempower, and steal our souls.

      How shall we answer those who would enslave us? Our authenticity and autonomy is realized through seizure of power, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and humankind as a free society of equals.

      We Americans tend to see things in terms of white hats and black hats, as in the Western films which serve as origin myths and archetypes of our national character. Once victim status has been conferred, such groups and persons become white hats and good guys, incapable of evil and diametrically opposed to whomever must then be black hats. It’s a terrible way of choosing national policy.

     Sadly, we humans can be good and evil at once, the flaws of our humanity echo and reflect the brokenness of the world. It is a truth proven once again tonight in al Quds or Jerusalem depending on to whom one is speaking and in what language, as Gaza burns from the onslaught of an Israeli Defense Forces run amok much the same as the night almost four decades ago in Beirut when they tried to burn Genet and I alive in our café, as a dozen human beings from whom everything but hope has been stolen swear vows to each other to hold a position covering the escape of the women and children trapped by the Israeli attack until all are safe, in a final defense not of al Aqsa Mosque, magnificent and beautiful and filled with significance, monument to the human impulse to reach beyond ourselves and to the limitless possibilities of becoming human, a stage fit for the glorious deaths of heroes, but of the disembodied screams of strangers among the nameless warrens of a derelict antiquity.

     Against the chasms of emptiness and nihilistic barbarism of a world of darkness and fire, of fear and force, I have only words to offer, and I write to you what I have said to my comrades who have chosen to stand with me; I’ve lost count of Last Stands, but I’ve risked everything against impossible odds and survived more times than I can remember, and all that matters is that we abandon neither ourselves nor one another, that we refuse to submit, for this is the moment of our freedom and of our seizure of power, and it can never be taken from us.

      From this night, Palestine is free, for we can be killed, but we cannot be conquered.         

The Scream, Munch

              Palestine: a reading list

Concerto al-Quds, Adonis

Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory, Nur Masalha

The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine, Ben Ehrenreich

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Rashid Khalidi

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman   

Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, Where the Line Is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine, When the Birds Stopped Singing: Life in Ramallah Under Siege, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine, Occupation Diaries, A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle, Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation, Raja Shehadeh

Gate of the Sun, Elias Khoury

The Question of Palestine, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said David Barsamian (Editor), Orientalism, Edward W. Said

On Palestine, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land Two Peoples, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel, Across the Wall: Narratives of Israeli-Palestinian History, The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge, The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis 1700-1948, Ilan Pappe

Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays, Amos Oz

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter

Robert Fisk on Israel: The Obama Years: A unique anthology of reporting and analysis of a crucial period of history, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk

The Unmaking of Israel, Occupied Territories: The Untold Story Of Israel’s Settlements, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount Gershom Gorenberg

Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, Ian Black

An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification, Jeff Halper

Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, Joel Kovel

Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco

Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics, Marc Lamont Hill, Mitchell Plitnick

Mornings in Jenin, Against the Loveless World, The Blue Between Sky and Water, Susan Abulhawa

Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean, Basem L. Ra’ad

I Saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, A River Dies of Thirst: journals, Memory for Forgetfulness: August Beirut 1982, Mahmoud Darwish

Palestine on a Plate: Memories From My Mother’s Kitchen, Baladi: A Celebration of Food from Land and Sea, Joudie Kalla

The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey, Laila El-Haddad

Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen, Yasmin Khan

The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, Claudia Roden

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, Sandy Tolan

Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege, Amira Hass

Jerusalem: The Biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story, The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story, Ramzy Baroud

The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, Gilbert Achcar

Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, Marcello Di Cintio

A Country of Words: A Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page, Abdel Bari Atwan

Behind the Myth: Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Revolution, Arafat: The Biography, Andrew Gowers, Tony Walker

Hamas: A History from Within, Azzam S. Tamimi

Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector, Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Sara Roy

The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, Emile Habiby

Dancing Arabs, Let It Be Morning, Sayed Kashua

Inside the Night: A Modern Arabic Novel, Gaza Weddings, Time of White Horses, Ibrahim Nasrallah

A Balcony Over the Fakihani: Three Novellas, A Compass for the Sunflower, The Eye of the Mirror, Liana Badr

Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood, Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine, Ibtisam Barakat

So What: New and Selected Poems 1971-2005, Taha Muhammad Ali

Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, Naomi Shihab Nye

In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine, Return: A Palestinian Memoir, Ghada Karmi

The Parisian, Isabella Hammad

Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence, Zachary Karabell

Arabic

29 تشرين الثاني (نوفمبر) 2024التضامن مع الجنس البشري ضد الفاشية والاستبداد وإرهاب الدولة يعني التضامن مع فلسطين

ي هذا اليوم العالمي للتضامن مع فلسطين، أكتب لأطبق شفرة أوكام في التبسيط على القضية المعقدة والمشحونة عاطفيا المتعلقة بالعلاقات الفلسطينية الإسرائيلية ومشكلة الأقلية المزدوجة من خلال طرح سؤال؛ ما هو أفضل ما يخدم فرحة البشرية؟

       هناك العديد من الطرق الأخرى لبناء مثل هذا السؤال، خاصة كمبادئ التحول إلى إنسان من خلال النضال الثوري والاستيلاء على السلطة في ظل ظروف النضال المفروضة والتي تشمل التزييف والتسليع والتجريد من الإنسانية كأنظمة قمع؛ الموت، والعجز المكتسب، والذل، والرعب، وانقسام الهويات المسموح بها؟

      ما هي أفضل السبل لإنشاء مجتمع حر متساوٍ كبشرية موحدة من خلال الديمقراطية العلمانية وحقوق الإنسان العالمية؟

      كيف نوازن بين تفردنا كأفراد داخل مجتمع متنوع وشامل؟

       كيف يمكن تسوية جميع التسلسلات الهرمية للانتماء والاختلاف الإقصائي وإبادة جميع أنظمة القوة غير المتكافئة؟

       كيف يمكن تحقيق الفوضى والتمزق والكسر والتغيير وإضفاء الطابع الديمقراطي على هيمنة النخبة من الثروة والسلطة والامتيازات، والهروب من تراث تاريخنا وفاشية الدم والإيمان والتربة؟

       كيف يمكن إعادة تصور وتحويل الإمكانيات اللامحدودة للإنسان والمعنى والقيمة؟

       كيف نحرر أنفسنا وبعضنا البعض في ظل ظروف النضال المفروضة التي تتطلب العنف واستخدام القوة الاجتماعية في الاستيلاء على السلطة، دون أن نصبح السلطة التي نناضل ضدها ونستخدم القوة والعنف لفرض أفكارنا الخاصة بالفضيلة؟

       إن الفظائع الإسرائيلية وجرائم الحرب في التطهير العرقي للفلسطينيين قد جعلتنا جميعا نواجه تواطؤنا في الشر، ويصاب العالم بالرعب والذل بينما يخوننا قادتنا ويتخلون عن مبدأ حقوق الإنسان العالمية التي تقوم عليها حضارتنا. وهي حضارة تمر الآن بعمليات الانهيار والتخريب على يد الفاشية في فجر عصر الطغاة. لكن هذا يعني أيضًا أن كل شيء أصبح موضع تساؤل، ويمكن الاستيلاء على السلطة، واختيار مستقبل جديد، إذا عملنا بشكل تضامني في أوقات الفوضى كمساحة للعب الإبداعي الحر.

      وكما يعلمنا غييرمو ديل تورو في كرنفال رو؛ “الفوضى هي الأمل العظيم للضعفاء.”

     من الواضح أنه يجب أن نحصل على مساواة حقيقية إذا أردنا أن تظل حقوقنا وحرياتنا عالمية في ظل قوة وسيطرة الدولة. كذلك تكون الحرية والمساواة ممكنتين فقط عندما نتحرر من التقسيمات المرخص بها للآخرين الإقصائيين وفاشيات الدم والإيمان والتربة.

     ما الذي يمنعنا ، هنا في أمريكا وفي جميع أنحاء العالم ، من رؤية هذه الكارثة الإنسانية كما هي؟ أولاً ، مصالح النخبة في الثروة والسلطة ، التي أنشأت مستعمرة أمريكية وعملاقًا عسكريًا إمبرياليًا لأغراض الهيمنة على الشرق الأوسط والسيطرة على الأصول الاستراتيجية للنفط ، والتي كانت حملة ترامب الدبلوماسية من أجل الاعتراف بها. إسرائيل من قبل جيرانها هي أحدث شكل من أشكال التحالف العربي الأمريكي الغادر التاريخي.

     أننا استخدمنا تهديد النفوذ الإيراني والثأر السني الشيعي القديم لتقسيم المنطقة واحتلالها ، وإضفاء الشرعية على الصراع في اليمن كحالة اختبار لهيمنتنا ، وزعزعة استقرار الحركات الديمقراطية في لبنان والعراق وإيران وكذلك إن إدامة الحرمان والتطهير العرقي لشعب فلسطين يتحدث عن الدوافع الحقيقية لأمريكا ؛ ليس لمناصرة السلام والحرية ، ولكن لتأمين الثروة والسلطة من خلال الحرب والاستبداد.

     أعتقد أن السبب الثانوي لعمىنا عن مظالم الوضع الفلسطيني الإسرائيلي هو إرث الهولوكوست وكيف نعالج السرديات التاريخية للإيذاء. بمجرد أن ندهن كضحية ، وتتوج بقبعة بيضاء من البراءة الكاملة ، يصبح هذا الرقم في خيالنا غير قادر على ارتكاب أي خطأ بأي طريقة أخرى. نحن نفكر من منظور الخير والشر على أنه صراع كوني بين قوى ثنائية التفرع ، وليس من منظور عيوب إنسانيتنا. المطلق أبسط.

     نحن جميعًا قادرون على فعل الخير والشر ، وسوء الفهم ، ومشاعر وردود متضاربة ومتضاربة ، وفشل التعاطف. ونحن نميل إلى تجاهل أشياء مثل المناطق الرمادية الأخلاقية التي تجعلنا غير مرتاحين بدلاً من مواجهتها ؛ هذا يسمى الحد من التنافر المعرفي ، وهذا يعني أننا نميل إلى الاستمرار في فعل الأشياء التي نعلم أنها خاطئة إذا كانت لدينا قصة جيدة لتبرير أفعالنا والاعتقاد بأن الله في صفنا. لقد تم ارتكاب أفظع الأعمال الوحشية في التاريخ بهذه الطريقة.

     هنا يجب أن أقول بوضوح إنني أؤيد إنشاء ديمقراطية علمانية يتساوى فيها جميع البشر ، الفلسطينيين والإسرائيليين على حد سواء ، في الواقع وفي ظل القانون ، وأنني أؤيد المقاطعة وسحب الاستثمارات وفرض عقوبات على دولة إسرائيل وتحرير فلسطين ، وأن إسرائيل بتكوينها الحالي هي استبداد فاشي لإرهاب الدولة المذنب بارتكاب جرائم ضد الإنسانية في التطهير العرقي للشعب الفلسطيني.

     عندما كنت طفلة في عام 1969 في حدث مع والدتي بدأ احتجاجًا على احتلال فلسطين في بيبولز بارك بيركلي ، الخميس الدامي ، 15 مايو ، كنت في الخط الأمامي عندما فتحت الشرطة النار على الحشد ؛ كان هذا أول موت لي وولادة جديدة ، عندما وقفت للحظة خارج الزمن ورأيت المستقبل المحتمل ، والجداول الزمنية ، والحقائق البديلة التي انتشرت منذ تلك اللحظة ، والإمكانيات اللامحدودة لأصبح إنسانًا والفرصة الرهيبة لعصر قادم للفاشية الاستبداد والحرب وسقوط الحضارة وانقراض الجنس البشري الذي قد يتحقق إذا لم نتمكن من إعادة تصور وتحويل أنفسنا ومجتمعنا ، والعثور على شفاء لعيوب إنسانيتنا ، وأصول الشر في حلقة فاغنريان. الخوف والقوة والقوة وانكسار العالم.

    في الربيع الماضي ، بعد أكثر من خمسين عامًا ، قاتلت في الانتفاضة الثالثة. هل سنواصل القتال من أجل إنسانيتنا وحريتنا بعد خمسين عامًا من الآن ، أم خمسة آلاف؟

     آمل أن يكون خلفاؤنا في الأجيال القادمة قد شكلوا مجتمعًا حرًا من أنداد وتخلوا عن استخدام القوة الاجتماعية ، ولن يكون لديهم استبداد أو إرهاب دولة لمقاومته ، ويمكنهم أن يعيشوا حياتهم بفرح ومحبة وليس في صراع كما أنا. لديك.

     يجب أن نحلم أحلامًا أفضل ، وأن نتضامن في العمل لجعلها حقيقة.

     من نريد أن نصبح نحن البشر؟

     دعونا نختار بعضنا البعض وليس الثروة والسلطة وامتياز النخب المهيمنة ، والمساواة ، والتنوع ، والاندماج ، وليس الانقسامات والتسلسلات الهرمية للآخرين الإقصائيين ، والحرية ، وليس مركزية السلطة والسلطة لدولة جزئية يملكها الغنى والديمقراطية لا الاستبداد والامل ولا الخوف والحب ولا الكراهية.

كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 10 مايو 2021 ، الدفاع عن الأقصى: الحرية في مواجهة الاستبداد في القدس. ربما شهدنا اندلاع الانتفاضة الثالثة هذه الليلة ، في الدفاع عن الأقصى والاقتتال في الشوارع في غزة الذي أعقب ذلك ، والذي أشعله الغزو الإمبراطوري والغزو الإمبراطوري لدولة إسرائيل الفاشية والكراهية للأجانب والتي لا تهتم بأحد إلا دولتهم. القبيلة والإيمان كإنسان حقًا ، والتي ارتكبت هجومًا مميتًا دون استفزاز كعمل من أعمال إرهاب الدولة وجريمة ضد الإنسانية على المصلين المسالمين في أحد أقدس المساجد في العالم الإسلامي ، دليل على القوة والسيطرة التي بعد أسابيع من الاستفزازات والاعتداءات وأعمال الدعاية لنزع الصفة الإنسانية عن شعب فلسطين.

      مثل انتفاضة الأقصى الثانية أو انتفاضة الأقصى التي استمرت أربع سنوات من 28 سبتمبر 2000 إلى 8 فبراير 2005 ، فإن القضايا العالقة للاحتلال الآن في عامه الرابع والخمسين منذ احتلال إسرائيل للقدس القديمة في 7 يونيو 1967 ، والذي احتفلت به دولة إسرائيل وفقًا إلى التقويم العبري كيوم القدس اليوم من خلال مهاجمة الأقصى ، وكارثة مستمرة الآن منذ ثلاثة وسبعين عامًا منذ يوم النكبة 15 مايو 1948 ، قد تضافرت حول القيمة الرمزية للأقصى ، التي لها هوية مزدوجة متنازع عليها مثل جبل الهيكل في اليهودية.

     إن فرص وقف التصعيد وتجنب الحرب تعتمد الآن ليس على العوامل المحلية بل على استجابة المجتمع الدولي ، فالتاريخ هنا أصبح فخًا ينهار ليوقعنا في شرك ، وعلى القوى الخارجية أن تحررنا من إخفاقاتنا. التناقضات الداخلية لنظامنا.

     هل تتبرأ أمريكا وتتخلى عن مستعمرتها إسرائيل ، ملكة سياستها الإمبريالية في الشرق الأوسط والسيطرة على المورد الاستراتيجي للنفط؟ هل يمكن للوحدة الدولية وضغط المقاطعة وسحب الاستثمارات وفرض العقوبات أن تحررنا من طغيان وإرهاب نظام الفصل العنصري كما حدث في جنوب إفريقيا؟

     أم أن الحرب هي الحساب الوحيد الذي يمكن للبشرية أن تقدمه أم ستقبله؟

     كما كتبه إيشان ثارور في الواشنطن بوست. ومساء الاثنين ، تبادل مسلحون في قطاع غزة والجيش الإسرائيلي إطلاق صواريخ وضربات جوية وسط تصعيد مميت للعنف. أطلقت حماس والجهاد الإسلامي ، الجماعات المسلحة المتمركزة في غزة المحاصرة ، وابلًا من الصواريخ التي سقطت بالقرب من القدس وفي أجزاء من جنوب إسرائيل ، مما أدى إلى إصابة شخص واحد على الأقل. قتلت الغارات الجوية الإسرائيلية ردا على ذلك ما لا يقل عن 20 شخصا في غزة ، وفقا لوزارة الصحة في غزة ، من بينهم تسعة أطفال.

     قال رئيس الوزراء الإسرائيلي بنيامين نتنياهو إن “الجماعات الإرهابية” في غزة “تجاوزت الخط الأحمر” بهجماتها الصاروخية. لكن الانفجار الأخير في الأعمال العدائية له ذيل طويل ، بعد العديد من الأعمال العدوانية من قبل كل من قوات الأمن الإسرائيلية والجماعات اليهودية اليمينية المتطرفة في القدس. قبل أسبوعين ، قامت مجموعات من المتطرفين اليهود ، بما في ذلك بعض المستوطنين من الضفة الغربية ، بمسيرة عبر المناطق المأهولة بالفلسطينيين في المدينة المقدسة ، مرددين “الموت للعرب” ، وهاجموا المارة وألحقوا أضرارًا بممتلكات الفلسطينيين ومنازلهم. أثارت المحاولات الإسرائيلية لإجلاء عدد من العائلات الفلسطينية في حي الشيخ جراح بالقدس الشرقية – نموذج مصغر لما يعتبره الفلسطينيون جزءًا من تاريخ طويل من النهب والمحو على يد الدولة الإسرائيلية – احتجاجات التضامن الفلسطيني في أجزاء مختلفة من الأراضي المحتلة وإسرائيل.

     كما زاد التوتر قبل إحياء ذكرى يوم القدس يوم الاثنين ، وهو يوم عطلة رسمية إسرائيلية للاحتفال بالاستيلاء على المدينة خلال الحرب العربية الإسرائيلية عام 1967. تم إلغاء مسيرة سنوية مخطط لها من قبل المتطرفين الإسرائيليين اليمينيين المتطرفين بعد أن غيرت السلطات مسارها في اللحظة الأخيرة. لا تزال أعداد كبيرة تشق طريقها إلى حائط المبكى وتردد أغنية انتقامية متطرفة ضد الفلسطينيين.

     أفاد زملائي أن “هجمات حماس الصاروخية ، والتي تضمنت الضربات الأولى على القدس منذ عدة سنوات ، جاءت بعد اشتباكات دارت بين الشرطة الإسرائيلية والمتظاهرين الفلسطينيين والإسرائيليين اليهود من اليمين المتطرف حول البلدة القديمة”. وذكر الهلال الأحمر الفلسطيني أن “من بين مئات الجرحى سبعة نقلوا إلى المستشفى في حالة خطيرة. تم تداول لقطات فيديو على وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي لضباط شرطة إسرائيليين يضربون بوحشية رجلاً فلسطينياً محتجزاً “.

كيف يمكن لأمريكا أن تدعم دولة إسرائيل في الاستبداد والارهاب والغزو والنهب؟ إنه سؤال يطرح بنبرات من الغضب والأسى والحيرة منذ مجيء النكبة في 15 مايو 1948 ، يوم النكبة الذي بدأ باحتلال فلسطين والاستعباد والإبادة الجماعية الممنهجة لشعبها في أعقاب الفتح الإسرائيلي. القدس. كيف يتم إضفاء الشرعية على هذا؟

      أعاد صديق لي مؤخرًا صياغة هذا السؤال ؛ لقد أحببت التقليد اليهودي واحتضنته ، وانضممت إلى كنيس وأعمل جنبًا إلى جنب مع حاخامه. عندما أشهد معاملة الحكومة اليهودية الإسرائيلية للفلسطينيين ، تغمرني مشاعر الارتباك والغضب. غير قادر على التوفيق بين هذا الفسق ، أشكك في أساس إيماني. أين الانتفاضة الحسنة والأخلاقية للأصوات اليهودية الدولية التي تدين مسار الحكومة؟ لقد فقدت الثقة في كوني يهودية “.

     ما هو واضح بالنسبة لي هو أن أزمة الإيمان هذه هي أيضًا أزمة وجودية في الهوية ، وهي حالة بالغة الخطورة والخطر والتي تنطوي أيضًا على إمكانية إعادة التخيل والولادة التحويلية ، وهي صدى شخصي لأزمة حضارية موازية ينطلق منها الجنس البشري والجنس البشري. يجب على مجتمع الدول العالمي أن يجد طريقة للظهور وتحرير أنفسنا من إرث تاريخنا. هنا ردي:

     دولة إسرائيل ليست متطابقة مع العقيدة اليهودية ، على الرغم من أن الفصيل الإمبريالي الفاشي الذي يمثله نتنياهو يود من الجميع أن يعتقد ذلك.

    أمة تقوم على تخصيص مواطنيها للهوية القبلية ، والتسليح الطائفي للإيمان في خدمة السلطة والهوية الوطنية المصرح بها ، والمجتمع العسكري مع الخدمة الإلزامية الشاملة ، واللغة العبرية المعاد بناؤها للوحدة الوطنية ، استخدمت سياسات الهوية من أجل إخضاع مواطنيها لسلطة الاستبداد المركزية ؛ إسرائيل هي دولة فاشية من الدم والإيمان والتربة لا تقل عن تلك الخاصة بالنازيين.

     أضف إلى هذا المزيج السام نظام كليبتوقراطي نشر روايات عن الإيذاء التاريخي لإضفاء الشرعية على السرقة الهائلة والغزو الإمبراطوري لأمم الشعوب الأخرى ، وهناك شيء واحد واضح ؛ لقد تعلمت إسرائيل الدروس الخاطئة من النازيين.

لعلكم تعلمون من إشاراتي العديدة إلى الحادثة في كتاباتي أنني مناهض للفاشية ، أقسمت على اليمين للمقاومة من قبل جان جينيه في عام 1982 في بيروت ، أثناء قتالنا ضد الغزو والحصار الإسرائيلي. في الأربعين عامًا التالية ، كنت صيادًا للفاشيين وثوريًا منخرطًا في النضال من أجل تحرير البشرية ضد فاشية الدم والإيمان والتراب وضد الاستبداد وأنظمة القوة والسيطرة الاستبدادية ، من أجل الديمقراطية ومثلها العليا الحرية والمساواة والحقيقة والعدالة وحقوق الإنسان العالمية. من أجل هذا أضع حياتي في الميزان مع كل أولئك الذين سماهم فرانتس فانون معذبو الأرض ؛ الضعيف والمحروم ، الصامت والمحو.

      الوطن الفلسطيني والعدالة لشعبه كانا من أهدافي منذ ذلك الصيف منذ زمن بعيد. مثل هدف تحرير أيرلندا من الحكم الاستعماري البريطاني ، لا يزال يتعين تحقيقه. إن فكرة الحرية والمواطنة هي السيادة والاستقلال للشعوب من الاستعمار الأجنبي والاستبداد الاستبدادي ، وأولوية دولة غير طائفية خالية من الانقسامات والتسلسل الهرمي الإيماني ، لأن من يقف بيننا وبين اللامتناهي لا يخدم أيًا من هؤلاء. .

     كما أنني أؤيد فكرة إقامة وطن إسرائيلي ، ولا أرى أي سبب يجب أن تكون هاتان الدولتان ، فلسطين وإسرائيل ، متعارضة أو متعارضة. لماذا المواطنة ملزمة بحدود الجغرافيا ، أو الدول بحدود؟

     لأكون واضحا ، أنا إلى جانب أي شخص مهدد بجرائم الكراهية بغض النظر عن أي عوامل أخرى ؛ في أعمال الشغب والحرب ، كان اختباري لاستخدام القوة بسيطًا ؛ من يملك السلطة؟

     أنا إلى جانب كل أولئك الذين سماهم فرانتس فانون “معذبو الأرض”. الضعيف والمحروم ، الصامت والمحو. ينطبق هذا بالتساوي على اليهود والمسلمين ، وإسرائيل وفلسطين ، وأي كائن بشري آخر بغض النظر عن هويتهم ، ولا سيما بدون أي عبء أخلاقي من الاستحقاق كما يعلمنا شو بشخصية ألفريد بي دوليتل في فيلم My Fair Lady.

     دعونا لا نرسل أي جيوش لفرض الفضيلة.

     بعض الإسرائيليين الذين يختلفون معي بشأن قضية فلسطين والنزعة العسكرية في الغزو الإمبراطوري والهيمنة الإقليمية كانوا حلفاء في قضية مطاردة النازيين ، لكنهم لا يعرفون تواطؤهم في هذا الشر لأنهم يرون أنفسهم ضحايا ومدافعين عن الضحايا. بدلا من مرتكبي الجرائم ضد الإنسانية.

     هذا عن الخوف والدورة المدمرة للإساءة والعنف. عدم العضوية في أي مجموعة أو هويات مرخصة من الانتماء ، والتسلسلات الهرمية للنخبة والمنتخبين ، وتقسيمات الآخرين الإقصائيين. إن أصول العنف والاستخدام الاجتماعي للقوة عالمية وتاريخية ومنهجية ، وليست على الإطلاق في أي دافع شرير أسطوري أو خطيئة أصلية أو فساد متأصل للإنسان.

     لا تنتمي حلقة واغنريان من الخوف والقوة والقوة لأحد ، بل تنتمي إلى أنظمة غير شخصية ذات قوة غير متكافئة. أنا أفهم جيدًا كيف تجعلنا القوة نشعر بالأمان ، والجمال المغري للأسلحة الذي يجعلنا محكمين على الفضيلة ، وكيف تمنح عضوية النخبة الاستحقاق ؛ هذا ينطبق على الدول كما هو الحال بالنسبة للأفراد ، في ساحة اللعب وساحة السجن والأماكن العامة المتنازع عليها مثل جبل الهيكل وهو الأقصى أيضًا.

     عندما يتم تخصيص الإيمان من قبل السلطة لإضفاء الشرعية في سياسات الهوية ، تصبح الهوية نفسها مشوشة وغامضة. لكي نصبح أحرارًا ، يجب أن نمتلك ملكية أنفسنا ككائنات مخلوقة ذاتيًا ومستقلة.

     هذا هو السبب في أن الواجبات الأساسية للمواطن هي التشكيك في السلطة ، وفضح السلطة ، والتحايل على السلطة ، وتحدي السلطة.

     لا يزال هناك دائمًا صراع بين الأقنعة التي يصنعها الآخرون لنا وتلك التي نصنعها لأنفسنا ؛ هذه هي الثورة الأولى التي يجب أن نحارب فيها جميعًا.

     أفكر في مشكلة الشر البشري ودورته من الخوف والسلطة والقوة في حالة الدول التي أصبحت طغيانًا قاتلوا لتحرير أنفسهم منها ، وهذا ينطبق على الدول الثورية المعادية للاستعمار عمومًا بسبب الموروثات التاريخية للإيذاء. وشروط النضال المفروضة بهذه الطريقة. غالبًا ما يصبح الضحايا منتهكين لأن هويتهم منظمة حول السلطة باعتبارها الوسيلة الوحيدة للهروب والبقاء في عالم لا يمكن الوثوق فيه بأحد.

     عندما يتم إلغاء الثقة وإثبات أنها فارغة وبدون معنى ، عندما تنكسر القدرة على الارتباط مع الآخرين والشعور بألمهم في التعاطف ويكون المرء بلا شفقة أو ندم ، عندما يكون الخوف طاغياً ومعمماً وتشكله السلطة من أجل خدمة السلطة ، يتعلم الضحايا أن القوة وحدها لها معنى وأنها حقيقية. يجب ألا نسمح لمن يسيء إلينا أن يصبح معلمينا.

     في حين أن كل قضية من هذا القبيل لها أصولها الفريدة وتاريخها ، فإن المشكلة نفسها عالمية وتتعلق بما يخشاه المرء وكيف يتشكل هذا الخوف من خلال السلطة باعتبارها هوية. من وجهة نظرنا كأمريكيين يفسرون الأحداث في CLA

مشكلة الأقلية المزدوجة التي تمثلها إسرائيل وفلسطين ، كيف ندرك القضايا لها علاقة كبيرة بكيفية تأطيرها من خلال مصادرنا الإعلامية والمحفزة.

      في النهاية يتم تعريفنا بما نفعله بخوفنا ، وكيف نستخدم قوتنا.

      السؤال الأول الذي يجب طرحه في أي قصة والأهم هو بسيط ؛ لمن هذه قصته

      نحن ضائعون في برية المرايا والأكاذيب والأوهام وتزييف أنفسنا والصور المشوهة والانعكاسات والأصداء والهويات المرخصة التي تشوه أرواحنا وتجردها من القوة وتسرقها.

      كيف نجيب على من يستعبدنا؟ تتحقق أصالتنا واستقلاليتنا من خلال الاستيلاء على السلطة ، وإعادة تصور وتغيير أنفسنا والبشرية كمجتمع حر من أنداد.

      نميل نحن الأمريكيين إلى رؤية الأشياء من منظور القبعات البيضاء والقبعات السوداء ، كما هو الحال في الأفلام الغربية التي تعتبر بمثابة أساطير أصل ونماذج أولية لشخصيتنا الوطنية. بمجرد منح وضع الضحية ، تصبح هذه الجماعات والأشخاص قبعات بيضاء ورجال صالحين ، غير قادرين على الشر ومعارضين تمامًا لمن يجب أن يكون عندئذٍ من القبعات السوداء. إنها طريقة مروعة لاختيار السياسة الوطنية.

     للأسف ، يمكننا نحن البشر أن نكون صالحين وأشرار في آنٍ واحد ، عيوب إنسانيتنا تعكس صدى وانكسار العالم. إنها حقيقة تم إثباتها مرة أخرى الليلة في القدس أو القدس اعتمادًا على من يتحدث الشخص وبأي لغة ، حيث أن غزة تحترق من هجوم لقوات الدفاع الإسرائيلية كما كانت الليلة الماضية تقريبًا في بيروت. عندما حاولوا حرق جينيه وأنا على قيد الحياة في المقهى الخاص بنا ، حيث أن عشرات البشر الذين سرق منهم كل شيء ما عدا الأمل ، أقسموا على بعضهم البعض أن يشغلوا منصبًا يغطي هروب النساء والأطفال المحاصرين بسبب الهجوم الإسرائيلي حتى كل شيء. آمنون ، في دفاع نهائي ليس عن المسجد الأقصى ، رائعًا وجميلًا ومليئًا بالمعنى ، نصبًا للدفعة البشرية لتجاوز أنفسنا والإمكانيات اللامحدودة للتحول إلى إنسان ، وهي مرحلة مناسبة لموت الأبطال المجيد ، ولكن صرخات الغرباء بلا جسد بين المحاربين المجهولين لعصور قديم مهجور.

     أمام فجوات الفراغ والهمجية العدمية في عالم الظلام والنار والخوف والقوة ، ليس لدي سوى الكلمات لأقدمها ، وأكتب لكم ما قلته لرفاقي الذين اختاروا الوقوف معي ؛ لقد فقدت العدد الأخير من المدرجات ، لكنني جازفت بكل شيء ضد احتمالات مستحيلة ونجوت مرات أكثر مما أتذكره ، وكل ما يهم هو أننا لا نتخلى عن أنفسنا ولا عن بعضنا البعض ، وأننا نرفض الخضوع ، لأن هذا هو لحظة حريتنا ، ولا يمكن أن تؤخذ منا أبدًا.

      من هذه الليلة فلسطين حرة ، لأننا يمكن أن نقتل ، لكن لا يمكن غزونا.

Hebrew

29 בנובמבר 2022 סולידריות עם המין האנושי נגד פשיזם, עריצות וטרור מדינה פירושה סולידריות עם פלסטין

ביום הסולידריות הבינלאומי הזה עם פלסטין

אני כותב כדי ליישם את התער של אוקאם של הפשטות על הנושא המורכב והטעון רגשית של יחסי פלסטין-ישראל ובעיית המיעוט הכפול על ידי שאילת שאלה; מה משרת בצורה הטובה ביותר את שמחת המין האנושי?

ש       כל כך הרבה דרכים אחרות לבנות שאלה כזו, במיוחד כעקרונות של הפיכת אנוש באמצעות מאבק מהפכני ותפיסת כוח בתנאי מאבק כפויים הכוללים זיוף, סחורה ודה-הומניזציה כמערכות של דיכוי; של מוות, חוסר אונים נלמד, סלידה, אימה וחלוקות של זהויות מורשות?

      כיצד ליצור חברה חופשית של שווים כמין אנושי מאוחד באמצעות דמוקרטיה חילונית וזכויות אדם אוניברסליות?

      כיצד לאזן את הייחודיות שלנו כיחידים בתוך חברה מגוונת ומכילה?

       כיצד ליישר את כל ההיררכיות של השתייכות ואחרות מדריגה ולחסל את כל המערכות של כוח לא שוויוני?

       כיצד להביא את הכאוס, השיבוש, השבר, השינוי והדמוקרטיזציה של הגמוניות עילית של עושר, כוח ופריבילגיה, ולהימלט ממורשת ההיסטוריה שלנו ומהפשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה?

       כיצד לדמיין מחדש ולשנות את האפשרויות הבלתי מוגבלות של האדם, המשמעות והערך?

       כיצד לשחרר את עצמנו ואחד את השני בתנאי מאבק כפויים הדורשים אלימות ושימוש בכוח חברתי בתפיסות כוח, מבלי להפוך לסמכות שאנו נאבקים בה ולהשתמש בכוח ובאלימות כדי לאכוף את רעיונות המידות הטובות שלנו?

       זוועות ופשעי מלחמה ישראלים בטיהור האתני של הפלסטינים עימתו את כולנו עם שותפותנו לרוע, והעולם מוצף באימה ובתסבון כאשר מנהיגינו בוגדים בנו וזונחים את עקרון זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שעל פיו מתקיימת הציוויליזציה שלנו. , ציוויליזציה שנמצאת כעת בתהליכי קריסה וחתרנות על ידי הפשיזם בשחר עידן הרודנים. אבל זה גם אומר שהכל בסימן שאלה, ניתן לתפוס כוח ולבחור עתיד חדש, אם נפעל בסולידריות בזמנים של כאוס כמרחב של משחק יצירתי חופשי.

      כפי שמלמד אותנו גיירמו דל טורו ב-Carnival Row; “כאוס הוא התקווה הגדולה של חסרי הכוח.”

     ברור שחייבים להיות לנו שוויון אמיתי אם זכויותינו וחירויותינו יישארו אוניברסליות בצל הכוח והשליטה של המדינה. כך גם חופש ושוויון אפשריים רק כאשר אנו נקיים מחלוקות מוסמכות של אחרות מוציאה מהכלל ופשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה.

     מה מונע מאיתנו, כאן באמריקה ובכל העולם, לראות את האסון ההומניטרי הזה כפי שהוא? ראשית הם אינטרסים עילית של עושר וכוח, שיצרו מושבה אמריקאית וענק צבאי אימפריאליסטי למטרות דומיננטיות של המזרח התיכון ושליטה בנכס האסטרטגי של הנפט, אשר הקמפיין הדיפלומטי של טראמפ למען הכרה במדינת ישראל על ידי שכנותיה היא הצורה העדכנית ביותר של הברית הערבית-אמריקאית ההיסטורית והבוגדנית.

     שהשתמשנו באיום ההשפעה האיראנית ובנקמה הסונית-שיעית העתיקה כדי לפלג ולכבוש את האזור, לתת לגיטימציה לסכסוך בתימן כמקרה מבחן להגמוניה שלנו ולערער את תנועות הדמוקרטיה בלבנון, עיראק ואיראן וכן הנצחת שלילת הזכויות והטיהור האתני של תושבי פלסטין מדברת על המניעים האמיתיים של אמריקה; לא כדי לקדם שלום וחופש, אלא כדי להבטיח עושר וכוח באמצעות מלחמה ועריצות.

     אני מאמין שהגורם המשני לעיוורון שלנו לעוולות המצב הפלסטיני-ישראלי הוא מורשת של השואה והאופן שבו אנו מעבדים נרטיבים היסטוריים של קורבנות. ברגע שנמשח כקורבן, והוכתר בכובע לבן של תמימות ללא תמים, הדמות הזו בדמיוננו הופכת ללא מסוגלת לעשות פסול בשום דרך אחרת. אנו חושבים במונחים של טוב ורע כמאבק קוסמי של כוחות דיכוטומיים, לא במונחים של הפגמים של האנושיות שלנו. מוחלטים הם פשוטים יותר.

     כולנו מסוגלים לפעולות טובות ורעות כאחד, לאי הבנות, לרגשות ותגובות מסוכסכים ובעלי ניואנסים וכישלונות של חמלה. ואנחנו נוטים להתעלם ולא להתעמת עם דברים כמו אזורים אפורים מוסריים שגורמים לנו לאי נוחות; זה נקרא הפחתת דיסוננס קוגניטיבי, וזה אומר שאנחנו נוטים להמשיך לעשות דברים שאנחנו יודעים שהם לא נכונים אם יש לנו סיפור טוב להצדיק את מעשינו ואת האמונה שאלוהים בצד שלנו. הזוועות הנוראות ביותר בהיסטוריה בוצעו בדרך זו.

     כאן אני חייב לומר בבירור שאני תומך ביצירת דמוקרטיה חילונית שבה כל בני האדם, הפלסטינים והישראלים כאחד, שווים בדיוק הן למעשה והן על פי החוק, שאני תומך בחרם, ביטול וסנקציה של מדינת ישראל.

שראל כפי שהיא מכוננת כיום היא עריצות פשיסטית של טרור מדינתי אשר אשמה בפשעים נגד האנושות בטיהור האתני של העם הפלסטיני.

     כילדה בשנת 1969 באירוע עם אמי שהחל כמחאה נגד כיבוש פלסטין בפארק העממי בברקלי, יום חמישי הדמים 15 במאי, הייתי בקו החזית כשהמשטרה פתחה באש על ההמון; זה היה המוות והלידה מחדש הראשון שלי, כשלרגע עמדתי מחוץ לזמן וצפיתי בעתידים האפשריים, קווי הזמן והמציאות החלופית שהתפשטו מאותו רגע, האפשרויות הבלתי מוגבלות להיות אנושיות והסיכוי הנורא לעידן פשיסט מתקרב. עריצות, מלחמה, נפילת הציוויליזציה והכחדת המין האנושי שעוד עלולות להתרחש אם לא נוכל לדמיין מחדש ולשנות את עצמנו ואת החברה שלנו, ולמצוא מרפא לפגמי האנושות שלנו, מקורות הרוע בטבעת הווגנרית של פחד, כוח וכוח, ושברו של העולם.

    באביב האחרון, למעלה מחמישים שנה לאחר מכן, לחמתי באינתיפאדה השלישית; האם עדיין נלחם על אנושיותנו וחירותנו בעוד חמישים שנה, או חמשת אלפים?

     תקוותי היא שממשיכי דרכו בדורות הבאים יצרו חברה חופשית של שווים וינטשו את השימוש בכוח חברתי, לא יהיו להם עריצות או טרור ממלכתי להתנגד להם, ויוכלו לחיות את חייהם בשמחה ובאהבה ולא במאבק כמוני. יש.

     עלינו לחלום חלומות טובים יותר, ולעמוד יחד בסולידריות של פעולה כדי להפוך אותם למציאותיים.

     מי אנחנו רוצים להיות, אנו בני האדם?

     הבה נבחר זה בזה ולא את העושר, הכוח והפריבילגיה של האליטות ההגמוניות, השוויון, הגיוון וההכלה ולא את החלוקה וההיררכיות של אחרות מדריגה, חירות ולא ריכוזיות של כוח וסמכות למדינה קרסראלית בבעלות עשירים, דמוקרטיה ולא עריצות, תקווה ולא פחד, אהבה ולא שנאה.

כפי שכתבתי בפוסט שלי מ-10 במאי 2021, ההגנה על אל אקצא: חירות מול עריצות בירושלים; ייתכן שהיינו עדים להופעת האינתיפאדה השלישית הלילה, בהגנת אל-אקצא ובקרבות הרחוב בעזה שבאו בעקבותיה, שהוצתו בעקבות הבגידה והכיבוש האימפריאלי של מדינת ישראל שנאת זרים ופשיסטית שאינה מתייחסת לאיש מלבד מדינת ישראל. שבט ואמונה כאנושיים באמת, ואשר ביצעו מתקפה בלתי מעוררת וקטלנית כמעשה טרור ממלכתי ופשע נגד האנושות על המתפללים השלווים באחד המסגדים הקדושים ביותר בעולם האסלאם, הפגנת כוח ושליטה אשר עוקב אחרי שבועות של פרובוקציות, תקיפות ופעולות של דה-הומניזציה תעמולה נגד העם הפלסטיני.

      כמו אינתיפאדת אל-אקצא השנייה או אל-אקצא שנמשכה ארבע שנים מה-28 בספטמבר 2000 עד ה-8 בפברואר 2005, נושאים לא פתורים של כיבוש שנמצא כעת בחמישים וארבעה שנים מאז כיבוש ירושלים העתיקה ב-7 ביוני 1967 על ידי ישראל, שמדינת ישראל חגגה על פי ללוח העברי כיום ירושלים היום על ידי תקיפת אל אקצא, ואסון הנמשך כבר שבעים ושלוש שנים מאז יום הנכבה ה-15 במאי 1948, התלכדו סביב הערך הסמלי של אל אקצא, בעל זהות כפולה שנויה במחלוקת כהר הבית ב. יַהֲדוּת.

     סיכויי הסלמה ומניעת מלחמה תלויים כעת לא בגורמים מקומיים אלא בתגובת הקהילה הבינלאומית, שכן ההיסטוריה הפכה כאן למלכודת שמתמוטטת כדי ללכוד אותנו במלתעותיה, וכוחות חיצוניים חייבים לשחרר אותנו מהכישלונות של הסתירות הפנימיות של המערכת שלנו.

     האם אמריקה תתנער ותתנער ממושבה ישראל, מלכת המדיניות האימפריאלית שלה במזרח התיכון והשליטה במשאב האסטרטגי של הנפט? האם האחדות הבינלאומית והלחץ של חרם, ביטול וסנקציה יכולים לשחרר אותנו מהעריצות והטרור של משטר אפרטהייד כפי שעשה בדרום אפריקה?

     או שמא מלחמה היא ההתחשבנות היחידה שהמין האנושי יכול להציע או לקבל?

     כפי שנכתב על ידי ישאן ת’ארור בוושינגטון פוסט; “ביום שני בלילה, חמושים ברצועת עזה והצבא הישראלי החליפו ירי רקטות ותקיפות אוויריות על רקע הסלמה קטלנית של האלימות. חמאס והג’יהאד האיסלאמי, ארגונים חמושים שבסיסם בעזה המצוררת, שיגרו מטח רקטות שנחתו ליד ירושלים ובחלקים מדרום ישראל, ופצעו לפחות אדם אחד. תקיפות אוויריות ישראליות בתגמול הרגו לפחות 20 בני אדם בעזה, לפי משרד הבריאות של עזה, כולל תשעה ילדים.

     ראש ממשלת ישראל בנימין נתניהו אמר כי “קבוצות הטרור” בעזה “חצו קו אדום” עם התקפות הרקטות שלהם. אבל לפיצוץ הלחימה האחרון יש זנב ארוך, בעקבות פעולות תוקפניות רבות הן של כוחות הביטחון הישראליים והן של ארגוני עליונות יהודים מהימין הקיצוני בירושלים. לפני שבועיים צעדו להקות של קיצונים יהודים, כולל כמה מתנחלים מהגדה המערבית, דרך אזורים מאוכלסים בפלסטינים בעיר הקדושה, קראו “מוות לערבים”, תקפו עוברי אורח ופגעו ברכוש ובבתים פלסטינים. ניסיונות ישראלים לפנות מספר משפחות פלסטיניות בשכונת שייח ג’ראח במזרח ירושלים – מיקרוקוסמוס של מה שהפלסטינים רואים כחלק מהיסטוריה ארוכה של נישול ומחיקה בידי מדינת ישראל – עוררו מחאות סולידריות פלסטיניות בחלקים שונים. של השטחים הכבושים וישראל עצמה.

     זה גם העלה את המתיחות לקראת ציון יום ירושלים ביום שני, חג ישראלי רשמי שחוגג את כיבוש העיר במהלך מלחמת ערב-ישראל ב-1967. צעדה שנתית מתוכננת של ישראלים אולטרה-לאומיים מהימין הקיצוני בוטלה לאחר שהרשויות ניתבו את דרכה ברגע האחרון. מספרים גדולים עדיין עשו את דרכם לכותל ושרו שיר נקמה קיצוני נגד הפלסטינים.

     “התקפות הרקטות של חמאס, שכללו את התקיפות הראשונות נגד ירושלים מזה מספר שנים, הגיעו לאחר עימותים בין משטרת ישראל, מפגינים פלסטינים וישראלים יהודים ימין קיצוני ברחבי העיר העתיקה”, דיווחו עמיתיי. “בין מאות הפצועים היו שבעה שאושפזו במצב קשה, כך לפי הסהר האדום הפלסטיני. קטעי וידאו שהופצו ברשתות החברתיות של שוטרים ישראלים מכים באכזריות גבר פלסטיני עצור”.

איך אמריקה יכולה לתמוך במדינת ישראל בעריצות ובטרור, בכיבוש ובגזל? זו שאלה שנשאלת בטונים של זעם, צער ותמיהה מאז ה-15 במאי 1948, יום הקטסטרופה שהחל את השעבוד השיטתי ורצח העם של אנשיו בעקבות הכיבוש הישראלי.של ירושלים. איך זה מקבל לגיטימציה?

      חבר ניסח לי לאחרונה מחדש את השאלה הזו; “אהבתי ואימצתי את המסורת היהודית, הצטרפתי לבית כנסת ועבדתי לצד הרב שלו. כשאני עד ליחס של ממשלת ישראל היהודית לפלסטינים, אני מוצף ברגשות של בלבול וכעס. אני לא מצליח ליישב את חוסר המוסריות הזה, אני מטיל ספק בעצם היסוד של האמונה שלי. היכן ההתקוממות הטובה והמוסרית של הקולות היהודיים הבינלאומיים המגנה את דרכה של הממשלה? איבדתי את האמון בלהיות יהודי”.

     מה שברור לי הוא שמשבר האמונה הזה הוא גם משבר זהות קיומי, מצב של כובד וסכנה עצום שיש בו גם פוטנציאל לדמיון מחדש ולידה מחדש טרנספורמטיבית, הד אישי למשבר ציוויליזציוני מקביל שממנו האנושות קהילה גלובלית של אומות חייבת למצוא דרך להגיח ולשחרר את עצמנו מהמורשת של ההיסטוריה שלנו. הנה תשובתי:

     מדינת ישראל אינה זהה לאמונה היהודית, אם כי הפלג הפשיסטי-אימפריאליסטי שנתניהו מייצג היה רוצה שכולם יחשבו כך.

    אומה המבוססת על שיוך אזרחיה לזהות שבטית, נשק עדתי של אמונה בשירות לשלטון וזהות לאומית מורשית, חברה צבאית עם שירות חובה אוניברסלי ושפה עברית משוחזרת של אחדות לאומית השתמשה בפוליטיקת זהויות כדי להכפיף את אזרחיה לכוח הריכוזי של העריצות; ישראל היא מדינה פשיסטית של דם, אמונה ואדמה לא פחות מזו של הנאצים.

     הוסיפו לתמהיל הרעיל הזה משטר קלפטוקרטי שהפיץ נרטיבים של קורבנות היסטורית כדי לתת לגיטימציה לגניבה מסיבית וכיבוש אימפריאלי של מדינות אחרות ודבר אחד ברור; ישראל למדה את הלקחים הלא נכונים מהנאצים.

אתה אולי יודע מההתייחסויות הרבות שלי לתקרית בכתיבתי שאני אנטי-פשיסט, שנשבע לשבועת ההתנגדות על ידי ז’אן ז’נה ב-1982 בביירות, במהלך מאבקנו נגד הפלישה והמצור הישראלים. בארבעים השנים שאחרי, הייתי צייד פשיסטים ומהפכן העוסק במאבק לשחרור המין האנושי נגד פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה ונגד עריצות ומשטרים אוטוריטריים של כוח ושליטה, למען הדמוקרטיה והאידיאלים שלה. חופש, שוויון, אמת וצדק, ולמען זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו. בעניין זה אני מעמיד את חיי באיזון עם כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי הארץ; חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והמחוקים.

      מולדת פלסטינית, וצדק לאנשיה, היו בין המטרות שלי מאז אותו קיץ לפני כל כך הרבה זמן. כמו המטרה של שחרור אירלנד מהשלטון הקולוניאלי הבריטי, עוד נותרה להשיגה. מדובר ברעיון החירות והאזרחות כריבונות ועצמאות של עמים מקולוניאליזם זר ועריצות אוטוריטרית, והקדימות של מדינה לא-כתתית נקייה מפילוגים והיררכיות של אמונה, שכן מי שעומד בין כל אחד מאיתנו לבין האינסופי אינו משרת אף אחד מהם. .

אני לא רואה סיבה ששתי המדינות הללו יהיו סותרות זו את זו או אנטגוניסטיות. מדוע אזרחות חייבת להיות קשורה לגבולות הגיאוגרפיה, או למדינות לפי גבולות?

     שיהיה ברור, אני בצד של כל מי שמאוים בפשע שנאה ללא קשר לכל גורם אחר; בהתפרעות ובמלחמה המבחן שלי לשימוש בכוח הוא פשוט; מי מחזיק בכוח

     אני בצד של כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה את עלובי כדור הארץ; חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והמחוקים. זה חל באותה מידה על כל בני אדם אחרים, ללא קשר למי שהם, ובמיוחד ללא כל נטל מוסרי של הכשרון כפי שמלמד אותנו שואו עם דמותו של אלפרד פ. דוליטל ב”גברתי הנאווה”.

     אל לנו לשלוח צבאות לאכוף מידות טובות.

במקום מבצעי פשעים נגד האנושות.

     מדובר בפחד, ובמעגל ההרסני של התעללות ואלימות. לא חברות באף קבוצה או זהויות מורשות של השתייכות, היררכיות של האליטה והנבחרים, וחלוקות של אחרות מוציאה מהכלל. מקורות האלימות והשימוש החברתי בכוח הם אוניברסליים, היסטוריים ומערכתיים, ולחלוטין לא בשום דחף רשע מיתי, חטא קדמון או קלקול מובנה של האדם.

     הטבעת הווגנרית של פחד, כוח וכוח אינה שייכת לאיש, אלא למערכות אישיות של כוח לא שוויוני. אני מבין היטב כיצד כוח גורם לנו להרגיש בטוחים, את היופי המפתה של כלי הנשק שהופך אותנו לפוסקי מידות טובות, וכיצד חברות עילית מעניקה זכאות; זה עובד אותו הדבר עבור עמים כמו עבור יחידים, במגרש המשחקים, בחצר הכלא ובמרחבים ציבוריים מתמודדים כמו הר הבית שהוא גם אל אקצא.

     כאשר אמונה מוחזקת על ידי סמכות ללגיטימציה בפוליטיקת זהויות, הזהות עצמה הופכת מבולבלת ומעורפלת. כדי להיות חופשיים, עלינו לתפוס בעלות על עצמנו כיצורים שנוצרו בעצמנו ואוטונומיים.

     זו הסיבה שהתפקידים העיקריים של אזרח הם להטיל ספק בסמכות, לחשוף סמכות, ללעוג לסמכות ולערער על סמכות.

     תמיד נשאר המאבק בין המסכות שאחרים עושים לנו לבין אלה שאנחנו עושים לעצמנו; זו המהפכה הראשונה שבה כולנו צריכים להילחם.

     אני חושב על בעיית הרוע האנושי ומעגל הפחד, הכוח והכוח שלו במקרה של מדינות שהופכות לעריצות מהן נלחמו כדי להשתחרר מהן, וזה נכון לגבי מדינות מהפכניות אנטי-קולוניאליות בדרך כלל בגלל המורשת ההיסטורית של הקורבנות ותנאי המאבק המוטלים, בדרך זו; קורבנות הופכים לעתים קרובות למתעללים מכיוון שזהותם מאורגנת סביב כוח כאמצעי המילוט וההישרדות היחיד בעולם שבו לא ניתן לסמוך על איש.

     כאשר האמון בוטל והוכח כריק וללא משמעות, כאשר היכולת להתחבר ולהרגיש את כאבם של אחרים באמפתיה נשברה ואדם ללא רחמים או חרטה, כאשר הפחד הוא מכריע ומוכלל ועוצב על ידי סמכות בשירות הכוח, הקורבנות לומדים שרק לכוח יש משמעות והוא אמיתי. אסור לנו לאפשר למתעללים שלנו להפוך למורים שלנו.

     בעוד שלכל נושא כזה יש מקורות והיסטוריה ייחודיים משלו, הבעיה עצמה היא אוניברסלית, וקשורה למה שחוששים, ואיך הפחד הזה מעוצב על ידי סמכות זהות. מנקודת המבט שלנו כאמריקאים המפרשים אירועים בקלא

הבעיה של המיעוט הכפול, האופן שבו אנו תופסים נושאים קשורים רבות לאופן שבו הם ממוסגרים על ידי מקורות המידע והמניעים שלנו.      בסופו של דבר אנחנו מוגדרים לפי מה אנחנו עושים עם הפחד שלנו, ואיך אנחנו משתמשים בכוח שלנו.

      השאלה הראשונה שיש לשאול על כל סיפור, והחשובה ביותר, היא פשוטה; של מי הסיפור הזה

      אנחנו אבודים בשממה של מראות, של שקרים ואשליות, זיופים של עצמנו, דימויים והשתקפויות מעוותים, הדים וזהויות מורשות שמעוותות, מעצימות וגונבות את נשמתנו.

      איך נענה למי שישעבד אותנו? האותנטיות והאוטונומיה שלנו מתממשות באמצעות תפיסת כוח, ודמיון מחדש והפיכתנו של עצמנו ושל המין האנושי כחברה חופשית של שווים.

      אנו האמריקאים נוטים לראות דברים במונחים של כובעים לבנים וכובעים שחורים, כמו בסרטי המערבון המשמשים כמיתוסים וארכיטיפים של המקור הלאומי שלנו. ברגע שהוענק מעמד של קורבן, קבוצות ואנשים כאלה הופכים לכובעים לבנים ולחבר’ה טובים, חסרי יכולת לרוע ומנוגדים בתכלית למי שחייבים להיות כובעים שחורים. זו דרך איומה לבחור במדיניות לאומית.

     למרבה הצער, אנו בני האדם יכולים להיות טובים ורעים בבת אחת, פגמי האנושות שלנו מהדהדים ומשקפים את השבר של העולם. זו אמת שהוכחה שוב הלילה באל קודס או בירושלים תלוי למי מדברים ובאיזה שפה, בעוד עזה בוערת מהסתערות של צבא הגנה ישראלי משתוללת בדומה ללילה לפני כמעט ארבעה עשורים בביירות. כשניסו לשרוף את ג’נט ואני בחיים בבית הקפה שלנו, כתריסר בני אדם שנגנב מהם הכל מלבד התקווה נשבעים נדרים זה לזה להחזיק בתפקיד שיכסה את בריחת הנשים והילדים שנלכדו בתקיפה הישראלית עד שכל בטוחים, בהגנה סופית לא על מסגד אל אקצא, מפואר ויפה ומלא במשמעות, אנדרטה לדחף האנושי להגיע אל מעבר לעצמנו ולאפשרויות הבלתי מוגבלות להפוך לאנושיות, במה המתאימה למותם המפואר של גיבורים, אבל של צרחות חסרות גוף של זרים בין המלחמות חסרות השם של עתיקות נטושה.

     אל מול תהום הריקנות והברבריות הניהיליסטית של עולם של חושך ואש, של פחד וכוח, יש לי רק מילים להציע, ואני כותב לך את מה שאמרתי לחבריי שבחרו לעמוד איתי; איבדתי את ספירת היציעים האחרונים, אבל סיכנתי הכל כנגד סיכויים בלתי אפשריים ושרדתי יותר פעמים ממה שאני יכול לזכור, וכל מה שחשוב הוא שאנחנו לא נוטשים לא את עצמנו ולא אחד את השני, שאנחנו מסרבים להיכנע, כי זה רגע החופש שלנו, ולעולם לא ניתן לקחת אותו מאיתנו.

      מהלילה הזה, פלסטין חופשית, כי אנחנו יכולים להיהרג, אבל אי אפשר לכבוש אותנו.

     And because I cannot think of Palestine now without also thinking of a friend who gave her life in the cause of the Liberation of Palestine, and has become for me a figure of Liberty, here is the post that FaceBook banned; but also a question for those friends who have shared my thoughts with me in reading thus far.

      Palestine has now become a woman in my imagination; a heroic and particular woman, but one who was none the less very real, and I cannot help but wonder what kind of world we might build together if nations wore the forms of people to us all, the masks of friends whom we loved?

     Would we be better human beings, if nations as ideas of otherness and belonging lived within us as figures we claim and who claim us in turn?

     How if the answer to the origins of evil in fear and force is as simple as this; what we know and love cannot be alien to us.

     How if we all belong to each other?

June 21 2022 We Balance the Terror of Our Nothingness With the Joy of Total Freedom, the Flaws of Our Humanity With the Redemptive Power of Love, and the Brokenness of the World With Our Absurd Hope For the Limitless Possibilities of Becoming Human

     Death is the ultimate life disruptive event, the mirror image of Chaos as creative force and the adaptive potential of a system. This day I have re-enacted the stages of grief process as I relive an event of a year ago, caught in the labyrinth of its story, and as always with such complexes of memory, history, and identity I emerge through its passage with changed perspective.

     Some stories can shatter our lives, but also free us from the legacies of history and the limits of our former selves.

    This is a story which has become interwoven with my annual reading of Sartre’s works in celebration of his birthday, a juxtaposition which I find wholly appropriate, illuminating, and strangely hopeful.

    Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? 

     We choose our friends and lovers from among those reflections which embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves or fully integrate into our consciousness and personality; and it is the interface between these two bounded realms, the Ideal and the Real, which I am driven to interrogate today.

     Here is where the art of questioning lives, at the intersection of Socratic method and classical rhetoric, the dialectics of history, and the problematization of our motives, feelings, and processes of ideation through the methods of psychotherapy.

      We speak of the juxtaposition of imaginal and actual realms of being as a form of Dadaist collage as pioneered by Tristan Tzara and instrumentalized as methodology by William S. Burroughs which creates the universe of our experience, of the discontiguous, relative, ambiguous, and ephemeral nature of truth described by Akutagawa in Rashomon Gate and the methods of fiction exemplified by Raymond Queneau  as applied to identity and self construal, and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty as dyadic forces of the psyche which work themselves out through our relationships with ourselves and with others. These three parallel and interdependent processes shape who we become, and how we instrumentalize others in our self creation.

     We must first own the fact that dealing with our memories of someone is not the same as the lived experience of our history; it is all one sided and has been moved into an interior space of performance, and in which reimagination and transformation is ongoing. The map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski teaches us, nor is our idea of a person equal to the actual person themselves.

     What parts of myself do I embody as a figural space into which to grow in the character whom I have thought of as Cleopatra, with all of the ambivalence, power, legacies of cultural history, and liminality such an identification implies, how do I imagine her now, and what kind of story have I cast us in?

     I think of her now in terms of Rachel McAdams’ wily, sophisticated, and transgressive Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, as she became throughout the twelve years of our work in liberation struggle for the independence of Palestine, with elements of Millie Bobby Brown’s fearless, brilliant, and utterly without boundaries Enola Holmes as she began, bearing onward the colours of a beloved and martyred family member in the course of investigating his disappearance. I am reasonably certain that this is not how she saw herself.

     For illumination as to how a Palestinian woman might imagine herself, the characters she may choose to play as role models and the stories she may embody as ritual enactments, even a highly unusual one such as she, we may look to the wonderfully rich culture of Palestine’s female film directors and authors; of auteurs Annemarie Jacir, Maysaloun Hamoud, Mai Masri, and Farah Nabulsi, and of novelists Susan Abulhawa, Liana Badr, Ghada Karmi, Sahar Khalifeh, Hala Alyan, and Sahar Mustafah.

     Bearing in mind that all such reading lists are nothing less than a set of authorized identities. As Margaret Atwood so splendidly demonstrates in her works, our intertexts are primary in the construction of our identities, including those of sex and gender, as mimesis and as dialectical processes of history.

     And this is where it never ceases to be fascinating, the study of human being, meaning, and value and the limitless possibilities of becoming human. For in the sphere of our relationships with others, parallel and interdependent with our relationships between the masculine and feminine halves of our psyche, each co-evolves with the other in recursive processes of growth and adaptation to change in the construction of identity.

     I say again; we interpret the actions of others and form relationships on the basis of our self-construal and ideas of ourselves, and we use our relations with real people to shape who we wish to become.

       How does this work out in real life? As a personal example of the discontiguous gaps of meaning in the interfaces between bounded realms of masculine and feminine personae, a free space of creative play, I offer the artifacts of memory of a figure which may or may not align with the martyr I know only by her Code Name: Cleopatra.

      Of the Last Stand in which we met and forged an alliance, betrayed and caught in a trap which we turned against our enemies who had trapped themselves in with us, which I think of as the final battle scene in the film  Mr & Mrs Smith, this operatic quest was set in motion by the conflict of dominion between Hamas and al Qaeda in Gaza during August of 2009, during which the forces of light prevailed over those of darkness in the victory of Hamas, with Israel playing each against the other through infiltration agents, spies, deniable assets, and use of a special Recon team masquerading as various Arab factions to commit atrocities against presumed rival Arab groups in a classic policy of divide and conquer. This space of play was complicated by clan vendettas such as hers, and the usual political and religious fragmentation, crime syndicates, mercenary forces, tribalism, corruption, and the shadow wars of foreign states.

     Our paths crossed several times over the next twelve years, always in memorable circumstances, sometimes as allies and others as rivals, often as both. Which of these is the real and true version of her, or of myself? Such iterations of our images are without number, like the captured and distorted selves in funhouse mirrors aligned to reflect into infinity.

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

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

     The Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat uses the phrase, in a story about the creation of a fictitious officer bearing documents designed to trick the Nazis into preparing for the invasion of Europe somewhere other than Sicily, a series I watched with rapt attention because each of us is created by our stories exactly like this false identity attached to the body of a derelict. Within each of us, a team of authors, archetypes and transpersonal figures like the anima which concerns us here, create our personae through stories, a network of memories, histories, and identity; and they do so for their own purposes, which we do not always understand.  

     As T. S. Eliot has written in Gerontin, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities”

      We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as Shakespeare teaches us in Act IV, Scene 1 of The Tempest, a line spoken by Ariel. For if we are ephemeral and insubstantial beings, constructions of our stories, this also means that the ontological nature of human being is a ground of struggle which can be claimed by seizures of power.

      The first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?

      Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.

      This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.

      Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others. 

     To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become? 

     As I wrote in my post of June 21 2021, The Hope of Humankind: On Becoming Autonomous Zones as Agents of Chaos and Transformative Change;      A friend has written in despair of our significance and hope for the liberation of humankind, of the impactfulness of our lives and our struggles which balance the flaws of our humanity against the monstrous and vast forces of a system of dehumanization, falsification, and commodification; for to be human is to live in a state of existential crisis and struggle for the ownership of ourselves.

     Today is the birthday of Jean Paul Sartre, and so this event finds me reading once again his magnificent reimagination of Jean Genet in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr; Genet who set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982.

     Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.

     We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said “Fix bayonets?”

     And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty nine years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”

     He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the first of many Last Stands.

     This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell with its iconic crack, I am broken open to the suffering of others and the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.

     This morning I awoke to a call to identify the body of a friend missing and believed killed in Gaza by Israeli terrorists in the savage street fighting which followed the rocket attacks of last week, which I was unable to do; I searched for my friend in this sad and ruined form, like the skin of a wild thing which has sung itself utterly away, and could recognize nothing.

    Where is my friend, agile, lithe, mercurial, fearless, insightful and quick witted, who always had four scenarios running and three escape routes, who survived against impossible odds through improvisation and leveraging chaos, whose vision could discern true motives within the secret chambers of the human heart and play them like an instrument as songs of rapture and terror, who chameleon-like and protean could shift identities as needed and behind their masks move among her enemies unseen?

      I never knew her true name; perhaps she no longer had one, as is true for so many of us who play the Great Game of futures and the possibilities of becoming human, a term popularized by Rudyard Kipling in the novel Kim. My own names are numberless as the stars, like those of an actor who has played multitudes of roles in films and theatres of many kinds.

     She first entered my orbit during the victorious struggle of Hamas against al Qaeda for dominion of Gaza in August of 2009 in Rafah, an Egyptian Palestinian drawn into the maelstrom of war like countless others by family duty and vendetta.

    Yet she said no to authority at great peril when she could have said yes and become a slave, stood in solidarity with others when she could have run; this was a choice, one which confers agency, autonomy, and self-ownership as a seizure of power in a limited and deterministic context. Refusal to submit is the primary human act, one which cannot be taken from us, wherein we become Unconquered and free, and able to liberate others.

     So it is that we may escape the wilderness of mirrors in which we wander, a realm of lies and illusions, captured and distorted images, falsification and the theft of the soul. For the authentic self, the image which we seize and claim as our own, flies free of its mad circus of seductions and traps. Hence we achieve our true selves and form, in rapture and exaltation as beings of our own uniqueness.

    Impossible that such grandeur could be reduced to its material form, like the abandoned shell of a fantastic sea creature which has grown beyond its limits and moved on, to realms unknown.

     The lines spoken by Hamlet while holding the skull of his friend Yorick came unbidden to my thoughts; “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?”

     For twelve years you danced with death, and danced away laughing, until today.

     Farewell, my friend; I’ll see you in the eyes of the defiant ones, who bear your fire onward into the unknown, and with it I hope your laughter. Our successors will need both fire and laughter, if the future we win for them is to be equal to its price, and worth living in.

     Our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus from which warriors arise; from each, multitudes. For we live on as echoes and reflections in the lives of others, in the consequences and effects of our actions, in the good we can do for others which gathers force over time, and in the meaning, value, and possibilities we create.

     How can choosing death and freedom be better than submission to authority and its weaponization of fear and force?

     My experience of accepting death in confronting force and violence finds parallels in the mock executions of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maurice Blanchot, and I’m not done challenging state terror and tyranny and forces of repression. I’m going to stand between people with guns and their victims in future, as I have many times in past, and here I find resilience among my motivating and informing sources; Sartre’s total freedom won by refusal to submit, and Camus’ rebellion against authority which renders force meaningless when met by disobedience, give me the ability to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.

     And all who are mortal share these burdens with me. In this all who resist subjugation by authority are alike as Living Autonomous Zones, bearing seeds of change; we can say with the figure of Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”

     We are all Nikolai Gogol’s hero in Diary of a Madman, caught in the wheels of a great machine he services, like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. But we know that we are trapped and enslaved, and we know how and why; we know the secrets of our condition which our masters would keep silent, and in refusing to be silent we can free ourselves and our fellows. This Michel Foucault called truth telling; a poetic vision of reimagination and sacred calling to pursue the truth which bears transformative power.

     So here I offer all of you words of hope for moments of despair, the horror of meaninglessness, the grief of loss, and the guilt of survivorship.

     Your voice has defied our nothingness, and resounds throughout the chasms of a hostile and dehumanizing world; gathering force and transformative power as it finds a thousand echoes, and begins to awaken refusal to submit to authority and to heal the pathology of our falsification and disconnectedness. 

    The voice of even one human being who bears a wound of humanity which opens him to the pain of others and who places his life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who in resistance to tyranny and terror, force and control, becomes unconquered and free, such a voice of liberation is unstoppable as the tides, an agent of reimagination and transformation which seizes the gates of our prisons and frees the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

    Despair not and be joyful, for we who are Living Autonomous Zones help others break the chains of their enslavement simply by condition of being as well as action; for we violate norms, transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, expose the lies and illusions of authority, and render the forces of repression powerless to compel obedience.

      This is the primary revolutionary struggle which precedes and underlies all else; the seizure of ownership of ourselves from those who would enslave us.  

     Such is the hope of humankind.

ولأنني لا أستطيع التفكير في فلسطين الآن دون التفكير أيضًا في صديقة ضحت بحياتها من أجل تحرير فلسطين ، وأصبحت بالنسبة لي شخصية من رموز الحرية ، فإليك المنشور الذي حظره فيسبوك ؛ ولكن أيضًا سؤال لأولئك الأصدقاء الذين شاركوا أفكاري معي في القراءة حتى الآن. أصبحت فلسطين الآن امرأة في مخيلتي. امرأة بطولية ومحددة ، لكنها كانت حقيقية جدًا ، ولا يسعني إلا أن أتساءل ما هو نوع العالم الذي يمكن أن نبنيه معًا إذا ارتدت الأمم أشكال الناس لنا جميعًا ، أقنعة الأصدقاء الذين أحببناهم؟

      هل سنكون بشرًا أفضل ، إذا كانت الأمم كأفكار عن الآخر والانتماء تعيش في داخلنا كشخصيات نطالب بها ومن يطالبنا بدورنا؟

      كيف لو كان الجواب على أصول الشر في الخوف والقوة بهذه البساطة ؛ ما نعرفه ونحبه لا يمكن أن يكون غريبًا علينا.

      كيف لو كنا جميعًا ننتمي إلى بعضنا البعض؟

21 يونيو 2022 نوازن بين رعب لا شيء لدينا وبين فرحة الحرية الكاملة وعيوب إنسانيتنا مع قوة الحب التعويضية وانكسار العالم بأملنا السخيف لإمكانيات لا حدود لها في أن نصبح إنسانًا

     الموت هو الحدث التخريبي النهائي للحياة ، وصورة الفوضى كقوة إبداعية وإمكانية التكيف للنظام. في هذا اليوم ، قمت بإعادة تمثيل مراحل عملية الحزن حيث أعيش مرة أخرى حدثًا مضى عليه عام مضى ، وأنا عالق في متاهة قصته ، وكما هو الحال دائمًا مع مثل هذه المجمعات من الذاكرة والتاريخ والهوية ، فإنني أخرج من خلال مروره مع التغيير. إنطباع.

     يمكن لبعض القصص أن تحطم حياتنا ، ولكنها تحررنا أيضًا من إرث التاريخ وحدود أنفسنا السابقة.

    هذه قصة أصبحت متداخلة مع قراءتي السنوية لأعمال سارتر احتفالًا بعيد ميلاده ، وهو تجاور أجده مناسبًا تمامًا ، ومنيرًا ، ومفعمًا بالأمل بشكل غريب.

    ألسنا القصص التي نرويها عن أنفسنا وأنفسنا والآخرين؟

     نختار أصدقائنا وعشاقنا من بين تلك الانعكاسات التي تجسد الصفات التي نرغب في استيعابها في أنفسنا أو الاندماج الكامل في وعينا وشخصيتنا ؛ وهي الواجهة بين هذين المجالين المحدودين ، المثالية والواقعية ، التي دفعت إلى الاستجواب اليوم.

     هذا هو المكان الذي يعيش فيه فن التساؤل ، عند تقاطع الأسلوب السقراطي والخطاب الكلاسيكي ، وديالكتيك التاريخ ، وإشكالية دوافعنا ومشاعرنا وعمليات تفكيرنا من خلال أساليب العلاج النفسي.

      نتحدث عن تجاور العوالم الخيالية والفعلية للوجود كشكل من أشكال الكولاج الدادائي كما ابتكره تريستان تزارا واستغلها كمنهجية من قبل ويليام س. طبيعة الحقيقة التي وصفها أكوتاغاوا في بوابة راشومون وأساليب الرواية التي جسدها ريموند كوينو باعتبارها مطبقة على الهوية وتأويل الذات ، وإضفاء المثالية على الجمال الذكوري والأنثوي كقوى ثنائية للنفسية تعمل بنفسها من خلال علاقاتنا مع أنفسنا ومعنا. الآخرين. هذه العمليات الثلاث المتوازية والمترابطة تشكل من نصبح ، وكيف نستغل الآخرين في خلقنا لأنفسنا.

     يجب أن نتحلى أولاً بحقيقة أن التعامل مع ذكرياتنا عن شخص ما يختلف عن التجربة الحية لتاريخنا ؛ كل هذا من جانب واحد وقد تم نقله إلى مساحة داخلية للأداء ، حيث يستمر إعادة التخيل والتحول. الخريطة ليست المنطقة ، كما يعلمنا ألفريد كورزيبسكي ، ولا فكرتنا عن شخص مساوٍ للشخص الفعلي نفسه.

ما هي الأجزاء في نفسي التي أجسدها كمساحة تصويرية تنمو فيها الشخصية التي اعتقدت أنها كليوباترا ، مع كل التناقض ، والقوة ، وموروثات التاريخ الثقافي ، والحيوية التي ينطوي عليها مثل هذا التعريف ، كيف أتخيل هي الآن ، وما نوع القصة التي أوقعتنا فيها؟

     أفكر بها الآن من منظور إيرين أدلر الحاذقة والمتطورة والمخالفة لراشيل ماك آدمز في فيلم شيرلوك هولمز ، حيث أصبحت طوال اثني عشر عامًا من عملنا في نضال التحرير من أجل استقلال فلسطين ، مع عناصر من ميلي بوبي براون الشجاعة ، إنولا هولمز الرائعة ، وبدون حدود تمامًا كما بدأت ، تحمل ألوان أحد أفراد العائلة المحبوب والمفترض أنه استشهد أثناء التحقيق في اختفائه. أنا متأكد بشكل معقول من أن هذه ليست الطريقة التي رأت بها نفسها.

     لإلقاء الضوء على كيف يمكن للمرأة الفلسطينية أن تتخيل نفسها ، والشخصيات التي قد تختار أن تلعبها كنماذج يحتذى بها والقصص التي قد تجسدها كطقوس ، حتى لو كانت غير عادية مثلها ، قد ننظر إلى ثقافة غنية بشكل رائع. مخرجات وكاتبات أفلام فلسطينيات ؛ للمؤلفين آن ماري جاسر وميسلون حمود ومي مصري وفرح نابلسي والروائيين سوزان أبو الهوى وليانا بدر وغادة كرمي وسحر خليفة وهالة عليان وسحر مصطفى.

     مع الأخذ في الاعتبار أن جميع قوائم القراءة هذه ليست أقل من مجموعة من الهويات المصرح بها. كما توضح مارغريت أتوود بشكل رائع في أعمالها ، فإن الترابطات الخاصة بنا أساسية في بناء هوياتنا ، بما في ذلك هوياتنا الجنسية والجنس ، والمحاكاة والعمليات الديالكتيكية للتاريخ.

     وهذا هو المكان الذي لا تتوقف فيه أبدًا عن أن تكون رائعة ، دراسة الإنسان والمعنى والقيمة والإمكانيات اللامحدودة لتصبح إنسانًا. في مجال علاقاتنا مع الآخرين ، الموازية والمترابطة مع علاقاتنا بين النصفين المذكر والمؤنث من نفسنا ، يتطور كل منهما مع الآخر في عمليات متكررة للنمو والتكيف مع التغيير في بناء الهوية.

     أقول مرة أخرى. نحن نفسر تصرفات الآخرين ونكوِّن علاقات على أساس تأويلنا الذاتي وأفكارنا عن أنفسنا ، ونستخدم علاقاتنا مع أناس حقيقيين لتشكيل من نرغب في أن نصبح.

       كيف يعمل هذا في الحياة الحقيقية؟ كمثال شخصي للفجوات غير المترابطة في المعنى في الواجهات بين العوالم المحدودة للشخصيات الذكورية والمؤنثة ، مساحة خالية من اللعب الإبداعي ، أعرض القطع الأثرية لذاكرة شخصية قد تتوافق أو لا تتوافق مع الشهيد الذي أعرفه فقط من خلال الاسم الرمزي لها: كليوباترا.

      من الموقف الأخير الذي التقينا فيه وعقدنا تحالفًا ، تعرضنا للخيانة ووقعنا في الفخ الذي قلبناه ضد أعدائنا الذين حاصروا أنفسهم معنا ، والذي أعتقد أنه مشهد المعركة الأخير في فيلم السيد والسيدة سميث ، بدأ هذا المسعى الأوبرالي بسبب صراع الهيمنة بين حماس والقاعدة في غزة خلال شهر أغسطس من عام 2009 ، حيث تغلبت قوى الضوء على قوى الظلام في انتصار حماس ، حيث لعبت إسرائيل بعضها ضد بعض من خلال التسلل. عملاء وجواسيس وأصول يمكن إنكارها واستخدام فريق ريكون خاص يتنكر في شكل فصائل عربية مختلفة لارتكاب فظائع ضد الجماعات العربية المتنافسة المزعومة في سياسة كلاسيكية من فرق تسد. كانت مساحة اللعب هذه معقدة بسبب الثأر العشائري مثلها ، والتشظي السياسي والديني المعتاد ، وعصابات الجريمة ، وقوات المرتزقة ، والقبلية ، والفساد ، وحروب الظل للدول الأجنبية.

     تقاطعت مساراتنا عدة مرات على مدار الاثني عشر عامًا التالية ، دائمًا في ظروف لا تُنسى ، وأحيانًا كحلفاء وآخرون كمنافسين ، وغالبًا ما يكون كلاهما. أي من هذه هي النسخة الحقيقية والحقيقية لها ، أم لي؟ مثل هذه التكرارات لصورنا بدون أرقام ، مثل الذوات الملتقطة والمشوهة في مرايا بيت المرح المحاذاة لتعكس إلى اللانهاية.

     Wilderness of Mirrors ، عبارة من T. Eliot’s Gerontin ، هو أحد الأشياء التي أستخدمها لوصف أمراض تزوير أنفسنا من خلال الدعاية والأكاذيب والأوهام ، وإعادة كتابة التواريخ ، وأسرار الدولة ، والحقائق البديلة ، والإيمان الاستبدادي الذي يلتهم الحقائق. هذا أنا أتعاقد مع نقيضه ، الصحافة وشهادة التاريخ على أنهما السعي المقدس للسعي وراء الحقيقة. نحن مزورون لأنفسنا من قبل أنظمة النخبة المهيمنة مثل النظام الأبوي ، ومن قبل أولئك الذين قد يستعبدوننا ، من خلال التقاط قصصنا على أنها سرقة للروح.

     جيمس أنجلتون ، العبقري الشرير في وكالة المخابرات المركزية الأمريكية (سي آي إيه) والذي بنى عليه جون لو كاري شخصيته لجورج سمايلي ، استخدم العبارة سيئة السمعة بهذا المعنى أيضًا ، وأصبحت عالمية في جميع أنحاء مجتمع الاستخبارات الذي شكله وتأثر به خلال الثانية. الحرب العالمية وعواقبها الحرب الباردة. في إشارة إلى السيرة الذاتية لديفيد مارتن بعنوان Wilderness of Mirrors ، وصفها أنجلتون بأنها “عدد لا يحصى من

الحيل والخداع والخدع وجميع وسائل التضليل الأخرى التي تستخدمها الكتلة السوفيتية وأجهزة استخباراتها المنسقة لإرباك الغرب وتقسيمه … مشهد دائم التغير حيث تندمج الحقيقة والوهم “. وبالطبع ، فإن كل ما نسبه إلى السوفييت كان صحيحًا بالنسبة له ، ووكالته الخاصة ، وكذلك بالنسبة لأمريكا ، وكذلك بالنسبة لجميع الدول ، فكلها هي بيوت الوهم.

     تستخدم Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat العبارة ، في قصة حول إنشاء ضابط وهمي يحمل وثائق مصممة لخداع النازيين للاستعداد لغزو أوروبا في مكان آخر غير صقلية ، وهي سلسلة شاهدتها باهتمام شديد لأن كل واحد منا تم إنشاؤها بواسطة قصصنا تمامًا مثل هذه الهوية المزيفة المرتبطة بجسد المهجور. داخل كل واحد منا ، يقوم فريق من المؤلفين والنماذج البدائية والشخصيات العابرة للشخصيات مثل الأنيما التي تهمنا هنا ، بإنشاء شخصياتنا من خلال القصص وشبكة من الذكريات والتاريخ والهوية ؛ وهم يفعلون ذلك لأغراضهم الخاصة ، والتي لا نفهمها دائمًا.

     كما كتب T. S. Eliot في Gerontin ، “بعد هذه المعرفة ، أي غفران؟ فكر الآن

للتاريخ العديد من الممرات الماكرة والممرات المفتعلة

والقضايا والخداع مع التهامس الطموح ،

يرشدنا بالباطل “

      نحن مثل الأشياء التي تصنع الأحلام ، كما يعلمنا شكسبير في الفصل الرابع ، المشهد الأول من The Tempest ، سطر تحدث به آرييل. لأنه إذا كنا كائنات سريعة الزوال وغير جوهرية ، بناء لقصصنا ، فهذا يعني أيضًا أن الطبيعة الوجودية للإنسان هي أرض صراع يمكن الاستيلاء عليها من خلال الاستيلاء على السلطة.

      السؤال الأول الذي يجب طرحه في القصة هو لمن هذه القصة؟

      لا يزال الصراع قائمًا دائمًا بين القصص التي نحكيها عن أنفسنا وتلك التي يرويها الآخرون عنا ؛ الأقنعة التي نصنعها لأنفسنا وتلك التي صنعها لنا الآخرون.

      هذه هي الثورة الأولى التي يجب أن نحارب فيها جميعًا ، النضال من أجل امتلاك أنفسنا.

      من إذن سنكون؟ نسأل أنفسنا عن الأسطح والصور والأقنعة التي تتفاوض كل لحظة على حدودنا مع الآخرين.

     تجيب عليها ذاتنا السرية ، ذات الظلام والعاطفة ، الذات التي تعيش خارج المرآة ولا تعرف حدودًا ، غير مقيدة بالزمان والمكان وغير محدودة في الاحتمالات ؛ من تريد أن تصبح؟

كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 21 يونيو 2021 ، أمل البشرية: أن تصبح مناطق حكم ذاتي كوكلاء للفوضى والتغيير التحويلي ؛ لقد كتب صديق يائسًا من أهميتنا وأملنا في تحرير البشرية ، وتأثير حياتنا ونضالاتنا التي توازن عيوب إنسانيتنا ضد القوى الوحشية والواسعة لنظام التجريد من الإنسانية والتزوير والتسليع ؛ أن تكون إنسانًا يعني أن تعيش في حالة أزمة وجودية ونضال من أجل امتلاك أنفسنا.

     اليوم هو عيد ميلاد جان بول سارتر ، ولذا وجدني هذا الحدث أقرأ مرة أخرى إعادة تخيله الرائع لجان جينيه في سانت جينيه: الممثل والشهيد ؛ جينيه الذي وضعني على طريق حياتي بقسم المقاومة في بيروت صيف 1982.

     كان جنود الاحتلال قد أضرموا النار في المنازل في الشارع الذي أسكن فيه ، ودعوا الناس للخروج والاستسلام. كانوا يعصبون أعين أطفال من فعلوا ويستخدمونهم كدروع بشرية.

     لم يكن لدينا أي سلاح آخر غير زجاجة الشمبانيا الفارغة التي انتهينا منها لتونا من وجبة الإفطار المكونة من كريب الفراولة ؛ سألت “أي أفكار؟” ، فهز كتفيه وقال “أصلح الحراب؟”

     ثم أعطاني مبدأ العمل الذي عشت من خلاله تسعة وثلاثين عامًا حتى الآن ؛ “عندما لا يكون هناك أمل ، يكون المرء حرا في القيام بأشياء مستحيلة ، وأشياء مجيدة.”

     سألني إذا كنت سأستسلم فقلت لا. ابتسم وقال: “ولن أفعل”. ولذا أقسمني على القسم الذي ابتكره في عام 1940 في باريس في بداية الاحتلال لمثل هؤلاء الأصدقاء الذين يمكن أن يجمعهم ، وقد أعيدت صياغته من القسم الذي كان قد أقامه كجندى. قال إنه أفضل شيء سرقه على الإطلاق ؛ “نقسم على ولائنا لبعضنا البعض ، أن نقاوم ولا نستسلم ، ولا نتخلى عن زملائنا.” لقد أصبحت الآن حاملًا لتقليدًا يتجاوز عمره الثمانين عامًا وصنعت في أكثر النزاعات رعباً ورعبًا التي عرفها العالم على الإطلاق ، قبل وقت قصير من توقعي أن أحترق حيًا في الأول من بين العديد من المدرجات الأخيرة.

     كانت هذه لحظة تزويري ، هذا القرار لاختيار الموت على القهر ، ومنذ أن أصابني الجرس ، أدق الجرس. ومثل جرس الحرية بصدعه الأيقوني ، أنا منفتح على معاناة الآخرين وعيوب إنسانيتنا. كانت هذه أعظم هدية حصلت عليها على الإطلاق ، هذا التعاطف الناجم عن جرح مقدس ، ولن أتوقف أبدًا عن الدعوة إلى الحرية ، ولن أتردد في الرد لأنني قادر على الدعوة إلى التضامن مع الآخرين.

استيقظت هذا الصباح على اتصال هاتفي للتعرف على جثة صديق مفقود ويعتقد أنه قُتل في غزة على يد إرهابيين إسرائيليين في قتال الشوارع الوحشي الذي أعقب الهجمات الصاروخية الأسبوع الماضي ، وهو ما لم أستطع فعله ؛ لقد بحثت عن صديقي في هذا الشكل الحزين والمدمّر ، مثل جلد الشيء البري الذي غرق تمامًا بعيدًا ، ولم يستطع التعرف على أي شيء.

    أين صديقي ، رشيق ، رشيق ، زئبقي ، شجاع ، ثاقب وسريع الذكاء ، الذي كان لديه دائمًا أربعة سيناريوهات قيد التشغيل وثلاثة طرق للهرب ، والذي نجا من الصعاب المستحيلة من خلال الارتجال والاستفادة من الفوضى ، والذي يمكن لرؤيته أن تميز الدوافع الحقيقية داخل الغرف السرية من قلب الإنسان ولعبها كآلة موسيقية مثل نشوة الطرب والرعب ، من الذي تشبه الحرباء والبروتين يمكن أن يغير الهويات حسب الحاجة وتتنقل وراء أقنعةها بين أعدائها غير المرئيين؟

      لم أعرف اسمها الحقيقي قط. ربما لم يعد لديها واحدة ، كما هو الحال بالنسبة للكثيرين منا الذين يلعبون اللعبة الكبرى للمستقبل وإمكانيات أن يصبحوا بشرًا ، وهو مصطلح شاعه روديارد كيبلينج في رواية كيم. أسمائي لا تعد ولا تحصى كنجوم ، مثل أسماء الممثل الذي لعب العديد من الأدوار في الأفلام والمسارح من أنواع عديدة.

     لقد دخلت فلكي لأول مرة خلال كفاح حماس المنتصر ضد القاعدة للسيطرة على غزة في أغسطس من عام 2009 في رفح ، وهي فلسطينية مصرية انجرفت إلى دوامة الحرب مثل عدد لا يحصى من الآخرين بسبب واجب الأسرة والثأر.

    ومع ذلك ، قالت لا للسلطة في خطر كبير عندما كان بإمكانها أن تقول نعم وتصبح عبدة ، ووقفت متضامنة مع الآخرين عندما كان بإمكانها الركض ؛ كان هذا اختيارًا يمنح الوكالة والاستقلالية والملكية الذاتية كاستيلاء على السلطة في سياق محدود وحتمي. إن رفض الخضوع هو الفعل الإنساني الأساسي ، الذي لا يمكن أن يؤخذ منا ، حيث نصبح غير مقيدين وأحرارًا ، وقادرون على تحرير الآخرين.

     لذلك قد نهرب من برية المرايا التي نتجول فيها ، عالم الأكاذيب والأوهام ، الصور الملتقطة والمشوهة ، التزييف وسرقة الروح. بالنسبة للذات الأصيلة ، فإن الصورة التي نلتقطها ونطالب بها على أنها صورنا ، تطير خالية من سيركها المجنون من الإغراءات والفخاخ. ومن هنا نحقق ذواتنا وشكلنا الحقيقيين ، في نشوة الطرب والتمجيد ككائنات فريدة من نوعها.

    من المستحيل اختزال هذه العظمة إلى شكلها المادي ، مثل القشرة المهجورة لمخلوق بحري رائع نما إلى ما وراء حدوده وانتقل إلى عوالم غير معروفة.

     جاءت السطور التي قالها هاملت بينما كان ممسكًا بجمجمة صديقه يوريك غير محظورة على أفكاري ؛ علقت هنا تلك الشفاه التي قبلتها ، ولا أعرف كيف كثيرًا. حيث يكون الإستهزاء بك الآن؟ الخاص بك gambols؟ أغانيك؟ ومضات الفرح الخاصة بك ، التي لن تضبط الطاولة على هدير؟ لا أحد الآن ، للسخرية من ابتسامتك؟ “

     لمدة اثني عشر عاما رقصت مع الموت ورقصتي ضاحكة حتى اليوم.

     الوداع يا صديقي. سأراكم في عيون التحدي ، الذين يحملون نيرانكم نحو المجهول ، ومعها أتمنى أن تضحكوا. سيحتاج خلفاؤنا كلا من النار والضحك ، إذا كان المستقبل الذي نربحه لهم هو أن يكون مساوياً لسعره ، ويستحق العيش فيه.

     حياتنا مثل أسنان التنين التي زرعها في الأرض الأمير الفينيقي قدموس الذي نشأ منه المحاربون. من كل جموع. لأننا نعيش كأصداء وانعكاسات في حياة الآخرين ، في عواقب وتأثيرات أفعالنا ، في الخير الذي يمكننا فعله للآخرين الذي يجمع القوة بمرور الوقت ، وفي المعنى والقيمة والإمكانيات التي نخلقها.

     كيف يكون اختيار الموت والحرية أفضل من الخضوع للسلطة وتسليحها بالخوف والقوة؟

     تجربتي في قبول الموت في مواجهة القوة والعنف تجد أوجه تشابه في الإعدام الوهمي لفيودور دوستويفسكي وموريس بلانشو ، ولم أنتهي من تحدي إرهاب الدولة والاستبداد وقوى القمع. سأقف بين الأشخاص المسلحين وضحاياهم في المستقبل ، كما فعلت مرات عديدة في الماضي ، وهنا أجد مرونة بين مصادري المحفزة والمعلمة ؛ تم كسب الحرية الكاملة لسارتر برفضه الخضوع ، وتمرد كامو على السلطة الذي يجعل القوة بلا معنى عندما تقابل بالعصيان ، يمنحني القدرة على شق طريقي للخروج من الأنقاض والقيام بموقف أخير آخر ، بعيدًا عن الأمل في النصر أو حتى البقاء. .

     وجميع البشر الفانين يشاركونني هذه الأعباء. في هذا كل الذين يقاومون الاستعباد من قبل السلطة هم على حد سواء مناطق حية ذاتية الحكم ، تحمل بذور التغيير. يمكننا القول مع شخصية لوكي ؛ “انا أعاني الارهاق لتحقيق غاية مجيدة.”

     نحن جميعًا بطل نيكولاي غوغول في يوميات رجل مجنون ، عالقون في عجلات آلة رائعة يخدمها ، مثل تشارلي شابلن في فيلمه Modern Times. لكننا نعلم أننا محاصرون ومستعبدون ، ونعرف كيف ولماذا. نحن نعرف أسرار حالتنا التي سيصمت أسيادنا ، وفي رفض الصمت يمكننا تحرير أنفسنا.

وفاق ورفاقنا. هذا ميشيل فوكو دعا قول الحقيقة. رؤية شعرية لإعادة التخيل والدعوة المقدسة لمتابعة الحقيقة التي تحمل قوة تحويلية.

     لذلك أقدم لكم جميعًا كلمات الأمل في لحظات اليأس ، والرعب من انعدام المعنى ، والحزن من الخسارة ، والشعور بالذنب من البقاء على قيد الحياة.

     لقد تحدى صوتك العدم لدينا ، ويتردد صداه في جميع شقوق عالم معادٍ وغير إنساني ؛ تجمع القوة والقوة التحويلية لأنها تجد ألف صدى ، وتبدأ في إيقاظ رفض الخضوع للسلطة وشفاء أمراض تزويرنا وانفصالنا.

    صوت إنسان واحد يحمل جرحًا إنسانيًا يفتحه على ألم الآخرين ويضع حياته في الميزان مع أولئك الذين أسماهم فرانتس فانون معذبو الأرض ، والضعفاء والمحرومين ، والمُسكِمَين و. المبعوث ، الذي في مقاومة الاستبداد والإرهاب ، القوة والسيطرة ، يصبح غير مقهر وحر ، صوت التحرير هذا لا يمكن إيقافه مثل المد والجزر ، عامل إعادة التخيل والتحول الذي يستولي على أبواب سجوننا ويحرر الإمكانيات اللامحدودة من أن يصبح إنسانًا.

    لا تيأس وكن مبتهجًا ، لأننا نحن الذين نعيش في مناطق حكم ذاتي نساعد الآخرين على كسر قيود استعبادهم ببساطة بشرط أن يكونوا فعلًا ؛ لأننا نخالف الأعراف ، ونتجاوز حدود المحرمات ، ونكشف أكاذيب وأوهام السلطة ، ونجعل قوى القمع عاجزة عن فرض الطاعة.

      هذا هو النضال الثوري الأساسي الذي يسبق كل شيء ويقوم على أساسه. الاستيلاء على ملكية أنفسنا من أولئك الذين يستعبدوننا.

     هذا هو أمل البشرية.

       How Palestinian Women Imagine Themselves, in Film:

Salt of the Sea, film by Annemarie Jacir

In Between, film by Maysaloun Hamoud

The Present, film by Farah Nabulsi

3000 Nights, film by Mai Masri

Soraida, a Woman of Palestine, documentary film by Tahani Rached

          How Palestinian Women Imagine Themselves, in Literature:

Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa

Against the Loveless World: A Novel, by Susan Abulhawa

The Eye of the Mirror, by Liana Badr

In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, by Ghada Karmi

Passage to the Plaza, by Sahar Khalifeh

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52061970-passage-to-the-plaza

Salt Houses, by Hala Alyan

The Beauty of Your Face, by Sahar Mustafah

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45894170-the-beauty-of-your-face

19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, by Naomi Shihab Nye

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/342068.19_Varieties_of_Gazelle

     Negotiating the Interface Between Bounded Realms, a Study in Film and Literature: the Anima or Inner Woman of my Platonic Ideal Versus the Ghosts of Memory of a Lost Friend

How I remember our meeting, betrayed and standing together against the world: Mr & Mrs Smith final gunfight scene

How I imagine her now:

Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes Montage to Britney Spears’ version of Bobby Brown’s My Perogative

Enola Holmes Montage to Fifth Harmony’s That’s My Girl

Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

                  References

Zazie in the Metro, by Raymond Queneau

Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Jay Rubin (Translator), Haruki Murakami (Introduction), Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Illustrator)

The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess, by Andrei Codrescu

Mosaic of Juxtaposition: William S. Burroughs’ Narrative Revolution,

by Micheal Sean Bolton

Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction,

by Robin Lydenberg, William S. Burroughs

Charlie Chaplin in The Factory

Song: “Monster” – Imagine Dragons (cover by Runaground on youtube)

With film montage of Marvel’s Loki

Hamlet: Screenplay, Introduction And Film Diary, by Kenneth Branagh (introduction and screenplay), William Shakespeare

Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, by Jean-Paul Sartre

The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre (Preface)

Kipling’s Kim, a Longman Cultural Edition, by Tricia Lootens, Rudyard Kipling

Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, by Nikolai Gogol

Parrhesia

https://psyche.co/ideas/as-the-ancient-greeks-knew-frankness-is-an-essential-virtue?utm_

Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, by Michel Foucault

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, by Roberto Calasso

The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anna Brailovsky (Translator)

The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, by Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida

Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, by Alfred Korzybski

The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, by Albert Camus

A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, by Robert Zaretsky

Gerontin, by T.S. Eliot

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47254/gerontion

Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents, by David C. Martin

Operation Mincemeat Netflix trailer

The Tempest, by William Shakespeare

           Articles on the war in Gaza in 2021

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/17/israeli-air-raids-target-gaza-strip-for-second-time-since-truce

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/15/gaza-protests-against-israeli-right-wing-march-through-jerusalem

https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2021/gaza-families-left-behind/index.html

On Death and Grief Process

https://www.lionsroar.com/the-wisdom-in-the-dark-emotions/

Arabic

21 حزيران (يونيو) 2022 نوازن بين رعب العدم وبين فرحة الحرية الكاملة وعيوب إنسانيتنا مع قوة الحب التعويضية وانكسار العالم بأملنا العبثي لإمكانيات لا حدود لها في أن نصبح إنسانًا

     الموت هو الحدث التخريبي النهائي للحياة ، وصورة الفوضى كقوة إبداعية وإمكانية التكيف للنظام. لقد قمت في هذا اليوم بإعادة تمثيل مراحل الحزن حيث أعيش مرة أخرى حدثًا مضى عليه عام مضى ، وأنا عالق في متاهة قصته ، وكما هو الحال دائمًا مع مثل هذه المجمعات من الذاكرة والتاريخ والهوية ، فإنني أخرج من خلال مروره مع التغيير. إنطباع.

     يمكن لبعض القصص أن تحطم حياتنا ، ولكنها تحررنا أيضًا من إرث التاريخ وحدود أنفسنا السابقة.

    هذه قصة أصبحت متداخلة مع قراءتي السنوية لأعمال سارتر احتفالًا بعيد ميلاده ، وهو تجاور أجده مناسبًا تمامًا ، ومنيرًا ، ومفعمًا بالأمل بشكل غريب.

    ألسنا القصص التي نرويها عن أنفسنا وأنفسنا والآخرين؟

     نختار أصدقائنا وعشاقنا من بين تلك الانعكاسات التي تجسد الصفات التي نرغب في استيعابها في أنفسنا أو الاندماج الكامل في وعينا وشخصيتنا ؛ وهي الواجهة بين هذين المجالين المحدودين ، المثالية والواقعية ، التي دفعت إلى الاستجواب اليوم.

     هذا هو المكان الذي يعيش فيه فن التساؤل ، عند تقاطع الأسلوب السقراطي والخطاب الكلاسيكي ، وديالكتيك التاريخ ، وإشكالية دوافعنا ومشاعرنا وعمليات تفكيرنا من خلال أساليب العلاج النفسي.

      نتحدث عن تجاور العوالم التخيلية والفعلية للوجود كشكل من أشكال الكولاج الدادائي كما ابتكره تريستان تزارا واستغلها كمنهجية من قبل ويليام س. طبيعة الحقيقة التي وصفها أكوتاغاوا في بوابة راشومون وأساليب الرواية التي جسدها ريموند كوينو باعتبارها مطبقة على الهوية وتأويل الذات ، وإضفاء المثالية على الجمال الذكوري والأنثوي كقوى ثنائية للنفسية تعمل بنفسها من خلال علاقاتنا مع أنفسنا ومعنا. الآخرين. هذه العمليات الثلاث المتوازية والمترابطة تشكل من نصبح ، وكيف نستغل الآخرين في خلقنا لأنفسنا.

يجب أن نتحلى أولاً بحقيقة أن التعامل مع ذكرياتنا عن شخص ما يختلف عن التجربة الحية لتاريخنا ؛ كل هذا من جانب واحد وقد تم نقله إلى مساحة داخلية للأداء ، حيث يستمر إعادة التخيل والتحول. الخريطة ليست المنطقة ، كما يعلمنا ألفريد كورزيبسكي ، ولا فكرتنا عن شخص مساوٍ للشخص الفعلي نفسه.

     ما هي الأجزاء في نفسي التي أجسدها كمساحة تصويرية تنمو فيها الشخصية التي اعتقدت أنها كليوباترا ، مع كل التناقض ، والقوة ، وموروثات التاريخ الثقافي ، والحيوية التي يوحي بها هذا التعريف ، كيف أتخيل هي الآن ، وما نوع القصة التي أوقعتنا فيها؟

     أفكر بها الآن من منظور إيرين أدلر الحاذقة والمتطورة والمخالفة لراشيل ماك آدمز في فيلم شيرلوك هولمز ، حيث أصبحت طوال اثني عشر عامًا من عملنا في نضال التحرير من أجل استقلال فلسطين ، مع عناصر من ميلي بوبي براون الشجاعة ، إنولا هولمز الرائعة ، وبدون حدود تمامًا كما بدأت ، تحمل ألوان أحد أفراد العائلة المحبوب والمفترض أنه استشهد أثناء التحقيق في اختفائه. أنا متأكد بشكل معقول من أن هذه ليست الطريقة التي رأت بها نفسها.

     لإلقاء الضوء على كيف يمكن للمرأة الفلسطينية أن تتخيل نفسها ، والشخصيات التي قد تختار لعبها كنماذج يحتذى بها والقصص التي قد تجسدها كطقوس ، حتى لو كانت غير عادية مثلها ، قد ننظر إلى ثقافة غنية رائعة من مخرجات وكاتبات أفلام فلسطينيات ؛ للمؤلفين آن ماري جاسر وميسلون حمود ومي مصري وفرح نابلسي والروائيين سوزان أبو الهوى وليانا بدر وغادة كرمي وسحر خليفة وهالة عليان وسحر مصطفى.

     مع الأخذ في الاعتبار أن جميع قوائم القراءة هذه ليست أقل من مجموعة من الهويات المصرح بها. كما توضح مارغريت أتوود بشكل رائع في أعمالها ، فإن النصوص البينية لدينا أساسية في بناء هوياتنا ، بما في ذلك هوياتنا الجنسية والجنس ، والمحاكاة والعمليات الديالكتيكية للتاريخ.

وهذا هو المكان الذي لا تتوقف فيه أبدًا عن أن تكون رائعة ، دراسة الإنسان والمعنى والقيمة والإمكانيات اللامحدودة لتصبح إنسانًا. في مجال علاقاتنا مع الآخرين ، الموازية والمترابطة مع علاقاتنا بين النصفين المذكر والمؤنث من نفسنا ، يتطور كل منهما مع الآخر في عمليات متكررة للنمو والتكيف مع التغيير في بناء الهوية.

     أقول مرة أخرى. نحن نفسر تصرفات الآخرين ونكوِّن علاقات على أساس تأويلنا الذاتي وأفكارنا عن أنفسنا ، ونستخدم علاقاتنا مع أناس حقيقيين لتشكيل من نرغب في أن نصبح.

       كيف يعمل هذا في الحياة الحقيقية؟ كمثال شخصي للفجوات غير المترابطة في المعنى في الواجهات بين العوالم المحدودة للشخصيات الذكورية والمؤنثة ، مساحة خالية من اللعب الإبداعي ، أعرض القطع الأثرية لذاكرة شخصية قد تتوافق أو لا تتوافق مع الشهيد الذي أعرفه فقط من خلال الاسم الرمزي لها: كليوباترا.

      من الموقف الأخير الذي التقينا فيه وعقدنا تحالفًا ، تعرضنا للخيانة ووقعنا في الفخ الذي قلبناه ضد أعدائنا الذين حاصروا أنفسهم معنا ، والذي أعتقد أنه مشهد المعركة الأخير في فيلم السيد والسيدة سميث ، بدأ هذا المسعى الأوبرالي بسبب صراع الهيمنة بين حماس والقاعدة في غزة خلال شهر أغسطس من عام 2009 ، حيث تغلبت فيه قوى الضوء على قوى الظلام بانتصار حماس ، حيث لعبت إسرائيل بعضها ضد بعض من خلال التسلل. عملاء وجواسيس وأصول يمكن إنكارها واستخدام فريق ريكون خاص يتنكر في شكل فصائل عربية مختلفة لارتكاب فظائع ضد الجماعات العربية المتنافسة المفترضة في سياسة كلاسيكية من فرق تسد. كانت مساحة اللعب هذه معقدة بسبب الثأر العشائري مثلها ، والتشظي السياسي والديني المعتاد ، وعصابات الجريمة ، وقوات المرتزقة ، والقبلية ، والفساد ، وحروب الظل للدول الأجنبية.

     تقاطعت مساراتنا عدة مرات على مدار الاثني عشر عامًا التالية ، دائمًا في ظروف لا تُنسى ، وأحيانًا كحلفاء وآخرون كمنافسين ، وغالبًا ما يكون كلاهما. أي من هذه هي النسخة الحقيقية والحقيقية لها ، أم لي؟ مثل هذه التكرارات لصورنا بدون أرقام ، مثل الذوات الملتقطة والمشوهة في مرايا بيت المرح المحاذاة لتعكس إلى اللانهاية.

Wilderness of Mirrors ، عبارة من T. Eliot’s Gerontin ، هو واحد أستخدمه لوصف علم الأمراض من تزوير أنفسنا من خلال الدعاية والأكاذيب والأوهام ، وإعادة كتابة التواريخ ، وأسرار الدولة ، والحقائق البديلة ، والإيمان الاستبدادي الذي يلتهم الحقائق. هذا أنا أتعاقد مع نقيضه ، الصحافة وشهادة التاريخ على أنهما السعي المقدس للسعي وراء الحقيقة. نحن مزورون لأنفسنا من قبل أنظمة النخبة المهيمنة مثل النظام الأبوي ، ومن قبل أولئك الذين يستعبدوننا ، من خلال التقاط قصصنا على أنها سرقة للروح.

     جيمس أنجلتون ، العبقري الشرير في وكالة المخابرات المركزية الأمريكية (سي آي إيه) والذي بنى عليه جون لو كار شخصيته لجورج سمايلي ، استخدم هذه العبارة بشكل سيئ السمعة بهذا المعنى أيضًا ، وقد أصبحت عالمية في جميع أنحاء مجتمع الاستخبارات الذي شكله وأثر عليه خلال الثانية. الحرب العالمية وعواقبها الحرب الباردة. في إشارة إلى السيرة الذاتية التي كتبها ديفيد مارتن عن نفسه بعنوان Wilderness of Mirrors ، وصفها أنجلتون بأنها “عدد لا يحصى من الحيل والخداع والخدع وجميع وسائل التضليل الأخرى التي تستخدمها الكتلة السوفيتية وأجهزة استخباراتها المنسقة لإرباك وتقسيم الغرب … مشهد دائم التغير حيث تندمج الحقيقة والوهم “. وبالطبع ، كل ما نسبه إلى السوفييت كان صحيحًا بالنسبة له ، ووكالته الخاصة ، وكذلك بالنسبة لأمريكا ، وكذلك بالنسبة لجميع الدول ، فكلها هي بيوت الوهم.

     تستخدم Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat العبارة ، في قصة حول إنشاء ضابط وهمي يحمل وثائق مصممة لخداع النازيين للاستعداد لغزو أوروبا في مكان آخر غير صقلية ، وهي سلسلة شاهدتها باهتمام شديد لأن كل واحد منا تم إنشاؤها بواسطة قصصنا تمامًا مثل هذه الهوية المزيفة المرتبطة بجسد المهجور. داخل كل واحد منا ، يقوم فريق من المؤلفين والنماذج الأصلية والشخصيات العابرة للشخصيات مثل الأنيما التي تهمنا هنا ، بإنشاء شخصياتنا من خلال القصص وشبكة من الذكريات والتاريخ والهوية ؛ وهم يفعلون ذلك لأغراضهم الخاصة ، والتي لا نفهمها دائمًا.

     كما كتب T. S. Eliot في Gerontin ، “بعد هذه المعرفة ، أي غفران؟ فكر الآن

للتاريخ العديد من الممرات الماكرة والممرات المفتعلة

والقضايا والخداع مع التهامس الطموح ،

ترشدنا بالباطل “

      نحن أشياء مثل صنع الأحلام ، كما يعلمنا شكسبير في الفصل الرابع ، المشهد الأول من العاصفة ، سطر تحدثه آرييل. لأنه إذا كنا كائنات سريعة الزوال وغير جوهرية ، بناء لقصصنا ، فهذا يعني أيضًا أن الطبيعة الوجودية للإنسان هي أرض صراع يمكن الاستيلاء عليها من خلال الاستيلاء على السلطة.

      السؤال الأول الذي يجب طرحه في القصة هو لمن هذه القصة؟

      لا يزال هناك صراع دائمًا بين القصص التي نحكيها عن أنفسنا وتلك التي يرويها الآخرون عنا ؛ الأقنعة التي نصنعها لأنفسنا وتلك التي صنعها لنا الآخرون.

      هذه هي الثورة الأولى التي يجب أن نحارب فيها جميعًا ، النضال من أجل امتلاك أنفسنا.

      من إذن سنكون؟ نسأل أنفسنا عن الأسطح والصور والأقنعة التي تتفاوض كل لحظة على حدودنا مع الآخرين.

     تجيب عليها ذاتنا السرية ، ذات الظلام والعاطفة ، الذات التي تعيش خارج المرآة ولا تعرف حدودًا ، غير مقيدة بالزمان والمكان وغير محدودة في الاحتمالات ؛ من تريد أن تصبح؟

كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 21 يونيو 2021 ، أمل البشرية: أن تصبح مناطق حكم ذاتي كوكلاء للفوضى والتغيير التحويلي ؛ لقد كتب صديق يأسًا من أهميتنا وأملنا في تحرير البشرية ، وتأثير حياتنا ونضالاتنا التي توازن عيوب إنسانيتنا ضد القوى الوحشية والواسعة لنظام التجريد من الإنسانية والتزوير والتسليع ؛ أن تكون إنسانًا يعني أن تعيش في حالة أزمة وجودية ونضال من أجل امتلاك أنفسنا.

     اليوم هو عيد ميلاد جان بول سارتر ، ولذا وجدني هذا الحدث أقرأ مرة أخرى إعادة تخيله الرائع لجان جينيه في سانت جينيه: الممثل والشهيد ؛ جينيه الذي وضعني على طريق حياتي بقسم المقاومة في بيروت صيف 1982.

     كان جنود الاحتلال قد أضرموا النار في المنازل في الشارع الذي أسكن فيه ، ودعوا الناس للخروج والاستسلام. كانوا يعصبون أعين أطفال من فعلوا ويستخدمونهم كدروع بشرية.

     لم يكن لدينا أي سلاح آخر غير زجاجة الشمبانيا الفارغة التي انتهينا للتو من تناول وجبة الإفطار المكونة من كريب الفراولة ؛ سألت “أي أفكار؟” ، فهز كتفيه وقال “أصلح الحراب؟”

     ثم أعطاني مبدأ العمل الذي عشت من خلاله تسعة وثلاثين عامًا حتى الآن ؛ “عندما لا يكون هناك أمل ، يكون المرء حراً في القيام بأشياء مستحيلة ، وأشياء مجيدة.”

     سألني إذا كنت سأستسلم فقلت لا. ابتسم وقال: “ولن أفعل”. ولذا أقسمني على القسم الذي ابتكره في عام 1940 في باريس في بداية الاحتلال لمثل هؤلاء الأصدقاء الذين يمكن أن يجمعهم ، وقد أعيدت صياغته من القسم الذي كان قد أقامه كجندى. قال إنه أفضل شيء سرقه على الإطلاق ؛ “نقسم على ولائنا لبعضنا البعض ، أن نقاوم ولا نستسلم ، ولا نتخلى عن زملائنا.” لقد أصبحت الآن حاملًا لتقليدًا يتجاوز عمره الثمانين عامًا وصنعت في أكثر الصراعات المخيفة والأكثر رعبًا التي عرفها العالم على الإطلاق ، قبل وقت قصير من توقعي أن أحترق حيًا في الأول من بين العديد من المدرجات الأخيرة.

     كانت هذه لحظة تزويري ، هذا القرار باختيار الموت على القهر ، ومنذ أن أصابني الجرس ، أدق الجرس. ومثل جرس الحرية بصدعه الأيقوني ، أنا منفتح على معاناة الآخرين وعيوب إنسانيتنا. كانت هذه أعظم هدية حصلت عليها على الإطلاق ، هذا التعاطف الناجم عن جرح مقدس ، ولن أتوقف أبدًا عن الدعوة إلى الحرية ، ولن أتردد في الرد لأنني قادر على الدعوة إلى التضامن مع الآخرين.

استيقظت هذا الصباح على اتصال هاتفي للتعرف على جثة صديق مفقود ويعتقد أنه قُتل في غزة على يد إرهابيين إسرائيليين في قتال الشوارع الوحشي الذي أعقب الهجمات الصاروخية الأسبوع الماضي ، وهو ما لم أستطع فعله ؛ لقد بحثت عن صديقي في هذا الشكل الحزين والمدمّر ، مثل جلد الشيء الوحشي الذي غنى بنفسه تمامًا ، ولم يستطع التعرف على أي شيء.

    أين صديقي ، رشيق ، رشيق ، زئبقي ، شجاع ، ثاقب وسريع الذكاء ، الذي كان دائمًا لديه أربعة سيناريوهات قيد التشغيل وثلاثة طرق للفرار ، والذي نجا من الصعاب المستحيلة من خلال الارتجال والاستفادة من الفوضى ، والذي يمكن لرؤيته أن تميز الدوافع الحقيقية داخل الغرف السرية من قلب الإنسان ولعبها كآلة موسيقية مثل نشوة الطرب والرعب ، من الذي تشبه الحرباء والبروتين يمكن أن يغير الهويات حسب الحاجة وتتنقل وراء أقنعةها بين أعدائها غير المرئيين؟

      لم أعرف اسمها الحقيقي قط. ربما لم يعد لديها واحدة ، كما هو الحال بالنسبة للكثيرين منا الذين يلعبون اللعبة الكبرى للمستقبل وإمكانيات أن يصبحوا بشرًا ، وهو مصطلح شاعه روديارد كيبلينج في رواية كيم. أسمائي لا تعد ولا تحصى كنجوم ، مثل أسماء الممثل الذي لعب أدوارًا عديدة في الأفلام والمسارح من أنواع عديدة.

     دخلت فلكي لأول مرة خلال كفاح حماس المنتصر ضد القاعدة للسيطرة على غزة في أغسطس من عام 2009 في رفح ، وهي فلسطينية مصرية انجرفت إلى دوامة الحرب مثل عدد لا يحصى من الآخرين بسبب واجب الأسرة والثأر.

    ومع ذلك ، قالت لا للسلطة في خطر كبير عندما كان بإمكانها أن تقول نعم وتصبح عبدة ، ووقفت متضامنة مع الآخرين عندما كان بإمكانها الركض ؛ كان هذا اختيارًا يمنح الوكالة والاستقلالية والملكية الذاتية كاستيلاء على السلطة في سياق محدود وحتمي. إن رفض الخضوع هو الفعل الإنساني الأساسي ، الذي لا يمكن أن يؤخذ منا ، حيث نصبح غير مقيدين وأحرارًا ، وقادرين على تحرير الآخرين.

لذلك قد نهرب من برية المرايا التي نتجول فيها ، عالم الأكاذيب والأوهام ، الصور الملتقطة والمشوهة ، التزييف وسرقة الروح. بالنسبة للذات الأصيلة ، فإن الصورة التي نلتقطها ونطالب بها على أنها صورنا ، تطير خالية من سيركها المجنون من الإغراءات والفخاخ. ومن هنا نحقق ذواتنا وشكلنا الحقيقيين ، في نشوة الطرب والتمجيد ككائنات فريدة من نوعها.

    من المستحيل اختزال هذه العظمة إلى شكلها المادي ، مثل القشرة المهجورة لمخلوق بحري رائع نما إلى ما وراء حدوده وانتقل إلى عوالم غير معروفة.

     جاءت السطور التي قالها هاملت بينما كان ممسكًا بجمجمة صديقه يوريك غير محظورة على أفكاري ؛ علقت هنا تلك الشفاه التي قبلتها ، ولا أعرف كيف كثيرًا. حيث يكون الإستهزاء بك الآن؟ الخاص بك gambols؟ أغانيك؟ ومضات الفرح الخاصة بك ، التي لن تضبط الطاولة على هدير؟ لا أحد الآن ، للسخرية من ابتسامتك؟ “

     لمدة اثني عشر عاما رقصت مع الموت ورقصتي ضاحكة حتى اليوم.

     الوداع يا صديقي. سأراكم في عيون التحدي ، الذين يحملون نيرانكم نحو المجهول ، ومعها أتمنى أن تضحكوا. سيحتاج خلفاؤنا كلا من النار والضحك ، إذا كان المستقبل الذي نربحه لهم هو أن يكون مساوياً لسعره ، ويستحق العيش فيه.

     حياتنا مثل أسنان التنين التي زرعها في الأرض الأمير الفينيقي قدموس الذي نشأ منه المحاربون. من كل جموع. لأننا نعيش كأصداء وانعكاسات في حياة الآخرين ، في عواقب وتأثيرات أفعالنا ، في الخير الذي يمكننا فعله للآخرين الذي يجمع القوة بمرور الوقت ، وفي المعنى والقيمة والإمكانيات التي نخلقها.

     كيف يكون اختيار الموت والحرية أفضل من الخضوع للسلطة وتسليحها بالخوف والقوة؟

تجربتي في قبول الموت في مواجهة القوة والعنف تجد أوجه تشابه في الإعدام الوهمي لفيودور دوستويفسكي وموريس بلانشو ، ولم أنتهي من تحدي إرهاب الدولة والاستبداد وقوى القمع. سأقف بين الأشخاص المسلحين وضحاياهم في المستقبل ، كما فعلت مرات عديدة في الماضي ، وهنا أجد مرونة بين مصادري المحفزة والمعلمة ؛ تم كسب الحرية الكاملة لسارتر برفضه الخضوع ، وتمرد كامو على السلطة الذي يجعل القوة بلا معنى عندما يقابلها العصيان ، يمنحني القدرة على شق طريقي للخروج من الأنقاض والقيام بموقف أخير آخر ، بعيدًا عن الأمل في النصر أو حتى البقاء على قيد الحياة. .

     وجميع البشر الفانين يشاركونني هذه الأعباء. في هذا كل الذين يقاومون الاستعباد من قبل السلطة هم على حد سواء مناطق حية ذاتية الحكم ، تحمل بذور التغيير. يمكننا القول مع شخصية لوكي ؛ “انا أعاني الارهاق لتحقيق غاية مجيدة.”

     نحن جميعًا بطل نيكولاي غوغول في يوميات رجل مجنون ، عالقون في عجلات آلة رائعة يخدمها ، مثل تشارلي شابلن في فيلمه Modern Times. لكننا نعلم أننا محاصرون ومستعبدون ، ونعرف كيف ولماذا. نحن نعرف أسرار حالتنا التي سيصمت أسيادنا ، وفي رفضنا الصمت يمكننا تحرير أنفسنا وزملائنا. هذا ميشيل فوكو دعا قول الحقيقة. رؤية شعرية لإعادة التخيل والدعوة المقدسة لمتابعة الحقيقة التي تحمل قوة تحويلية.

     لذلك أقدم لكم جميعًا كلمات الأمل في لحظات اليأس ، والرعب من انعدام المعنى ، والحزن من الخسارة ، والشعور بالذنب من البقاء على قيد الحياة.

     لقد تحدى صوتك العدم لدينا ، ويتردد صداه في جميع أنحاء فجوات عالم معادٍ وغير إنساني ؛ تجمع القوة والقوة التحويلية لأنها تجد ألف صدى ، وتبدأ في إيقاظ رفض الخضوع للسلطة وشفاء أمراض تزويرنا وانفصالنا.

    صوت إنسان واحد يحمل جرحًا إنسانيًا يفتحه على ألم الآخرين ويضع حياته في الميزان مع أولئك الذين أسماهم فرانتس فانون معذبو الأرض ، والضعفاء والمحرومين ، والمسكومين والمسلمين. المموه ، الذين في مقاومة الاستبداد والإرهاب ، القوة والسيطرة ، يصبحون غير مقهرين وحررين ، صوت التحرير هذا لا يمكن إيقافه مثل المد والجزر ، عامل إعادة التخيل والتحول الذي يستولي على أبواب سجوننا ويحرر الإمكانيات اللامحدودة من أن يصبح إنسانًا.

    لا تيأس وكن مبتهجًا ، لأننا نحن الذين نعيش في مناطق حكم ذاتي نساعد الآخرين على كسر قيود استعبادهم ببساطة بشرط أن يكونوا فعلًا ؛ لأننا ننتهك الأعراف ، ونتجاوز حدود المحرمات ، ونكشف أكاذيب وأوهام السلطة ، ونجعل قوى القمع عاجزة عن فرض الطاعة.

      هذا هو النضال الثوري الأساسي الذي يسبق ويؤسس كل شيء آخر. الاستيلاء على ملكية أنفسنا من أولئك الذين يستعبدوننا.

     هذا هو أمل البشرية.

November 28 2024 On America’s National Day of Mourning / Thanksgiving and the Falsification and Authorization of Identity Through Rewritten History

     The teaching of history has always been a tool of state power and the falsification and authorization of identity; when lies replace truths as the stories of ourselves to shape a national character to the designs of hegemons of elite power, or silence and erase voices of dissent and the marginalized as an instrument of assimilation and subjugation, when control and disinformation can accomplish all this, force and repression, ever costly, become less necessary for tyrannical regimes in the game of dominion and the centralization of power.

     Nowhere is this more pervasive than in the national holidays we celebrate, taught to our children and reinforced throughout our education system as a national myth. We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. What story do we tell with Thanksgiving, and whose story is it?

     Enacted by Lincoln as a symbolic holiday of Abolition and racial diversity and inclusion, something we can all rejoice in, Thanksgiving as a ground of struggle is rooted in the narrative of a mythic Colonist-Native Accord, and of the Pilgrims as a common national origin. That neither of these things are true, but are today still promulgated in every kindergarten and elementary school in the nation, speaks to the persistence of lies which serve power and to their purpose in shaping obedient citizens.

     As Gloria Steinem said in her 1998 speech at Stanford, amending the Biblical passage in John 8:32; “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

     In this Age of Reckoning with the legacies of historical injustices we now have a holiday which Janus-like faces opposite directions as do so many of our symbols and stories; the National Day of Mourning/Thanksgiving. I hope it will be possible to celebrate the ideal of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, as Gene Roddenberry termed it in Star Trek, while acknowledging the horrific history of the colonial conflicts between Europeans and Native Americans, our legacy of African slavery, and of theocratic and patriarchal sexual terror which defines and is the true purpose of authoritarian organizations of faith like that of the Pilgrims, systems of oppression from which we have not yet emerged as a society of true equals.

     It is necessary to have dreams to which we can aspire, so long as we do the work to make them real.

     There is, however, an alternative Thanksgiving unrelated to the iconography of state power and our dichotomous national identity, which may serve as a counterforce to the stolen voices and fictional histories which have ensnared us in the struggle between authority and autonomy; the Roman festival of Saturnalia. True, its direct replacement was Christmas; yet many elements of this celebration of chaos and the reversal of order were transferred to Thanksgiving because they are both harvest festivals.

     One example is the Horn of Plenty; another is the Thanksgiving Feast which is centered on the ritual sacrifice of an enormous turkey, resting in the trees as the proverbial low-hanging fruit. I delighted in the authenticity of the Thanksgiving representation in season four episode eight of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pangs, which directly interrogates the conflicted nature of the holiday as a glorification of the Conquest which originates in a ritual Hunt and Feast, and also signposts the turkey as a ritual sacrifice.

     I celebrate Saturnalia from Thanksgiving through Christmas; feasts, parties, gag gifts, and the violation of norms. This is a time in which nothing is Forbidden and the Lord of Misrule reigns; honor transgression and the sacred role of the outlaw with me through acts of equalization and the leveling of the social hierarchy, becoming autonomous, seizures of power, and liberation from law and order and the authority which it enforces, and the rapture and ecstatic joy which exalts us beyond ourselves.

     Let us run amok and break some rules.

     As I wrote in my post of November 24 2021, Thanksgiving as a Ground of Struggle: Fundamentalism and Authoritarian Exclusionary Religion Are Gateway Drugs to Tyranny and Fascism; Among my earliest memories is watching the burning cross my town set on fire on the front lawn of newlyweds, a Dutch Reformed Church man and a Swiss Calvinist girl, which the town was calling a mixed marriage because they were members of different Protestant churches. It was like a carnival; I asked a neighbor boy why they were setting fires and he said “We’re punishing the bad people”.

     Then I asked my mom, “Are they bad people?”

      She said no, and pointed at the crowd with torches, “These are the bad people.”

     My next question was, “Why are they bad?”

      And she forever simplified a complex set of issues for me with her answer; “Because they want to make everyone the same.”

     As we enter this time of the ancient harvest festival which has been reimagined as Thanksgiving in service to political power by our nation, a holiday anchored in the false history of an origin story as Puritan fundamentalist zealots which authorizes a white supremacist Christian Identity myth of America, let us remember instead why the Puritans fled Europe in the wake of centuries of religious wars and inquisitions as a cause and example of why our founders designed America as a secular state, and why we must resist devolution into theocracy.

     Gaza provides another such example of why state religion is a terrible idea, and of its consequences as the most evil force in human history.

     State religion produced centuries of war, genocide, colonialism, imperialism, Crusades, Inquisitions, assimilation and enslavement, the horrors of the Divine Right of Kings and of the Conquest. The Dark Ages were not a lost golden age to which we should long to return, but a time of rapacity, ignorance, brutality, and the supremacy of the most vicious criminals as priests and kings. Our world was ever thus, since the emergence of tyrants and priests, cities, nations, armies, and gods in whose name to conquer and rule with the invention of agriculture and the need for mass slave labor.

     Authority, carceral states of force and control, divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite membership and wealth, power, and privilege, imperialism and colonialism, patriarchal sexual terror and racist terror all begin with a man in a golden robe who speaks for the gods and who has deceived others into doing the hard and dirty work, who anoints kings and sends armies to enforce virtue and keep the slaves in the fields.

     Gott Mitt Uns is the most terrible battle cry in human history, because it permits anything, authorizes any atrocity, any genocide, any conquest. As Voltaire wrote; ““Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

     Let us resist the seizure of this holiday by Gideonite fundamentalists whose true values and objectives are those of patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror by reclaiming it as a celebration of diversity and inclusion, as Lincoln intended, and of America as a free society wherein all human beings are created equal.

     As written by Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post; “A decade or two ago, no one had trouble figuring out what White evangelical Christians wanted from the federal government. Alongside supply-siders and national security hawks, they made up the triumvirate of the GOP base and were willing to embrace their allies’ economic and foreign policy positions to ensure support for abortion restrictions and anti-gay policies. (During the Cold War, they were enthusiastic partners with national security hawks in the battle against godless communism.)

     But social policy is no longer at the heart of the agenda of the demographic. Instead, it has become nearly indistinguishable from the MAGA movement.

     Conservative commentator and evangelical Christian David A. French acknowledges in a piece for the Dispatch: “We know that opposition to abortion rights motivates white Evangelicals far less than their leaders’ rhetoric would suggest. Eastern Illinois University’s Ryan Burge, one of the nation’s leading statisticians of American religion, has noted, for example, that immigration drove Evangelical support for [Donald] Trump more than abortion.”

     As for gay rights, the Public Religion Research Institute’s annual values survey shows a majority of White evangelical Christians still oppose gay marriage, but that “substantial majorities in every major religious group favor nondiscrimination laws that protect LGBTQ people, ranging from 59% among white evangelical Protestants to 92% among religiously unaffiliated Americans.” Moreover, even opposition to gay marriage is declining because of a massive generational divide on the issue between older evangelicals and more tolerant millennials and Generation Xers.

     So what, then, do these voters want? Many essentially see politics as a great battle between White, Christian America and the multiracial, religiously diverse reality of 21st century America. They want someone to help them win that existential fight. Government is there not to produce legislative fixes to real-world problems but to engage their enemies on behalf of White Christianity.

     PRRI’s chief executive Robert P. Jones points out: “Among the 42% of Virginia voters who believe that Confederate monuments should be taken down, nearly nine in ten (87%) voted for the Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe.” By contrast, “Among the 51% of Virginia voters who believe that Confederate monuments should be left in place, more than eight in ten (82%) voted for Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin.”

     Other statistics bolster the view that racism or defense of white supremacy is at the heart of the GOP. Jones writes:

     Among voters who hold an unfavorable view of the Black Lives Matter movement, believe the U.S. criminal justice system treats all people fairly, or believe that racism is a minor problem or not a problem at all, more than eight in ten voted for Donald Trump. At the national level, the divides produced by these attitudes are stronger than the divides over abortion. Among those who believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, 76% voted for Trump.

The fixation with defining the United States as a White Christian nation is on full display nightly on Fox News, where replacement theory — not abortion or gay rights — drives so much more of the conversation. (Disclosure: I am an MSNBC contributor.)

     In this context, White evangelical Christians’ attraction to the thrice-married philanderer Trump is understandable, as is their support for the cruelest immigration policies (e.g., child separation) and the anti-Muslim travel ban. It’s all about race and religious identity, not policies founded in Christian values and certainly not about finding a role model for civic virtues. Trump was determined to protect White evangelicals against people of color and the decline in Christian identification; that was all they could hope for in a politician.

     For these voters, government is a means of enforcing (they would say “preserving”) domination of Whites and Christianity as essential to America’s identity. That’s why they support politicians who demonize Black Lives Matter, demand that corporations meekly accept voter suppression, express outrage over a publisher’s decision about Dr. Seuss titles or fixate on saying “Merry Christmas.” It’s also why insurrectionists marauded through the Capitol on Jan. 6 bearing Confederate flags and wearing T-shirts mocking the Holocaust. They keep telling us who they are and what they want, but well-meaning Americans and the media often refuse to accept that their fellow Americans’ motives are so antithetical to American values.

     Jones underscores that this MAGA resentment translates into “fears about the rising number of Latino Americans, fears about Islam, and anti-Black attitudes tied to a ‘law and order’ mentality where African Americans are associated with criminal activity and lawlessness in major cities. You won’t need to search far to find each of these interpretations made painfully explicit in former President Trump’s speeches and in the content of the 2016 and 2020 Republican National Conventions.”

     The fixation on race and Christian nationalism has serious ramifications for American political life. First, White evangelical Christians are fighting an impossible crusade against demographic inevitability (their minority status is what has fueled the MAGA movement). Because they can never win (at least in a democracy with free and accurate elections), their political venom will not abate.

     Second, the aims of White evangelicals run smack into the American ideal that “all men are created equal” and constitutional protections that allow no bias against any particular religion or racial group. In that regard, they have become deeply antidemocratic.

     Finally, a Democratic Party committed to social justice and racial tolerance is never going to win over the hardcore White evangelical base of the GOP. There is nothing Democrats can “give” them (e.g., jobs, cheaper health care) to satisfy their need for White Christian ascendency. That puts a premium on Democrats’ ability to organize a broad ideological coalition that is firmly grounded in democratic ideals and racial/religious inclusion.

     We face a battle over the meaning of America. All defenders of a diverse democracy must stand shoulder to shoulder for an inclusive system of government.”

Wednesday Addams’ Revolution

Buffy Season 4 episode 08 Pangs: Ritual Sacrifice with Pie

William S. Burroughs’ Thanksgiving Prayer

            On the Return of Theocracy in America

Symbols of Plenty: The Return of the Wild Turkey by Jill Lepore

             On History and Myths of Authorized National Identity

https://jacobinmag.com/2014/11/americas-founding-myths

https://jacobinmag.com/2016/11/thanksgiving-native-genocide-united-states-pilgrims

            “Thanksgiving Day November 28 1986” by William S. Burroughs

Thanks for the wild turkey and

the passenger pigeons, destined

to be shat out through wholesome

American guts. Thanks for a continent to despoil

and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a

modicum of challenge and

danger. Thanks for vast herds of bison to

kill and skin leaving the

carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves

and coyotes. Thanks for the American dream,

To vulgarize and to falsify until

the bare lies shine through. Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin’ lawmen,

feelin’ their notches . For decent church-goin’ women,

with their mean, pinched, bitter,

evil faces. Thanks for “Kill a Queer for

Christ” stickers. Thanks for laboratory AIDS.Thanks for Prohibition and the

War Against Drugs. Thanks for a country where

nobody’s allowed to mind his

own business. Thanks for a nation of finks.Yes, thanks for all the

memories– all right, let’s see

your arms! You always were a headache and

you always were a bore. Thanks for the last and greatest

betrayal of the last and greatest

of human dreams.         

This is a good day to fight racists and those who would enslave us

November 27 2024 History, Identity, Power: On Native American Heritage Day, Thanksgiving, Falsification, and the Echoes of the Conquest In Our Lives

     The Gordian Knot of history, memory, and identity as a function of narrative has always been a ground of struggle between autonomy and authority, between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves, in which power silences and erases the voices of those it wishes to enslave and uses sophisticated techniques of disinformation and propaganda to falsify the identities of those it claims to represent as well as those it disavows.

     The torturer and his prisoner are both victims of authority, and the instruments of unequal power and divisions of exclusionary otherness with which it sets them against each other in subjugation to an elite hegemony and dominion.

     It only gets worse from there; unless it begins to get better.

     Our story, of America and of humankind, is a lamentation, a howl of loneliness and despair, of unutterable pain, disconnectedness, horror; but also of survival of those horrors, and the roar of defiance against fathoms of darkness and unanswerable force, of the triumph of the unconquerable will to become.

     Who resists becomes Unconquered and free.

     This is the forge of the spirit, this place beyond fear of death or hope of victory, and those who live here are transformed and liberated by our seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves as autonomous and self-created individuals.

     Each of us who refuses to submit to authority and its laws which serve power becomes a living Autonomous Zone.

     And this is why we will make a better future than we have the past; because tyrannies of force and control have no power over us unless we consent to give it to them. Each of us who in resistance is beyond compulsion opens the door to limitless unknowns and possibilities of becoming human, and this no authoritarian regime can survive. For authority must colonize, assimilate, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us, and if it cannot it has failed.

     This is the great secret of power; its emptiness. Power requires complicity, for it is stolen from those it subjugates and enslaves.

    As to Native American Heritage Day, let us reclaim our stories and our ownership of identity. Thanksgiving is one notable example of lies and illusions designed to serve state power and create a national identity of imperialism; as written in Time by Olivia Waxman, “early days of thanks celebrated the burning of a Pequot village in 1637, and the killing of Wampanoag leader Massasoit’s son”. 

    Such stories are numberless as the stars in the heavens; time to reclaim the truth behind the illusions, and free ourselves from the grip of authorized histories and identities.

    I have often written that we in the sacred pursuit of truth, including those truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature in the discovery and creation of our uniqueness and of truths made for us by others against which we emerge in struggle, often against vast historical and systemic forces and inequalities, confer twin responsibilities and rights upon us all which are both seizures of power and duties of care for others as guarantors of each others universal human rights and our inherent freedom to create ourselves and how we choose to be human together as we ourselves decide to construct human being, meaning, and value; remembrance and reckoning. 

    For only this offers escape from the Wilderness of Mirrors; lies and illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, falsification, dehumanization, and theft of the soul whereby those who would enslave us enact our subjugation.

     So for the legacies of our history from which we must emerge; the truths we must keep and those we must escape in liberation struggle, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.

     Of our many possible futures I can only say this; all is not yet lost, nor is anything past redemption when the will to resist and to become can be found.

     So I leave you with the words of Alan Moore from V for Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”

      As written by Kisha James, The Lilly, in Popular Resistance, in an article entitled My Grandfather Founded the National Day of Mourning; “ I’m Carrying On His Legacy.

Every Year, I March To Tell The True History Of The European Conquest Of The United States.

     On Thursday, millions of families across the United States will celebrate Thanksgiving without giving much thought to the truth behind the heavily mythologized and sanitized story taught in schools and promulgated by institutions. According to this myth, 400 years ago, the Pilgrims were warmly welcomed by the “Indians,” and the two groups came together in friendship to break bread. The “Indians” taught the Pilgrims how to live in the “New World,” setting the stage for the eventual establishment of a great land of liberty and opportunity.

     In the usual narrative, no further mention is made of the Native people, as if they all faded away. By sanitizing the English invasion of Wampanoag homelands, the Thanksgiving myth blatantly disregards the true history of the Pilgrims’ arrival in America and the centuries of violence and oppression that Indigenous peoples have endured as a result of the colonization of the Americas.

    I know the Thanksgiving myth well. For my entire life — 22 years — I have gathered annually with hundreds of other Native Americans and supporters in Plymouth, Mass., on the fourth Thursday in November. We gather and march to challenge this myth, to tell the true history of the European conquest of the United States, to speak about the devastating and continuous impacts of colonization on Indigenous peoples. We gather to declare Thanksgiving a National Day of Mourning for Native Americans.

     The protest was founded in 1970 by my grandfather, Wamsutta Frank James, a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah).

     His story of the founding of the National Day of Mourning goes like this: In 1970, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts invited my grandfather to give a speech at a banquet celebrating the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims. However, when state officials saw an advance copy of his speech, they refused to allow him to give it, labeling it as too “inflammatory.” My grandfather had revealed in his speech the truth about the Pilgrims and their treatment of the Wampanoag, the often-unnamed “Indians” in the Thanksgiving myth.

     He described how the English even before 1620 had brought diseases that caused a “Great Dying” — nearly decimating our people — and how they took Wampanoag people captive, selling them as slaves in Europe.

     The meal Thanksgiving dinner is modeled after is misremembered, too. Although there may have been a meal provided largely by the Wampanoag in 1621, it was not a “thanksgiving”; and the Wampanoag people certainly weren’t invited. Rather, the first official “thanksgiving” has its origins in 1637, when White settlers massacred hundreds of Pequot men, women and children on the banks of the Mystic River in Connecticut.

     Within 50-odd years of the arrival of the Pilgrims and other Europeans, the Wampanoag and many other tribes had been nearly wiped out because of warfare and disease, and had been dispossessed of most of their ancestral lands. Those who resisted were killed and their families enslaved.

     State officials offered to rewrite my grandfather’s speech to ensure that it presented a more sanitized version of history, but he refused to have words put into his mouth and was disinvited from the banquet. His suppressed speech was printed in newspapers across the country.

     But that wasn’t enough: My grandfather and other organizers decided that something had to be done in Plymouth to ensure that the truth about the Pilgrims would be loud and clear.

     On Thanksgiving Day in 1970, Wamsutta Frank James, along with other Native activists and allies, gathered on a hill above Plymouth Rock to speak about the true history of Thanksgiving, the violent history of the European settlement of the United States, the lasting impacts of colonization, and the social and political issues faced by Indigenous peoples.

     They declared it a National Day of Mourning for the millions of Indigenous peoples killed as a result of European colonization. United American Indians of New England (UAINE), the organization that my grandfather founded and led for decades, has continued for more than 50 years to organize National Day of Mourning and challenge the mainstream Thanksgiving narrative, as well as highlight the modern-day struggles faced by Indigenous peoples.

     My grandfather was heroic, and I am proud to be his granddaughter and help lead UAINE as we continue our work. But I also have noticed over the years, and especially while going through old newspaper clippings, that for decades the media often focused solely on the men as spokespeople and organizers of National Day of Mourning.

     Women from the Boston Indian Council and other organizations played a key organizing role from 1970 on. My grandmother Priscilla helped write my grandfather’s 1970 speech. A Native activist, Judy Mendes, was attacked by police dogs in 1972 for wearing an upside-down American flag.

     My mother, Mahtowin Munro, has been a major contributor to the National Day of Mourning and a tireless advocate for Indigenous rights. She and my late father, Moonanum James, became the co-leaders of UAINE in 1994. My twin brother and I learned from a young age how to patiently explain to non-Native peers and adults why we did not celebrate the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. We are not against giving thanks or family gatherings, I’d tell my classmates; in fact, we are taught to give thanks every day. But we will not give thanks for the invasion of the Pilgrims and other Europeans, nor for the ongoing colonialism and genocide that our communities continue to face.

     Now, I am the co-organizer of the National Day of Mourning along with my mother. I feel a great sense of pride in my family’s role in the Indigenous rights movement and in sharing the truth about Thanksgiving, and I look forward to continuing to raise awareness about contemporary front-line Indigenous issues such as climate justice, the preservation and expansion of tribal sovereignty, and the ongoing demand for the return of our ancestral lands.

     In recent years, my mother and I have worked to ensure that women’s voices, as well as those of Two-Spirit and LGBTQ people, are amplified at the National Day of Mourning. When I look at the Line 3 struggle or at the Indigenous people who were on the streets in Glasgow demanding climate justice, I see Indigenous people of all ages, and especially women and Two-Spirit leaders, as part of a continuum of resistance leading into the future.

     Women have long been at the center of Indigenous activism, and are respected and revered within many traditional Indigenous cultures as leaders and culture-bearers — even if they were silenced by settlers. That’s why it’s crucial for our voices to be amplified within modern-day movements, especially because settler-colonial violence continues to disproportionately impact women, as evidenced by the ongoing epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in the United States and Canada.

     On this National Day of Mourning, I am honored to walk not only in the footsteps of my grandfather, but also in the footsteps of all the Indigenous women who have led the way for my generation.

     We will not stop telling the truth about the Thanksgiving story and what happened to our ancestors.” 

    Here is the speech that turned the tide of history for lies in the service of white power to truth which offers equality, diversity, inclusion, remembrance and possibly hope for a Reckoning:

    “THE SUPPRESSED SPEECH OF WAMSUTTA (FRANK B.) JAMES, WAMPANOAG

     To have been delivered at Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1970

ABOUT THE DOCUMENT: Three hundred fifty years after the Pilgrims began their invasion of the land of the Wampanoag, their “American” descendants planned an anniversary celebration. Still clinging to the white schoolbook myth of friendly relations between their forefathers and the Wampanoag, the anniversary planners thought it would be nice to have an Indian make an appreciative and complimentary speech at their state dinner. Frank James was asked to speak at the celebration. He accepted. The planners, however, asked to see his speech in advance of the occasion, and it turned out that Frank James’ views — based on history rather than mythology — were not what the Pilgrims’ descendants wanted to hear. Frank James refused to deliver a speech written by a public relations person. Frank James did not speak at the anniversary celebration. If he had spoken, this is what he would have said:

     I speak to you as a man — a Wampanoag Man. I am a proud man, proud of my ancestry, my accomplishments won by a strict parental direction (“You must succeed – your face is a different color in this small Cape Cod community!”). I am a product of poverty and discrimination from these two social and economic diseases. I, and my brothers and sisters, have painfully overcome, and to some extent we have earned the respect of our community. We are Indians first – but we are termed “good citizens.” Sometimes we are arrogant but only because society has pressured us to be so.

     It is with mixed emotion that I stand here to share my thoughts. This is a time of celebration for you – celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People.

     Even before the Pilgrims landed it was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe and sell them as slaves for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn and beans. Mourt’s Relation describes a searching party of sixteen men. Mourt goes on to say that this party took as much of the Indians’ winter provisions as they were able to carry.

     Massasoit, the great Sachem of the Wampanoag, knew these facts, yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers of the Plymouth Plantation. Perhaps he did this because his Tribe had been depleted by an epidemic. Or his knowledge of the harsh oncoming winter was the reason for his peaceful acceptance of these acts. This action by Massasoit was perhaps our biggest mistake. We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.

     What happened in those short 50 years? What has happened in the last 300 years?

     History gives us facts and there were atrocities; there were broken promises – and most of these centered around land ownership. Among ourselves we understood that there were boundaries, but never before had we had to deal with fences and stone walls. But the white man had a need to prove his worth by the amount of land that he owned. Only ten years later, when the Puritans came, they treated the Wampanoag with even less kindness in converting the souls of the so-called “savages.” Although the Puritans were harsh to members of their own society, the Indian was pressed between stone slabs and hanged as quickly as any other “witch.”

     And so down through the years there is record after record of Indian lands taken and, in token, reservations set up for him upon which to live. The Indian, having been stripped of his power, could only stand by and watch while the white man took his land and used it for his personal gain. This the Indian could not understand; for to him, land was survival, to farm, to hunt, to be enjoyed. It was not to be abused. We see incident after incident, where the white man sought to tame the “savage” and convert him to the Christian ways of life. The early Pilgrim settlers led the Indian to believe that if he did not behave, they would dig up the ground and unleash the great epidemic again.

     The white man used the Indian’s nautical skills and abilities. They let him be only a seaman — but never a captain. Time and time again, in the white man’s society, we Indians have been termed “low man on the totem pole.”

     Has the Wampanoag really disappeared? There is still an aura of mystery. We know there was an epidemic that took many Indian lives – some Wampanoags moved west and joined the Cherokee and Cheyenne. They were forced to move. Some even went north to Canada! Many Wampanoag put aside their Indian heritage and accepted the white man’s way for their own survival. There are some Wampanoag who do not wish it known they are Indian for social or economic reasons.

     What happened to those Wampanoags who chose to remain and live among the early settlers? What kind of existence did they live as “civilized” people? True, living was not as complex as life today, but they dealt with the confusion and the change. Honesty, trust, concern, pride, and politics wove themselves in and out of their [the Wampanoags’] daily living. Hence, he was termed crafty, cunning, rapacious, and dirty.

     History wants us to believe that the Indian was a savage, illiterate, uncivilized animal. A history that was written by an organized, disciplined people, to expose us as an unorganized and undisciplined entity. Two distinctly different cultures met. One thought they must control life; the other believed life was to be enjoyed, because nature decreed it. Let us remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white man. The Indian feels pain, gets hurt, and becomes defensive, has dreams, bears tragedy and failure, suffers from loneliness, needs to cry as well as laugh. He, too, is often misunderstood.

     The white man in the presence of the Indian is still mystified by his uncanny ability to make him feel uncomfortable. This may be the image the white man has created of the Indian; his “savageness” has boomeranged and isn’t a mystery; it is fear; fear of the Indian’s temperament!

     High on a hill, overlooking the famed Plymouth Rock, stands the statue of our great Sachem, Massasoit. Massasoit has stood there many years in silence. We the descendants of this great Sachem have been a silent people. The necessity of making a living in this materialistic society of the white man caused us to be silent. Today, I and many of my people are choosing to face the truth. We ARE Indians!

     Although time has drained our culture, and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts. We may be fragmented, we may be confused. Many years have passed since we have been a people together. Our lands were invaded. We fought as hard to keep our land as you the whites did to take our land away from us. We were conquered, we became the American prisoners of war in many cases, and wards of the United States Government, until only recently.

     Our spirit refuses to die. Yesterday we walked the woodland paths and sandy trails. Today we must walk the macadam highways and roads. We are uniting We’re standing not in our wigwams but in your concrete tent. We stand tall and proud, and before too many moons pass we’ll right the wrongs we have allowed to happen to us.

     We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we must work towards a more humane America, a more Indian America, where men and nature once again are important; where the Indian values of honor, truth, and brotherhood prevail.

     You the white man are celebrating an anniversary. We the Wampanoags will help you celebrate in the concept of a beginning. It was the beginning of a new life for the Pilgrims. Now, 350 years later it is a beginning of a new determination for the original American: the American Indian.

     There are some factors concerning the Wampanoags and other Indians across this vast nation. We now have 350 years of experience living amongst the white man. We can now speak his language. We can now think as a white man thinks. We can now compete with him for the top jobs. We’re being heard; we are now being listened to. The important point is that along with these necessities of everyday living, we still have the spirit, we still have the unique culture, we still have the will and, most important of all, the determination to remain as Indians. We are determined, and our presence here this evening is living testimony that this is only the beginning of the American Indian, particularly the Wampanoag, to regain the position in this country that is rightfully ours.

Wamsutta

September 10, 1970”

https://time.com/5725168/thanksgiving-history-lesson/

https://popularresistance.org/my-grandfather-founded-the-national-day-of-mourning-to-dispel-the-myth-of-thanksgiving/?fbclid=IwAR3NKhIQCRx2a1jf0p-5qQhh6J4Lv_aLU-eJfKRp2MaYTQvW6i5vK1adID4

http://www.uaine.org/suppressed_speech.htm

https://scoop.upworthy.com/six-native-american-girls-explain-real-history-behind-thanksgiving?fbclid=IwAR2wzyDkBLE9z1SGUEa_uNCmhMaHntTzFGXdeL8A8PSXeHglriRjbHs10Yo

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/25/1059262045/the-mashpee-wampanoag-want-you-to-know-the-full-history-behind-thanksgiving?fbclid=IwAR07Tz4guMmeKrNNEIhm4iK9E4tss6gQhFC_WsaiFYfdwfFp4Mat_5JsQFs

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/11/25/native-americans-thanksgiving-mourning?fbclid=IwAR1YwfcsntYGqpgGnbxAbyOWWtmDCvqDFB7fLp2cXQimzmSvhVaDHry0YG0

https://popularresistance.org/6-thanksgiving-myths-and-the-wampanoag-side-of-the-story/?fbclid=IwAR08-9JiLkCGyZrcdxPhOh1CONj_58cSqJHMNgggvA8tPxoTOBZWErQKYpc

                    Native American History

     500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians, Josephy

     The Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale

      Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, American West, Dee Brown

      The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, David Treuer

     Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from           Prophecy to the Present, Peter Nabokov (editor)

     The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, Thomas King

     Native American Mythology, Hartley Burr Alexander

     Pocahontas, Paula Gunn Allen

     This Land is Their Land, David J. Silverman

     The Cherokee Nation; a history, Robert J. Conley

     One Vast Winter Count, The Indian World of George Washington, Colin Calloway

     Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides

     Empire of the Summer Moon, S.C. Gwynne

     The Comanche Empire, Lakota America: a new history of indigenous power, Pekka Hamalainen

     The Killing of Crazy Horse, Thomas Powers

     Crow Dog: Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men, Leonard Crow Dog

     Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement, Richard Erdoes

     The Apache Wars, Paul Andrew Hutton

     The Serpent’s Tongue: Prose, Poetry, and Art of the New Mexico Pueblos, Nancy Wood

     The Trickster: A Study In American Indian Mythology, Paul Radin, Karl Kerényi, C.G. Jung

                    Native American Literature

    Secrets from the Center of the World, How We Become Human: poems 1975-2002, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: poems, Soul Talk Song Language: conversations, Crazy Brave, Joy Harjo

     Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means

     Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog

     Black Elk Speaks

     The Man Made of Words: essays, stories, passages, N. Scott Momaday

     Night Flying Woman, Ignatia Broker

     Fool’s Crow, James Welch

     Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, Louise Erditch

     Our Stories Remember: history, culture, & values through storytelling, Joseph Bruchac

     Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Storyteller, Turquoise Ledger, Leslie Silko

     Blue Highways, William Least-Heat Moon

     Firesticks, Primer of the Obsolete, Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha, Uprising of Goats, Designs of the Night Sky, The Mask Maker, Stories of the Driven World, American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays, The Dance Partner, The Dream of a Broken Field, Diane Glancy

     The Journey of Crazy Horse, John Marshall III

     Houdini Heart, Ki Longfellow

     You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Blasphemy: new and selected stories, Sherman Alexie

     Two Old Women, Bird Girl & the Man Who Followed the Sun, Velma Wallis

     The Voice of Rolling Thunder, Sidian Morning Star Jones

     Spirit and Reason: the Vine Deloria, Jr Reader

     Aurum, Santee Frazier

      Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz       

November 26 2024 Peace in Lebanon?

       President Biden has announced a durable peace and permanent ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and this I celebrate whether or not it remains true.

       If the peace holds, it will be among the greatest achievements of diplomacy in all of history, and President Biden will be remembered as the man who stopped World War Three.

      If the peace holds.

      What next for Lebanon, after this Pax Americana between Israel and Hezbollah? Though Hezbollah serves many of the functions of a state where states are notional or performative, is complex as both a transnational humanitarian organization which has historically stood in solidarity with precariat underclasses and with liberation struggle especially versus Israeli aggression and at the same time always a proxy force of the Dominion of Iran, Hezbollah is not identical with the nation of Lebanon even though it is marginally its government.

       This opens a gate of possibility for secular democracy and the liberation of Lebanon from foreign capture and influence and from a theocratic state which will always draw the nation toward sectarian conflict. A truly independent Lebanon, free from both Iran and Israel, and from the proxy wars of America and Russia which threaten her destruction. Such a buffer state could be very useful in defusing any future conflicts, and a stabilizing presence in the region.

      Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?

      As I wrote in my post of January 19 2020, The Revolution in Lebanon’s Week of Anger Closes with Nine Hours of Battles in Beirut; In magnificent demonstrations of solidarity and mass protest against the sectarian regime of corruption and force which has driven Lebanon to the edge of economic and social collapse, the Revolution’s Week of Anger gathered force throughout the nation and culminated yesterday in nine hours of battles in Beirut against state forces of repression, proxies of Iranian dominion, and the private militias of warlords, oligarchs, and religious forces of division.

     Twenty three years of Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon did nothing to heal these divisions, and much to encourage them as Israel plays her neighbors against each other with terrifying skill and multilayered deception in a decades long strategy of conquest.

      Alongside the regional Sunni-Shia conflict ongoing since the assassination of Ali on January 28 661, and the consequences of historical colonialism, the malign influence of Israel as a destabilizing factor and a fascist tyranny of blood, faith, and soil which eyes hungrily her neighbors remains among the three primary causes of disunity and woe throughout the Middle East.

     For those fighting in the streets for their freedom, it is time to abandon theocracy and unite in nonsectarian secular democracy, to cast off foreign influences and semifeudal oligarchic nepotism, and emerge from the shadows of history as an independent nation and a free society of equals, with liberty and justice for all.

     As I wrote in my post of January 29 2020, Lebanon’s new Iranian proxy government eliminates plurality of representation and subverts democracy; Democracy in Lebanon fell on January 26 to a seizure of power by a new  pro-Iranian proxy government, which eliminates plurality of representation, subverts the meaning of the vote as with all one-party systems, and directly challenges the nonsectarian democracy revolution.

     With all key government functions now controlled by Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies, Lebanon has been captured as a key piece in Iran’s fifteen year chess game of dominion throughout the Middle East. The theocratic regime of the mullahs has sought to create shadow states within their neighboring nations, to infiltrate and seize control of Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria in coordination with their invasion of the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, a pincer movement whose ultimate aim is Jerusalem and the Saudi-American alliance which controls the oil market.

     While I personally would welcome the restoration of historical Palestine and the founding of a nonsectarian, democratic, and fair government in Jerusalem which represents and secures the universal human rights of all its citizens equally, I also expect the same from any other nation and envision a pluralistic society in which each of us may choose how to live and believe without being answerable to our neighbors.

     Let us meet tyranny with resistance, where ever it casts its shadow upon the soul of humankind.

     As I wrote of the Democracy Revolution in Lebanon at its beginning, in a post entitled October 24 2019 Global Revolution engulfs Lebanon; In Lebanon, where the wealthy and powerful have used fear and sectarian interests to divide and subjugate the people for decades, a global revolution which unites the victims of a failing system of capitalism against our plutocratic-oligarchic overlords with the enslaved peoples of authoritarian tyrannies of state terror and control in demands for democracy, independence, freedom and autonomy, equality and universal human rights, engulfs yet another nation.

     Driven to the brink of survival by the contradictions of capitalism and the parasitic one percent who own more wealth than the rest of humanity, by the threat of extinction of our species as we drown in our own wastes for the profit of others, and of dehumanization by the force and surveillance of tyrannies, those who have nothing left to lose have begun to challenge and defy authority, and to reclaim the power that has been stolen from us.

     As I sit with my morning coffee listening to the distant crowds chanting the leitmotif of the Arab Spring of  2010-12,  Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-nizām or People want to bring down the regime, among other slogans, I find I am returned to my beginning again, when a chance encounter with a stranger who was very strange indeed set me on my path.

     I had come to Beirut in the summer of 1982 on holiday from university to enjoy the marvels of its famous cuisine, and found myself involved in its defense against the Israeli invasion and siege. There was a café that served the best strawberry crepes in the world, inconveniently on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across for breakfast. Amazing that none of us died, and that we laughed at the danger; I would call it a folly of youth except that I knew even then the creed I have lived by: there is no threat worth obeying when it stands between oneself and a lived truth. He who is fearless is free to dream, and may yet make new dreams real.

     One morning we arrived joking and breathless to claim our prize breakfast, when a gentleman seated nearby, whose features were carved from stone as if by centuries like an ancient prophet and whose eyes were full of mischief, challenged me with a question. “I’m told you gamble with death every day for your breakfast. Why do you do this?”

     “It makes this moment the most valuable thing in the world, a thing of risk and desire and the meaning it brings, a thing which is mine alone. To defy the power of any other over our mortality liberates and exalts us, if in true desires we find also our true selves.”

    “I agree,” he replied, and came to sit at my table. We stole each other’s strawberries and spoke of the Forbidden and the power conferred by its transgression.

      In our many conversations over the next few days, with war and ruin all around us as a great nation fell, we spoke of many things, of freedom and the meaning of being human; I once quoted The Thief’s Journal to refute a claim of his, at which he laughed in delight. Somewhere in all of this he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, which he said he stole from that of the Foreign Legion before they threw him out for asking inconvenient questions.

     Later I learned my friend Jean, former Legionnaire and member of the French Resistance, prone to Sphinxian dialectical questioning and poetic turns of phrase, and an endless fount of literary references and stories which turned out to be from experience instead of scholarship, was the infamous Jean Genet, author of The Thief’s Journal and much else.

     In the Fall of Beirut my resistance to tyranny begins, inspired by his example and forged by the horrors which surrounded us. May we all find the will to become better than we are, to challenge injustice and to defy authority. I suspect this is exactly what is happening throughout the world today, in countless iterations of Resistance, each with its own unique origins but alike in common cause with all oppressed peoples.

     Humankind is awakening, and civilization has begun to destroy and recreate itself in an epochal process like that of the invention of fire.   

     The map of such mass protests, which erupted this year in gloriously anarchic and spontaneous leaderless movements like the Brownian motion of self-organizing microbes or a tidal effect of probabilities, now spans the globe and includes sustained revolts in the UK, France, Spain, Serbia, Albania, Montenegro, Russia, and Ukraine, in Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and Haiti, in Algeria, Eqypt, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Liberia, and Guinea, in Indonesia and Hong Kong, Iraq and Lebanon. Not since The Year of the Barricades in 1968 has such a global wave of change seized and shaken authorized order by its throat.

     We bear witness to the triumph of chaos; that it will inevitably sweep aside the old order of ossified forms and failing systems, bringing totalistic social transformation to human society, is without question; what remains to be seen is whether we humans can transcend our differences and unite in a planetary system of democracy and universal human rights.

    The dream of freedom and equality may be within our grasp.

     As to the origins of the conflict in the 1982 Israeli Invasion and Occupation of Lebanon, I wrote in my post of September 18 2024 Anniversary of the 1982 Shatila and Sabra massacres in Lebanon

     In a three day massacre between September 16 and 18 1982, one of the most horrific genocidal mass murders in history was perpetrated in the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps against the people of Palestine, which marked the beginning of twenty years of brutal Israel occupation of Lebanon.

     What is the meaning of this anniversary of state terror and tyranny, imperial conquest and colonial dominion, and crimes against humanity?

      Here was an atrocity perpetrated by the mighty against the powerless and the dispossessed as an instrument of the disruption and fracture of history, a holocaust performed by survivors of a parallel Holocaust because of how power works in the origins of evil as a recursive process of fear, power, and force; but also a classic example of state terror and war as a moral failure and the collapse of the legitimacy and authority of the state which changes the narrative and becomes the forge of a nation as a primary trauma, for the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates resistance as its own counterforce.

     On such anniversaries as today we remember the tragedies, and honor the resistance.

     Let us honor our sacred dead and those who fought in resistance to state terror and crimes against humanity, but let us also never forget the names of its perpetrators nor rest in our vigilance to see them brought to justice.

     There is a debt we owe to, and a responsibility we bear for, our fellow human beings, if we are to remain human and avoid degradation to an animal state of atavisms of instinct and become shadows, bereft of our dimensionality and the innate powers which may sustain and exalt us; hope, love, and faith as solidarity with and loyalty to each other.

     We must remember, and we must not be silent.

     This is called Tikkun Olam in Judaism, repair of the world, a duty which binds us together, both with those who are like and those who are unlike us across vast gulfs of human being, meaning, and value and hierarchies and taxonomies of belonging and otherness. Of this I will tell you a secret; boundaries can also become interfaces.

         This terrible anniversary of state terror and imperial conquest and tyranny roughly coincides with the Jewish New Year celebrations of Rosh Hashanah, this year October 2 to 4, and just before the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, this year from sunset on the 11th of October through the 12th, approximate with the actions of the state of Israel which led to the Second Intifada.

     Despite all the prayers and rituals during these high holy days, I doubt the state of Israel will be doing much reparations to the people of Palestine, and quite a lot of valorizing national identities of blood, faith, and soil. Beware those who claim to speak and act in your name, for this is a primary fascist strategy of subjugation and manufacture of consent.

     Why must faith define boundaries and not interfaces, walls and not bridges?

      Among the endless litany of woes and exemplars of fear weaponized in service to power by authority, the Sabra and Shatila Massacres remain to challenge our ideas of the brotherhood of humankind.

     For this we must truly bring a Reckoning and an Atonement; but not for the legacies of the past, which must be Remembered, nor for our complicity in silence against injustice, which may be redeemed through action. We can do nothing for the dead; it is the living who must be avenged, and the future which must be redeemed.

     Who is responsible for this terrible crime?

     Planned and directed in personal meetings by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon, Mossad Director Nahum Admoni, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Director of Military Intelligence Yehoshua Saguy, Division Commander Beirut Amos Yaron, US diplomat Morris Draper acting under orders from President Ronald Reagan, President of Lebanon Bashir Gemayel who was a Jesuit educated C.I.A. operative recruited when he was a lawyer working in Washington D.C., Chief of Lebanese Military Intelligence Johnny Abdu, and Phalange leader Elie Hobeika, along with other representatives of Israeli-American interests and the Phalange, a quasi-fascist Christian Maronite militia founded by the newly elected President of Lebanon’s father. Gemayel rose to leadership by murdering the families of Lebanon’s former Presidents, bankrolled by Ronald Reagan at the request of Ariel Sharon, and became President on August 23 as a result of the June 6 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

     Thus the stage was set for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians who had been driven from their homes by Israel into the wretched refugee camps in Lebanon, where the survivors remain today, a precariat no less oppressed than that of Victor Hugo’s magisterial novel Les Miserables, and no less exalted with revolutionary fire.

     How long must the dead and their descendants wait for justice?

    In Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo, Seth Anziska writes “Under the leadership of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon, the Israeli government launched an invasion in June of that year partly on the pretext of stopping Palestinian militant rocket fire on the Galilee region of northern Israel. After the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, Israeli leaders had also become increasingly anxious about the power of the PLO and the growing links between Palestinians inside the occupied territories and across the Arab diaspora. The main focus of their concern was on Lebanon, where the PLO had relocated its center of operations from Jordan after an armed confrontation with King Hussein’s army in 1970–1971. Israeli strategists believed that targeting the PLO in Lebanon and forcing its withdrawal would accomplish several objectives: the quashing of Palestinian national aspirations for a homeland, the expulsion of Syria’s troops from Lebanon and the elimination of Syrian influence there, and the establishment of a client Maronite Christian state as a close ally.

     Instead of entrenching Israeli dominance over its northern neighbor, the Lebanon War morphed into what some have called “Israel’s Vietnam.” In the midst of an already brutal civil war, the Israeli intervention resulted in the deaths of more than 600 Israeli soldiers and at least 5,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians—over 19,000 by Lebanese estimates that counted combatants as well. Closely coordinated with Maronite forces, Israel’s invasion soon devolved from being a limited incursion to a summer-long siege against the PLO’s stronghold in West Beirut. Unlike the wars in 1948, 1967, or 1973, Israel was unequivocally engaged in what Begin called a “war of choice.” Combining military force with psychological operations, Israeli forces inflicted heavy casualties inside an Arab capital for the first time, bombarding Palestinian positions from land, sea, and air, while occupying Lebanon’s international airport.

     President Ronald Reagan, disturbed by the images of destruction, pushed his administration to negotiate an end to the fighting and to facilitate a peaceful evacuation of PLO fighters from the city to neighboring Arab states. The PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, had signaled that he and his men were willing to withdraw provided that the PLO had the requisite American guarantees of security for Palestinian civilians and Lebanese supporters who remained behind. Sharing the draft of the withdrawal agreement with Shafiq al-Hout, Arafat sounded a wistful note about the departure: “Beirut has given Palestine what no other Arab capital has. It has given and given, without asking for anything in return. And it never would ask. Nor should we make it ask. We should pay it back of our own free will.”

     The first contingent of PLO fighters left the city on August 21, with Arafat and leading PLO officials departing on a Greek shipping vessel to Tunisia on August 30. In all, some 10,000 fighters left Lebanon by sea and land routes, pushing the PLO into still deeper exile. Even after the heaviest fighting ended, a protracted Israeli occupation of the south of the country lasted until 2000, reshaping the politics of the region. Syrian influence over the country continued, but increasingly it was supplanted by Iranian power with the rise of Hezbollah. Far from cementing Israel’s regional hegemony, the 1982 War ultimately undercut Israeli and American influence in the Middle East, while transforming perceptions of both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism around the globe.”

     As Nabil Mohamad of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee wrote in al Jazeerah in 2017; “A fourth generation is now growing up in the squalid refugee camps in Lebanon. In Sabra and Shatila, most living spaces consist of two very small rooms: a bedroom, where the entire family sleeps, and a living room of sorts. There is no ventilation, and hardly any electricity. Most families use battery-powered lighting. Drinking tap water is prohibited, as it is full of bacteria and very salty – it actually corrodes pipes. There are poor sanitary conditions. Medications for all illnesses are in short supply. Narrow alleyways – some with sewage running through – wind through the camps. When it rains these small paths become muddy. Electrical wires hang from dwellings. Young men connect and reconnect wires; from time to time, someone is electrocuted. Foul odours emanate from those crowded conditions. Illness is rampant. The Palestinian refugees in Lebanon long to return from exile to the homeland they were expelled from but are not permitted to do so by Israel, simply because they are not Jewish.

     If the international community is obliged to remedy its moral responsibility to the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre by working to end Israel’s occupation and other abuses of Palestinian rights, then the lives of my family members and the others we remember on this 35th year will not have been lost in vain.”

     Let me now append my own witness of history here, for the days of this anniversary immerse me in memories, both those of which I cannot speak and those which I cannot bear alone.

     In my post of July 31 2020, A Useful Past: What is Antifa? I wrote; “I offer you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut in 1982 by Jean Genet; here is the story of how it happened, and of my true origin.

     During the summer before my senior undergraduate year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Soldiers were roaming the streets like packs of feral dogs, committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, and more joined us. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.

     A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”

     To which I replied, “Moments stolen from death belong to us, and set us free. Possibly this is all we truly own. It’s a poor man who has no pleasures worth dying for.”

    He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before his capture, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path of struggle for liberty against tyranny and autocracies of state force and control, for equality against racist violence and injustice, and against the fascism which combines both state tyranny and racist terror.

     He introduced himself as a former Legionnaire by the name of Jean, was mischievous, wise, immensely learned in classical scholarship and possibly had once been educated as a priest, and filled with wild stories about the luminaries of modern European culture. I was stunned when I discovered days later that my strange new friend was one of the greatest literary figures of the century. I had quoted The Thief’s Journal in refutation of something he said, which he found hilarious, while we were discussing interpretations of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra by C.G. Jung, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and others, a conversation which remained unfinished as he couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually he sputtered, “I myself am Jean Genet.” To me he remains a Trickster figure and part of my historical identity and personal mythology.

     There came a day when the barricades were overrun and our neighborhood along with it, one of our last days together. With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers running amok in a sack of murder, arson, and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, our building set on fire by soldiers who were calling for people to come out and surrender and were stealing the children of those who did and blindfolding them to use as hostages and human shields, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with an apologetic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”

     We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all.

     Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’

     To which I replied, “No.”

    “Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”

     And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”

     To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.

     We escaped capture that day because, once we had escaped the burning house itself and blended into the crowds, we were led through the checkpoints of the encirclement by an unlikely ally, a figure who materialized out of the background at the far end of the alley and walked over to us grinning. This was the sniper whom my friends and I had been playing our games with for two weeks, who had been utterly invisible and had outwitted every attempt to track, trap, ambush, or identify him, and who had in fact besieged the city from within. 

     He held out his hand to me and I shook it as he said, “Well played, sir. I’ve tried to kill you every day for fourteen days now, but the Israelis being inside the city changes everything. We have a common enemy, but they don’t know that, so I’m in a position to help you. But I can’t fight them alone. Want a partner?”

     So began a great adventure and friendship, which I share with you now in the context of the nature of antifascist resistance because it illustrates something which can never be forgotten by anyone who does this kind of work; human beings are not monsters, are deserving of human doubt, and are never beyond redemption.

     The struggle between good and evil in the human heart often pivots and balances on the differences between the purpose of the use of force; to punish transgression when inflicted by authority as an act of subjugation and repression against the powerless, or to seize power and to protect the powerless as a duty of care.

     Be very sure you know which cause your actions serve.

    And in my post on the tragedy of the Beirut port explosion, August 5 2020 Madness Death Illumination Transcendence: A Song of Beirut; We seek meaning in the catastrophes and life disruptive events which flesh is heir to, yet as in the disaster in Beirut such causes are often beyond our understanding.

     Herein I refer now to Sura 18 of the Holy Quran, called The Cave, verses 60-82, an allegory which features Khidr, the Islamic Trickster figure who is an immortal and is symbolized as green as an embodiment of the Garden of Paradise to which he is a gateway, who acts as a guide of the soul through the puzzles of the labyrinth of life which leads toward it, and who speaks to us through dreams, visions, and signs.

     I consider it a narrative form of Godel’s Theorem; a proof of the necessity of faith and of the existence of the Infinite, of the limits of human knowledge and the Absurdity of the human condition. Such an interpretation aligns with that of   the great scholar and translator Abdullah Yusuf Ali.

     As with the foundational thought experiment of one of Plato’s contemporaries, the Spear of Archytas, which defines the horizon of the known as it is thrown and marks a boundary in landing, which we repeat endlessly in scientific revolutions, no matter who much we learn the unknown remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance. As developed in the anonymous Middle English work The Cloud of Unknowing and by Nicholaus of Cusa in Of Learned Ignorance, this is the first principle of epistemology; the Conservation of Ignorance.

     The canonical story recapitulates themes of the Sacrifice of Ibrahim which I would say forms the basis of Islamic and possibly of all forms of Abrahamic faith, and in the streets of Beirut long ago I saw it unfold once again.

    In this story the Green Man instructs Moses by doing three things which are criminal and nonsensical, things which can be understood only through the foreknowledge of prophecy which is not ours. As with justice, foresight does not belong to man; though we may envision our possible futures we cannot know which among them will be realized. Maimonides argues that this is because the universe is continually destroyed and recreated with each moment, which preserves free will. Frank Herbert’s Dune is an extended thought experiment and allegory which problematizes the themes and questions of the story of Khidr in Sura 18.

    The relevant passage is this;  فَأَرَدْنَا أَن يُبْدِلَهُمَا رَبُّهُمَا خَيْرًا مِّنْهُ زَكَاةً وَأَقْرَبَ رُحْمًا, or “So we intended that their Lord should substitute for them a better son than him in purity and nearer to mercy,” a classic changeling substitution. It also represents a point of bifurcation on which possible futures turn.

     I have hope for the future of humankind because of what I witnessed when this primary story was played out before me forty years ago, and because of it I have never despaired.

     Such a gate stands or once stood in Beirut, like Rashomon Gate or a gate to the Infinite and to limitless possibilities of human becoming. It may now be dust and memories, or like Schrodinger’s Cat both exist and not exist at once; this I cannot answer for you.

      But I can speak as the witness of history that something remarkable happened there in its shadow, which like Khidr exchanging the young man for another to prevent a greater evil from occurring in the future, a time travel paradox if ever there was one, struck me with the force of revelation.

     It was an insignificant thing in the scope of the Siege of Beirut, one atrocity among many which was averted by the innate goodness of a single man whose name remains unknown, a tragic hero whom I will never forget, an unwilling conscript in the service of his government like so many others, who said no to authority and to the seduction of evil. The existence of humankind pivots on the balance of such individuals, and they are very few.

    This Israeli soldier refused to commit violations and depravities upon the person of a Palestinian girl, about twelve years old, who had been captured for this purpose by the lieutenant of his platoon, a common loyalty test and initiation. He blushed at the first demands of his officer to the taunting of his fellows like the raucous cries of crows about to feast, there in the street before the Gate of Decision we must all face, then became angry in refusal when he realized it was not a joke, that the Occupation was about terror and plunder and not as he had been told. His commanding officer murdered him where he stood with a single shot to the head as the girl escaped.

     I have returned to this spot throughout my life to touch the stones stained with his blood, for I am reminded that we are not beyond redemption, and that so long as we resist unjust authority we are free, and there is hope.

Joe Biden announces ceasefire deal to end fighting between Israel and Hezbollah

What Israel and Hezbollah’s ceasefire deal will look like in action

In the end, Israel and Hezbollah concluded that they could gain more through negotiations than they could on the battlefield.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/israel-hezbollahs-ceasefire-deal-will-look-action-rcna181876?fbclid=IwY2xjawG0ktlleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHcGlxqecsNKeGzgsUGW99hGFg1A1iPeOjAc9ZEum7-XgZp7p1ezZ-L-2rA_aem_SipcKmD-52YlO6ehxQL84w

Thousands return to southern Lebanon amid uneasy ceasefire

          Histories, Memories, Identities

Beirut, Samir Kassir

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7966167-beirut?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_12

Lebanon: A History, 600 – 2011, William W. Harris

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13687123-lebanon?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_50

Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo, Seth Anziska

and three works of literature written by fellow witnesses and survivors of the Siege, figures of Resistance and poetic vision who left their marks of strangeness upon me and whom I wish I had known far better;

Memory for Forgetfulness: August Beirut 1982, Mahmoud Darwish

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142583.Memory_for_Forgetfulness?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_62

 Concerto al-Quds, Adonis, Khaled Mattawa (Translation)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34746502-concerto-al-quds?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_21

Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet, Barbara Bray, Ahdaf Soueif (Introducer)

              A Short History of the Democracy Revolution in Lebanon

January 16 2022 On the Edge of Revolution in Lebanon

August 5 2020 Madness Death Illumination Transcendence: A Song of Beirut

January 19 2020 The Revolution in Lebanon’s Week of Anger Closes with Nine Hours of Battles in Beirut

January 29 2020 Lebanon’s new Iranian proxy government eliminates plurality of representation and subverts democracy

February 11 2020 Lebanon’s New Government Promises Economic Rebirth Amid Protests

December 15 2019 In Beirut the Revolution burns the political party offices of the pro-Iran theocratic Shia forces responsible for this weekends assaults on the secular democracy protestors

October 29 2019 Victory in Lebanon as Prime Minister Hariri resigns and the second front of the democracy revolution in Iraq becomes a war of resistance

October 24 2019 Global Revolution Engulfs Lebanon

                     Origins of the Disaster

September 18 2024 Anniversary of the 1982 Shatila and Sabra massacres in Lebanon

Arabic

6 نوفمبر 2024 السلام في لبنان؟

أعلن الرئيس بايدن عن سلام دائم ووقف إطلاق نار دائم بين إسرائيل وحزب الله في لبنان، وأنا أحتفل بذلك سواء بقي صحيحًا أم لا.

إذا صمد السلام، فسيكون من بين أعظم إنجازات الدبلوماسية في التاريخ كله، وسيُذكَر الرئيس بايدن باعتباره الرجل الذي أوقف الحرب العالمية الثالثة.

إذا صمد السلام.

ماذا بعد بالنسبة للبنان، بعد هذا السلام الأمريكي بين إسرائيل وحزب الله؟ على الرغم من أن حزب الله يخدم العديد من وظائف الدولة حيث تكون الدول وهمية أو تمثيلية، إلا أنه معقد كمنظمة إنسانية عابرة للحدود الوطنية وقفت تاريخيًا في تضامن مع الطبقات الدنيا من ذوي الدخل المنخفض ومع النضال من أجل التحرير وخاصة ضد العدوان الإسرائيلي وفي نفس الوقت قوة بالوكالة دائمًا لسيادة إيران، فإن حزب الله ليس متطابقًا مع دولة لبنان على الرغم من أنه يشكل حكومتها بشكل هامشي.

هذا يفتح بابًا من الإمكانات للديمقراطية العلمانية وتحرير لبنان من الاستيلاء والنفوذ الأجنبي ومن الدولة الثيوقراطية التي ستجذب الأمة دائمًا نحو الصراع الطائفي. لبنان مستقل حقا، خال من إيران وإسرائيل، ومن الحروب بالوكالة التي تشنها أميركا وروسيا والتي تهدد بتدميره. إن مثل هذه الدولة العازلة قد تكون مفيدة جدا في نزع فتيل أي صراعات مستقبلية، ووجود مستقر في المنطقة.

لماذا يجب أن نكون سجانين لبعضنا البعض، وليس محررين لبعضنا البعض؟

18 سبتمبر 2024 ذكرى مجزرة شاتيلا وصبرا عام 1982 في لبنان

      في مذبحة استمرت ثلاثة أيام في الفترة ما بين 16 و18 سبتمبر 1982، تم ارتكاب واحدة من أفظع عمليات القتل الجماعي في التاريخ في مخيمي شاتيلا وصبرا للاجئين ضد الشعب الفلسطيني، والتي كانت بمثابة بداية عشرين عامًا من الاحتلال الإسرائيلي الوحشي للبنان. .

      ما معنى هذه الذكرى السنوية لإرهاب الدولة وطغيانها، والغزو الإمبراطوري والسيطرة الاستعمارية، والجرائم ضد الإنسانية؟

       هنا كانت الفظائع التي ارتكبها الأقوياء ضد الضعفاء والمحرومين كأداة لتعطيل التاريخ وكسره، محرقة ارتكبها الناجون من محرقة موازية بسبب كيفية عمل القوة في أصول الشر كعملية خوف متكررة والقوة والقوة. ولكنه أيضًا مثال كلاسيكي على إرهاب الدولة والحرب باعتبارها فشلًا أخلاقيًا وانهيار شرعية وسلطة الدولة مما يغير السرد ويصبح صياغة الأمة كصدمة أولية، لأن استخدام القوة الاجتماعية يطيع نظرية نيوتن الثالثة. قانون الحركة ويخلق المقاومة كقوة مضادة خاصة به.

      في مثل هذه المناسبات، مثل اليوم، نستذكر المآسي، ونكرم المقاومة.

      دعونا نكرم موتانا المقدسين وأولئك الذين قاتلوا في مقاومة إرهاب الدولة والجرائم ضد الإنسانية، ولكن دعونا أيضًا ألا ننسى أبدًا أسماء مرتكبي هذه الجرائم ولا نبقى في يقظتنا لرؤيتهم يقدمون إلى العدالة.

      هناك دين ندين به لإخواننا من البشر، ومسؤولية نتحملها، إذا أردنا أن نبقى بشرًا ونتجنب الانحطاط إلى حالة حيوانية من النزعات الغريزية الرجعية ونصبح ظلالاً، مجردين من أبعادنا والقوى الفطرية التي قد يعضدنا ويرفعنا؛ الأمل والحب والإيمان كتضامن وولاء لبعضنا البعض.

      وعلينا أن نتذكر، ويجب ألا نصمت.

      وهذا ما يسمى تيكون أولام في اليهودية، إصلاح العالم، وهو واجب يربطنا معًا، سواء مع أولئك الذين يشبهوننا أو أولئك الذين لا يشبهوننا عبر خلجان واسعة من البشر والمعنى والقيمة والتسلسلات الهرمية وتصنيفات الانتماء و الآخر. سأخبرك بسر عن هذا. يمكن أن تصبح الحدود أيضًا واجهات.

      تتزامن هذه الذكرى الرهيبة لإرهاب الدولة والغزو الإمبراطوري والطغيان تقريبًا مع احتفالات رأس السنة اليهودية في رأس السنة اليهودية، في الخامس عشر إلى السابع عشر من سبتمبر هذا العام، وقبل يوم الكفارة مباشرةً، يوم الغفران، هذا العام بدءًا من غروب الشمس في الرابع والعشرين من شهر سبتمبر. أيلول/سبتمبر إلى الخامس والعشرين من أيلول/سبتمبر، بالتزامن مع أعمال دولة إسرائيل التي أدت إلى الانتفاضة الثانية.

      على الرغم من كل الصلوات والطقوس خلال هذه الأيام المقدسة، أشك في أن دولة إسرائيل ستقدم الكثير من التعويضات لشعب فلسطين، والكثير من تثمين الهويات الوطنية للدم والإيمان والتربة. احذر من أولئك الذين يدعون أنهم يتحدثون ويتصرفون باسمك، فهذه استراتيجية فاشية أساسية للإخضاع وتصنيع الرضا.

      لماذا يجب على الإيمان أن يحدد الحدود وليس الواجهات، والجدران وليس الجسور؟

       ومن بين سلسلة لا نهاية لها من الويلات ونماذج الخوف التي استخدمتها السلطة كسلاح لخدمة السلطة، تظل مذبحة صبرا وشاتيلا تتحدى أفكارنا حول أخوة البشرية.

      ولهذا يجب علينا حقًا أن نأتي بالحساب والتكفير؛ ولكن ليس من أجل إرث الماضي الذي يجب أن نتذكره، ولا من أجل تواطؤنا في الصمت ضد الظلم، والذي يمكن تعويضه من خلال العمل. لا يمكننا أن نفعل شيئا للموتى. إن الأحياء هم الذين يجب أن ينتقموا، والمستقبل هو الذي يجب أن يفدى.

      ومن المسؤول عن هذه الجريمة النكراء؟

      تم التخطيط لها وتوجيهها في اجتماعات شخصية من قبل رئيس الوزراء الإسرائيلي مناحيم بيغن، ووزير الدفاع أرييل شارون، ومدير الموساد ناحوم أدموني، ووزير الخارجية اسحق شامير، ومدير المخابرات العسكرية يهوشوا ساغي، وقائد الفرقة بيروت عاموس يارون، والدبلوماسي الأمريكي موريس دريبر، الذين يعملون بموجب أوامر من الرئيس رونالد ريغان، ورئيس لبنان بشير الجميل الذي كان يسوعيًا تلقى تعليمه في وكالة المخابرات المركزية. تم تجنيد العميل عندما كان محامياً يعمل في واشنطن العاصمة، ورئيس المخابرات العسكرية اللبنانية جوني عبده، وزعيم الكتائب إيلي حبيقة، إلى جانب ممثلين آخرين عن المصالح الإسرائيلية الأمريكية وكتائب الكتائب، وهي ميليشيا مسيحية مارونية شبه فاشية أسسها الكتائب الجديدة. رئيساً منتخباً للبنان الأب. صعد الجميل إلى القيادة بقتل عائلات رؤساء لبنان السابقين، بتمويل من رونالد ريغان بناءً على طلب أرييل شارون، وأصبح رئيساً في 23 أغسطس نتيجة للغزو الإسرائيلي للبنان في 6 يونيو.

      وهكذا تم إعداد المسرح للتطهير العرقي للفلسطينيين الذين طردتهم إسرائيل من منازلهم إلى مخيمات اللاجئين البائسة في لبنان، حيث لا يزال الناجون حتى اليوم، وهم في وضع محفوف بالمخاطر لا يقل اضطهاداً عن رواية فيكتور هوغو الرائعة البؤساء. ولا يقل تعالى عن التنوب الثوري

إلى متى يجب على الموتى وأحفادهم انتظار العدالة؟

     في كتابه “منع فلسطين: تاريخ سياسي من كامب ديفيد إلى أوسلو”، كتب سيث أنزيسكا “تحت قيادة رئيس الوزراء مناحيم بيغن ووزير الدفاع أرييل شارون، شنت الحكومة الإسرائيلية غزوًا في يونيو من ذلك العام جزئيًا بحجة إيقاف الفلسطينيين”. إطلاق نار من قبل ناشطين مسلحين على منطقة الجليل شمال إسرائيل. وبعد معاهدة السلام مع مصر عام 1979، أصبح القادة الإسرائيليون قلقين بشكل متزايد بشأن قوة منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية والروابط المتنامية بين الفلسطينيين داخل الأراضي المحتلة وعبر الشتات العربي. وكان التركيز الرئيسي لقلقهم منصبًا على لبنان، حيث نقلت منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية مركز عملياتها من الأردن بعد مواجهة مسلحة مع جيش الملك حسين في الفترة 1970-1971. اعتقد الاستراتيجيون الإسرائيليون أن استهداف منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية في لبنان وإجبارها على الانسحاب من شأنه أن يحقق عدة أهداف: سحق التطلعات الوطنية الفلسطينية إلى وطن، وطرد القوات السورية من لبنان والقضاء على النفوذ السوري هناك، وتأسيس كيان ماروني عميل. الدولة المسيحية كحليف وثيق.

      وبدلاً من ترسيخ الهيمنة الإسرائيلية على جارتها الشمالية، تحولت حرب لبنان إلى ما أطلق عليه البعض “فيتنام إسرائيل”. وفي خضم حرب أهلية وحشية بالفعل، أدى التدخل الإسرائيلي إلى مقتل أكثر من 600 جندي إسرائيلي وما لا يقل عن 5000 مدني لبناني وفلسطيني – أكثر من 19000 حسب التقديرات اللبنانية التي أحصت المقاتلين أيضًا. وبالتنسيق الوثيق مع القوات المارونية، سرعان ما تحول الغزو الإسرائيلي من توغل محدود إلى حصار دام الصيف ضد معقل منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية في بيروت الغربية. وخلافاً لحروب الأعوام 1948، أو 1967، أو 1973، كانت إسرائيل منخرطة بشكل لا لبس فيه في ما أسماه بيغن “حرب الاختيار”. ومن خلال الجمع بين القوة العسكرية والعمليات النفسية، ألحقت القوات الإسرائيلية خسائر فادحة داخل عاصمة عربية للمرة الأولى، حيث قصفت المواقع الفلسطينية من البر والبحر والجو، بينما احتلت مطار لبنان الدولي.

      دفع الرئيس رونالد ريغان، الذي انزعج من صور الدمار، إدارته إلى التفاوض على إنهاء القتال وتسهيل الإخلاء السلمي لمقاتلي منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية من المدينة إلى الدول العربية المجاورة. وكان زعيم منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية، ياسر عرفات، قد أشار إلى أنه ورجاله على استعداد للانسحاب شريطة أن تحصل منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية على الضمانات الأمريكية المطلوبة لأمن المدنيين الفلسطينيين والمؤيدين اللبنانيين الذين بقوا في العراق. وأثناء مشاركته مسودة اتفاق الانسحاب مع شفيق الحوت، أطلق عرفات ملاحظة حزينة بشأن الرحيل: “لقد أعطت بيروت فلسطين ما لم تمنحه أي عاصمة عربية أخرى. لقد أعطى وأعطى دون أن يطلب أي شيء في المقابل. ولن يسأل أبدا. ولا ينبغي لنا أن نجعلها تسأل. يجب أن ندفعها بإرادتنا الحرة.

      غادرت أول كتيبة من مقاتلي منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية المدينة في 21 أغسطس/آب، ثم غادر عرفات وكبار مسؤولي منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية على متن سفينة شحن يونانية إلى تونس في 30 أغسطس/آب. وفي المجمل، غادر نحو عشرة آلاف مقاتل لبنان عن طريق البحر والطرق البرية، مما دفع منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية إلى حالة من الجمود. منفى أعمق. وحتى بعد انتهاء القتال الأعنف، استمر الاحتلال الإسرائيلي الذي طال أمده لجنوب البلاد حتى عام 2000، مما أدى إلى إعادة تشكيل سياسة المنطقة. استمر النفوذ السوري على البلاد، لكن القوة الإيرانية حلت محله بشكل متزايد مع صعود حزب الله. وبعيدًا عن ترسيخ هيمنة إسرائيل الإقليمية، أدت حرب عام 1982 في نهاية المطاف إلى تقويض النفوذ الإسرائيلي والأمريكي في الشرق الأوسط، في حين غيرت المفاهيم حول كل من الصهيونية والقومية الفلسطينية في جميع أنحاء العالم.

      وكما كتب نبيل محمد من اللجنة الأمريكية العربية لمكافحة التمييز في قناة الجزيرة عام 2017؛ “هناك جيل رابع ينشأ الآن في مخيمات اللاجئين البائسة في لبنان. في صبرا وشاتيلا، تتكون معظم مساحات المعيشة من غرفتين صغيرتين للغاية: غرفة نوم، حيث تنام جميع أفراد الأسرة، وغرفة معيشة من نوع ما. لا توجد تهوية، ولا يوجد كهرباء تقريبًا. تستخدم معظم العائلات الإضاءة التي تعمل بالبطارية. يحظر شرب مياه الصنبور، لأنها مليئة بالبكتيريا ومالحة جدًا – فهي في الواقع تؤدي إلى تآكل الأنابيب. هناك ظروف صحية سيئة. هناك نقص في الأدوية لجميع الأمراض. وتمتد الأزقة الضيقة – التي يمر بعضها بمياه الصرف الصحي – عبر المخيمات. وعندما يهطل المطر، تصبح هذه الممرات الصغيرة موحلة. الأسلاك الكهربائية تتدلى من المساكن. يقوم الشباب بتوصيل الأسلاك وإعادة توصيلها؛ ومن وقت لآخر، يتعرض شخص ما للصعق بالكهرباء. وتنبعث الروائح الكريهة من تلك الظروف المزدحمة. المرض متفشي. يتوق اللاجئون الفلسطينيون في لبنان إلى العودة من المنفى إلى وطنهم الذي طردوا منه، لكن إسرائيل لا تسمح لهم بذلك، وذلك ببساطة لأنهم ليسوا يهوداً.

      إذا كان المجتمع الدولي ملزما بمعالجة مسؤوليته الأخلاقية تجاه ضحايا مجزرة صبرا وشاتيلا من خلال العمل على إنهاء الاحتلال الإسرائيلي وغيره من الانتهاكات.

لانتهاكات بحق الفلسطينيين، فإن حياة أفراد عائلتي والآخرين الذين نتذكرهم في هذا العام الخامس والثلاثين لن تذهب سدى”.

      واسمحوا لي الآن أن ألحق شهادتي التاريخية هنا، لأن أيام هذه الذكرى تغمرني في الذكريات، سواء تلك التي لا أستطيع أن أتحدث عنها أو تلك التي لا أستطيع أن أتحملها وحدي.

      في مقالتي بتاريخ 31 يوليو 2020، ماضي مفيد: ما هي أنتيفا؟ كتبت؛ “أقدم لكم قسم المقاومة كما أعطاني إياه جان جينيه في بيروت عام 1982؛ إليكم قصة كيف حدث ذلك، وأصلي الحقيقي.

      خلال الصيف الذي سبق سنتي الأخيرة في الجامعة في سان فرانسيسكو، كنت قد انطلقت في جولة طهي كبرى في البحر الأبيض المتوسط، وتعلمت طهي الطعام الذي أحبه، وكنت في بيروت عندما غزت إسرائيل لبنان وحاصرتني في مدينة تحت الحصار. . كان الجنود يتجولون في الشوارع مثل مجموعات من الكلاب الضالة، يرتكبون الفظائع؛ قامت إحدى هذه الوحدات التابعة لقوات الدفاع الإسرائيلية بإشعال النار في بعض الأطفال، وهم يضحكون ويراهنون على المدى الذي يمكنهم الركض فيه وهم يصرخون قبل أن يسقطوا في برك من الخراب الأسود وتصمت صراخهم. وجدت نفسي أقاتلهم. انضم إليّ آخرون، وانضم إلينا المزيد. ومنذ ذلك اليوم فصاعدًا كنت جزءًا من الدفاع عن بيروت ضد الحصار.

      يقع مقهى رائع يحتوي على أفضل كريب الفراولة في العالم على الجانب الآخر من زقاق القناصة، حيث قمنا أنا وأصدقائي برياضة شديدة من الاندفاع عبره للوصول إلى الإفطار بينما ارتطمت الرصاصة العرضية بالجدار خلفنا. في أحد الأيام وصلنا إلى معنوياتنا العالية المعتادة عندما جلس رجل أنيق على طاولتي، وبدأ الحديث بالفرنسية قائلاً: “لقد قيل لي إنك تفعل هذا كل يوم، تسابق ضد الموت لتناول الإفطار”.

      فأجبته: اللحظات المسروقة من الموت ملك لنا، وتحررنا. ربما هذا هو كل ما نملكه حقًا. إنه رجل فقير ليس لديه متعة تستحق الموت من أجلها.

     ابتسم وقال: “أنا موافق”، وهكذا بدأت محادثاتنا على الإفطار في الأيام الأخيرة التي سبقت أسره، أيام لا تنسى لأنها وضعتني على طريق حياتي من النضال من أجل الحرية ضد الطغيان واستبداد قوة الدولة و السيطرة، من أجل المساواة ضد العنف العنصري والظلم، وضد الفاشية التي تجمع بين استبداد الدولة والإرهاب العنصري.

      قدم نفسه على أنه عضو سابق في الفيلق باسم جان، وكان مؤذًا وحكيمًا ومتعلمًا بشكل كبير في الدراسات الكلاسيكية وربما تلقى تعليمه في السابق ككاهن ومليء بالقصص الجامحة عن نجوم الثقافة الأوروبية الحديثة. لقد أذهلت عندما اكتشفت بعد أيام أن صديقي الجديد الغريب كان أحد أعظم الشخصيات الأدبية في القرن. كنت قد اقتبست من “مذكرات اللص” لدحض شيء قاله، والذي وجده مضحكا، بينما كنا نناقش تفسيرات كتاب “هكذا تكلم زرادشت” لنيتشه بقلم سي جي. يونج، وموريس بلانشو، وجورج باتاي، وآخرون، محادثة ظلت غير مكتملة لأنه لم يستطع التوقف عن الضحك. وأخيراً قال بغمغمة: “أنا نفسي جان جينيه”. بالنسبة لي، يظل شخصية محتالة وجزءًا من هويتي التاريخية وأسطورتي الشخصية.

      لقد جاء يوم تم فيه اجتياح المتاريس وحينا معه، وهو أحد آخر أيامنا معًا. ومع امتلاء الشوارع فجأة بالجنود الإسرائيليين الذين يركضون بشكل مسعور في كيس من القتل والحرق العمد وغير ذلك من أعمال الإرهاب والوحشية الأخرى، أضرم الجنود النار في بنايتنا الذين كانوا يدعون الناس للخروج والاستسلام وكانوا يسرقون أطفال هؤلاء. من فعل ذلك وعصب أعينهم لاستخدامهم كرهائن ودروع بشرية، واكتشاف سلاحنا الوحيد وهو زجاجة الشمبانيا التي انتهينا منها للتو من كريب الفراولة، سألت رفيقي في الإفطار إذا كان لديه أي أفكار. وأجاب على ذلك بهز كتفيه اعتذاريًا وسؤالًا آخر: «أصلح الحراب؟»

      ضحكنا، وأوضح؛ “عندما نفقد كل الأمل، نصبح أحرارًا في القيام بأشياء مستحيلة، أشياء مجيدة.” هذه النصيحة أجد من الضروري أن أذكرها بين الحين والآخر، وأوصيكم بها جميعًا.

      ثم سأل: هل تستسلم؟

      فأجبت: “لا”.

     قال وهو واقف: «ولا أنا». “كما أشارككم الآن، مرِّروا للآخرين المحتاجين؛ هذا هو القسم الذي ابتكرته عام 1940 من القسم الذي أديته كجندي في مقاومة الاحتلال النازي. ربما يكون أفضل شيء سرقته على الإطلاق.”

      ولذا فإنني أعرض عليكم جميعا قسم المقاومة كما أعطاه لي العظيم جان جينيه في منزل محترق، في قضية خاسرة، في زمن القوة والظلام، في الوقفة الأخيرة وعمل من أعمال الخير. التحدي الذي يفوق الأمل في النصر أو البقاء؛ “نقسم الولاء لبعضنا البعض، الذين يجيبون على الطغيان بالحرية والفاشية بالمساواة. سنقاوم ولن نستسلم، ولن نتخلى عن إخواننا”.

      بالنسبة للفاشية وفكرة أن البعض منا أفضل من الآخرين بحكم ولادتهم، لا يمكن أن يكون هناك سوى رد واحد؛ لن يحدث مطلقا مرة اخري.

      لقد أفلتنا من الاعتقال في ذلك اليوم لأنه تم اقتيادنا عبر حواجز الحصار ب

لقد كان حليفًا غير متوقع، وهو شخصية ظهرت من الخلفية في أقصى نهاية الزقاق ومشى نحونا مبتسمًا. كان هذا هو القناص الذي كنا نلعب معه أنا وأصدقائي لمدة أسبوعين، والذي كان غير مرئي تمامًا وتغلب على كل محاولة لتعقبه أو اصطياده أو نصب كمين له أو التعرف عليه، والذي كان في الواقع قد حاصر المدينة من الداخل. .

      مد لي يده فصافحتها وهو يقول: “أحسنت اللعب يا سيدي. لقد حاولت قتلك كل يوم لمدة أربعة عشر يومًا، لكن وجود الإسرائيليين داخل المدينة يغير كل شيء. لدينا عدو مشترك، لكنهم لا يعرفون ذلك، لذلك أنا في وضع يسمح لي بمساعدتك. لكنني لا أستطيع قتالهم وحدي. هل تريد شريكًا؟”

      وهكذا بدأت مغامرة وصداقة عظيمة، أشارككم إياها الآن في سياق طبيعة المقاومة ضد الفاشية لأنها توضح شيئًا لا يمكن لأي شخص يقوم بهذا النوع من العمل أن ينساه أبدًا؛ البشر ليسوا وحوشًا، ويستحقون الشك البشري، وليسوا أبدًا خارج نطاق الخلاص.

      إن الصراع بين الخير والشر في قلب الإنسان غالباً ما يتمحور ويتوازن حول الاختلافات بين الغرض من استخدام القوة؛ لمعاقبة التجاوزات عندما ترتكبها السلطة كعمل من أعمال القهر والقمع ضد الضعفاء، أو الاستيلاء على السلطة وحماية الضعفاء كواجب رعاية.

      كن متأكدًا جدًا من أنك تعرف السبب الذي يخدم أفعالك.

     وفي تدوينتي عن فاجعة انفجار مرفأ بيروت، 5 أغسطس 2020، جنون الموت، إضاءة التعالي: أغنية بيروت؛ نحن نبحث عن معنى للكوارث والأحداث التي تعطل الحياة والتي يرثها الجسد، ولكن كما هو الحال في كارثة بيروت، غالبًا ما تكون هذه الأسباب خارج نطاق فهمنا.

      أشير هنا الآن إلى السورة 18 من القرآن الكريم، المسماة الكهف، الآيات 60-82، وهي قصة رمزية تصور الخضر، الشخصية الإسلامية المحتالة التي هي خالدة ويرمز لها باللون الأخضر كتجسيد لجنة الجنة التي لها إنه البوابة، الذي يكون مرشدًا للنفس عبر ألغاز متاهة الحياة المؤدية إليها، ويتحدث إلينا بالأحلام والرؤى والإشارات.

      أنا أعتبرها شكلاً سرديًا من نظرية جودل؛ دليل على ضرورة الإيمان ووجود اللانهائي، وحدود المعرفة الإنسانية وعبثية الحالة الإنسانية. ويتوافق هذا التفسير مع تفسير العلامة والمترجم الكبير عبد الله يوسف علي.

      كما هو الحال مع التجربة الفكرية التأسيسية لأحد معاصري أفلاطون، وهي رمح أرخيتاس الذي يحدد أفق المعلوم إذ يُلقى ويرسم حدًا في الهبوط، وهو ما نكرره بلا نهاية في الثورات العلمية مهما تعلمنا كثيرًا. ويظل المجهول شاسعًا كما كان من قبل، مما يحافظ على الجهل. كما تم تطويره في العمل الإنجليزي الأوسط المجهول سحابة الجهل ونيكولاس كوزا في الجهل المتعلم، هذا هو المبدأ الأول لنظرية المعرفة؛ حفظ الجهل.

      تلخص القصة الأساسية موضوعات تضحية إبراهيم والتي أود أن أقول أنها تشكل أساس الدين الإسلامي وربما جميع أشكال العقيدة الإبراهيمية، وفي شوارع بيروت منذ فترة طويلة رأيتها تتكشف مرة أخرى.

     في هذه القصة، يأمر الرجل الأخضر موسى بالقيام بثلاثة أشياء إجرامية وغير منطقية، أشياء لا يمكن فهمها إلا من خلال المعرفة المسبقة للنبوة التي ليست لنا. كما هو الحال مع العدالة، فإن البصيرة لا تنتمي إلى الإنسان؛ على الرغم من أننا قد نتصور مستقبلنا المحتمل، إلا أننا لا نستطيع أن نعرف أي منهم سوف يتحقق. يجادل موسى بن ميمون بأن هذا يرجع إلى تدمير الكون وإعادة خلقه باستمرار في كل لحظة، مما يحافظ على الإرادة الحرة. “الكثيب” لفرانك هربرت عبارة عن تجربة فكرية موسعة واستعارة تثير إشكالية موضوعات وأسئلة قصة الخضر في السورة 18.

     المقطع ذو الصلة هو هذا؛ فَأَرَدْنَا أَن يُبْدِلَهُمَا رَبُّهُمَا خَيْرًا مِّنْهُ زَكَاةً وَأَقْرَبَ رُحْمًا، أو “فأردنا أن يبدلهما ربهما ولدًا خيرًا منه زكاة وأقرب إلى الرحمة”، وهو تبديل كلاسيكي. كما أنه يمثل نقطة التشعب التي تتحول إليها العقود الآجلة المحتملة.

      لدي أمل في مستقبل البشرية بسبب ما شهدته عندما تم عرض هذه القصة الأساسية أمامي قبل أربعين عامًا، وبسببها لم أشعر باليأس أبدًا.

      مثل هذه البوابة تقف أو كانت موجودة في بيروت، مثل بوابة راشومون أو بوابة إلى اللانهائي وإلى الإمكانيات اللامحدودة للصيرورة الإنسانية. قد يكون الآن غبارًا وذكريات، أو مثل قطة شرودنجر كلاهما موجود وغير موجود في آن واحد؛ هذا لا أستطيع الإجابة عليه بالنسبة لك.

       لكن يمكنني أن أتحدث كشاهد للتاريخ أن شيئًا رائعًا حدث هناك في ظله، وهو مثل قيام الخضر باستبدال الشاب بآخر لمنع حدوث شر أكبر في المستقبل، وهي مفارقة السفر عبر الزمن إن وجدت، أذهلتني. مع قوة الوحي.

      لقد كان أمراً تافهاً في نطاق حصار بيروت

هذه الفظائع التي تم تجنبها من بين الكثيرين من خلال الطيبة الفطرية لرجل واحد لا يزال اسمه مجهولاً، وهو بطل مأساوي لن أنساه أبدًا، وهو مجند غير راغب في خدمة حكومته مثل كثيرين آخرين، الذين قالوا لا للسلطة وللحكومة. إغراء الشر. ووجود الإنسان يدور حول ميزان هؤلاء الأفراد، وهم قليلون جداً.

     ورفض هذا الجندي الإسرائيلي ارتكاب انتهاكات وسفوح بحق فتاة فلسطينية تبلغ من العمر نحو اثني عشر عاماً، تم أسرها لهذا الغرض من قبل ملازم في فصيلته، في اختبار ولاء مشترك وبدء. احمر خجلا عند أول طلبات ضابطه أمام استهزاء زملائه مثل صرخات الغربان الصاخبة على وشك تناول وليمة، هناك في الشارع أمام باب القرار الذي يجب علينا جميعا أن نواجهه، ثم غضب من الرفض عندما أدرك أنه ليس كذلك مزحة، أن الاحتلال كان من أجل الإرهاب والنهب وليس كما قيل له. قتله قائده حيث كان واقفاً برصاصة واحدة في الرأس بينما كانت الفتاة تهرب.

      لقد عدت إلى هذا المكان طوال حياتي لألمس الحجارة الملطخة بدمه، لأنني أتذكر أننا لسنا بعيدين عن الفداء، وأننا طالما نقاوم السلطة الظالمة فنحن أحرار، وهناك أمل.

Hebrew

26 בנובמבר 2024 שלום בלבנון?

 הנשיא ביידן הכריז על שלום מתמשך והפסקת אש קבועה בין ישראל לחיזבאללה בלבנון, ואת זה אני חוגג בין אם זה יישאר נכון ובין אם לאו.

 אם השלום יישאר, זה יהיה בין ההישגים הגדולים של הדיפלומטיה בכל ההיסטוריה, והנשיא ביידן ייזכר כאיש שעצר את מלחמת העולם השלישית.

 אם השלום יחזיק מעמד.

 מה הלאה עבור לבנון, אחרי הפאקס אמריקנה הזה בין ישראל לחיזבאללה? למרות שחיזבאללה משרת הרבה מתפקידיה של מדינה שבה מדינות הן רעיוניות או ביצועיות, הוא מורכב כארגון הומניטרי טרנס-לאומי שעמד היסטורית בסולידריות עם מעמדות קדומים ועם מאבקי שחרור, במיוחד מול תוקפנות ישראלית ובו זמנית תמיד נציג כוח השלטון של איראן, חיזבאללה אינו זהה לעם לבנון למרות שהוא ממשלה שולית.

 זה פותח שער של אפשרות לדמוקרטיה חילונית ולשחרור לבנון מתפיסה והשפעה זרה וממדינה תיאוקרטית שתמיד תמשוך את האומה לעימות עדתי. לבנון עצמאית באמת, משוחררת מאיראן ומישראל וממלחמות הפרוקסי של אמריקה ורוסיה המאיימות על השמדתה. מצב חיץ כזה יכול להיות שימושי מאוד בנטרול כל עימות עתידי, ונוכחות מייצבת באזור.

 מדוע עלינו להיות כלואים זה של זה, ולא המשחררים זה של זה?

18 בספטמבר 2023 יום השנה לטבח שתילה וסברה בלבנון ב-1982

      .

      מה המשמעות של יום השנה הזה של טרור ועריצות המדינה, כיבוש אימפריאלי ושליטה קולוניאלית ופשעים נגד האנושות?

       כאן הייתה זוועה שבוצעה על ידי האדירים נגד חסרי הכוח והמנושלים כמכשיר לשיבוש ושבר ההיסטוריה, שואה שבוצעה על ידי ניצולי שואה מקבילה בגלל האופן שבו הכוח פועל במקורות הרוע כתהליך רקורסיבי של פחד , כוח וכוח; אלא גם דוגמה קלאסית של טרור ומלחמה של המדינה ככישלון מוסרי והתמוטטות הלגיטימיות והסמכות של המדינה שמשנה את הנרטיב והופכת למבנה של אומה כטראומה עיקרית, שכן השימוש בכוח חברתי מציית ל-Third של ניוטון חוק התנועה ויוצר התנגדות ככוח נגד של עצמו.

      בימי השנה כמו היום אנו זוכרים את הטרגדיות, ומכבדים את ההתנגדות.

      הבה נכבד את המתים הקדושים שלנו ואת אלה שלחמו בהתנגדות לטרור המדינה ולפשעים נגד האנושות, אך הבה גם לעולם לא נשכח את שמות מבצעיה ולא ננוח בדריכותנו לראותם מובאים לדין.

      ישנו חוב שאנו חבים לו, ואחריות שאנו נושאים בעבור, בני האדם שלנו, אם ברצוננו להישאר אנושיים ולהימנע מהידרדרות למצב חייתי של אטאוויסטים של אינסטינקטים ולהיות צללים, חסרי הממדיות שלנו והכוחות המולדים אשר יכול לקיים ולרומם אותנו; תקווה, אהבה ואמונה כסולידריות ונאמנות זה לזה.

      עלינו לזכור, ואסור לנו לשתוק.

      זה נקרא ביהדות תיקון עולם, תיקון העולם, חובה שמחברת אותנו, הן עם הדומים והן עם אלה שאינם דומים לנו על פני מפרצים עצומים של ישות אנושית, משמעות וערך והיררכיות וטקסונומיות של שייכות ו. זוּלָתִיוּת. על זה אגלה לך סוד; גבולות יכולים גם להפוך לממשקים.

      יום השנה הנורא הזה של טרור המדינה וכיבוש אימפריאלי ועריצות, חופף בערך את חגיגות השנה החדשה היהודית של ראש השנה, השנה חמישה עשר עד שבע עשרה בספטמבר בספטמבר, ורגע לפני יום הכיפורים, יום כיפור, השנה משקיעת החמה ב-24 בספטמבר. ספטמבר עד זה של העשרים וחמישה, בקירוב לפעולות מדינת ישראל שהובילו לאינתיפאדה השנייה.

      היזהרו ממי שמתיימרים לדבר ולפעול בשמכם, כי זוהי אסטרטגיה פשיסטית ראשונית של הכנעה וייצור הסכמה.

      מדוע האמונה חייבת להגדיר גבולות ולא ממשקים, חומות ולא גשרים?

       בין האוסף האינסופי של צרות ומופתים של פחד שנעשה נשק בשירות לשלטון על ידי הסמכות, נותרו טבח סברה ושתילה כדי לערער על הרעיונות שלנו על אחוות המין האנושי.

      לשם כך עלינו להביא באמת חשבון וכפרה; אך לא עבור מורשת העבר, שיש לזכור, ולא עבור שותפותנו בשתיקה נגד עוול, שניתן לגאול באמצעות פעולה. איננו יכולים לעשות דבר למען המתים; יש לנקום על החיים, ועל העתיד יש לגאול.

      מי אחראי לפשע הנורא הזה?

      מתוכנן ומנחה בפגישות אישיות של ראש ממשלת ישראל מנחם בגין, שר הביטחון אריאל שרון, ראש המוסד נחום אדמוני, שר החוץ יצחק שמיר, מנהל המודיעין הצבאי יהושע שגיא, מפקד האוגדה ביירות עמוס ירון, הדיפלומט האמריקני מוריס דרייפר הפועל לפי פקודות מאת הנשיא רונלד רייגן, נשיא לבנון בשיר גמאייל שהיה ישועי משכיל C.I.A. פעיל שגויס כשהיה עורך דין שעבד בוושינגטון הבירה, ראש המודיעין הצבאי הלבנוני ג’וני עבדו, ומנהיג הפלנגות אלי חוביקה, יחד עם נציגים נוספים של אינטרסים ישראלים-אמריקאים והפלנגה, מיליציה מעין-פאשיסטית נוצרית-מארונית שהוקמה על ידי הארגון החדש. אביו של נשיא לבנון נבחר. גמאייל עלה למנהיגות על ידי רצח משפחות הנשיאים לשעבר של לבנון, על ידי רונלד רייגן לבקשת אריאל שרון, והפך לנשיא ב-23 באוגוסט כתוצאה מהפלישה הישראלית ללבנון ב-6 ביוני.

      כך הוכן הבמה לטיהור האתני של הפלסטינים שגורשו מבתיהם על ידי ישראל למחנות הפליטים האומללים בלבנון, שם נותרו הניצולים כיום, פרקריאט מדוכא לא פחות מזה של הרומן הקסום של ויקטור הוגו “עלובי החיים”. ולא פחות מרומם עם אשוח מהפכני

כמה זמן צריכים המתים וצאצאיהם לחכות לצדק?

     ירי רקטות לוחמני לעבר אזור הגליל בצפון ישראל. לאחר הסכם השלום עם מצרים ב-1979, גם מנהיגים ישראלים נהיו חרדים יותר ויותר לגבי כוחו של אש”ף והקשרים ההולכים וגדלים בין פלסטינים בתוך השטחים הכבושים וברחבי הפזורה הערבית. עיקר דאגתם היה בלבנון, שם העביר אש”ף את מרכז הפעילות שלו מירדן לאחר עימות מזוין עם צבאו של המלך חוסיין בשנים 1970–1971. אסטרטגים ישראלים האמינו כי הכוונת אש”ף בלבנון וכפיית נסיגתו ישיגו מספר מטרות: סילוק השאיפות הלאומיות הפלסטיניות למולדת, גירוש חיילי סוריה מלבנון וחיסול ההשפעה הסורית שם, והקמת מרונית לקוחה. מדינה נוצרית כבעלת ברית קרובה.

      במקום לבסס את הדומיננטיות הישראלית על שכנתה מצפון, מלחמת לבנון הפכה למה שכינו “וייטנאם של ישראל”. בעיצומה של מלחמת אזרחים אכזרית ממילא, ההתערבות הישראלית הביאה למותם של יותר מ-600 חיילים ישראלים ולפחות 5,000 אזרחים לבנונים ופלסטינים – יותר מ-19,000 לפי הערכות לבנוניות שספרו גם לוחמים. בתיאום הדוק עם הכוחות המארונים, הפלישה של ישראל הפכה במהרה מהיותה פלישה מוגבלת למצור של קיץ על מעוז אש”ף במערב ביירות. בניגוד למלחמות ב-1948, 1967 או 1973, ישראל הייתה מעורבת באופן חד משמעי במה שבגין כינה “מלחמת בחירה”. בשילוב כוח צבאי עם פעולות פסיכולוגיות, כוחות ישראליים גרמו לראשונה אבדות כבדות בתוך בירה ערבית, כשהם הפציצו עמדות פלסטיניות מהיבשה, מהים ומהאוויר, תוך כדי כיבוש שדה התעופה הבינלאומי של לבנון.

      הנשיא רונלד רייגן, המוטרד מתמונות ההרס, דחף את ממשלו לנהל משא ומתן על סיום הלחימה ולהקל על פינוי של לוחמי אש”ף מהעיר למדינות ערב השכנות. מנהיג אש”ף, יאסר ערפאת, אותת שהוא ואנשיו מוכנים לסגת בתנאי שלאש”ף יהיו הערבויות האמריקניות הנדרשות לביטחון לאזרחים פלסטינים ותומכי לבנון שנותרו מאחור. ערפאת שיתף את טיוטת הסכם הנסיגה עם שפיק אל-הוט והשמיע הערה עגומה על העזיבה: “ביירות נתנה לפלסטין מה שאין לאף בירה ערבית אחרת. זה נתן ונתן, בלי לבקש שום דבר בתמורה. וזה לעולם לא יבקש. אנחנו גם לא צריכים לגרום לזה לשאול. אנחנו צריכים להחזיר את זה מרצוננו החופשי”.

      המחלקה הראשונה של לוחמי אש”ף עזבה את העיר ב-21 באוגוסט, כאשר ערפאת ופקידי אש”ף מובילים יצאו על ספינת ספנות יוונית לתוניסיה ב-30 באוגוסט. בסך הכל, כ-10,000 לוחמים עזבו את לבנון בדרכי הים והיבשה, ודחפו את אש”ף למצב דומם. גלות עמוקה יותר. גם לאחר שהסתיימו הקרבות הקשים ביותר, כיבוש ישראלי ממושך בדרום המדינה נמשך עד שנת 2000, שעיצב מחדש את הפוליטיקה של האזור. ההשפעה הסורית על המדינה נמשכה, אך יותר ויותר היא נדחקה על ידי הכוח האיראני עם עליית חיזבאללה. הרחק מלחזק את ההגמוניה האזורית של ישראל, מלחמת 1982 חתרה בסופו של דבר את ההשפעה הישראלית והאמריקאית במזרח התיכון, תוך כדי שינוי תפיסות של ציונות ושל לאומיות פלסטינית ברחבי העולם”.

      כפי שכתב נביל מוחמד מהוועדה האמריקאית-ערבית נגד אפליה באל-ג’זירה ב-2017; “דור רביעי גדל כעת במחנות הפליטים העלובים בלבנון. בסברה ושתילה רוב חללי המגורים מורכבים משני חדרים קטנים מאוד: חדר שינה, בו ישנה כל המשפחה וסלון מעין. אין אוורור, וכמעט אין חשמל. רוב המשפחות משתמשות בתאורה המופעלת על ידי סוללה. שתיית מי ברז אסורה, כיוון שהם מלאים בחיידקים ומלוחים מאוד – הם למעשה משחיתים צינורות. יש תנאים סניטריים גרועים. יש מחסור בתרופות לכל המחלות. סמטאות צרות – חלקן עם ביוב זורם – מתפתלות בין המחנות. כשיורד גשם השבילים הקטנים האלה הופכים לבוציים. חוטי חשמל תלויים מבתי מגורים. גברים צעירים מחברים ומחברים מחדש חוטים; מדי פעם מישהו מתחשמל. ריחות רעים בוקעים מאותם תנאים צפופים. המחלה משתוללת. הפליטים הפלסטינים בלבנון כמהים לחזור מהגלות למולדת ממנה גורשו, אך אינם רשאים לעשות זאת על ידי ישראל, פשוט כי הם אינם יהודים.

      אם הקהילה הבינלאומית תהיה מחויבת לתקן את אחריותה המוסרית כלפי קורבנות הטבח בסברה ושתילה על ידי פעילות לסיום הכיבוש של ישראל ועוד.

הפרות של זכויות פלסטינים, אז חייהם של בני משפחתי ושל האחרים שאנו זוכרים בשנה ה-35 הזו לא יאבדו לשווא”.

      הרשו לי כעת לצרף כאן את העדות שלי להיסטוריה, כי ימי יום השנה הזה מטביעים אותי בזיכרונות, גם אלה שאני לא יכול לדבר עליהם וגם אלה שאני לא יכול לשאת לבד.

      בפוסט שלי מ-31 ביולי 2020, עבר שימושי: מהי אנטיפה? כתבתי; “אני מציע לך את שבועת ההתנגדות כפי שניתנה לי בביירות ב-1982 על ידי ז’אן ז’נה; הנה הסיפור של איך זה קרה, ושל המוצא האמיתי שלי.

      בקיץ שלפני השנה האחרונה באוניברסיטה בסן פרנסיסקו, יצאתי לסיבוב הופעות קולינרי בים התיכון, למדתי לבשל את האוכל שאהבתי, והייתי בביירות כשישראל פלשה ללבנון ולכדה אותי בעיר תחת מצור. . חיילים הסתובבו ברחובות כמו להקות של כלבי פרא, מבצעים זוועות; יחידה אחת כזו של צה”ל הציתה כמה ילדים, צחקו והימורים על כמה רחוק יוכלו לרוץ בצרחות לפני שייפלו לתוך בריכות חורבה מושחרת וצרחותיהם ישתקו. מצאתי את עצמי נלחם בהם; אחרים הצטרפו אלי, ועוד הצטרפו אלינו. מאותו יום ואילך הייתי חלק מההגנה על ביירות מפני המצור.

      בית קפה מדהים שהיה בו את קרפי התותים הטובים ביותר בעולם שכב בצד הרחוק של סמטת צלפים, שחבריי ואני עשינו ספורט אתגרי של לחצות להגיע לארוחת הבוקר בזמן שקליע מדי פעם פגע בקיר שמאחורינו. יום אחד הגענו במצב הרוח הרגיל שלנו, כאשר ג’נטלמן אלגנטי ישב לשולחני, ודיבר בצרפתית החל בשיחה עם, “אמרו לי שתעשה את זה כל יום, מירוץ נגד המוות לארוחת בוקר.”

      על כך השבתי, “רגעים שנגנבו ממוות שייכים לנו, ומשחררים אותנו. אולי זה כל מה שיש לנו באמת. זה אדם עני שאין לו תענוגות ששווה למות עבורם.”

     הוא חייך ואמר, “אני מסכים”, וכך התחילו שיחותינו בארוחת הבוקר בימים האחרונים שלפני לכידתו, ימים בלתי נשכחים שכן זה המקום שבו הוא הוביל אותי למסלול חיי של מאבק לחירות נגד עריצות ואוטוקרטיות של כוח המדינה ו שליטה, למען שוויון נגד אלימות ואי צדק גזעניים, ונגד הפשיזם המשלב גם עריצות מדינה וגם טרור גזעני.

      הוא הציג את עצמו כלגיונר לשעבר בשם ז’אן, היה שובב, חכם, למד עצום בלימודים קלאסיים ואולי פעם התחנך ככומר, ומלא בסיפורים פראיים על מאורות התרבות האירופית המודרנית. הייתי המום כשגיליתי ימים לאחר מכן שהחבר החדש והמוזר שלי הוא אחת הדמויות הספרותיות הגדולות של המאה. ציטטתי את כתב העת הגנב בהפרכה של משהו שהוא אמר, שהוא מצא מצחיק, בזמן שדנו בפרשנויות ל”ככה אמר זרתוסטרה” של ניטשה מאת סי.ג. יונג, מוריס בלאנשו, ז’ורז’ בטאיל ואחרים, שיחה שלא הסתיימה כיוון שהוא לא יכול להפסיק לצחוק. בסופו של דבר הוא פלט, “אני בעצמי הוא ז’אן ז’נה.” בעיני הוא נשאר דמות טריקסטר וחלק מהזהות ההיסטורית ומהמיתולוגיה האישית שלי.

      הגיע יום שהבריקדות נחרצו והשכונה שלנו יחד איתה, אחד הימים האחרונים שלנו ביחד. כשהרחובות התמלאו לפתע בחיילים ישראלים משתוללים בשק של רצח, הצתות ושאר שפל של טרור וחוסר אנושיות, הבניין שלנו הוצת על ידי חיילים שקראו לאנשים לצאת ולהיכנע וגונבו את ילדיהם של אלה. מי עשה את זה וכיסה את עיניהם כדי להשתמש בהם כבני ערובה ומגנים אנושיים, והגילוי של הנשק היחיד שלנו הוא בקבוק השמפניה שזה עתה סיימנו עם קרפ התותים שלנו, שאלתי את בן לוויתי לארוחת הבוקר אם יש לו רעיונות. על כך השיב במשיכת כתפיים מתנצלת ובשאלה נוספת, “לתקן כידונים?”

      צחקנו, והוא פירט; “כאשר כל תקווה אבודה, אנו חופשיים לעשות דברים בלתי אפשריים, דברים מפוארים.” בעצה זו אני מוצא צורך לזכור מעת לעת, ושאני ממליץ לכולכם.

      ואז הוא שאל: “האם תיכנע?’

      ועל כך השבתי “לא”.

     “גם אני,” הוא אמר בעמידה. “כפי שאני משתפת אתכם עכשיו, עברו לאחרים הזקוקים לכך; זו שבועה שהמצאתי ב-1940 מהשבועה שנשאתי כלגיונר, על ההתנגדות לכיבוש הנאצי. זה אולי הדבר הכי טוב שגנבתי אי פעם”.

      ועל כן אני מציע לכולכם את שבועת ההתנגדות כפי שניתנה לי על ידי ז’אן ז’נה הגדול בבית בוער, במטרה אבודה, בזמן של כוח וחושך, בעמידה אחרונה ובמעשה של התרסה מעבר לתקווה לניצחון או הישרדות; “אנחנו נשבעים את נאמנותנו זה לזה, שעונים לעריצות עם חירות ופשיזם עם שוויון. נתנגד ולא נכנע, ולא נוטש את רעינו”.

      לפשיזם ולרעיון שחלקנו טובים מאחרים בתנאי לידתנו יכולה להיות רק תשובה אחת; לעולם לא שוב.

      נמלטנו מתפיסה באותו יום כי הובלנו דרך המחסומים של כיתור ב

אתה בעל ברית לא סביר, דמות שהתממשה מהרקע בקצה הסמטה וניגשה אלינו בחיוך. זה היה הצלף שחבריי ואני שיחקנו איתו במשחקים שלנו במשך שבועיים, שהיה בלתי נראה לחלוטין והערים על כל ניסיון לעקוב, ללכוד, לארוב או לזהות אותו, ולמעשה כיתר את העיר מבפנים .

      הוא הושיט לי את ידו ולחצתי אותה כשהוא אמר, “שיחקתי טוב, אדוני. ניסיתי להרוג אותך כל יום כבר ארבעה עשר ימים, אבל הישראלים שנמצאים בתוך העיר משנה הכל. יש לנו אויב משותף, אבל הם לא יודעים את זה, אז אני בעמדה לעזור לך. אבל אני לא יכול להילחם בהם לבד. רוצה בן זוג?”

      אז התחילה הרפתקה גדולה וידידות, שאני חולק איתכם כעת בהקשר של טבעה של ההתנגדות האנטי-פשיסטית, כי היא ממחישה משהו שלעולם לא יכול להישכח על ידי מי שעושה עבודה מסוג זה; בני אדם אינם מפלצות, הם ראויים לספק אנושי, ולעולם אינם מעבר לגאולה.

      המאבק בין טוב לרע בלב האדם לרוב מסתובב ומתאזן על ההבדלים בין מטרת השימוש בכוח; להעניש עבירה כאשר היא מופעלת על ידי סמכות כאקט של הכנעה ודיכוי נגד חסרי הכוח, או לתפוס את השלטון ולהגן על חסרי הכוח כחובת זהירות.

      תהיו בטוחים שאתם יודעים לאיזו סיבה משרתות הפעולות שלכם.

     ובפוסט שלי על הטרגדיה של פיצוץ נמל ביירות, 5 באוגוסט 2020 Madness Death Illumination Transcendence: A Song of Beirut; אנו מחפשים משמעות באסונות ובאירועי החיים המשבשים שהבשר הוא יורש שלהם, אך כמו באסון בביירות, סיבות כאלה הן לרוב מעבר להבנתנו.

      כאן אני מתייחס כעת לסורה 18 של הקוראן הקדוש, הנקראת המערה, פסוקים 60-82, אלגוריה הכוללת את Khidr, דמות הטריקסטר האסלאמית שהיא בן אלמוות ומסומלת כירוק כהתגלמות של גן גן העדן שאליו הוא שער, שפועל כמדריך של הנשמה דרך חידות מבוך החיים המוביל אליו, ומדבר אלינו דרך חלומות, חזיונות וסימנים.

      אני רואה בזה צורה נרטיבית של משפט גודל; הוכחה לנחיצות האמונה ולקיומו של האינסוף, לגבולות הידע האנושי ולאבסורד המצב האנושי. פרשנות כזו מתיישרת עם זו של המלומד והמתרגם הגדול עבדאללה יוסף עלי.

      כמו בניסוי המחשבתי הבסיסי של אחד מבני דורו של אפלטון, החנית של ארכיטאס, המגדירה את אופק הידוע כפי שהוא נזרק ומסמנת גבול בנחיתה, עליו אנו חוזרים בלי סוף במהפכות מדעיות, לא משנה כמה נלמד לא ידוע נשאר עצום כמו קודם, משמר בורות. כפי שפותח בעבודה האנונימית של Middle Englich The Cloud of Unknowing ועל ידי ניקולאוס מקוזה ב-Of Learned Ignorance, זהו העיקרון הראשון של האפיסטמולוגיה; שימור הבורות.

      הסיפור הקנוני משחזר נושאים של קורבן איברהים שהייתי אומר מהווה את הבסיס לאסלאם ואולי לכל צורות האמונה האברהמית, וברחובות ביירות מזמן ראיתי את זה מתגלה שוב.

     בסיפור זה האיש הירוק מורה למשה על ידי עשיית שלושה דברים שהם פליליים ושטויות, דברים שניתן להבין רק באמצעות ידיעה מוקדמת של נבואה שאינה שלנו. כמו בצדק, ראיית הנולד אינה שייכת לאדם; למרות שאנו עשויים לדמיין את העתיד האפשרי שלנו, איננו יכולים לדעת איזה מהם יתממש. הרמב”ם טוען שהסיבה לכך היא שהיקום מושמד ונברא בכל רגע מחדש, מה ששומר על הרצון החופשי. החולית של פרנק הרברט היא ניסוי מחשבתי ואלגוריה מורחבת אשר מעוררת בעייתיות בנושאים והשאלות של סיפורו של Khidr בסורה 18.

     הקטע הרלוונטי הוא זה; הוא גם מייצג נקודת התפצלות שעליה מסתובבים עתידיים אפשריים.

      יש לי תקווה לעתיד האנושות בגלל מה שראיתי כשהסיפור העיקרי הזה הוצג לפני ארבעים שנה, ובגללו מעולם לא התייאשתי.

      שער כזה עומד או עמד פעם בביירות, כמו שער ראשומון או שער אל האינסוף ולאפשרויות בלתי מוגבלות של התהוות אנושית. זה יכול להיות עכשיו אבק וזיכרונות, או כמו החתול של שרדינגר שניהם קיימים ואינם קיימים בבת אחת; על זה אני לא יכול לענות לך.

       אבל אני יכול לדבר כעדה של ההיסטוריה שמשהו מדהים קרה שם בצלו, שכמו חייד שהחליף את הצעיר באחר כדי למנוע מרע גדול יותר להתרחש בעתיד, פרדוקס מסע בזמן אם היה כזה, היכה בי. בכוח ההתגלות.

      זה היה דבר לא משמעותי בהיקף המצור על ביירות, הלאה

זוועה בקרב רבים שנמנעה בזכות טובתו המולדת של אדם בודד ששמו נותר עלום, גיבור טרגי שלעולם לא אשכח, מתגייס לא מוכן בשירות ממשלתו כמו רבים אחרים, שאמר לא לסמכות ול הפיתוי של הרוע. קיומה של המין האנושי תלוי באיזון של אנשים כאלה, והם מעטים מאוד.

     חייל ישראלי זה סירב לבצע הפרות וקללות בדמותה של נערה פלסטינית, כבת שתים עשרה, שנלכדה לשם כך על ידי סגן מחלקתו, מבחן נאמנות וחניכה נפוצה. הוא הסמיק למשמע הדרישות הראשונות של הקצין שלו להתגרות של חבריו כמו זעקות עורבים שעומדים לחגוג, שם ברחוב לפני שער ההכרעה שכולנו צריכים להתמודד, ואז כעס בסירוב כשהבין שזה לא בדיחה, שהכיבוש עוסק בטרור ובגזל ולא כפי שנאמר לו. המפקד שלו רצח אותו במקום שעמד עם ירייה אחת בראש כשהילדה נמלטה.

      חזרתי למקום הזה במשך כל חיי כדי לגעת באבנים המוכתמות בדמו, כי אני נזכר שאנחנו לא מעבר לגאולה, ושכל עוד אנחנו מתנגדים לסמכות לא צודקת אנחנו חופשיים, ויש תקווה

November 25 2024 Witness of Jimmy Lai, Martyr For A Free Press, Democracy,  and the Independence and Sovereignty of Hong Kong

      In the witness of Jimmy Lai before the court of the Chinese Communist Party but also that of history, a state of tyranny and terror which Occupies Hong Kong as imperial conquest and dominion is delegitimized and exposed, and a figure emerges of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth and of freedom as refusal to submit to authority, its brutal force in repression of dissent and its terrorist though control and theft of our universal human rights including that of a free press.

     We must recognize the independence and sovereignty of Hong Kong and stand with her in Solidarity against tyranny and terror, we all us who love liberty, by any means necessary.

     China has established an archipelago of artificial islands as fortresses for control of the South China Sea and its strategic shipping lanes as a launchpad for the conquest of the Pacific Rim, and we may see her plans for us all in the Occupation of Hong Kong, the genocide of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, the seizure of Tibet, and the repression of the democracy movement in China itself in Tiananmen and the Umbrella Revolution. And we may look to her proxy forces and client states, the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar and the North Korean soldiers invading Ukraine.

      If we do not confront China’s imperial conquest and dominion now, we will be fighting in the streets of San Francisco and every city with a Chinese community when the CCP has the power to enforce their Overseas Chinese Policy which claims all persons of Chinese ancestry as their own citizens regardless of where they were born or what nations they are loyal citizens of currently. The CCP already has secret police stations to silence dissidents globally, and they will send forces of Occupation to capture cities where Chinese people now reside as a pretext for invasion. The existence of the Chinese Communist Party, its capture of China, and its plans for the Pacific Rim nations are among the existential threats we must face, and we will do so either on our terms or theirs.

     The French Revolution began with the attempted jailbreak of de Sade now celebrated as Bastille Day; can we not do the same for Jimmy Lai and Hong Kong?

     As written by William McGurn in MSN, in an article entitled The Absurd Trial of Jimmy Lai; “Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai’s trial resumed last week in Hong Kong. Among the questions asked by the defense was about someone the prosecution characterized as a “U.S. anti-China propagandist.” That would be me. Jimmy answered that we are the “closest” of friends, and that when he became a Catholic, I became his godfather.

     All innocuous stuff. But a Chinese friend of Jimmy’s told me the word “godfather” may carry more sinister connotations for the Hong Kong government. Cue the theme song from Francis Ford Coppola’s film epic about the Corleone family.

     It’s absurd. But no more absurd than Jimmy’s whole trial, which paints him as Hong Kong’s Osama bin Laden—“mastermind” of a national security threat to China. To drive this home, the Hong Kong government has pulled out props that rival Hollywood’s: the chains they put on a then-72-year-old Jimmy when he was arrested, the massive police presence at his trial as though he might bust out, not to mention the solitary confinement imposed for most of Jimmy’s four years in prison.

     With all this, the trial is only showing what everyone in Hong Kong already knows: Jimmy was an incredibly engaged publisher whose journalism proved highly popular.

     On Friday Jimmy was asked about an Oct. 27, 2019, interview with him headlined, “What the Americans are telling Us.” The piece called for “continuous lobbying” to gain foreign support for Hong Kong. Asked to explain, Jimmy said “lobbying” meant emphasizing the peaceful and nonviolent nature of the protests.

     “All I said in this article was the true reflection of the facts I perceived,” Jimmy said according to Reuters. “And the true thoughts of my heart, without any sense of hostility or intention to be seditious. And this goes for all my other articles.”

     He added: “For truth prevails in God’s kingdom, and that’s good enough for me.”

     Official transcripts aren’t publicly available. But each day a website called the Witness—founded by a group of former court reporters—publishes an unofficial account. The public can also follow the reporting of media outlets in the courtroom.

     The moderating nature of Jimmy’s voice shines through the testimony. Apple Daily staffers were forbidden to advocate for Hong Kong independence. Jimmy also opposed the violence by some of the younger protesters, recognizing immediately that it “scared away” the peaceful Hong Kong citizenry.

     Likewise he denied that calls for “resistance” were really calls for violence. The core of the government’s case is that Jimmy is anti-China and anti-Hong Kong. As he’s made clear from the first day of his testimony, all his activities were pro-freedom and pro-Hong Kong.

     Specifically, he was trying to hold China to its promises to honor the values and freedoms that transformed Hong Kong from a barren rock into a global center for trade and finance. On the stand, he listed these Hong Kong values: “rule of law, freedom, pursuit of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly.” Apple Daily, he said, “aligned” itself with them.

     As for the U.S., the Hong Kong government can’t seem to make up its mind whether Jimmy was carrying out an American plot or directing America to carry out his. Probably the most substantive allegation is that at meetings with senior officials including Vice President Mike Pence, Jimmy lobbied them for sanctions.

     In the courtroom he denied it. “I would not dare to ask the vice president to do anything,” he said. “I would just relay to him what happened in Hong Kong when he asked me.” And encourage Mr. Pence to lend his voice to Hong Kong’s cause.

     Mr. Pence confirms Jimmy’s account. In a text Sunday, he called Jimmy a “hero.” “During our meeting at the White House in July of 2019,” he said, “Jimmy Lai and I discussed his stand for democracy and his hope that we would continue to speak out on behalf of the rights and autonomy promised to the people of Hong Kong.”

     On sanctions Mr. Pence was unequivocal: “Jimmy Lai did not ask for US sanctions or any action against Hong Kong or China.”

     John Bolton, then national security adviser, says the same. “I’ve known Jimmy for many years,” he said in an email, “and I was glad to visit with him about what was actually going on in Hong Kong.”

     Those who know Jimmy say it’s dangerous for the government to have him on the stand. They say that after all that time in solitary, he’s back to his old, charismatic self. And that watching him testify can seem like watching an Apple Daily editorial meeting, with Jimmy holding forth on truth and freedom.

     Mark Clifford is a former Hong Kong newspaperman and board member of Jimmy’s media group. He is also author of Jimmy’s biography, “The Troublemaker,” which will be published Dec. 3. He sums up the trial this way:

     “Jimmy Lai’s testimony shows that he was guilty only of practicing good journalism. The idea that he was somehow driving U.S. policy on Hong Kong is laughable.”

      As I wrote in my post of December 6 2021, America Boycotts China’s Olympics; Though historical forces and the different visions of its leaders divided the Revolution, for a brief shining moment the possibility of a new China as a successor of both the democracy and universal human rights of the American and French Revolutions and the socialism of the Second International and the Russian Revolution illuminated the future. Among the limitless possibilities of becoming human, it remains a hope which still lives as a vision of humankind united as a global free society of equals.

    It is a vision of liberty and equality stolen from the Chinese people in the Loyalty Purge and Massacre of the Jiangxi Soviet of 1930-31, the true origin of the Chinese Communist Party which now exists in which Mao killed three out of four of the communists, some one hundred thousand people, and seized absolute control. In this mass murder and crime against humanity Mao established the First Rule of Tyranny; When the state’s absolute monopoly on power is in doubt, kill everyone not personally loyal to you. This aphorism, not included in the public version of the Red Book, became the founding principle of the Chinese Communist Party as an instrument of terror and tyranny, as autocratic and totalitarian as the regime of any king or emperor.

      Democracy in China is a dream stolen by a dead tyrant, but one which may be restored.

     The Black Flag still flies from the barricades in Hong Kong where we raised it on New Year’s Day in 2020, and its primary meaning has not changed since its use by the First International and the veterans of the Paris Commune; freedom versus tyranny, the abolition of state terror, surveillance, force and control, and resistance to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

     With this bold signal the people declare: We have no masters; we shall be ruled by none.

     As I wrote in my post of August 19 2020, China’s Holocaust: the Genocide of the Uighurs of Xinjiang and the Colonization of Hong Kong; It begins with the Great Wall of Silence and the control of truth, the repression of dissent and silencing of heroes like Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai, and Cai Xia, but it always ends in concentration camps like those in Xinjiang; the path of tyranny and fascism leads ever downward into degradation and dehumanization.

     What do you call it when a government enacts the erasure and genocide of an ethnic and religious minority, and profits by their slave labor in concentration camps?

    I call it a Holocaust.

     What do you call a government which uses forced sterilizations, mass abductions, torture, murder, sending children to orphanages to be taught only in the official language, the outlawing of religious practice, and all this and more horrors and crimes against humanity targeted against those who do not fit the authorities paradigm of blood, faith, and soil?

    I call it fascism.

    And I say that whatever lies such governments tell about their crimes, what they call themselves or the particulars of their inhumanity, means nothing. All that matters is this; the powerful are inflicting harm on the powerless and the dispossessed.

     Shall we let the vulnerable and wretched of the earth stand alone? Are all humans our brothers and sisters?

     In the conquest and genocide of the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang the Chinese Communist Party has revealed their true nature as a xenophobic authoritarian state of force and control and a criminal organization of state terror and tyranny. They are a government without legitimacy.

     Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?

     In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”  

      As I wrote in my post of February 12 2022, Genocide Games: the Case of Hong Kong;  I do not like thee, Xi Jinping; and unlike Dr Fell in the beloved poem of 1680 by Tom Brown, I both know and can tell why as a truthteller and witness of history; state terror and tyranny, carceral states of force and thought control, disappearance and torture by police, universal surveillance, and the falsification of propaganda and alternate histories, imperial conquest and colonial exploitation, slave labor and genocidal ethnic cleansing, and fascisms of blood, ideology as a faith, and soil; of all this I accuse Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.

    These things I am able to say because of the freedom of access to information which I enjoy as an American citizen, because the transparency of the state in America and the legal protection and heroic stature in our society of whistleblowers and truthtellers is a firewall against secret power, and because the sacred calling to pursue the truth as both a right of citizens and a universal human right are among those parallel and interdependent sets of rights of which the common defense is the primary purpose of the state.

     So are legitimacy, trust, and representation conferred to any state which is a guarantor of the rights of its citizens; the corollary of this is that any state whose primary purpose is not to guarantee the rights of individuals has no such legitimacy.

     We must be a democracy and a free society of equals, or the slaves of tyrants.

     And this we must resist.

      Why we fight: the stakes of the Hong Kong liberation struggle can be seen in the corpses of political prisoners which toured the world as the Human Bodies Exhibition and the CCP’s threat of terror and atrocities to silence global dissent.

     They are coming for us and for all democracy protestors with teams of assassins throughout the world, and we must come for them first and bring regime change to the Chinese Communist Party.

     As I wrote in my post of February 15 2022, Monsters, Freaks, Transgression of the Forbidden, the Sacred Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves: On Chaos as Love and Desire;  Watching the sunrise overlooking Hong Kong from Lion Rock, seized many times in recent years by democracy protesters and revolutionaries in the struggle for liberation and independence from China, in the wake of the last celebrations of Chinese New Year and several nearly sleepless nights of making mischief for tyrants under cover of the festival, my thoughts turn to the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature, of ourselves as wild and glorious things, of love and desire as anarchic forces of liberation, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden and the violation of norms as seizures of power from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and the refusal to submit to authority.

     Freedom, and all that comes with it; above all freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, as defiance of authorized identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of love and desire as liberating forces of Chaos, and all of this as sacred acts of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.

     And of our myriad possible futures, sorting themselves out in our daily lives like a hurricane governed by the flight of a hummingbird; tyranny or liberty, extinction or survival.

     Order and its forms as authority, power, capital, and hegemonic elites of patriarchy and racism, class and caste, which arise from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, which appropriates and subjugates us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization and weaponizes hierarchies of otherness and belonging and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and creates states as embodied violence, tyrannies of force and control, carceral states of police and military terror, and dominions of imperial conquest and colonial assimilation and exploitation; all of these systems and structures are born in fear, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and submission to authority, have a key weakness without which they cannot arise and perpetuate unequal power, for this requires the renunciation of love.

    Chaos has as its champion the totalizing and uncontrollable divine madness of love, which leaps across all boundaries to unite us in solidarity of action against those who would enslave us.

    Love exalts us beyond the limits of ourselves and the flags of our skin, disrupts authorized identities and narratives as imposed conditions of struggle,  seizes power as ownership of ourselves, and reveals the embodied truth of others.

     Once we have a definition of democracy as a free society of equals and a praxis of love, there are some principles which can be derived as an art of revolution and seizures of power.

     Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.

     Order is unequal power and systemic violence; Chaos is liberty, equality, interdependence, and harmony.

     Order subjugates through division and hierarchy; Chaos liberates through equality and solidarity.

      Authority falsifies; speaking truth to power or parrhesia as Foucault called  truth telling and performing the witness of history confers authenticity to us in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, and delegitimize tyrants.

      Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s just an old humbug.

      The four primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.

     There is no just Authority.       

      Law serves power and authority; transgression and refusal to submit confer freedom and self-ownership as primary acts of becoming human and Unconquered.

      Always go through the Forbidden Door. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”

     Such is my art of revolution and democracy as love; there remains poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our limitless possibilities of becoming human, and love and desire as unconquerable informing, motivating, and shaping forces and innate human realms of being and  powers which cannot be taken from us as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, anarchic and ungovernable as the tides, and it is love and desire as forms of wildness and embodied truth which offer us a definition of freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.

     As I wrote in my post of February 10 2024, This Chinese New Year, Let Us Bring the Chaos; Happy Chinese New Year to all humankind; may we find the joy of total freedom to balance the terror of our nothingness, embrace the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves in liberation struggle from authorized identities and the masks others make for us, discover the truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh with which to free ourselves from the lies and illusions of our falsification, build solidarity to triumph over the subjugation of our divisions, rekindle the absurd hope we need to claw our way out of the ruins of our fallen civilization and make yet another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival,  and love to transcend the limits of our form, redeem the flaws of our humanity, and heal the brokenness of the world.

     Such is the spell I cast this night with my wishes, ephemeral and possibly going nowhere at all as my words drift like candles set free upon the winds and the tides, yet this is their beauty.

     We lost and broken things, who refuse to submit and abandon not our fellows.

      Here in this place of darkness ruled by fear and force we light up the night with fireworks and hurl defiance to those who would enslave us; this earth, this sad and glorious humankind.

     In Hong Kong tonight I unleash the fire of poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation of ourselves and of human being, meaning, and value, as revolutionary struggle and making mischief for tyrants, one among many with my brothers, sisters, and others throughout the world.

     In my pocket I have a jar which contains the death scream of a hero of the revolution and of the sovereignty and independence of Hong Kong, whom the Occupation forces of the Chinese Communist Party regime tried to silence but could not, not while others bear his voice and his witness onward. This is a kind of power like nothing else, and one day it will seize and shake the world, the Chinese Communist Pary and the nation of China it has captured and poisoned along with the rest.

     We are coordinating actions among networks of democracy and liberation organizations and movements throughout South Asia and the world, systems of alliances referred to in Asia as the Milk Tea Movement, in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities in China, Thailand, Myanmar and its sister state Sri Lanka, which during the past years have morphed with protean strangeness to include Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, West Papua, the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, India, Kashmir, possibly a whole emerging South Asian Spring, and now newly energized with the outbreak of World War Three and the invasion of Ukraine has solidarity with democracy movements as well as direct agents of change within Russia and its imperial dominion of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya, and Africa and within the dominion of Iran including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, and since October 2023 in Gaza and regionally as a theatrical performance in three dimensions; anticolonial struggle of Palestine versus America and her colony of Israel, second the broader conflict between the Arab-American Alliance and the Dominion of Iran which is driven by the ancient sectarian Sunni-Shia division, and World War Three as Iran’s ally Russia attempts to re-found her Empire, and all of this as civilizational collapse and rebirth in the titanic struggle between forces of liberation and a theatre of cruelty and imperial state terror.

     There is a saying attributed as a Chinese curse but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong, “May you live in interesting times.”

     We are now living in interesting times; whether we make of our time a curse or a fulcrum with which to change the balance of power in the world from tyranny to democracy and free societies of equals rests with each of us.

     Join us.

     Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, has a scene in which two young successors to leadership of traditionally rival factions find themselves in love and in need of allies in a subplot which reimages Romeo and Juliet; the rebellious hellion Jonah Breakspear asks his Machiavellian lover Sophie Longerbane, “Who is chaos good for?” To which she replies, “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.” 

     Let us bring the Chaos.

The Hunger Games: Salute of the Resistance

     The three finger salute from The Hunger Games adopted by the Thai democracy revolution in 2014 was embraced in Hong Kong, now having spread to allied liberation struggles and democracy movements globally as the Salute of the Resistance.

“If we burn, you burn with us”.

     To all masters, lords, and rulers in all lands and throughout time:

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

The Absurd Trial of Jimmy Lai

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/opinion-the-absurd-trial-of-jimmy-lai/ar-AA1uK6q3

The Troublemaker : How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic, Mark L. Clifford

The Trial, Franz Kafka

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17690.The_Trial?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_16

September 28 2024 Anniversary of the Umbrella Revolution: Tyranny and Resistance in Hong Kong

July 1 2024 This July, the 27th Anniversary of the Abandonment of Hong Kong to China and of Democracy to Tyranny

June 4 2024 A Legacy of Refusal to Submit to Tyranny and State Terror: 35th Anniversary of Tiananmen Square

February 10 2024 This Chinese New Year, Let Us Bring the Chaos

February 6 2022 The Genocide Games: China’s Glorification of State Terror and Tyranny

February 11 2022 Genocide Games: the Case of Xinjiang

February 12 2022 Genocide Games: the Case of Hong Kong

February 19 2022 Genocide Games Part Three: the Legacy of Tiananmen

February 20 2022 Genocide Games Part Four, The True Face of the Chinese Communist Party: Case of the Human Bodies Exhibition

Chinese

2024年11月25日 新聞自由、民主、香港獨立與主權殉道者黎智英的見證

 在黎智英在中共法庭和歷史的見證下,以帝國征服和統治的方式佔領香港的暴政和恐怖狀態被非法化和暴露,一個以新聞為神聖使命的人物出現了。於權威、鎮壓異見的殘暴力量,以及透過控制和竊取我們的普世人權(包括新聞自由權)來實現恐怖主義。

 我們所有熱愛自由的人必須不擇手段地承認香港的獨立和主權,並與她團結一致,反對暴政和恐怖。

 中國已經建立了一個人工島嶼群島作為控制南中國海的堡壘,並以其戰略航道作為征服環太平洋的發射台,我們可能會在佔領香港、新疆維吾爾人的種族滅絕、西藏的佔領,以及天安門事件和雨傘革命對中國民主運動的鎮壓。我們還可以關注她的代理人軍隊和附庸國、緬甸羅興亞人的種族滅絕以及入侵烏克蘭的北韓士兵。

 如果我們現在不對抗中國的帝國征服和統治,當中共有權執行他們的華僑政策時,我們將在舊金山的街頭和每一個有華人社區的城市進行戰鬥,該政策聲稱所有華裔都是他們的人。自己的公民,無論他們出生在哪裡,也無論他們目前是哪個國家的忠實公民。中共已經在全球設立了秘密警察局來壓制異議人士,他們將派遣佔領軍佔領中國人民現在居住的城市,作為入侵的藉口。中國共產黨的存在、它對中國的佔領以及它對環太平洋國家的計劃都是我們必須面對的生存威脅,我們將按照我們的條件或他們的條件這樣做。

 法國大革命始於德薩德越獄,現在被慶祝為巴士底日。難道我們不能為黎智英和香港做同樣的事情嗎?

November 24 2024 A Stain of Cruelty On Our Armour: America’s Complicity In the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians

      There’s a stain of cruelty on our armour, my fellow Americans, to paraphrase the line from Hamlet and Star Trek in season one, episode 13, The Conscience of the King; and the twistings and turnings of time and fate which have brought us to this place are many and strange indeed. 

     An aphorism from my youth promises us that hurricanes are born with the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings; soon we may have opportunity to test that proposition.

     We have answered terror and death with terror and death, and this is both tragic and shameful. Force cannot answer force, nor heal the flaws of our humanity.  

     On this day and all too often, the Promethean Fire of the Torch of Liberty which illuminates the gates of our nation in New York Harbor did not reach across the wild seas to foreign shores. This is a great tragedy, and it is a tragedy which is ours and for which we must answer.

     In Palestine and Lebanon our taxes buy the deaths of children.

       Let us return to First Principles with a simple question; Who is suffering and in need of mercy? It is a similar question to the one I ask to determine when and how to use force and violence, Who holds power?, but with a very different direction as to the unfolding of our future.

     Here in a Holy Land divided by the sectarian particulars of how to be human together in accord with the will of the Infinite as universal brotherhood and love, crimes which define the limits of the human are perpetrated against our most innocent, utterly powerless, and incapable of threatening anyone; children. Children whom the enemy of our humanity, the state of Israel and its sponsors including America, either brutalize and kill with glee in the hysteria of power or refuse to see and recognize in complicity. And our history surfaces one figure to represent all of the children sacrificed to power and hate, and doomed by the complicity of silence.

     I ask you now, all of humankind, to abandon the path of our dehumanization and renounce genocide, ethnic cleansing, wars of conquest and dominion, and crimes against humanity.

      I ask, I beg, I demand; I ask you in the name of Anne Frank.

     As I wrote in my post of May 21 2024, Abjection Despair Horror: Surviving the Terror of Our Nothingness in the Mirror Of Gaza; In the mirror of Gaza the Abyss looks back at us, and we are captives of the distorted funhouse images of Israel and America, vestiges of dreams as refuge of the outcasts and guarantor of our universal human rights, and the monsters we have now become.

     I can recognize nothing in the figures which confront us, and though I hurl defiance at the endless chasms of darkness my words find no limit and return no echoes, as if devoured by the Nothing.

     Yet I am neither defeated by the overwhelming force and terror of Authority nor subjugated by despair and learned helplessness, for this is the space where I live, this horror, this joy, this freedom.

     As Jean Genet said to me in 1982 during the Siege of Beirut, in a lost cause, in a burning house, in a time of great darkness; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”

     I hope that this remains true, for all of us as we struggle to emerge from the legacies of our history and seize our power from systems of oppression, for this is the great task of becoming human, in general and in this Rashomon Gate Event now unfolding in Rafah and elsewhere; to dream impossible things and make them real. 

    There are some things which should be true even if they never were, even if Keats was wrong and finding a thing beautiful does not make it so, even if Thomas Mann was right and love cannot redeem anything, even if as Tolkien feared we have arrived at the Black Gate with no bonds of brotherhood to unify us, even if as did Camus we must claw our way out of the ruins to make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.

    There are no Israelis, no Palestinians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.

     What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, plunder, and enslave others?

     What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words?   And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

     What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?

    What is Israel, if not a refuge for the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, among them the most demonized and persecuted people of human history, the Jews?

    Let us reply with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”

     Join us.

     As I wrote in my post of March 20 2020, Fear and Despair: How Dancing With Our Darkness May Help Us to Learn, Grow, and Transform Ourselves and Our World; In this time of suffering and of fear and despair, of injustice and loss, violence and greed, isolation and loneliness, life disruptive events and cataclysms, of vast power asymmetries of patriarchy and plutocracy, and of the atavistic barbarisms of fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, we are confronted with the truth of the human condition in the darkness of its most negative aspects, but also liberated by these same empty spaces.

     When illusion is robbed of its power over us, and the echo chamber of lies is revealed for the hollow misdirection of rapacious predators that it is, a space of freedom opens into which we may grow beyond our limits.

    We are now all Edvard Munch’s figure in The Scream, overwhelmed with the horror of a world gone mad, our fear and despair made manifest in our cry for humanity and our lament for the brokenness of the world.

     And in this moment of Awakening we seize our power and reclaim ourselves, for the realization of our flawed nature and the wounds of our humanity opens us to the pain of others, confers transformative power and heralds the redemption of the world. Humans are beautiful not in spite of our flaws, but because of them.

     When all the evils have escaped the Pandora’s Box of authoritarian force and control, hope remains; for when all our gods and masters have been revealed as humbugs like Oz behind the curtain of their smoke and bluster, the realization that no one has any hold over us is swiftly followed by the terrible and wonderful awareness of our total freedom.

     We are the negative spaces of our fears and other demons, figures cast like  shadow puppets by the darkness which defines our limits and which we are able to embrace.

     Cherish your darkness, for the darkness will set you free.   

     As I wrote in my post of July 22 2022, Now Is the Time of Monsters; Hope and Despair On the Cusp of Change; The government of Italy has collapsed, an act of sabotage by fascist revivalists who have abandoned the political coalition which has thus far prevented it from tumbling off the edge of a precipice into the Abyss, an existential threat to the survival of her peoples and the basic services of any state which include healthcare.

    So does the looming threat of Traitor Trump’s return to power in America’s 2024 elections represent an existential crisis of democracy and of our whole global civilization and world order.

    But if the Abyss holds terrors of a precariat held hostage by death and the material needs of survival, the Abyss is also where hope lies, for here the balance of power may be changed in revolutionary struggle.

    In this liminal time of the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human, of seizures of power and the performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen, Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, let us look to our glorious past in the Resistance which was victorious in the Liberation of Italy on April 25 and the hanging of Mussolini on April 28 1945.

      May Trump and all who would enslave us, all tyrants, theocrats, fascists, monsters, may all of these join Mussolini in death and ruin.

     As Slavoj Zizek’s favorite saying goes, a French mistranslation or paraphrase of Antonio Gramsci’s line in his Prison Notebooks “La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati”, literally “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”, as “Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”, which introduces the idea of monstrosity, referential to the historical development of the idea in Michel de Montaigne, Michel Foucault, and Georges Canguilhem’s work The Normal and the Pathological, a dialectical process of mimesis which results in the form of the principle as; “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”

     Meanings shift, adapt, and change as they transgress boundaries, inhabit public and private spaces, and unfold over vast gulfs of time, and so must we.

     As I wrote in my post of December 20 2022, This Christmas, Confront the Meaninglessness of Life Not With Abjection, Despair, and Helplessness But With the Joy of Total Freedom;  As we enter the Christmas season, a time much of America will be consumed by orgiastic buying as displays of elite class membership and obligatory feasts often with people we don’t actually like or deeply know, adrift in a universe without imposed values living lives of random chaotic episodes of being which form no grand design, ephemeral and illusory, subjected to totalizing passions and caught in vast invisible systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization enslaved to authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege like Charlie Chaplin eaten by the gears of the machine he serves in The Factory, let us confront the meaninglessness of life and the terror of our nothingness not with abjection, despair, and helplessness but with the joy of total freedom.

     When there are no rules, there are no impossibilities.

    Merry Christmas, and don’t forget to run amok and be ungovernable.

     As I wrote in my post of October 13 2023, Our World Is Destroyed and Recreated in This Ritual of the Black Sun Wherein Our Humanity Is Eclipsed By the Legacies of Our History; As the season of Halloween is signaled tomorrow by the new moon, it opens with a solar eclipse and the Ritual of the Black Sun as symbolized despair, abjection, grief, and fear, illuminated with great beauty and horror in Stanton Marlin’s study of the alchemical works of Jung in The Black Sun: the alchemy and art of darkness, William Blake’s Book of Urizen, and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, my three primary references on this subject.

     And this ritual of transformative rebirth occurs in the wake of the war crimes and atrocities of the Hamas terror attack on Israel, which now conclusively from plans and orders found on its slain perpetrators includes the planned mass murders and abduction of school children.

     There are two possible replies to an event of this kind, which disrupts and fractures systems of order on the positive side and violates our humanity as degradation and dehumanization on the negative like a Janus coin of mirror reversals; with fear and its mad children rage and violence, or with love and its praxis as compassion and mercy.

     To bring harm or healing, enforcement of virtue and the tyranny and terror of wars of imperial dominion and conquest and the centralization of power to authority and carceral states of force and control, or solidarity as guarantors of each others universal human rights and democracy as co owners of the state in a free society of equals.

     If we choose war in this moment, and America sends military aid to Israel as a sponsor and collaborator in the genocide of the Palestinians in retribution for this vast war crime and atrocity perpetrated by Hamas to fasten their political control of the people of Gaza, the Age of Tyrants has begun.

     If we choose peace and send humanitarian aid both to the people of Israel and of Gaza in the war of annihilation which is coming as Netanyahu gathers his forces to invade, we may yet have a chance for a future democracy to emerge in the region and globally as a United Humankind.

     Our best chance to heal the legacies of our history and reunite the peoples of Israel and Palestine is if they turn their backs on those who claim to act in their name, both Netanyahu’s regime and that of Hamas, and refuse to kill each other in service to the power of those who would enslave us.

     Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.

    Yet hope remains for transformative change, the fall of theocratic regimes and the emergence of secular democracy free from the legacies of our history, a history which in the bifurcated and fragmented states and national identities of the region divides one people into Israelis and Palestinians through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in service to the power of tyrants and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, systems of oppression which are our true enemies.

    A massive people’s protest movement has erupted both locally and globally, and this gives me hope that we may yet escape the Age of Tyrants, which I predict will unfold as six to eight centuries of totalitarian empires and wars of dominion ending with the extinction of humankind; with 92 to 98 percent probability.

     But the chance to salvage something of our humanity and our civilization of democracy and universal human rights does exist, however fragile and unlikely, if we can unite and act in solidarity as each other’s liberators and guarantors of a free society of equals.

     As written by Alex Lantier in the World Socialist Web Site of the Fourth International, in an article entitled Mass protests erupt internationally against Israeli war on Gaza; “A week after Palestinians initiated an armed uprising against Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, protests are erupting internationally against Israel’s war on Gaza.

     The fascistic regime of Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered 1.1 million Palestinians to flee Gaza City and go south, along roads bombed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Israel—which has now cut off Gaza’s water, fuel and electricity, and whose leaders call the Palestinians “human animals”—is targeting the Palestinians for genocide.

     As the scale of the crimes committed by the Israeli regime and its NATO allies has become clear, protests have erupted around the world in bold disobedience of media denunciations of Palestinians, police intimidation and protest bans.

     The most significant demonstration Friday took place in New York City, where thousands rallied to oppose the onslaught against Palestine, in open defiance of the unrelenting pro-Israel propaganda of the entire American political establishment and corporate media. In the center of world imperialism, home to the largest Jewish population of any American city, masses of people—including over 1,000 Jews—expressed their revulsion with the unfolding crimes in Gaza.

     Other protests on Friday involving hundreds of people were held in Pittsburgh, Portland and Washington D.C., with larger demonstrations planned across the US this weekend. Despite the efforts of the media and politicians to demonize all protests against Israel’s policies as “antisemitic” and to isolate those feeling sympathy for the Palestinians, opposition is building among workers and youth of all backgrounds. A 2021 poll found that one-quarter of American Jews consider Israel to be an “apartheid state” hostile to the Palestinians, a figure that will only continue to grow.

     Thousands also took to the streets in London once again on Friday, defying similar propaganda and threats from the British media and political establishment.

     A series of larger demonstrations also swept across the Middle East, involving hundreds of thousands of people. In Jordan, mass protests in Amman demanded the opening of Jordan’s border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Protesting crowds marched on the border with Israel, only to be turned back by Jordanian police.

     Large protests took place in Sanaa and Tehran. In Cairo, tens of thousands rallied outside the Al Azhar Mosque, chanting “Free Palestine.” Thousands defied a state ban to march in support of Gaza in Tunis. In Iraq, a country that has lost over one million lives after decades of US-led sanctions, war and occupation since the 1991 Gulf War, hundreds of thousands marched in Baghdad.

     Protesters in the Middle East are effectively opposing not only the Israeli regime, but also their own governments, which have betrayed the Palestinians for decades. The Arab bourgeoisie’s role is exemplified by the treachery of the Egyptian military dictatorship. Having signed a treaty with Israel in 1978, Egypt has now closed its borders to Palestinians trying to flee Gaza.

     In Israel itself, despite the ultra-reactionary political atmosphere fostered by Netanyahu’s government, which has now been joined by the official opposition, there is explosive discontent. Millions joined protests earlier this year against Netanyahu’s attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary. The attack on the judiciary, as a letter titled “Elephant in the Room” from 3,000 predominantly Jewish intellectuals made clear, is intimately tied up with the conditions that led to the Hamas uprising.

     The letter states:

     (There is a) direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity. …

     There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.

     All the major imperialist powers stand exposed by their support for Netanyahu and his war on the Palestinians. On Sunday, October 8, the heads of state of France, Italy, Germany, Britain and the United States pledged “steadfast and united support to the State of Israel,” and an “unequivocal condemnation of Hamas.” At a press conference in Qatar on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken doubled down in condoning Israeli crimes.

     Asked by a reporter if Israel is “retaliating in a fury” and whether the US supports this, Blinken replied with total hypocrisy and double-talk: “What Israel is doing is not retaliation. What Israel is doing is defending the lives of its people. … I think any country faced with what Israel has suffered would likely do the same thing.”

     What message are the NATO powers sending? They aim to create on a global scale a new era of imperialist colonial rule. They brook no resistance to the Israeli state’s illegal, 16-year blockade of Gaza, its denial of food and medicine to the impoverished enclave, and its targeted assassinations of Gaza residents. If this united front of imperialist gangsters were to sum up its policy toward the Palestinian people in one phrase, it would be: “Slaves you were, and slaves you remain.”

     In a video released Friday, which has gone almost entirely unreported in the Western media, Hamas official Basim Naim summarized the background of Israeli oppression, which led to the October 7 rebellion.

     He said:

      We are speaking about a 75-year-old occupation that neglected and ignored all political and legal means to settle the conflict, where the Israeli enemy continued their policy of denial of the Palestinian people’s existence and their national rights. We have repeatedly warned during the past few months and years that the situation on the ground was not sustainable and that the explosion was only a matter of time.

     We have warned repeatedly about the Israeli continued violations in Al-Aqsa Mosque and their attempt to change its status quo in an apparent plan to divide the holy mosque spatially and temporally. We have also warned about the state terrorism implemented by the fascist settlers across the occupied West Bank. We have warned about the forceful expulsion of our people from Jerusalem. We have also warned about the systematic crimes against our prisoners, including women and children, in Israeli jails.

     And lastly, we have warned about the Israeli siege on Gaza for more than 17 years, which is a war crime that turned Gaza into the biggest open-air prison on earth, where a whole generation has lost all kind of hopes. But unfortunately, no one listened to these warnings, and the international community, especially the Western countries, continue to give Israel the cover at all levels to continue committing its crimes.

     In prosecuting their war against Gaza, the Israeli government and Western imperialist powers aim to obliterate this historical background and numb the population with wall-to-wall atrocity propaganda.

     While the deaths of Israeli civilians are undoubtedly tragic, the violence that took place occurred in the context of a massively oppressed people rebelling against a heavily armed oppressor. Even if one were to accept all the accounts of Palestinian violence, it only raises the question—what could lead to such violence?

     History judges differently the violence of a population rising up against oppression and the calculated resort to mass murder by capitalist state machines armed with vast military and financial resources. The imperialists have always claimed that the resistance of the oppressed to colonialism justifies their savage retribution. In exacting this retribution, they have always portrayed the oppressed as savages and murderers.

     In 1899, the Boxers revolted against the division of China into imperialist spheres of influence. Citing the Boxers’ killings of Christian missionaries and their seizure of foreign property, eight imperialist powers sent armies to sack Beijing and massacre the Boxers. Mounting conflicts between these powers over the division of the spoils in China led ultimately to the bloody Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s, which cost nearly 20 million lives, provoking the 1949 revolution that ended colonial rule over China.

     In 1904, the Herero people in Namibia rose up against German colonial rule, killing more than 100 German settlers. The German army responded by carrying out the first genocide of the 20th century against the Herero, forcing them into deserts where they died of thirst, or imprisoning them in death camps prefiguring the extermination camps of the Nazi regime. In 2015, German officials formally acknowledged the genocide and offered a state apology.

      Netanyahu’s regime and its imperialist allies are resorting to similar methods against Gaza. However, the great anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century that broke out after the Russian revolutions of 1905 and October 1917 did not take place in vain. Among masses of workers and youth internationally, Netanyahu’s barbaric methods provoke outrage. This opposition will grow as the monumental scale of the crimes being planned and committed against Gaza become evident to ever broader layers of workers and youth throughout the world.

     The NATO powers’ other justification for backing Netanyahu’s crimes—that they are defending Jews and opposing antisemitism—is collapsing. In reality, they are supporting Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in a close alliance with political descendants of the forces that carried out the Holocaust.

     As the capitalist ruling elites plunge into barbarism, a mass movement is emerging in the international working class. Protests against imperialism and Zionism are erupting amid mounting global struggles of the working class. Strikes against exploitation, austerity, inflation and police violence shook all the major imperialist powers this year and will intensify in the weeks and months ahead.

     The liberation of Palestine is only possible in the context of the growth of a powerful socialist movement of the international working class, including within Israel itself. This will create the conditions for the overthrow of Zionist chauvinism and the unity of Palestinian and Israeli workers. The struggle against the war in Gaza must acquire a clear, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist character, mobilizing the working class in a struggle for socialism across Palestine and the Middle East and internationally.”

       In juxtaposition with this internationalist and revolutionary lens of vision are forces of reaction born of fear and trauma weaponized in service to power, the siren call of armed might and retribution as a form of security, but security is an illusion, and only love can reconcile these conflicted identities of Israeli and Palestinian and heal the systems of division and unequal power which are at the heart of this war which threatens to swallow us all.

    As written by Yuval Noah Harari in The Guardian, in an article entitled Israelis and Palestinians are facing their moment of greatest danger since 1948: There is still a slim chance of peace if wiser counsels prevail and other major powers intervene in a coalition of the willing; “Israel has just experienced the worst day in its history. More Israeli civilians have been slaughtered in a single day than all the civilians and soldiers Israel lost in the 1956 Sinai war, the 1967 six-day war and the 2006 second Lebanon war combined. The stories and images coming out of the area occupied by Hamas are horrific. Many of my own friends and family members have suffered unspeakable atrocities. This means the Palestinians, too, are now facing immense danger. The most powerful country in the Middle East is livid with pain, fear and anger. I do not have either the knowledge or moral authority to speak about how things look from the Palestinian perspective. But in the moment of Israel’s greatest pain, I would like to issue a warning about how things look from the Israeli side of the fence.

     Politics often works like a scientific experiment, conducted on millions of people with few ethical limitations. You try something – whether increasing the welfare budget, electing a populist president or making a peace offer – witness the results, and decide whether to proceed further down that particular path; or you reverse course and try something else. This is how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has unfolded for decades: by trial and error.

     During the 1990s Oslo peace process, Israel gave peace a chance. I know that from the viewpoint of Palestinians and some outside observers, Israeli peace offers were insufficient and arrogant, but it was still the most generous offer Israel has ever made. During that peace process, Israel handed partial control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority. The outcome for Israelis was the worst terror campaign they had experienced until then. Israelis are still haunted by memories of daily life in the early 2000s, with buses and restaurants bombed every day. That terror campaign killed not only hundreds of Israeli civilians, but also the peace process and the Israeli left. Maybe Israel’s peace offer wasn’t generous enough. But was terrorism the only possible response?

     After the failure of the peace process, Israel’s next experiment in Gaza was disengagement. In the mid-2000s, Israel unilaterally retreated from the entire Gaza Strip, dismantled all settlements there and returned to the internationally recognised pre-1967 border. True, it continued to impose a partial blockade on the Gaza Strip and to occupy the West Bank. But the withdrawal from Gaza was still a very significant Israeli step, and Israelis waited anxiously to see what the result of that experiment would be. The remnants of the Israeli left hoped that the Palestinians would make an honest attempt to turn Gaza into a prosperous and peaceful city state, a Middle Eastern Singapore, showing to the world and to the Israeli right what the Palestinians could do when given the opportunity to govern themselves.

     Sure, it is difficult to build a Singapore under a partial blockade. But an honest attempt could still have been made, in which case there would have been greater pressure on the Israeli government from both foreign powers and the Israeli public to remove the blockade from Gaza and to reach an honourable deal about the West Bank as well. Instead, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and turned it into a terrorist base from which repeated attacks were launched on Israeli civilians. Another experiment ended in failure.

       This completely discredited the remnants of the Israeli left, and brought to power Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish governments. Netanyahu pioneered another experiment. Since peaceful coexistence had failed, he adopted a policy of violent coexistence. Israel and Hamas traded blows on a weekly basis and almost every year there was a major military operation, but for a decade and a half, Israeli civilians could go on living within a few hundred metres from Hamas bases on the other side of the fence. Even Israel’s messianic zealots showed little zeal to reconquer the Gaza Strip, and even rightwingers hoped that the responsibilities involved in ruling more than 2 million people would gradually moderate Hamas.

     Indeed, many on the Israeli right saw Hamas as a better partner than the Palestinian Authority. This was because Israeli hawks wanted to go on controlling the West Bank, and feared a peace deal. Hamas seemed to offer the Israeli right the best of all worlds: relieving Israel of the need to govern the Gaza Strip, without making any peace offers that might dislocate Israeli control of the West Bank. The day of horror Israel has just experienced signals the end of the Netanyahu experiment in violent coexistence.

     So what comes next? No one knows for sure, but some voices in Israel are veering towards reconquering the Gaza Strip or bombing it to rubble. The result of such policy could be the worst humanitarian crisis the region has experienced since 1948. Especially if Hezbollah and Palestinian forces in the West Bank join the fray, the death toll could reach many thousands, with millions more driven from their homes. On both sides of the fence, there are religious fanatics fixated on divine promises and the 1948 war. Palestinians dream of reversing the outcome of that war. Jewish zealots like the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich have warned even Arab citizens of Israel that “you are here by mistake because Ben-Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister] didn’t finish the job in ’48 and didn’t kick you out”; 2023 could enable fanatics on both sides to pursue their religious fantasies, and re-stage the 1948 war with a vengeance.

     Even if things don’t go to such extremes, the current conflict is likely to put the last nail in the coffin of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The kibbutzim along the Gaza border have been socialist communes and some of the most tenacious bastions of the Israeli left. I know people from those kibbutzim who, after years of almost daily rocket attacks from Gaza, still clung to the hope of peace, as if to a religious cult. These kibbutzim have just been obliterated, and some of the last peaceniks are either murdered, burying their loved ones, or held hostage in Gaza. For example, Vivian Silver, a peace activist from Kibbutz Be’eri who for years has been transporting ailing Gazans to Israeli hospitals, is missing and likely held hostage in Gaza.

     What has already happened cannot be undone. The dead cannot be brought back to life, and the personal traumas will never completely heal. But we must prevent further escalation. Many of the forces in the region are currently led by irresponsible religious fanatics. External forces must therefore intervene to deescalate the conflict. Anyone who wishes for peace must unequivocally condemn the Hamas atrocities, put pressure on Hamas to immediately and unconditionally release all the hostages, and help deter Hezbollah and Iran from intervening. This would give Israelis a bit of breathing space and a tiny ray of hope.

     Second, a coalition of the willing – ranging from the US and the EU to Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority – should take responsibility for the Gaza Strip away from Hamas, rebuild Gaza and simultaneously completely disarm Hamas and demilitarise the Gaza Strip.

     There are only slim chances that these steps will be realised. But after the recent horrors, most Israelis don’t think they can live with anything less.”

    As I wrote in my post of October 17 2023, Chaos Is the Great Hope of the Powerless: Case of the Hamas-Israel War; A wise friend has questioned my valorization of Chaos as a principle of change in the context of Black Saturday, a term which describes the Hamas attack on Israel and the immense forces of terror, death, destruction, fracture, grief, rage, and revenge it unleashed, becoming a single tide of darkness.

     Thank you once again for your kindness and your wisdom.

     In this moment of tragedy I am thinking of Chaos as a disruptive force of fracture and change which has stripped us bare of our ideologies to reveal the fragile humanity beneath, and may be leveraged for liberty or tyranny by how we respond as a species and global civilization. As Guillermo del Toro writes in Carnival Row, Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.

     What do I hope for now, for the peoples of Israel and Palestine?  That both may unite to free each other, but first we will need universal humanitarian aid to any one on either side of these lines of division, and a Reckoning for the war crimes of both Hamas and Israel. For Israel took the bait, and gave Hamas the victory; they are now equal as war criminals without legitimacy.

    Israel took the bait, and the world is calling them out for war crimes; this may be the end of the Netanyahu alt right regime and the dawn of a new Middle East. I was absolutely expecting Biden and allies to enable Israels Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem; in this I rejoice to be wrong about human nature. Maybe the idea of human rights is not dead. As my mother used to sing to students who asked her to make authorizing statements about anything, artifact of a Shakespeare in Thirty Minutes theatrical show that toured nationally with some of her students in it, bouncing her open hands left and right; Maybe, maybe not, Maybe, maybe not.

     No one seems to have noticed publicly that this means Israeli intelligence has been infiltrated. It is also possible that unknown puppetmasters have infiltrated and seized control of both Hamas and Israel, for purposes which are unclear and antithetical to the interests and well being of either. We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, friends.

      What Reckoning, for crimes against humanity by an organization of terror which has long been a vanguard of anticolonial revolutionary struggle under the imposed conditions of Occupation, slavery, and a genocidal Blockade?

      Not the totalization of the general population of Palestinians in a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing as Netanyahu wishes and Hamas intends as a strategy of delegitimation of the Israel state in the moral equivalence of terror, for if Israel, her patron America, and the international community accept the terms of struggle offered by Hamas they too become organizations of terror, and Hamas wins.

     This is a decolonial revolution, and victory goes to the side who can establish the legitimacy and moral supremacy of their story. As my father taught me, Never play someone else’s game.

     Hamas also wishes in this provocation to weld the peoples of Gaza to them; this is a primary strategy of fascism and tyranny, to make the people in whose name you claim to act complicit in unforgiveable crimes. Always beware those who claim to speak and act in your name as a strategy of your subjugation.

     A third layer of meaning here is the ambiguity of the geopolitical and world-historical forces beyond the Holy Land; Russia, her ally Iran and the Iranian Dominion of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, especially the Assad regime of Syria which has sent forces into Israel as a client state of Russia and Iran, and Hezbollah, which offers many of the social services of a government and may be in the process of emergence as an independent state, or a true empire in the transnational sense like the Holy Roman Empire. The great question here is; has Russia opened a new front of her plan of global conquest and made this a theatre of World War Three?

      How does one answer all of this? How bring a Reckoning for the terror of Hamas without authorizing and becoming complicit in the greater terror of Israel’s kleptocratic Occupation and looming genocide of the Palestinians?

       The forms that might take give me pause, for they will determine our future, and though I know what I myself must do, I do not like it, and am calling out here in my journals, where I work through the consequences of my decisions before acting on them, for unknown possibilities I myself cannot envision.

     Yes, my friend, Chaos has profoundly destructive forms; death among them, ruin and civilizational collapse, the negation of all we have claimed as our identity, but all are also measures of the adaptive range of systems, and can give birth to new forms from this liberated energy. And as you point out, all forces operate in opposite directions at once, creating their own opposition in accord with Newton’s Third Law of Motion. These are not moral forces in balance, but ambivalent forces which contain each other in recursion and processes of change.

     So, while our nations try to shatter each other’s truths with overwhelming force and mass terror, I must find a path of least force to salvage what I can of our humanity, and I hope I will not fail as I did at Mariupol and Panjshir.

    This may be all we have as humans lost in chasms of darkness and a Wilderness of Mirrors, this refusal to abandon each other to dehumanization, but like our refusal to submit to authority it is a power which cannot be taken from us, even in imposed conditions of struggle designed to produce abjection and learned helplessness, or rage and tribalization as identity politics and the manufacture of consent to be fed into engines of death for the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and tyrannies.

     Such ephemeral and insubstantial things, like whispered prayers to abyssal unknowns, figments of love, hope, faith, which belong to the shadows, the delusions of grandeur of beasts harnessed to systems of oppression by others who yet dream that we might become more.

    Dream with me.

     Embrace our absurdity as flawed things wrestling with immense forces of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization in a mad quest to become human, under imposed conditions of struggle typified by atrocities designed to produce abjection, learned helplessness, and despair, as we are consumed by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege whose primary weapon is division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as identity politics and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

     Against all of this we have only our solidarity with each other, the redemptive power of love, our refusal to submit or to believe and trust authority which frees us as Unconquered and self created beings and Living Autonomous Zones, and our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves. Powers which cannot be taken from us, and which can seize the power of those who would enslave us.

     This is why I practice the art of believing impossible things, but only those I myself have chosen or created. Among these are Liberty, Equality, Solidarity, Truth, Justice, our universal human rights and a United Humankind as a free society of equals in which we are guarantors of each other’s humanity. And crucially, act to make them real. In cases of tyranny and terror, wars of ethnic supremacy, enforcement of virtue as crusades and inquisitions and faith weaponized in service to power,, and other conflicts of national identity, of conquest and imperial dominion, carceral states of force and control, of our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and of all forms of unequal power and systems of oppression, we must bring a Reckoning, especially to the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity regardless of who they may be or in the name of what cause they act, and silence the drums of war.

     Dream with me, but act in solidarity to make it real.

     As the Mad Hatter says to Alice; “That is an excellent practice, but right now you might want to focus on the Jabberwock.”

    Just so.

     As I wrote in my post of March 10 2023, On Hope and Despair: Surviving Life Disruptive Events; To a friend with suicidal ideation and facing multiple trauma, life disruptive events, and institutional catch 22s which include class and patriarchal oppression enforced by rentier capitalism and the political theft of our right to life through failure to provide the free universal healthcare which is its precondition,  I have written this brief message:

     Now is the time to reach out, make connections, and build community. Isolation is dangerous in the extreme for you in this moment. A sea of fellow humans surrounds us, all of whom must wrestle with the flaws of our humanity as imposed conditions of struggle. I hear you in this message, and am afraid. Choose life, my friend, as precarious and filled with pain and fear as it may be; our stories can always change, regardless of the limits of our scope of action and agency.

     It may now become possible to reclaim the life which has been stolen from you, and begin to heal and reinvent yourself. May you find peace and joy in this terrible world, my friend.

     All I have to offer in this are words, ephemeral and impermanent as leaves taking flight in the wind; a poor substitute for the golden coins which should be laid upon our eyes to bear us to unknown shores where we may be free from the limits of our form and the material basis of our lives under unequal power as imposed conditions of struggle.

      We must struggle against such authoritarian forces of coercion as a universal process of becoming human, and against tyranny and terror our best defense is solidarity, loyalty, mutual aid and interdependence, faith in each other, and our duty of care for each other. If these should fail, those who would enslave us win.

     A maker of mischief, I; and a bringer of Chaos, bearing songs of liberation. I cannot free us from the systems of unequal power which entrap us, but I can illuminate their limits, flaws, and internal contradictions which will inevitably bring about their collapse, and if we all of us act together we may seize our power to reimagine and transform our possibilities of becoming human and the choices we make about how to be human together.

     And maybe one thing more; a spell, if you will, or a wish; I reach once more into Pandora’s Box to problematize and interrogate hope as a balance for despair.

     As I wrote in my post of September 27 2020, What Do We Need Now to Forge A Future For Humankind?; We live in interesting times,  a phrase attributed in popular culture as Chinese but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong; beset by complex and interdependent problems; existential threats to democracy and to our survival as a species, and confronted by a political crisis of identity driven by pervasive and overwhelming fears and the modern pathology of disconnectedness. This is a moment of decision, with extinction and civilizational annihilation hanging in the balance, of the wonder and terror of total freedom, and our choices will gloriously expand the possibilities of becoming human or cast us into oblivion.

     History begins with us, or ends with us.

     What do we need now if we are to forge a future for humankind?

      So I asked the question three years ago, which I revisit now to recontexualize the praxis of hope as historical and political as well as personal and psychological, one which shapes us both as individuals and as nations.

      Here follows a Book of Hope, to balance against despair in surviving life disruptive events, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.

        What is hope, and how is it useful?

       Hope is power, an inherent and defining quality of human being, and a primary force of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization.

      Hope dances with faith and love as parts of us which cannot be taken from us, a final space of free creative play which escapes the darkness and those who would enslave us, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and resistant to our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their carceral states of force and control.

     Hope is also a fulcrum of change not only for ourselves in becoming human, but also of seizures of power in revolutionary and liberation struggle, a form of poetic vision which allows us to see beyond the limits of our material and social conditions to diagnose systemic flaws and contradictions and find new ways of being human together.

     These aspects of hope as recursive processes of change, adaptation, and growth in living systems, social, political, and psychological as well as biological ecologies which construct us, make of hope a kind of freedom inborn in us, and interconnected with ideas of agency, autonomy, and liberty.

     How can we find the will and power to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival? This has been the great question of my life posed by existential threats in the first three Last Stands which created and defined me; when the police opened fire on the student protestors my mother and I were among at Bloody Thursday in People’s Park Berkeley 1969, when I was nearly executed by police bounty hunters in Brazil in 1974 for refusal to stand aside from the street children they were authorized to kill for being who the system made them, and in Beirut 1982 when I was given the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet as we refused to surrender to the soldiers who had just set fire to our café and expected to be burned alive.

     In my very long journey to becoming who I am now, I began from the position of Camus regarding hope that it is an instrument of our subjugation to authority through faith weaponized in service to power and the falsification of lies, illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use Angleton’s iconic metaphor. Hope for me then must be abandoned if we are to become free; with time I began to see instead hope as a form of freedom, one crucial to our defiance of authority and seizures of power.

      First, here is the place from which I began, as I wrote in my post of August 20 2019, On Becoming Human; This morning I was rereading my favorite stories by H.P. Lovecraft on his birthday and writing some thoughts about his work in my literary blog, sister site to this one, when I realized that his surreal mythology illuminates the existential crisis of meaning and values which confronts us in America today and in the world at large in what is rapidly becoming a post-democracy global tyranny under the Fourth Reich, and that we have faced similar peril after both World Wars as western civilization destroyed and recreated itself; how can we go on when the values of the Enlightenment, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, have failed us? It is as if we looked to the heavens for signs and portents of guidance, only to find writ large the words, “I do not exist.”

     One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre and Marx or a Lovecraftian one of Absurdist faith, referential to classical sources, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign, tyrannical, and hostile to humanity, ideal figures of Trump and his lunatic presidency of Absurdist-Nihilist Theatre of Cruelty, rests with our solution to the riddle of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils?

     Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope in its negative form directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen as we so often do with liberators who become tyrants, or like T.S. Elliot of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bear the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation.

    True freedom requires disbelief. Freedom means self-ownership and the smashing of the idols. 

      Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop lightningbolt awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”

     It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.

     Now imagine humanity after civilization destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars facing that same awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country, exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one but herself.

     Our responses to this awakening to possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.

     Everyone possesses and uses both forces just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity, or ruptures to our prochronism, the history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.

      For both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their connections. And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and history.

     This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.

    As I wrote in my post of January 20 2021, The Turning of the Tide: With Inauguration Day Comes the Return of Hope; I have a complex relationship with the idea of hope, with the ambiguity, relativity, and context-determined multiple truths and simultaneity of meaning which defines hope, that thing of redemption and transformative power which remains in Pandora’s Box after all the evils have escaped, as either the most terrible of our nightmares or the gift of the miraculous depending on how we use it.

      As the Wizard of Oz said of himself it’s a humbug, but it is also a power which cannot be taken from us by force and control, and like faith of which it is a cipher holds open the door of our liberation and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

    As we believe, so we may become.

    Human being, meaning, and value originate in this uniquely human capacity to transcend and grow beyond our limits as an act of transformation, rebirth, and self-creation, and as a seizure of power over our identities. Among other things it allows us to escape the flag of our skin and inhabit that of others; to forge bonds through empathy and compassion and enact altruism and mercy.

    This is what is most human in us, a quality which defines the limits of what is human, and which we must cherish and conserve as our most priceless gift.

     Hope is the thing which can restore us to ourselves and each other, unite a divided nation and begin to heal our legacies of historical inequalities and injustices, and it can be wielded as an instrument which counters fear. Hope is the balance of fear, and fear is a negative space of hope; and because fear births hate, racism, fascism, hierarchies of elite privilege and belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, hope is a power of liberation and of revolutionary struggle.

     As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession; One day I crossed beyond our topologies of meaning and value and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden into the unknown, the blank places on the maps of our becoming marked Here Be Dragons, and never returned. I live now where the dragons dwell, and I wouldn’t trade a moment of the life I have lived for any treasure on earth, for I am free.

     It happened like this; one day I was driving from my fun job teaching high school to my real work counseling at my very elegant office in San Francisco, and I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this. So I took a wrong turn to the airport and bought a ticket to the other side of the earth. I had no idea where I was flying to, and when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia I found a bus station with a map that showed all the routes ending in the mountains, which were an enormous empty space along the spine of the country. So I took a bus there and got off at the end of the road, where a dirt track led into the forest of the Cameron Highlands, and began walking.

    Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah (Live In London)

This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate

Confronting the Jabberwock

This post partum psychosis parallels how many of us feel about America now, trapped in a monstrous form we never chose by a monstrous future which we have birthed. Post election psychosis, but also our national Awakening to complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. Now is the Time of Monsters, truly.

The Normal and the Pathological, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault

 (Introduction)

‘We all share the same pain’: can the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement rebuild after 7 October?

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/may/21/peace-reconciliation-dialogue-activism-middle-east-7-october-gaza-israel-palestinians-west-bank?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1td0uO4WYMH0JNJ0K_NHgdndksFdt49CgTMqvRZh0P5LCCQ4W2w-vruTM_aem_Adklpi2sb5YEqseXMCZd-G51eUMnMSKznxtG4hwDOgNrcXIAd6-PEU1Gt92geMaXRIbGtbtsBdxUzCSooEjvBEoN

Exclusive interview: ICC prosecutor seeks arrest warrants against Sinwar and Netanyahu for war crimes over October 7 and Gaza

Standing up for Palestine is also standing up to save the west from the worst of itself, by Moustafa Bayoumi

Letter signed by 178 members of US’s most prestigious law faculties calls Israeli reaction to Hamas attack ‘a moral catastrophe’

The peril now facing us: Israel invades, Iran intervenes – and this war goes global, Simon Tisdall

Dual Loyalty, Sahar Vardi

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/dual-loyalty-2/

How do I both condemn Hamas and support Israeli and Palestinian people?, Mordecai Martin

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/WhctKKZGhLtjLsWvxsFtmwMxmBrtRGZGSLfFJpNfLtqlskrChCvLxhxxdTbWqXXRxCSTpqB

Mass protests erupt internationally against Israeli war on Gaza

Israelis and Palestinians are facing their moment of greatest danger since 1948,

Yuval Noah Harari

The Black Sun, Julia Kristeva                   

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JFdZI1n6F9iwJFItPFfcMsGrzy_xCgHo/view?usp=sharing

The Black Sun: the alchemy and art of darkness, Stanton Marlan

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J-mjBLJhRwsqVvkjVQguUIEpTF9XevkF/view?usp=sharing

The Book of Urizen, William Blake

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JIVqya6uqyru-8yOLC8WxOWZ-yEa-aqG/view?usp=sharing

Images of the Black Sun: Notes on the relationship between Heinrich Heine and Gérard de Nerval, Ralph Häfner

https://www.cairn.info/revue-de-litterature-comparee-2006-3-page-285.htm

     Our friend, the Abyss, and my Kit For Hope; a reading list

     At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom.

The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus

The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway

The Trial of Socrates, by I.F. Stone

Invictus, by William Ernest Henley

November 23 2024 Bluesky Replaces X Over Musk’s Bankrolling of Trump

      Come and dance with us in a space of free creative play unbound by the limits of fascist, white supremacist, and theocratic-patriarchal terror and propaganda, and let your social media fund joy, hope, and liberty instead.

     Join us in Resistance to falsification and the Wilderness of Mirrors that is X; lies and illusions, conspiracy theories and alternate realities, treasonous and dishonorable fascist and Russian propaganda and the subversion of democracy, a poisonous sea of thought control and repression of dissent now become an instrument of state propaganda as Traitor Trump returns to power riding the crest of its wave, and all the while the entirety of our activity on X creates the wealth and power of those who would enslave us.

      Follow me here on Bluesky; I’ll follow you back unless your content is sexual exploitation or otherwise that which I cannot endorse or be associated with.

Jay of Dollhouse Park @makerofmischief.bsky.social  https://bsky.app/profile/makerofmischief.bsky.social

     Come and dance with us.

     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 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.

     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, we must enact 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 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, former 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?

What is Bluesky and why are so many people suddenly leaving X for the platform? Users turn to the heavily moderated network after warnings about misinformation on Elon Musk’s X

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/16/what-is-bluesky-and-why-are-so-many-people-suddenly-leaving-x-for-the-platform-elon-musk

I’ve joined Bluesky and it feels like a breath of fresh air – in some ways…

For now, let’s revel in Bluesky’s promised land and kid ourselves it’ll never get like X

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/24/bluesky-promised-land-x-social-media

The exodus from X to Bluesky has happened – the era of mass social media platforms is over

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/15/x-bluesky-social-media-platforms

The Curious Alliance of Alex Jones and Elon Musk

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/elon-musk-alex-jones-curious-alliance-1234924495/

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

December 16 2022 Hate Speech is Not Free Speech: the Case of Elon Musk’s Twitter

November 22 2024 Arrest Warrant Issued for Netanyahu By the ICC

     Victory!

      We celebrate the ICC issue of the arrest warrant for Netanyahu as a war criminal, for this is a historic victory which changes the narrative of the conflict, delegitimizes Israel through loss of the white hat of immunity conferred by historical victimization, and empowers the Palestinian liberation and independence movement.

      The collapse of Netanyahu’s kleptocratic settler regime and of the Israeli state as a theocratic terrorist institution may now be inevitable, and this is the moment for America to free herself of historical complicity in crimes against humanity as a patron of imperial conquest and dominion of Palestine as a nation and of the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

     We must now bring regime change to Israel and Netanyahu to justice, but we must also bring a Reckoning to his entire apparatus of state terror and tyranny including the settler militias our own nation has funded.

      Our best chance and hope to restore balance in the region and defuse the metastasizing conflict between the Israel and Iran and between America and Russia is still BDS of Israel, but we must also disempower and bring change and a Reckoning to the regime.

     This tidal change begins but does not end with Netanyahu on the witness stand where once stood another monster whose space he now occupies, Slobodan Milošević. And it cannot end in Israel alone, but must also bring transformative change and a Reckoning to America and all those complicit in such crimes throughout the world.

      Peace be upon us all.

     As I wrote in my post of September 19 2024, Israeli Terror Attack Kills Americans With Impunity: No BDS, No Arrest of Netanyahu and Other War Criminals, No Policy of Regime Change in Israel, No Legitimacy of the American State As A Guarantor of Our Universal Human Rights; Our leaders have betrayed us to the Nothing; the cruel and merciless racist genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terror of a theocratic and amoral regime designed for fiendish dual purposes; the imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors and the Final Solution of the Palestinians.

     This and this alone does Israel now represent, for the capture of the state by a settler regime to whom only their own fellow Jews are truly human and the subversion of democracy, our universal human rights, and the dream of Israel as a refuge from fascism and hate crime is now total and nearly final. The dream of a new Sepharad dies, and in its place rises a carceral state of force and control based on Jewish Identity politics, the weaponization of faith in service to power, the centralization of power to tyranny, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

     With the Gaza War and its myriads of atrocities and crimes against humanity, directly modeled on Putin’s destruction of Mariupol and which both follow the doctrine of Total War as crafted by Hitler and Franco and tested at Guernica, Israel has become a mirror of the death camps her people once survived, a nation of walls and internal borders, quasi-slave labor enforced by a system of barricaded slums modeled on the Bantustans of Apartheid South Africa, and have a permanent war economy which exports globally instruments of the repression of dissent and universal surveillance.

     Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis. Here only fear, power, and force are real and have meaning, and we are all threatened by dehumanization and subjugation to a wicked and malign authority which has abandoned human being, meaning, and value for power enforced by terror, abjection, despair, and learned helplessness.

     No matter where you begin with hierarchies and taxonomies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.

     What must be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such different results; the ideology of nonviolent Resistance which Gandhi and Martin Luther King used in victorious seizures of power, and the Russian and all subsequent Revolutions of class struggle and socialist liberation?

     In this horrific event of mass terror a great truth is revealed; the liberty and human rights of one people is identical to that of all people, especially those of an Occupied or colonized people and of the imperialist-colonialist people who claim ownership of them, for the imperials are also enslaved by their own empire.

     Beware of those who claim to speak and act in your name, for this is a primary strategy of subjugation and the manufacture of consent; especially when coupled with unforgiveable acts committed in your name.

     Israel has committed many such unforgiveable acts of dehumanization against the people of Palestine, because they worship the Infinite differently and are less white in the flags of their skins. Yet Israel was founded as a democracy, and the apologists of state terror both in Israel and in America are glad to behave as if this were still true and rally vast wealth and power to the Israeli state and war machine in the name of the Jewish people whom they no longer defend, but use the language of defense, security, and just cause to authorize and legitimate brutal repression and crimes against humanity.

     This has all unfolded over seventy years, but this week something new has happened which changes everything; they have killed Americans, volunteer  medics and famine relief workers, among their victims of mass random civilian terror.

     We American are uniquely positioned to influence Israel and end this war of genocide and ethnic cleansing, for we are the primary sponsors of Israeli tyranny and terror. They are our colony and proxy state in America’s monopolization of oil as a strategic asset which confers us our global hegemony and dominion, and this is instrumental to the business of empire.

     As of this week our taxes not only buy the deaths of children in Palestine, but also the deaths of our fellow Americans.

     Netanyahu believes he can commit any crime against humanity without losing American money, arms, and political cover, because we are caught on the horns of a dilemma in our elections; we must unite in solidarity to deny Trump the capture of the state lest we lose our democracy utterly and forever, but the Democratic Party thus far refuses to reign in our wayward vassal for fear of losing votes and money. Netanyahu and Trump almost certainly conspired together in the tragedy of Black Saturday to do exactly this, hand Trump the election together with manufacturing a casus belli for Netanyahu’s conquest and genocide of Palestine and the globalization of the conflict in which a Zionist Empire may arise.

     There is but one rule in American politics; nobody messes with the grift.

     What measures have we taken to bring peace and justice to the twin nations of Israel and Palestine? Genocide Joe refused to vote to charge Netanyahu with genocide, then armed him with the weapons to commit it; in all fairness, this is nothing new, and continues seventy years of American policy. We missed our best chance at defusing this war when we refused to enact Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction against Israel; again nothing new, as this was what we were protesting for when Governor Reagan ordered the police to fire on the students on Bloody Thursday 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley, I a nine year old child holding my mothers hand when she offered a bouquet of flowers to a policeman who replied by cocking and aiming a shotgun at her. We were saved by a police grenade thrown into the crowd, as all devolved into death and chaos; fifty five years later our universities are still using police terror to repress dissent regarding our investment and arming of Israel versus Palestine.

     America has no policy of regime change in Israel, has not brought Netanyahu and his regime to trial, has not used BDS to silence the bombs, and now allows the murder of American citizens with impunity.

     Kamala laughs; but this time she is laughing at us. We need her to break the power of the fascists who plan to overthrow democracy, and she knows this and that at this point we cannot disavow her or fail to vote for her; but we can keep both democracy and our universal human rights if she and the Democratic Party change their policy of arming and funding Israel without accountability for how those weapons are used. We must bring this to the front of the election as its defining issue; Kamala must lead the change, for the principle of human rights is of equal importance with the preservation of democracy.

      Biden failed this test, and abandoned the idea of human rights by refusing to change policy, use BDS, arrest Netanyahu, or stop sending weapons of mass destruction for purposes of ethnic cleansing and genocide, and we purged him from the election because of it, on the pretext of being an imbecile rather than a conspirator in genocide as he was. Yet the Democratic Party wants to ignore the elephant in the room, and makes no mention of the most crucial issue on the ballot other than democracy and abortion, our complicity in crimes against humanity; this is a mistake.

      Trump of course is far worse, for he is an active partner and ally of Netanyahu, possibly a co-conspirator as well, who hopes to divide and conquer America by making us complicit in the unforgivable crimes of Israel. This we must resist and meet with solidarity and a United Humankind, but we must also recognize and acknowledge the complicity of the Democratic as well the Republican Parties in the crimes against humanity of the state of Israel.

     Our lives count as nothing against the power offered by Zionist paymasters; we have not even declared AIPAC a terrorist organization.

    Now is the moment to free ourselves from capture of the state by forces inimical to our humanity and our liberty. If we cannot do so now, rallying to the bloodied shirt of our fellow Americans, we never will.

     Among the legacies of the past which we drag around behind us like an invisible reptilian tail, there are those which must be kept and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.

     As I wrote in my post of July 24 2024, Tyrant of Völkisch-Nationalen Hebräertum, Hebrew National Socialism, Netanyahu Addresses Congress When He Should Be On Trial For Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity;     Völkisch-Nationalen Hebräertum; an interesting phrase created by the founders of the Zionist project to describe themselves, which frames the design of the state of Israel within the ideology of the Nazi Party as its model and counterpart, speaks to us today from the august lectern of the United States Congress.

      The First Lie of Tyrants is that they speak for the people in whose name they wield power, and further centralize power to authority through fear and divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, birthing fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

     Everything the enemy says is a lie.

     No matter where you begin with boundaries and hierarchies of membership and otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.

     Look to Gaza for proof, and as an oracle of our future should we align ourselves with the path of tyranny and not of Liberty.

     In this time of darkness, under the shadows of fascist tyranny both here in America embodied by the Party of Treason which has invited a war criminal to dictate to us all the terms of our nation’s engagement with his regime, and in Israel where fascist tyranny and terror has captured the state, these two abominations seek to legitimize each other as political campaign performances as mass protests in our nations and throughout the world challenge and defy their seizure of power over us and its consequences for the Palestinian Genocide and the imperial conquest and dominion of Gaza and the whole of the Middle East.

     At stake here are first the idea of universal human rights, second the subversion of democracy and a free society of equals globally, and third the danger that broadening the Gaza War into a war between the Arab-American Alliance which includes Israel as our colony and proxy state and the Iranian Dominion which includes Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen will draw into its maelstrom all of NATO versus Russia, a Third World War now ongoing in several theatres but not yet a nuclear one or direct superpower conflict, and a war in which much of humankind will die, an Age of Tyrants will begin, and civilization will fall.

     And if fascist tyrannies can replace democracies and the Third World War becomes a universal conflict of imperial powers and Orwellian totalitarian nightmares, either we will emerge a millennia from now as scattered bands of savages brutalized and dehumanized by centuries of war and tyranny, or our species will become extinct before then. In ninety eight or more possible futures out of every one hundred, humankind is already doomed.

    But there is that slim Forlorn Hope that one day something like ourselves discovers the ruins of our civilization, and begins once again to wonder and to question.

     Today as Netanyahu sings his siren songs of fear, power, and force to America and the world, let us give to fascism and to tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!    

     As I wrote in my post of May 29 2021, Palestine and Israel: State of the Peace; A fragile peace holds for now in the volatile, chaotic, and rapidly changing relationships between Palestine and Israel, and between these partners in the imaginations of America and the international community. It is an uneasy dance of identity, memory, and history performed to the lyrical songs of narratives of victimization, songs which seduce and shape us to the service of power and authority.

     Before the stage of the world and the witness of history, we can see here in real time the processes and consequences of divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as primary informing, motivating, and shaping forces of human being, meaning, and value.

     For those of us who participated on May 10 2021 not in the defense of al Aqsa, a thing of grandeur fit for the deaths of heroes, but in defense of the families at prayer which Israel attacked and the unarmed women and children hunted through the maze of a derelict antiquity, disembodied screams in a land of fear and darkness, the Third Intifada was born on that night as a hope beyond the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity for reimagination, transformation, the redemptive power of love to heal the divisions of exclusionary otherness and the pathology of our disconnectedness, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

     What is the state of the peace? How we answer this question hinges on implicit value judgements and becomes a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, and a measure of our character. In this as in many things, I recall Monet’s description of the meaning of his art as a form of metaphysics and investigation into the soul of humankind; “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks outward, but the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.”

      So our question becomes, what does this look like from the perspectives of its partners, Palestine, Israel, and America?

     America vacillates with Joe Biden on the cusp of a vast and horrific realization; that we have for over seventy years been the sponsors of tyranny and state terror, and responsibility for the endless litany of woes which have shaped the peoples of Palestine are shared by all of us and by our proxy state of Israel. It parallels our national reckoning with the legacies of slavery and our systemic racial inequalities and injustices which awaken with the Black Lives Matter protests, like our reckoning with Patriarchy and sexual terror in the #metoo movement, and with the consequence of capitalism for our extinction in the Green New Deal and the global ecological movement ignited by the Pythian visionary Greta Thunberg.

      An awakening and tidal change whose full consequences and potential for the reimagination and transformation of humankind are incalculable, our political, ecological-material, sexual, and racial social justice movements represent a total civilizational shift and a revolution in universal human rights which will one day utterly change and renew our ideas of human being, meaning, and value.

    Francis Fukuyama was wrong when he predicted that we live at the end of history; we live at the beginning of a new history. But he was exactly right when he diagnosed its principles of operation in The End of History and the Last Man; “It was the slave’s continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master.”

     I hope we are at the beginnings of becoming human. I fear that our historical legacies may become traps, falsifications, assimilative and colonizing narratives wherein tyrannies of authorized identities may steal our souls. This is the problem of the Hobgoblin’s broken mirror in Anderson’s The Snow Queen; we are lost in a world of distorted images, captured echoes, and illusions. This, too, we must resist.

     Israel is caught in the jaws of its history, held captive by Netanyahu’s regime of kleptocratic fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but also a victim which has become a dark mirror of her abuser. Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis; fear, power, and force are not the only things which have meaning, nor do we live in a world wherein love is without redemptive power.

     In his massive campaign of ethnic cleansing and repression of dissent, and in his diplomacy of terror and negotiations by missile fire, Netanyahu plays to his own alt-right constituents as their figurehead. But he may have miscalculated international reactions; he has been provoked into exposing the true nature of the Occupation, and the White Hat conferred by narratives of historical victimization is slipping.

     The Third Intifada has accomplished its goals of changing the narrative, fracturing American support for Israeli militarism and advancing support for Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction, moving a decades old issue to center stage, and timed to the vote on the massive arms deal now in Congress. At least, those were my goals in the wake of our defense of the people of Palestine at al Aqsa.

      Others among the defenders of Palestine have their own plans and objectives; certainly Hamas emerged as the clear victor of the struggle, having seized authority from the Fatah government of Palestine through active defense of its people, and rendering the elections Abbas refuses to call irrelevant. Hamas has delegitimized the Palestinian Authority, and stained its partnership with the Israeli government as collaboration, while the Third Intifada, waged by Hamas but also dozens of other factions, special forces from a number of allied governments, and madmen like myself, has called into question the idea of the Two State Solution.

     Of Hamas and of all revolutionaries I say this; Any who stand between the tyranny and state terror of conquest, enslavement, and death, and the lives of innocents are heroes and champions of our humanity. The particulars are irrelevant.

     Are we not our brother’s keepers?

     There is a path forward beyond the dichotomous paradigm of a dual identity; abandon the Two State Solution and reimagine and transform Israel and Palestine as a united nation under secular law and designed to safeguard equality and universal human rights.

     America’s enormous financial and military sponsorship of the state of Israel provides a very big lever with which to change the balance of power. I advocate BDS when it means peace and demilitarization; we must fund and shape ourselves to constructive and not destructive ends, to love rather than hate and to hope rather than fear.

      Build democracy in Israel and we also build justice and equality for its minorities, exactly as in America. I believe we must liberate the peoples of Israel from a fascist regime of blood, faith, and soil, for the beneficiaries of state terror and tyranny are also subjugated by it. This is the great internal contradiction of authoritarian power as fascism; it is a system which dehumanizes and instrumentalizes even those in whose name it perpetrates its crimes against humanity as a strategy of authorization and the manufacture of consent, and why it must inevitably consume itself.

     As Israel prepares its Final Solution to the problem of Palestine, America does nothing. Nothing to stop crimes against humanity, and everything to provide the criminals with arms and other support. We bear responsibility for these crimes with our proxies in Israel.

     The people who lived near the Nazi death camps claimed they knew nothing of the Holocaust, nothing about the vast rain of human ash which blanketed their towns and stained them with its silent crimes. But we know. How shall we answer, when we knew and did nothing?

     As I wrote in my post of January 5 2023, Netanyahu’s Israel Announces Its Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem; Inscribed upon the iron gates of Netanyahu’s Israel are the words; “Work is Freedom”, and as at Dachau and Auschwitz, it is always a lie.

      How has the dream of Israel, a homeland and safe haven for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, a people historically among the world’s most persecuted, marginalized, and vilified minorities, become a proxy of American dominion through control of the strategic resource of oil behind the fig leaf of narratives of victimization which confer legitimacy and moral authority, a militarized theocratic society whose vast military power defends Jewish peoples everywhere, but also perpetrates the conquest, enslavement, and genocide of the Palestinians in the world’s oldest Occupation?

    Why create a Brave New World of walls and borders, surveillance and brutal repression?

     Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis.

     No matter where you begin with hegemonies of the elect, in this unique case whose deed of title to the lands of Israel is signed in the Bible by the Infinite, and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.

Benjamin Netanyahu is a wanted man – and he has only himself to blame

The Guardian view of global justice at a crossroads: war crimes demand accountability

The ICC arrest warrants must bring an end to Israel’s atrocities – and true accountability for all the guilty

Hebrew

נִצָחוֹן!

אנו חוגגים את סוגיית ה-ICC של צו המעצר לנתניהו כפושע מלחמה, שכן זהו ניצחון היסטורי שמשנה את הנרטיב של הסכסוך, עושה דה-לגיטימציה לישראל באמצעות אובדן הכובע הלבן של החסינות שמעניקה קורבנות היסטורית, ומעצים את השחרור הפלסטיני. ותנועת עצמאות.

 קריסת משטר המתנחלים הקלפטוקרטי של נתניהו ושל מדינת ישראל כמוסד טרור תיאוקרטי עשויה להיות כעת בלתי נמנעת, וזה הרגע של אמריקה להשתחרר משותפות היסטורית לפשעים נגד האנושות כפטרונית של כיבוש קיסרי ושליטתה של פלסטין. אומה ושל רצח עם וטיהור אתני של העם הפלסטיני.

 כעת עלינו להביא את שינוי המשטר לישראל ולנתניהו לדין, אך עלינו גם להביא חשבון לכל מנגנון הטרור והעריצות המדינתיים שלו, כולל מיליציות המתנחלים שמימנה אומתנו.

 הסיכוי והתקווה הטובים ביותר שלנו להחזיר את האיזון באזור ולנטרל את הסכסוך הגרורות בין ישראל לאיראן ובין אמריקה לרוסיה היא עדיין ה-BDS של ישראל, אבל עלינו גם לבטל את הכוח ולהביא שינוי וחשבון למשטר.

 השינוי הגאות הזה מתחיל אבל לא מסתיים עם נתניהו על דוכן העדים שבו עמדה פעם מפלצת נוספת שאת שטחה הוא תופס כעת, סלובודן מילושביץ’. וזה לא יכול להסתיים בישראל לבדה, אלא חייב גם להביא שינוי מהפך והתחשבנות לאמריקה ולכל השותפים לפשעים כאלה ברחבי העולם.

 שלום לכולנו.

Arabic

لنصر!

نحتفل بإصدار المحكمة الجنائية الدولية مذكرة اعتقال بحق نتنياهو باعتباره مجرم حرب، لأن هذا انتصار تاريخي يغير رواية الصراع، وينزع الشرعية عن إسرائيل من خلال فقدان القبعة البيضاء للحصانة الممنوحة من خلال الضحية التاريخية، ويعزز حركة التحرير والاستقلال الفلسطينية.

إن انهيار نظام نتنياهو الاستيطاني اللصوصي والدولة الإسرائيلية كمؤسسة إرهابية ثيوقراطية قد يكون الآن أمرًا لا مفر منه، وهذه هي اللحظة المناسبة لأمريكا لتحرير نفسها من التواطؤ التاريخي في الجرائم ضد الإنسانية كراعٍ للغزو الإمبراطوري والسيطرة على فلسطين كأمة والإبادة الجماعية والتطهير العرقي للشعب الفلسطيني.

يجب علينا الآن جلب تغيير النظام في إسرائيل ونتنياهو إلى العدالة، ولكن يجب علينا أيضًا محاسبة جهازه بالكامل من الإرهاب والاستبداد بما في ذلك ميليشيات المستوطنين التي مولتها أمتنا.

إن أفضل فرصة وأمل لدينا لاستعادة التوازن في المنطقة ونزع فتيل الصراع المتفاقم بين إسرائيل وإيران وبين أمريكا وروسيا لا يزال يتمثل في مقاطعة إسرائيل وسحب الاستثمارات منها وفرض العقوبات عليها، ولكن يتعين علينا أيضًا نزع القوة وإحداث التغيير ومحاسبة النظام.

إن هذا التغيير الهائل يبدأ ولا ينتهي بنتنياهو على منصة الشهود حيث وقف ذات يوم وحش آخر يشغل مكانه الآن، سلوبودان ميلوسيفيتش. ولا يمكن أن ينتهي الأمر في إسرائيل وحدها، بل يجب أيضًا أن يحدث تغييرًا تحويليًا ومحاسبة لأمريكا وكل المتواطئين في مثل هذه الجرائم في جميع أنحاء العالم.

السلام علينا جميعًا.

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