The Lovecraft Mythos remains an iconic study in fear as the organizing principle of an invented mythology of Absurdist Nihilism; it also reveals how we use fear to shape ourselves and others. What are its methods and purposes in Lovecraft, and in horror literature in general? Why do we need fear as an instrument of identity creation?
Fear is both a limit of our openness to change which defines our boundaries and a disruptive force which transgresses normalities; a form of Chaos which is a measure of the adaptive potential of ourselves and our society as systems. We must listen to the secrets our fear whispers to us, for it both reflects our true selves and describes the negative spaces of our future possibilities of becoming human. Above all, fear is an instrument by which we create ourselves.
Cherish your fear and hold it close; question and probe the limits of your darkness, for it speaks to us of ambiguous truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Especially we must explore and interrogate the Uncanny Valley of horror, revulsion, disgust; the instinctive terror of things not quite like ourselves as figures of otherness, and the shock and awe of unknown possibilities of becoming human which live beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden.
We are seized and shaken by overwhelming forces of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity; the pathology of our disconnectedness and the psychopathy of power, the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and its loathsome manifestations of tyranny and carceral states of force and control as embodied violence which co-evolves with elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, hierarchies of belonging and otherness, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
How shall we answer the terror of our nothingness?
Among the angels with which we must wrestle and the demons with which we must dance or be consumed by, the fracture of life disruptive events becomes a Rashomon Gate of relative and multiple truths and possible selves. Herein we may choose between two paths in seizures of power; we may become liberators or tyrants.
On one face of this coin, the tyrant Janus; the terror of our nothingness, falsification, dehumanization, abjection, and theft of the soul. On its reverse the liberator Janus; the joy of total freedom, seizure of power, self ownership, love which exalts us beyond the limits of our flesh and the discovery of our best selves as truths both self created and immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
Becoming human as a process of identity formation, self-construal or personae which is the word for a character mask which actors speak through in classical Greek theatre and which I believe describes identity as a performance and a narrative structure with precision, clarity, and great explanatory power, remains fluid, ambiguous, relative, ephemeral, and a primary ground of struggle.
Who chooses how we are to be defined, the boundaries between our limits and the possibilities of what we may become, and hos and under what conditions boundaries become interfaces between divergent realms?
This is the first question to ask of any story; whose story is this?
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Such is the work of Resistance as Repair of the World, tikkun olam in the Kabbalah and Judaism in general, under imposed conditions of struggle which include our fragile human form and the ambiguous and ephemeral truths written in our flesh.
As I wrote in my post On the Wisdom of Our Darkness in the wake of my mother’s death years ago; Grief, despair, and fear, the trauma of loss, the torment of loneliness, and the guilt of survivorship; the realm of our darkest and most negative passions immerses us in atavistic states with totalizing and tidal force.
Life disruptive events can destabilize identity and realign personality, transform meanings and values, send shockwaves through our network of relationships, shift our worldview and unmoor us from the anchorages of our ideological paradigms and historical contexts.
As such they both shatter who we are and open us to becoming anew, like a bird emerging from the shell of its egg.
Such traumas confront us with the unfiltered face of our shadow self as a healing process, a transformative journey filled with dangers but also with the limitless possibilities of rebirth. As redirections of our momentum, disruptive events force reflection and redefinition of ourselves as intentional choice; among them the death of a loved one is surely the most terrible.
Overwhelming and painful as they may be, our negative emotions have adaptive value or we wouldn’t have evolved and developed them. How then do they help us survive? What is their purpose?
Grief, especially but not exclusively, connects us with other people, opens us to the pain of others, and brings us to a renegotiation of the terms of ourselves and our lives.
We are bound together by the flaws of our humanity, by our brokenness and our pain, by the fragile nature of our lives and our vulnerability to disruptive events.
Beneath our masks we are a continuum of consciousness, history, and mimesis through which we are interconnected, especially with our loved ones and ancestors for whom our bodies are anchorages to this world.
The negative emotions are a biosocial tax on individuals which in part serve to drive us together to meet threats collectively as families and societies united in the cause of our survival, wherein the costs are shared among distributed resources. This is the origin of altruism; humans are designed to help each other. Each of us is marked by our nature as our brother’s keeper.
Far from wholly destructive, our darkness can be growth oriented and creative; destruction may be read as liberation and Chaos as the adaptive potential of a system.
Our darkness whispers, embrace your passion and your true self, and be reborn.
Passions of both light and darkness can act as warning buoys as we navigate into the future and the unknown; they can also illuminate and provoke us to abandon the known and discover new possibilities. Here I think of the green light at the end of his rival’s dock which drives Gatsby to reimagine himself, and in the end to destroy himself like Icarus in reaching for false illusions. Joy and sorrow, as with all our myriad passions, come as balanced pairs which help us process events by leveraging change.
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?
So I described grief process and the abjection and despair of life disruptive events as trauma but also as a gift of the unknown which bears potentialities of liberation and transformative rebirth.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians in the Netflix series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous tyrant and cannibal god, a figural study of Hitler and the motive forces of fascism and the psychopathy of power, a line which like a Zen riddle enfolds and typifies what for myself is the primary question of how to become human under imposed conditions of struggle which require the use of force in resistance, where the use of social force is always ambiguous, dehumanizing, and obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion as bidirectional forces of reaction which create their own antithesis. “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak.”
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil and carceral states of force and control as embodied violence; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values.
But there are other ways of facing our darkness, among them the path of poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and through our actions of humankind and our world; of revolutionary struggle against the systems of oppression which possess us and of liberation from our own hegemonies of power, of embracing our monstrosity and questioning the origins and limits of that which we find abhorrent within us, of violations of normality and transgression of the boundaries of our authorized identities and the limits of the human, of dancing our demons; the way of Lovecraft.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
As I wrote in my post of December 26 2021, Reflections During the After Party; As the festivities of a wonderfully out of control after party swirl around me with raucous and dissonant sounds and the silent hungers, unanswerable pain, and strange desires of our guests press upon me like living brands, I sit among my ghosts, dreaming their dreams, both those they lived and those yet to be realized.
On such occasions as this, surrounded by feasts and family, I am also surrounded by chasms of darkness, loneliness, disconnection, and the voices and presences of the dead which interpenetrate my flesh with the shadows of their histories, literally in the case of our genetic code as transforms of messages about how to shape ourselves to the material world and its imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle to become human.
We are bearers of stories, made of memories and histories which echo back through the numberless unknown lives of our ancestors as an unfolding of human intention and poetic vision, prochronisms or histories expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation like the shells of fantastic sea creatures, songs which reverberate through our lives as epigenetic informing, motivating, and shaping forces which are not unique to us but part of an immense and incomprehensible wave of the limitless possibilities of becoming human, which can seize us with dreams of being, meaning, and value we ourselves cannot imagine.
Such is the power of vision as reimagination and transformation, and the nature of our persona and identities as performances in a theatre of which, as Shakespeare teaches us, all the world is a stage. What is important is to ask, whose stage is it? In whose story do we perform our lives? For these questions direct us not to the subjugation to authority of learned helplessness, but to seizures of power and revolutionary struggle.
How answer we the terrible pronouncement in MacBeth,
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
How shall we answer the terror of our nothingness and the legacies of our history? I have but one reply; to gather and cherish my trauma and pain, and make something beautiful with it. Thus may we stand against the darkness, and remain Unconquered.
My answer to the suffering of the world is to give voice to the voices which have been stolen from us, the numberless generations of the silenced and the erased.
Welcome and embrace your pain and the terror of our nothingness as sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Dance your demons before the stage of the world; go ahead, frighten the horses.
Forge great beauty from the flaws of your humanity and the brokenness of the world, and wield it as an instrument of reimagination and transformation in glorious change.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As I wrote in my post of October 26 2021, On Fear as the Basis of Exchange, Madness as Poetic Vision, and the Terror of Our Nothingness: the Case of Lovecraft; Who is this Absurd fellow Lovecraft, with his gorgeous phraseology and peculiar allegiance to British rather than American English, his Surreal strangeness, an Absurdist Nihilism which echoes in Samuel Beckett and Kobo Abe, bizarre Sadeian transgression, Freudian horror, and poetics of fear?
Above all in this age of political polarization and historical culture and identity as a ground of struggle, how are we to understand him?
Is he a fascist? Nowhere in literature will you find a more useful case study of fascist psychology, and in nonfiction only the book I discovered, while a senior in high school in the wake of studies of Holocaust literature and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, which led me to a lifelong study of the origins of evil through the intersections of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, a multidisciplinary analysis of Hitler entitled The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite, is more illuminating.
Lovecraft is a conflicted author who mocked Hitler as a clown but also admired his performances as a form of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Pirandello’s Theatre of the Grotesque; many Americans thought of Trump in this way as parallel figures of public spectacle. Hitler’s famous maxim “Politics is the new art” marks the turning point of an unknown artist into a monstrous tyrant, and of our civilization to an age of darkness. From this moment on, image has replaced content and public life has been a theatrical performance wherein values are irrelevant.
Lovecraft’s paranoid delusions of alien conspiracies and ancient cults can be read as antisemitic allegories derived from propaganda like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion of which Umberto Eco wrote so beautifully in Prague Cemetery, but for the fact that he was a madman who believed them to be literally true; humanity is a tenuous and illusory quality for Lovecraft, whose world is filled with monsters wearing human masks who might reveal themselves at any moment, himself most especially, a precarious reality under constant threat.
His only known romantic relationship was his brief marriage to a Jewish woman, to whom he incessantly muttered dark imprecations, poisonous metacommentary, and racist characterizations about virtually everyone they passed on the streets of New York as monsters from his stories in disguise, as he did in his hundred thousand letters to his literary proteges.
He is not a fascist, which requires submission to authority and the abandonment of all meaning other than power and all value other than wealth, but he shares with fascists the terrible truth that fear is the basis of human exchange. Fascism weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear in service to power and operates as tyranny; Lovecraft’s work is filled with elite hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness as images and figures which may be read as racist, and he shares many of the obsessions of fascism, but nowhere does he long for authority or imposed meaning; instead he signposts and calls it out as cruelty without meaning or value, and his narratives are driven by existential dread and terror of authority.
His is a poetics of rebellion and nihilism like that of Camus and Beckett in a universe wherein the gods are not merely dead as in Nietzsche’s reimagination of the problem of the Deus Absconditus, the god who bound us to his laws and abandoned us, Thus Spake Zarathustra, but are actively hostile to humankind, mad idiot superbeings whose motives are utterly alien and predatory, who created humankind as slaves and food, a radical nihilistic atheism which has its political form as anarchy. The Anarchist slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World, “No gods, no masters”, coined by the socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui in 1880 and popularized by Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent in 1907, might have been written for him.
Is he a racist? Yes and no, as we may say of fellow Surrealists Djuna Barnes and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His fears of otherness, miscegenation, contamination, devolution to an animal state, and of the monstrosity of others is often expressed in racist terms, but he neither begins nor ends with unselfcritical racism. It remains ambiguous whether he is calling it out or employing such tropes to advance his themes; the first interpretation ascribes intentionality and self awareness which is unprovable but aligns with his themes, the second miscasts him as a Warhol like mocker of expectations whose images are deliberately discontiguous and unaligned, or a fabulist without a cause which he was not.
He was instead a profoundly wounded and savaged soul who fears his own monstrosity most of all, and this is why he is useful to us. His cause was to speak the truth in witness, remembrance, and Reckoning with systems of oppression and legacies of history which like a private Holocaust had disfigured him and stolen much of his humanity. In the literature of madness only the works of Akutagawa and Philip K. Dick are true equals, authors who like Lovecraft were fighting a losing battle against madness, and aware of the degeneration of their skill and artistic control. We may say of him as Renfield says of himself in Dracula; “I’m not a mad man. I’m a sane man fighting for my soul.”
Why should we read Lovecraft now?
Like the Hanging of the Maids in Homer’s Ulysses, the inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, his writing becomes meaningful for us when it is relevant to problems we face in our own lives, and literature is useful when it helps us solve problems of adaptation and change, such as confronting and interrogating implicit privilege as patriarchy and racism. What else is literature for? Purge it of its power to disturb, incite, and provoke, and it becomes meaningless and worthless.
The tragic flaw of Lovecraft is also that of our civilization; a blindness to our own privilege and a failure to embrace our monstrosity and otherness. Such lines of fracture can be read in our borders with their concentration camps of migrants and our prisons whose purpose is the re-enslavement of Black people as contract forced labor, and in our democracy which has been infiltrated and subverted by fascists and transformed into a carceral state of imperial force and control.
We must claim our monstrosity, and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
Here I think of our monstrosity in terms of the classic allegorical novel of America as a family with the dark purpose of breeding its own carnival freak show, Geek Love by Katherine Dunn.
Any serious scholarship of Lovecraft begins with Michel Houellebecq’s stunning debut and manifesto, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, whose chapter titles suggest the ars poetica of Lovecraft; “Attack the story like a radiant suicide, utter the great NO to life without weakness. Then you will see a magnificent cathedral, and your senses, vectors of unutterable derangement, will map out an integral delirium that will be lost in the unnamable architecture of time”.
Next comes the definitive biography I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Volumes 1 & 2, by S.T. Joshi, Joshi’s An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, and the volumes he edited in the Black Wings series of Lovecraftian horror anthologies. Finally there is Thomas Ligotti’s manifesto The Conspiracy against the Human Race, and his darkly luminous fictions.
Why is Lovecraft relevant to us now?
H.P. Lovecraft investigates the failure of our civilization to protect us from our animal nature, the shadow which grants us depth and limitless passion; the purpose of our invention of civilization according to Camille Paglia’s magisterial Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.
His writing is filled with images and themes which have been misread as racist, but his intent is the reverse; to name and disempower the forces which destroyed civilization in World War One as fear of otherness, exactly as did his model T.S. Eliot. Together with Vladimir Nabokov, they are the greatest, and perhaps the last, of our true conservatives.
But this, too, is ambiguous, for he is equally a revolutionary; Lovecraft’s vision of Western civilization is that of a colony of ants mining the waning power of a dead god’s carcass, a horror without purpose. He shares the critique of Idealism with Eliot, Nabokov, and especially Thomas Mann in Death in Venice, but also of traditional society as structural and systemic tyranny and authoritarian force and control with his fellow Absurdists and Surrealists, to some degree of normality as a basis of the power of church and state with de Sade as a literary provocateur and the valorization of transgression as liberation from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, and above all of formal power itself with the great visionary for whom he was a direct model with Genet and Bataille, William S. Burroughs.
Burroughs’ conspiracy of Venusian insects to conquer humankind through drug addiction as a metaphor of capitalism, summarized in his formulation of Marxism as The Algebra of Need, is an appropriation of Lovecraft. The master and his disciple were also both serious scholars of the occult obsessed with dark magic, who saw in mysticism a tradition of counterculture and dissent, as with the martyrdom of the Templars and Jacques DeMolay. As magicians and scholars of the occult there is a direct line of transmission and successorship from medieval ceremonial magic and Aleister Crowley to Lovecraft to Burroughs.
Anyone who has read my literary criticism or my political commentary will be aware that I despise and abjure fascism above all else. Why, then, do I love and admire conservative authors as a treasure, and acclaim any quixotic defense of Idealism against the onslaught of atavistic barbarism and dehumanized modernity?
Let me clarify; fascism is an intrusive force of destruction and no part of the Western Civilization which I champion, born as self-criticism in the Forum of Athens, but also in the fathomless chasms of darkness in the prison cell of Plato’s Trial of Socrates through which we renew our humanity in resistance to authority periodically throughout our history. Conservatism in America or indeed any free nation founded on the values of the Enlightenment begins with a free society of equals, a secular state, objective and testable truth, and a system of justice which is impartial to class, race, or gender, founded on the Rights of Man, scientific rationalism, and Humanism.
Any philosophy of totalitarian authority which centralizes power to a state of force and control, either theocratic, monarchist-aristocratic, communist, or fascist, is anathema to myself and to democracy and freedom. I am an American and a bearer of the Torch of Liberty. This is why I am on the side of rebellion, transgression, revolution, anarchy, chaos, and the frightening of the horses.
Regarding the themes of existential dread of otherness and the terror of alien civilizations, of being overrun by a zombie apocalypse of mindless cannibal brutes which has always been a metaphor of nonwhite immigration, H.P. Lovecraft explored this territory of fear as a cause of the collapse of our civilization. He interrogates rather than valorizes the causes of monarchy and fascism as forms of colonial imperialism.
Lovecraft asked a simple question; what happens to humankind and to human being, meaning, and value without Freudian control of our animal instinctive nature? Throughout his works he recapitulates and extends Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis and interrogation of Nietzsche in The Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist critique of state power based on a legal reformulation of the Doctrine of Original Sin; that without the restraining force of law man devolves into a subhuman condition and the most ruthless and amoral wins and becomes king, originally formulated to limit the divine right of kings and crucial to the Enlightenment project and the birth of modern secular democracy.
Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s savage morality play which examines concepts of state power, justice, and the theology of the depravity of man on which our legal system is founded, is luminous with Kafka-esque Absurdism and Freudian horror.
Here are Lovecraft’s primary sources and references; grimoires of magic, Shakespeare and classical Greek theatre which are common sources, Nietzsche, and Freud. What he did with them, however, was utterly unique and a luminous work of genius which interrogated the failure and collapse of our civilization in World War One from its internal contradictions and forged from his vision an ars poetica of Absurdist-Surrealist Nihilism which prefigured Existentialism.
This line of transmission originates with Dostoevsky and Gogol, was codified by Kafka, and finds realization in Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Kobo Abe, and Thomas Ligotti as Absurdist Nihilism and in William S. Burroughs, Jorge Borges, Philip K. Dick, Haruki Murakami, Andre Breton, Philip Lamantia, Allen Ginsburg, Jonathan Carroll, Jeff Vander Meer, and others as Surrealism.
It is his Surrealism for which I love him; Lovecraft’s principal stories form an
Initiation cycle of Jungian shadow work and the confrontation with ones own darkness as the Other in a metamorphosis of Orphic descent like Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, or in Augustinian exaltation like Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue, culminating in his reimagination of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, William S. Burrough’s model for his own final masterwork The Western Lands.
Fellow Surrealist Vladimir Nabokov articulated the principles of poetic vision and dreams as transcendent imaginal journeys through time and other dimensions to seize control of our own evolution in his great novel Ada, Jung models them in the Red Book, and Philip K. Dick was consumed by them, but Surrealism as a transhumanist project to become a god or to unite with the Infinite draws on myriads of esoteric, mythic, occult, and mystery traditions, many of which inform Lovecraft’s work. Like Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Lovecraft can be read as a summa theologica and codex of the whole Western mystery tradition.
Like his models and sources, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, Gogol’s Dead Souls, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and those for whom he became a model and reference in turn, Jung, Nabokov, Burroughs, Lamantia, and Philip K. Dick, and aligned with the works of Akutagawa in Kappa, Leonora Carrington, Djuna Barnes, and Jerzy Kosinski in The Painted Bird, the works of Lovecraft are also a therapy journal which documents his struggles with madness.
Like Baudelaire he realizes the world is mad; but he is also mad, and his great works chart the course of his degeneration and unmooring from consensus reality which was also a liberation of the spirit and of the imagination, a madness and rapture which transformed him into an angelic figure, combining in one being illumination and darkness, depravity and exaltation.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As a figure of Orpheus and Milton’s Rebel Angel Lovecraft struggled to escape the limits of the human and the legacies of his history, his madness a consequence of unresolved internal conflicts and the massive trauma of being an emotionally abandoned child whose parents both died of madness in an asylum, a madness which he shared and feared he could not escape, which made strange his vision as a unique genius but also marked him with a sign of otherness, robbed him of self control and reason at times and crippled his ability to bond or even socialize in person with others, making him a reclusive hermit without sexual interest of any kind.
Lovecraft bore the wound of the Fisher King in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; he married at age 34 having never even kissed anyone before, and his wife remarked that she had to initiate sex as he was uninterested; the failure of their marriage is unmysterious in this light. This and lack of interest in eating which may have been attempts to starve himself to death and resulted in his gauntness make me suspect that he was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, who hated his body and feared his desires. He may also have been held prisoner in isolation during his formative years, under the strict regime of his insane mother and female guardians, and the tortures he survived are described in symbolic and allegorical form in his works.
Here is a great secret of the mechanism of unequal power as epigenetic and multigenerational trauma and internalized oppression; the son is shaped and deployed as the vengeance of the mother, and the victim by the abuser who is a tyrant and also a survivor of powerlessness and victimhood, and so the system of oppression perpetuates itself. Patriarchy and racism are persistent because they create some of us as monsters with which to subjugate the rest of us.
Lovecraft suffered from what I call Dr Moreau syndrome, fear of devolution to an animal state; also of ones own animal nature, like the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow and could not and which William S. Burroughs gloried in being possessed by, avatar of a god of darkness and nightmares which he claimed as the successor of Nietzsche and shared with me as a boy through his bizarre and unique storytelling rituals, drawn from diverse sources including Crowley, Lovecraft, and his friend Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche.
This fear of degeneration and loss of humanity coupled with the xenophobic fear of being overwhelmed by representations of parental authority as alien outsiders are compounded in the leitmotif of ancient and superior prehuman civilization which renders our own insignificant, pathetic, and meaningless, and robs us of culture as a primary control mechanism of our id or shadow self. Hence the existential horror of the Western scholar confronted by elder and superior alien civilizations such as Eqypt, as in the Randolph Carter stories which were brilliantly reimagined in The Mummy films starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. In the mythology of Lovecraft, the Other is feared because it is superior and uncontrollable, not because it is despised as inferior, and this too is a crucial difference between Lovecraft and fascism as identitarian nationalist politics. The fascination with Egyptian mythology is an element of Surrealism in general as well as with Lovecraft and Burroughs as Surrealists, especially in the poetry of its great visionary Philip Lamantia.
As regards his style; Lovecraft extends Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and as the direct model of Burroughs reimagines the nihilism and transgressive eroticism of Georges Bataille as Surrealism harnessed to the project of Romantic Idealism; to paraphrase the words of Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, to break through the mask of our material existence and seize the Reality it conceals. That the quest of Ahab was also his is quite evident; “to the end I shall grapple with thee, from Hell’s heart I strike at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee” as Ahab declaims to the White Whale, figure of authoritarian tyranny who stands in for God and for his abusers. Whether he was able through his stories to leave us a map of the journey to the unknowns which lie beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden is another matter, proven only in the doing.
As to the stylistics of his rhetoric and ars poetica, Lovecraft has lost his adjectives, which are running amok and taunting their substantives. His howls of desolation are a cause of great merriment among the several grammars he employs, and this is the only thing on which they are in agreement.
His words are formed of scrabble pieces, randomized by being shaken in a dice cup in a game against the gods of madness and the ravening dark, the future of our emerging humanity wagered against the barbarism of our past.
What can be saved, and what dreamed anew? For the stately pleasure dome of Xanadu is once again revealed as an illusion, a palace of memories and lies which in their dance of chaos cannot be limited by their classification and taxonomies of value, but frangible and hollow do betray us.
Mirrors and false images which capture, distort, and falsify us, a wilderness of lost meanings which steal our souls, sound and fury signifying nothing but which seizes and shakes us with the terror of our nothingness like a rag doll in a lion’s mouth, and the signifying monkey who lives at the Buddha’s foot to denote the inherent animal nature of all humankind as a theriomorphic representation has harnessed and is riding him like a pony.
Sometimes our demons must be let out to dance.
What can we learn from Lovecraft now?
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 or a Lovecraftian one, referential to classical sources which include Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign and hostile to humanity, rests with our solution to the paradox of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils? I have come to believe that both are true at once, as Korzybski taught in his General Semantics.
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 directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen, of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith as did T.S. Eliot. 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 bears the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation. Hope in this context is subjugation to authority.
The terror of our nothingness, meaninglessness, and powerlessness in a hostile universe wherein the gods are mad and depraved monsters, a universe empty of imposed meaning or value, may also become the joy of total freedom, autonomy, authenticity, self-ownership and self-creation, as it was for Sartre; a universe in which the mould of man is broken and we are utterly without authorized identities.
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 as we are once again in the process of doing in the ongoing Third World War 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 interdependence. And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and history. Much of our sorrows originate in the conflicts between the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, nature and nurture, the historical and social informing, motivating, and shaping forces of identity.
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.
Is Lovecraft such a figure of heroic struggle against authority, like Icarus, Milton’s Rebel Angel, or Victor Frankenstein, fallen but great, a tragic bearer of the Torch of Liberty?
Great authors are a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, which like the fragmented images of the Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror in Anderson’s Snow Queen reflect and reveal aspects of ourselves and come alive in their readers; which Lovecraft shall I describe?
The poet of Chaos whom I adore, of madness and the existential terror of our nothingness in a universe of dethroned authority, a visionary and tragic hero?
The survivor of abandonment and abuse who forged beauty from their trauma, a flawed and very human man whose fear of otherness was expressed in tragically disfigured allegories of dysmorphia, dehumanization, and degradation which are horrifically filled with racist figures and images and can be read as illuminating case studies of fear and of the dyadic origins of evil in overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized by authority in service to power and the systemic inequalities of power and privilege in hierarchies of elite belonging and otherness?
Lovecraft understood the principle of dancing ones demons; the monstrous figures he describes as shuggoths can be read as racist metaphors, but are also unflinching descriptions of actual childhood night terrors, manifestations of sexual abuse, which invaded his dreams and his flesh to “tickle” him awake. It is this relentless engagement with his fear and darkness, with the legacies of his victimization, this willingness to see the abominable and not look away, and to witness the truth as an author, like Camus to refuse to submit, and above all to embrace his own monstrosity, which makes him useful to us and places his work among the literature of madness and therapy journals, with Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Leonora Carrington, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Jerzy Kosinski, Philip K. Dick, and Kathy Acker. Foucault called this truth telling, and this parrhesia as a sacred calling to pursue the truth as a witness of history lies at the heart of Lovecraft’s bizarre invented mythos.
How does this help us forge our future as antifascists and antiracists, citizens of a free society of equals and bearers of the Torch of Liberty?
We must speak directly to that fear which is the origin of evil; to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, and we do this best by bearing sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others. In the words of Karl Popper; “No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not wish to adopt a rational attitude.” Let us embrace instead the irrational, our Shakespearean taxonomies of passion as motive forces, of rapture and terror, in the great work of reimagination and transformation of humankind and our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
We may say of Lovecraft what is said of Vincent Van Gogh in Doctor Who; “He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of the world; no one had ever done it before, perhaps no one will ever do it again. To my mind, that strange, wild man was not only among the world’s greatest artists, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.”
What is greatness? What does it mean to be a great author or creative genius of any kind, a great human being, in this or any time?
For myself, greatness does not require us to overcome the limits of our histories, which possess and inhabit us like the Toad of Nietzsche and Burroughs, only to engage the legacies of our history and the systems of oppression which entangle us in authentic struggle. Like Jacob wrestling the angel, everything in life is more powerful than we are; victory lies not in defeating the forces which shape us, but in refusal to submit to them, and in reaching beyond our limits. And in this Lovecraft emerges as a tragic hero, who can teach us how to struggle with our own darkness in our journey toward becoming human.
From the darkness of the unknown and the Forbidden, our demons call to us with siren songs which echo and thunder among limitless chasms of our possibilities, and whisper secrets in our dreams; and they say, Come dance with us.
Come dance with us.
The Lighthouse film trailer
On the Construction of My Shadow, a retrospective
June 15 2026 Gods of My Father: Father’s Day Part One
The Psychopathic God, Robert G.L. Waite (the book that fixed me on the origins of evil as my field of study, through the lens of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy)
Conversing Around Lovecraft: Leslie S. Klinger and Neil Gaiman
(yes, the fact that Gaiman sexually enslaved a homeless fan actually makes him a better authority on the subject, for he speaks from within its darkness)
The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic, Peter Levenda (author of the 1977 Necronomicon writing as Simon, from the perspective of a rogue Greek Orthodox priest)
We learn languages to be able to think the thoughts of others and to inhabit their imaginal realities as our own, and to turn boundaries into interfaces as a global family member. Language is the primary layer of identity, which determines the kinds of ideas we are able to have, and since my teenage James Joyce- Ludwig Wittgenstein fanboy years it has been a quest of mine to discover the universal grammar and humanity which lies hidden within us all.
My second and third languages from the age of nine were Chinese and Japanese; including Traditional Chinese inkbrush calligraphy, the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, and the Wu Dialect of Shanghai. During my sixteen years of formal study of Zen Buddhism, Chinese and Japanese martial arts, and the game of Go I studied Chan/Zen literature in both Chinese and Japanese.
An atlas of myself as a bearer of languages as instruments of exploring unknowns with regard to the possibilities of becoming human is extensive, especially with Asian languages.
Levantine Arabic I began learning in 1982 during the Siege of Beirut; it is by now a natural language of mine. Later I studied Classical Quranic Arabic, Classical Persian, and Ottoman Turkish from 1990 as a scholar of the Naqshbandi Order of Sufism in Kashmir and later in Malaysia, also the official language Urdu which is Hindi written with a Perso-Arabic script and influenced by Classical Persian, and conversational use of the Kashmiri language Koshur.
Hindi I learned in India, being once a student of a priestess of Kali and as a member of the Aghora which recognizes no differences of caste and offers healing to all.
Herein I also count Afrikaans as an Asian language, as it was invented by an exiled Malay prince, the only Germanic language written in Arabic script and influenced by the Portuguese-Chinese trade language Kristang, with Bantu and Khoi elements. This is from my years of revolutionary struggle against Apartheid.
From my time in the Golden Triangle and Shan States I learned Thai, Shan, S’gaw Karen, the Singpho language of the Kachin Confederation of northern Burma and India, and the Sino-Tibetan language of the Konyak Naga.
In Nepal my role as a monk of the Buddhist Kagyu Vajrayana Order required literacy in Classical Tibetan, conversational Gorkali or Nepalese as it is the official language and spoken by half the population, Newari which is the language of Kathmandu Valley where I lived, and Gurung which is a tribal language of the Annapurna region and a major language of my key allies the Gurkha military and the horse nomads with whom I operated across the border between Nepal and Kashmir.
From my voyages and treks in South Asia on a later journey, where I sailed out of Georgetown on the island of Penang as a home port, I Iearned Malay in which I am literate and so count among my Voices, this being the major language of the region, of sailors, and of my scholarship as a member of the Naqshbandi pan-Islamic warrior brotherhood synonymous in the region with the martial arts of silat, and Buginese which is the language of the Bugis people of the Sultanate of Sulawesi who are the primary shipbuilders and navigators of South Asia, where half of all shipped freight is still by sail in traditional Phinisi or gaff ketch rigged schooners, and of the pirates with whom I waged an antislavery campaign led by our Captain Starfollower.
Then came the Minangkabu of Sumatra where I studied the martial art of Raja Harimau Silat, briefly I learned what I could of one of the many languages of the Mentawai Islands where I was castaway in a storm at sea and with an indigenous tribe built an outrigger or Oceanic Proa over a couple months to sail ten hours across open seas to the mainland of Sumatra at Padaung, Iban which is a language of the indigenous Dayak peoples of Borneo which I both trekked across and sailed out of from Kuching, and Hokkien Chinese in its Penang and Singaporean variants which is understood throughout the Peranankan or Straits Chinese communities.
Hong Kong and Singapore remain among my places of refuge in the region, and for nearly half my life, though the idea of home has become ambiguous for me for many years now. Sometimes I think of Dollhouse Park, my cottage on a hill in the Pacific Northwest, as home; sometimes this is Dragon House in George Town Malaysia, which I converted from a row of shophouses.
As to national identity I remain an American citizen, though one who looks to a future wherein nation-states no longer exist and we are all a United Humankind, as in my final wishes I wrote; Bury me at sea, for I belong to no nation but to the world.
Regarding faith as a claim of identity, I may within reason claim membership in all three of the major religions of Asia, having at various times been authorized by institutions of Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim faith. This is especially true of Zen Buddhism, which I chose to grow up in and claimed as my religion on official documents through my university years.
In the final category of identity as a ground of struggle, that of ethnicity, I can make no claim to either speak as or for the members of any tribe, though I have lived as a member of many all over the world and sincerely tried to learn from them what I could about how we choose to be human together and how we create human being, meaning, and value over vast epochs of time. In the case of Asian American denotation, my sister’s DNA tests reveal a fractional inheritance of 1.2%, and that from a single known Asian ancestor two generations before the American Revolution. We know she was literate in Persian and claimed to have once been a courtier of the Mughal princess and poetess Zeb-un-Nisa, captured with the Ganj-i-Sawai in the 1695 pirate raid on the Mughal fleet by Henry Every, for whom her grandson Henry who fought in the Revolutionary War was named.
This ancestry tests as .2% Egypt and Levant and .5% broadly West Asia and North Africa, and .5% Central and South Asia including: .2% North India and Pakistan and .3% South India and Sri Lanka. These probably represent two different lines of descent, occurring at between five and eight generations of separation respectively.
History becomes complex, even within the genealogy of a single family within a mere two or three centuries; how much more so that of nations, especially as the idea of nationality was a very modern invention.
History, memory, identity, the stories we tell about ourselves and those others tell about us as a ground of struggle, and the truths written in our flesh versus authorized identities of blood, faith, and soil; so the mimesis of self-construal and the performance of our identities emerge from historical processes as narratives.
Of the legacies of our history, this I say; there are those which must be kept, and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Asian American History
The Making of Asian America: a history, Erica Lee
Sons of the Yellow Emperor: a history of the Chinese Diaspora, Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, Lynn Pan
Asian American Literature
The Joy Luck Club, The Hundred Secret Senses, Amy Tan
West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story, Road Trips: Becoming an American in the vapor trail of The Sixties, Tamim Ansary
Inferno, Catherine Cho
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, Hoa Nguyen
A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam
Hawai’i: a reading list
Hawai’I seizes me with an immediacy and vividness in the context of Asian American literature and history, for it embodies both the terror of our racist and imperial-colonial history and our hopes for a better future as a diverse and inclusive United Humankind in which all human beings are truly equal. Between the systemic evils in which we are complicit and our liberation from unequal power and elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness there lies a long path of reckoning and emergence; but first we must find a vision of who we want to become, we humans, and in Hawai’I this too we may discover.
Hawai’I is a Cuba that never found a liberator.
You may notice that herein I do not follow my usual rule of including only works by authors who are members of a historical people and may speak both of and for them, which in this case would limit my selection to books by native indigenous persons of Kānaka Maoli identity.
What is a Hawaiian, or an American? In Hawaii we see an image of our possible future as a united humankind, multiethnic and transhistorical, protean, inclusive, and diverse beyond limit or categorization.
In such a society, to claim membership is to become a member without question or qualification. To write as such a member is to negotiate the legacies of our history, which include epigenetic harms of racism and colonialism, and to reimagine and transform the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Here are works by people born in Hawaii, or written in Hawaii from within its many layered and interdependent communities.
This is also true of its two great ancestor spirits, guardians and guides of the soul, who speak to us through dreams and poetic vision of our futures from a mythic past, Barack Obama and Maxine Hong Kingston. Some scholars argue that they were once living human beings like any other, who became exalted and deified in a remote age not because they were embodiments of Hegelian world-historical forces, but because they changed such forces and processes through poetic vision and a realized action of human values, and the nature and fate of humankind changed with them.
May we all become such fulcrums of change, and help to dream and to realize a free society of equals.
Hawaii speaks here with many voices, all of which belong.
History and Culture
Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’I, by Hokulani K. Aikau (Editor)
Pacific Worlds, by Matt K. Matsuda
Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii, by Susanna Moore
Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands, Honolulu: The First Century, by Gavan Daws
Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings and America’s First Imperial Adventure, by Julia Flynn Siler
Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowell
Captive Paradise: The Story of the United States and Hawaii, by James L. Haley
From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’I, by Haunani-Kay Trask
Waikiki: A History of Forgetting & Remembering, by Andrea Feeser
Volcanoes, Palm Trees, and Privilege: Essays on Hawai’I, by Liz Prato
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, by Tony Horwitz
A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief: The Island Civilization of Ancient Hawai’I, On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact, Unearthing the Polynesian Past. Explorations and Adventures of an Island Archaeologist, by Patrick Vinton Kirch
No Footprints in the Sand: A Memoir of Kalaupapa, by Henry Nalaielua, Sally-Jo Keala-O-Anuenue Bowman
Big Happiness: The Life and Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior, by Mark Panek
Waking Up in Eden: In Pursuit of an Impassioned Life on an Imperiled Island,
by Lucinda Fleeson
My Time in Hawaii: A Polynesian Memoir by Victoria Nelson
Hawaiian Mythology, by Martha Warren Beckwith
Ancient Hawai’I, by Herb Kawainui Kane
The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant, by Keaulumoku
The Burning Island: Myth and History of the Hawaiian Volcano Country, by Pamela Frierson
Kika Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music, by John W. Troutman
The Haumana Hula Handbook: A Manual for the Student of Hawaiian Dance,
by Mahealani Uchiyama
Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions from the Past, by John R.K. Clark
Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai’I,
by Isaiah Helekunihi Walker
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan
Archipelago: Portraits of Life in the World’s Most Remote Island Sanctuary,
by David Liittschwager, Susan Middleton
Sam Choy’s Island Flavors, Sam Choy Woks the Wok : Stir Fry Cooking at Its Island Best, The Choy of Seafood: Sam Choy’s Pacific Harvest, Sam Choy’s Polynesian Kitchen: More Than 150 Authentic Dishes from One of the World’s Most Delicious and Overlooked Cuisines, by Sam Choy
Written By Outsiders Looking In, as was said of Timothy Leary by The Moody Blues
Hotel Honolulu, by Paul Theroux
The Curse of Lono, by Hunter S. Thompson, Steve Crist (Editor), Ralph Steadman (Illustrator)
Travelers’ Tales Hawai‘I, By Rick & Marcie Carroll
Six Months in the Sandwich Islands: Among Hawaii’s Palm Groves, Coral Reefs and Volcanoes, by Isabella Lucy Bird
Literature
Shark Dialogues, House of Many Gods, Kiana Davenport
Night Is a Sharkskin Drum, by Haunani-Kay Trask
This is Paradise: stories, Kristiana Kahakauwila
The Heart of Being Hawaiian, by Sally-Jo Keala-O-Anuenue Bowman
Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Shadow Child, by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
The Tattoo, by Chris McKinney
School for Hawaiian Girls, by Georgia Ka’Apuni McMillen
The Descendants, by Kaui Hart Hemmings
Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn
Diamond Head, by Cecily Wong
Language of the Geckos and Other Stories, A Ricepaper Airplane, by Gary Pak
Hawaii Nei: Island Plays, by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl
Molokai, Kaaawa: A Novel about Hawaii in the 1850s, by O.A. Bushnell
A Little Too Much Is Enough, Makai, by Kathleen Tyau
Jan Ken Po, by Dennis M. Ogawa
The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, by W.S. Merwin
Moloka’I, Daughter of Moloka’I, Honolulu, by Alan Brennert
Aloha Las Vegas: And Other Plays, by Edward Sakamoto
Picture Bride, The Land Of Bliss, Cloud Moving Hands, by Cathy Song
On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems, All-Night Lingo Tango, Babel, Holoholo: Poems, Delirium: Poems, The Alphabet of Desire, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, by Barbara Hamby
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, We Can Be Better: The Influential Speeches of Barack Obama, The Promiser: Barack Obama’s Fireside Chats, A Promised Land, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Barack Obama
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, by David Remnick
Woman Warrior, China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Broken Book of Life: An Intertextual Study of the Woman Warrior and China Men, by Maureen Sabine
The Art of Parody: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Use of Chinese Sources,
by Yan Gao
Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Fiction,
by Jeanne Rosier Smith
Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature, by Brandy Nālani McDougall
The Power of the Steel-tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History, by Noenoe K. Silva
There are some things which must never be forgotten, lest they be repeated, and six years ago today America came perilously close to re-enacting the Holocaust.
Trump did not conceal it; he campaigned on it. And won. This is the central truth with which we must grapple, we Americans, we human beings, and we Democrats in crafting a vision of our future that can prevail in our elections. I personally have a Plan 2028; does the Democratic Party? Do all who Resist fascist tyranny and terror in the cause of democracy and our universal human rights throughout the world?
Americans are a sadly ahistorical people; we tend not only not to think of our current and ongoing environment of threats and opportunities for change in terms of our past, always codeterminative as informing, motivating, and shaping forces, but not to think too far into our future either. Our current primary existential crises, the fall of democracy and universal human rights to fascist tyrannies and the ecological disasters which presage human extinction, are proof of my thesis.
This week ICE begins testing electric shock gloves, originally designed as rape gloves for use by prison guards, as instruments of abduction, torture, and repression of dissent. This as AI data centers lay siege to our cities and steal our vanishing drinking water to build the infrastructure of a surveillance state. And as Trump sabotages our historic alliance with South Korea as part of his mission to destroy us and democracy globally as he courts tyrants, abandons our sailors to deprivation in pursuit of stealing Iran’s oil, and mutters dark fantasies of depravity as he tries to build a Fuhrer bunker under the White House.
All of this and much more are consequences of our failure to purge our destroyers from among us.
While there are many policies on which I disagree with the collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party, including the fact that not only have we failed to abolish police, prisons, and the apparatus of the carceral state, we still allow police to carry guns with which to murder nonwhite people with impunity, nor have we stripped the legislators and other conspirators of the January 6 Insurrection of their citizenship and exiled them, neither have we united in Boycott, Sanction, and Divestiture of Israel in aid of the liberation of Palestine and the preservation of the principle of the Rights of Man, nor of China in aid of the independence of Hong Kong and an end to the Occupation of Tibet and genocide in Xinjiang, nor lifted sanctions against historic champion of liberation struggle Cuba, nor stood in solidarity with myriads of independence movements throughout the world unless there was profit in it for the hegemonic elite class which owns our state, nor sent to the aid of Ukraine everything we can in her historic fight as the main theatre of World War Three and the gates of Europe, among many other issues of our global imperial dominion; actually I have quite a long list of failures of vision and will on the part of our government and our nation, but none of this obscures a simple fact that what is at stake in America and the world today and in our time is a choice between democracy and fascist tyranny.
Trump met with Putin on this occaision, wishing to trade him Alaska for some little blonde children to perv, his partner in human trafficking Epstein no longer being available and the countless stolen migrant children disappeared into what hell we know not of being insufficiently mirror images of his daughter for his vile purposes, and thereafter met with Zelensky to perpetrate the Ritual of Abasement upon Ukraine, this last being stopped only by the European Alliance. Standing with Zelensky and European Unity and Solidarity against the Axis of Fascist Tyranny led by Putin and his star agent Trump were United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, President of the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.
Trump squealed like a piggy in terror when Europe defied him, as Ursula drove him back with her whip and the others took turns mocking him with clever jibes, but he also rolled over and showed his belly to his puppetmaster Vladimir whenever the Russian tyrant signaled for obeisance.
Anyone no matter how vile can make Trump perform tricks; just throw money and flattery.
In all, this was a fine time for the Trump show and his circus of freaks and treasonous criminals, but gladly not in the way Trump intended. He looked weak, and he looked ridiculous.
Mockery too is Resistance, and Europeans are masters of the art.
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again.
And Trump’s timing of this photo op spectacle with the five year anniversary of a particularly horrific example of his crimes against humanity make the meaning and design of himself, his regime, and his plans for the subversion of democracy and the fall of civilization to an age of tyrants incontestably clear.
As I wrote in my post of August 18 2020, Who Begins By Building Walls Ends With Gas Chambers: Why We Must Defeat Trump’s Re-Election; Today saw two important events relevant to the 2020 Presidential election campaign other than the Democratic convention; the release of a report confirming Russian espionage in the Stolen Election of 2016, and the failure of Trump’s vote suppression attempt to shut down the United States Postal Service. I had originally planned to write about the latter today, but public revilement and lawsuits have already forced Trump to abandon his vote suppression plans for the post office; I was thinking of this listening to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorse Bernie when I noticed a story which has escaped national attention, and it focused my awareness on what is at stake.
I believe AOC is the President we deserve, and I am declaring for her in 2024 tonight, but it is imperative that we elect any placeholder Democratic government we can now, for America and global democracy may not survive another four years of Trump and his Fourth Reich of foreign spies, white supremacist terrorists, and Gideonite patriarchs of sexual terror.
The Stolen Election of 2016 left the former KGB’s most successful infiltration, subversion, and influence agent in charge of America, which he has been monkey wrenching since. History will always remember Trump as the traitor and foreign saboteur who is responsible for the end of America’s hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege and the fall of America as the primary guarantor of democracy and universal human rights in the world.
America has drawn a line in the sand to weaponize disparity of wealth and create masses of exploitable invisible labor, modeled on the Bantustan system of Apartheid in South Africa which in full circle was modeled both on America’s Indian Reservation system and the camp system of the Nazis who designed their own system for genocide of the Jews, no real surprise here, on our own nation’s genocide of the Native Anmerican peoples, and have been using ICE and the Border Patrol to abduct migrant laborers into concentration camps in a campaign of dehumanization and crimes against humanity. Migrant labor is slave labor; and it has become more horrific still with the advent of a new instrument of state terror; gas chambers.
Concentration camps, secret prisons, child abduction, a federal occupation force of secret police, vote suppression, paramilitary units of white supremacist terror, pervasive and endemic surveillance and state disinformation and propaganda, assaults on equality, truth, justice, liberty, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil; Republicans have much to answer for.
And of course, who begins by building walls ends with gas chambers.
As Dave Lindorf writes in Counterpunch; “As the first and hopefully only presidential term of Donald Trump nears its November 3 moment of truth, the accusations of fascist or even Nazi tendencies and actions by him and his administration have multiplied.
But this latest one I’m calling out is particularly horrific: The use of a powerful “for industrial use only” disinfectant called HDQ Neutral on captive immigrants at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, a Trump administration-funded for-profit detention center outside of Los Angeles, CA.
According to a report in the Independent, a UK newspaper, the powerful toxic ammonia-based chemical made by Spartan Chemical Co. is being sprayed in the occupied detention facility despite company warnings on the label that it only be used near people outdoors, not in confined spaces. Worse yet, there are allegations from detainees that the chemical is being sprayed directly on them, though the company’s label warns that exposure to the eyes can cause “permanent eye damage” while inhaling it can cause lung damage , breathing difficulty and asthma.
The Nazi connection? As Charles Vidich, author of a powerful and timely new book due out later this year on the history of quarantines in the US, dating back to the earliest days of the Colonies in the 1600s down to the present (Germs at Bay, Praeger), notes, Zyklon B, the extermination gas of choice of Hitler’s Third Reich for its extermination camps, was actually a powerful cyanide-based insecticide invented during the late 19th Century. It was for decades, well into the early 20th century, used to fumigate ships engaged in international trade in order to kill rats, mice, fleas and other vermin. The Nazis adopted a variant of the product to eliminate Jews, Gypsies, Communists, people with deformities or retardation and other “undesirables” during the war years.
Now we have the administration of Donald Trump, whose own family had a history of Nazi sympathies and who himself has referred to Nazi demonstrators in the US as “good people,” similarly using an insecticide/disinfectant that is highly toxic and life-threatening on detained immigrants awaiting deportation.
Investigations by Reuters an organization called the Shut Down Adelanto Coalition and a not-for-profit legal organization called Earthjustice, have learned that immigrants locked indoors in detention at Adelanto have been getting sprayed “as often as every 15-30 minutes,” sometimes directly at them, with a chemical that the company says should only be used outdoors or in well-ventilated areas. They are reporting rashes, nosebleeds, nausea, headaches and breathing difficulties among other symptoms following the spraying.
I must point out that when I first learned about the vicious way African slaves were treated in the colonies and later in the United States by their owners, it struck me, even as a youngster, that it was strangely worse than these white owners treated their own beasts of burden. I wondered at that, only coming to understand later as I got older, that the abuse of slaves — the whippings, the starving, the over-working, etc. — was a control mechanism, a dehumanization process of both owner and slave that wasn’t necessary in dealing with horses or cattle. I recognize that the same analysis applies to the way ICE and its detention center contract employees cruelly abuse their immigrant captives.
HDQ Neutral thankfully isn’t as toxic as the Zyklon B gas used by Nazi death squads at the German extermination camps, but what is being done is still a grotesque chemical assault on America’s “undesirables,” differing from the Nazi efforts against their human victims only in degree. The inhumanity of the overlords administering this toxin to their captive victims is little different from that which was punished, often with death sentences, in the Nuremberg Trials that followed World War II.
One can only hope that when this Trumpian nightmare is over in the US, Donald Trump and his criminal henchmen in the Homeland Security Department will be similarly hauled before a court to face crimes against humanity charges for their abuse of immigrants, including young children, as well as for their other grotesque crimes.”
References of 2026
ICE torture and rape shock gloves
ICE bought nonlethal shock gloves for officers. Democrats still are not pleased
Because the personal and the political are interdependent, and we are made of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, I offer here a story from my family history as told to me by my mother of how Jewish people saved our family, when no one else would, and without whom none of us would have ever lived.
Upon the docks of America arrived a nine year old girl, alone and without a penny to her name or a word of English. A Stranger, with no one waiting to meet her, no family, no friends, nothing. My maternal great grandmother Apollonia this was, with flaming red hair like my mother’s, whose family had put her on a ship to escape from Austria as their home burned, the sole survivor of her whole town so far as we now know.
She wandered the port of Seattle asking for help, in her five languages and in descending likelihood of recognition; French, Austrian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, and finally, in despair and fear that the reaction would be far worse than being abandoned to starve and freeze to death lost and alone among strangers, Yiddish.
This like a magic spell summoned a crowd, by happy chance not one armed with torches and axes. So a stranger was adopted and raised by Jewish people, a family of whom I know nothing, and thus our family’s survival is owed to the entire Jewish community and people.
This happened in 1873, year of the glorious Vienna World’s Fair but also the stock market crash in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War which began a twenty year Depression in Europe and the Jewish persecutions as they were blamed for it; also conflicts between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in their borderlands.
She it was who owned her own rifles and horses by the age of sixteen when she began her career as a hunting guide; like a maharani’s tiger hunt these were, grand processionals of the Gilded Age with gourmet feasts. She died in the saddle at the age of 95, rifle in her hand, having shot the bear that attacked her horses and killed her. The Indians buried her like the Huns buried Attila, on her horse and with her rifle, as a warrior princess.
I was born within days of her death, and as with all ancestors I bear her onward, literally as DNA and the stories which possess us as the ghosts of other lives; truths written in our flesh. I believed I was her reincarnation from childhood.
Historical context and the fact that my ancestor in the maternal line knew Yiddish and was raised as a member of a Jewish community makes it possible that under Jewish law we are Jews, by adoption if not by descent, though my mother never claimed so and moreover was a radical atheist who raised us with no religious traditions at all. In so doing the family faith she liberated herself from was Catholicism, an artifact of her Austrian paternal line who were exiles of the 1919 fall of the Hapsburg Empire after 600 years.
As a teenager working through the trauma of a near death experience in Brazil the summer before high school, my execution by a police death squad while rescuing abandoned street children they were bounty hunting having been prevented by the Matadors, and conversations with my mother as she wrote her study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet medical records and childhood therapy journal of Jerzy Kosinski which he fictionalized as The Painted Bird, whose protagonist I identified with and an influence on my choice of the origins of evil as violence as my field of study, I once asked her directly, Are we Jews?
To this she replied; “Everyone is a Jew. Everyone is someone’s Jew, someone’s scapegoat, someone’s Other. The great task of becoming human is to embrace the uniqueness of Others as we do our own.”
Jewish American Literature
Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews
Jewish American Literature
The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, The Hope, The Glory, Marjorie Morningstar, Herman Wouk
The Origins of Totalitarianism, On Revolution, The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, The Life of the Mind, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Love and Saint Augustine, Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975, The Promise of Politics, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics Civil Disobedience On Violence and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution, The Recovery of the Public World, Responsibility and Judgment, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, Hannah Arendt
The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth, Ken Krimstein
Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah, The Classic Tales: 4,000 Years of Jewish Lore, Jewish Spirit: Stories & Art, Ellen Frankel
The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book, The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019, Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic, Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Sages and Dreamers, A Passover Haggadah, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters, All RIvers Run To The Sea: Memoir, Night Trilogy ( Night, Dawn, Day), The Trial of God: as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod, A Beggar in Jerusalem, Elie Wiesel
Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, Ariel Burger
The Red Tent – 20th Anniversary Edition: A Novel, Day After Night, Anita Diamant
The Chosen, The Promise, My Name is Asher Lev, The Gift of Asher Lev, Davita’s Harp, Chaim Potok
The Shawl/Rosa, Envy, or Yiddish in America / The Pagan Rabbi, Collected Stories, The Messiah of Stockholm, The Puttermesser Papers, Antiquities, Heir to the Glimmering World, Foreign Bodies, Art & Ardor, Metaphor & Memory, Quarrel & Quandary: Essays, The Din in the Head, Critics Monsters Fanatics and Other Literary Essays, Portrait Of The Artist As A Bad Character: And Other Essays On Writing Cynthia Ozick
The Rabbi of Lud, Boswell, George Mills, The Dick Gibson Show, Stanley Elkin
Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The March, World’s Fair, E.L. Doctorow
E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom
Essays, Collected Stories, Grace Paley
Gimpel the Fool and other stories, Shadows on the Hudson, In My Father’s Court, Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side (with Bruce Davidson), The Spinoza of Market Street, A Friend of Kafka and other stories, A Crown of Feathers and other stories, The Family Moskat, Isaac Bashevis Singer
Anarchy and other writings, Living My Life, Emma Goldman
The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, Collected Stories, There Is Simply Too Much to Think about: Collected Nonfiction, Saul Bellow
Conversations with Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow (Editor), Gloria L. Cronin, Ben Siegel
The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964, The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, Zachary Leader
The Complete Stories, The Natural, The Assistant, The Fixer, Dubin’s Lives, Bernard Malamud
The Ghost Writer, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, The Plot Against America, American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, Philip Roth
The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, Jason Shinder ed Man Walks into a Room, The History of Love, Great House, Forest Dark, Nicole Krauss
A Guide for the Perplexed: a novel, Septimania: a novel, Jonathan Levi
36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love Betrayal and Quantum Physics, The Dark Sister, Strange Attractors: Stories, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, Rebecca Goldstein
Kaddish, Leon Wieseltier
Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Tree of Codes, Here I Am, Eating Animals, The Future Dictionary of America (Editor), New American Haggadah, Jonathan Safran Foer
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, The Final Solution, Summerland, Gentlemen of the Road, Telegraph Avenue, Moonglow, Manhood for Amateurs, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, Michael Chabon
Poems 1962-2020, American Originality: Essays on Poetry, Louise Glück
The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction, Daniel Morris
Let us celebrate and amplify the cause of all black cats, figures of historically marginalized others and all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, with whom I, as the founder of Lilac City Antifa and member of the Resistance founded in Paris 1940 as sworn to its Oath by the great Jean Genet in Beirut 1982, and my friends and allies in the cause of liberation place our lives in the balance.
A whole secret history of resistance and revolutionary struggle lies here written in the figure of the Black Cat, whose genealogy as a symbol and legacy of resilience and empowerment I outline in brief here, as a heritage we may all claim.
Since the dawn of our civilization black cats have held a special place in our mythologies as figures and symbols of unconquerable power beyond the reach of kings and priests to subjugate, repress, and control, or indeed any who would enslave us and steal our souls; so also they have symbolized forces of nature, and as chthonic figures of the realm of shadows which includes death and dreams. Servants of Hecate, whose Festival of Torches or Hecatean Ides was celebrated August 13-15 by the Roman Empire in connection with her role as co ruler of the Underworld with Peresephone, and also servants of Freya who pulled her chariot through the nights of the Wild Hunt, and like all cats sharing in the liminal powers of the Egyptian dual aspected goddess Maat the nurturing mother and Sekhmet the protective lioness.
We have today the comic and film mythology of Catwoman, whose autonomy and powers of resurrection are a mirror reverse image of the traditional evil witch in Christian theocratic patriarchy, who can transform into a black cat or leonine battle form. Sadly we have yet to be offered a film in which Catwoman can change into a lioness battle form, nor possesses her magical powers as a goddess of death.
Black cats have symbolized freedom since they were chosen by Le Chat Noir, the original Kropotkin-Bakunin anarchist clandestine rendevous spot and the first cabaret, which opened in Paris in 1881, depicted in the iconic Théophile Steinlen poster of 1896. This was a decade since the glory days of an ancestor of mine, called The Red Queen after the Alice in Wonderland character for her signature means of assassination, was defending the barricades during the Paris Commune.
Having a Maenad in my near ancestry explains much.
As I wrote in my post of March 18 2024 Anniversary of the Founding of the Paris Commune; We celebrate today the one hundred fifty third anniversary of the founding of the Paris Commune, a glorious legacy of resistance in which all humankind shares. It conjures for me visions of the Bacchantes, a society of women revolutionaries who printed tickets with an image of the god of ecstasy and poetic vision on one side and the address of an enemy of the people on the other, bearing the legend “good for burning”. The play by Euripides, especially in Anne Carson’s version, remains a brilliant study of the function of the sacred in society as a liberating force of ecstasy, madness, vision, reimagination, and transformation, and all of this in a theme of Chaos as liberty, subversion of authority and its systems of oppression and the centralization of power as law and order, state tyranny, and patriarchy. Distribution of the lottery tickets was through street runners as if it were any other black market gambling ring, something of no real interest to the police; teams bearing axes and torches would converge on the target as a flash mob.
As I told my nieces when Trump was elected; girls, all you need is the home address of the enemy, an ax, and a posse of wild girls.
An ancestor of mine was one of them, called the Red Queen in reference to the character in Alice in Wonderland due to her signature method of assassination, a friend of figures of the Commune including Karl Marx, Gustave Courbet, Arthur Rimbaud, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and a comrade of Louise Michel; she was among the members of the Garde Militaire of the Commune who later immigrated to San Francisco as an intact unit, with their banners and uniforms. The secret society of revolutionaries descended from the original Garde Militaire remains among the most influential of global covert military organizations independent from any nation, though clearly not unique in this.
I imagine her as a combination of Helena Bonham Carter’s Eudoria Holmes in Enola Holmes, which depicts the key figures of Suffragette history Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Sylvia, Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns.
When you dream of ur-sources of historical identity and archetypal figures who can act as guardians and guides and provide spaces to grow into, dream big.
Sustained and relentless waves of liberation actions and revolutionary struggle continue to hammer the world’s tyrannies of authoritarian force and control and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil with massive protests and electoral activism, and as we did in the Autonomous Zones of Seattle, Portland, and New York and hundreds more throughout the world, we will emerge victorious from the fight against unequal power and oppression because whosoever refuses to submit to force and defies authority and those who would enslave us becomes Unconquered and free. Each of us is a Living Autonomous Zone, ungovernable as the tide, uncontrollable as the wind; we are wild things, who serve no masters.
The Black Flag flies from the barricades in al Quds-Jerusalem, Moscow, Hong Kong, Atlanta, and dozens of other cities in every continent of earth, and its primary meaning has not changed since its use by the First International and by Louise Michel, veteran of the Paris Commune, who first flew it as an anarchist banner when she led the Paris worker’s revolt of March 9 1883; freedom versus tyranny, refusal to submit to authority, the abolition of state terror, surveillance, and control, resistance to nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and abandonment of fear as the basis of human exchange and the social use of force as a principle of human organization.
With this bold signal the people declare: we shall be ruled by none.
Vive la Commune!
When the Garde Militaire of the Paris Commune came to America with its flags and uniforms as a military society of the Internationale, the Black Cat as a recognition sign of liberation struggle came with it. Passed down along generations of international revolutionaries from its founders as a secret military society, who dispersed it everywhere while gathering in and lending aid and solidarity of action to the remnants of the Abolitionists, the Suffragettes, the Russian and other Revolutions, and especially the anarchist communes of the Seattle coast from which the labor union movement was born in America, it became the Sabotage Cat of the IWW with its electric spiky fur, also called the Wildcat and the origin of the term Wildcat Strike which harkens back to the Bacchantes of the Paris Commune.
As successors and inheritors of these original organizations of liberation struggle became Antifascists and Resistance cadre, first in the People’s Militia founded in 1921 in Italy to oppose Mussolini, then Antifaschistische Aktion founded in 1932 in Germany, the International Brigades of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, and finally in the French Resistance of World War Two, to name four major sources which we claim as forebears, symbols and ideologies of resistance and revolution such as the Black Cat became pervasive and were carried forward to the next great movement of liberation struggle, the Black Panthers.
Here I wish to note that among the vast and rich history of Black resistance and liberation struggle, against both slavery and colonialism, the Pan-African Leopard Society brotherhood of warriors provided a ready and wholly African model and context both for the Black Panthers and the mythology of the comic and film hero Black Panther.
As written by Billie Anania in Hyperallergic, in an article entitled How Black Cats Went From Bad Luck to Symbols of Defiance: Icons like the Black Panther Party logo, the “Sabo-Tabby,” and innumerable pieces of protest art go against the traditional Western taboo around the felines; “The superstition associating black cats with bad luck is rooted in the European fear of darkness. In Celtic mythology, the Cat Sìth stole the souls of the recently deceased. During the Middle Ages, Devil-fearing Christians killed black cats because of their perceived proximity to the underworld. This fear even carried over to the Salem Witch Trials, when ownership of a black cat could be cited in charges of witchcraft. While pop culture still preserves this troubled legacy, underground artists have revived an alternative tradition that dates back thousands of years.
The pantheon of Ancient Egypt included Bastet, the goddess of domesticity and fertility who took the form of a black cat. Generations of Egyptian artists portrayed Bastet differently as her mythos evolved, to the point that crimes against cats were punishable by death. Some representations of black cats have been more in this vein, against the Western taboo that they are ominous or sinister.
Feline disobedience works against the Western notion that nature serves humanity, and therefore disrupts a sense of order. The Industrial Workers of the World use a black cat (“Sab-Kitty” or “Sabo-Tabby”) as their icon for sabotage. Similarly, the Black Panthers named their party after an animal that only attacks when provoked.
Why do analyses of black cat folklore avoid this connection? Perhaps it’s because the IWW and the Black Panthers are still considered unsavory by those above a certain tax bracket. In most political contexts, black cats are silent agitators advocating for redistribution of wealth or even the overthrow of the government. As the first industrial labor union to recruit women and BIPOC, the IWW (or Wobblies) challenged the tactics of more conservative unions like the American Federation of Labor. Socialist writer Ralph Chaplin created the original Sabo-Tabby at the apex of the union’s radicalism, when it was hated by predatory capitalists and targeted for police suppression and surveillance. Over time, the symbol foreshadowed bad luck for bosses but liberation for workers, and artists adapted its likeness for political cartoons and propaganda to suit localized actions.
The Black Panther logo was originally drafted in 1966 by Dorothy Zellner and Ruth Howard at the request of Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael) to represent the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. The symbol evolved after the Party for Self-Defense incorporated in Oakland. Local artist Lisa Lyons popularized alternative designs of the panther on black-and-white flyers for rallies and marches, particularly for the freeing of Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver’s presidential campaign. Lyons helped transform the panther into a symbol of beauty and honor. One poster declares: “An attack against one is an attack against all. The slaughter of Black people must be stopped! By any means necessary!”
Although the Wobblies and Panthers both suffered sabotage by the US government, their ideologies have inspired insurrection among anarchists and environmentalists worldwide, and their legacies continue in the fights for labor reform and prison abolition. In the last month, stunning copyright-free tributes have emerged on social media. A recent illustration by Brazilian artist Gabriel Borjoize shows a black cat with the Gadsden rattlesnake — a libertarian symbol based on the American Revolution’s “Don’t Tread on Me” flag — between its teeth. This scene feels evergreen in light of anti-lockdown protests as well as the ongoing right-wing push for smaller government and reduced social welfare spending (outside of police and the military, of course). Another illustration by Canadian artist Michael DeForge asserts, “Cops Aren’t Workers, No Cops in Labour,” with a giant Sabo-Tabby chomping on a cop car. It remains to be seen whether these black cats are a sign of progress, or of a longer battle on the horizon.”
Myth, history, identity, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human. How can the idea of the Black Cat help us become who we wish to be, to discover and perform those truths written in our flesh?
Our history as a series of seizures of power in liberation struggle offers us two vivid and immediate role models and figures of the Black Cat as outsider and champion of outsiders; Catwoman and Black Panther.
Adopt a black cat, lovers of liberty!
Let us run amok and be ungovernable.
Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther
Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns
The Syracusan Bride leading Wild Animals in Procession to the Temple of Diana by Lord Frederick Leighton (depicts the Ides of Hecate festival of August 13-15)
FB Group For the Love of Black Cats Appreciation Day
Bacchae: A Bold Translation of the Classic Greek Drama Exploring Order, Chaos, and the Price of Defying the Gods, Euripides, Robin Robertson translator,
Of the Fall of Afghanistan we may say with Charles Dickens as written in A Tale of Two Cities; “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way …”
This Defining Moment of our history, of both America and Afghanistan and of the broader conflict of civilizations of which our story is a part, beginning with the creation of civilization itself in the wars between the democracies of Greece and the autocratic Persian Empire, I imagine the Fall of Kabul now not in terms of vast systemic forces but as darkness illuminated by sudden flashes of vivid memories out of time from what has thus far been my final expedition into this theatre of war and ground of struggle; terror, pain, death, and hope, that gift and curse of Pandora to us all.
I wrote my journal entry of this day five years ago from Peshawar during preparations for the expedition; by August 24 2021 I was across the Khyber Pass, and my journal for that date includes a film clip from Inglorious Basterds, Shoshanna Prepares for German Night with the glorious music by David Bowie, my theme song for Last Stands, which I post only when I am about to do something from which there is no return.
Long ago I lost count of such Last Stands; it seems now to be my true state of being, this leap of faith into the Abyss. As Jean Genet said to me in 1982 Beirut, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a suicide pact of refusal to surrender when he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance which set me on my life’s path; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
During our Defense of Panjshir that September a forlorn hope of Independence for her people was lost, but never shall be forgotten.
Afghanistan my love; one day I will return to you, though hell should bar the way.
As written by Alfred Noyes in The Highwayman;
PART ONE
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
He’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin.
They fitted with never a wrinkle. His boots were up to the thigh.
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard.
He tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred.
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
Where Tim the ostler listened. His face was white and peaked.
His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
But he loved the landlord’s daughter,
The landlord’s red-lipped daughter.
Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say—
“One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I’m after a prize to-night,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;
Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.”
He rose upright in the stirrups. He scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair in the casement. His face burnt like a brand
As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
(O, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the west.
PART TWO
He did not come in the dawning. He did not come at noon;
And out of the tawny sunset, before the rise of the moon,
When the road was a gypsy’s ribbon, looping the purple moor,
A red-coat troop came marching—
Marching—marching—
King George’s men came marching, up to the old inn-door.
They said no word to the landlord. They drank his ale instead.
But they gagged his daughter, and bound her, to the foot of her narrow bed.
Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!
There was death at every window;
And hell at one dark window;
For Bess could see, through her casement, the road that he would ride.
They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest.
They had bound a musket beside her, with the muzzle beneath her breast!
“Now, keep good watch!” and they kissed her. She heard the doomed man say—
Look for me by moonlight;
Watch for me by moonlight;
I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!
She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!
She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!
They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years
Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,
Cold, on the stroke of midnight,
The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!
The tip of one finger touched it. She strove no more for the rest.
Up, she stood up to attention, with the muzzle beneath her breast.
She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;
For the road lay bare in the moonlight;
Blank and bare in the moonlight;
And the blood of her veins, in the moonlight, throbbed to her love’s refrain.
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horsehoofs ringing clear;
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did not hear?
Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,
The highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The red coats looked to their priming! She stood up, straight and still.
Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!
Nearer he came and nearer. Her face was like a light.
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him—with her death.
He turned. He spurred to the west; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o’er the musket, drenched with her own blood!
Not till the dawn he heard it, and his face grew grey to hear
How Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
The landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.
Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high.
Blood red were his spurs in the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat;
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.
. . .
And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding—
Riding—riding—
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.
Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard.
He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred.
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
As I wrote in my post of August 16 2021, The Fall of Kabul and Afghanistan; We are confronted with mesmerizing images this weekend of the Fall of Kabul and Afghanistan to the victorious forces of the Taliban and the collapse of our Potempkin Village regime and its mirage army who fired not a single shot in resistance, images which recall the Fall of Saigon in 1975 under parallel conditions.
If America wants a seat at the table in shaping the policies of the new government, we must recognize it as the legitimate independence movement that it is and refuse to play the role of foreign ogres of imperialism. We may win with the carrot what we have lost with the stick.
Send not soldiers but diplomats with humanitarian aid and material support; this can be conditional on adherence to the principles of universal human rights. The Taliban need something from the US and the world at large; recognition of legitimacy, and this can be a powerful lever.
As Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth says; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”
America’s epic crusade and imperial adventures in Afghanistan began with a stunningly successful campaign to bring down the Soviet Union by luring and trapping it into an unwinnable invasion and conquest, a lesson subsequently forgotten, in which we armed, trained, funded, and often directly commanded and fought alongside freedom fighters who are today the warlords who actually rule Afghanistan. These American clients infamously included the brilliant religious scholar Osama bin Laden, and I think we all know how well that worked out.
It seems we have learned nothing from the failures of our imperialism; this time may be different, but I doubt it.
Unless we change the forces and conditions which make war profitable to elites and useful to authorities in the centralization of power.
This will not be the first time the Taliban, a Pashto word meaning “students”, have ruled Afghanistan, as they did so from 1996 to 2001 as proxies of Pakistan, until America invaded in the wake of 911. Nor is it the first time Afghanistan has merited its title as “the Graveyard of Empires”; Alexander the Great’s successor state of Bactria, the Mongols, the British Empire and the Soviet Union all were broken upon its anvil. It has also been the birthplace of great empires which then fragmented; Parthia, Scythia, the Buddhist Kushans, White Huns, Kidarites, the Hindu Shahi Dynasty, and the empire of Nader Shah. Modern Afghanistan was founded in 1747 by Ahmad Shah Durrani from the remnants of the Mughals and Nader Shah’s heirs in Persia, after a mutually destructive conflict between the Safavid Dynasty of Persia and the Mughals of India for possession of Kandahar.
And now, it seems, it is America’s turn. What madness possesses us, we humans, that we are driven to dominate and control others, with the institutionalized psychotic rage and violence of war on the one hand and the seductive lies and illusions of falsification and capitalist theft of public resources and wealth on the other?
How can we escape the destructive vicious cycle and Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force?
What are some lessons we can learn from our imperial failures to divide and conquer through manufacturing proxies and hegemonic elites along balkanized sectarian and ethnic lines, warlords, illusory client states, and the harnessed strategies of state terror and tyranny and a global carceral state of torture, surveillance, repression of dissent, borders, and police, in tandem with assimilation, co-optation, colonial exploitation through the pawns of corrupt oligarchs and puppet regimes, and the weaponization of our values and ideals, of democracy and universal human rights, as propagandistic bait for the trap of our dominion?
Who bears arms bears death; choose life.
Let us abandon the social use of force.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue.
As I wrote in my post of April 19 2021, Biden Proclaims the End of America’s War in Afghanistan: Hooray, and Good Luck With That; In Afghanistan we came for vengeance, and stayed for profit. It has proven difficult to let go of either.
President Biden has proclaimed the end of America’s War in Afghanistan; this I celebrate, my joy at news of peace shadowed only by the fact that we have been here before. Declaring peace is one thing; keeping the peace is quite another.
2019 was a year of great hope tempered with tragic failure, typified by its end and the start of a new year with a fragile peace in Afghanistan after 18 years of war, a peace lost a few days later in a six hour fight in the total darkness of a cave, rescuing the SEALs trapped in a Taliban fortress by the destruction of their helicopters during an assault in violation of the treaty, a mission of provocation whose objective was sabotaging the peace, in which the whole history of millennia of civilizational conflict was borne by four men who free climbed a mountain in recapitulation of Alexander the Great’s capture of the Sogdian Rock and then with stealth, misdirection, and precision defeated a force which had overwhelmed and pinned down an airborne assault team of SEALs.
As with many events which unfold as a regression of throwing words into throwing stones, it was both a tactical success and a strategic failure, a glorious act of heroism and an imperialist provocation which sabotaged our withdrawal from the madness of a forever war.
This was a theatrical set-piece action designed to provide a casus belli, a secret mission to sabotage peace modeled on the ruse used by the Japanese to legitimize their invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Mukden Incident, which involved a single Japanese soldier, a Missing Man whom other soldiers were sent to rescue.
Biden’s Peace will be a test of the soul of America, of our true values and intentions toward the world, and of our unity of purpose. This is a line I hope we can hold, for if our profiteers of death and what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex sabotage the chance for peace yet again in service to wealth and power, as Trump did in 2019 and the forces of Imperial Japan did in 1931, the possible futures which unfold from that moment do not promise a better world.
We know what happened the last time, at Pearl Harbor.
As I wrote in my post of January 2 2020, An end in sight to the Forever War in Afghanistan?; The New Year brings a gift of peace, or its possibility, which may allow us to end our 18 year Forever War in Afghanistan and bring our 12,000 troops there home.
Hundreds of thousands have died in this epic conflict with no real benefit to anyone, a war in which the objectives, alliances, and constellations of power have been amorphous and shifting, a flood America has tried to oppose with a bucket brigade.
If a peace can be forged, if a nation can be put together again like Humpty Dumpty, it will be a miracle, but one much like Vietnam in which America flees in defeat and abandons its allies to an implacable enemy dedicated to enforcing its vision of an ideal society on everyone it can. Such comparison is limited in many ways, among them the odd fact that America has been subsidizing the Taliban through the tribute paid by our civilian contractors while our militaries have been savaging each other in a pit fight marked by war crimes on all sides, attended by dehumanization and the civilizational loss of values.
War makes for good business for a few, and incomprehensible horror for the many.
As described by Rahim Faiez and Kathy Gannon in Huffpost; “A key pillar of the agreement, which the U.S. and Taliban have been hammering out for more than a year, is direct negotiations between Afghans on both sides of the conflict.
Those intra-Afghan negotiations are expected to be held within two weeks of the signing of a U.S.-Taliban peace deal. They will likely decide what a post-war Afghanistan will look like, and what role the Taliban will play. The negotiations would cover a wide range of subjects, such as the rights of women, free speech and the fate of the tens of thousands of Taliban fighters, as well as the heavily armed militias belonging to Afghanistan’s warlords who have amassed wealth and power since the Taliban’s ouster.”
And in my subsequent post of February 29 2020, Peace in Afghanistan?; We celebrate today the historic signing of the peace accord between America and the Taliban, and the chance to bring our troops home from an 18 year war which has achieved little at great cost in blood and treasure. It is a tentative, conditional peace, formulated in a brilliant document which will forever remain an example of masterful diplomacy, in which both sides may claim victory.
America has won the destruction and disavowal of a great enemy, al-Qaeda, by their Taliban allies; this also poises the Taliban as a Sunni nation with de facto American recognition directly on the eastern border of Iran as a counterweight, an unqualified win in terms of geopolitical strategy.
The Taliban can claim victory over America in their long war to free their nation of foreign imperialism. We have ceded legitimacy to the Taliban and admitted in writing our total defeat, by direct order of our cowardly idiot President Trump, whose words mean nothing; it remains only to abandon our allies and flee Afghanistan like whipped dogs.
This may not be how the narrative will be framed, spun, and sold in America, either by our government nor a nation weary of meaningless destructive forever wars, but I guarantee you this is how history and much of the world will interpret it.
But this is not the reason I am uneasy and filled with brooding dread at the prospect of a chance for peace which this accord offers. Why am I not jubilant and dancing with victorious rapture at the chance of an end to war, any chance at all?
As Jennifer Hansler writes in CNN; “The four-page agreement states that the Taliban will take steps “to prevent any group or individual, including al-Qa’ida, from using the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” Those steps include commitments that the Taliban will instruct its members “not to cooperate with groups or individuals threatening the security of the United States and its allies” and that it “will prevent any group or individual in Afghanistan from threatening the security of the United States and its allies, and will prevent them from recruiting, training, and fundraising and will not host them in accordance with the commitments in this agreement.”
“The text of the agreement does not contain any specific language regarding the protection of women or civil society,” such trivialities as universal human rights and democracy, and especially the rights of women, being of no value to the Republican government of America, the abolition of liberty and equality in both domestic and global spheres constituting the main goal of all three factions which allied to seize what has become the Party of Treason; the Patriarchy and sexual terror of the Gideonite fundamentalists, the white supremacists who want to overturn the rule of law entirely, and the plutocrats who would dehumanize and enslave us.
The idea that all of us have equal rights under the law is a nuisance for the Republican alliance which seeks to impose a tyranny of fascism on the whole world as the Fourth Reich. They want to contain and limit viable external threats like Al Qaeda and ISIS, not eliminate them, as such enemies are very useful in driving nationalist fear and rage and in winning the submission of our own citizens to an authoritarian state of force and control, of surveillance and the counterinsurgency model of policing. Tyrants must create such threats if they do not actually exist.
How many of the terrorist acts against us were perpetrated by pawns who were unaware of their true masters? How many such deniable forces does America employ globally to sow fear and hate, historically in the cause of our imperialism and now also in the subversion of democracy throughout the world?
We fail to challenge the mechanisms and structures of our enslavement because they are well hidden, devious, subtle, made of smoke and mirrors. Fascisms of blood, faith, and soil now resurgent throughout the world are often characterized as outliers, but they are central to the course of human history. The long game of the Fourth Reich, its invisible tentacles sinuously proliferating and seizing power throughout decades of influence operations until it ensnares us in its grasp, must not be underestimated.
So my gladness at news of peace is shadowed by my mistrust in our government, for making peace and bringing our soldiers home conditional to the Taliban policing their areas against al-Qaeda and any terrorists at all, threats they may be powerless to save America from, sabotages peace and renders this accord a spectacle of Trump’s election campaign whose failure can be blamed on others.
I hope that in this I am wrong, and we will soon be reunited with our loved ones who serve with honor and valor a government which has none, and that nevermore will we fight wars.
“Korengal continues the eye-opening and terrifying account of a US military platoon in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan during 2007 and 2008. The documentary follows the same soldiers featured in Restrepo. Rather than focusing on the action and battles experienced by the platoon, the aftermath on the psyche is considered. With hauntingly detached, yet emotional interviews, soldiers from the platoon give their personal account of the war in all its facets. Shot in what’s called extreme closeup, the interviews are meant to physically and emotionally dive into the man under the uniform.
Battle-worn soldiers from the Korengal Valley discuss their experiences: the good, the bad, and what’s leftover. Fear, adrenaline, brotherhood, honour and bravery are some of the topics brought into the full light of the war in these interviews. With a bittersweet note, several soldiers speak longingly for the intense bonds developed with one another.”
من سقوط أفغانستان ، قد نقول مع تشارلز ديكنز كما هو مكتوب في حكاية مدينتين ؛ “لقد كانت أفضل الأوقات ، كانت أسوأ الأوقات ، كانت عصر الحكمة ، وكان عصر الحماقة ، لقد كان عصر الاعتقاد ، لقد كان عصر الشق ، كان موسم الضوء ، لقد كان موسم الظلام ، لقد كان ربيع الأمل ، كان شتاء اليأس … ، لم يكن لدينا شيء أمامنا ، كنا جميعًا نذهب مباشرة إلى الجنة ، وكنا جميعًا نسير في الاتجاه الآخر … “
هذه اللحظة الحاسمة من تاريخنا ، لكل من أمريكا وأفغانستان ، لا أتخيل الآن ليس من حيث القوى الجهازية الشاسعة ، ولكن مع ظلام الظلام من خلال ومضات مفاجئة من الذكريات الحية في الوقت المناسب من ما كان حتى الآن بعدوتي الأخيرة في مسرح الحرب هذا وأرض الصراع ؛ الإرهاب والألم والموت والأمل ، تلك الهدية ولعنة باندورا لنا جميعًا.
كتبت مجلسي في هذا اليوم من العام الماضي من بيشاور خلال الاستعدادات للبعثة ؛ بحلول 24 أغسطس ، كنت عبر ممر خيبر ، وتتضمن مجلتي لهذا التاريخ مقطع فيلم من Inglorious Basterds ، تستعد Shoshanna لـ German Night ، مع أغنيتي الموضوعية لـ Last Stands ، من قبل David Bowie ، والتي أنشرها فقط عندما أكون حولني لفعل شيء لا يوجد منه عودة. خلال دفاعنا عن Panjshir في سبتمبر الماضي ، فقدت أمل في الاستقلال لشعبها ، ولكن لن يتم نسيانها أبدًا.
أفغانستان حبي. في يوم من الأيام سأعود إليك ، على الرغم من أن الجحيم يجب أن يمنع الطريق.
منذ زمن بعيد فقدت عدد هذه المدرجات الأخيرة ؛ يبدو الآن أنه حالتي الحقيقية ، قفزة الإيمان هذه إلى الهاوية. كما قال لي جان جينيه عام 1982 ، بيروت ، في منزل محترق ، في قضية خاسرة ، في ميثاق انتحاري لرفض الاستسلام وقسم المقاومة الذي وضعني على طريق حياتي. “عندما لا يكون هناك أمل ، نحن أحرار في القيام بأشياء مستحيلة ، وأشياء مجيدة.”
كما كتبه ألفريد نويز في الطريق السريع ؛
الجزء الأول
كانت الريح سيلًا من الظلام بين الأشجار العاصفة.
كان القمر جاليون شبحًا تم إلقاؤه على البحار الملبدة بالغيوم.
كان الطريق شريطًا من ضوء القمر فوق المستنقع الأرجواني ،
وجاء الطريق السريع – ركوب –
ركوب – الدوافع –
جاء الطريق السريع يركب ، حتى باب النزل القديم.
لقد كان قبًا فرنسيًا على جبينه ، حفنة من الدانتيل في ذقنه ،
معطف من مخملي كلاريت ، ومؤخرات من الجلد البني.
أنها مزودة مع أبدا التجاعيد. كانت حذائه حتى الفخذ.
وركب مع وميض مرصع بالجواهر ،
مسدسه بأعقامه ،
رابيره أقصى طوبان ، تحت السماء المرصعة بالجواهر.
فوق الحصى ، اشتبك واشتبك في ساحة الظلام.
استغله مع سوطه على مصاريع ، ولكن تم قفل كل شيء ومنعه.
صفير نغمة إلى النافذة ، ومن يجب أن ينتظر هناك
لكن ابنة المالك السوداء ،
بيس ، ابنة المالك ،
ضفيعًا لعقدة حب حمراء داكنة في شعرها الأسود الطويل.
ومظلمة في ساحة النزل القديمة المظلمة
حيث استمع تيم أوستلر. كان وجهه أبيض وذروة.
كانت عيناه جوفاء من الجنون ، وشعره مثل القش متعفن ،
لكنه أحب ابنة المالك ،
ابنة المالك الحمراء.
غبي ككلب استمع إليه ، وسمع السارق يقول –
“قبلة واحدة ، حبيبتي البوني ، أنا بعد جائزة ليلا ،
لكنني سأعود مع الذهب الأصفر قبل ضوء الصباح ؛
ومع ذلك ، إذا ضغطوا علي بشكل حاد ، وهاري لي طوال اليوم ،
ثم ابحث عني بواسطة ضوء القمر ،
شاهد لي بواسطة ضوء القمر ،
سآتي إليك بواسطة ضوء القمر ، على الرغم من أن الجحيم يجب أن يمنع الطريق “.
ارتفع منتصبا في ركاب. نادر يمكن أن يصل إلى يدها ،
لكنها خففت شعرها في الدسم. محترق وجهه مثل العلامة التجارية
عندما جاء سلسلة العطور السوداء على صدره.
وقبل موجاتها في ضوء القمر ،
(يا ، الأمواج السوداء الحلوة في ضوء القمر!)
ثم قام بسحبه في ضوء القمر ، وخرج بعيدًا عن الغرب.
الجزء الثاني
لم يأت في الفجر. لم يأت عند الظهر.
ومن بين غروب الشمس المقلق ، قبل صعود القمر ،
عندما كان الطريق شريط الغجر ، يحلق المستنقع الأرجواني ،
جاءت قوات حمراء في مسيرة-
مسيرة – مارشينغ –
جاء رجال الملك جورج يسيرون ، حتى باب النزل القديم.
قالوا لا كلمة للمالك. شربوا البيرة بدلا من ذلك.
لكنهم وضعوا ابنته ، وربطوها ، على سفح سريرها الضيق.
ركع اثنان منهم على قذائفها ، مع المساحات إلى جانبهم!
كان هناك موت في كل نافذة.
والجحيم في نافذة مظلمة واحدة ؛
لأن بيس يمكن أن يرى ، من خلال قاعها ، الطريق الذي كان يركبه.
لقد ربطوها بالانتباه ، مع العديد من الدعابة.
كانوا يرتبون مسكيت بجانبها ، مع كمامة تحت صدرها!
“الآن ، حافظ على مراقبة جيدة!” وقبلوها. سمعت الرجل المحكوم يقول –
ابحث عني بواسطة ضوء القمر.
راقب لي بواسطة ضوء القمر.
سآتي إليك بواسطة ضوء القمر ، على الرغم من أن الجحيم يجب أن يمنع الطريق!
انها ملتوية يديها خلفها. لكن كل العقدة كانت جيدة!
كانت تتلوى يديها حتى كانت أصابعها رطبة بالعرق أو الدم!
امتدوا وتوتروا في الظلام ، وساعات الزحف من قبل سنوات
حتى الآن ، على السكتة الدماغية في منتصف الليل ،
بارد ، على السكتة الدماغية في منتصف الليل ،
طرف إصبع واحد لمسته! كان الزناد على الأقل لها!
طرف إصبع واحد لمسته. لم تسعى أكثر للباقي.
صعودا ، وقفت انتباه ، مع كمامة تحت صدرها.
لن تخاطر بسماعهم ؛ لن تسعى مرة أخرى.
للطريق وضع عارية في ضوء القمر.
فارغة وعارية في ضوء القمر.
ودماءها ، في ضوء القمر ، تخثرت على امتناع حبها.
tlot-tlot ؛ tlot-tlot! هل سمعوا ذلك؟ الرنين Horsehoofs واضحة.
tlot-tlot ؛ tlot-tlot ، في المسافة؟ هل كانوا صما لدرجة انهم لم يسمعوا؟
أسفل شريط ضوء القمر ، فوق جبين التل ،
جاء الطريق السريع ركوب –
ركوب – الدوافع –
نظرت المعاطف الحمراء إلى تحضيرها! وقفت ، مستقيمة وما زالت.
tlot-tlot ، في الصمت الفاتر! tlot-tlot ، في ليلة الصدى!
أقرب جاء وأقرب. كان وجهها مثل الضوء.
نمت عيناها للحظة. رسمت نفسا عميقا آخر ،
ثم تحركت إصبعها في ضوء القمر ،
حطم بندقية ضوء القمر ،
حطمت صدرها في ضوء القمر وحذرته – مع وفاتها.
التفت. دفع إلى الغرب. لم يكن يعرف من يقف
انحنى ، مع رأسها على المسكيت ، غارق بدمها!
ليس حتى الفجر سمعها ، ونما وجهه رمادي لسماع
كيف بيس ، ابنة المالك ،
ابنة المالك السوداء ،
كانت قد شاهدت حبها في ضوء القمر ، وتوفي في الظلام هناك.
مرة أخرى ، حفز مثل رجل مجنون ، صرف لعنة على السماء ،
مع تدخين الطريق الأبيض خلفه ورصاصه العالي.
كان الدم الأحمر يوتنهام في الظهر الذهبي. وي
كان NE-Red معطفه المخملي.
عندما أطلقوا النار عليه على الطريق السريع ،
أسفل مثل كلب على الطريق السريع ،
ووضع في دمه على الطريق السريع ، مع مجموعة من الدانتيل في حلقه.
. . .
يقولون إنه لا يزالون في ليلة الشتاء عندما تكون الريح في الأشجار ،
عندما يكون القمر جاليون شبحًا يتم إلقاؤه على البحار الغائمة ،
عندما يكون الطريق شريطًا من ضوء القمر فوق المستنقع الأرجواني ،
يأتي طريق سريع – ركوب –
ركوب – الدوافع –
يأتي الطريق السريع ركوبًا ، حتى باب النزل القديم.
فوق الحصى يتساقط ويتطوع في ساحة النزل المظلمة.
انه ينقر مع سوطه على مصاريع ، ولكن كل شيء مغلق ومنع.
صافرة نغمة إلى النافذة ، ومن يجب أن ينتظر هناك
لكن ابنة المالك السوداء ،
بيس ، ابنة المالك ،
ضفيعًا لعقدة حب حمراء داكنة في شعرها الأسود الطويل.
كما كتبت في منصبي في 16 أغسطس 2021 ، سقوط كابول وأفغانستان ؛ نحن نواجه صورًا ساحرة في نهاية هذا الأسبوع من سقوط كابول وأفغانستان إلى القوى المنتصرة في طالبان وانهيار نظام قرية بوتمبكين وجيشه الميرغ الذي أطلق النار على لم يتمتع بمقاومة ، صور تتذكر سقوط سقوط سقص في عام 1975 في ظل الظروف المتوازية.
إذا أرادت أمريكا مقعدًا على الطاولة في تشكيل سياسات الحكومة الجديدة ، فيجب علينا أن ندركها على أنها حركة الاستقلال المشروعة وهي ترفض أن تلعب دور الغول الأجنبي للإمبريالية. قد نربح مع الجزر ما فقدناه مع العصا.
لا ترسل جنودًا بل دبلوماسيون بمساعدة إنسانية ودعم مادي ؛ هذا يمكن أن يكون مشروطًا بالالتزام بمبادئ حقوق الإنسان الشاملة. تحتاج طالبان إلى شيء من الولايات المتحدة والعالم بشكل عام ؛ الاعتراف بالشرعية ، ويمكن أن يكون رافعة قوية.
كما يقول هنري شكسبير الخامس. “عندما يلعب التسامح والقسوة للمملكة ، فإن اليد اللطيفة هي أفضل الفائز”.
بدأت الحملة الصليبية الملحمية الأمريكية والمغامرات الإمبراطورية في أفغانستان بحملة ناجحة بشكل مذهل لإسقاط الاتحاد السوفيتي من خلال جذبها ومحاصرةها في غزو وموقد لا يمكن التغلب عليه ، وهو درس نسيه لاحقًا ، نسلح فيه وتدريبه ، وغالبًا ما تم تمويله مباشرة ، وغالبًا ما تم تمويله مباشرة ، وغالبًا ما تم تمويله مباشرة ، وقاتلوا جنبا إلى جنب مع مقاتلي الحرية الذين هم اليوم أمراء الحرب الذين يحكمون بالفعل أفغانستان. شمل هؤلاء العملاء الأميركيين بشكل سيء العالم الديني الرائع أسامة بن لادن ، وأعتقد أننا جميعًا نعرف مدى نجاح ذلك.
يبدو أننا لم نتعلم شيئًا من إخفاقات الإمبريالية ؛ قد تكون هذه المرة مختلفة ، لكنني أشك في ذلك.
ما لم نغير القوى والظروف التي تجعل الحرب مربحة للنخب ومفيدة للسلطات في مركزية السلطة.
لن تكون هذه هي المرة الأولى التي يحكم فيها طالبان ، وهي كلمة الباشتو التي تعني “الطلاب” ، أفغانستان ، كما فعلوا ذلك من عام 1996 إلى عام 2001 كوكيل في باكستان ، حتى غزت أمريكا في أعقاب 911. كما أنها ليست المرة الأولى وقد أستحق أفغانستان لقب “مقبرة الإمبراطوريات” ؛ تم كسر ولاية ألكساندر الخليفة الكبرى في باكتريا ، المغول والإمبراطورية البريطانية والاتحاد السوفيتي جميعها على سندانها. لقد كان أيضًا مسقط رأس الإمبراطوريات العظيمة التي تم تجزئها بعد ذلك ؛ Parthia ، Scythia ، The Boddhist Kushans ، White Huns ، Kidarites ، The Hindu Shahi Dynasty ، و Empire of Nader Shah. تأسست أفغانستان الحديثة في عام 1747 من قبل أحمد شاه دوراني من بقايا المغول وورثة نادر شاه في بلاد فارس ، بعد صراع مدمر متبادل بين سلالة السفافيد في بلاد فارس ومغول الهند لحيازته كاندهار.
والآن ، يبدو أن دور أمريكا. ما يمتلكهنا ما الجنون ، نحن البشر ، ونحن مدفوعون للسيطرة على الآخرين والسيطرة على الآخرين ، مع الغضب الذهاني المؤسسي وعنف الحرب من جهة والأكاذيب المغرية وأوهام التزوير والسرقة الرأسمالية للموارد العامة والثروة على الآخر ؟
كيف يمكننا الهروب من الدورة المدمرة المدمرة وخاتم فاجنر من الخوف والقوة والقوة؟
ما هي بعض الدروس التي يمكن أن نتعلمها من إخفاقاتنا الإمبراطورية في تقسيم وتهاب الوكلاء التصنيعيين والنخب المهيمنة على طول الخطوط الطائفية والعرقية البلقان ، وأمراء الحرب ، ودول العميل الوهمية ، واستراتيجيات الحنطة الإرهابية والطغيان ودولة تعذيب عالمية. ، مراقبة ، قمع المعارضة ، الحدود ، والشرطة ، جنبًا الطعم الدعائي لفخ هيمنةنا؟
الذي يحمل السلاح يحمل الموت. اختيار الحياة.
دعونا نتخلى عن الاستخدام الاجتماعي للقوة.
دعونا لا نرسل أي جيوش لفرض الفضيلة.
كما كتبت في منصبي في 19 أبريل 2021 ، أعلن بايدن نهاية حرب أمريكا في أفغانستان: الصيحة ، ونتمنى لك التوفيق في ذلك ؛ في أفغانستان ، جئنا للانتقام ، وبقينا من أجل الربح. لقد ثبت أنه من الصعب التخلي عن أي منهما.
أعلن الرئيس بايدن نهاية حرب أمريكا في أفغانستان ؛ هذا أحتفل به ، فرحتي في أخبار السلام التي تظل فيها فقط حقيقة أننا كنا هنا من قبل. إعلان السلام شيء واحد ؛ الحفاظ على السلام هو آخر تماما.
كان عام 2019 عامًا من الأمل العظيم الذي خفف من الفشل المأساوي ، الذي تم تصويره بنهايته وبداية عام جديد بسلام هش في أفغانستان بعد 18 عامًا من الحرب ، خسر سلام بعد بضعة أيام في معركة مدتها ست ساعات في المجموع ظلام كهف ، إنقاذ الأختام المحاصرة في قلعة طالبان من خلال تدمير طائراتهم الهليكوبتر خلال اعتداء في انتهاك للمعاهدة ، وهي مهمة الاستفزاز التي كان هدفها تخريب السلام ، حيث كان تاريخ آلاف السنين في الحضارة كله.
تم تحمل CT من قبل أربعة رجال قاموا بحرية تسلق جبلًا في إعادة تسوية ألكساندر ذا كبرز القبض على صخرة سوجديان ، ثم مع خلسة ، وتوجيه خاطئ ، وهزمت الدقة قوة طغت عليها وتثبيتها في فريق هجوم محمول جواً من الأختام.
كما هو الحال مع العديد من الأحداث التي تتكشف باعتبارها انحدارًا لرمي الكلمات في رمي الحجارة ، فقد كان نجاحًا تكتيكيًا وفشلًا استراتيجيًا ، وعملًا مجيدًا للبطولة وإمبريالية استفزاها التي أجرت انسحابنا من جنون حرب إلى الأبد.
كان هذا بمثابة عمل مسرحي مصمم لتزويد Casus Belli ، وهي مهمة سرية لتخريب السلام على غرار الحيلة التي يستخدمها اليابانيون لإضفاء الشرعية على غزوهم لمانشوريا في عام 1931 ، وهو حادثة موكدن ، التي تضمنت جنديًا يابانيًا واحدًا ، وهو أحد الجنود الياباني ، رجل مفقود تم إرسال الجنود الآخرين للإنقاذ.
سيكون سلام بايدن بمثابة اختبار لروح أمريكا ، وقيمنا ونوايانا الحقيقية تجاه العالم ، ووحدتنا للهدف. هذا هو الخط الذي آمل أن نتمكن من الاحتفاظ به ، لأنه إذا كان مستثنينا للموت وما وصفه أيزنهاور بتخريب المعقدة العسكرية ، فإن الفرصة للسلام مرة أخرى في الخدمة للثروة والسلطة ، كما فعل ترامب في عام 2019 وقوى الإمبراطورية اليابانية فعلت في عام 1931 ، فإن العقود الآجلة المحتملة التي تتكشف من تلك اللحظة لا تعد بعالم أفضل.
نحن نعرف ما حدث في المرة الأخيرة ، في بيرل هاربور.
كما كتبت في منصبي في 2 يناير 2020 ، نهاية في الأفق إلى الحرب إلى الأبد في أفغانستان؟ يجلب العام الجديد هدية من السلام ، أو احتماله ، مما قد يسمح لنا بإنهاء حربنا 18 عامًا إلى الأبد في أفغانستان وإحضار قواتنا البالغ عددها 12000 قوات إلى المنزل.
مات مئات الآلاف في هذا الصراع الملحمي دون أي فائدة حقيقية لأي شخص ، وهي حرب كانت فيها الأهداف والتحالفات وأبراج السلطة غير متبلورة وتتحول ، وقد حاولت أمريكا الفيضان معارضتها مع لواء دلو.
إذا كان من الممكن تزوير سلام ، إذا كان من الممكن تجميع أمة مرة أخرى مثل Humpty Dumpty ، فستكون معجزة ، ولكنها واحدة مثل فيتنام التي تهرب فيها أمريكا في الهزيمة وتتخلى عن حلفائها لعدو غير مريح مخصص لإنفاذ رؤيتها لها مجتمع مثالي على الجميع يمكنه. هذه المقارنة محدودة بعدة طرق ، من بينها الحقيقة الغريبة التي تدعمها أمريكا طالبان من خلال الجزية التي يدفعها مقاولينا المدنيين بينما كانت الجيوش لدينا توفر بعضها البعض في معركة حفرة تتميز بجرائم حرب من جميع الأطراف ، التي حضرها تجريد الإنسانية وفقدان الحضارة للقيم.
الحرب تجعل العمل الجيد لعدد قليل ، ورعب غير مفهوم للكثيرين.
كما وصفها رحيم فايز وكاثي غانون في HuffPost ؛ “إن الركن الرئيسي للاتفاقية ، التي كانت الولايات المتحدة و Taliban تتخلى عن أكثر من عام ، هي مفاوضات مباشرة بين الأفغان على جانبي الصراع.
من المتوقع أن تُعقد تلك المفاوضات داخل الأفغان في غضون أسبوعين من توقيع اتفاق سلام في الولايات المتحدة. من المحتمل أن يقرروا كيف ستبدو أفغانستان بعد الحرب ، وما هو الدور الذي سيلعبه طالبان. ستغطي المفاوضات مجموعة واسعة من الموضوعات ، مثل حقوق المرأة ، وحرية التعبير ومصير عشرات الآلاف من مقاتلي طالبان ، وكذلك الميليشيات المسلحة المسلحة التي تنتمي إلى أمراء الحرب في أفغانستان الذين جمعوا الثروة والقوة منذ طالبان الإطاحة “.
وفي منصبي اللاحق في 29 فبراير 2020 ، السلام في أفغانستان؟ نحتفل اليوم بالتوقيع التاريخي لاتفاق السلام بين أمريكا وعلى طالبان ، وفرصة لإعطاء قواتنا إلى المنزل من حرب 18 عامًا والتي لم تحقق سوى تكلفة كبيرة في الدم والكنز. إنه سلام مبدئي ، مشروط ، صُمم في وثيقة رائعة ستبقى إلى الأبد مثالًا على الدبلوماسية الرائعة ، والتي قد يطالب فيها كلا الجانبين بالانتصار.
لقد فازت أمريكا بتدمير وتنسيق عدو عظيم ، تنظيم القاعدة ، من قبل حلفائهم في طالبان ؛ هذا أيضًا يتأرجح طالبان كدولة سنية مع اعتراف بحكم الواقع على الحدود الشرقية لإيران باعتباره ثقلًا موازًا ، وهو فوز غير مؤهل من حيث الاستراتيجية الجيوسياسية.
يمكن لطالبان المطالبة بالفوز على أمريكا في حربهم الطويلة لتحرير أمهم الإمبريالية الأجنبية. لقد تنازلنا عن الشرعية إلى طالبان واعترفنا في كتابة هزيمتنا التامة ، من خلال النظام المباشر لرئيسنا الأبله الجبان ترامب ، الذي لا تعني كلماته شيئًا ؛ يبقى فقط للتخلي عن حلفائنا والفرار من أفغانستان مثل الكلاب المخفوقة.
قد لا تكون هذه هي الطريقة التي سيتم بها تأطير السرد ، وتنسجها ، وبيعها في أمريكا ، إما من قبل حكومتنا ولا أمة من حروب الأبد المدمرة التي لا معنى لها ، لكنني أضمن لك أن هذا هو مقدار ما سوف يفسره العالم.
لكن هذا ليس هو السبب في أنني غير مرتاح ومليء بالفزع الحضنة على احتمال وجود فرصة للسلام التي يقدمها هذه الاتفاقية. لماذا أنا لست مبتهجًا ويرقص مع نشوة الطرب المنتصرة في فرصة إنهاء الحرب ، أي فرصة في آل
ل؟
كما تكتب جنيفر هاندلر في سي إن إن ؛ “ينص الاتفاق المكون من أربع صفحات على أن طالبان ستتخذ خطوات” لمنع أي مجموعة أو فرد ، بما في ذلك القاعدة ، من استخدام تربة أفغانستان لتهديد أمن الولايات وحلفائها “. تتضمن هذه الخطوات التزامات بأن طالبان ستوجه أعضائها “عدم التعاون مع مجموعات أو أفراد يهددون بأمن الولايات المتحدة وحلفائها” وأنها “ستمنع أي مجموعة أو فرد في أفغانستان من تهديد أمن الولايات المتحدة وحلفائها ، وسيمنعونهم من التوظيف والتدريب وجمع التبرعات ولن يستضيفهم وفقًا للالتزامات في هذه الاتفاقية. “
“نص الاتفاق لا يحتوي على أي لغة محددة فيما يتعلق بحماية المرأة أو المجتمع المدني” ، مثل هذه التظاهرات مثل حقوق الإنسان والديمقراطية العالمية ، وخاصة حقوق المرأة ، لا قيمة لها للحكومة الجمهورية الأمريكية ، إلغاء الحرية والمساواة في كل من المجالات المحلية والعالمية التي تشكل الهدف الرئيسي لجميع الفصائل الثلاثة التي تحالفها الاستيلاء على ما أصبح حزب الخيانة ؛ الإرهاب الأبوي والإرهاب الجنسي لأصولي الجدونيت ، والتفوق البيض الذين يرغبون في إلغاء حكم القانون بالكامل ، والبلوتوقراطيين الذين يتجاهلوننا ويستعبدونا.
إن فكرة أن جميعًا لدينا حقوق متساوية بموجب القانون هي مصدر إزعاج للتحالف الجمهوري الذي يسعى إلى فرض طغيان من الفاشية في العالم بأسره باعتباره الرايخ الرابع. إنهم يريدون احتواء وتقييد تهديدات خارجية قابلة للحياة مثل القاعدة وداعش ، وليس القضاء عليها ، لأن هذه الأعداء مفيدة للغاية في قيادة الخوف القومي والغضب وفي الفوز بتقديم مواطنينا إلى حالة سلطنة من القوة والسيطرة ، من المراقبة ونموذج مكافحة التمرد للشرطة. يجب أن يخلق الطغاة مثل هذه التهديدات إذا لم تكن موجودة بالفعل.
كم من الأعمال الإرهابية ضدنا ارتكبها البيادق الذين لم يكونوا على دراية بسادائهم الحقيقيين؟ كم عدد هذه القوى التي يمكن إنكارها التي توظفها أمريكا على الصعيد العالمي لزرع الخوف والكراهية ، تاريخياً في قضية الإمبريالية والآن في تخريب الديمقراطية في جميع أنحاء العالم؟
نفشل في تحدي آليات وهياكل استعبادنا لأنها مخفية جيدًا ، ملتوية ، خفية ، مصنوعة من الدخان والمرايا. غالبًا ما يتم تمييز الفاشية من الدم والإيمان والتربة في جميع أنحاء العالم على أنها القيم المتطرفة ، لكنها أساسية في مجرى تاريخ البشرية. اللعبة الطويلة في الرايخ الرابع ، مخالبها غير المرئية التي تنتشر بشكل خاطئ وتستولى على السلطة على مدار عقود من عمليات التأثير حتى لا تنفجر في قبضتها.
لذا فإن سعادتي في أخبار السلام قد تظل من خلال عدم ثقتني في حكومتنا ، ولعمل سلامهم وجواد جنودنا إلى المنزل الشرطي لبطولة طالبان مناطقهم ضد تنظيم القاعدة وأي إرهابيين على الإطلاق ، قد يكونون عاجزين لإنقاذ أمريكا من ، تخريب السلام ويجعل هذا الأمر يتفق على مشهد في حملة ترامب الانتخابية التي يمكن إلقاء اللوم على فشلها على الآخرين.
آمل أن أكون مخطئًا في هذا ، وسنجمد قريباً مع أحبائنا الذين يخدمون بشرف وشجاعة حكومة لا يوجد بها شيء ، ولن نحارب الحروب أبدًا.
قد يكون السلام علينا جميعًا.
Pashto
6 اګست 2024 د کابل او افغانستان د سقوط کلیزه
د افغانستان د سقوط په اړه موږ ممکن د چارلس ډیکنز سره ووایو لکه څنګه چې د دوه ښارونو کیسه کې لیکل شوي؛ “دا تر ټولو ښه وخت و، دا تر ټولو بد وخت و، دا د حکمت عمر و، دا د حماقت زمانه وه، دا د باور زمانه وه، دا د بې باورۍ دور و، دا د رڼا موسم و، دا د تیارو موسم و، دا د امید پسرلی و، دا د نا امیدۍ ژمی و …، زموږ په وړاندې هیڅ شی نه و، موږ ټول مستقیم جنت ته روان وو، موږ ټول په مستقیم ډول بل لوري ته روان وو … “
زموږ د تاریخ دا ټاکونکې شیبه، د امریکا او افغانستان دواړو او د تمدنونو د پراخې جګړې چې زموږ کیسه یې یوه برخه ده، د یونان د ډیموکراسۍ او د فارس د استبدادي امپراتورۍ تر منځ په جګړو کې پخپله د تمدن له رامینځته کیدو سره پیل شو. د کابل سقوط اوس د پراخو نظامی ځواکونو له نظره نه، بلکې د تیارو په څیر د وخت په تیریدو سره د ناڅاپه روښانه یادونو په رڼا کې د هغه څه څخه چې تر دې دمه د جګړې دې ډګر او د مبارزې ډګر ته زما وروستی سفر دی؛ ډار، درد، مرګ، او امید، دا ډالۍ او د پانډورا لعنت موږ ټولو ته.
ما د دې ورځې د ننوتنې په ورځ کې درې کاله مخکې له پېښور څخه د سفر لپاره د چمتووالي په حال کې لیکلی و. تر 24 اګست 2021 پورې زه د خیبر د لارې په اوږدو کې وم، او د دې نیټې لپاره زما په ژورنال کې د Inglorious Basterds څخه یو فلمي کلپ شامل دی، شوشانه د ډیویډ بووی لخوا د عالي موسیقۍ سره د جرمن شپې لپاره چمتو کوي، د وروستي سټینډز لپاره زما موضوع سندره، کوم چې زه یوازې هغه وخت پوسټ کوم زه د هغه څه په اړه یم چې له هغې څخه بیرته راستنیدل نشته.
ډیر پخوا ما د داسې وروستي سټینډونو شمیر له لاسه ورکړ. اوس داسې بریښي چې زما ریښتیني حالت دی ، د عقیدې دا کودتا په حبس کې. لکه څنګه چې ژان جینټ په 1982 بیروت کې ما ته وویل، په یوه سوځیدلي کور کې، په یوه ورک شوي دلیل کې، د تسلیم کولو څخه د انکار په ځانمرګي تړون کې او د مقاومت حلف چې زما د ژوند لاره یې جوړه کړه؛ “کله چې هیڅ امید شتون ونلري، موږ د ناممکن شیانو، عالي شیانو ترسره کولو لپاره آزاد یو.”
زموږ د پنجشیر د سپتمبر د دفاع په جریان کې د هغې د خلکو لپاره د خپلواکۍ یوه هیره شوې هیله له لاسه ورکړه، مګر هیڅکله به هیر نشي.
افغانستان زما مینه؛ یوه ورځ به زه تا ته بیرته راستون شم، که څه هم دوزخ باید لاره بنده کړي.
دا ممکن دا نه وي چې داستان به په امریکا کې څنګه جوړ شي، سپړل شي او وپلورل شي، نه زموږ د حکومت لخوا او نه هم د تل لپاره د بې معنی ویجاړونکي جنګونو څخه ستړي شوي، مګر زه تاسو ته تضمین درکوم چې دا به د نړۍ څومره تشریح کړي.
مګر دا د دې لامل نه دی چې زه د سولې لپاره د هغه فرصت په اړه چې دا تړون وړاندیز کوي ناخوښه او له ویره ډک یم. ولې زه د جګړې د پای ته رسیدو په چانس کې د بریالۍ خوښۍ سره خوښ نه یم او نڅا کوم ، په هیڅ چانس کې؟
لکه څنګه چې جینیفر هینسلر په CNN کې لیکي؛ په څلور مخیز هوکړه لیک کې راغلي چې طالبان به د القاعدې په ګډون د هرې ډلې یا فرد د مخنیوي لپاره اقدامات کوي چې د افغانستان له خاورې د امریکا او د هغې د متحدینو امنیت ته ګواښ پېښ کړي. په دې ګامونو کې هغه ژمنې شاملې دي چې طالبان به خپلو غړو ته لارښوونه کوي چې “له هغو ډلو یا اشخاصو سره همکاري ونه کړي چې د متحده ایالاتو او د هغې د متحدینو امنیت ته ګواښ پېښوي” او دا چې “په افغانستان کې د هرې ډلې یا فرد مخه نیسي چې د متحده ایالاتو امنیت ته ګواښ پېښوي.” او متحدین به یې د استخدام، روزنې او تمویل څخه مخنیوی وکړي او په دې تړون کې د ژمنو سره سم به د دوی کوربه توب نه کوي.”
“د تړون متن د ښځو او مدني ټولنې د خوندیتوب په اړه کومه ځانګړې ژبه نه لري،” د نړیوالو بشري حقونو او ډیموکراسۍ او په ځانګړې توګه د ښځو حقونه لکه د امریکا د جمهوري غوښتونکي حکومت لپاره هیڅ ارزښت نلري. په کورنیو او نړیوالو دواړو برخو کې د آزادۍ او مساواتو له منځه وړل چې د ټولو دریو ډلو اصلي هدف جوړوي چې د هغه څه د نیولو لپاره متحد شوي چې د خیانت ګوند بدل شوی؛ د ګیډونیت بنسټپالو سرپرستي او جنسي ترهګري، هغه سپینې واکمنان چې غواړي د قانون حاکمیت په بشپړه توګه له منځه یوسي، او هغه پلوټوکراټان چې موږ به بې انساني او غلامان کړي.
دا نظر چې موږ ټول د قانون له مخې مساوي حقونه لرو د جمهوري غوښتونکو اتحاد لپاره یو خنډ دی چې غواړي د څلورم ریخ په توګه په ټوله نړۍ د فاشیزم ظلم مسلط کړي. دوی غواړي چې د القاعدې او داعش په څیر باثباته بهرني ګواښونه محدود او محدود کړي، نه یې له منځه یوسي، ځکه چې دا ډول دښمنان د ملتپالو ویره او قهر په راپارولو او د زور او کنټرول حاکمیت ته د خپلو اتباعو د تسلیمولو په ګټلو کې خورا ګټور دي. نظارت او د پولیسو د بغاوت ضد ماډل. ظالمان باید دا ډول ګواښونه رامینځته کړي که دوی واقعا شتون نلري.
موږ د خپل غلامۍ میکانیزمونو او جوړښتونو په ننګولو کې پاتې راغلي یو ځکه چې دوی ښه پټ، منحرف، فرعي، د لوګي او شیانو څخه جوړ شوي دي. د وینې، عقیدې او خاورې فاشیزم اوس په ټوله نړۍ کې بیا راژوندي کیږي ډیری وختونه د بهرنیانو په توګه پیژندل کیږي، مګر دوی د بشري تاریخ په جریان کې مرکزي دي. د څلورم ریخ اوږده لوبه، د هغې نه لیدل کیدونکي خیمې د لسیزو د نفوذ عملیاتو په اوږدو کې په پراخه کچه پراخوي او واک ترلاسه کوي تر هغه چې دا موږ په خپل گرفت کې راګیروي، باید له پامه ونه غورځول شي.
نو د سولې په خبرونو زما خوښي زموږ په حکومت کې زما د بې باورۍ له سیوري لاندې ده، ځکه چې سوله کول او زموږ سرتیري کور ته په دې شرط راوستل چې طالبان خپلې سیمې د القاعدې او هر ډول تروریستانو په وړاندې پولیس کړي، هغه ګواښونه چې دوی ممکن د امریکا د ژغورلو توان نلري. ، سوله سبوتاژ کوي او دا تړون د ټرمپ د ټاکنیز کمپاین یوه تماشه وړاندې کوي چې ناکامي یې په نورو باندې اچول کیدی شي.
زه امید لرم چې پدې کې زه غلط یم ، او موږ به ډیر ژر له خپلو عزیزانو سره یو ځای شو چې په غیرت او زړورتیا سره د داسې حکومت خدمت کوي چې هیڅ نه لري ، او دا به هیڅکله جګړه ونه کړي.
پر موږ ټولو دې سوله راشي.
Persian
6 آگوست 2024 سالگرد سقوط کابل و افغانستان
در مورد سقوط افغانستان می توان گفت با چارلز دیکنز همانطور که در داستان دو شهر نوشته شده است. «بهترین روزگار بود، بدترین روزگار بود، عصر خرد بود، عصر حماقت بود، عصر باور بود، دوران ناباوری بود، فصل نور بود، فصل تاریکی بود، بهار امید بود، زمستان ناامیدی بود…، ما چیزی پیش روی خود نداشتیم، همه مستقیم به بهشت می رفتیم، همه از طرف دیگر مستقیم می رفتیم…»
تصور میکنم این لحظه تعیینکننده تاریخ ما، هم در آمریکا و هم در افغانستان و درگیری گستردهتر تمدنهایی که داستان ما بخشی از آن است، با ایجاد خود تمدن در جنگهای بین دموکراسیهای یونان و امپراتوری استبدادی ایران آغاز میشود. سقوط کابل اکنون نه از نظر نیروهای گسترده سیستمی، بلکه به مثابه تاریکی روشن شده توسط جرقه های ناگهانی خاطرات زنده خارج از زمان از آنچه تاکنون آخرین سفر من به این تئاتر جنگ و میدان مبارزه بوده است. وحشت، درد، مرگ و امید، آن هدیه و نفرین پاندورا به همه ما.
من دفتر خاطرات خود را در این روز سه سال پیش از پیشاور در حین آماده سازی برای اعزام نوشتم. تا 24 آگوست 2021 من در سراسر گذرگاه خیبر بودم، و دفتر خاطرات من برای آن تاریخ شامل یک کلیپ فیلم از حرامزادههای بیعظم، شوشانا برای شب آلمانی آماده میشود با موسیقی باشکوه دیوید بووی، آهنگ موضوع من برای Last Stands، که فقط زمانی پست میکنم من در شرف انجام کاری هستم که از آن بازگشتی نیست.
مدتها پیش شمار این آخرین جایگاهها را از دست دادم. به نظر می رسد اکنون وضعیت واقعی من است، این جهش ایمان به ورطه. همانطور که ژان ژنه در سال 1982 در بیروت، در یک خانه در حال سوختن، در یک هدف از دست رفته، در یک پیمان خودکشی برای امتناع از تسلیم و سوگند مقاومت که مرا در مسیر زندگی ام قرار داد، به من گفت. “وقتی امیدی نیست، ما در انجام کارهای غیرممکن آزاد هستیم، کارهای باشکوه.”
در جریان دفاع ما از پنجشیر در آن سپتمبر، امید ناامید شده استقلال برای مردمش از دست رفت، اما هرگز فراموش نخواهد شد.
افغانستان عشق من; روزی به سوی تو باز خواهم گشت، هر چند جهنم راه را ببندد.
همانطور که توسط آلفرد نویز در بزرگراه نوشته شده است.
بخش اول
باد سیلابی از تاریکی در میان درختان تند بود.
ماه یک گالیون شبح مانند بود که روی دریاهای ابری پرتاب می شد.
جاده نواری از مهتاب بود بر روی لنگر بنفش،
و بزرگراه سوار آمد-
سواری – سواری –
بزرگراه سوار سوار شد، تا در مسافرخانه قدیمی.
او یک کلاه فرانسوی روی پیشانی اش گذاشته بود، یک دسته توری روی چانه اش،
کتی از مخمل کلارت، و شلوارک از پوست خس قهوه ای.
آنها با هیچ چروک. چکمه هایش تا ران بود.
و با چشمک جواهر سوار شد،
قنداق تپانچه اش چشمک می زند،
دسته راپیرش در زیر آسمان نگین دار.
روی سنگفرش ها در تاریک حیاط مسافرخانه با هم برخورد کرد.
او با شلاق به کرکره ضربه زد، اما همه چیز قفل و مسدود بود.
او آهنگی را به پنجره سوت زد و چه کسی باید آنجا منتظر بماند
اما دختر چشم سیاه صاحبخانه،
بس، دختر صاحبخانه،
گره عشقی قرمز تیره را روی موهای مشکی بلندش میبافد.
و در تاریکی تاریک حیاط مسافرخانه قدیمی دریچه اصطبلی به صدا در آمد
جایی که تیم صحرا گوش داد. صورتش سفید و اوج گرفته بود.
چشمانش گودال های جنون بود، موهایش مثل یونجه کپک زده،
اما او عاشق دختر صاحبخانه بود،
دختر لب قرمز صاحبخانه.
گنگ مانند سگ گوش داد و دزد را شنید که گفت:
“یک بوس، عزیزم، من امشب دنبال جایزه هستم،
اما من با طلای زرد قبل از روشنایی صبح برخواهم گشت.
با این حال، اگر آنها به شدت مرا تحت فشار قرار دهند و در طول روز مرا آزار دهند،
سپس در نور ماه به دنبال من بگرد،
زیر نور ماه مراقب من باش،
من با نور ماه پیش تو خواهم آمد، هرچند جهنم باید راه را ببندد.»
او در میان رکاب ها ایستاده بود. به ندرت می توانست به دست او برسد،
اما او موهایش را در جعبه شل کرد. صورتش مثل مارک می سوخت
همانطور که آبشار سیاه عطر روی سینه اش می چرخید.
و امواج آن را در نور ماه بوسید،
(ای امواج سیاه شیرین در مهتاب!)
سپس افسار خود را در نور مهتاب گرفت و به سمت غرب رفت.
بخش دوم
او در سحر نیامد. ظهر نیامد.
و از غروب خرمایی، قبل از طلوع ماه،
وقتی جاده روبان کولی بود که لنگه بنفش را حلقه می کرد،
یک سرباز کت قرمز آمدند و راهپیمایی کردند –
راهپیمایی – راهپیمایی –
مردان شاه جورج در راهپیمایی آمدند، تا در مسافرخانه قدیمی.
آنها به صاحبخانه چیزی نگفتند. به جای آن دمنوش او را نوشیدند.
اما آنها دهان دخترش را بستند و او را به پای تخت باریکش بستند.
دو نفر از آنها در کنار قاب او زانو زدند و مشک ها در کنارشان بودند!
مرگ در هر پنجره بود.
و جهنم در یک پنجره تاریک.
زیرا بس میتوانست از لابهلای جعبهاش، جادهای را ببیند که سوار میشود.
آنها او را با شوخی های خنده آور زیادی به او جلب کرده بودند.
آنها یک تفنگ در کنار h
بسته شده بودند
وه، با پوزه زیر سینه اش!
“حالا، خوب مراقب باش!” و او را بوسیدند. او شنید که مرد محکوم به فنا گفت:
در نور ماه به دنبال من بگرد.
زیر نور ماه مراقب من باش.
من با نور مهتاب نزد تو خواهم آمد، هرچند جهنم باید راه را ببندد!
دستانش را پشت سرش چرخاند. اما همه گره ها خوب بود!
دستانش را آن قدر می پیچید که انگشتانش خیس عرق یا خون شدند!
آنها در تاریکی دراز میکشیدند و میکشیدند و ساعتها مانند سالها میخزیدند
تا به حال، در نیمه شب،
سرد، در نیمه شب،
نوک یک انگشت آن را لمس کرد! ماشه حداقل مال او بود!
نوک یک انگشت آن را لمس کرد. او دیگر برای بقیه تلاش نکرد.
بالا، او در حالی که پوزه زیر سینه اش بود، در مقابل توجه ایستاد.
او شنوایی آنها را به خطر نمی اندازد. او دوباره تلاش نمی کند.
زیرا جاده زیر نور مهتاب برهنه بود.
خالی و برهنه در نور مهتاب؛
و خون رگهایش در نور مهتاب به صدای عشقش می کوبید.
Tlot-tlot; تلات-تلات! آیا آنها آن را شنیده بودند؟ صدای سم اسب ها واضح است.
Tlot-tlot; Tlot-tlot، در دوردست؟ آیا کر بودند که نشنیدند؟
پایین روبان مهتاب، بالای پیشانی تپه،
بزرگراه سوار آمد-
سواری – سواری –
کت های قرمز به رنگ آمیزی خود نگاه می کردند! او صاف و بی حرکت ایستاد.
Tlot-tlot، در سکوت یخبندان! Tlot-tlot، در شب پژواک!
نزدیکتر آمد و نزدیکتر شد. صورتش مثل نور بود.
چشمانش برای لحظه ای گشاد شد. او آخرین نفس عمیق را کشید،
سپس انگشت او در نور ماه حرکت کرد،
مشک او مهتاب را شکست،
سینهاش را زیر نور مهتاب شکست و به او هشدار داد – با مرگش.
چرخید. او به سمت غرب حرکت کرد. او نمی دانست چه کسی ایستاده است
خم شده، با سرش روی مشک، آغشته به خون خودش!
تا سپیده دم آن را شنید و چهره اش برای شنیدن خاکستری شد
چگونه بس، دختر صاحبخانه،
دختر چشم سیاه صاحبخانه،
در نور ماه مراقب عشق او بود و در تاریکی آنجا مرد.
به عقب، او مانند یک دیوانه جهش کرد و نفرینی به آسمان فریاد زد،
با جاده سفیدی که پشت سرش دود میکرد و راپرش بالا میزد.
خارهای سرخ او در ظهر طلایی بودند. قرمز شرابی کت مخملی او بود.
وقتی او را در بزرگراه تیراندازی کردند،
پایین مثل یک سگ در بزرگراه،
و در اتوبان دراز کشید و دستهای توری در گلویش داشت.
. . .
و هنوز از یک شب زمستانی، می گویند، وقتی باد در درختان است،
وقتی ماه یک گالیون شبح مانند است که روی دریاهای ابری پرتاب می شود،
وقتی جاده نواری از مهتاب بر روی لنگر بنفش است،
یک بزرگراه سوار می آید –
سواری – سواری –
مرد بزرگراهی سوار بر مسافرخانه می آید.
روی سنگفرش ها در حیاط تاریک مسافرخانه به صدا در می آید و به صدا در می آید.
او با شلاق خود به کرکره ضربه می زند، اما همه چیز قفل و مسدود است.
او آهنگی را به پنجره سوت میزند، و چه کسی باید آنجا منتظر بماند
اما دختر چشم سیاه صاحبخانه،
بس، دختر صاحبخانه،
گره عشقی قرمز تیره را روی موهای مشکی بلندش میبافد.
همانطور که در پست خود در 16 اوت 2021، سقوط کابل و افغانستان نوشتم. ما در این آخر هفته با تصاویر مسحورکننده ای از سقوط کابل و افغانستان به نیروهای پیروز طالبان و فروپاشی رژیم روستای پوتمپکین ما و ارتش سراب آن روبرو هستیم که حتی یک گلوله در مقاومت شلیک نکردند، تصاویری که سقوط سایگون را به یاد می آورد. در سال 1975 در شرایط موازی.
اگر آمریکا میخواهد در شکلدهی به سیاستهای دولت جدید، یک کرسی بر سر میز داشته باشد، باید آن را به عنوان جنبش استقلالطلب مشروع بدانیم و از ایفای نقش غلامان خارجی امپریالیسم خودداری کنیم. ممکن است با هویج چیزی را که با چوب از دست داده ایم به دست آوریم.
نه سرباز، بلکه دیپلماتهایی را با کمکهای بشردوستانه و حمایت مادی بفرستید. این می تواند مشروط به رعایت اصول جهانی حقوق بشر باشد. طالبان به چیزی از ایالات متحده و جهان در کل نیاز دارند. به رسمیت شناختن مشروعیت، و این می تواند یک اهرم قدرتمند باشد.
همانطور که هانری پنجم شکسپیر می گوید; “وقتی نرمش و ظلم برای پادشاهی بازی می کند، دست مهربان تر مطمئن ترین برنده است.”
جنگ صلیبی حماسی و ماجراجویی های امپریالیستی آمریکا در افغانستان با یک کمپین موفقیت آمیز خیره کننده برای سرنگونی اتحاد جماهیر شوروی با فریب دادن و به دام انداختن آن در یک تهاجم و فتح غیرقابل پیروزی آغاز شد، درسی که متعاقباً فراموش شد، که در آن ما مسلح، آموزش دیدیم، کمک مالی کردیم و اغلب مستقیماً فرماندهی می کردیم. و در کنار مبارزان آزادی که امروز جنگ سالارانی هستند که در واقع بر افغانستان حکومت می کنند، جنگید. این مشتریان آمریکایی به طرز بدنامی شامل اسامه بن لادن، محقق مذهبی باهوش بود، و فکر میکنم همه ما میدانیم که این کار چقدر خوب انجام شد.
به نظر می رسد ما از شکست های امپریالیسم خود چیزی یاد نگرفته ایم. این بار ممکن است متفاوت باشد، اما من شک دارم.
مگر اینکه نیروها و شرایطی را تغییر دهیم که جنگ را برای نخبگان سودمند و برای مقامات در تمرکز قدرت مفید می کند.
این اولین باری نخواهد بود که طالبان، یک پا
کلمه shto به معنی “دانشجویان”، از سال 1996 تا 2001 به عنوان نیابتی پاکستان، تا زمانی که آمریکا در پی سال 911 به آن حمله کرد، بر افغانستان حکومت کردند. ”؛ کشور جانشین اسکندر مقدونی باختری، مغول ها، امپراتوری بریتانیا و اتحاد جماهیر شوروی همه بر سندان آن شکسته شدند. این شهر همچنین زادگاه امپراتوری های بزرگی بوده است که سپس تکه تکه شدند. پارت، سکا، کوشانی های بودایی، هون های سفید، کیداریت ها، سلسله شاهی هندو و امپراتوری نادرشاه. افغانستان مدرن در سال 1747 توسط احمد شاه درانی از بقایای مغولان و وارثان نادرشاه در ایران، پس از درگیری ویرانگر متقابل بین سلسله صفویه ایران و مغولان هند برای تصاحب قندهار تأسیس شد.
و حالا، به نظر می رسد، نوبت آمریکاست. چه جنون ما انسانها را در بر می گیرد که با خشم و خشونت روانی نهادینه شده جنگ از یک سو و دروغ ها و توهمات فریبنده جعل و سرقت سرمایه داری منابع و ثروت عمومی از سوی دیگر به سوی تسلط و کنترل بر دیگران سوق داده می شویم. ?
چگونه می توانیم از چرخه معیوب ویرانگر و حلقه واگنری ترس، قدرت و زور فرار کنیم؟
چه درس هایی می توانیم از شکست امپریالیستی خود در ایجاد تفرقه و تسخیر از طریق تولید نیابت ها و نخبگان هژمونیک در امتداد خطوط فرقه ای و قومی بالکانیزه شده، جنگ سالاران، دولت های مشتری واهی، و استراتژی های مهار شده ترور و استبداد دولتی و وضعیت جهانی شکنجه بیاموزیم. نظارت، سرکوب مخالفان، مرزها و پلیس، همراه با همگون سازی، همدستی، استثمار استعماری از طریق پیادههای الیگارشی فاسد و رژیمهای دست نشانده، و سلاحسازی ارزشها و آرمانهای ما، دموکراسی و حقوق بشر جهانی، طعمه تبلیغاتی برای دام سلطه ما؟
کسی که اسلحه حمل می کند مرگ را تحمل می کند. زندگی را انتخاب کن.
بیایید استفاده اجتماعی از زور را کنار بگذاریم.
بیایید هیچ ارتشی برای اعمال فضیلت نفرستیم.
همانطور که در پست خود در 19 آوریل 2021 نوشتم، بایدن پایان جنگ آمریکا در افغانستان را اعلام کرد: هورا، و با آن موفق باشید. در افغانستان برای انتقام آمدیم و برای سود ماندیم. ثابت شده است که رها کردن هر یک از آنها دشوار است.
پرزیدنت بایدن پایان جنگ آمریکا در افغانستان را اعلام کرده است. این را جشن میگیرم، شادی من از اخبار صلح تنها با این واقعیت که ما قبلاً اینجا بودهایم تحت الشعاع قرار میگیرد. اعلام صلح یک چیز است. حفظ صلح چیز دیگری است.
سال 2019، سالی سرشار از امید همراه با شکست غمانگیز بود که با پایان آن و آغاز سال جدید با صلحی شکننده در افغانستان پس از 18 سال جنگ مشخص شد، صلحی که چند روز بعد در یک نبرد شش ساعته در مجموع از دست رفت. تاریکی غار، نجات SEAL های گرفتار شده در قلعه طالبان با انهدام هلیکوپترهای آنها در جریان حمله ای که نقض معاهده بود، ماموریتی تحریک آمیز که هدف آن خراب کردن صلح بود، که در آن کل تاریخ هزاره ها درگیری تمدنی در جریان بود. با تحمل چهار مردی که آزادانه به تصرف صخره سغدی توسط اسکندر مقدونی پرداختند، از یک کوه بالا رفتند و سپس با مخفی کاری، هدایت نادرست و دقت، نیرویی را شکست دادند که یک تیم حمله هوایی متشکل از SEAL ها را مغلوب کرده بود و سرنگون کرده بود.
مانند بسیاری از وقایع که به صورت قهقرایی از پرتاب کلمات به سنگ پرتاب می شوند، هم یک موفقیت تاکتیکی و هم یک شکست استراتژیک، یک اقدام باشکوه قهرمانانه و یک تحریک امپریالیستی بود که خروج ما از جنون یک جنگ ابدی را خراب کرد.
این یک اکشن صحنهای تئاتری بود که برای ارائه یک casus belli طراحی شده بود، یک ماموریت مخفی برای خراب کردن صلح با الگوبرداری از حیلهای که ژاپنیها برای مشروعیت بخشیدن به تهاجمشان به منچوری در سال 1931 استفاده کردند، حادثه موکدن، که شامل یک سرباز ژاپنی بود. مرد گمشده ای که سربازان دیگر برای نجات او فرستاده شدند.
صلح بایدن آزمونی برای روح آمریکا، ارزشها و نیات واقعی ما نسبت به جهان و وحدت هدف ما خواهد بود. این خطی است که امیدوارم بتوانیم آن را حفظ کنیم، زیرا اگر سودجویان ما از مرگ و آنچه آیزنهاور آن را مجتمع نظامی-صنعتی نامید، شانس صلح را دوباره در خدمت به ثروت و قدرت خراب کنند، همانطور که ترامپ در سال 2019 و نیروهای امپراتوری ژاپن انجام داد. در سال 1931، آیندههای احتمالی که از آن لحظه آشکار میشوند، نوید دنیای بهتر را نمیدهند.
ما می دانیم که آخرین بار، در پرل هاربر چه اتفاقی افتاد.
همانطور که در پست خود در 2 ژانویه 2020 نوشتم، پایانی برای جنگ برای همیشه در افغانستان؟ سال نو یک هدیه صلح یا امکان آن را به ارمغان می آورد، که ممکن است به ما اجازه دهد تا به جنگ 18 ساله برای همیشه در افغانستان پایان دهیم و 12000 سرباز خود را به خانه بازگردانیم.
صدها هزار نفر در این درگیری حماسی جان خود را از دست داده اند که هیچ سود واقعی برای کسی نداشته است، جنگی که در آن اهداف، اتحادها و صور فلکی قدرت بی شکل و در حال تغییر بوده است، سیل آمریکا سعی کرده با یک تیپ سطلی با آن مقابله کند.
اگر بتوان صلحی برقرار کرد، اگر
یک ملت را می توان دوباره مانند هامپتی دامپی گرد هم آورد، این یک معجزه خواهد بود، اما کشوری بسیار شبیه ویتنام که در آن آمریکا با شکست می گریزد و متحدان خود را به دشمنی سرسخت رها می کند که برای اجرای دیدگاه خود از یک جامعه ایده آل برای هرکسی که می تواند تلاش می کند. چنین مقایسه ای از بسیاری جهات محدود است، از جمله این واقعیت عجیب است که آمریکا از طریق خراجی که توسط پیمانکاران غیرنظامی ما پرداخت می شود، به طالبان یارانه پرداخت می کند، در حالی که نظامیان ما در یک نبرد چاله ای که با جنایات جنگی از همه طرف مشخص شده است، یارانه می دهد. انسانیت زدایی و از بین رفتن تمدنی ارزش ها.
جنگ برای عده معدودی تجارت خوبی ایجاد می کند و برای بسیاری وحشتی غیرقابل درک.
همانطور که رحیم فیض و کتی گانن در هاف پست توصیف کردند. یکی از ستونهای اصلی این توافق که ایالات متحده و طالبان بیش از یک سال است که آن را امضا کردهاند، مذاکرات مستقیم بین افغانها در هر دو طرف درگیری است.
انتظار می رود این مذاکرات بین الافغانی ظرف دو هفته پس از امضای توافقنامه صلح میان ایالات متحده و طالبان برگزار شود. آنها احتمالا تصمیم خواهند گرفت که افغانستان پس از جنگ چگونه خواهد بود و طالبان چه نقشی ایفا خواهند کرد. این مذاکرات طیف وسیعی از موضوعات مانند حقوق زنان، آزادی بیان و سرنوشت دهها هزار جنگجوی طالبان و همچنین شبهنظامیان به شدت مسلح متعلق به جنگسالاران افغانستان را در بر میگیرد که از آن زمان ثروت و قدرت جمعآوری کردهاند. برکناری طالبان.»
و در پست بعدی من در 29 فوریه 2020، صلح در افغانستان؟ ما امروز امضای تاریخی توافق صلح بین آمریکا و طالبان و فرصت بازگرداندن نیروهایمان به خانه از یک جنگ 18 ساله را جشن میگیریم که دستاوردهای اندکی به قیمت خون و گنج به دست آورده است. این یک صلح آزمایشی و مشروط است که در سندی درخشان تنظیم شده است که برای همیشه نمونه ای از دیپلماسی استادانه باقی خواهد ماند که در آن هر دو طرف ممکن است ادعای پیروزی کنند.
آمریکا در نابودی و انکار دشمن بزرگ القاعده توسط متحدان طالبان خود پیروز شده است. این همچنین طالبان را به عنوان یک ملت سنی با به رسمیت شناختن واقعی آمریکا در مرزهای شرقی ایران به عنوان وزنه تعادل، یک پیروزی بدون صلاحیت از نظر استراتژی ژئوپلیتیک، قرار می دهد.
طالبان می توانند ادعای پیروزی بر آمریکا را در جنگ طولانی خود برای رهایی ملت خود از امپریالیسم خارجی کنند. ما مشروعیت خود را به طالبان واگذار کرده ایم و به دستور مستقیم رئیس جمهور ترامپ احمق ترسو خود که سخنانش هیچ معنایی ندارد، به شکست کامل خود اعتراف کرده ایم. تنها باقی می ماند که متحدان خود را رها کنیم و مانند سگ های شلاق خورده از افغانستان فرار کنیم.
ممکن است این روایت در آمریکا چه توسط دولت ما و نه کشوری که از جنگهای ویرانگر بیمعنا خسته شدهاند، در آمریکا قاببندی، چرخانده و فروخته شود، اما من به شما تضمین میدهم که اینگونه تفسیر خواهد شد.
اما این دلیلی نیست که من از چشم انداز فرصتی برای صلح که این توافق ارائه می دهد، ناآرام و مملو از هراس هستم. چرا در فرصت پایان جنگ، اصلاً هیچ شانسی، خوشحال نیستم و با وجد پیروزمندانه نمی رقصم؟
همانطور که جنیفر هانسلر در CNN می نویسد; در این توافقنامه چهار صفحه ای آمده است که طالبان اقداماتی را برای جلوگیری از استفاده هر گروه یا فردی از جمله القاعده از خاک افغانستان برای تهدید امنیت ایالات متحده و متحدانش انجام خواهد داد. این اقدامات شامل تعهداتی است که طالبان به اعضای خود دستور می دهد “با گروه ها یا افرادی که امنیت ایالات متحده و متحدانش را تهدید می کنند همکاری نکنند” و “از هر گروه یا فردی در افغانستان از تهدید امنیت ایالات متحده جلوگیری خواهد کرد.” و متحدانش را از جذب، آموزش و جمع آوری کمک مالی ممانعت می کند و طبق تعهدات مندرج در این قرارداد میزبانی آنها را نخواهد داشت.»
«متن توافقنامه حاوی هیچ زبان خاصی در مورد حمایت از زنان یا جامعه مدنی نیست.» موارد پیش پا افتاده ای مانند حقوق بشر جهانی و دموکراسی و به ویژه حقوق زنان که برای دولت جمهوری خواه آمریکا ارزشی ندارد. الغای آزادی و برابری در هر دو حوزه داخلی و جهانی که هدف اصلی هر سه جناحی را تشکیل می دهد که برای تصرف حزب خیانت متحد شدند. پدرسالاری و ترور جنسی بنیادگرایان گیدونیتی، برتری گرایان سفیدپوست که می خواهند حکومت قانون را به طور کامل زیر پا بگذارند، و پلتوکرات هایی که ما را از انسانیت خارج می کنند و به بردگی می کشند.
این ایده که همه ما تحت قانون از حقوق مساوی برخورداریم، برای اتحاد جمهوری خواهان که به دنبال تحمیل ظلم فاشیسم بر کل جهان به عنوان رایش چهارم است، مزاحم است. آنها می خواهند تهدیدهای خارجی قابل اجرا مانند القاعده و داعش را مهار و محدود کنند، نه از بین بردن آنها، زیرا چنین دشمنانی در ایجاد ترس و خشم ناسیونالیستی و در برانگیختن تسلیم شدن شهروندان خود در برابر یک دولت استبدادی زور و کنترل بسیار مفید هستند. نظارت و الگوی پلیس ضد شورش ظالمان باید چنین تهدیدهایی را ایجاد کنند، اگر واقعا وجود نداشته باشند.
چگونه
سیاری از اقدامات تروریستی علیه ما توسط پیاده هایی انجام شد که از اربابان واقعی خود بی خبر بودند؟ چه تعداد از چنین نیروهای انکارناپذیری را آمریکا در سطح جهانی به کار می گیرد تا ترس و نفرت بکارد، از نظر تاریخی در راه امپریالیسم ما و اکنون نیز در براندازی دموکراسی در سراسر جهان؟
ما نمی توانیم سازوکارها و ساختارهای بردگی خود را به چالش بکشیم زیرا آنها به خوبی پنهان، فریبنده، ظریف، ساخته شده از دود و آینه هستند. فاشیسم های خونی، ایمانی و خاکی که اکنون در سرتاسر جهان احیا می شوند، اغلب به عنوان فاشیسم های پرت توصیف می شوند، اما در مسیر تاریخ بشریت محوری هستند. بازی طولانی رایش چهارم، شاخکهای نامرئی آن که در طول دههها عملیات نفوذ بهطور ناپیوسته تکثیر میشوند و قدرت را در دست میگیرند تا زمانی که ما را در چنگال خود گرفتار کند، نباید دست کم گرفت.
بنابراین خوشحالی من از اخبار صلح تحت الشعاع بی اعتمادی من به دولتمان است، زیرا صلح و بازگرداندن سربازان ما به خانه مشروط به طالبان برای پلیس کردن مناطق خود در برابر القاعده و اصلاً هر تروریستی است، تهدیدهایی که ممکن است در نجات آمریکا از شر آن ناتوان باشند. ، صلح را خراب می کند و این توافق را به منظره کمپین انتخاباتی ترامپ تبدیل می کند که شکست آن را می توان به گردن دیگران انداخت.
امیدوارم که من در این مورد اشتباه می کنم و به زودی با عزیزانمان که با افتخار و شجاعت به دولتی خدمت می کنند که هیچ کدام ندارد، متحد شویم و دیگر هرگز جنگ نخواهیم کرد.
درود بر همه ما باد.
Urdu
6 اگست 2024 کابل اور افغانستان کے زوال کی سالگرہ
افغانستان کے زوال کے بارے میں ہم چارلس ڈکنز کے ساتھ کہہ سکتے ہیں جیسا کہ اے ٹیل آف ٹو سٹیز میں لکھا ہے۔ “یہ بہترین وقت تھا، یہ بدترین وقت تھا، یہ حکمت کا دور تھا، یہ حماقت کا دور تھا، یہ یقین کا دور تھا، یہ بے اعتباری کا دور تھا، یہ روشنی کا موسم تھا، یہ اندھیروں کا موسم تھا، یہ امید کی بہار تھی، یہ مایوسی کی سردی تھی…، ہمارے سامنے کچھ نہیں تھا، ہم سب سیدھے جنت کی طرف جا رہے تھے، ہم سب سیدھے دوسری طرف جا رہے تھے…”
ہماری تاریخ کا یہ متعین لمحہ، امریکہ اور افغانستان دونوں کی اور تہذیبوں کے وسیع تنازعات کا جس کا ہماری کہانی ایک حصہ ہے، یونان کی جمہوریتوں اور مطلق العنان فارسی سلطنت کے درمیان جنگوں میں خود تہذیب کی تخلیق سے شروع ہوا، میں تصور کرتا ہوں۔ کابل کا زوال اب وسیع نظامی قوتوں کے لحاظ سے نہیں بلکہ اندھیرے کی طرح روشن یادوں کے اچانک چمکنے سے روشن ہو گیا ہے جس سے اب تک جنگ کے اس تھیٹر اور جدوجہد کے میدان میں میری آخری مہم رہی ہے۔ دہشت، درد، موت، اور امید، وہ تحفہ اور پنڈورا کی لعنت ہم سب کے لیے۔
میں نے اس دن کا اپنا جریدہ تین سال قبل مہم کی تیاریوں کے دوران پشاور سے لکھا تھا۔ 24 اگست 2021 تک میں خیبر پاس تھا، اور اس تاریخ کے لیے میرے جریدے میں Inglorious Basterds کا ایک فلمی کلپ شامل ہے، شوشننا ڈیوڈ بووی کی شاندار موسیقی کے ساتھ جرمن نائٹ کی تیاری کرتی ہے، لاسٹ اسٹینڈز کے لیے میرا تھیم سانگ، جسے میں تب ہی پوسٹ کرتا ہوں جب میں ایک ایسا کام کرنے والا ہوں جس سے واپسی نہیں ہوتی۔
بہت پہلے میں نے اس طرح کے آخری اسٹینڈز کی گنتی کھو دی تھی۔ اب لگتا ہے کہ یہ میری حقیقی حالت ہے، ایمان کی یہ چھلانگ پاتال میں۔ جیسا کہ جین جینیٹ نے مجھ سے 1982 میں بیروت میں ایک جلتے ہوئے گھر میں، ایک گمشدہ مقصد میں، ہتھیار ڈالنے سے انکار کے خودکش معاہدے اور مزاحمت کے حلف میں کہا جس نے مجھے میری زندگی کی راہ پر گامزن کیا۔ “جب کوئی امید نہیں ہے، ہم ناممکن چیزوں کو کرنے کے لئے آزاد ہیں، شاندار چیزیں.”
ہمارے پنجشیر کے دفاع کے دوران ستمبر اس کے لوگوں کے لیے آزادی کی ایک مایوس کن امید کھو گئی، لیکن اسے کبھی فراموش نہیں کیا جائے گا۔
افغانستان میرا پیار؛ ایک دن میں آپ کے پاس واپس آؤں گا، اگرچہ جہنم راستے میں رکاوٹ بن جائے۔
جیسا کہ دی ہائی وے مین میں الفریڈ نوائس نے لکھا ہے۔
حصہ اول
ہوا درختوں کے درمیان اندھیرے کا ایک طوفان تھی۔
چاند ابر آلود سمندروں پر پھینکا ہوا ایک بھوت گیلیون تھا۔
سڑک جامنی مور کے اوپر چاندنی کا ربن تھی،
اور ہائی وے مین سوار ہو کر آیا-
سواری – سواری –
ہائی وے مین سوار ہو کر پرانی سرائے کے دروازے تک آیا۔
اس کے ماتھے پر فرانسیسی کاکڈ ٹوپی، ٹھوڑی پر فیتے کا ایک گچھا،
کلارٹ مخمل کا ایک کوٹ، اور بھوری ڈو-جلد کی بریچ۔
وہ کبھی بھی شیکن کے ساتھ لیس۔ اس کے جوتے ران تک تھے۔
اور وہ ایک جواہرات والی چمک کے ساتھ سوار ہوا،
اس کے پستول کے بٹ ایک دم چمکتے ہیں،
اس کا ریپیر جواہرات سے بھرے آسمان کے نیچے چمکتا ہوا جھلک رہا تھا۔
موچیوں پر وہ ہڑبڑاتا اور اندھیرے سرائے کے صحن میں ٹکراتا رہا۔
اس نے شٹر پر اپنے کوڑے سے ٹیپ کیا، لیکن سب کچھ بند اور روک دیا گیا تھا۔
اس نے کھڑکی کی طرف سیٹی بجائی، اور وہاں کس کا انتظار کرنا چاہیے۔
لیکن زمیندار کی کالی آنکھوں والی بیٹی،
بیس، زمیندار کی بیٹی،
اس کے لمبے سیاہ بالوں میں گہرے سرخ محبت کی گرہ لگا رہی ہے۔
اور اندھیرے پرانے سرائے کے صحن میں ایک مستحکم وکٹ گرنے لگی
جہاں ٹم دی آسٹر سنتا تھا۔ اس کا چہرہ سفید اور چوٹی تھی۔
اس کی آنکھیں جنون کی کھوکھلی تھیں، اس کے بال گھاس کی طرح،
لیکن وہ زمیندار کی بیٹی سے پیار کرتا تھا،
زمیندار کی لال ہونٹ والی بیٹی۔
ایک کتے کی طرح گونگا اس نے سنا، اور اس نے ڈاکو کو کہتے سنا-
“ایک بوسہ، میرے پیارے پیارے، میں آج رات انعام کے بعد ہوں،
لیکن میں صبح کی روشنی سے پہلے پیلے سونے کے ساتھ واپس آؤں گا۔
پھر بھی، اگر وہ مجھے زور سے دبائیں، اور دن بھر مجھے تنگ کریں،
پھر چاندنی میں ڈھونڈو مجھے
مجھے چاندنی سے دیکھو،
میں آپ کے پاس چاندنی سے آؤں گا، اگرچہ جہنم راستے میں رکاوٹ بن جائے۔”
وہ رکاب میں سیدھا اٹھ کھڑا ہوا۔ وہ کم ہی اس کے ہاتھ تک پہنچ سکتا تھا،
لیکن اس نے کیسمنٹ میں اپنے بال ڈھیلے کر لیے۔ اس کا چہرہ کسی برانڈ کی طرح جل گیا تھا۔
جیسے ہی عطر کا سیاہ جھرنا اس کی چھاتی پر گرنے لگا۔
اور اس نے چاندنی میں اس کی لہروں کو چوما،
(اے، چاندنی میں میٹھی سیاہ لہریں!)
پھر اس نے چاندنی کی روشنی میں اپنی لگام کو کھینچا، اور مغرب کی طرف سرپٹ پڑا۔
دوسرا حصہ
وہ سحری میں نہیں آیا۔ وہ دوپہر کو نہیں آیا۔
اور چاند کے طلوع ہونے سے پہلے غروب آفتاب سے باہر،
جب سڑک ایک خانہ بدوش کا ربن تھی، جامنی رنگ کے مور کو لپیٹتی ہوئی،
ایک سرخ کوٹ والا دستہ مارچ کرتا ہوا آیا-
مارچ کرنا – مارچ کرنا –
کنگ جارج کے آدمی پرانی سرائے کے دروازے تک مارچ کرتے ہوئے آئے۔
انہوں نے مالک مکان سے کوئی بات نہیں کی۔ انہوں نے اس کی بجائے اس کی ایل پی لی۔
لیکن اُنہوں نے اُس کی بیٹی کا گلا گھونٹ دیا، اور اُسے اُس کے تنگ بستر کے پاؤں سے باندھ دیا۔
ان میں سے دو اس کے کیسمنٹ پر گھٹنے ٹیکتے تھے، ان کے پہلو میں مسکٹس تھے!
ہر کھڑکی پر موت تھی۔
اور جہنم ایک تاریک کھڑکی پر۔
کیونکہ بیس اپنے کیسمنٹ کے ذریعے وہ سڑک دیکھ سکتا تھا جس پر وہ سوار ہوتا تھا۔
انہوں نے بہت سے طنزیہ مذاق کے ساتھ اسے توجہ دلانے کے لیے باندھ دیا تھا۔
انہوں نے h کے پاس ایک مسکٹ باندھ رکھا تھا۔
r، اس کی چھاتی کے نیچے توتن کے ساتھ!
“اب، اچھی طرح دیکھتے رہو!” اور انہوں نے اسے چوما. اس نے برباد آدمی کو کہتے سنا-
مجھے چاندنی سے ڈھونڈو
چاندنی سے مجھے دیکھو
میں چاندنی سے آپ کے پاس آؤں گا، اگرچہ جہنم راستے میں رکاوٹ بن جائے!
اس نے اس کے پیچھے ہاتھ گھمائے۔ لیکن تمام گرہیں اچھی ہیں!
وہ اس وقت تک اپنے ہاتھ مروڑتی رہی جب تک کہ اس کی انگلیاں پسینے یا خون سے تر نہ ہو جائیں!
وہ اندھیرے میں پھیلے اور تنگ کیے گئے، اور گھنٹے برسوں کی طرح رینگتے رہے۔
اب تک، آدھی رات کے جھٹکے پر،
سردی، آدھی رات کے جھٹکے پر،
ایک انگلی کی نوک نے اسے چھوا! محرک کم از کم اس کا تھا!
ایک انگلی کی نوک اسے چھو گئی۔ اس نے باقی کے لیے مزید کوشش نہیں کی۔
اوپر، وہ اپنی چھاتی کے نیچے تھپکی کے ساتھ توجہ دینے کے لیے اٹھ کھڑی ہوئی۔
وہ ان کی سماعت کو خطرے میں نہیں ڈالے گی۔ وہ دوبارہ کوشش نہیں کرے گی۔
سڑک چاندنی میں ننگی پڑی ہے
چاندنی میں خالی اور ننگے؛
اور اس کی رگوں کا خون، چاندنی میں، اس کی محبت کے گریز میں دھڑک رہا تھا۔
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! کیا انہوں نے سنا تھا؟ گھوڑوں کے کھر صاف بج رہے ہیں۔
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot، فاصلے میں؟ کیا وہ بہرے تھے کہ انہوں نے نہیں سنی؟
چاندنی کا ربن نیچے، پہاڑی کی پیشانی پر،
ہائی وے مین سوار ہو کر آیا-
سواری – سواری –
سرخ کوٹ اپنے پرائمنگ کی طرف دیکھ رہے تھے! وہ سیدھی اور ساکت کھڑی ہو گئی۔
تلاطم خیز خاموشی میں! ٹلو ٹلوٹ، گونجتی رات میں!
قریب آیا اور قریب۔ اس کا چہرہ نور کی طرح تھا۔
اس کی آنکھیں ایک لمحے کے لیے پھیل گئیں۔ اس نے ایک آخری گہری سانس کھینچی
پھر چاندنی میں اس کی انگلی ہل گئی
اس کی مسکٹ نے چاندنی کو بکھرا دیا،
چاندنی میں اس کی چھاتی کو توڑ دیا اور اسے خبردار کیا – اس کی موت کے ساتھ۔
وہ مڑا۔ وہ مغرب کی طرف بڑھا۔ وہ نہیں جانتا تھا کہ کون کھڑا ہے۔
جھک گئی، اپنے سر کے ساتھ، اپنے ہی خون سے بھیگی!
صبح تک اس نے اسے سنا نہیں تھا، اور اس کا چہرہ سننے کے لئے بھوری ہو گیا تھا
کیسے بیس، مالک مکان کی بیٹی،
زمیندار کی کالی آنکھوں والی بیٹی،
چاندنی میں اس کی محبت کو دیکھا تھا، اور وہیں اندھیرے میں مر گیا۔
پیچھے، وہ دیوانے کی طرح تیز ہوا، آسمان پر لعنت بھیجتا ہوا،
اس کے پیچھے سفید سڑک تمباکو نوشی کے ساتھ اور اس کا ریپیر اونچا نشان لگا ہوا تھا۔
سنہری دوپہر میں خون کی سرخی اُس کے شعلے تھے۔ شراب سرخ اس کا مخملی کوٹ تھا۔
جب انہوں نے اسے ہائی وے پر گولی مار دی،
شاہراہ پر کتے کی طرح نیچے،
اور وہ ہائی وے پر اپنے خون میں لت پت پڑا، اس کے گلے میں فیتے کا گچھا تھا۔
. . .
اور اب بھی سردیوں کی رات کے بارے میں، وہ کہتے ہیں، جب ہوا درختوں میں ہوتی ہے،
جب چاند ابر آلود سمندروں پر پھینکا ہوا بھوت گیلیون ہے،
جب سڑک جامنی موور پر چاندنی کا ربن ہے،
ایک ہائی وے مین سوار ہو کر آتا ہے-
سواری – سواری –
ایک ہائی وے مین سوار ہو کر آتا ہے، پرانی سرائے کے دروازے تک۔
موچیوں کے اوپر وہ اندھیرے سرائے کے صحن میں چیختا اور بجتا ہے۔
وہ شٹر پر اپنے کوڑے سے تھپتھپاتا ہے، لیکن سب کچھ بند اور روک دیا جاتا ہے۔
وہ کھڑکی کی طرف سیٹی بجاتا ہے اور وہاں کس کا انتظار کرنا چاہیے۔
لیکن زمیندار کی کالی آنکھوں والی بیٹی،
بیس، زمیندار کی بیٹی،
اس کے لمبے سیاہ بالوں میں گہرے سرخ محبت کی گرہ لگا رہی ہے۔
جیسا کہ میں نے 16 اگست 2021 کی اپنی پوسٹ میں لکھا، کابل اور افغانستان کا زوال؛ ہم کابل اور افغانستان کے زوال کے اس ہفتے کے آخر میں طالبان کی فاتح قوتوں اور ہماری پوٹیمکن ولیج حکومت کے خاتمے اور اس کی سراب کی فوج کے خاتمے کی دلکش تصاویر کے ساتھ سامنا کر رہے ہیں جنہوں نے مزاحمت میں ایک بھی گولی نہیں چلائی، ایسی تصاویر جو سیگون کے زوال کو یاد کرتی ہیں۔ 1975 میں متوازی حالات میں۔
اگر امریکہ نئی حکومت کی پالیسیوں کی تشکیل میں میز پر بیٹھنا چاہتا ہے، تو ہمیں اسے آزادی کی جائز تحریک کے طور پر تسلیم کرنا چاہیے اور سامراج کے غیر ملکی غنڈوں کا کردار ادا کرنے سے انکار کرنا چاہیے۔ ہم گاجر سے جیت سکتے ہیں جو ہم نے چھڑی سے ہارا ہے۔
فوجیوں کو نہیں بلکہ انسانی امداد اور مادی مدد کے ساتھ سفارت کار بھیجیں۔ یہ عالمگیر انسانی حقوق کے اصولوں کی پابندی سے مشروط ہو سکتا ہے۔ طالبان کو امریکہ اور پوری دنیا سے کچھ درکار ہے۔ قانونی حیثیت کی پہچان، اور یہ ایک طاقتور لیور ہو سکتا ہے۔
جیسا کہ شیکسپیئر کا ہنری پانچواں کہتا ہے؛ “جب نرمی اور ظلم کسی بادشاہی کے لیے کھیلتے ہیں، تو نرم ہاتھ یقینی فاتح ہوتا ہے۔”
افغانستان میں امریکہ کی مہاکاوی صلیبی جنگ اور سامراجی مہم جوئی کا آغاز سوویت یونین کو ایک ناقابل شکست حملے اور فتح میں پھنسا کر اسے گرانے کی ایک شاندار کامیاب مہم کے ساتھ ہوا، جو بعد میں ایک سبق بھول گیا، جس میں ہم مسلح، تربیت یافتہ، مالی امداد اور اکثر براہ راست کمانڈ کرتے تھے۔ اور آزادی کے جنگجوؤں کے ساتھ مل کر لڑے جو آج جنگی سردار ہیں جو حقیقت میں افغانستان پر حکومت کرتے ہیں۔ ان امریکی مؤکلوں میں بدنام زمانہ مذہبی اسکالر اسامہ بن لادن بھی شامل تھا، اور میرے خیال میں ہم سب جانتے ہیں کہ اس نے کتنا اچھا کام کیا۔
ایسا لگتا ہے کہ ہم نے اپنے سامراج کی ناکامیوں سے کچھ نہیں سیکھا۔ یہ وقت مختلف ہو سکتا ہے، لیکن مجھے شک ہے.
جب تک ہم ان قوتوں اور حالات کو تبدیل نہیں کرتے جو جنگ کو اشرافیہ کے لیے فائدہ مند اور اقتدار کی مرکزیت میں حکام کے لیے مفید بناتی ہیں۔
یہ پہلی بار نہیں ہو گا کہ طالبان، ایک پا
o لفظ کا مطلب ہے “طلبہ”، جس نے افغانستان پر حکومت کی ہے، جیسا کہ انہوں نے 1996 سے 2001 تک پاکستان کے پراکسی کے طور پر کیا، یہاں تک کہ 911 کے بعد امریکہ نے حملہ کیا۔ ”; سکندر اعظم کی جانشین ریاست باختر، منگولوں، برطانوی سلطنت اور سوویت یونین سب کو اس کی نالی پر توڑ دیا گیا۔ یہ عظیم سلطنتوں کی جائے پیدائش بھی رہی ہے جو پھر بکھر گئیں۔ پارتھیا، سیتھیا، بدھ کشان، سفید ہن، کیدارائٹس، ہندو شاہی خاندان، اور نادر شاہ کی سلطنت۔ جدید افغانستان کی بنیاد احمد شاہ درانی نے 1747 میں مغلوں کی باقیات اور فارس میں نادر شاہ کے وارثوں سے رکھی تھی، قندھار پر قبضے کے لیے فارس کے صفوی خاندان اور ہندوستان کے مغلوں کے درمیان باہمی طور پر تباہ کن تنازعہ کے بعد۔
اور اب، ایسا لگتا ہے، امریکہ کی باری ہے۔ ہم انسانوں کو کیا پاگل پن حاصل ہے کہ ایک طرف ادارہ جاتی نفسیاتی غصہ اور جنگ کے تشدد اور دوسری طرف عوامی وسائل اور دولت کی سرمایہ دارانہ چوری اور فریب کاری کے موہک جھوٹ اور فریب کے ساتھ ہم دوسروں پر غلبہ حاصل کرنے اور ان پر قابو پانے کے لیے مجبور ہیں۔ ?
ہم خوف، طاقت اور طاقت کے تباہ کن شیطانی چکر اور ویگنیرین رنگ سے کیسے بچ سکتے ہیں؟
ہم اپنی سامراجی ناکامیوں سے کیا سبق سیکھ سکتے ہیں جو پراکسیوں اور بالادستی کے اشرافیہ کے ذریعے بالکانائزڈ فرقہ وارانہ اور نسلی خطوط پر تقسیم اور فتح حاصل کر سکتے ہیں، جنگجوؤں، فریب خوردہ کلائنٹ ریاستوں، اور ریاستی دہشت گردی اور استبداد کی حکمت عملیوں اور عالمی سطح پر کارسرل ریاست کے نگرانی، اختلاف رائے کا جبر، سرحدوں اور پولیس، انضمام، تعاون، بدعنوان حکمرانوں اور کٹھ پتلی حکومتوں کے پیادوں کے ذریعے نوآبادیاتی استحصال، اور ہماری اقدار اور نظریات، جمہوریت اور عالمی انسانی حقوق کے ہتھیار بنانے کے ساتھ۔ ہمارے تسلط کے جال کے لئے پروپیگنڈا چارہ؟
جو ہتھیار اٹھاتا ہے موت برداشت کرتا ہے۔ زندگی کا انتخاب کریں.
آئیے طاقت کے سماجی استعمال کو ترک کر دیں۔
آئیے نیکی کے نفاذ کے لیے کوئی فوج نہ بھیجیں۔
جیسا کہ میں نے 19 اپریل 2021 کی اپنی پوسٹ میں لکھا، بائیڈن نے افغانستان میں امریکہ کی جنگ کے خاتمے کا اعلان کیا: ہورے، اور اس کے ساتھ گڈ لک؛ افغانستان میں ہم انتقام کے لیے آئے، اور فائدے کے لیے رہے۔ دونوں کو چھوڑنا مشکل ثابت ہوا ہے۔
صدر بائیڈن نے افغانستان میں امریکہ کی جنگ کے خاتمے کا اعلان کیا ہے۔ یہ میں جشن مناتا ہوں، امن کی خبروں پر میری خوشی صرف اس حقیقت سے چھائی ہوئی ہے کہ ہم پہلے بھی یہاں آ چکے ہیں۔ امن کا اعلان کرنا ایک چیز ہے۔ امن برقرار رکھنا ایک اور چیز ہے۔
2019 ایک بڑی امید کا سال تھا جو المناک ناکامی سے دوچار تھا، جس کے اختتام اور نئے سال کا آغاز افغانستان میں 18 سال کی جنگ کے بعد ایک نازک امن کے ساتھ ہوا، چند دنوں بعد مجموعی طور پر چھ گھنٹے کی لڑائی میں ایک امن ہار گیا۔ ایک غار کی تاریکی، معاہدے کی خلاف ورزی کرتے ہوئے ایک حملے کے دوران ان کے ہیلی کاپٹروں کی تباہی سے طالبان کے قلعے میں پھنسے سیلوں کو بچانا، اشتعال انگیزی کا ایک ایسا مشن جس کا مقصد امن کو سبوتاژ کرنا تھا، جس میں صدیوں پر محیط تہذیبی تصادم کی پوری تاریخ تھی۔ چار آدمیوں نے برداشت کیا جنہوں نے سکندر اعظم کے سغدیان چٹان پر قبضے کی یاد میں ایک پہاڑ پر آزادانہ چڑھائی کی اور پھر چپکے سے، غلط سمت اور درستگی کے ساتھ ایک ایسی طاقت کو شکست دی جس نے SEALs کی ایک ہوائی حملہ آور ٹیم کو مغلوب کر دیا تھا۔
جیسا کہ بہت سے واقعات کے ساتھ جو پتھر پھینکنے میں الفاظ کے رجعت کے طور پر سامنے آتے ہیں، یہ ایک حکمت عملی کی کامیابی اور ایک سٹریٹجک ناکامی، بہادری کا ایک شاندار عمل اور ایک سامراجی اشتعال انگیزی تھی جس نے ہمیشہ کے لیے جنگ کے جنون سے ہماری دستبرداری کو سبوتاژ کیا۔
یہ ایک تھیٹریکل سیٹ پیس ایکشن تھا جو ایک کیسس بیلی فراہم کرنے کے لیے ڈیزائن کیا گیا تھا، جو کہ امن کو سبوتاژ کرنے کا ایک خفیہ مشن تھا جس کا نمونہ جاپانیوں نے 1931 میں منچوریا پر اپنے حملے کو جائز قرار دینے کے لیے استعمال کیا تھا، مکڈن واقعہ، جس میں ایک جاپانی فوجی شامل تھا۔ لاپتہ آدمی جسے بچانے کے لیے دوسرے فوجی بھیجے گئے تھے۔
بائیڈن کا امن امریکہ کی روح، دنیا کے تئیں ہماری حقیقی اقدار اور ارادوں اور مقصد کے اتحاد کا امتحان ہوگا۔ یہ وہ لائن ہے جس کی مجھے امید ہے کہ ہم پکڑ سکتے ہیں، کیونکہ اگر ہمارے منافع خوروں اور جسے آئزن ہاور نے ملٹری-انڈسٹریل کمپلیکس کہا تھا وہ دولت اور طاقت کی خدمت میں ایک بار پھر امن کے مواقع کو سبوتاژ کرتے ہیں، جیسا کہ ٹرمپ نے 2019 میں کیا تھا اور امپیریل جاپان کی افواج 1931 میں کیا، اس لمحے سے سامنے آنے والے ممکنہ مستقبل ایک بہتر دنیا کا وعدہ نہیں کرتے۔
ہم جانتے ہیں کہ پرل ہاربر میں آخری بار کیا ہوا تھا۔
جیسا کہ میں نے 2 جنوری 2020 کی اپنی پوسٹ میں لکھا، افغانستان میں ہمیشہ کے لیے جنگ کا خاتمہ؟ نیا سال امن کا تحفہ، یا اس کا امکان لے کر آتا ہے، جو ہمیں افغانستان میں اپنی 18 سالہ ہمیشہ کے لیے جاری جنگ کو ختم کرنے اور وہاں اپنے 12,000 فوجیوں کو واپس لانے کا موقع فراہم کر سکتا ہے۔
اس مہاکاوی تنازعہ میں لاکھوں افراد ہلاک ہوچکے ہیں جس کا کسی کو کوئی فائدہ نہیں ہوا، ایک ایسی جنگ جس میں مقاصد، اتحاد اور طاقت کے برج بے کار اور بدلتے رہے ہیں، ایک سیلاب امریکہ نے بالٹی بریگیڈ کے ساتھ مخالفت کرنے کی کوشش کی ہے۔
اگر امن قائم کیا جا سکتا ہے، اگر
ایک قوم کو ہمپٹی ڈمپٹی کی طرح دوبارہ اکٹھا کیا جا سکتا ہے، یہ ایک معجزہ ہو گا، لیکن ویتنام جیسی ایک قوم جس میں امریکہ شکست کھا کر بھاگ جاتا ہے اور اپنے اتحادیوں کو ایک ایسے ناقابل تسخیر دشمن کے حوالے کر دیتا ہے جو ایک مثالی معاشرے کے اپنے وژن کو ہر ایک پر نافذ کرنے کے لیے وقف ہو جاتا ہے۔ اس طرح کا موازنہ بہت سے طریقوں سے محدود ہے، ان میں سے ایک عجیب حقیقت یہ ہے کہ امریکہ ہمارے سویلین کنٹریکٹرز کی طرف سے ادا کی جانے والی خراج تحسین کے ذریعے طالبان کو سبسڈی دے رہا ہے جبکہ ہماری فوجیں ہر طرف سے جنگی جرائم کی زد میں آنے والی گڑھے کی لڑائی میں ایک دوسرے کو بچا رہی ہیں۔ غیر انسانی اور تہذیبی اقدار کا نقصان۔
جنگ چند لوگوں کے لیے اچھے کاروبار کا باعث بنتی ہے، اور بہت سے لوگوں کے لیے ناقابل فہم ہولناکی۔
جیسا کہ رحیم فیض اور کیتھی گینن نے ہف پوسٹ میں بیان کیا ہے۔ “معاہدے کا ایک اہم ستون، جسے امریکہ اور طالبان ایک سال سے زیادہ عرصے سے ختم کر رہے ہیں، تنازع کے دونوں اطراف کے افغانوں کے درمیان براہ راست مذاکرات ہیں۔
توقع ہے کہ امریکہ طالبان امن معاہدے پر دستخط ہونے کے دو ہفتوں کے اندر اندر افغان مذاکرات ہوں گے۔ وہ ممکنہ طور پر فیصلہ کریں گے کہ جنگ کے بعد کا افغانستان کیسا ہوگا، اور طالبان کیا کردار ادا کریں گے۔ مذاکرات میں بہت سے موضوعات کا احاطہ کیا جائے گا، جیسا کہ خواتین کے حقوق، آزادی اظہار اور دسیوں ہزار طالبان جنگجوؤں کی قسمت، نیز افغانستان کے جنگجوؤں سے تعلق رکھنے والی بھاری مسلح ملیشیا جنہوں نے اس کے بعد سے دولت اور طاقت جمع کی ہے۔ طالبان کا خاتمہ۔”
اور 29 فروری 2020 کی میری بعد کی پوسٹ میں، افغانستان میں امن؟ ہم آج امریکہ اور طالبان کے درمیان تاریخی امن معاہدے پر دستخط کا جشن منا رہے ہیں، اور اپنے فوجیوں کو 18 سالہ جنگ سے گھر واپس لانے کا موقع ہے جس نے خون اور خزانے کی بڑی قیمت پر بہت کم حاصل کیا ہے۔ یہ ایک عارضی، مشروط امن ہے، جو ایک شاندار دستاویز میں وضع کیا گیا ہے جو ہمیشہ کے لیے شاندار سفارت کاری کی ایک مثال رہے گا، جس میں دونوں فریق فتح کا دعویٰ کر سکتے ہیں۔
امریکہ نے اپنے طالبان اتحادیوں کے ذریعے ایک عظیم دشمن القاعدہ کی تباہی اور نامنظور جیت لی ہے۔ یہ طالبان کو ایک سنی قوم کے طور پر بھی پیش کرتا ہے جس میں ایران کی مشرقی سرحد پر براہ راست امریکی تسلیم کیا جاتا ہے، جو کہ جغرافیائی سیاسی حکمت عملی کے لحاظ سے ایک نااہل جیت ہے۔
طالبان اپنی قوم کو غیر ملکی سامراج سے نجات دلانے کے لیے اپنی طویل جنگ میں امریکہ پر فتح کا دعویٰ کر سکتے ہیں۔ ہم نے اپنے بزدل احمق صدر ٹرمپ کے براہ راست حکم سے طالبان کو قانونی حیثیت دے دی ہے اور تحریری طور پر اپنی مکمل شکست تسلیم کر لی ہے، جن کے الفاظ کا کوئی مطلب نہیں ہے۔ یہ صرف اپنے اتحادیوں کو چھوڑنے اور کوڑے مارے کتوں کی طرح افغانستان سے بھاگنا باقی ہے۔
ایسا نہیں ہوسکتا ہے کہ امریکہ میں بیانیہ تیار کیا جائے گا، کاتا جائے گا اور بیچا جائے گا، یا تو ہماری حکومت اور نہ ہی بے معنی تباہ کن ہمیشہ کی جنگوں سے تنگ قوم، لیکن میں آپ کو گارنٹی دیتا ہوں کہ دنیا اس کی کتنی تشریح کرے گی۔
لیکن یہی وجہ نہیں ہے کہ میں اس معاہدے سے ملنے والے امن کے موقع کے بارے میں بے چین اور خوفزدہ ہوں۔ میں جنگ کے خاتمے کے موقع پر، کسی بھی موقع پر خوشی اور فاتحانہ خوشی کے ساتھ رقص کیوں نہیں کر رہا ہوں؟
جیسا کہ جینیفر ہینسلر CNN میں لکھتی ہیں؛ “چار صفحات پر مشتمل معاہدے میں کہا گیا ہے کہ طالبان “القاعدہ سمیت کسی بھی گروہ یا فرد کو افغانستان کی سرزمین کو امریکہ اور اس کے اتحادیوں کی سلامتی کو خطرے میں ڈالنے سے روکنے کے لیے اقدامات کریں گے۔” ان اقدامات میں یہ وعدے شامل ہیں کہ طالبان اپنے ارکان کو “امریکہ اور اس کے اتحادیوں کی سلامتی کے لیے خطرہ بننے والے گروہوں یا افراد کے ساتھ تعاون نہ کرنے کی ہدایت کریں گے” اور یہ کہ “افغانستان میں کسی بھی گروہ یا فرد کو امریکہ کی سلامتی کے لیے خطرہ بننے سے روکیں گے۔ اور اس کے اتحادی، اور انہیں بھرتی، تربیت اور فنڈ ریزنگ سے روکیں گے اور اس معاہدے کے وعدوں کے مطابق ان کی میزبانی نہیں کریں گے۔”
“معاہدے کے متن میں خواتین یا سول سوسائٹی کے تحفظ کے حوالے سے کوئی مخصوص زبان نہیں ہے،” عالمی انسانی حقوق اور جمہوریت، اور خاص طور پر خواتین کے حقوق جیسی چھوٹی چھوٹی باتیں، جو کہ امریکہ کی ریپبلکن حکومت کے لیے کوئی اہمیت نہیں رکھتیں۔ ملکی اور عالمی دونوں شعبوں میں آزادی اور مساوات کا خاتمہ جو کہ تینوں دھڑوں کا بنیادی ہدف ہے جو غداری کی پارٹی بن چکی ہے پر قبضہ کرنے کے لیے متحد ہیں۔ Gideonite بنیاد پرستوں کی پدرانہ حکومت اور جنسی دہشت گردی، سفید فام بالادستی جو قانون کی حکمرانی کو مکمل طور پر ختم کرنا چاہتے ہیں، اور Plutocrats جو ہمیں غیر انسانی اور غلام بنائے گا۔
یہ خیال کہ ہم سب کو قانون کے تحت مساوی حقوق حاصل ہیں، ریپبلکن اتحاد کے لیے ایک پریشانی ہے جو فورتھ ریخ کے طور پر پوری دنیا پر فاشزم کا ظلم مسلط کرنا چاہتا ہے۔ وہ القاعدہ اور آئی ایس آئی ایس جیسے قابل عمل بیرونی خطرات کو محدود اور محدود کرنا چاہتے ہیں، انہیں ختم نہیں کرنا چاہتے، کیونکہ ایسے دشمن قوم پرستوں کے خوف اور غصے کو بھڑکانے اور ہمارے اپنے شہریوں کو طاقت اور کنٹرول کی آمرانہ ریاست کے تابع کرنے میں بہت کارآمد ہیں۔ نگرانی اور پولیسنگ کا انسداد بغاوت ماڈل۔ ظالموں کو ایسی دھمکیاں ضرور پیدا کرنی چاہئیں اگر وہ حقیقت میں موجود نہیں ہیں۔
کیسے
مارے خلاف دہشت گردی کی بہت سی کارروائیاں ایسے پیادوں نے کی ہیں جو اپنے حقیقی آقاؤں سے بے خبر تھے؟ امریکہ عالمی سطح پر خوف اور نفرت کے بیج بونے کے لیے ایسی کتنی ہی قابلِ انکار قوتوں کو استعمال کرتا ہے، تاریخی طور پر ہمارے سامراج اور اب پوری دنیا میں جمہوریت کی سرکوبی کے لیے؟
ہم اپنی غلامی کے میکانزم اور ڈھانچے کو چیلنج کرنے میں ناکام رہتے ہیں کیونکہ وہ اچھی طرح سے پوشیدہ، منحرف، لطیف، دھوئیں اور شیشوں سے بنے ہیں۔ خون، عقیدے اور مٹی کے فسطائیت جو اب پوری دنیا میں دوبارہ سر اٹھا رہے ہیں، ان کو اکثر باہر کے طور پر نمایاں کیا جاتا ہے، لیکن وہ انسانی تاریخ میں مرکزی حیثیت رکھتے ہیں۔ چوتھے ریخ کا طویل کھیل، اس کے پوشیدہ خیمے کئی دہائیوں کے اثر و رسوخ کی کارروائیوں کے دوران طاقت کو بے دریغ پھیلاتے اور اس پر قبضہ کرتے رہتے ہیں جب تک کہ یہ ہمیں اپنی گرفت میں نہ لے لے، اس کو کم نہیں سمجھا جانا چاہیے۔
لہٰذا امن کی خبروں پر میری خوشی ہماری حکومت پر میرے عدم اعتماد پر چھائی ہوئی ہے، امن قائم کرنے اور اپنے فوجیوں کو اس شرط پر گھر لانے کے لیے کہ طالبان اپنے علاقوں میں القاعدہ اور کسی بھی دہشت گرد کے خلاف پولیس کر رہے ہیں، ایسے خطرات سے جو وہ امریکہ کو بچانے کے لیے بے بس ہیں۔ امن کو سبوتاژ کرتا ہے اور اس معاہدے کو ٹرمپ کی انتخابی مہم کا تماشا بناتا ہے جس کی ناکامی کا الزام دوسروں پر لگایا جا سکتا ہے۔
مجھے امید ہے کہ اس میں میں غلط ہوں، اور ہم جلد ہی اپنے پیاروں کے ساتھ مل جائیں گے جو عزت اور بہادری کے ساتھ ایک ایسی حکومت کی خدمت کرتے ہیں جس کے پاس کوئی نہیں ہے، اور یہ کہ ہم کبھی بھی جنگیں نہیں لڑیں گے۔
Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from the Colonial Period to the Present Era, Zaragosa Vargas
El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, Carrie Gibson
The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, Miriam Pawel
The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States, John Storm Roberts
My Art, My Life: An Autobiography, Diego Rivera
The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, Carlos Fuentes intro
Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, Luis Alberto Urrea
The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, Dolores Tierney, Deborah Shaw, & Ann Davies, Editors
Hispanic-American Literature
Bless Me Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya
The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, The Sum of Our Days, Eva Luna, The Stories of Eva Luna, The Infinite Plan, Daughter of Fortune, Zorro, Island Beneath the Sea, Ines of My Soul, Maya’s Notebook, The Japanese Lover, The Sum of Our Days, Conversations With Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea, Isabele Allende
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Yo!, In the Time of the Butterflies, In the Name of Salome, The Woman I Kept to Myself, Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA, Something to Declare, Julia Alvarez
Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion, Silvio Sirias
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
The Moths and other stories, Under the Feet of Jesus, Their Dogs Came with Them, Helena ViramontesT
Hummingbird’s Daughter, Queen of America, Into the Beautiful North, The Water Museum, The House of Broken Angels, Tijuana Book of the Dead, Luis Alberto Urrea
So Far From God, Peel My Love Like an Onion, The Guardians, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, Watercolor Women / Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, I Ask the Impossible, Ana Castillo
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, Oscar Hijuelos
The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollaring Creek and other stories, Caramelo, My Wicked Wicked Ways: Poems, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Harold Bloom
House of the Impossible Beauties, Joseph Cassara
Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia
Who is an African American, and who decides? What is race, and what are its consequences as an idea for a nation founded on the principle of universal human equality which recognizes no such differences under the law, but which historically has seldom behaved so?
Of the legacies of our history, there are those which must be kept and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and those others tell about us. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
No matter where we begin with hierarchies of belonging and otherness, we always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
All that matters in the end is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
African American History & Literature
African-American History
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, Nikole Hannah-Jones
How We Fight White Supremacy, Akiba Solomon & Kenrya Rankin (Editors)
Stamped from the Beginning, How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X Kendi
Creating Black America: African-American History and Its Meanings 1619 to the Present, Nell Irvin Painter
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, Clint Smith
On Juneteenth, Annette Gordon-Reed
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley
Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, David Zucchino
Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, Bloom & Martin
The Dead Are Arising, Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008, The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country (Gates & Cornel West), Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Africana (Gates & Kwame Anthony Appiah), Harlem Renaissance Lives: From the African American National Biography (Gates & Higgenbotham eds), The Annotated African American Folktales (Gates & Tatar eds), Henry Louis Gates Jr.
The African Diaspora, Toyin Falola
Parting the Waters: Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-63, Pillar of Fire: 1963-65, At Canaan’s Edge: 1965-68, Taylor Branch
His Truth Is Marching on: John Lewis and the Power of Hope, Jon Meacham, John Lewis (Afterword)
Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy, Robert Farris Thompson
This was Harlem, Charles Anderson
The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Richard Williams
The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, Andrea Elliott
African-American Literature
Dreams Of My Father, Barak Obama
Between the World and Me, We Were Eight Years In Power, The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele, Angela Y. Davis (Foreword)
A Testament of Hope: the essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther King, James Washington editor
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr, Clayborne Carson ed
Black Power: the Politics of Liberation, Stokely Carmichael
Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, Richard Bruce Nugent, Thomas H. Wirth, Henry Louis Gates Jr
The Angela Davis Reader
The Cornel West Reader, Black Prophetic Fire, Hope on a Tightrope: words and wisdom, Cornel West
I Am Not Your Negro (Peck ed), Go Tell It On The Mountain, Just Above My Head, Jimmy’s Blues and other poems, The Price of the Ticket: collected nonfiction 1948-1985, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and other conversations, James Baldwin
The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois
W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, David Levering Lewis
Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, and Then Again: a Zora Neal Hurston Reader, Alice Walker ed, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dust Tracks On A Road, Collected Plays, Zora Neal Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past And Present (Amistad Literary Series) Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kwame Anthony Appiah
Native Son, The Long Dream, Black Boy, American Hunger, Pagan Spain, The Richard Wright Reader, Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Critical Prespectives Past And Present, Gates & Appiah eds
Cane, Jean Toomer
The Free-Lance Pallbearers, The Plays, New & Collected Poems 1964-2006, Going Too Far: essays, Mixing It Up: essays, Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto, Ishmael Reed
The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor
All Night Visitors, Clarence Major
Kindred, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia E. Butler
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Harold Bloom ed
The Color Purple, Living by the Word, The Temple of My Familiar, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems, The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers , The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, Alice Walker
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom ed
A Langston Hughes Reader
Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past And Present, Gates & Appiah eds
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, Complete Stories, Maya Angelou
The LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka Reader, The Fiction of LeRoi Jones, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, S.O.S. : Poems 1961-2013, Amiri Baraka
Beloved , Song of Soloman, The Bluest Eye, A Mercy, Jazz, Desdemona, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (the Harvard Lectures), Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, Henry Louis Gates Jr. & Kwame Anthony Appiah eds
Bedouin Hornbook, Djibot Baghostus’s Run, Atet A. D., Bass Cathedral, School of Udhra, Whatsaid Serif, Splay Anthem, Nod House, Blue Fasa, Nathaniel Mackey
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, The Collected Poems, The Collected Plays, ZAMI: a new spelling of my name, Audre Lorde
John Henry Days, The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
The Devil in Silver, Lucretia and the Kroons, Big Machine, The Ballad of Black Tom, The Changeling, Victor Lavalle
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: an American Lyric, Citizen: an American Lyric, Just Us, Claudia Rankine
The World Doesn’t Require You, Rion Amilcar Scott
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Black Looks: Race and Representation, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, bell hooks
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Words Are All We Have, Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, Jean-Michel Basquiat
The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste
The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, Amanda Gorman
The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr.
Palmares, Gayl Jones
Sho, Douglas Kearney
Living Weapon: Poems, Rowan Ricardo Phillip
Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the #MeToo Movement, Tarana Burke
The world rejoices in the anniversary of the Fall of the British Raj, and Independence Day in India and Pakistan, nations which embody the civilizational duality of the subcontinent, long afflicted with sectarian division and its weaponization in service to power as a legacy of colonialism, and of the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle.
Fragmented at the origins of Independence like the Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror in Anderson’s fairytale The Snow Queen, a thousand conflicting narratives and national identities born anew in pain and loss as a bifurcated myth of Exile like that of Mircea Cartarescu in his novel of Bucharest, Blinding; images which distort like those of funhouse mirrors, which lure and deceive as the lies and illusions of falsification, which capture and rob us of our uniqueness in endless repetition but which also exalt us into Infinity; history is a Wilderness of Mirrors in which we wander lost and alone, seeking to reclaim our interdependence, community, and wholeness.
While the words of Gandhi are a light of nations and known to the whole world, I would like to amplify here my favorite quotes from India’s other national treasure, the brilliant and visionary Arundhati Roy:
“The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”
“Use your art to fight.”
“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”
“Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.”
“Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.”
Ancestor spirits who embody the soul of India and the best of our infinite possibilities of becoming human among myriads of futures, represent ideals of masculine and feminine beauty in their actions toward others, and guide our choices about how to be human together, Gandi and Arundati Roy belong to India but also to all humankind and our universal struggle to become human.
When the moment of decision comes we must place our lives in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the marginalized and the erased, or turn away; choose the path of beauty and not of disfigurement of the soul.
When the forces of state tyranny and terror, of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, of hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, come to claim us and steal our souls, let them find not a humankind subjugated by despair and learned helplessness nor divided in service to power, but united in solidarity and liberty, for the use of force and brutality in repression of dissent is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of refusal to obey.
Who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled is free, and becomes Unconquered as a living Autonomous Zone, and this no tyranny can take from us.
Let us seize the gates of our prisons, and be free.
How shall we answer the terror of our absurdity and nothingness? With solidarity and resistance to tyranny and divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging, and to all sectarian fascisms of blood, faith, and soil; this will ever be my answer, for we create ourselves anew when we refuse to submit to authority and authorized identities and become Unconquered and free, as Living Autonomous Zones.
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
One may also welcome total freedom and self-ownership with joy, as we do today, for with Independence comes limitless possibilities of becoming human, and our exploration of the unknown within us is only beginning.
Celebrate with me Independence Day as a liminal and transformative time of exploring unknowns beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the defiance of authority, the sabotage of hierarchies and of force and control, and the violation of normalities.
Let us run amok and be ungovernable.
Gandhi film trailer
References
Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies
by Blair Davis (Editor), Robert Anderson (Editor), Jan Walls (Editor)
My Seditious Heart collects two decades of essays, in a thousand pages; one could begin with the foundational The Algebra of Infinite Justice, a favorite of mine as it references and extends William S. Burroughs’ reimagination of Marxist dialectics and Sartrean alienation as The Algebra of Need, and Broken Republic which is an al fresco portrait of India.
15 अगस्त 2026 ब्रिटिश राज का अंत: भारत और पाकिस्तान में स्वतंत्रता दिवस
इस सप्ताह के अंत में दुनिया ब्रिटिश राज के अंत की सालगिरह पर और भारत और पाकिस्तान में स्वतंत्रता दिवस पर खुशी मनाती है, जो देश उपमहाद्वीप के सभ्यतागत द्वंद्व का प्रतीक हैं, जो लंबे समय से सांप्रदायिक विभाजन से पीड़ित हैं और सत्ता की विरासत के रूप में सत्ता की सेवा में इसके हथियार हैं। उपनिवेशवाद, और उपनिवेशवाद विरोधी संघर्ष की थोपी गई स्थितियाँ।
एंडरसन की कहानी द स्नो क्वीन में हॉबगोब्लिन के ब्रोकन मिरर की तरह स्वतंत्रता के मूल में खंडित, बुखारेस्ट, ब्लाइंडिंग के अपने उपन्यास में मिर्सिया कार्टारेस्कु की तरह निर्वासन के द्विभाजित मिथक के रूप में दर्द और हानि में एक हजार परस्पर विरोधी कथाएं और राष्ट्रीय पहचान पैदा हुई; छवियां जो फ़नहाउस दर्पणों की तरह विकृत होती हैं, जो झूठ और मिथ्याकरण के भ्रम के रूप में लुभाती हैं और धोखा देती हैं, जो हमें अंतहीन दोहराव में हमारी विशिष्टता को पकड़ती हैं और लूटती हैं लेकिन जो हमें अनंत में भी बढ़ाती हैं; इतिहास दर्पणों का जंगल है जिसमें हम खोए हुए और अकेले घूमते हैं, अपनी अन्योन्याश्रयता, समुदाय और पूर्णता को पुनः प्राप्त करने की कोशिश करते हैं।
जबकि गांधी के शब्द राष्ट्रों के प्रकाश हैं और पूरी दुनिया को ज्ञात हैं, मैं यहां भारत के अन्य राष्ट्रीय खजाने, शानदार और दूरदर्शी अरुंधति रॉय से अपने पसंदीदा उद्धरणों को बढ़ाना चाहूंगा:
“मुश्किल यह है कि एक बार जब आप इसे देख लेते हैं, तो आप इसे अनदेखा नहीं कर सकते। और एक बार जब आप इसे देख लेते हैं, तो चुप रहना, कुछ न कहना, बोलने जैसा राजनीतिक कार्य बन जाता है। कोई मासूमियत नहीं है। किसी भी तरह से, आप जवाबदेह हैं।”
“लड़ने के लिए अपनी कला का प्रयोग करें।”
“बीसवीं सदी के अधिकांश नरसंहारों का कारण किसी न किसी प्रकार का राष्ट्रवाद था। झंडे रंगीन कपड़े के टुकड़े होते हैं जिनका उपयोग सरकारें पहले लोगों के दिमाग को सिकोड़ने के लिए करती हैं और फिर मृतकों को दफनाने के लिए औपचारिक कफन के रूप में। ”
“आतंकवाद लक्षण है, बीमारी नहीं।”
“किसी भी तरह से, बदलाव आएगा। यह खूनी हो सकता है, या यह सुंदर हो सकता है। यह हम पर निर्भर करता है।”
जब निर्णय का क्षण आता है जब हमें अपने जीवन को उन लोगों के साथ संतुलन में रखना चाहिए जिन्हें फ्रांट्ज़ फैनन ने पृथ्वी का मनहूस कहा, शक्तिहीन और वंचित, हाशिए पर और मिट गए, या दूर हो गए, सुंदरता का मार्ग चुनें और नहीं आत्मा की विकृति से।
जब राज्य के अत्याचार और आतंक की ताकतें, खून, विश्वास और मिट्टी के फासीवाद की, धन, शक्ति और विशेषाधिकार के कुलीन आधिपत्य की, अपनेपन और बहिष्कृत अन्यता के पदानुक्रम, हम पर दावा करने और हमारी आत्माओं को चुराने के लिए आते हैं, तो उन्हें खोजने दें निराशा और सीखी हुई लाचारी के अधीन मानव जाति नहीं है और न ही सत्ता की सेवा में विभाजित है, बल्कि एकजुटता और स्वतंत्रता में एकजुट है, क्योंकि असंतोष के दमन में बल और क्रूरता का उपयोग खोखला और भंगुर है, और पालन करने से इनकार करने के बिंदु पर विफल रहता है।
जो झुकने से इंकार करता है और मजबूर नहीं किया जा सकता वह स्वतंत्र है, और एक जीवित स्वायत्त क्षेत्र के रूप में अजेय हो जाता है, और यह कोई अत्याचार हमसे नहीं ले सकता है।
आइए हम अपने जेलों के फाटकों को जब्त कर लें, और स्वतंत्र रहें।
हम अपनी बेहूदगी और शून्यता के आतंक का जवाब कैसे देंगे? अत्याचार के प्रति एकजुटता और प्रतिरोध के साथ और अपवर्जनात्मक अन्यता के विभाजन और अपनेपन के पदानुक्रम, और रक्त, विश्वास और मिट्टी के सभी सांप्रदायिक फासीवादों के लिए; यह हमेशा मेरा जवाब होगा, क्योंकि जब हम प्राधिकरण और अधिकृत पहचानों को प्रस्तुत करने से इनकार करते हैं और जीवित स्वायत्त क्षेत्रों के रूप में अजेय और मुक्त हो जाते हैं, तो हम खुद को नया बनाते हैं।
फासीवाद का एक ही जवाब हो सकता है; फिर कभी नहीं!
कोई भी पूर्ण स्वतंत्रता और स्व-स्वामित्व का आनंद के साथ स्वागत कर सकता है, जैसा कि हम आज करते हैं, स्वतंत्रता के साथ मानव बनने की असीम संभावनाएं आती हैं, और हमारे भीतर अज्ञात की खोज केवल शुरुआत है।
मेरे साथ स्वतंत्रता दिवस को निषिद्ध की सीमाओं से परे अज्ञात की खोज के एक सीमित और परिवर्तनकारी समय के रूप में मनाएं, अधिकार की अवहेलना, पदानुक्रम की तोड़फोड़ और बल और नियंत्रण, और मानदंडों का उल्लंघन।
आइए हम अमोक दौड़ें और अनियंत्रित हों।
Urdu
15 اگست 2026 برطانوی راج کا خاتمہ: ہندوستان اور پاکستان میں یوم آزادی
اس ہفتے کے آخر میں دنیا برطانوی راج کے خاتمے کی سالگرہ، اور ہندوستان اور پاکستان میں یوم آزادی کی خوشی منا رہی ہے، وہ قومیں جو برصغیر کی تہذیبی دوئی کو مجسم کرتی ہیں، جو طویل عرصے سے فرقہ وارانہ تقسیم سے دوچار ہیں اور اس کے ہتھیار کو اقتدار کی میراث کے طور پر استعمال کر رہی ہیں۔ استعمار، اور استعمار مخالف جدوجہد کی مسلط کردہ شرائط۔
اینڈرسن کی افسانہ دی سنو کوئین میں ہوبگوبلن کے ٹوٹے ہوئے آئینہ کی طرح آزادی کی ابتدا میں بکھرے ہوئے، ایک ہزار متضاد داستانیں اور قومی شناختیں جو اپنے ناول بخارسٹ میں میرسیا کارٹاریسکو کی طرح جلاوطنی کے ایک منقسم افسانے کے طور پر درد اور نقصان میں نئے سرے سے پیدا ہوئیں؛ ایسی تصاویر جو فن ہاؤس کے آئینے کی طرح مسخ کرتی ہیں، جو جھوٹ اور فریب کاری کے فریب کے طور پر لالچ دیتی ہیں اور دھوکہ دیتی ہیں، جو نہ ختم ہونے والی تکرار میں ہماری انفرادیت کو چھین لیتی ہیں لیکن جو ہمیں لامحدودیت میں بھی بلند کرتی ہیں۔ تاریخ آئینوں کا ایک جنگل ہے جس میں ہم کھوئے ہوئے اور اکیلے گھومتے ہیں، اپنے باہمی انحصار، برادری اور مکمل پن کو دوبارہ حاصل کرنے کی کوشش کرتے ہیں۔
اگرچہ گاندھی کے الفاظ قوموں کے لیے روشنی ہیں اور پوری دنیا کے لیے مشہور ہیں، میں یہاں ہندوستان کے دوسرے قومی خزانے، شاندار اور بصیرت اروندھتی رائے سے اپنے پسندیدہ اقتباسات کو بڑھانا چاہوں گا:
“مصیبت یہ ہے کہ ایک بار جب آپ اسے دیکھتے ہیں، تو آپ اسے نہیں دیکھ سکتے۔ اور ایک بار جب آپ اسے دیکھ چکے ہیں، خاموش رہنا، کچھ نہ کہنا، اتنا ہی سیاسی عمل بن جاتا ہے جتنا کہ بولنا۔ کوئی معصومیت نہیں ہے۔ کسی بھی طرح، آپ جوابدہ ہیں.”
“لڑنے کے لیے اپنے فن کا استعمال کریں۔”
’’بیسویں صدی کی زیادہ تر نسل کشی کا سبب کسی نہ کسی قسم کی قوم پرستی تھی۔ جھنڈے رنگین کپڑے کے ٹکڑے ہوتے ہیں جنہیں حکومتیں پہلے لوگوں کے ذہنوں کو سمیٹنے کے لیے استعمال کرتی ہیں اور پھر مردوں کو دفنانے کے لیے رسمی کفن کے طور پر۔
’’دہشت گردی بیماری کی علامت نہیں‘‘۔
“کسی بھی طرح، تبدیلی آئے گی. یہ خونی ہو سکتا ہے، یا یہ خوبصورت ہو سکتا ہے۔ یہ ہم پر منحصر ہے۔”
جب فیصلہ کا وہ لمحہ آتا ہے جب ہمیں اپنی زندگیوں کو ان لوگوں کے ساتھ توازن میں رکھنا چاہیے جنہیں فرانٹز فینن نے زمین کے بدبخت، بے اختیار اور بے گھر، پسماندہ اور مٹائے ہوئے کہا تھا، یا منہ موڑ کر خوبصورتی کی راہ کا انتخاب کریں اور نہ کہ۔ روح کی بگاڑ کی.
جب ریاستی جبر اور دہشت کی قوتیں، خون، ایمان اور مٹی کی فسطائیت، دولت، طاقت اور مراعات کی اشرافیہ کی بالادستی کی، ہم پر دعویٰ کرنے اور ہماری روحیں چرانے کے لیے آئیں، تو انہیں تلاش کرنے دیں۔ مایوسی سے مغلوب اور بے بسی سیکھی اور نہ ہی اقتدار کی خدمت میں بٹی بلکہ یکجہتی اور آزادی میں متحد ہو کیونکہ اختلاف کو دبانے میں طاقت اور ظلم کا استعمال کھوکھلا اور ٹوٹا پھوٹا ہے اور اطاعت سے انکار پر ناکام ہو جاتا ہے۔
جو تسلیم کرنے سے انکار کرتا ہے اور اسے مجبور نہیں کیا جا سکتا وہ آزاد ہے، اور ایک زندہ خود مختار علاقے کے طور پر ناقابل تسخیر ہو جاتا ہے، اور یہ کوئی ظلم ہم سے نہیں چھین سکتا۔
آئیے اپنی جیلوں کے دروازوں پر قبضہ کر لیں، اور آزاد ہو جائیں۔
ہم اپنی بے ہودگی اور بے ہودگی کی دہشت کا کیا جواب دیں گے؟ یکجہتی اور ظلم کے خلاف مزاحمت کے ساتھ اور الگ الگ الگ الگ ہونے کی تقسیم اور تعلق کے درجہ بندیوں، اور خون، عقیدے اور مٹی کے تمام فرقہ وارانہ فاشزم کے ساتھ؛ یہ کبھی بھی میرا جواب ہوگا، کیونکہ ہم خود کو نئے سرے سے تخلیق کرتے ہیں جب ہم اتھارٹی اور مجاز شناخت کے سامنے سر تسلیم خم کرنے سے انکار کرتے ہیں اور خود مختار علاقوں کی حیثیت سے ناقابل تسخیر اور آزاد ہو جاتے ہیں۔
فاشزم کا جواب صرف ایک ہو سکتا ہے۔ دوبارہ کبھی نہیں!
کوئی بھی خوشی کے ساتھ مکمل آزادی اور خود مختاری کا خیرمقدم کر سکتا ہے، جیسا کہ آج ہم کرتے ہیں، کیونکہ آزادی کے ساتھ انسان بننے کے لامحدود امکانات پیدا ہوتے ہیں، اور ہمارے اندر نامعلوم کی کھوج صرف شروع ہوتی ہے۔
میرے ساتھ یوم آزادی کو حرام کی حدود سے باہر نامعلوم کو تلاش کرنے، اختیارات کی خلاف ورزی، درجہ بندیوں کی تخریب کاری اور طاقت اور کنٹرول، اور اصولوں کی خلاف ورزی کے ایک اہم اور تبدیلی کے وقت کے طور پر منائیں۔
On this day the Partition of India unleashed all the timeless evils of Pandora’s Box, a tragedy with few parallels in the history of the world on such a mass scale, and very few hopes for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value.
For myself, I remain unconvinced that Partition was anything other than a scheme of the British Empire in partnership with nationalist elites to retain vestiges of dominion through the old colonial strategies of division by weaponization of faith, race, gender, class or caste, and narratives of victimization and identity politics.
Modi’s India under the heel of the political party of Gandhi’s assassins reflects all of these historical legacies of imperialism and colonialism as an imposed condition of struggle. Here as throughout the world and history, we of the Resistance oppose fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but it is important to recognize that the origins of evil in unequal power and the centralization of authority to a carceral state of force and control propagate from the crimes of masters through the successor states of their liberated slaves.
Nationalism, and its expression as militarized authoritarian states, is a predictable phase of revolutionary struggle, especially anti-colonial revolutions. All of the things that make for victory against overwhelming force become systemic flaws once power has been seized; as if national identity changes benevolent for malign masks in the performance of realizing itself.
What we must do to escape the legacies of our history, once power has been seized and the tyrants cast down from their thrones, is to abandon power over others and refuse to take the place of our abusers; to renounce the social use of force.
Sadly, the flaws of our humanity make it far more difficult to wage revolutionary struggle against ourselves and our own power and privilege than to seize power from those who would enslave us.
We must free ourselves from systems of oppression; this is our true enemy, and not other human beings. Regardless of hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and identity as a strategy of subjugation by hegemonic elites, division which we must resist with solidarity, we must find ways to unite in common cause if we are to free each other, to embrace our uniqueness and to celebrate and learn from the uniqueness of others as diversity and inclusion in a free society of equals.
In the subcontinent of India and its myriads of historical societies and cultures now riven into nations of Hindus and Muslims as political identities shaped by the legacies of history and the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle, I mean that when the best solution, a secular state, is for now out of reach, we must begin with the abandonment of violence to enforce and authorize identities and fascisms of faith, blood, and soil, for the social use of force does one thing above all else from which myriads of injustices derive; it centralizes power to elites, then subjugates those it claims to speak for and dehumanizes, enslaves, and erases others in campaigns of ethnic cleansing, legitimizes authority, and creates tyrannies and carceral states of force and control.
Faith serves power, and both are born of fear. Faith weaponized in service to power by authority centralizes power to carceral states of force and control, which create and enforce divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and national identity; to restore our humanity to each other we must unite in solidarity to seize our power from those who claim to act and speak in our name and make us complicit in unforgiveable crimes as a strategy of our subjugation; for only love conquers hate, frees us from the Ring of fear, power, and force, redeems us from the flaws of our humanity and the flags of our skin, and confers liberation in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us.
To combat the state as embodied violence we must build bridges and not walls.
This day we mourn the birth of a new India in blood and pain, like all human life cast into a world utterly without meaning or value, in which we must create our own in creating ourselves. This is the terror of being human; and this is the joy of becoming human in total freedom.
How will we use this chance, conferred by seizure of power over a brutal oppressor in imposed conditions of struggle which include dehumanization, commodification, and falsification, and most especially divisions of faith, race, and caste?
Here the past has consumed the present, and we must free ourselves from the legacies of our history as systems of oppression.
We must let go of who we were, for the chance to become who we wish to be.
‘My mother was beheaded in front of me’: a survivor recalls India’s violent partition; Zareena Parveen was 12 years old when British colonial India was carved up along religious lines. Documentary by The Guardian
Questioning Hindu Nationalism, a reading list
The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy, Rahul Bhatia
इस दिन भारत के विभाजन ने पेंडोरा के बॉक्स की सभी कालातीत बुराइयों को उजागर किया, इस तरह के बड़े पैमाने पर दुनिया के इतिहास में कुछ समानताएं के साथ एक त्रासदी, और मानव के रूप में, अर्थ, और मूल्य के पुनर्मिलन और परिवर्तन के लिए बहुत कम उम्मीदें ।
खुद के लिए, मैं इस बात पर असीम है कि विभाजन, ब्रिटिश साम्राज्य की एक योजना के अलावा कुछ भी था, जो विश्वास, नस्ल, लिंग, वर्ग या जाति के हथियारकरण द्वारा विभाजन की पुरानी औपनिवेशिक रणनीतियों के माध्यम से प्रभुत्व के वेस्टेज को बनाए रखने के लिए था, और पीड़ित और पहचान की राजनीति की कथाएँ ।
गांधी के हत्यारों की राजनीतिक पार्टी की एड़ी के तहत मोदी का भारत साम्राज्यवाद और उपनिवेशवाद के इन सभी ऐतिहासिक विरासतों को संघर्ष की एक थोपी हुई स्थिति के रूप में दर्शाता है। यहाँ दुनिया और इतिहास के रूप में, हम प्रतिरोध रक्त, विश्वास और मिट्टी के फासीवाद का विरोध करते हैं, लेकिन असमान शक्ति में बुराई की उत्पत्ति और प्राधिकरण के केंद्रीकरण को बल और नियंत्रण के लिए प्राधिकरण के केंद्रीकरण से पहचानना महत्वपूर्ण है। अपने मुक्त दासों के उत्तराधिकारी राज्यों के माध्यम से स्वामी के अपराध।
राष्ट्रवाद, और इसकी अभिव्यक्ति सैन्य रूप से सत्तावादी राज्यों के रूप में, क्रांतिकारी संघर्ष का एक पूर्वानुमानित चरण है, विशेष रूप से उपनिवेश विरोधी क्रांतियों। एक बार बिजली जब्त हो जाने के बाद, भारी बल के खिलाफ जीत के लिए जीत के लिए सभी चीजें प्रणालीगत दोष बन जाती हैं; जैसे कि राष्ट्रीय पहचान खुद को साकार करने के प्रदर्शन में घातक मुखौटे के लिए परोपकारी बदलती है।
हमें अपने इतिहास की विरासत से बचने के लिए क्या करना चाहिए, एक बार शक्ति जब्त कर ली गई है और अत्याचारियों को उनके सिंहासन से नीचे गिरा दिया गया है, तो दूसरों पर सत्ता को छोड़ देना और उनकी जगह लेने से इनकार करना है; बल के सामाजिक उपयोग को त्यागने के लिए।
अफसोस की बात यह है कि हमारी मानवता की खामियां अपने और अपनी शक्ति और विशेषाधिकार के खिलाफ क्रांतिकारी संघर्ष को छेड़ने के लिए कहीं अधिक कठिन बना देती हैं, जो हमें उन लोगों से सत्ता को जब्त करने के लिए।
हमें खुद को उत्पीड़न की व्यवस्था से मुक्त करना होगा; यही हमारा सच्चा शत्रु है, अन्य मनुष्य नहीं। संबद्धता और बहिष्करणीय अन्यता के पदानुक्रमों के बावजूद, और आधिपत्य अभिजात वर्ग द्वारा अधीनता की रणनीति के रूप में पहचान, विभाजन जिसका हमें एकजुटता के साथ विरोध करना चाहिए, अगर हमें एक-दूसरे को मुक्त करना है, अपनी विशिष्टता को अपनाना है और साझा उद्देश्य में एकजुट होने के तरीके खोजने होंगे समानता के मुक्त समाज में विविधता और समावेशन के रूप में दूसरों की विशिष्टता का जश्न मनाना और उससे सीखना।
भारत के उपमहाद्वीप में और इसके असंख्य ऐतिहासिक समाज और संस्कृतियाँ अब इतिहास की विरासतों और उपनिवेशवाद-विरोधी संघर्ष की थोपी गई स्थितियों से आकार लेने वाली राजनीतिक पहचान के रूप में हिंदू और मुसलमानों के राष्ट्रों में विभाजित हो गई हैं, मेरा मतलब है कि जब सबसे अच्छा समाधान, एक धर्मनिरपेक्ष राज्य, अभी पहुंच से बाहर है, हमें विश्वास, रक्त और मिट्टी की पहचान और फासीवाद को लागू करने और अधिकृत करने के लिए हिंसा के परित्याग से शुरुआत करनी चाहिए, क्योंकि बल का सामाजिक उपयोग अन्य सभी चीजों से ऊपर एक काम करता है; यह सत्ता को अभिजात वर्ग के हाथों में केंद्रीकृत करता है, उन लोगों को अपने अधीन कर लेता है जिनके लिए वह बोलने का दावा करता है और दूसरों को अमानवीय बनाता है, प्राधिकार को वैध बनाता है, और बल और नियंत्रण के अत्याचार और क्रूर राज्य बनाता है।
राज्य को मूर्त हिंसा के रूप में मुकाबला करने के लिए हमें पुल बनाने होंगे, दीवारें नहीं।
इस दिन हम रक्त और पीड़ा से भरे एक नए भारत के जन्म का शोक मनाते हैं, जैसे कि सभी मानव जीवन को पूरी तरह से अर्थ या मूल्य के बिना एक दुनिया में फेंक दिया जाता है, जिसमें हमें खुद को बनाने में अपना खुद का निर्माण करना होगा। यह इंसान होने का आतंक है; और यह पूर्ण स्वतंत्रता में मानव बनने का आनंद है।
हम इस अवसर का उपयोग कैसे करेंगे, जो संघर्ष की थोपी गई स्थितियों में एक क्रूर उत्पीड़क पर सत्ता की जब्ती द्वारा प्रदान किया गया है, जिसमें अमानवीयकरण, वस्तुकरण, और मिथ्याकरण, और विशेष रूप से विश्वास, नस्ल और जाति के विभाजन शामिल हैं?
यहां अतीत ने वर्तमान को निगल लिया है, और हमें उत्पीड़न की व्यवस्था के रूप में अपने इतिहास की विरासत से खुद को मुक्त करना होगा।
हमें वह बनने का मौका पाने के लिए जो हम थे, छोड़ना होगा जो हम बनना चाहते हैं।
Urdu
اگست 14 2024 تقسیم کی سالگرہ
اس دن ہندوستان کی تقسیم نے پنڈورا کے خانے کی تمام لازوال برائیوں کو جاری کیا ، یہ ایک ایسا المیہ ہے جس میں اس طرح کے بڑے پیمانے پر دنیا کی تاریخ میں کچھ متوازی ہیں ، اور انسان کی بحالی اور تبدیلی ، معنی اور قدر کی تبدیلی کے لئے بہت کم امیدیں ہیں۔
اپنے لئے ، میں اس بات پر متفق نہیں ہوں کہ تقسیم برطانوی سلطنت کی ایک اسکیم کے علاوہ کچھ بھی تھا جو عقیدے ، نسل ، صنف ، طبقے یا ذات کے ہتھیاروں کے ذریعہ تقسیم کی پرانی نوآبادیاتی حکمت عملیوں کے ذریعے تسلط کے حصول کو برقرار رکھنے کے لئے کچھ اور تھا۔
مودی کا ہندوستان گاندھی کے قاتلوں کی سیاسی جماعت کی ایک ہیل کے تحت سامراج اور استعمار کی ان تمام تاریخی وراثت کی عکاسی کرتا ہے جس کی جدوجہد کی ایک مسلط حالت ہے۔ یہاں پوری دنیا اور تاریخ کی طرح ، ہم مزاحمت کے حامل خون ، عقیدے اور مٹی کے فاشزموں کی مخالفت کرتے ہیں ، لیکن یہ ضروری ہے کہ غیر مساوی طاقت میں برائی کی ابتدا کو تسلیم کیا جائے اور اختیار کی مرکزیت کو مرکزیت کا مرکز بنانا اور اس پر قابو پالنا۔ ان کے آزاد غلاموں کی جانشین ریاستوں کے ذریعہ ماسٹرز کے جرائم۔
قوم پرستی ، اور عسکریت پسند آمرانہ ریاستوں کی حیثیت سے اس کا اظہار ، انقلابی جدوجہد کا ایک پیش قیاسی مرحلہ ہے ، خاص طور پر نوآبادیاتی انقلابات۔ طاقت کے قبضے میں آنے کے بعد زبردست طاقت کے خلاف فتح کے ل جو ساری چیزیں سیسٹیمیٹک خامیاں بن جاتی ہیں۔ گویا قومی شناخت خود کو سمجھنے کی کارکردگی میں مہلک ماسک کے لئے فلاحی تبدیلیوں کو تبدیل کرتی ہے۔
ہمیں اپنی تاریخ کی وراثت سے بچنے کے ل کیا کرنا چاہئے ، ایک بار جب اقتدار پر قبضہ کرلیا گیا اور ظالموں کو اپنے تخت سے اتار دیا گیا ، دوسروں پر اقتدار ترک کرنا اور ان کی جگہ لینے سے انکار کرنا ہے۔ طاقت کے معاشرتی استعمال کو ترک کرنا۔
افسوس کی بات یہ ہے کہ ہماری انسانیت کی خامیوں سے اپنے اور اپنی طاقت اور استحقاق کے خلاف انقلابی جدوجہد کرنا کہیں زیادہ مشکل ہوجاتا ہے جو ہمیں ان لوگوں سے اقتدار سے فائدہ اٹھانا پڑتا ہے جو ہمیں غلام بناتے ہیں۔
ہمیں اپنے آپ کو جبر کے نظام سے آزاد کرنا چاہیے۔ یہ ہمارا حقیقی دشمن ہے، دوسرے انسان نہیں۔ اس سے قطع نظر کہ تعلق اور الگ الگ دوسرے پن کے درجہ بندی، اور تسلط پسند اشرافیہ کے زیر تسلط کی حکمت عملی کے طور پر شناخت، تقسیم جس کا ہمیں یکجہتی کے ساتھ مقابلہ کرنا چاہیے، ہمیں مشترکہ مقصد میں متحد ہونے کے طریقے تلاش کرنا ہوں گے اگر ہم ایک دوسرے کو آزاد کرنا چاہتے ہیں، اپنی انفرادیت کو قبول کرنا چاہتے ہیں اور مساوات کے آزاد معاشرے میں تنوع اور شمولیت کے طور پر دوسروں کی انفرادیت کو منانا اور سیکھنا۔
برصغیر پاک و ہند اور اس کے بے شمار تاریخی معاشروں اور ثقافتوں میں اب ہندوؤں اور مسلمانوں کی قوموں میں سیاسی شناخت بن گئی ہے جو تاریخ کی وراثت اور استعمار مخالف جدوجہد کی مسلط کردہ شرائط سے تشکیل پاتی ہے، میرا مطلب یہ ہے کہ جب بہترین حل، ایک سیکولر ریاست، ابھی تک پہنچ سے باہر ہے، ہمیں عقیدے، خون اور مٹی کی شناخت اور فاشزم کو نافذ کرنے اور اس کی اجازت دینے کے لیے تشدد کو ترک کرنے کے ساتھ شروع کرنا چاہیے، کیونکہ طاقت کا سماجی استعمال سب سے بڑھ کر ایک چیز کرتا ہے۔ یہ طاقت کو اشرافیہ کے لیے مرکزیت دیتا ہے، ان لوگوں کو محکوم بناتا ہے جو اس کے لیے بات کرنے کا دعویٰ کرتے ہیں اور دوسروں کو غیر انسانی بنا دیتے ہیں، اختیار کو قانونی حیثیت دیتے ہیں، اور جبر اور کنٹرول کی ظالمانہ حالتیں پیدا کرتے ہیں۔
ریاست کو مجسم تشدد کے طور پر مقابلہ کرنے کے لیے ہمیں پل تعمیر کرنے چاہئیں نہ کہ
اس دن ہم خون اور درد میں ایک نئے ہندوستان کی پیدائش کا ماتم کرتے ہیں، جیسے تمام انسانی زندگی بالکل بے معنی اور قیمت کے بغیر ایک ایسی دنیا میں ڈال دی گئی ہے، جس میں ہمیں خود کو تخلیق کرنے کے لیے خود کو خود بنانا ہوگا۔ یہ انسان ہونے کی دہشت ہے۔ اور یہ مکمل آزادی میں انسان بننے کی خوشی ہے۔
ہم اس موقع کو کس طرح استعمال کریں گے، جو ایک ظالم جابر پر اقتدار پر قبضے کے ذریعے جدوجہد کے مسلط کردہ حالات میں دیا گیا ہے جس میں غیر انسانی، اجناس، اور جھوٹ، اور خاص طور پر عقیدے، نسل اور ذات کی تقسیم شامل ہے؟
یہاں ماضی نے حال کو کھا لیا ہے، اور ہمیں اپنی تاریخ کی وراثت سے اپنے آپ کو جبر کے نظام کے طور پر آزاد کرنا چاہیے۔
ہمیں اس بات کو چھوڑ دینا چاہیے کہ ہم کون تھے، تاکہ وہ بننے کا موقع ملے جو ہم بننا چاہتے ہیں۔
Maria Popova on How to Bear Your Suffering; exemplars Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, Anne Aldrich, and Walt Whitman
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