What is a woman or a man, how are such identities constructed, and who decides?
On this International Woman’s Day, I am wondering how we define such a thing, and how our idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty shape our range of choices in the performance of ourselves.
I am thinking of these things in the context of a conversation in which a friend described the primary trauma of realizing they were imprisoned in a body whose sex did not match their gender, and in this vulnerable space was multiply attacked on grounds of falsely identifying as female in order to appropriate female spaces of performance.
It seems to me that our idea of trans personhood is a test of how we imagine the role of biology in regards to identity; trans exclusion reinforces and originates in a narrow definition of gender restricted to biology, and one which privileges signs and forms over hormones, the psyche, memory and history, and inner experience; this ignores social construction of identity entirely, and also perpetuates systemic inequalities and authorized identities of sex and gender.
Is biology destiny? I phrase the question in this way because of its historic role in women’s liberation movements, and because outlaws of sex and gender teach us something about how we become human and how we choose to be human together, as seizures of power wherein our forms and their narratives of authorized identity are imposed conditions of struggle.
Gender is always fluid, relational, ambiguous, and a ground of struggle. It is also, like sexual orientation, distinct from biological sex and not a spectrum with endpoint limits but an infinite Moebius Strip where we are born and exist everywhere at once as polymorphosly perverse beings, to use Freud’s delicious phrase, who say yes to life and to all pleasure; except where identity is chosen as seizure of power or imposed by other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
Freud was so right about humans being animals who are self aware as a primary conflict and a primary ground of struggle, and so wrong about the goal of growing up being control of our libido, our desires and imagination. And this is the great tragedy of our civilization; fear of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
To be an outcast is a terrible thing; but to be forced to create your own forms because you fit in no one else’s bottles can be a wonderful thing as well, though never an easy one.
Sartre described this with the phrase; ”We are condemned to be free,” in his 1946 lecture Existentialism Is A Humanism, and what this means is that in a universe empty of all meaning and value other than that which we ourselves create, we must balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of our total freedom.
In such a universe, free of imposed meaning and of purpose, all rules are arbitrary and can be changed, rules which are legacies of our histories and the fictional laws of false and unjust authorities, wherein all normalities are negotiable, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human may be pursued as our uniqueness through the reimagination and transformation of poetic vision and metaphorical truths.
Life is a performance art, and we all have one problem in common; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
This process of becoming human or 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.
Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
Our identities, including those of sex and gender, are literally masks; social constructs and artifacts of our process of adaptation and becoming human. Herein the primary shaping, informing, and motivating source is the interface between authority and autonomy as an unknown and unclaimed potential, a blank space of limitless possibilities of the reimagination of humankind, like the places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Let us pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Our performance of identities of sex and gender is a theatre of possibilities, of negotiations and dances with normativity and the transgression of boundaries, of the questioning and reimagination of idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of self-creation as liberation and autonomous total freedom, a quest for our uniqueness and for the human transcendent, and of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
This need not be determinative or prescriptive, but a space of free creative play.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As written by Amy M. Vaughn on the Surrealist site Babou691, in a brilliant interrogation of identity as performance art and of the boundaries of the Forbidden as interfaces of reimagination, transformation, and autonomy; “I love genderfuck. I love watching the disruption of enculturated norms, which is what genderfuck does to traditional notions of the male/female, masculine/feminine dichotomy.
While genderfuckery has had a place in both gay culture and, to a lesser extent, punk rock since the ’70s, it remained mostly underground until drag hit mainstream media. I am, of course, referring to RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR).
These days drag serves as an umbrella term for the work of several different types of performance artists. The most well-known of these are drag queens, who perform as women, and drag kings, who perform as men. Sometimes this traditional type of drag is campy, sometimes it’s realistic, but it’s always based on the idea of the gender binary—fucking with the binary, but still within it. Genderfuck rejects the binary, often aggressively, sometimes playfully, always purposefully.
I believe there may be something to gain from looking at these performative manipulations of gender though the ideas of the Surrealists of the early 20th century. The Surrealists saw themselves as a revolutionary cultural movement. Their goal was to free people from false and restrictive conceptions of reality. In other words, they wanted to disrupt enculturated norms. And their method was the juxtaposition of disparate entities with the intention of creating a surprising or startling effect.
I don’t think it’s too far a leap to say performative genderbending fits this approach. Whether we’re talking about overlaying feminine characteristics on a masculine form or vice versa, or combining the genders together in incongruous ways, done well, the effect is literally stunning.”
And RPDR has provided a platform for genderfuck, but because the goal of the competition is to find the “next drag superstar”—a person who can represent RuPaul’s polished, feminine brand to the world— genderfuck queens rarely excel. “May the best woman win,” has been one of the show’s catchphrases, repeated every episode until the current season. Now RuPaul says, “May the best drag queen win.” We could speculate that this change is due to the casting of the first ever trans contestant, though the point remains the same—RPDR is a safe space for gay males to express themselves through female impersonation.
Which is drag but not genderfuck.
However, something even more subversive has entered through the door that RPDR opened: The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, an “alternative drag competition” based on the principles of horror, filth, and glamour. And the Boulets’ stage is far more welcoming of genderfuck.
While drag has traditionally been dominated by gay men performing as women, genderfuck is not gender specific or sexual-orientation specific. Disasterina, on season two of Dragula, described himself as hetero-fluid and is married to a woman, while season three featured two AFAB contestants: Landon Cider, a lesbian drag king, and Hollow Eve, who identifies as nonbinary.
At this point, spelling out all of these distinctions seems more than a little cumbersome and like a whole lot of nunya bizness, as if these descriptions have no place in the discussion of genderfuck because genderfuck is beyond them. In fact, jabs at traditional drag culture are not rare on Dragula, as can be seen in Evah Destruction’s disposable razor bikini on her hirsute body, a look which would not have a place in RPDR.
The Surrealists believed that art could bring about revolutionary social change through the process of the Hegelian dialectic—thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If we examine the recent history of drag and genderfuck through this lens, while vastly simplified, it might look something like this: the thesis that there are two heteronormative genders was met with the antithesis of an artform superimposing one gender over another to provoke the surreal effect of juxtaposing opposites in order to startled people out of ingrained cultural constructs. The synthesis has been greater acceptance of gay male culture and freedom of expression. Worthy goals, no question.
The dialectic for genderfuck, which I see as following traditional drag to further the same and expanded goals, would also start with the thesis that there are two genders but it would add three sexual identities (gay, straight, and bi). The antithesis is the performance of multiple expressions of gender and sexuality, provoking the surreal effect, and leading to the synthesis of radical freedom of expression and an existence untethered to preconceived cultural definitions—gay, straight, or otherwise.”
“Real progress has been made through queer art in providing a surrealist antithesis to the idea of a gender dichotomy, and the result has been to guide mainstream culture toward not just tolerance or acceptance but celebration of gender differences.”
Was Judith Butler right when she wrote that; “All gender is a form of drag.”?
If so, is the idea of gender itself a falsification of ourselves?
If not, how does one account for idealizations of masculinity and femininity as imposed conditions of struggle and patriarchal systems of oppression?
My interest is in how such things create us as informing, motivating, and shaping forces, over vast epochs of time and as mimesis and performance.
If gender is a story, whose story is it?
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Of the legacies of our history there are those we must escape, and those which must be kept, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Idealizations of Feminine Beauty in Performance of Identity: Ru Paul’s Drag Race: LaGanja’s Let’s Get Physical
Subversions of Idealizations of Masculinity and Femininity: The Boulet Brothers Dragula, Season 4 trailer
Here is my review of the book from 2018, when it was published:
One of the two best novels of 2018, House of the Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara is among the immortal classics of world literature, the books we’ll still be reading in a thousand years.
Joseph Cassara’s marvelous and beautiful debut novel must be accompanied by viewing the glorious celebration of our humanity which is the film Paris Is Burning, the primary source of the novel.
House of the Impossible Beauties is an investigation of idealized masculine and feminine beauty which poses fundamental questions regarding identity and the struggle for its ownership, the interplay of dreams and imagination with a sometimes cruel and unforgiving reality, and of the shaping forces of the families we have chosen and the ones imposed on us.
Under siege and on the stage; the profoundly human characters who inhabit this marginal realm are masters of negotiating the boundaries and interfaces between the Real and the Ideal, often discontiguous and filled with peril as seizures of power and revolutionary struggle versus authorized identities of sex and gender; herein are models of how to be human together and of challenging authorized versions of self, sometimes with life and death in the balance.
To be an Impossible Beauty; who cannot hear the siren call of this mad quest? Not the mere adoration of the Ideal, but its enactment. An Impossible Beauty; a title absolutely saturated in the whole Romantic project of the quest for the Ideal and its realization in the flesh and world of the senses, here especially referential to the poetry of Keats and also to Thomas Mann’s critique of Romanticism in Death in Venice.
Cassara’s work presents a communal, interdependant society as the medium in which we create ourselves and each other. Under siege from the forces of reaction, but within the community supportive and collaborative; mutualism here presented as a Platonic Republic. This image of an ideal society, praxis of his values of unconditional love and total freedom to choose the roles we will play, is equally important as his analysis of the performative nature of identity.
To whom are we responsible for who we are, if not ourselves? For whom are we responsible, if not one another?
Today we honor the heroes who helped secure freedom and equality for us all on this the 61st anniversary of Selma’s Bloody Sunday, when hundreds of Black citizens faced death and violence with none offered in return, a courageous stand of love against hate which will continue to inspire humankind for all eternity, a defiance of systemic and institutional racist terror and authoritarian repression of dissent, theft of citizenship by vote suppression, and re-enslavement through prison labor, a march of protest made simply to claim the power to exercise a hundred year old legal right and the most sacred duty of a citizen, the right to vote.
This was the turning point of the Civil Rights Movement, which like Gandhi’s Salt Tax protest exposed a corruptive and malign government of brutal force and the falsification of propaganda, lies, and false histories, for after this day the forces of white supremacy could never again claim a moral high ground nor conceal themselves within the legal and political structures they had infiltrated and subverted.
Sadly it remains a fight for liberty and equality today, as the heroes of Atlanta wage resistance struggle against a police state of white supremacist terror and repression of dissent, in the contest between democracy and tyranny brought into hideous relief by the plans of racist elites and the corrupt politicians who serve them to build a Cop City for the manufacture of police to replace the Klu Klux Klan as their primary enforcers and institutionalize the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor under the fig leaf of law and order.
This industrial production of force and control in a totalitarian society is the end result of the weaponization of fear in service to power by those who would enslave us.
No matter where you begin with Othering people, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
How does one lay siege to an unjust system and its fortress of state terror? First we must define the terms of struggle and control the narrative. Second comes the praxis of mass protests, general strikes, defunding tyranny and terror, isolation by Boycott, Sanction, and Divestiture, and other electoral and legislative actions. Third is Direct Action in all its forms, in this context especially the infiltration of the police and security services and the sabotage of their enforcement of authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Let us teach the enemies of liberty a simple truth; security is an illusion. There is no level of force which can protect us from each other without also destroying each other, our defining relationships, and our humanity.
The great secret of power and the use of force and violence is that it is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disobedience.
The great secret of authority and legitimacy is that it is an illusion which fails when met with disbelief and questioning.
We each of us possess two powers which define our liberty, and cannot be taken from us; to disbelieve authority and to disobey in refusal to submit.
And when we do these things, we become Unconquered and able to liberate others as Living Autonomous Zones.
Resistance is victory.
As written by Jeff Martin and Jeff Amy in Huffpost , in an article entitled More Than 20 Charged With Terrorism In Atlanta ‘Cop City’ Protest:
The wooded area outside Atlanta has become a flashpoint of ongoing conflict between authorities and left-leaning protesters; “More than 20 people from around the country faced domestic terrorism charges Monday after dozens in black masks attacked the site of a police training center under construction in a wooded area outside Atlanta where one protester was killed in January.
The area has become the flashpoint of ongoing conflict between authorities and left-leaning protesters.
Flaming bottles and rocks were thrown at officers during a protest Sunday at “Cop City,” where 26-year-old environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, or “Tortuguita,” was shot to death by officers during a raid at a protest camp in January. Police have said that Tortuguita attacked them, a version that other activists have questioned.
Almost all of the 23 people arrested are from states across the U.S., while one is from Canada and another from France, police said Monday.
Like many protesters, Tortuguita was dedicated to preserving the environment, friends and family said, ideals that clashed with Atlanta’s hopes of building a $90 million Atlanta Public Safety Training Center meant to boost preparedness and morale after George Floyd’s death in 2020.
Now, authorities and young people are embroiled in a clash that appears to have little to do with other high-profile conflicts.
Protesters who oppose what detractors call “Cop City” run the gamut from more traditional environmental environmentalists to young, self-styled anarchists seeking clashes with what they see as an unjust society.
Defend the Atlanta Forest, a social media site used by members of the movement, said Monday on Twitter that those arrested were not violent agitators “but peaceful concert-goers who were nowhere near the demonstration.” A representative of a public-relations firm involved in the group’s events said that it could not immediately comment.
After “Tortuguita” was killed, demonstrations spread to downtown Atlanta. A police cruiser was set ablaze, rocks were thrown and fireworks were launched at a skyscraper that houses the Atlanta Police Foundation. Windows were shattered. The governor declared a state of emergency.
On Sunday, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum said at a midnight news conference, pieces of construction equipment were set on fire in what he called “a coordinated attack” at the site for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in DeKalb County.
Surveillance video released by police shows a piece of heavy equipment in flames. It was among several destroyed pieces of construction gear, police said.
Protesters also threw rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks at police, officials said. In addition, demonstrators tried to blind officers by shining green lasers into their eyes, and used tires and debris to block a road, the Georgia Department of Public Safety said Monday.
Officers used nonlethal enforcement methods to disperse the crowd and make arrests, Schierbaum said, causing “some minor discomfort.”
Along with classrooms and administrative buildings, the training center would include a shooting range, a driving course to practice chases and a “burn building” for firefighters to work on putting out fires. A “mock village” featuring a fake home, convenience store and nightclub would also be built for rehearsing raids.
Opponents have said that the site would be to practice “urban warfare,” and the 85-acre (34-hectare) training center would require cutting so many trees that it would be environmentally damaging.
Many activists also oppose spending millions on a police facility that would be surrounded by poor neighborhoods in a city with one of the nation’s highest degrees of inequality.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens has said that the site was cleared decades ago for a former state prison farm. He has said that it is filled with rubble and overgrown with invasive species, not hardwood trees. The mayor also has said that while the facility would be built on 85 acres, about 300 others would be preserved as public green space.
Many of those already accused of violence in connection with the training site protests are being charged with domestic terrorism, a felony that carries up to 35 years in prison. Those charges have prompted criticism from some that the state is being heavy-handed.
Lawmakers are considering classifying domestic terrorism as a serious violent felony. That means anyone convicted must serve their entire sentence, can’t be sentenced to probation as a first offender and can’t be paroled unless they have served at least 30 years in prison.
Meanwhile, more protests are planned in coming days, police said Monday.”
The heroes of this historic act of liberation generations ago in Selma, like those in Atlanta today, among them Martin Luther King and John Lewis, remain with us forever as totemic figures and guardian spirits of America and of revolutionary struggle throughout the world, and I honor and invoke them today for inspiration and guidance in the victories yet to be won.
Christopher Klein’s article in History describes the events of that day; “Nearly a century after the Confederacy’s guns fell silent, the racial legacies of slavery and Reconstruction continued to reverberate loudly throughout Alabama in 1965. Even the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 months earlier had done little in some parts of the state to ensure African Americans of the basic right to vote. Perhaps no place was Jim Crow’s grip tighter than in Dallas County, where African Americans made up more than half of the population, yet accounted for just 2 percent of registered voters.
For months, the efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to register black voters in the county seat of Selma had been thwarted. In January 1965, Martin Luther King Jr., came to the city and gave the backing of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) to the cause. Peaceful demonstrations in Selma and surrounding communities resulted in the arrests of thousands, including King, who wrote to the New York Times, “This is Selma, Alabama. There are more negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.”
The rising racial tensions finally bubbled over into bloodshed in the nearby town of Marion on February 18, 1965, when state troopers clubbed protestors and fatally shot 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, an African American demonstrator trying to protect his mother, who was being struck by police.
In response, civil rights leaders planned to take their cause directly to Alabama Governor George Wallace on a 54-mile march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. Although Wallace ordered state troopers “to use whatever measures are necessary to prevent a march,” approximately 600 voting rights advocates set out from the Brown Chapel AME Church on Sunday, March 7. King, who had met with President Lyndon Johnson two days earlier to discuss voting rights legislation, remained back in Atlanta with his own congregation and planned to join the marchers en route the following day. By a coin flip, it was determined that Hosea Williams would represents the SCLC at the head of the march along with 25-year-old John Lewis, a SNCC chairman and future U.S. congressman from Georgia.
The demonstrators marched undisturbed through downtown Selma, where the ghosts of the past constantly permeated the present. As they began to cross the steel-arched bridge spanning the Alabama River, the marchers who gazed up could see the name of a Confederate general and reputed grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, Edmund Pettus, staring right back at them in big block letters emblazoned across the bridge’s crossbeam.
Once Williams and Lewis reached the crest of the bridge, they saw trouble on the other side. A wall of state troopers, wearing white helmets and slapping billy clubs in their hands, stretched across Route 80 at the base of the span. Behind them were deputies of county sheriff Jim Clark, some on horseback, and dozens of white spectators waving Confederate flags and giddily anticipating a showdown. Knowing a confrontation awaited, the marchers pressed on in a thin column down the bridge’s sidewalk until they stopped about 50 feet away from the authorities.
“It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march,” Major John Cloud called out from his bullhorn. “This is an unlawful assembly. You have to disperse, you are ordered to disperse. Go home or go to your church. This march will not continue.”
“Mr. Major,” replied Williams, “I would like to have a word, can we have a word?”
“I’ve got nothing further to say to you,” Cloud answered.
Williams and Lewis stood their ground at the front of the line. After a few moments, the troopers, with gas masks affixed to their faces and clubs at the ready, advanced. They pushed back Lewis and Williams. Then the troopers paced quickened. They knocked the marchers to the ground. They struck them with sticks. Clouds of tear gas mixed with the screams of terrified marchers and the cheers of reveling bystanders. Deputies on horseback charged ahead and chased the gasping men, women and children back over the bridge as they swung clubs, whips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. Although forced back, the protestors did not fight back.
Weeks earlier, King had scolded Life magazine photographer Flip Schulke for trying to assist protestors knocked to the ground by authorities instead of snapping away. “The world doesn’t know this happened because you didn’t photograph it,” King told Schulke, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Race Beat.” This time, however, television cameras captured the entire assault and transformed the local protest into a national civil rights event. It took hours for the film to be flown from Alabama to the television network headquarters in New York, but when it aired that night, Americans were appalled at the sights and sounds of “Bloody Sunday.”
Around 9:30 p.m., ABC newscaster Frank Reynolds interrupted the network’s broadcast of “Judgment at Nuremberg”—the star-studded movie that explored Nazi bigotry, war crimes and the moral culpability of those who followed orders and didn’t speak out against the Holocaust—to air the disturbing, newly arrived footage from Selma. Nearly 50 million Americans who had tuned into the film’s long-awaited television premier couldn’t escape the historical echoes of Nazi storm troopers in the scenes of the rampaging state troopers. “The juxtaposition struck like psychological lightning in American homes,” wrote Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in “The Race Beat.”
The connection wasn’t lost in Selma, either. When his store was finally empty of customers, one local shopkeeper confided to Washington Star reporter Haynes Johnson about the city’s institutional racism, “Everybody knows it’s going on, but they try to pretend they don’t see it. I saw ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’ on the Late Show the other night and I thought it fits right in; it’s just like Selma.”
Outrage at “Bloody Sunday” swept the country. Sympathizers staged sit-ins, traffic blockades and demonstrations in solidarity with the voting rights marchers. Some even traveled to Selma where two days later King attempted another march but, to the dismay of some demonstrators, turned back when troopers again blocked the highway at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Finally, after a federal court order permitted the protest, the voting rights marchers left Selma on March 21 under the protection of federalized National Guard troops. Four days later, they reached Montgomery with the crowd growing to 25,000 by the time they reached the capitol steps.
The events in Selma galvanized public opinion and mobilized Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which President Johnson signed into law on August 6, 1965. Today, the bridge that served as the backdrop to “Bloody Sunday” still bears the name of a white supremacist, but now it is a symbolic civil rights landmark.”
Proof of Selma’s resilience as an informing and motivating source in the ongoing resistance to fascism and tyranny may be found in the words of one its leaders, John Lewis, who has given a life of service to America and to the cause of Liberty, and the massive voter turnout he helped inspire which has stunningly transformed the Democratic primaries this week and possibly changed the destiny of our nation and of humankind.
As Sanjana Karanth writes in Huffpost; “Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) made a surprise appearance at Sunday’s commemorative “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, Alabama, urging attendees to use their right to vote “to redeem the soul of America.”
White Alabama state troopers fractured Lewis’ head when he was 25 years old on what became known as Bloody Sunday, when Lewis and several hundred other voting rights activists faced state-sanctioned violence for peacefully marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965.
The commemorative gathering honored the Selma protest and those who suffered in the fight to ensure voting rights for Black Americans.
“Fifty-five years ago, a few of God’s children attempted to march from Brown Chapel AME Church across this bridge,” Lewis, 80, said in a passionate speech on Sunday. “We were beaten, we were tear-gassed. I thought I was going to die on this bridge. But somehow and some way, God almighty helped me.”
The Georgia congressman’s remarks came as the Democratic primary ramps up, with South Carolina voting on Saturday and 14 additional states voting in the upcoming Super Tuesday primaries this week. Lewis used the moment of the primaries and the nature of the Selma march to encourage everyone to exercise their right to vote.
“We cannot give up now. We cannot give in. We must keep the faith, keep our eyes on the prize,” he said. “We must go out and vote like we never, ever voted before.”
“Some people gave more than a little blood, some gave their very lives. So to each and every one of you, especially you young people … go out there,” he said. “Speak up, speak out. Get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”
Selma
The protestors needed sniper teams covering the bridge, for the horse cavalry. And if they opened ranks before the charging racist terror police, to reveal HMG emplacements, a barricade for grenadiers, and fire teams to support them and prevent flanking with point defense and to cover exfiltration of the bait from the killing zone the enemy had been lured into; but that would be a different story.
Maybe next time, friends; and there will always be a next time.
Historical Newsreel of the Crossing
Rev. Al on 60th anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday’: I think about the progress and the threat
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, by Raymond Arsenault, Mirron Willis (Narrator), Thurgood Marshall, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. (Contributors)
As it turns out, some principles remain true regardless of scale; just as the most vulnerable part of any security system is its human element, which can be leveraged through social engineering, the human leadership of Homeland Security and its ICE white supremacist terror force is the key to its delegitimation and neutralization.
In Kristi Noem we have proof of concept, and as celebrations of her fall from power reverberate throughout our nation and the world, changing the future possibilities of our history, I am savoring the moment with relish.
There is nothing like a jest well played.
How did this come to be?
The Fall of the Dogkiller can be charted with precision; it begins with the utter and shameful defeat of the special terror force, its campaigns of ethnic cleansing and of the federal Occupation of our Sanctuary cities in repression of dissent, the second time we the People, among whom our Antifa direct action commando teams may be counted, have defeated in open battle the federal government of the United States within its contiguous boundaries since Little Bighorn, the first being the actions of the Black Lives Matter protests.
But the consequences of this sea change event are far more decisive in the continuing liberation struggle for the Restoration of America from the Fourth Reich of the Trump Regime. For the people organized in solidarity of action, formed new alliances, developed new tactics and strategies for countering ICE in the field, and created a national Resistance which was nonexistent before the ICE provocations. The state tested the limits of its power to compel and enforce obedience, and lost.
Lost publicly and decisively, which threatens the whole of the Trump Regime and its programme of the racialization of our society and the centralization of power to a totalitarian state.
The ICE murder of a white woman was the second and fatal blow, because it disrupted the white supremacist and nationalist pretext for the whole mission; Trump’s thugs are more of a threat to those in whose name he claims to act than the migrants they are hunting, and Republican support began to crumble like an avalanche.
Noem lost control of the narrative during her Congressional hearing, and all war is about who owns the story. Always there remains the struggle between the stories others tell about us, and those we tell about ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Trump sacrificed Noem, but this will not save him nor restore legitimacy to his regime.
Let us remember always that Noem acted not only as commander of a white supremacist terror force in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, but also ran the domestic side of two ongoing two front wars; the war on campus dissent which was the home front of the Trump-Netanyahu genocide of the Palestinians, and a pogram against Venezuelan migrants concealed within the broader ethnic cleansing campaign which is the home front of the undeclared imperial war to conquer Latin America beginning with Venezuela and Cuba. And for all of this we must bring a Reckoning.
What general principles of resistance, revolutionary struggle, and war can be drawn from the case of the Fall of the Dogkiller?
First, all war is theatre, and who controls the narrative wins.
Second, the goal of conflict is seizure or enforcement of power, and the relevant form of power as authority is constituted by its perceived legitimacy. To take their power, we must delegitimize authority through the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority by Disbelief and Disobedience. This is why revolutionary struggle has delegitimation of authority as its primary objective.
As written by Marina Dunbar in The Guardian, in an article entitled Minneapolis killings and deportation outrage: Kristi Noem’s scandal-plagued DHS tenure: Backlash grew against homeland security secretary after slew of controversies from Trump’s immigration crackdown; “Kristi Noem’s year-long tenure as homeland security secretary has been plagued by controversies as she led an aggressive immigration crackdown that hasprompted protests and lawsuits.
There have been scandals, legally dubious deportations condemned by human rights groups, taxpayer-funded publicity campaigns, and false claims about US citizens.
After she described two US citizens killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis as being involved in actions of “domestic terrorism” – assertions which independent analyses and state officials said the footage did not support – bipartisan pressure on her leadership mounted and public support plummeted.
Here’s a look back at some of the key moments in Noem’s controversial time as the head of DHS.
12 November 2024 – Trump selects Noem for homeland security
Then president-elect Donald Trump announced that South Dakota governor Kristi Noem would serve as homeland security secretary in his second administration. Trump selected Noem largely because of her hard-line positions on immigration and her loyalty to his agenda, including plans for large-scale deportations and tougher border enforcement. The choice was one of many signals that immigration enforcement would be a central focus of the administration’s national security strategy.
Earlier in 2024, Noem went on an ill-fated book tour, widely seen, at least at the time, as an audition to be Trump’s running mate. The memoir is now remembered mostly for her admission that she had shot and killed the family’s “untrainable” hunting dog, a 14-month-old wirehair pointer named Cricket.
January 2025 – Senate confirmation
Noem was confirmed by the Senate on 25 January by a 59–34 vote, with some bipartisan support. She was sworn in that same day and resigned as governor of South Dakota to take the position. Within days, she joined federal immigration enforcement operations, including raids targeting undocumented immigrants in New York.
Early 2025 – immigration crackdowns
One of Noem’s earliest policy moves was to rescind temporary protections for large groups of migrants. Her department moved to end an 18-month extension of temporary protected status for roughly 600,000 Venezuelans – a move which was later blocked by the courts. Noem later revoked legal protections for more than 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, who had entered under humanitarian programs.
April 2025 – deportation controversies
Major controversies emerged pretty much immediately into her tenure. Following the deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García, whom the Trump administration admitted was mistakenly sent to an El Salvador mega-prison, Noem said if Ábrego García was sent back to the US, the administration “would immediately deport him again”. García has since been in and out of ICE custody after returning to the US as the administration has repeatedly tried to deport him again, despite court rulings.
July 2025 – ICE presence grows
ICE continues to be a bigger and bigger presence across the US, becoming the unofficial blueprint for the Trump administration’s policies and approach to policing. The agency grew in numbers by promising new recruits $50,000 signing bonuses and pledges of patriotism. Noem faced further scandal when a report was published that revealed she had failed to disclose $80,000 she accepted while serving as South Dakota’s governor.
August 2025 – politics and pop culture
The TV comedy South Park shocked viewers with its critical depiction of the Trump administration, satirizing the incompetence of several members of the administration, not least Noem. An episode poked fun at her perceived penchant for killing dogs, racial profiling and cosmetic surgery. Noem responded by accusing the show of sexism. The show’s high ratings were seen as a sign of the public’s increasingly negative sentiment towards the administration’s mass deportation campaign.
September 2025 – inhumane conditions in Ice detention
Pressure continued to mount as several reports emerged that detailed the horrific conditions that detainees were forced to endure in ICE custody. A Guardian investigation found US immigration officials had been increasingly detaining people in small, secretive holding facilities for days or even weeks at a time in violation of federal policy. Outrage over the treatment of immigrants grew, with a total of 32 people having died in ICE custody by the end of 2025.
October 2025 – social media takeover
an ICE facility in Portland. Photograph: Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images
The Trump administration tried repeatedly to use social media and so-called “Maga influencers” to push their policies and popularize the deportation campaigns. In early October, Noem toured the ICE facility in Portland, accompanied by a trio of conservative influencers, one of many examples of right-leaning media figures given special access in exchange for more positive coverage. These attempts to normalize hardline immigration methods among younger audiences were met with moderate success, but not nearly enough to cancel out the growing unease and plummeting approval ratings.
January 2026 – Minneapolis shootings crisis
A turning point came early this year when immigration enforcement operations intensified to unprecedented degrees. During separate incidents in a crackdown in Minneapolis, immigration officers shot and killed two US citizens, 37-year-old local residents Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, triggering nationwide protests. Both had been protesting the ICE raids. Noem defended the officers and accused the two killed Americans of “domestic terrorism” , remarks that drew immediate backlash from Democrats and some Republicans who questioned her leadership and demanded investigations.
February 2026 – mounting investigations and bipartisan pressure
Noem appeared before Congress amid escalating scrutiny over enforcement tactics and departmental spending. Lawmakers questioned DHS leadership over the Minneapolis killings, agency oversight, and alleged obstruction of investigations. Several members of Congress began publicly calling for her resignation or removal.
By mid-February, it emerged Tricia McLaughlin, the homeland security department’s top spokesperson and one of the most visible defenders of the Trump administration’s deportation raids, was leaving.
March 2026 – $220m DHS advertising controversy
Yet another political scandal erupted over a $220m DHS advertising campaign for border security that prominently featured Noem in promotional material. Lawmakers from both parties questioned the contracting process and whether the campaign amounted to taxpayer-funded self-promotion. The controversy deepened when Trump said he had not approved the campaign, contradicting testimony that suggested he had been informed.
On 4 March, Noem appeared at a House judiciary committee oversight hearing and was asked about reports turmoil at the department and reports she had engaged in a personal relationship with Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager who was her senior adviser. Both are married.
Noem denied the reports and described them as “tabloid garbage”.
5 March 2026 – Trump fires Noem
By early March, tensions between the White House and Noem had escalated sharply, with Trump officially announcing her ousting on Truth Social, marking the first major personnel change of Trump’s second term. Trump said Noem “has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!)”, and that she would become special envoy for “the Shield of the Americas”, a security initiative Trump said he planned to announce over the weekend.
Trump also announced Markwayne Mullin, a Republican Oklahoma senator, would take over from Noem starting on 31 March, though Congress would need to vote to confirm the choice first.”
As I wrote in my post of May 19 2025, Beauty and Ugliness, Horror and Wonder, and the Limits of the Human: Case of the Kristi Noem Television Commerical For Homeland Security’s White Supremacist Terror; We are surprised now and again with the unlooked for juxtaposition of the beautiful, the ugly, and the strange, like a fiery chili heart in a Mexican candy on the side of wonderful surprises, or on the side of horrible surprises reaching out to hold a frightened comrade’s hand as the world shatters under artillery fire to discover its just the hand that’s left.
Yemen that last was, as Trump ordered the bombardment of our positions in the counter blockade of Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid to Palestine on March 19, exactly as had Biden last year. Tyranny has traded masks in our elections, but the abandonment of our principle of universal human rights has not changed, if it was ever true.
Ansar Allah’s glorious Resistance to our dehumanization and the depravity of an America which would buy the deaths of children with our taxes and conspire with Israel in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine in order to build a Riviera of casinos on their bones as Trump and Netanyahu together plot are become a chiaroscuro which defines us all, and the limits of the human.
I wish I could say that all things are equal to me in this regard, horror and wonder, ugliness and beauty, but its not true, or true only in moments when I am Most Sincerely Dead and my consciousness is free from the limits of our form.
For all that I have lived in this vast wilderness of unknowns, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and the limits of the human, through Rashomon Gate Events which destroy and create universes and possibilities of becoming human and fracture time like a Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror, how little have I escaped the legacies of our history and the flags of my skin.
But the suffering of others remains greater than my own, and our duty of care for others compels me to do what I can to help, even when it is meaningless, when it is impossible, when it can change nothing. In the end this is what defines our humanity, and it is the greatest power in the universe.
Ours is an Absurd universe, and one wherein two contradictory things can both be true, in which the terror of our nothingness is balanced with the joy of total freedom.
While watching Benedict Cumberbatch’s beautiful Dr Strange on television, my partner Dolly and I were confronted serially by a loathsome box of evils in Kristi Noem’s advertisement for white supremacist state terror and ethnic cleansing now ongoing by the Department of Homeland Security she commands.
Her plastic mouth simulates human speech like a possessed Barbie doll, made of lies disguised as truths, diabolisms as virtues, an artificial and illusory beauty of surfaces which masks horrors like the justifications of our concentration camps for nonwhite people and political dissidents as security.
Security is an illusion, law serves power, order is theft, and there is no just Authority.
And really, Kristi, you’re as dark as some Mexicans and you poisoned your lips with botox to make them look like a black girl’s in the hope that you may deceive men into thinking them yummy, and you are leading the ethnic cleansing of America through your secret armies of police white supremacist terror? Is this because you think they will come for you last?
No one controls such forces, once they are set in motion.
Beneath the human mask of those who would enslave us and steal our souls, including all Republicans and any who voted for our Rapist In Chief, Nazi revivalist, and Russian agent Traitor Trump and his Theatre of Cruelty with all of his freaks and degenerate subhuman monstrosities of his regime of systems of oppression including theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, and amoral nihilistic capitalism in the grand strategic trinity of predation designed to transform us from persons to things that can be owned and fed as raw material into the machine of elite wealth and power and from citizens to subjects through processes of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization; beneath all of this lies the depravities and perversions of endless chasms of darkness, full of crawling things.
This is why the stench of putrefaction trails Kristi Noem and all minions of Our Clown of Terror, slaves of Moloch the Seducer and Demon of Lies, and wafts a poisonous sweet candy scent into the labyrinth of the Wilderness of Mirrors with its endless echoes and reflections of propaganda, conspiracy theories, lies and illusions, bizarro worlds and reversals of meaning, and alternate realities which trap the unwary with their siren songs; for all such apologists of tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are zombified and hollowed out.
To be a Republican is to be like the Man of Worms in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer two part episode Whats My Line?, or Oogy Boogy Man in The Nightmare Before Christmas; a husk of human flesh utterly consumed by its own darkness and worn like a sock puppet by the horrors that possess it.
And remember, folks, you can always tell a Republican’s secret name; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.
What is to be done? As Lenin and Tolstoy asked with such different prescriptions, What is to be done?
As I wrote in my post of June 7 2025, A Battle For the Soul Of America and the Freedom of the World: ICE Versus The People; In the streets of Los Angeles and throughout Vichy America, the People rise in mass action and solidarity to do battle with Homeland Security’s army of occupation and white supremacist terror, ICE.
Is this not the beauty of human beings, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows? This is the primary act of becoming human which defines us, this refusal to submit to authority, or to betray our duty of care for others.
Here also is our victory, for who cannot be ruled or controlled, who disobeys and disbelieves the lies of those who would enslave us, becomes Unconquered and free, and this is a power that cannot be taken from us.
This is now the fifth time Trump has tried to terrorize America into submission through use of secret armies of federal occupation; and each of these previous campaigns of repression of dissent, which loosed looting, arson, and random violence under the direction of Homeland Security on our cities to delegitimize the Black Lives Mater protests and seize control of the narrative in service to the centralization of power and authority to the carceral state, each and every such action has failed.
The sole result of all of this state terror and repression of dissent was the defeat of the Homeland Security army in the Battle of Portland and the articles of surrender published by the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf and their joint declaration of New York, Seattle, and Portland as Autonomous Zones beyond control of the federal state. To my knowledge, we Antifa are the only force to defeat the federal government of the United States in open battle on ground within her borders since Little Bighorn.
We have been victorious over forces like that of ICE which the Trump regime sends against us now; it can be done, friends, and we all of us can do it again, here and now.
When the enemies of liberty come for us, as they always have and will, let them find not an America divided by propaganda of otherness and defeated by learned helplessness, abjection, and despair, but a United Humankind of Living Autonomous Zones and the Unconquered, citizens who refuse to become subjects, and a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights.
And if we all stand together and the circle is unbroken, we will be victorious.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2025, Resist ICE By Amy Means Necessary; If They Come For One Of Us, Let Them Be Met With All Of Us; If you see ICE agents, send up a general warning. Photograph and publish their identities. Track them to their lair, picket their homes, flash mob them, set false trails and load the sites they raid with protestors.
Never let police take anyone alone; they are both infiltrated by white supremacist terrorists and coordinating actions with them as deniable assets like the Oathkeepers, and states are now hiring bounty hunters with no security clearances or training and paying one thousand dollars per human deported, and that means anyone nonwhite, citizen or not, a policy which has hit the Native American Tribes as racist state terror.
One armed thug with or without a badge cannot abduct a target when three of us intervene; one hundred enforcers of racist state terror cannot overcome a thousand who Resist.
Men without badges, wearing masks, without warrants and who offer no rights of trial as we our guaranteed by our founding documents, who abduct people at random and send them to secret foreign prisons without probable cause or evidence of any kind, without Miranda rights or hearing the evidence against them in a court of law; such teams as ICE now employs are not police of any kind but extrajudicial crime syndicates of racist terror. Resist to the death abduction of yourself or others.
In the words of the character Mick Rory in Legends of Tomorrow, episode Turncoat; “You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re outcasts, misfits, and proud of it. If the enemy attacks in formation, we pop em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, we raid their camp in the night. And if they’re going to hang you, you fight dirty. And we never surrender.”
How shall we resist? By any means necessary, as Sartre wrote in his play of 1948 Dirty Hands, and was made famous by Malcolm X. All Resistance is War to the Knife, for who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
I am prepared at all times to fight to the death, but this does not mean taking unnecessary risks. One must study the possibilities like a problem in chess, have plans for everything you can imagine, and spring the trap only when it is properly set.
The first lesson of the Art of War is diversion and surprise; and the last lesson is the same as the first. On the modern battlefield any threat that can be seen or identified can be destroyed; so don’t tip your hand.
In the context of Resistance against ICE kidnapping teams, your enemy has military weapons, armor, and communications, and possibly some training; if Trump calls in the National Guard to support them as he has threatened today, they will unquestionably be trained to work as a team in ways far superior to that of any pickup team you may be able to put together, even if your team has better skills individually. This means you must avoid direct confrontation; you must be clever, unpredictable, strike anonymously from the shadows when the enemy is off guard and at their weakest in ways which cannot be countered, and never use the same trick twice.
Offer no target, give no warning, leave no trace.
Of course, you want to train as a team as much as possible, and as broadly as possible which among other things means cross training in each other’s disciplines.
This brings us to one of the crucial and decisive factors in any conflict; the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce such as Resistance, so the reaction must be part of its design if one is to use force to shape the future.
Another such principle is that in the Calculus of Fear, too little invites Chaos and social disorder, and too much galvanizes Resistance. I’d have thought the world would have learned this at Nanking, but its something tyrants never truly learn. People who have nothing left to lose are uncontrollable and dangerous, like ourselves.
Herein a word of caution; do not meet force with force, fear with fear, terror with terror. Leave evil to the evildoers. This I advise not as a moral principle, but as a strategic one when the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle include a nominally democratic state which may be brought into alignment with its constitutional ideals of the equality of all human beings under the law and of the co-ownership of the state by its citizens, through mass action, solidarity, and performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen: Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
The great secret of authority as power, force, and control is that it is hollow and brittle, and becomes meaningless without legitimacy.
The Fourth Reich and its figurehead Traitor Trump and the Party of Treason are counting on losing some of their enforcers to mob violence as a pretext for the occupation of America by federal troops under martial law, a trick they tried four times during the Black Lives Matter protests using police provocateurs and campaigns of arson, looting, and random violence to delegitimize the protests against racist police violence and seize the narrative. In this the enemy failed; during months of mass protests in over fifty cities throughout our nation, only one act of violence by anyone other than police and their co-conspirators happened, and that was when our Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl returned fire when fired upon when confronting a motorcade of 600 armed fascists on August 29 2020 in Portland Oregon, and was assassinated by a police death squad days later.
The goal of authority in centralizing power is to win legitimacy, and our goal as revolutionaries is to delegitimize authority and seize the moral high ground. We now find ourselves in a similar situation to that of Gandhi versus the British Empire, and his very elegant solution which tipped the balance was the Salt Tax Protest, during which hundreds of nonresisting Indians were systematically beaten with clubs by police on camera and before the stage of history, reported to the world with the words; “The British Empire has lost any claim to the moral high ground in India.”
Always the question of the social use of force remains central to any action versus or interrogation of evil in its origins as fear, power, and force in recursive processes of the Wagnerian Ring of Power, and any seizures of power in liberation struggle against systems of oppression and unequal power and the state as embodied violence, especially under imposed conditions of struggle which include brutal repression of dissent and thought control by enforcers of the carceral state and its elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
This goal of delegitimation of authority does not override our duty of care for others; if a man kneels on another’s neck he is a murderer and we are obligated to stop him by any means necessary, and if a man points a gun at another let a hundred guns reply.
Everything devolves to fear, power, and force, a maelstrom which only love can free us from, and we who hunt monsters must be very careful not to become so ourselves. As Nietzsche warned; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
News of the Dogkiller on her Fall
Good riddance to Kristi Noem. Her replacement won’t be an improvement
March 19 2025 Tyrants Attack In Campaign Of Genocide: Netanyahu Bombs Civilian Aid Corridor In Gaza To Divide It Into Bantustans As Trump Bombs Yemen To Break Our Counter Blockade of the Israeli Blockade of Humanitarian Aid
January 29 2024 Where Do We Go From Here? As the Gaza War Becomes A Great Powers Proxy War and a Theatre of World War Three, and the Arab-American Alliance With Our Colony Israel Versus the Iranian Dominion of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen With Their Key Ally Russia Make A Wishbone of the Holy Land
January 23 2026 Liberty Versus the ICE White Supremacist Terror Force of the Fourth Reich In the Battle of Minneapolis: the Case of Liam Ramos and the Three Thousand Eight Hundred Stolen Children
June 12 2025 Why We Fight: Authorized Versus Chosen And Ambiguous National Identities As a Ground of Struggle, Symbolized By the Mexican Flag In the Battle of Los Angeles
April 17 2025 Trump Regime Tests Its Power to Violate the Constitution and Abduct and Imprison Without Cause Or Trial Any Random Person and All Of Us: Case of Kilmar Ábrego García
The unwritten motto of the Trump regime has unfolded into its ultimate form of horror and criminality with the unprovoked and meaningless attacks on Iran, which has thrown the whole region into peril and threatened the supply of oil on which our global civilization and America depend, a war crime of mass death and destruction which goes far beyond the campaign of white supremacist terror and ethnic cleansing of the two-from war in America and Palestine, for its true purpose is to bring the Apocalypse and the end of humankind and the world.
A few days ago our Rapist In Chief began a second undeclared war, this time versus Iran to sabotage her democracy revolution against the regime of the mullahs by tainting it with American imperialism, to collaborate in the Israeli imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors as Greater Israel, to begin the Apocalypse and end of the world which is the official reason per Hegseth whom I described in my post of January 31 2025, Trump Unfurls His Tongue of Lies as “Civil War possessing the leering and drunken Christian Nationalist Pete Hegseth, dragging behind him the shadows of the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, patriarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings, bearing the Cross he wishes to nail us all to”, and of course to distract from the Epstein scandal and Trump’s role as kingpin of a global human trafficking and child sex predator syndicate. Any of these just causes for war alone are despicable and insane; together they typify the criminal folly of the Trump regime and its era as the Fourth Reich.
Trump has now reached the point of paranoid madness of his idol Hitler cowering in his bunker while Germany fell into ruin and flames; this was inevitable given the etiology of Trump’s madness, but a war begun in hope of total annihilation not only of an enemy but of all humankind, here in America most especially, was not. The gratuitous and nonsensical nature of this act of destabilization of the world order and international rule of law calls for removal of Trump and his collaborators from office immediately.
With the Second Nuremburg Trials which should follow, we may begin the Restoration of America, democracy, the international rule of law, and the hope of humankind for a better tomorrow.
Russia has yet to launch nuclear missiles at us to help her historic ally Iran, whom she needs if Putin’s mad dream of rebuilding the Russian Empire in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe is to be realized, but we may have hours and days rather that weeks and months to act in our survival and purge the Trump regime. For the red button of universal doom calls to both Trump and his master Putin like an evil genie in a bottle, whispering; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
As written by Brandi Buchman in Huffpost, in an article entitled Military Commander Tells Troops Bombing Iran Is ‘Part Of God’s Divine Plan’: One commander had a “big grin” on his face while saying Donald Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran,” a service member said.; “ For some U.S. military commanders, the emerging war in Iran is part of a biblical plan to bring about the end of the world as we know it, according to complaints filed by over 100 service members.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received a litany of complaints about religious ideology seeping into military orders since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran, independent journalist Jon Larsen first reported.
Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of MRFF, a nonprofit group established 21 years ago that focuses on ensuring constitutional protections for service members, spoke with HuffPost by phone Tuesday morning and illuminated some details of the complaints, which have come from more than three dozen military units situated in at least 30 different military installations.
“We started getting calls in the wee hours of Saturday morning from people saying their commanders were just jubilant about this and trying to tell people, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all part of God’s plan,’” Weinstein said.
Weinstein said the “metric promised” in the Bible’s Book of Revelation is horrifying and should worry everyone.
“They are promised a 200-mile-long river that is four-and-a-half feet deep filled with nothing but the blood that their weaponized version of Jesus will spill at the Battle of Armageddon,” Weinstein said. “That’s a lot of blood.”
Part of what makes the accounts so disturbing, Weinstein said, is that service members aren’t able to push back when they’re given orders that blur the line regarding the separation of church and state.
“This is all about time, place and manner,” he said. “If you’re being proselytized to by your superior, you can’t say, ‘Get out of my face.’ Under the military’s criminal code of justice, insubordination is considered a felony.”
One of the complaints MRFF received over the weekend came from a non-commissioned officer currently stationed outside of Iran but awaiting deployment at a moment’s notice. That officer filed the complaint on behalf of himself and 15 other troops, all of whom are of different religious backgrounds. (For their protection, MRFF is keeping the identity of these service members anonymous.)
The non-commissioned officer, who is Christian, reported to MRFF that a commander told them to tell fellow troops that the war in Iran was “all part of God’s divine plan.” The commander allegedly cited the Book of Revelation and the section specifically referring to Armageddon and the “imminent” return of Jesus Christ.
The non-commissioned officer said the messaging from higher-ups is not only “destroy[ing] morale and unit cohesion” among troops, but they also believe the commanders are flagrantly violating their oaths to uphold the Constitution, which guarantees the freedom of religion.
According to the complaint first reported by Larsen, the commander said President Donald Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
The commander “had a big grin on his face when he said all of this which made his message seem even more crazy,” the complaint said.
“I and my fellow troops know that it is completely wrong to have to suffer through what our commander said today. It’s not just the separation of church and state … It’s the fact that our commander feels as though he is fully supported and justified by the entire (combat unit’s name withheld) chain of command to inflict his Armageddon views of our attack on Iran on those of us beneath him in the chain of command,” the officer wrote in his complaint to MRFF.
Weinstein said some service members called him on Sunday to report that they were being invited to Bible studies at their commanders’ personal homes to “discuss how this was all part of the plan and it’s all being lived out in the Book of Revelation and Christian eschatology.”
Commanders were “in a hurry” to get subordinates on board, according to the complaints received by MRFF.
Once a service member makes a complaint to MRFF, finding a solution can be difficult. Service members have a few different options, Weinstein said: If troops are told they lack courage, intelligence or bravery because of their religious tradition or lack thereof, they can file an inspector general complaint or an ethics complaint within the military.
“But then you completely out yourself,” Weinstein said. “And when you do that in the military, you become what we call a ‘tarantula on a wedding cake.’ How long do you think that cake lasts at that wedding?”
Troops can complain to military judge advocates, lawyers or chaplains, but the latter can be especially tricky. The majority of the U.S. military’s chaplains are Christian and many are evangelical.
“By itself, that’s fine,” Weinstein said. “But if you are a Christian Nationalist, you don’t pay any attention to the time, place or manner … with any sort of religious extremism, we end up not with little streams, or creeks or brooks, but with oceans and oceans of blood.”
Weinstein said none of this should necessarily be shocking. The evangelical leanings of the Trump administration — and in particular the Department of Defense — have not been a secret. At a prayer breakfast last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed the U.S. was a “Christian nation,” and there are prayer meetings at the Pentagon each month.
But putting religion into politics is inflicting “generational damage” onto the U.S. and its military, Weinstein said.
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.
Harrison Mann, a 13-year veteran of the U.S. Army who served under President Barack Obama, during Trump’s first term and under President Joe Biden, told HuffPost that for soldiers, there “isn’t much of a difference” inside the military — at least “culturally speaking” — even when presidents are “doing some really crazy stuff” publicly, he said.
Because of that, he argues it may be too soon to say whether Hegseth can actually inflict permanent damage to the military. Mann is, however, deeply worried about what happens to the public perception of the troops in the meantime.
“There’s danger in commanders telling soldiers they only vouch for Christians, whites or MAGA supporters. When the public starts to view the military that way too, then you get to a much more dangerous place where they no longer have trust in them,” he said.
Today, Mann is the associate director of campaigns for Win Without War, a grassroots progressive foreign policy advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. that formed in 2003 in response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Mann left his role as assistant to the head of the Middle East Center at the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, in 2024, for moral reasons.
After the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Mann said his mission as a soldier primarily became about supporting Israel and sharing intel with Israeli military officials. But once he saw what the war in Gaza was becoming — “a genocide,” he said — he resigned.
Mann knows from personal experience how frightening it can be for a soldier to speak out. The Trump administration’s politicization of the military, as the MRFF complaints clearly show, makes it harder. Mann worries it is fast creating a situation where subordinate leaders may believe the messaging from on high grants them “tacit approval to start imposing their own religious beliefs on others.”
“I can tell you I’m very worried,” he said. “I think most people who join the military, they want to do something they feel is noble and they want to do the right thing. But the potential consequences for refusing an unlawful order or standing up for what you think is right is very high … So it goes back to the question: What can everyone else do to help them?”
To start, Mann said the public can broadcast support for service members who speak up or disobey unlawful orders or unconstitutional directives. That validation is in short supply inside the military, so it must come from the outside, he said.
“It’s very frightening to imagine that you would be on your own if you tried to defy an unlawful order,” Mann said. “We need to see increasing efforts by members of Congress to impeach Secretary Hegseth and everyone can put pressure on their lawmakers to support that effort.
“You can support a lot of the organizations like About Face and Win Without War that are trying to create a welcoming, safe space for service members who are experiencing this kind of unfair treatment,” he said.
Mann said he isn’t hopeless about the future even though there is much to despair over right now.
“It’s way too soon to give up. There’s just so much that we have not tried… there are so many pressure tactics that haven’t culminated yet. There’s so much people power that has not yet been mobilized. As terrifying as what is happening is, there’s a critical opportunity for growth and pushback against Trump’s agenda,” he said.”
This is not an isolated incident of aberrant military commanders aping the Crusader Cross tattooed Hegseth, or granted immunity by Trump for crimes against humanity like the actual Crusaders were historically by the Pope, but evidence of an advanced plan to seed Christian Identity Nationalist officers throughout the military, who will obey without question or mercy any criminal or lunatic order by their Fuhrer Trump and order their men to do the same. All of this, according to Hegseth, in service of a world purified in blood and fire, without any humans left alive to inherit this new Eden.
As written by Stephen Prager in Common Dreams, in an article entitled US Commanders Want to Make War With Iran as ‘Bloody’ as Possible to Bring About Biblical End Times, Officers Report: One noncommissioned officer said he was directed to tell his troops that Trump was “anointed by Jesus” and that war with Iran was “all part of God’s divine plan” to bring about Armageddon.; “In less than a week, the US and Israel’s war has rendered unfathomable suffering upon the people of Iran. Over 180 schoolgirls and staffers were killed in a massacre this weekend, and several hospitals have reportedly been struck, amid numerous other attacks on civilians.
But some US troops are being told the bloodletting is all a part of God’s plan.
At a briefing on Monday, as President Donald Trump unleashed what has been called a “carpet bombing” of Tehran, a combat-unit commander reportedly told noncommissioned officers (NCOs) that the commander-in-chief was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
The complaint, sent by one of those noncommissioned officers, was just one of at least 110 similar reports received by the Military Religious Freedom Fondation (MRFF) since Trump first launched strikes on Saturday.
In compliance with the First Amendment, the Department of Defense has long adopted rules against proselytizing within the armed forces. But under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, an evangelical Christian who has said the West must wage a “crusade” against Islam, Christian nationalist invocations in the military have become commonplace.
Mikey Weinstein, the president and founder of MRFF and an Air Force veteran who served in the White House of former President Ronald Reagan, told independent journalist Jonathan Larsen that the group has been “inundated” with complaints from NCOs since Saturday, which all have “one damn thing in freaking common.”
“Our MRFF clients report the unrestricted euphoria of their commanders and command chains as to how this new ‘biblically-sanctioned’ war is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian ‘End Times’ as vividly described in the New Testament Book of Revelation,” Weinstein said.
“Many of their commanders,” he added, “are especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be, zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end-of-the-world eschatology.”
According to Larsen, who first reported on the MRFF’s findings on Monday, the message has been spread far and wide as US troops rained missiles down upon Iran.
Larsen reported that the “complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations,” and have involved commanders in every branch of the US military.
One noncommissioned officer, who did not identify himself out of fear of retaliation, said his commander “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.”
The NCO added that his commander “had a big grin on his face when he said all of this, which made his message seem even more crazy.”
“Our commander would probably be described as a ‘Christian First’ supporter,” he said. “He has been this way for a very long time and makes it clear that he desires all of us under him to become just like him as a Christian. But what he did this morning was so toxic and over the line that it shocked many of us in attendance at the ops readiness briefing.”
The NCO identified himself as a Christian, but emailed MRFF on behalf of 15 of his troops, which included at least one Muslim and one Jewish person.
He said that their commanders’ remarks “destroy morale and unit cohesion and are in violation of the oaths we swore to support the Constitution.”
Christian nationalism has long simmered just under the surface of US military culture and has been invoked by presidents of the past, including George W. Bush, who referred to his War on Terror as a “crusade.”
But Hegseth, who regularly hosts Christian prayer services at the Pentagon during work hours, rails against “secular humanism” and the “godless left,” and has hosted the notorious fundamentalist pastor Doug Wilson—who opposes the right of women to vote and calls for the US to be a Christian theocracy—at the Pentagon, has dropped any pretenses of religious pluralism.
“While America’s relationship with Iran is influenced by all the typical geopolitical factors of oil, culture, and nuclear weaponry, there is a part of American foreign policy that is influenced by apocalyptic evangelical theology,” wrote Josh Olds, a pastor and theologian, on Monday for Baptist News Global.
Christian fundamentalists, some of whom have the ear of the White House, he said, view an Iranian war with Israel as central to triggering Armageddon, during which God will miraculously strike down Israel’s enemies, Jesus will return to Earth, and Christians will be raptured to Heaven, according to Biblical teachings.
He said that while Iran’s Muslim leaders are often accused of being dangerously irrational out of blind religious fundamentalism, “it is increasingly clear that American actions are shaped by it as well.”
In just over three days, US and Israeli strikes have killed at least 787 people in Iran, according to a Tuesday report from the Iranian Red Crescent Society, including hundreds of civilians. In addition to schools and hospitals, attacks have been reported against crowded residential buildings, a radio and TV broadcast center, and a sports complex.
“Donald Trump partnered with Israel to bomb Iran because of the influence of an eschatology that sees conflict with Iran as setting the stage for fulfilled prophecy,” Olds said. “The irony is profound: A faith centered on loving enemies and making peace becomes a framework that welcomes and advocates violence. The result is not the advance of God’s kingdom but its irrevocable damage in the eyes of the world.”
As written by Jamil Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled
In a Trump war, with great power comes no responsibility; “The bombs fell in our name before any of us knew. Then the president saw fit to inform us.
Legal scholars and politicians alike began debating whether they were constitutional. Markets responded within hours. Cities across the United States moved to heightened alert amid fears of retaliation.
The sequence matters.
In a constitutional system built on checks and balances, that system is supposed to constrain the use of military force before it unfolds. Instead, constraint is arriving afterward – if at all.
Lawmakers in the US are now invoking the war powers resolution. Constitutional scholars argue the strikes stretch or violate its limits. In private briefings, Pentagon officials reportedly told members of Congress there was no intelligence showing Iran was about to attack US forces first. That directly contradicts the urgency Donald Trump offered the public as justification.
When Congress and the rest of us dispute the justification for emergency action, the system should slow down. Instead, the president, in tandem with Israel, deployed force and the debate followed.
This is not only a question about Iran. The regression there is obvious: from a historic nuclear agreement reached under Barack Obama to acts of war (and possible war crimes). We must also consider whether the guardrails around presidential power still function as anything more than decoration.
In theory, they do. Congress declares war. The war powers resolution attempts to limit unilateral hostilities. Impeachment exists as a check against abuse. And even the possibility of criminal liability for egregious official acts has historically operated as a distant but real constraint. These mechanisms are designed to prevent escalation, not merely to criticize it after the fact.
Those guardrails have weakened in practice, however. We see war powers invoked reactively. Impeachment has become structurally partisan; it is now more admonishment than accountability. The US supreme court’s absurd decision to expand presidential immunity for official acts narrowed one of the last theoretical avenues of post-office liability. Before he even became president again, Trump didn’t even spend a day in jail after being convicted on 34 felony counts.
In plain terms: stopping him now would require extraordinary political will. That is true now, and it will be true next time. The guardrails haven’t simply weakened due to atrophy or age. Whether by intent or by consequence, people removed them. What remains are institutions that can object, debate and react, but cannot compel. A president who understands that faces a different calculus than one who does not. This one seems to understand it all too well.
Deterrence, mind you, does not equal constant punishment. It does require the credible possibility of meaningful consequences. When that possibility disappears, the institutional cost of unilateral escalation falls with it.
Is it possible the US and Israeli strikes will achieve their objectives? Sure. Iran’s nuclear infrastructure may be degraded. Escalation may stall. I certainly can’t rule out “success”, however Trump defines it.
Constitutional design is not built for best-case outcomes, though. It exists for moments of uncertainty and miscalculation – and those moments are already here, less than a week into this.
Hezbollah’s involvement threatens broader conflict. Friendly fire has already killed people, a reminder of how quickly complex operations lose clarity. Miscalculation in a nuclear-adjacent environment does not offer second chances. And several days in, the administration has yet to agree on why we are fighting – regime change, pre-emption and nuclear elimination have all been offered as justifications by different officials at different moments. When the people running a war cannot settle on its purpose, how can those fighting in it understand what they’re trying to achieve, perhaps outside of wanton violence? How are the rest of us supposed to know?
The human costs are not waiting to materialize. They are already landing. The state department urged thousands of Americans across the Middle East to leave even as airlines cancel flights and embassies warn they cannot guarantee evacuation. Americans calling the state department have been told travel assistance is not yet available. Asked why there was no evacuation plan, Trump said events had unfolded “very quickly” and that officials believed an attack was imminent. That answer is its own indictment.
Responsibility in matters of war is not rhetorical. It is anticipatory. It means weighing consequences before force is used – not explaining them afterward.
Not all wars carry the same civic burden. When a nation responds to an attack already under way, urgency shapes the moment. Wars of choice are different. They demand an even higher standard of proof, defined aims and candor before the first strike – not press conferences after the bombs have fallen.
The US keeps living through this. In Vietnam and in Iraq, the justifications shifted, the aims blurred and the consequences were borne by people who had no seat at the table when the decision was made.
My father was a sergeant in the air force who served in Vietnam, and he carried the visible and invisible scars for the rest of his life. Dad died last October, and his memorial certificate bears his name and the signature of the president who has now launched another war of choice. It sickens me to even look at it.
When presidents ask the country to support a war, honesty is not optional. It is owed, in part because the people who bear the true costs are almost never the people who made the choice.
Congress can object and impede. So can the courts. Markets will do what they do. None of that changes the sequence. Trump and this administration have already acted.
Those disfiguring decisions outlast the headlines. They survive the presidents who made them. What remains are the people who are left to carry the consequences.”
Dr. Strangelove trailer
Military Commander Tells Troops Bombing Iran Is ‘Part Of God’s Divine Plan’
One commander had a “big grin” on his face while saying Donald Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran,” a service member said.
Our Supreme Court two years ago today ignored the question of Trump’s treason and insurrection, and instead ruled that states cannot bar him from the ballot in a federal election on the basis of being an insurrectionist. As they well know, this moved him a step closer to the Presidency.
Among the many flaws in our system which must be changed as Trump has demonstrated to us all include our method of choosing a President, in which we must abolish the electoral college and adopt one citizen one vote national elections without regard to state of residency, wherein all citizens are equal in the power of their vote, and term limits for the Supreme Court to the term of the appointing President, which would recognize its political nature. Aberrant and disgusting as Trump is, he has been useful in exposing weaknesses in our democracy.
A few days ago our Rapist n Chief began a second undeclared war, this time versus Iran to sabotage her democracy revolution against the regime of the mullahs by tainting it with American imperialism, to collaborate in the Israeli imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors as Greater Israel, to begin the Apocalypse and end of the world which is the official reason per Hegseth, and of course to distract from the Epstein scandal and Trump’s role as kingpin of a global human trafficking and child sex predator syndicate. Any of these just causes for war alone are despicable and insane; together they typify the criminal folly of the Trump regime and its era as the Fourth Reich.
The time is now past for disqualifying Traitor Trump from office on the basis of his treason and foreign espionage, for his deplorables have elected him once again as our President and the Age of Tyrants may have already begun. His regime of destruction of the American state and the subversion of democracy must be met on its own terms and ground of struggle, in the unknown places beyond all laws and all limits marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value. I have lived in such places, among the dragons of the unknown and the monsters which define the limits of the human, for forty three years now, and it can be done, if when confronted by those who play by no rules but their own we do the same. As my father taught me, never play someone else’s game or by someone else’s rules.
In Syria we proved that the enemy can be defeated, for the bogeyman of Russian invincibility is an illusion, and so is the inevitability of the Fall of America and our global civilization before the onslaught of the Fourth Reich and Russia’s star agent Traitor Trump. The darkness is not an unstoppable wave; we have defeated the Fourth Reich twice before, in the 2020 Biden election and Restoration of America and in the surrender of the Triumvirs Trump, Barr, and Wolf in declaring New York, Seattle, and Portland to be Autonomous Zones under control by the people and not the state; we Antifascists being the only force to have defeated the federal government of the United States in open battle on its own ground since Little Bighorn.
We can take America back exactly the same way, by coordinating electoral and legislative action for the Restoration of America with mass action as in the Black Lives Matter protests which seized over fifty American cities for several months and birthed the Autonomous Zones.
Now we must reimagine, transform, and bring meaningful change to our institutions, systems, and structures, and to the praxis of our values and ideals in a rapidly changing threat environment, to envision ourselves anew as a free society of equals and work together in solidarity to make it real.
As I wrote in my post of January 9 2022, How Shall We Answer Treason?; Disloyalty and the betrayal of trust are among the worst and most terrible of true crimes, for they signify and represent the failure and collapse of all other values and meaning. This is why Solidarity as Fraternity is among the three principles on which the Revolution is built, along with Liberty and Equality, for without them there can be no free society of equals.
A brilliant Meidas Touch video which indicts Trump as a domestic terrorist for the January 6 Insurrection provoked me to question, How shall we answer treason? So wrote the following in reply:
Actually, I would like to see Trump achieve his true nature by being fed to dogs and transformed into dog shit. Wouldn’t it be a lovely display in a glass case exhibited in a museum of holocausts, atrocities, and crimes against humanity? Let his monument read thus:
Here lies Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, in his true form, most terrible enemy democracy has faced since Alcibiades betrayed Athens, most dangerous foreign agent to ever attack America even including Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, who subverted our ideals and sabotaged our institutions, and nearly enacted the fall of civilization as the figurehead of the Fourth Reich and herald of an age of fascist tyranny and state terror.
Yet here he lies, nothing but a pile of dog shit. Look upon the rewards of tyranny, you who are mighty, and despair.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
We can but wish. Beyond such fantasies, exclusion is a just balance for crimes of treason, disloyalty, and betrayal, in the forms of loss of citizenship, the most terrible punishment any nation can inflict, seizure of assets, and exile and erasure.
To be clear, all participants in the January 6 Insurrection, and all who conspired in this crime, had knowledge aforehand but did not sound an alarm, or acted subsequently to conceal, abet, or deny and excuse its perpetrators and its nature including all legislators who voted not to investigate it, bear responsibility in its crimes and should be repaid with loss of citizenship, seizures of assets, exile, and erasure.
Exile as the natural consequence of treason was explored in the short story “The Man Without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale, first published in The Atlantic in December 1863. It is a story of a traitor who comes to understand the true meaning of his crime; the renunciation of his social contract, connection and interdependence with other human beings, and membership in a national identity.
As described in Wikipedia; “It is the story of American Army lieutenant Philip Nolan, who renounces his country during a trial for treason, and is consequently sentenced to spend the rest of his days at sea without so much as a word of news about the United States.
The protagonist is a young US Army lieutenant, Philip Nolan, who develops a friendship with the visiting Aaron Burr. When Burr is tried for treason (that historically occurred in 1807), Nolan is tried as an accomplice. During his testimony, he bitterly renounces his nation and, with a foul oath, angrily shouts, “I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” The judge is completely shocked at that announcement and, on convicting him, icily grants him his wish. Nolan is to spend the rest of his life aboard US Navy warships in exile with no right ever to set foot on US soil again and with explicit orders that no one shall ever again mention his country to him.
The sentence is carried out to the letter. For the rest of his life, Nolan is transported from ship to ship, lives out his life as a prisoner on the high seas, and is never allowed back in a home port.”
So for Exile; now also for Erasure. As I wrote in my post of January 7 2021, Treason and Terror: Trump’s Brownshirts Attack Congress; This leaves the ringleader and chief conspirator of treason, sedition, insurrection, and terror to be removed from power and denied a platform from which to spread madness and violence like a plague; our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. I believe we must remove, impeach, deplatform, and prosecute him for his many crimes against America; Trump must be exiled from public life and isolated from his power to destroy us.
Roman law called this damnatio memoriae, the erasure of public forgetting, and coupled with the Amish practice of shunning provides a useful model of minimum use of social force in safeguarding ourselves from threats, without the brutality of torture and prison to which we have become addicted. A fascinating article by the classical scholar Alexander Meddings examines its use in the cases of Trump’s nearest Imperial parallels, Caligula and Nero.
Exile and Erasure; neither prison nor violence or the use of force and fear. Let us simply cast out those who would destroy us from among us, and forget them.
As I wrote in my post of December 28 2023, Can States Ban Trump From Our Next Election For the Crime of Insurrection Under the 14th Amendment?; As the wall of his immunity begins to crumble and states ban Trump from the ballot in the next elections, and the issue of whether or not states can do so is escalated to the Supreme Court that he rigged for just such a moment, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, struts in the lights of the circus he has made of our nation, howling with rage and cheerleading his adoring sycophants in barbarisms and fascist litanies of atrocities to come.
Our election year in 2024 will be like nothing in our history, a ground of struggle not only of fascist tyranny and democracy, but of hate and love, hope and despair, solidarity and division, madness and vision, the psychopathy of power and the mutualism of a free society of equals.
I hope what Shakespeare wrote in Henry the Fifth is still true; “When cruelty and lenity play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”
As written by Cameron Joseph and agencies in The Guardian, in an article entitled Why did Maine and Colorado disqualify Trump from their ballots?
Decisions stem from the US constitution’s insurrection clause and could have major ramifications for 2024 election; “Officials in Colorado and Maine have ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to run for the White House again, citing his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
In Colorado, the state supreme court ruled 4-3 earlier this month to take the former president off the state’s Republican presidential primary ballot; on Thursday, Maine’s secretary of state kicked him off the ballot there too.
The decisions will probably have major legal and political ramifications for the 2024 election, and stem from a rarely used provision of the US constitution known as the insurrection clause.
Trump’s campaign promised to immediately appeal the decisions to the US supreme court, which could well strike them down. Similar lawsuits are working their way through the courts in other states.
Here’s what we know so far, and what it might mean for the former president and current Republican frontrunner.
What is the insurrection clause and why was it used?
The decision by the Colorado supreme court is the first time a candidate has been deemed ineligible for the White House under the US constitutional provision.
Section 3 of the 14th amendment, also referred to as the insurrection clause, bars anyone from Congress, the military, and federal and state offices who once took an oath to uphold the constitution but then “engaged” in “insurrection or rebellion” against it.
Could Trump be barred under the constitution’s ‘engaged in insurrection’ clause?
Ratified in 1868, the 14th amendment helped ensure civil rights for formerly enslaved people, but also was intended to prevent former Confederate officials from regaining power as members of Congress and taking over the government they had just rebelled against.
Some legal scholars say the post-civil war clause applies to Trump because of his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and obstruct the transfer of power to Joe Biden by encouraging his supporters to storm the US Capitol.
“The dangers of Trump ever being allowed back into public office are exactly those foreseen by the framers of section 3,” Ron Fein, the legal director for Free Speech for People, said in a recent interview. “Which is that they knew that if an oath-taking insurrectionist were allowed back into power, they would do the same if not worse.”
How did this happen?
In Colorado, the case was brought by a group of voters, aided by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), who argued Trump should be disqualified from the ballot for his role in the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
Noah Bookbinder, the group’s president, celebrated the decision as “not only historic and justified, but … necessary to protect the future of democracy in our country”.
Colorado’s highest court overturned an earlier ruling from a district court judge, who found that Trump’s actions on January 6 did amount to inciting an insurrection, but that he could not be barred from the ballot, because it was unclear that the clause was intended to cover the role of the presidency.
A majority of the state supreme court’s seven justices, all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors, disagreed.
In Maine, the secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, examined the case after a group of citizens challenged Trump’s eligibility and concluded that he should be disqualified for inciting an insurrection on 6 January 2021.
Has this happened before?
The provision has rarely been used, and never in such a high-profile case. In 1919, Congress refused to seat a socialist, contending he gave aid and comfort to the country’s enemies during the first world war.
Last year, in the clause’s first use since then, a New Mexico judge barred a rural county commissioner who had entered the Capitol on January 6 from office.
What does this mean for the election?
The Colorado ruling applies only to the state’s Republican primary, which will take place on 5 March, meaning Trump might not appear on the ballot for that vote. The same is true in Maine – if the decision takes effect, it would only apply to the state’s ballot.
The Colorado supreme court temporarily stayed its ruling until 4 January, however, which would allow the US supreme court until then to decide whether to take the case. That’s the day before the qualifying deadline for candidates.
Colorado is no longer a swing state – Biden won it by a double-digit margin in 2020, and the last time a Republican won it was 2004 – but the ruling could influence other cases across the US, where dozens of similar cases are percolating. Other state courts have ruled against the plaintiffs; in Michigan, a judge ruled that Congress, not the courts, should make the call.
Advocates hoped the case would boost a wider disqualification effort and potentially put the issue before the US supreme court. It’s unclear whether the court might rule on narrow procedural and technical grounds, or answer the underlying constitutional question of whether Trump can be banished from the ballot under the 14th amendment.
The case could have significant political fallout as well. Trump allies will paint it as an anti-democratic effort to thwart the will of the American people, lumping it in with the numerous legal cases he faces in state and federal court.
“Democrats are so afraid that President Trump will win on Nov 5th 2024 that they are illegally attempting to take him off the ballot,” the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a close Trump ally, posted on social media.
Trump didn’t mention the decision during an evening rally on 19 December in Iowa but his campaign sent out a fundraising email calling it a “tyrannical ruling”, with the statement going on to say:
“Democrat Party leaders are in a state of paranoia over the growing, dominant lead President Trump has amassed in the polls. They have lost faith in the failed Biden presidency and are now doing everything they can to stop the American voters from throwing them out of office next November.”
Trump’s attorneys, meanwhile, have argued that the 14th amendment’s language does not apply to the presidency. A lawyer for Trump has also argued that the January 6 riot at the Capitol was not serious enough to qualify for insurrection, and that any remarks that Trump made to his supporters that day in Washington were protected under free speech.”
How if we fail to consequent treason and insurrection, and thereby make a rule that all things are permitted in service to theocratic patriarchy and white supremacist terror?
As written in The Guardian editorial, in an article entitled The Guardian view on a second Trump presidency: things could only get worse; Over the holidays, this column will explore next year’s urgent issues. Today we look at the danger posed by the former president’s bid for reelection; “The great spectre haunting 2024 is the threat of Donald Trump triumphing in November’s election. A second stint in the Oval Office would have grim repercussions for the US and the world. He dominates the Republican race for the presidential candidacy, while recent polls showed him beating Joe Biden in five of the six key battleground states, and besting the president on issues including the economy and national security. The Biden administration has overseen a striking economic recovery in tough global conditions, but voters don’t feel the improvement. The president’s handling of the war in Gaza is alienating core supporters. He inspires little enthusiasm.
Democrats point out that there’s a long way to go and that November’s off-year election results point to a brighter picture. Mr Trump faces a dizzying array of legal cases, though the most significant may not move to a trial before the election. While they boost the belief of diehard admirers that he is being persecuted, some supporters say he should not stand if convicted. It’s not impossible that he might run from a prison cell.
Mr Trump is already teeing voters up to declare a Biden victory fraudulent again. Election officials have been bombarded with death threats. Convictions for the January 6 storming of the Capitol were welcome and necessary, but his supporters remain armed and dangerous.
What would Mr Trump’s return to the White House mean for America and the world? Nothing good. For all the volatility of his presidency, he delivered on key pledges for his followers: his supreme court appointments led to the overturning of Roe v Wade. Authoritarians don’t improve with power: quite the opposite. Mr Trump’s first term began with “alternative facts” about his inauguration and ended with the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. His recent statements make 2016’s inflammatory rhetoric look almost mealy-mouthed. He declared that he would be a dictator, though only on “day one”, because “I want a wall and I want to drill, drill, drill”. His language is not merely racist but echoes the invective of Nazi Germany: immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, while “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs” are “vermin”.
Sycophantic state
What is truly alarming this time is not merely that he has declared his intentions loud and clear, it is that his backers have drawn up action plans to implement his talking points, and that he faces fewer political, institutional or legal constraints. “You cannot count on those institutions to restrain him,” said former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who fears that her country is “sleepwalking into dictatorship”. Ms Cheney is a rare exception to the rule that Republican politicians have ultimately fallen into line even when they briefly balked at his extremes. A re-elected President Trump would benefit from a more compliant Congress (though there’s speculation that Democrats might win back the House while the GOP takes the Senate). And having set out his stall, he could claim a mandate from the people.
He would not appoint those who might thwart his will this time. “The lesson he learned was to hire sycophants,” his former chief of staff John Kelly observed. He boasts that he would “dismantle the deep state”, clearing out career employees and replacing them with appointees he could fire at will. Intimidation – siccing his base on those who impede him – would always be an option. He has suggested that Gen Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, deserved to be put to death.
Legal challenges to his policies would face a harder path – the supreme court now has a conservative supermajority, with three Trump appointees, and he similarly stacked lower levels of the judiciary. He is preparing plans to turn the power of the state against opponents and critics, and boasting of “retribution” for those who hindered his attempt to steal the last election. He has warned that he would urge his attorney general to indict any political rival even without known grounds, saying: “I don’t know. Indict him on income tax evasion.” His associates have reportedly begun drafting plans to deploy the military against civil demonstrations – as he wanted to do against Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. One would hope that military leaders would oppose this. But it would be complacent to assume that.
Politics of hate
On the international front, the battle against global heating would be struck a catastrophic blow. A second Trump presidency would clearly be good for Vladimir Putin and bad for Ukraine and Nato, which the US could well leave. Mr Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy puts himself first, and has only the most narrow and short-term conception of US interests. Allies such as South Korea are already contemplating their own nuclear deterrents. He would seek to hammer China on trade again, and Republicans would encourage him to go further on other fronts, but his admiration for autocrats might allow him to come to terms with Xi Jinping on some issues – notably, Taiwan’s future. Overall, his ignorance, arrogance and erratic nature could be as damaging as his pursuit of specific goals.
The far right around the world would be emboldened by his victory. Mr Trump is in large part a symptom of our times, but he has encouraged and enabled others in his mould at home and abroad. The social fabric has been damaged by a style of politics in which hatred is the organising principle. Anti-Asian hate crime surged following his racist rhetoric about the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu”. A defeat for Mr Trump would not in itself be sufficient to defeat Trumpism. But it is necessary.
The Democrats cannot campaign only on the threat that Mr Trump poses. They must speak to broader concerns too. But focusing on the likely consequences of his re-election is critical to ensuring that voters understand the choice they are making – including by not voting, or by backing a candidate other than Mr Biden. Think of the way that the voter backlash against the destruction of abortion rights was essential for Democrats in the 2022 midterms and has been evident in ballot measures more recently, with voters opting to preserve or expand access.
Of course, Mr Trump might not be able to fully implement his nightmarish boasts in office. But he would do more than enough. Drive off a cliff and you might live to tell the tale. But you can’t count on survival – and you can be certain of damage. The US, and the world, cannot afford a second term for Mr Trump.”
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Sitting on a powder keg’: US braces for a year, and an election, like no other; “The 60th US presidential election, which will unfold in 2024, will be quite unlike any that has gone before as the US, and the rest of the world, braces for a contest amid fears of eroding democracy and the looming threat of authoritarianism.
It will be a fight marked by numerous unwanted firsts as the oldest president in the country’s history is likely to face the first former US president to stand trial on criminal charges. A once aspirational nation will continue its plunge into anxiety and divisions about crime, immigration, race, foreign wars and the cost of living.
Democrat Joe Biden, 81, is preparing for the kind of gruelling campaign he was able to avoid during coronavirus lockdowns in 2020. Republican Donald Trump will spend some of his campaign in a courtroom and has vowed authoritarian-style retribution if he wins. For voters it is a time of stark choices, unique spectacles and simmering danger.
“It feels to me as if America is sitting on a powder keg and the fuse has been lit,” said Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “The protective shield that all democracies and social orders rely on – legitimacy of the governing body, some level of elite responsibility, the willingness of citizens to view their neighbors in a civic way – is in an advanced stage of decline or collapse.
“It’s quite possible that the powder keg that America’s sitting on will explode over the course of 2024.”
US politics entered a new, turbulent era with Trump’s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. The businessman and reality TV star, tapping into populist rage against the establishment, was the first president with no prior political or military experience. His chaotic four-year presidency was scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic and ended with a bitter defeat by Biden in a 2020 election that was itself billed as an unprecedented stress test of democracy.
Trump never accepted the result and his attempts to overturn it culminated in a deadly riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, and his second impeachment. He has spent three years plotting revenge and describes the 5 November election as “the final battle”. But he is running for president under the shadow of 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions, knowing that regaining the White House might be his best hope of avoiding prison – a calculus that could make him and his supporters more desperate and volatile than ever.
Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, said: “This is the most astounding election I have ever seen.
“We have never had an election where a likely major party nominee is indicted for major felony charges of the most serious nature; this is not shoplifting. He’s being charged with an attempt to destroy our democracy and subverting our national security. Both in terms of Trump’s personal morality and his incredibly serious crimes, we have never seen anything remotely like this.”
First Trump must win the Republican primary against Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, putting the electoral and legal calendars on a collision course. On 16 January, a day after the Iowa caucuses kick off the Republican nomination process, Trump faces a defamation trial brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, who has already won a $5m judgment against him after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
On 4 March, Trump is due in court in Washington in a federal case accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election result. The following day is Super Tuesday, when more than 15 states are scheduled to hold Republican primaries, the biggest delegate haul of the campaign.
On 25 March, Trump also faces state charges in New York over hush-money payments to an adult film star, although the judge has acknowledged he may postpone that because of the federal trial. On 5 August, prosecutors have asked to start an election fraud trial in Georgia, less than three weeks after Trump is likely to have been nominated by the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Trump is hard at work to flip his legal troubles to his political advantage, contending that he is a victim of a Democratic deep state conspiracy. He frequently tells his supporters: “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you – and I’m just standing in their way.” His Georgia mugshot has been slapped on T-shirts and other merchandise like a lucrative badge of honor.
It seems to be working, at least according to a series of opinion polls that show Trump leading Biden in a hypothetical matchup. A survey in early December for the Wall Street Journal newspaper showed Trump ahead by four points, 47% to 43%. When five potential third-party and independent candidates were included, Trump’s lead over Biden expanded to six points, 37% to 31%.
To Democrats, such figures are bewildering. Biden’s defenders point to his record, including the creation of 14m jobs, strong GDP growth and four major legislative victories on coronavirus relief, infrastructure, domestic production of computer chips and the biggest climate action in history. He has also led the western alliance against Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Lichtman added: “He gets credit for nothing. It’s just amazing: I’ve never seen a president do so much and get so little mileage on it. He has more domestic accomplishments than any American president since the 1960s. He’s presided over an amazing economic recovery, a far better economy than was under Donald Trump even before the pandemic in terms of jobs, wages, GDP. Inflation has gone down by two-thirds.
“It was Biden who single-handedly put together the coalition of the west that stopped [Vladimir] Putin from quickly overtaking Ukraine. He seems to get no credit for any of this whatsoever and that’s partly his own fault and the fault of the Democratic party. The Democratic party has been horrible for some time now – at least 15 years. Republicans are so much better at messaging.”
The president’s approval rating has been stubbornly low since around the time of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. He is grappling with record numbers of migrants entering the country – an issue that increasingly aggravates states beyond the US-Mexico border. His refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is costing him some support among progressives and young people.
The latest Democratic messaging salvo – “Bidenomics” – appears to have been a flop at a moment when many voters blame him for rising prices and a cost-of-living crisis. For all the barrage of positive economic data, Americans are lacking the feelgood factor.
Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, said: “People feel that Biden overpromised and underdelivered and ultimately what it came down to was he didn’t make me feel good while he did it and he didn’t make it look easy.”
Biden still holds a potential ace in the hole. Democrats plan to make abortion central to the 2024 campaign, with opinion polls showing most Americans do not favor strict limits on reproductive rights. The party is hoping threats to those rights will encourage millions of women and independents to vote their way next year. It is also seeking to put measures enshrining access to abortion in state constitutions on as many ballots as possible.
The issue has flummoxed Republicans, with some concerned the party has gone too far with state-level restrictions since the supreme court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling last year, ending constitutional protection for abortion. Trump has taken notice and is conspicuously trying to be vague on the issue.
The Wall Street Journal poll found Biden leading Trump on abortion and democracy by double digits. But it gave Trump a double-digit lead on the economy, inflation, crime, border security, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and physical and mental fitness for office. Biden still has time to reshape perceptions but even close allies concede that he is not an inspirational speechmaker like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. How can he turn it around?
Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “My advice would be to be aggressive, go on offence and set the narrative. They must make the contrast between a Biden America and a Trump America and ask people which America do they want to live in.
“A year out, most people are not paying attention so the polls are meaningless in that they are not predictive of what will happen in a year. Where they do have value is what the trend line shows, which is that the American people are not getting the messaging clearly enough now, so it’s time to get up off their asses and activate the campaign at level 10 right now.”
Setmayer, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, added: “What Donald Trump is telegraphing, what he plans to do to this country, I don’t fully think most Americans understand.
“Use the power of incumbency, of the bully pulpit, of their record. Biden is surrounded by people who are experienced campaign veterans and so is he. Use it.”
Should Trump prevail, numerous critics have warned that his return would hollow out American democracy and presage a drift towards Hungarian-style authoritarianism. In a recent interview on Fox News, Trump was asked: “You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse this power as retribution against anybody?” He did not give an outright denial but replied airily: “Except for day one.”
Should Biden serve a second term, he will be 86 when he leaves office. Dean Phillips, 54, a congressman from Minnesota, mounting a Democratic primary challenge, is calling for a new generation of leadership. Some Democrats privately wish that Biden had declared mission accomplished after the 2022 midterm elections and stepped down to make way for younger contenders such as Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer. It now appears too late.
Frank Luntz, a prominent consultant and pollster, said: “Democrats should be apoplectic. Donald Trump has been indicted in felony after felony. The economy is relatively OK and yet Biden is sinking every week and it’s because of something that no soundbite and no messaging can fix: his age. If I were a Democratic strategist, I would have been arrested in front of the White House for begging him to accept four years and move on. You can’t fix age.”
Biden’s potential for gaffes was limited during the pandemic election; this time he will be expected to travel far and wide, his every misstep amplified by rightwing media. The social media platform X, formerly Twitter, is now owned by Elon Musk and populated by extremists such as Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. This has also been dubbed the first “AI election”, with deepfakes threatening to accelerate the spread of disinformation – a tempting target for foreign interference.
It is unfolding in a febrile atmosphere of conspiracy theories, polarisation, gun violence and surging antisemitism and Islamophobia. Political opponents are increasingly framed as mortal enemies. Violence erupted on January 6 and again last year when a man broke into the home of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband with a hammer.
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “If you have something like the last couple of elections where it’s razor thin, and people who don’t understand the American electoral process see malfeasance and misfeasance where there is none, we have a very non-trivial chance of violence.
“I wouldn’t even presume that we wouldn’t have an outbreak of sporadic violence before that. The fact is when people see each other as the enemy, and talk about each other as the enemy, people who are mentally unbalanced and have access to firearms will do mentally unbalanced things.”
Luntz does not foresee violence.
But nor is he optimistic about the future of a nation torn between hope and fear. “What I do expect is a fraying no longer at the edges but at the heart of American democracy,” he said. “I’m afraid that we are reaching the point of no return. In my conversations with senators and congressmen every day I’m on the Hill – it doesn’t matter which party – we all agree that it’s not coming, it’s here, and no one knows what to do about it.”
As written by Rachel Leingang in The Guardian, in an article entitled US supreme court ruling on Trump ballot ban: five key takeaways: Donald Trump can remain on the presidential ballot but the question of whether he was guilty of insurrection unresolved; “The US supreme court ruled on Monday that former president Donald Trump cannot be kept off the ballot in Colorado, foreclosing a series of legal challenges the Republican frontrunner faced in multiple states as he seeks a return to the White House.
The 14th amendment’s third clause, enacted after the US civil war, seeks to prevent people who were elected officials who engaged in insurrection from then holding office again. It has been rarely used since, but was resurrected by advocacy groups and voters who claim it applies to Trump because of his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The court’s nine justices agreed that a state can’t remove a federal candidate from its ballot. Though the decision was unanimous, briefs filed separately indicate tension among the justices about how far the majority opinion went.
Because the case involved an obscure part of the constitution, the court had to parse questions of how the clause works and to whom it applies. And, perhaps most critically, the court’s decision held tremendous capacity for disruption during an election year with a leading candidate known to rile up his followers.
Here are some key takeaways from the decision and the broader context at play.
State v federal rights at heart of issue
The core of the decision rests simply on the interplay between state and federal rights.
Though states administer federal elections, the court decided states have no authority to remove a candidate from the running under Section 3. Instead, the majority opinion noted, the 14th amendment “expanded federal power at the expense of state autonomy”. Allowing states to do as Colorado did would “invert the Fourteenth Amendment’s rebalancing of federal and state power”.
The language of the clause doesn’t include any direction on how a state could enforce it, the majority said. Only Congress is mentioned as an enforcer, they argue.
States could, and did, use the section to disqualify state candidates from holding office if they violate the insurrectionist clause, the majority wrote.
This federalism argument was clearly agreed to by all nine justices – though the majority opinion goes on further to suggest how Congress might act to enforce the clause in the future.
Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson all wrote, in two separate opinions, that the majority opinion went too far.
The decision that states lack the authority here “provides a secure and sufficient basis to resolve this case”, the liberal justices (Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson) wrote. “The Court should have started and ended its opinion with this conclusion.”
Tension among the justices on how far the ruling goes
The justices’ unanimity in the belief that the Colorado court couldn’t remove Trump was fractured by two addendums that strike at the extension of the case beyond its scope.
The court’s majority – conservative justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch – specified how the insurrectionist clause would need to be enforced. It would require an act of Congress to determine who would be ineligible to hold office because of insurrection, they wrote, relying on another section of the 14th amendment to make the case.
The liberal justices, in one separate opinion, and the conservative Barrett, in her own, said the majority went too far by prescribing what kind of process would be needed.
The case did not require the justices to “address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced”, Barrett wrote. Because of the sensitivity of the issue and its context, the justices should have left it with the federalism justification alone. “In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency,” she wrote.
The liberal justices took this disagreement further, saying the majority opinion moved into constitutional questions it didn’t need to as a way to “insulate this court and petitioner from future controversy”.
The case did not involve federal action; it was a state court in Colorado that decided Trump could not be on the ballot there. The majority did not need to move into contested federal issues, the liberals said. “These musings are as inadequately supported as they are gratuitous.”
No decision on whether Trump engaged in insurrection
What’s left entirely unsaid in the court’s opinions issued on Monday: whether Trump engaged in insurrection.
A finding that Trump had himself engaged in insurrection would have been required for keeping the former president off the ballot. The clause says that a person could be disqualified from holding office again if they had “engaged in insurrection or rebellion”.
Trump and his team fought against this claim, saying his actions after the 2020 election did not constitute an insurrection. Instead, he argued, 6 January was more akin to a “riot” and his comments to his followers, which some have contended amounted to incitement, were protected by the first amendment. In Colorado, the state supreme court had concluded that he incited his followers to engage in insurrection, which met the definition for engaging in insurrection.
The legal cases against Trump over his election subversion will continue unabated by any opining by the high court about whether he is an insurrectionist.
The potential for mayhem/violence was high because of this case
The 2024 election was already marked by tension because of the presence of Trump; his ability to direct his followers is unparalleled in American politics.
The cases against Trump in several states – for election subversion, hush-money claims, keeping classified documents and business fraud – have not injured his standing with his followers, but instead seemingly solidified or even amplified their support.
The 14th amendment cases entered into this fraught dynamic, throwing yet another legal bomb, albeit an obscure one, that gave Trump’s followers further belief that there is a conspiracy against Trump’s ability to run for re-election.
On the campaign trail, Trump has used these legal liabilities to his benefit, claiming they are evidence of election interference and a sign that President Joe Biden, not he, is a threat to democracy.
A survey focused on political violence conducted by the University of Chicago’s Chicago Project on Security & Threats in January showed that the court’s decision on the 14th amendment held the potential for further support of political violence, regardless of how the court decided, because of the extreme partisan divide on the issue.
Trump called the decision “very well-crafted” and said he thought it would bring the country together. Most states were “thrilled” to have Trump on the ballot, he said, but others didn’t want him on there for “political reasons” and because of “poll numbers”.
The court clearly considered the political implications
While courts often claim to avoid wading in on political questions, politics clearly played into how the court decided on this case. The implications of how removing Trump could play out electorally are contemplated throughout the opinions.
The potential that a candidate could be ineligible in some states, leading to a “patchwork” effect, would disrupt voters, the majority wrote in their opinion.
“An evolving electoral map could dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties, and States across the country, in different ways and at different times,” the majority wrote. “The disruption would be all the more acute – and could nullify the votes of millions and change the election result – if Section 3 enforcement were attempted after the Nation has voted. Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos – arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the Inauguration.”
It wasn’t just politics with the election itself or the public at large that came into view; the political dynamics between the justices showed through as well.
The liberal justices jabbed at the majority opinion for its extension of the case into how Congress would need to act, claiming that was an attempt to “insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office”.
Barrett, in her separate opinion, tried to strike a conciliatory note. She called attention to the fact that the court unanimously decided on a “politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election”. The court’s goal, she said, should be to turn down the national temperature instead of inflame it.
“For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case,” she wrote. “That is the message Americans should take home.”
As written by Rachel Leingang in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s supreme court case hinged on the 14th amendment – what it actually means: The supreme court determined if section 3 of the 14th amendment – which bars insurrectionists from holding office – applied to Trump; “ A former US president could have been kicked off the ballot in his quest to return to the White House because of a rarely used provision in an amendment created in the aftermath of the civil war.
A lawsuit out of Colorado that sought to oust Donald Trump in his re-election bid went before the US supreme court, which decided Trump could not be removed from seeking office there over the 14th amendment’s third clause.
The clause was intended to ensure that people who participated in the civil war and other acts against the US weren’t allowed to keep or resume holding positions of power in government. In essence, it says that people could not again hold office if they had participated in insurrection or rebellion against the country while they were in office.
Trump’s team argued the clause doesn’t apply to him for a handful of reasons, based on both esoteric readings of the clause itself and on larger questions like what constitutes an insurrection.
The justices sided with Trump, saying states could not try to keep a federal candidate off the ballot because it was beyond their power. The case involved several issues of legal reasoning the justices had to weigh.
Here are the clause’s big questions.
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State …”
The first part of the clause essentially says that a person can’t hold office again if they were an officer of the US when they participated in an insurrection. It specifies that it applies broadly – to the presidency, Congress and “any office … under the United States”.
Trump’s team argued, though, that this means he couldn’t hold office again, not that he can’t run for office again, so he can’t be disqualified from appearing on the ballot. The legal question would then be raised anew if he won and therefore “held office” again. The case is therefore premature, they said.
In Colorado, the court concluded that because Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president, it would be a “wrongful act” for the secretary of state there to list him as a candidate in the presidential primary.
“… who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States …”
Trump’s arguments related to this part of the clause involve twists of plain language to conclude the president is not an “officer of the United States” and therefore the clause doesn’t apply because anything Trump did happened when he was president.
His attorneys argued that because the presidency isn’t explicitly listed in the clause, it wasn’t intended to include the presidency. They’ve also said that the presidency is not “under” the United States because it is the government, and because the president is an officer of the constitution, not of the United States.
These arguments go hand in hand with the earlier provision in the clause, about whether someone could hold office. Trump’s team argued that because the presidency isn’t specifically mentioned, like “member of Congress” is, it doesn’t apply to him.
The Colorado supreme court essentially said the plain language of the amendment and how the presidency is viewed overall show that the presidency is an office of the US, and the president would be considered an “officer” of the US.
“President Trump asks us to hold that Section Three disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath-breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land,” Colorado’s ruling says.
“… shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
The insurrection part of the clause involves perhaps the more political questions of the case: whether the associated events of 6 January 2021 to overturn Trump’s loss would constitute an “insurrection” and, if so, if Trump himself “engaged” in it.
In Colorado, the case went before a jury for a trial, with evidence submitted that backed up the claims both that the events of 6 January 2021 were an insurrection and that Trump engaged in it. Among the evidence were many months of claims made by Trump that the election was stolen and specific callouts to his supporters to protest the results.
Using definitions of what was considered an insurrection when the clause was written, the Colorado court said basically that it would entail a public use or threat of force by a group of people to hinder some execution of the constitution – in this case, the awarding of electors and the peaceful transfer of power. By that definition, the events of 6 January constituted an insurrection.
Trump’s team argued both that the events of 6 January were not an insurrection and that the former president didn’t engage in it anyway. His attorneys instead described the events as a “riot” and said the president’s speech was protected by the first amendment. They also pointed to comments he made telling the mob to go home eventually on 6 January, in which he said they should “go peacefully and patriotically”.
Colorado’s justices concluded that free speech rights don’t allow for incitement and that his intent was to call for his supporters to fight his loss, which they responded to.
“President Trump’s direct and express efforts, over several months, exhorting his supporters to march to the Capitol to prevent what he falsely characterized as an alleged fraud on the people of this country were indisputably overt and voluntary,” the ruling said. “Moreover, the evidence amply showed that President Trump undertook all these actions to aid and further a common unlawful purpose that he himself conceived and set in motion: prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election and stop the peaceful transfer of power.”
But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Finally, there’s the matter of what role states play in assessing eligibility for federal offices and whether a state can decide not to put a candidate on the ballot because they haven’t met federal constitutional requirements for running, which include factors like age and citizenship as well as the broader insurrection question.
Even for federal elections, states manage the electoral process of who can vote, how they vote and how results are counted.
Trump argued that eligibility in this case is a political question that Congress should decide, not one for state courts – and not one for courts in general, which tend to stay away from purely political questions.
His team tried to make the case that Congress would need to put the process in motion to keep him off the ballot, saying that the clause is not “self-executing”, or something that goes into effect upon its creation.
The clause itself doesn’t say anything about whether Congress would initiate such a proceeding. Instead, it says Congress could remove a finding that kept an insurrectionist off the ballot with a two-thirds vote, thus allowing that person to hold office again.
The Colorado court rejected the idea that the clause needs congressional action to be implemented, relying on other Reconstruction-era amendments that went into effect without congressional action. If those other amendments needed Congress to go into effect, it “would lead to absurd results”.
“The result of such inaction would mean that slavery remains legal; Black citizens would be counted as less than full citizens for reapportionment; nonwhite male voters could be disenfranchised; and any individual who engaged in insurrection against the government would nonetheless be able to serve in the government, regardless of whether two-thirds of Congress had lifted the disqualification,” the court wrote. “Surely that was not the drafters’ intent.”
As written by Robert Reich in his newsletter, entitled The most troubling aspect of today’s Supreme Court decision: It doesn’t just allow Trump back on the ballot, but potentially disables enforcement of other provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment; “Friends, Even though Trump clearly engaged in an insurrection and even though the Constitution clearly bars insurrections from holding elected office, the Supreme Court today ruled that Trump will remain on the ballot anyway.
With the Super Tuesday primaries looming tomorrow, all nine justices agreed that states (in this case, Colorado) cannot decide to keep Trump off the ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment – which bars anyone who has sworn an oath to the Constitution and yet participated in an insurrection against the United States from holding office. They agreed that allowing states to make such decisions would lead to a patchwork of ballots, undercutting federal authority.
But this may not be the most troubling aspect of their decision over the long term. The five justices in the majority went further, ruling that Section 3 could only be enforced by Congress. They rested their argument on Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that Congress shall pass “appropriate legislation” to enforce the Amendment — such as, for example, procedures to identify which individuals should be disqualified under Section 3. And Congress has not done so.
But requiring that Congress first pass such legislation would prevent the Justice Department from bringing a suit alleging that someone should not be allowed on a ballot because they participated in an insurrection.
It would in effect shield any future insurrectionist candidate, whose party controls at least one chamber of commerce and therefore would not enact such legislation.
Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson were also rightfully concerned that the majority’s decision could be used to prevent the Justice Department from enforcing other provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment – such as Section 1, which prohibits states from making or enforcing laws that “abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” or deprive “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” or deny them “equal protection of the laws.”
Under the majority’s view of how the Fourteenth Amendment should be enforced, Section 5 might first require Congress to pass “appropriate legislation” to identify which defendants should be prosecuted under Section 1, before the Justice Department could act.
States charged with violating the privileges and immunities clause, or denying people due process of law, or denying their citizens the equal protection of the law will almost certainly use today’s ruling in attempts to shield themselves from federal prosecution.
By the way, Clarence Thomas should never have participated in this case, given his obvious conflicts of interest. His participation makes the Supreme Court’s recently adopted “ethics” guidelines look like the sham they are.”
Arrest Trump Now/ MeidasTouch
US supreme court ruling on Trump ballot ban: five key takeaways
On this holiday of Purim which began at sunset yesterday and ends with the fall of night today, the Jewish peoples of the world celebrate their salvation from genocide in 5th century Persia as written in the Book of Esther, and all of humankind may celebrate the triumph of love over hate, solidarity over division, and resistance over tyranny which it commemorates.
As we are confronted in the news with images of terrible violence and crimes against humanity in three wars which challenge our world order; the Israeli invasion of Gaza and general conquest of Palestine which has made America complicit in genocide and calls into question the idea of human rights, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, primary theater of World War Three as Russia attempts to refound her Empire, a war of total destruction unlike anything Europe has seen since the Second World War which echoes its atrocities and uses thermobaric weapons as mobile crematoriums against civilians, and the American-Iranian War which horrifically combines the Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict with America’s leadership in her ally’s plans to found a Greater Israel from the graveyard of the Iranian Dominion of Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and other neighboring states, into which all of the Arab-American Alliance will be drawn and may produce direct nuclear war versus Iran’s ally Russia, I think of these things today in terms of the historical legacies of resistance to tyranny, slavery, wars of imperial conquest and dominion, and genocide.
How shall we defend the peoples of Iran, Palestine, and Ukraine from the horrific war crimes of Netanyahu’s wars of Jewish hegemony, racial purity, and theocratic fascism of blood, faith, and soil and from Putin’s mad imperial wars of conquest, without ourselves becoming an empire?
The seduction of power begins with fear, especially overwhelming and generalized fear given forms of Otherness by authority in service to power; to find safety and security in becoming the arbiter of virtue. This too we must resist.
Moreover such strategies of force and control must always fail and come to ruin, for security is an illusion, and the use of social force creates its own resistance.
Never Again! is a phrase I have used often as a reply to tyranny and fascism, both in my writing and to my comrades personally as a call to total resistance without limits, and herein I wish to interrogate its meaning and consequences.
How can we use Never Again! as a principle of direct action which preserves and empowers the wellbeing and autonomy of others, without such action becoming a point of moral fracture, subversion of ideals, and the cascade failure of unequal power?
Herein I situation the arts of revolution and resistance in terms of my personal history in the quest to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. Of what use are such memoirs? Our histories are useful when they illuminate the origins of unequal power, the means by which systems of oppression subjugate, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us, and the methods by which we can seize our power and free ourselves and each other.
For myself the history of its use is connected to a category of my Defining Moments which I call Last Stands, the stories of which I have told many times. These include only moments in which I chose solidarity and refusal to submit over personal survival; refusing to step aside from the child behind me when ordered to surrender by the police bounty hunters in Brazil 1974, when soldiers set fire to the house Jean Genet and I were in, surrounded and unarmed, in Beirut 1982 when he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, a forlorn hope at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola 1988 for the liberation from Apartheid, and numberless others beyond my accounting.
Last Stands are choices of refusal to surrender our humanity and universal human rights, our duty of care and stewardship of one another, regardless of the consequences as lines we cannot cross without becoming something less than human.
In the ongoing Gaza War and genocide of the Palestinians, and now in the imperial conquest and dominion of Iran and her allies, this is also a refusal to abandon the cause of “freedom of faith for all humankind” as the legend on the monument of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden’s 1631 victory at the Battle of Breitenfeld which secured this right declares, the principle of a nonsectarian state on which America is founded and of the inherent right of independence and sovereign self-determination of all peoples, and solidarity with all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth against force and control, state terror and tyranny, war and imperial conquest.
Among my personal role models in antifascism and revolution is the fictional character of Harry Tuttle played by Robert de Niro in the film Brazil, whose line “we’re all in this together,” echoes through forty some years of my life and adventures.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen, in the summer of 1974, to train with some fellow fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there, though later the venue was moved to Mexico. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy my age I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial and equestrian sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls, from which I have never truly returned.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of white and patriarchal privilege, genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood, not because of language but of implicit systems of oppression. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, and a jar of tagged ears to prove the count. This was how the elites of Brazil had chosen to solve the problem of abandoned street children, fully ten per cent of the national population. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we do not challenge and defy tyranny and unjust systems.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and to obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a traumatic near death experience, similar to the mock executions of Maurice Blanchot by the Nazis in 1944 as written in The Instant of My Death and of Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czar’s secret police in 1849 as written in The Idiot; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was reflexive and a decision of instinct beneath the level of conscious thought or volition, where the truths of ourselves written in our flesh are forged and revealed. Asked to let someone die to save myself, I simply said no. When thought returned to me from this moment of panic or transcendence of myself, I asked how much to let us walk away, whereupon he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, infamous for avenging his mother’s savage murder by killing his father and eating his heart, who had been arrested the previous year after a spectacular series of one hundred or more revenge killings of the most fiendish and monstrous of criminals, powerful men beyond the reach of the law or who were the law and who had perpetrated atrocities on women and children. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, with the words; “You are one of us, come with us” and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
“We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge”; so they described themselves to me, and this definition of solidarity as praxis or the action of values remains with me and shadows my use of the battle cry Never Again! As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene I; “If you wrong us, shall we not avenge?”
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased; all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth.
Second is the day when Jean Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982.
Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.
We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said “Fix bayonets?”
And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for forty two years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire in 1929. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the second of many Last Stands.
This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell, I am broken open to the suffering of others and the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.
Of the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the largest battle ever fought in Africa, even more vast than El Alamein; this was where the system of Apartheid was broken. In a massive campaign involving over 300,000 Cuban volunteer soldiers between December 1987 and March 1988, in coordination with Angolan and other indigenous forces, international volunteers, and with Soviet aid and advisors, defeated the far larger and technologically superior South Africa and their UNITA and American allies and mercenaries in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, an Angolan military base which South Africa had failed to capture with five waves of assaults.
While the spectacle of this grand final battle in a decades long liberation struggle was unfolding, I was making mischief behind enemy lines in the bush. Here I discovered a lost unit, mainly Zulu, which was encircled by Apartheid forces. After reporting what I knew of the area to the command group and a brief conference in several languages, an old fellow who had heretofore been silent stood up from the shadows of the tent, whose shirtless form displayed a fearsome and magnificent scar from a lion’s claws, and said; “We are surrounded and outnumbered with no ammunition and worse, no water, and no one is coming to help us. We must attack.”
The sergeant smiled at this as if he had been given a marvelous gift, strode outside, and gave the order which if you are lucky you will never hear; “Fix bayonets!”
And the men about to die erupted in song. “Usuthu! Umkhonto wami womile!” The first is a universal Zulu battle cry, which asks the spirits of ones ancestors to awake and bear witness to the glorious acts of heroism one is about to perform. “My spear is thirsty”, that last.
And we were victorious, though the cost was terrible. No such costs are too great to bear compared to the costs of submission to slavery, commodification, falsification, and dehumanization; for in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free, and this power of self-ownership as victory in the struggle for our humanity cannot be taken from us. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Long ago I lost count of Last Stands; these have become truths written in my flesh, and I bear such marks without number. As doubtless will those who now stand with Iran, Palestine, Ukraine, or any people under threat of genocide and annihilation.
In all of this what matters is that in refusal to submit to authority and to force we become Unconquered and free; this is victory as a condition of being which cannot be taken from us, much like the heroic Ukrainian soldier guarding a desolate island who refused to surrender to a Russian warship with the words; “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” Such a man cannot be conquered, and his immortal words speak for his whole nation.
The secret of force, power, and authority is that these things are hollow and fragile, and fail when met with disobedience and the simple refusal to believe and to submit.
How do we find the will to do these things, to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival?
The truth is we need nothing beyond ourselves and our moment of decision to do such things; no great universal principles, not even the negative space of a heroic figure to inhabit and perform before the stage of the world. All we need is this; that others who rely on us will die if we do not.
This is what makes us human, and its something we must continue to affirm no matter what the cost.
There may be one more thing that can help us in such moments of decision; if we remember who we are, and not how others imagine us.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
History, memory, identity; we are a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation across vast gulfs of time, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We have begun to remember who we are, we Americans, after the long spell of falsification cast by Traitor Trump and his Fourth Reich propagandists; we fight for our liberty in the streets versus the ICE white supremacist terror force and its campaign of ethnic cleansing, and against the numberless crimes of our elites against the independence and humanity of peoples throughout the world. Europe too is reawakening and coheres its resistance to the imperial conquest of Ukraine and to the threat of a Russian conquest of Europe. As yet America has done nothing to bring regime change to either outlaw nation, nor silenced the bombs, nor liberated Ukraine or Palestine, nor opened the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid; but all of this remains possible, if we all help as we can.
At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom.
Here too, in a moment which parallels that of Spain in 1936 and Poland in 1939, we must say Never Again!
As I defined the phrase in my post of March 6 2022, How if Vladimir Putin Should Be Assassinated? An Interrogation of the Origins of Evil and the Social Use of Force, and of the State as Embodied Psychopathy and Violence; “I cannot be complicit in silence with these crimes against humanity, to which as with fascism there can be but one reply: Never Again! A rallying cry complicated by its popularization in the title of founder of the Jewish Defense League Meir Kahane’s book “Never Again!: A Program for Survival, its origin is in Isaac Lambdan’s 1926 poem Masada; “Never shall Masada fall again”; it first appeared in its current form on signs written by the prisoners of Buchenwald after its liberation.
Elie Wiesel defines the phrase in his novel Hostage; “Never again” becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow. There will never again be hatred, people say. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children. And never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence. It’s a prayer.”
As written in the article The Persistence of Genocide at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University: “According to the great historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, the phrase “Never Again” first appeared on handmade signs put up by inmates at Buchenwald in April, 1945, shortly after the camp had been liberated by U.S. forces.”
As written by Emily Burack in the Jerusalem Post; “After a gunman took the lives of 17 students and staff at their high school in Parkland, Florida, students there launched a national campaign to promote gun control. They called for a major protest in Washington, DC, on March 24, and are encouraging similar protests and student walkouts across the country.
And they took a name for their campaign, #NeverAgain, that has long been linked to Holocaust commemoration.
Parkland junior Cameron Kasky is credited with coining the hashtag. A Twitter account for the movement, NeverAgainMSD, is described as “For survivors of the Stoneman Douglas Shooting, by survivors of the Stoneman Douglas Shooting.”
Some supporters of the students’ efforts are put off by their use of Never Again. Lily Herman, writing in Refinery29, said “it’s very uncomfortable to watch a term you’ve used to talk about your family and people’s own heritage and history be taken away overnight.”
Malka Goldberg, a digital communications specialist in Maryland, tweeted, “When I saw they’re using #NeverAgain for the campaign it bothered me, b/c many Jews strongly [associate] that phrase w/ the Holocaust specifically. For a second it felt like cultural appropriation, but I doubt the kids knew this or did it intentionally.”
Hasia Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, is unfazed by the students’ use of the phrase. While some may object to the phrase Never Again being reappropriated for gun control, it “does not mean that reaction is appropriate or reasonable,” she told JTA.
While some have traced the phrase to the Hebrew poet Isaac Lambdan’s 1926 poem “Masada” (“Never shall Masada fall again!”), its current use is more directly tied to the aftermath of the Holocaust. The first usage of Never Again is murky, but most likely began in postwar Israel. The phrase was used in secular kibbutzim there in the late 1940s; it was used in a Swedish documentary on the Holocaust in 1961.
But the phrase gained currency in English thanks in large part to Meir Kahane, the militant rabbi who popularized it in America when he created the Jewish Defense League in 1968 and used it as a title of a 1972 book-length manifesto. As the president of the American Jewish Committee, Sholom Comay, said after Kahane’s assassination in November 1990, “Despite our considerable differences, Meir Kahane must always be remembered for the slogan Never Again, which for so many became the battle cry of post-Holocaust Jewry.”
For Kahane, Never Again was an implicitly violent call to arms and a rebuke of passivity and inactivity. The shame surrounding the alleged passivity of the Jews in the face of their destruction became a cornerstone of the JDL. As Kahane said, “the motto Never Again does not mean that ‘it’ [a holocaust] will never happen again. That would be nonsense. It means that if it happens again, it won’t happen in the same way. Last time, the Jews behaved like sheep.”
Kahane used Never Again to justify acts of terror in the name of fighting antisemitism. In the anthem of the Jewish Defense League, members recited, “To our slaughtered brethren and lonely widows: Never again will our people’s blood be shed by water, Never again will such things be heard in Judea.”
Later, however, Kahane’s violent call for action was adapted by American Jewish establishment groups and Holocaust commemoration institutions as a call for peace, tolerance and heeding the warning signs of genocide.
These days, when the phrase is used to invoke the Holocaust, it can be either particular or universal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tends toward the particular when he uses it to speak about the need for a strong Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust.
“I promise, as head of the Jewish state, that never again will we allow the hand of evil to sever the life of our people and our state,” he said in a speech at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp marking International Holocaust Memorial Day in 2010.
But Netanyahu has also used the phrase in its universal sense of preventing all genocides. After visiting a memorial to the victims of the Rwanda genocide in 2010, Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, wrote in the guestbook, “We are deeply moved by the memorial to the victims of one history’s greatest crimes — and reminded of the haunting similarities to the genocide of our own people. Never again.”
Then-President Barack Obama also used the phrase in its universal sense in marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2011. “We are reminded to remain ever-vigilant against the possibility of genocide, and to ensure that Never Again is not just a phrase but a principled cause,” he said in a statement. “And we resolve to stand up against prejudice, stereotyping, and violence – including the scourge of anti-Semitism – around the globe.”
That’s similar to how the US Holocaust Memorial Museum uses the phrase. In choosing the name Never Again as the theme of its 2013 Days of Remembrance, its used the term as a call to study the genocide of the Jews in order to respond to the “warning signs” of genocides happening anywhere.
And Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and author who came to be associated with the phrase, also used it in the universal sense. ”Never again’ becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow … never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence,” the Nobel laureate wrote in 2012.
Never Again is a phrase that keeps on evolving. It was used in protests against the Muslim ban and in support of refugees, in remembrance of Japanese internment during World War II and recalling the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. And now the phrase is taking on yet another life: in the fight for gun control in America.
Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish studies at Indiana University who is presently a visiting scholar at the Center for Jewish History in New York, told JTA, “For [Kahane], Never Again was not ‘this will not happen again because we will have a country’ but ‘we Jews will never be complacent like we were during the war.’ That is, for Kahane, Never Again was a call to militancy as the only act of prevention. In Parkland it is a call for gun control. In a way, a call for anti-militancy.”
So the dialectical forces of history have unfolded Never Again! like an origami Moebius Loop toward Infinity, from the defense of victims as our duty of care for others to general principles of action. I am uncomfortable with such abstractions; for they begin again a recapitulation of the cycle of centralization of authority and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which makes genocides possible. Gott Mitt Uns; it is an ancient evil.
As Voltaire has written; “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue. To protect and defend others from harm, our universal human rights, and democracy as a free society of equals, yes. Resistance and solidarity in the struggle against tyranny and fascism, always, and by any means necessary.
But we must never legitimize the use of social force because some of us are less human than others. No matter where you begin in authorizing identities, normalities, or the tyranny of imposed ideas of virtue, with elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, with fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
And now I will ask the same questions as in the beginning of my dialog herein, but I will reverse the order of the questions.
So, how can we use Never Again! as a principle of direct action which preserves and empowers the wellbeing and autonomy of others, without such action becoming a point of moral fracture and unequal power?
How shall we defend the peoples of Palestine, Iran, and Ukraine from the horrific war crimes of Israeli and Russian imperial conquest and genocide, without ourselves becoming an empire?
As written by David Rieff in The Persistence of Genocide; “According to the great historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, the phrase “Never Again” first appeared on handmade signs put up by inmates at Buchenwald in April, 1945, shortly after the camp had been liberated by U.S. forces. “I think it was really the Communists who were behind it, but I am not sure,” Hilberg said in one of the last interviews he gave before his death in the summer of 2007. Since then, “Never Again” has become kind of shorthand for the remembrance of the Shoah.
At Buchenwald, the handmade signs were long ago replaced by a stone monument onto which the words are embossed in metal letters. And as a usage, it has come to seem like a final word not just on the murder of the Jews of Europe, but on any great crime against humanity that could not be prevented. “Never Again” has appeared on monuments and memorials from Paine, Chile, the town with proportionately more victims of the Pinochet dictatorship than any other place in the country, to the Genocide Museum in Kigali, Rwanda. The report of conadep, the Argentine truth commission set up in 1984 after the fall of the Galtieri dictatorship, was titled “Nunca Mas” — “Never Again” in Spanish. And there is now at least one online Holocaust memorial called “Never Again.”
Since 1945, “never again” has meant, essentially, “Never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.”
There is nothing wrong with this. But there is also nothing all that right with it either. Bluntly put, an undeniable gulf exists between the frequency with which the phrase is used — above all on days of remembrance most commonly marking the Shoah, but now, increasingly, other great crimes against humanity — and the reality, which is that 65 years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, “never again” has proved to be nothing more than a promise on which no state has ever been willing to deliver. When, last May, the writer Elie Wiesel, himself a former prisoner in Buchenwald, accompanied President Barack Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel to the site of the camp, he said that he had always imagined that he would return some day and tell his father’s ghost that the world had learned from the Holocaust and that it had become a “sacred duty” for people everywhere to prevent it from recurring. But, Wiesel continued, had the world actually learned anything, “there would be no Cambodia, and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia.”
Wiesel was right: The world has learned very little. But this has not stopped it from pontificating much. The Obama administration’s National Security Strategy Paper, issued in May 2010, exemplifies this tendency. It asserts confidently that “The United States is committed to working with our allies, and to strengthening our own internal capabilities, in order to ensure that the United States and the international community are proactively engaged in a strategic effort to prevent mass atrocities and genocide.” And yet again, we are treated to the promise, “never again.” “In the event that prevention fails,” the report states, “the United States will work both multilaterally and bilaterally to mobilize diplomatic, humanitarian, financial, and — in certain instances — military means to prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities.”
Of course, this is not strategy, but a promise that, decade in and decade out, has proved to be empty. For if one were to evaluate these commitments by the results they have produced so far, one would have to say that all this “proactive engagement” and “diplomatic, financial, and humanitarian mobilization” has not accomplished very much. No one should be surprised by this. The U.S. is fighting two wars and still coping (though it has fallen from the headlines) with the floods in Pakistan, whose effects will be felt for many years in a country where America’s security interests and humanitarian relief efforts are inseparable. At the same time, the crisis over Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons capability is approaching its culmination. Add to this the fact that the American economy is in shambles, and you do not exactly have a recipe for engagement. The stark fact is that “never again” has never been a political priority for either the United States or the so-called international community (itself a self-flattering idea with no more reality than a unicorn). Nor, despite all the bluff talk about moral imperatives backed by international resolve, is there any evidence that it is becoming one.
And yet, however at variance they are with both geopolitical and geoeconomic realities, the arguments exemplified by this document reflect the conventional wisdom of the great and the good in America across the “mainstream” (as one is obliged to say in this, the era of the tea parties) political spectrum. Even a fairly cursory online search will reveal that there are a vast number of papers, book-length studies, think tank reports, and United Nations documents proposing programs for preventing or at least halting genocides. For once, the metaphor “cottage industry” truly is appropriate. And what unites almost all of them is that they start from the premise that prevention is possible, if only the “international community” would live up to the commitments it made in the Genocide Convention of 1948, and in subsequent international covenants, treaties, and un declarations. If, the argument goes, the world’s great powers, first and foremost of course the United States, in collaboration with the UN system and with global civil society, would act decisively and in a timely way, we could actually enforce the moral standards supposedly agreed upon in the aftermath of the Holocaust. If they do not, of course, then “never again” will never mean much more than it has meant since 1945 — which, essentially, is “Never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.”
The report of the United States Institute for Peace’s task force on genocide, chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, is among the best of these efforts. As the report makes clear, the task force undertook its work all too painfully aware of the gulf between the international consensus on the moral imperative of stopping genocide and the ineffectiveness to date of the actual responses. Indeed, the authors begin by stating plainly that 60 years after the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention and twenty years after it was ratified by the U.S. Senate, “The world agrees that genocide is unacceptable and yet genocide and mass killings continue.” To find ways to match words and “stop allowing the unacceptable,” Albright and Cohen write with commendable candor, “is in fact one of most persistent puzzles of our times.”
Whether or not one agrees with the task force about what can or cannot be done to change this, there can be no question that sorrow over the world’s collective failure to act in East Pakistan, or Cambodia, or Rwanda is the only honorable response imaginable. But the befuddlement the authors of the report confess to feeling is another matter entirely. Like most thinking influenced by the human rights movement, the task force seems imbued with the famous Kantian mot d’ordre: “Ought implies can.” But to put the matter bluntly, there is no historical basis to believe anything of the sort, and a great deal of evidence to suggest a diametrically opposing conclusion. Of course, history is not a straitjacket, and the authors of the report, again echoing much thinking within the human rights movement, particularly Michael Ignatieff’s work in the 1990s, do make the argument that since 1945 there has been what Ignatieff calls “A revolution of global concern” and they call a “revolution in conscience.” In fairness, if in fact they are basing their optimism on this chiliastic idea, then one better understands the degree to which the members of the task force came to believe that genocide, far from being “A Problem From Hell,” as Samantha Power titled her influential book on the subject, in reality is a problem if not easily solved then at least susceptible to solution — though, again, only if all the international actors, by whom the authors mean the great powers, the un system, countries in a region where there is a risk of a genocide occurring, and what they rather uncritically call civil society, make it a priority.
Since it starts from this presupposition, it is hardly surprising that the report is upbeat about the prospects for finally reversing course. “Preventing genocide,” the authors insist, “is a goal that can be achieved with the right institutional structures, strategies, and partnerships — in short, with the right blueprint.” To accomplish this, the task force emphasizes the need for strengthening international cooperation both in terms of identifying places where there is a danger of a genocide being carried out and coordinated action to head it off or at least halt it. Four specific responses are recommended, one predominantly informational (early warning) and three operational (early prevention, preventive diplomacy, and, finally, military intervention when all else has failed). None of this is exactly new, and most of it is commonsensical from a conceptual standpoint. But one of the great strengths of the report, as befits the work of a task force chaired by two former cabinet secretaries, is this practical bent — that is to say, its emphasis on creating or strengthening institutional structures within the U.S. government and the un system and showing how such reforms will enable policymakers to respond effectively to genocide.
However, this same presupposition leads the authors of the report to write as if there were little need for them to elaborate the political and ideological bases for the “can do” approach they recommend. Francis Fukuyama’s controversial theory of the “End of History” goes unmentioned, but there is more than a little of Fukuyama in their assumptions about a “final” international consensus having been established with regard to the norms that have come into force protecting populations from genocide or mass atrocity crimes. It is true that there is a body of such norms: the Genocide Convention, the un’s so-called Responsibility to Protect doctrine, adopted by the World Summit (with the strong support of the Bush administration) in 2005, and various international instruments limiting impunity, above all the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court. And, presumably, it is with these in mind that the report’s authors can assert so confidently that the focus in genocide prevention can now be on “implement[ing] and operationalizing the commitments [these instruments] contain.”
It is here that doubt will begin to assail more skeptical readers. Almost since its inception, the human rights movement has been a movement of lawyers. And for lawyers, the establishment of black-letter international law is indeed the “end of the story” from a normative point of view — an internationalized version of stare decisis, but extended to the nth degree. On this account such a norm, once firmly established (which, activists readily admit, may take time; they are not naifs), can within a fairly short period thereafter be understood as an ineradicable and unchallengeable part of the basic user’s manual for international relations. This is what has allowed the human rights movement (and, at least with regard to the question of genocide, the members of the task force in the main seem to have been of a similar cast of mind) to hew to what is essentially a positivist progress narrative. However, the human rights movement’s certitude on the matter derives less from its historical experience than it does from its ideological presuppositions. In this sense, human rights truly is a secular religion, as its critics but even some of its supporters have long claimed.
Of course, strategically (in both polemical and institutional terms) the genius of this approach is of a piece with liberalism generally, of which, in any case, “human rights-ism” is the offspring. Liberalism is the only modern ideology that will not admit it is an ideology. “We are just demanding that nations live up to the international covenants they have signed and the relevant national and international statutes,” the human rights activist replies indignantly when taxed with actually supporting, and, indeed, helping to midwife an ideological system. It may be tedious to have to point out in 2010 that law and morality are not the same thing, but, well, law and morality are not the same thing. The problem is that much of the task force report reads as if they were.
An end to genocide: It is an attractive prospect, not to mention a morally unimpeachable goal in which Kantian moral absolutism meets American can do-ism, where the post-ideological methodologies (which are anything but post-ideological, of course) of international lawyers meet the American elite’s faith, which goes back at least to Woodrow Wilson if not much earlier in the history of the republic, that we really can right any wrong if only we commit ourselves sufficiently to doing so. Unfortunately, far too much is assumed (or stipulated, as the lawyers say) by the report’s authors. More dismayingly still, far too many of the concrete examples either of what could have been done but wasn’t are presented so simplistically as to make the solutions offered appear hollow, since the challenge as described bears little or no resemblance to the complexities that actually exist.
The calls for an intervention in Darfur reached their height after the moral imperative for intervention had started to dissipate.
Darfur is a good example of this. The report mentions Darfur frequently, both in the context of a nuts and bolts consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of various states and institutions such as the UN and the African Union, which have intervened, however unsatisfactorily, over the course of the crisis, and as an example of how the mobilization of civil society can influence policy. “In today’s age of electronic media communication,” the report states, “Americans are increasingly confronted in their living rooms — and even on their cell phones — with information about and images of death and destruction virtually anywhere they occur. . . . The Internet has proven to be a powerful tool for organizing broad-based responses to genocide and mass atrocities, as we have seen in response to the crisis in Darfur.”
The problem is not so much that this statement is false but rather that it begs more questions than it answers, and, more tellingly still, that the report’s authors seem to have no idea of this. There is no question that the rise in 2005 and 2006 of a mass movement calling for an end to mass killing in Darfur (neither the United Nations nor the most important relief groups present on the ground in Darfur agree with the characterization of what took place there as a genocide) was an extraordinarily successful mobilization — perhaps the most successful since the anti-Apartheid movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Beginning with the activism of a small group of college students who in June 2004 had attended a Darfur Emergency Summit organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and addressed by Elie Wiesel, and shortly afterwards founded an organization called Save Darfur, the movement rapidly expanded and, at its height, included the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus, right-wing evangelicals, left-leaning campuses activists, mainline human rights activists, and American neoconservatives. But nowhere does the task force report examine whether the policy recommendations of this movement were wise, or, indeed, whether the effect that they had on the U.S. debate was positive or negative. Instead, the report proceeds as if any upsurge in grassroots interest and activism galvanized by catastrophes like Darfur is by definition a positive development.
In reality, the task force’s assumption that any mass movement that supports “more assertive government action in response to genocide and mass atrocities” is to be encouraged is a strangely content-less claim. Surely, before welcoming the rise of a Save Darfur (or its very influential European cousin, sos Darfour), it is important to think clearly not just about what they are against but what they are for. And here, the example of Save Darfur is as much a cautionary tale as an inspiring one. The report somewhat shortchanges historical analysis, with what little history that does make it in painted with a disturbingly broad brush. Obviously, the task force was well aware of this, which I presume is why its report insists, unwisely in my view, that it was far more important to focus on the present and the future more than on the past. But understanding the history is not marginal, it is central. Put the case that one believes in military intervention in extremis to halt genocide. In that case, intervening in late- 2003 and early-2004, when the killing was at its height, would have been the right thing to do. But Save Darfur really only came into its own in late 2005, that is, well after the bulk of the killing had ended. In other words, the calls for an intervention reached their height after the moral imperative for such an intervention had started to dissipate. An analogy can be made with the human rights justification for the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein. As Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, has pointed out, had this happened during Baghdad’s murderous Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1988, there would have been a solid justification for military intervention, whether or not Human Rights Watch would have agreed with it. But to intervene fifteen years later because of the massacre was indefensible on human rights grounds (though, obviously, there were other rationales for the war that would not have been affected by such reasoning).
If you want to be a prophet, you have to get it right. And if Save Darfur was wrong in its analysis of the facts relevant to their call for an international military intervention to stop genocide, either because there had in reality been no genocide (as, again, the un and many mainstream ngos on the ground insisted) or because the genocide had ended before they began to campaign for intervention, then Save Darfur’s activism can just as reasonably be described in negative terms as in the positive ones of the task force report. Yes, Save Darfur had (and has) good intentions and the attacks on them from de facto apologists for the government of Sudan like Mahmood Mamdani are not worth taking seriously. But good intentions should never be enough.
In fairness, had the task force decided to provide the history of the Darfur, or Bosnia, or Rwanda, in all their frustrating complexity, they would have produced a report that, precisely because of all the nuance, the ambiguity, the need for “qualifiers,” doubtless would have been of less use to policymakers, whose professional orientation is of necessity toward actionable policies. But when what is being suggested is a readiness for U.S. soldiers (to be sure, preferably in a multilateral context) in extreme cases to kill and die to prevent genocide or mass atrocity crimes, then, to turn human rights Kantianism against them for a change, it is nuance that is the moral imperative. Again, good intentions alone will not do. Qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bete, Pascal said. Who wishes to act the angel, acts the beast.
History, in all its unsentimentality, is almost always the best antidote to such simplicities. And yet, if anything, the task force’s report is a textbook case of ahistorical thinking and its perils. The authors emphasize that, “This task force is not a historical commission; its focus is on the future and on prevention.” The problem is that unless the past is looked at in detail, not just conjured up by way of illustrations of the West’s failures to intervene that the task force hopes to remedy, then what is being argued for, in effect, are, if necessary, endless wars of altruism. To put it charitably, in arguing for that, I do not think the authors have exactly established their claim to occupying the moral high ground. If they had spent half the time thinking about history in as serious a way as they did about how to construct the optimal bureaucratic architecture within the U.S. government, then what the task force finally produced would have been a document that was pathbreaking. Instead, they took the conventional route, and, in my view, will simply add their well-reasoned policy recommendations to the large number that came before and, indeed, as in the case of the recent initiative of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies on the so-called Will to Intervene, have already begun to come after.
With the best will in the world, what is one to make of arguments made at the level of generalization of the following?
Grievances over inequitable distribution of power and resources appear to be a fundamental motivating factor in the commission of mass violence against ethnic, sectarian, or political groups. That same inequality may also provide the means for atrocities to be committed. For example, control of a highly centralized state apparatus and the access to economic and military power that comes with it makes competition for power an all-or-nothing proposition and creates incentives to eliminate competitors. This dynamic was evident in Rwanda and Burundi and is serious cause for concern in Burma today.
The fact is that, vile as they are, there is actually very little likelihood of the butchers in Rangoon committing genocide — their crimes have other characteristics. It is disheartening that the members of the task force would allow the fact that they, like most sensible people, believe that Burma is one of the worst dictatorships in the world, to justify their distorting reality in this way, when they almost certainly know better. And since they do precisely that, it is hard not to at least entertain the suspicion — whose implications extend rather further than that and beg the question of what kind of world order follows from the task force’s recommendations — that consciously or (and this is worse, in a way) unconsciously they reasoned that if they could identify the Rangoon regime as genocidal, this would make an international intervention to overthrow it far more defensible. If this is right, then, if implemented, the report (again, intentionally or inadvertently) would have the effect of helping nudge us back toward a world where the prevention of genocide becomes a moral warrant for other policy agendas (as was surely the case with Saddam Hussein in 2003, and was the case with General Bashir in Khartoum until the arrival of the Obama administration).
I write this in large measure because the task force’s description of why mass violence and genocide occur could be a description of practically the entire developing world. Analysis at that level of generalization is not just useless, it is actually a prophylactic against thought.
It gets worse. The authors write:
“It is equally important to focus on the motivations of specific leaders and the tools at their disposal. There is no genocidal destiny. Many countries with ethnic or religious discrimination, armed conflicts, autocratic governments, or crushing poverty have not experienced genocide while others have. The difference comes down to leadership. Mass atrocities are organized by powerful elites who believe they stand to gain from these crimes and who have the necessary resources at their disposal. The heinous crimes committed in Nazi-occupied Europe, Cambodia, and Rwanda, for example, were all perpetrated with significant planning, organization, and access to state resources, including weapons, budgets, detention facilities, and broadcast media.
There are also key triggers that can tip a high-risk environment into crisis. These include unstable, unfair, or unduly postponed elections; high-profile assassinations; battlefield victories; and environmental conditions (for example, drought) that may cause an eruption of violence or heighten the perception of an existential threat to a government or armed group. Sometimes potential triggers are known well in advance and preparations can be made to address the risk of mass atrocities that may follow. Poorly planned elections in deeply divided societies are a commonly cited example, but deadlines for significant policy action, legal judgments, and anniversaries of highly traumatic and disputed historical events are also potential triggers that can be foreseen.”
I tax the reader’s patience with such a long quotation to show how expertise can produce meaninglessness. For apart from the mention of poorly planned elections — a reference to Rwanda that is perfectly correct as far as it goes — the rest of this does not advance our understanding one iota. To remedy or at least alleviate these vast social stresses, the task force recommends “effective [sic] early prevention”! The authors themselves were obliged to admit that, “Such efforts to change underlying social, economic, or political conditions are difficult and require sustained investment of resources and attention.” Really, you think? But about where these resources, as opposed to institutional arrangements, are to come from, they are largely silent, apart from emphasizing the need to target with both threats and positive inducements leaders thought likely to choose to commit such crimes. But the authors know perfectly well that, as they themselves put it, “early engagement is a speculative venture,” and that “the watch list of countries ‘at risk’ can be long, due to the difficulty of anticipating specific crises in a world generally plagued by instability.” Surely, people like Secretary Albright and Secretary Cohen know better than anyone that such ventures are never going to be of much interest to senior policymakers, just as the global Marshall Plan that would be required to effectively address the underlying causes of genocidal wars is never going to be on offer.
To a great power, and to the citizens of great power, powerlessness is simply an unconscionable destiny. The task force report, with its strange imperviousness to viewing historical tragedy as much more than an engineering problem, is a perfect illustration of this. Unsound historically, and hubristic morally, for all its good intentions, the task force report is not a blueprint for a better future but a mystification of the choices that actually confront us and between which we are going to have to choose if we are ever to prevent or halt even some genocides. My suspicion is that the reason that the very accomplished, distinguished people who participated in the task force did not feel obliged to face up to this is because the report gives as much weight to the national interest basis for preventing or halting genocide as it does to the moral imperative of doing so. As the report puts it:
“ First, genocide fuels instability, usually in weak, undemocratic, and corrupt states. It is in these same types of states that we find terrorist recruitment and training, human trafficking, and civil strife, all of which have damaging spillover effects for the entire world.
Second, genocide and mass atrocities have long-lasting consequences far beyond the states in which they occur. Refugee flows start in bordering countries but often spread. Humanitarian needs grow, often exceeding the capacities and resources of a generous world. The international community, including the United States, is called on to absorb and assist displaced people, provide relief efforts, and bear high economic costs. And the longer we wait to act, the more exorbitant the price tag. For example, in Bosnia, the United States has invested nearly $ 15 billion to support peacekeeping forces in the years since we belatedly intervened to stop mass atrocities.
Third, America’s standing in the world — and our ability to lead — is eroded when we are perceived as bystanders to genocide. We cannot be viewed as a global leader and respected as an international partner if we cannot take steps to avoid one of the greatest scourges of humankind. No matter how one calculates U.S. interests, the reality of our world today is that national borders provide little sanctuary from international problems. Left unchecked, genocide will undermine American security.
A core challenge for American leaders is to persuade others — in the U.S. government, across the United States, and around the world — that preventing genocide is more than just a humanitarian aspiration; it is a national and global imperative.”
Again, apologies for quoting at such length. but truthfully, is one meant to take this seriously? There is absolutely no evidence that terrorist recruiting is more promising in failed states than, say, in suburban Connecticut where the (very middle-class) Faisal Shahzad, son of a retired Pakistani Air Force vice-marshal, plotted to explode a car bomb in Times Square. Nor, in the U.S. case is there any basis for concluding that the main source of immigration is from places traumatized by war. To the contrary, most of our immigrants are the best and the brightest (in the sense not of the most educated but most enterprising) of Mexico, the Philippines, India, and China. The proportion of migrants from Sudan or Somalia is small by comparison. As for the costs of peacekeeping, are the authors of the report serious? Fifteen billion dollars? The sum barely signifies in the rubric of the military budget of the United States. And lastly, the report’s claim that the U.S. won’t be viewed as a global leader and respected as an international partner if it doesn’t take the lead to stop genocide is absurd on its face. Not respected by whom, exactly? Hu Jintao in Beijing? Merkel in Berlin? President Felipe Calderon in Mexico City? To put it charitably, the claim conjures up visions of Pinocchio, rather than Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson.
The report calls for courage, but courage begins at home. Pressed by Armenian activists at one of the events held to launch the report as to why they had both earlier signed a letter urging the U.S. not to bow to Armenian pressure and formally recognize the Armenian genocide, Secretary Cohen and Secretary Albright refused over and over again to characterize the Armenian genocide as, well, a genocide. It is true that the Armenian activists had come looking for a confrontation. But there can be little question that both secretaries did everything they could to avoid committing themselves one way or the other. “Terrible things happened to the Armenians,” Secretary Albright said, refusing to go any further. The letter, she explained, had been primarily about “whether this was an appropriate time to raise the issue.” For his part, Secretary Cohen, emphasized that angering the Turks while the Iraq war was raging could lead to Turkish reactions that would “put our sons and daughters in jeopardy.” And, in any case, the task force was not “a historical commission.”
This is a perfectly defensible position from the perspective of prudential realpolitik. The problem is that what the task force report constantly calls for is political courage. And whatever else they were, Secretaries Albright and Cohen’s responses were expedient, not courageous. There will always be reasons not to intervene — compelling pressures, I mean, not trivial ones. Why should a future U.S. government be less vulnerable to them than the Bush or Obama administrations? About this, as about so many other subjects, the task force report is as evasive as Secretary Albright and Secretary Cohen were at the press conference at which the Armenian activists confronted them. Doubtless, they had to be. For the solutions they propose are not real solutions, the history they touch on is not the actual history, and the world they describe is not the real world.”
Schindler’s List: What The Girl In The Red Coat Represents, Explained
4 במרץ 2026 בפורים: למה אנחנו מתכוונים כשאנחנו משתמשים בביטוי; “לעולם לא שוב!”
בחג פורים זה שמתחיל היום בשקיעה ומסתיים עם סתיו הלילה מחר, חוגגים עמי העולם את ישועתם מרצח העם בפרס המאה ה-5 כפי שכתוב במגילת אסתר, וכל האנושות עשויה לחגוג את הניצחון. של אהבה על שנאה, סולידריות על פילוג והתנגדות על עריצות שהיא מנציחה.
כאשר אנו מתמודדים בחדשות עם תמונות של אלימות נוראה ופשעים נגד האנושות בשתי מלחמות המאתגרות את סדר העולם שלנו; הפלישה הישראלית לעזה שהפכה את אמריקה לשותפה ברצח עם ומעמידה בספק את רעיון זכויות האדם, והפלישה הרוסית לאוקראינה, מלחמת הרס מוחלט שלא דומה לשום דבר שאירופה ראתה מאז מלחמת העולם השנייה, המהדהדת את הזוועות והשימושים שלה. נשק תרמברי כמשרפות ניידות נגד אזרחים, אני חושב על הדברים האלה היום במונחים של המורשת ההיסטורית של התנגדות לעריצות, עבדות, מלחמות כיבוש ושליטה אימפריאלית ורצח עם.
איך נגן על עמי פלסטין ואוקראינה מפני פשעי המלחמה הנוראיים של הפשיזם התיאוקרטי של נתניהו של הדם, האמונה והאדמה והכיבוש האימפריאלי המטורף של פוטין, מבלי שעצמנו נהיה אימפריה?
פיתוי הכוח מתחיל בפחד, במיוחד פחד מוחץ ומוכלל הנתון בצורות של אחר על ידי סמכות בשירות לכוח; למצוא ביטחון ובטחון בהפיכתו לבורר המידות. גם לזה עלינו להתנגד.
יתרה מכך, אסטרטגיות כאלה של כוח ושליטה חייבות תמיד להיכשל ולהתקלקל, שכן ביטחון הוא אשליה, והשימוש בכוח חברתי יוצר התנגדות משלו.
לעולם לא שוב! הוא ביטוי שהשתמשתי בו לעתים קרובות כתשובה לעריצות ולפשיזם, הן בכתיבתי והן לחבריי באופן אישי, כקריאה להתנגדות מוחלטת ללא גבולות, ובזה אני מבקש לחקור את משמעותו והשלכותיו.
איך נוכל להשתמש ב- Never Again! כעיקרון של פעולה ישירה המשמר ומעצים את הרווחה והאוטונומיה של אחרים, מבלי שפעולה כזו תהפוך לנקודת שבר מוסרית, חתרנות לאידיאלים וכישלון מפל של כוח לא שוויוני?
עבורי, ההיסטוריה של השימוש בו קשורה לקטגוריה של הרגעים המגדירים שלי, שאני קורא להם עמודים אחרונים, שאת סיפוריהם סיפרתי פעמים רבות. אלה כוללים רק רגעים שבהם בחרתי בסולידריות ובסירוב להיכנע על פני הישרדות אישית; מסרב לזוז הצידה מהילד שמאחורי כשציידי הראשים של המשטרה קיבלו פקודה להיכנע בברזיל 1974, כאשר חיילים הציתו את הבית בו ז’אן ז’נה ואני היינו, מוקפים ולא חמושים, בביירות 1982 כשהשביע אותי בשבועה. של ההתנגדות, תקווה עזובה בקרב Cuito Cuanavale באנגולה 1988 לשחרור מהאפרטהייד, ועוד אינספור אחרים מעבר לחשבון שלי.
עמדות אחרונות הן בחירות של סירוב לוותר על האנושות שלנו וזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, חובת הזהירות והניהול שלנו זה בזה, ללא קשר להשלכות כקווים שאנו לא יכולים לחצות מבלי להפוך למשהו פחות אנושי.
במלחמת עזה המתמשכת ורצח העם של הפלסטינים, זהו גם סירוב לנטוש את מטרת “חופש האמונה לכל המין האנושי” כאגדה על האנדרטה של ניצחונו של גוסטבוס אדולפוס משבדיה ב-1631 בקרב ברייטנפלד, שהבטיחה זאת. הימין מצהיר, העיקרון של מדינה לא עדתית שעליה מושתתת אמריקה ושל הזכות הטבועה לעצמאות והגדרה עצמית ריבונית של כל העמים, וסולידריות עם כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי כדור הארץ נגד כוח ושליטה, מדינה טרור ועריצות, מלחמה וכיבוש אימפריאלי.
בין המודלים האישיים שלי לחיקוי באנטי-פשיזם ובמהפכה היא דמותו הבדיונית של הארי טאטל בגילומו של רוברט דה נירו בסרט ברזיל, שהשורה שלו “כולנו בזה ביחד”, מהדהדת לאורך ארבעים שנים מהחיים וההרפתקאות שלי.
תן לי לשים את זה בהקשר; ברזיל הייתה חווית הסולו הראשונה שלי בנסיעות חוץ, טסתי לסאו פאולו כשהייתי בן ארבע עשרה, בקיץ 1974, כדי להתאמן עם כמה סייפים אחרים לקראת המשחקים הפאן אמריקאים שתוכננו להתקיים שם, אם כי מאוחר יותר הועבר המקום ל מקסיקו. הייתה לי קצת פורטוגזית שיחה חדשה שלמדתי, הזמנה להתארח בביתו של ילד בגילי שהכרתי ממעגל טורנירי הסייף שאיתו יכולתי לגלות את השובבות המקומית, וחזיונות של מסיבות חוף.
אז נכנסתי לעולם של נימוסים חצרניים ומשרתים עם כפפות לבנות, מארחים אדיבים ומבריקים שהיו מאורות מקומיים וזרקו כדור פורמלי מפואר כדי להציג אותי, וחבר שאיתו חלקתי תשוקה מטורפת לספורט לחימה ולספורט סוסים. , אבל גם עולם של חומות גבוהות ושומרים חמושים.
המבט הראשון שלי מעבר לאשליה זו הגיע עם קולות של ירי רובה מהשומרים; כשהסתכלתי מהמרפסת שלי לראות מי תוקף את החזית
בשער גיליתי שהשומרים יורים לתוך קהל של קבצנים, בעיקר ילדים, שהסתערו על משאית שהובילה את אספקת המזון השבועית. באותו יום עשיתי את הטיול הסודי הראשון שלי מעבר לחומות, שממנו מעולם לא חזרתי באמת.
אילו אמיתות מסתתרות בחומות הארמונות שלנו, שמעבר להן אסור להביט? קל להאמין לשקרי הסמכות כשאדם חבר באליטה שבאינטרס שלה הם טוענים שהוא מחזיקים בכוח, ולא להטיל ספק במניעים ובעמדת הפריבילגיה של עצמו. קל להחריד להאמין בשקרים כאשר אנו הנהנים מהיררכיות של אחרות מוציאה מהכלל, מפערי עושר וכוח ואי-שוויון המיוצרים באופן מערכתי ומיוצרים נשק בשירות לשלטון, ומפריבילגיות לבנים ופטריארכליים, רצח עם, עבדות, כיבוש ואימפריאליזם.
תמיד שימו לב לאיש שמאחורי הווילון. כי אין סמכות צודקת, וכפי שדורותי אומרת בקוסם מארץ עוץ, הוא “רק זקן זקן”, והשקרים והאשליות שלו, הכוח והשליטה שלו, אינם משרתים אינטרסים מלבד שלו.
בהיותי נער אמריקאי נאיבי, הרגשתי שחובתי לדווח על התקרית; אבל בתחנת המשטרה התקשיתי להפוך את עצמי למובן, לא בגלל שפה אלא בגלל מערכות דיכוי מרומזות. הם חשבו שאני שם כדי להמר על המשמר שלי בתחרות חודשית מתמשכת שעבורה השוטר הכניס הכי הרבה ילדי רחוב; היה לוח גיר על קיר התחנה בשביל זה, וצנצנת עם אוזניים מתויגות כדי להוכיח את הספירה. כך בחרו האליטות של ברזיל לפתור את בעיית ילדי הרחוב הנטושים, עשרה אחוזים מהאוכלוסייה הלאומית. משחק הימורים נוסף שנקרא “הגדול”, היה בו השוטר בעט בבטן של הנערות ההריוניות ביותר ודורג בין עשרת גורמי המוות המובילים בברזיל עבור נערות מתבגרות, המתגוררות תמיד באזורי שכונות עוני המכילים את העניים והשחורים ביותר. אזרחים; זאת בעיר שהוקמה על ידי עבדים אפריקאים שנמלטו כרפובליקה חופשית.
למדתי הרבה בשבועות שלאחר מכן; מעל הכל למדתי מי אחראי לאי השוויון הללו; אנחנו כן, אם לא נאתגר את העריצות ומערכות לא צודקות ומתריסות אותן.
במהלך לילות הרפתקאותיי מעבר לחומות ופעולות כדי לעזור ללהקות הילדים הקבצנים ולחסום את ציד הראשים של המשטרה חוויתי חוויה טראומטית של כמעט מוות, בדומה להוצאות להורג המדומה של מוריס בלאנשו על ידי הנאצים ב-1944 כפי שנכתב ב” מיידי מותי ופיודור דוסטויבסקי על ידי המשטרה החשאית של הצאר ב-1849 כפי שנכתב ב”אידיוט”; נמלט מרדף דרך מערך מנהרות עם ילד פצוע בין היתר ונלכד בשטח הפתוח על ידי שני רובאי משטרה שתפסו עמדות אגפים וכיוונו אלינו בעוד המנהיג קרא להיכנע מעבר לעיקול של מנהרה. עמדתי מול נער עם רגל מעוותת שלא יכול היה לרוץ בזמן שהאחרים התפזרו ונמלטו או מצאו מקומות מסתור, וסירבתי לעמוד מהצד כשהצטוו לעשות זאת. זה היה רפלקסיבי והחלטה של אינסטינקט מתחת לרמה של מחשבה או רצון מודע, שבו האמיתות של עצמנו שנכתבו על בשרנו מזויפות ומתגלות. ביקשתי לתת למישהו למות כדי להציל את עצמי, פשוט אמרתי שלא. כשחזרה אלי המחשבה מרגע זה של בהלה או התעלות של עצמי, שאלתי כמה לתת לנו להתרחק, ואז הוא הורה לאנשיו לירות. אבל הייתה רק ירייה אחת במקום הפגנה של אש צולבת, והחטאה רחבה; היה לו זמן לשאול “מה?” לפני נפילה ארצה.
ואז גילו את עצמם המצילים שלנו, לאחר שהתגנבו למשטרה מאחור; המטאדורים, שאפשר לתאר אותם כאנשי משמר, כנופיית פושע, קבוצה מהפכנית, או שלושתם, שהוקמה על ידי הכונן והפושע הידוע לשמצה של ברזיל פדרו רודריגס פילו, הידוע לשמצה בכך שנקם את הרצח הפראי של אמו על ידי הריגת אביו ואכילת ליבו, אשר נעצר בשנה הקודמת לאחר סדרה מרהיבה של מאה רציחות נקמה או יותר של הפושעים המטומטמים והמפלצתיים ביותר, גברים חזקים מעבר להישג ידם של החוק או שהיו החוק ושעשו זוועות בנשים וילדים. לתוך האחווה האימתנית הזו התקבלתי, עם המילים; “אתה אחד מאיתנו, בואי איתנו” וברחובות סאו פאולו באותו קיץ לא עמדתי שוב לבד.
“אנחנו לא יכולים להציל את כולם, אבל אנחנו יכולים לנקום”; אז הם תיארו לי את עצמם, וההגדרה הזו של סולידריות כפרקסיס או פעולת ערכים נשארת איתי ומצללת את השימוש שלי בזעקת הקרב לעולם לא שוב! כפי שכתב שייקספיר ב”סוחר מוונציה”, מערכה שלישית, סצנה א’; “אם אתה טועה בנו, האם לא ננקום?”
מהרגע שראיתי את השומרים של משפחת האצולה שאיתם התארחתי יורים על קהל הילדים חסרי הבית והקבצנים רוחשים את משאית אספקת המזון בשער האחוזה, עירומים ושלדיים ברעב, מצולקים ונכים ומשובשים במחלות לא ידועות. לכל אדם שעבורם שירותי בריאות ותזונה בסיסית א
מחדש תנאים מוקדמים חופשיים ומובטחים של הזכות האוניברסלית לחיים, נואשים לקומץ מזון שיכול להיות עוד יום אחד של הישרדות; באותו רגע בחרתי בצד שלי, ועמי הם חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והנמחקים; כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי כדור הארץ.
השני הוא היום שבו ז’אן ז’נה הוביל אותי למסלול חיי עם שבועת ההתנגדות בביירות בקיץ 1982.
חיילים ישראלים הציתו את הבתים ברחוב שלי וקראו לאנשים לצאת ולהיכנע. הם כיסו את עיניהם של הילדים של אלה שעשו זאת והשתמשו בהם כמגן אנושי.
לא היה לנו נשק אחר מלבד בקבוק השמפניה הריק שסיימנו זה עתה עם ארוחת הבוקר שלנו של קרפ תותים; שאלתי “יש רעיונות?”, והוא משך בכתפיו ואמר “לתקן כידונים?”
ואז הוא נתן לי עקרון פעולה שלפיו אני חי כבר ארבעים ושתיים שנה; “כשאין תקווה, אדם חופשי לעשות דברים בלתי אפשריים, דברים מפוארים.”
הוא שאל אותי אם אני מתכוון להיכנע, ואמרתי שלא; הוא חייך וענה, “גם אני לא.” וכך הוא השביע אותי לשבועה שהגה ב-1940 בפריז בתחילת הכיבוש עבור חברים שהוא יכול לאסוף, מנוסח מחדש מהשבועה שנשא כלגיונר ב-1918. הוא אמר שזה הדבר הטוב ביותר שהוא אי פעם. צָעִיף; “אנו נשבעים את נאמנותנו זה לזה, להתנגד ולא להיכנע, ולא לנטוש את חברינו.”
אז הפכתי להיות נושאת מסורת בת למעלה משמונים שנה וחיצפתי בסכסוך המפחיד והנורא ביותר שידע העולם, זמן קצר לפני שציפיתי להישרף בחיים בדוכן האחרון מבין רבים.
זה היה רגע הזיוף שלי, ההחלטה הזו לבחור במוות על פני כפיפות, ומאז שנפגעתי ממנו אני פעמון, מצלצל. וכמו פעמון החירות, אני פתוח לסבלם של אחרים ולפגמי האנושות שלנו. זו הייתה המתנה הגדולה ביותר שניתנה לי אי פעם, האמפתיה הזו שנושאת מפצע קדוש, ולעולם לא אפסיק את הקריאה לחירות, ולא אהסס לענות כפי שאני יכול לקריאה לסולידריות עם אחרים.
מבין קרב Cuito Cuanavale, הקרב הגדול ביותר שנלחם אי פעם באפריקה, עצום אפילו יותר מאל עלמיין; זה היה המקום שבו נשברה שיטת האפרטהייד. במערכה ענקית שכללה למעלה מ-300,000 חיילים מתנדבים קובנים בין דצמבר 1987 למרץ 1988, בתיאום עם כוחות אנגולה וילידים אחרים, מתנדבים בינלאומיים, ועם סיוע ויועצים סובייטים, הביסו את דרום אפריקה הגדולה והעדיפה בהרבה מבחינה טכנולוגית ואת UNITA והאמריקאית שלהם. בעלי ברית ושכירי חרב בקרב Cuito Cuanavale, בסיס צבאי אנגולי שדרום אפריקה לא הצליחה לכבוש בחמישה גלי תקיפות.
בעוד המחזה של הקרב האחרון הגדול הזה במאבק שחרור ארוך של עשרות שנים התגלגל, עשיתי שובבות מאחורי קווי האויב בשיח. כאן גיליתי יחידה אבודה, בעיקר זולו, שהוקפתה על ידי כוחות האפרטהייד. לאחר דיווח על מה שידעתי על האזור לקבוצת הפיקוד וכנס קצר במספר שפות, קם בחור זקן שעד כה שתק מצללי האוהל, שצורתו ללא חולצתו הראתה צלקת אימתנית ומרהיבה מציפורני אריה. , ואמר; “אנחנו מוקפים וחסרי מספרם בלי תחמושת וגרוע מכך, בלי מים, ואף אחד לא בא לעזור לנו. אנחנו חייבים לתקוף”.
הסמל חייך על כך כאילו ניתנה לו מתנה נפלאה, פסע החוצה ונתן את הפקודה שאם יתמזל מזלך לעולם לא תשמע; “תקן כידונים!”
והגברים שעומדים למות התפרצו בשירה. “אוסוטו! Umkhonto wami womile!” הראשון הוא קריאת קרב זולו אוניברסלית, המבקשת מרוחות אבותיו להתעורר ולהעיד על מעשי הגבורה המפוארים שעומדים לבצע. “החנית שלי צמאה”, זה האחרון.
וניצחנו, למרות שהמחיר היה נורא. אין עלויות כאלה גדולות מכדי לשאת בהשוואה לעלויות הכניעה לעבדות, סחורה, זיוף ודה-הומניזציה; כי בסירוב להיכנע אנו הופכים לבלתי נכבשים וחופשיים, ואי אפשר לקחת מאיתנו את הכוח הזה של בעלות עצמית כניצחון במאבק על האנושיות שלנו. כפי שכתב מקס סטירנר; “לא ניתן להעניק חופש; יש לתפוס אותו.”
מזמן איבדתי את ספירת היציעים האחרונים; אלה הפכו לאמיתות הכתובות על בשרי, ואני נושא סימנים כאלה ללא מספר. ללא ספק יהיו אלה שעומדים כעת לצד פלסטין, אוקראינה או כל עם שנמצא בסכנת השמדה.
בכל זה מה שחשוב הוא שבסירוב להיכנע לסמכות ולכפות אנו הופכים לבלתי נכבשים וחופשיים; זהו ניצחון כתנאי הוויה שאי אפשר לקחת מאיתנו, בדומה לחייל האוקראיני הגיבור השומר על אי שומם שסירב להיכנע לספינת מלחמה רוסית במילים; “ספינת מלחמה רוסית, לך תזדיין.” אדם כזה אי אפשר לכבוש, ודבריו האלמותיים מדברים בעד כל האומה שלו.
ט
סוד הכוח, הכוח והסמכות הוא שהדברים האלה חלולים ושבירים, ונכשלים כשהם נתקלים בחוסר ציות ובסירוב פשוט להאמין ולהיכנע.
איך אנחנו מוצאים את הרצון לעשות את הדברים האלה, לצאת מהחורבות ולעשות עוד עמדה אחרונה, מעבר לתקווה לניצחון או אפילו הישרדות?
האמת היא שאנחנו לא צריכים שום דבר מעבר לעצמנו ולרגע ההחלטה שלנו לעשות דברים כאלה; אין עקרונות אוניברסליים גדולים, אפילו לא המרחב השלילי של דמות גיבורה לאכלס ולהופיע לפני בימת העולם. כל מה שאנחנו צריכים זה זה; שאחרים שסומכים עלינו ימותו אם לא.
זה מה שהופך אותנו לאנושיים, וזה משהו שאנחנו חייבים להמשיך לאשר לא משנה מה המחיר.
יכול להיות שיש עוד דבר אחד שיכול לעזור לנו ברגעים כאלה של החלטה; אם נזכור מי אנחנו, ולא איך אחרים מדמיינים אותנו.
האם אנחנו לא הסיפורים שאנו מספרים על עצמנו, לעצמנו ולאחרים?
היסטוריה, זיכרון, זהות; אנחנו פרוכרוניזם, היסטוריה המתבטאת בצורתנו של האופן שבו פתרנו בעיות של הסתגלות על פני מפרצי זמן עצומים, כמו קונכייה של יצור ימי פנטסטי.
תמיד נשאר המאבק בין המסכות שאחרים עושים לנו, לבין אלה שאנחנו עושים לעצמנו. זו המהפכה הראשונה שבה כולנו חייבים להילחם; המאבק לבעלות על עצמנו.
התחלנו להיזכר מי אנחנו, אנחנו האמריקאים, אחרי התקף הארוך של הזיוף שהטילו הבוגד טראמפ ותעמולי הרייך הרביעי שלו; קראנו כעת להפסקת אש בעזה, לאחר חצי שנה של חימוש חשאי במלחמת עזה של ישראל בהוראת רצח העם ג’ו. גם אירופה מתעוררת מחדש כאשר נאט”ו מאחד את התנגדותה לכיבוש האימפריאלי של אוקראינה ולאיום של כיבוש אירופה הרוסי. עד כה אמריקה לא עשתה דבר כדי להביא שינוי משטר לאומה מחוץ לחוק, לא השתיקה את הפצצות, לא שחררה את אוקראינה או פלסטין, ולא פתחה את המצור הישראלי של סיוע הומניטרי; אבל כל זה נשאר אפשרי, אם כולנו נעזור ככל שנוכל.
ברגעים של ספק כמו זה קראתי שוב את המיתוס של סיזיפוס של קאמי, את הזקן והים של המינגווי, את Invictus של הנלי, I.F. משפט סוקרטס של סטון; מיתוסים, סיפורים, שירה והיסטוריה של הוד של ההתנגדות המקנה חופש.
גם כאן, ברגע המקביל לזה של ספרד ב-1936 ופולין ב-1939, עלינו לומר לעולם לא
Joy explodes in puffs of colored powder and the exaltation of rainbow delights, masses of human bodies dance and writhe like a vast colony organism or the murmuration of birds ascending to the heavens, as the Festival of Holi unfolds across the Hindu diaspora in psychedelic surrealism and ecstatic trance.
Herein a festival of love and ecstasy emerges from a more ancient one of spring and fertility, embedded in a historical psychodrama and mythic narrative of Krishna and Radha, who share the same blue skin through exaltation and the magic of his marking her with colored powder, a ritual of transformation enacted during this massive street party of colors cast upon the winds.
In this wild and magic time, let us all be one color in our universal humanity and limitless love and many in our uniqueness’s and diversity, with no boundaries between us. Let us transcend the flags of our skins through love and transgression.
Wary as I am of institutions of faith as enforcers of authorized truths, especially those which field armies, Krishna and his festival of Holi are just love without boundaries, and explicitly transgressive love as the gods are blind to whatever we do during this liminal amok time. In a society bound with laws still rooted in divisions of caste and hierarchies of virtue as karmic action, Holi is the free pass festival, wherein Nothing Is Forbidden.
Let us embrace those truths written in our flesh and love which liberates us from the limits of our form.
As I wrote in my post of October 7 2021, Love as a Divine Madness: a Celebration of Mad Hatter Day; We celebrate the beginning of the Halloween season, wherein we let our demons out to play, a time of masquerades, the performance of secret identities, violations of normality and transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, reversals of order, the embrace of our monstrosity, of the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, and the pursuit of new truths through ecstatic trance and poetic vision, with our new national holiday of amok time, Mad Hatter Day.
The Mad Hatter acts as a psychopomp or guide of the soul in Alice in Wonderland, and Alice is a Holy Fool like Parsifal, but he and Alice are also figures of a single whole person and the story one of hierosgamos or heavenly marriage; like Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, a myth into which Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes cast themselves so disastrously.
Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast interrogates this myth of idealizations of authorized masculinity and femininity as Freudian horror and Sadeian transgression. But it is also a primary myth of reimagination and transformation which signposts the inherent fluidity of identities of sex and gender.
What does love do? Love sublimes us into a unitary being, erases our limits as individuals defined by our form and liberates us from the event horizon of our flesh.
Love also reveals to us our true selves; a lover has the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves. To love is to transform others by the power of our vision to see who they truly are and set them free.
A lover is both a Pythian seer of truths who like Michelangelo can free us as images captive within the stone of our bodies and our material and social context, who in naming us like Adam naming the beasts defines our truth, and an inverted figure of Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze and transforms it into the power to see others true selves and release them to be free, and to mutually assimilate the qualities of the other and transform them both.
Love is a divine madness which defiles and exalts, reveals truths and confers authenticity, and the redemptive power of love can make glorious and beautiful the flaws of our humanity and bring healing to the brokenness of the world and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
Sitar, Flute & Tabla for meditation
Sources of Holi festival myth and ritual
Gitagovinda of Jayadeva: Love Song of the Dark Lord, Jayadeva Goswami, Barbara Stoler Miller (Translator)
Celebrate with me the historic 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, which on this day 113 years ago brought thousands to women to Washington D.C. to call for the right to vote, the first such event on a massive national scale after 60 years of the fight for women’s suffrage.
It was a public declaration of freedom from fear, and of solidarity in the face of horrific repression. One hundred women were hospitalized this day, attacked by mobs unrestrained by the police, merely one incident in a decades long struggle against violence and control, and against the deniable forces of a government wholly vested in the Patriarchy. And before that, millennia of enslavement, dehumanization, marginalization, and the silencing of women’s voices.
But after that day, the world has never been the same. Women had stood up to the brutal tyranny of force and control in defiance and refusal to submit, and that is a genie which can never be put back in its bottle. This is the secret of power; it is hollow and brittle, for it fails at the point of disobedience. In the words of the great Sylvia Plath; “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
Women will be silent no more, and as we rejoice together in the refusal to submit to authority, remember the victories of our history which brought us to what liberation we now enjoy.
In this time of darkness when atavistic forces of Patriarchy and Gideonite fundamentalism scuttle from beneath their stones to attempt once again the re-enslavement of women through control of reproductive rights and denial of bodily autonomy without which there is no freedom, and which also infringes on our universal right to health care as a precondition of the right to life, which together threaten dehumanization, theft of citizenship, and render democracy meaningless, let us claim and raise again the suffragette banner bearing the catchphrase of liberation which Alice Paul appropriated from Woodrow Wilson, “The time has come to conquer or submit.”
On this anniversary of the historic 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade led by Alice Paul, let us frighten the horses, and through our public performance of identities of sex and gender seize ownership of ourselves, reclaim the narratives of liberation from the marginalization and silences of historical authorization of identity, and shift the boundaries of the Forbidden through transgression of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas.
Freaking the normies, we called it in the San Francisco of my youth; enactments of difference and uniqueness as revolutionary struggle and guerilla theatre, in which we seized public spaces as our stage. As in the spectacle of human possibilities of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, strategies of confrontation which valorize totemic figures of transgression act as rituals of liberation, seizures of power, and the transformation and reimagination of authorized identities and of humankind.
Go ahead, frighten the horses; for none of us need stand alone, and if they come for one of us, they must be met with all of us.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
the Women’s Suffrage Movement in America, a reading list
Votes for Women!: American Suffragists and the Battle for the Ballot, by Winifred Conkling
On this night of the Worm Moon, sacred to serpents and dragons, for myself symbols of the wisdom of our darkness and of unknowns beyond all limits and all laws respectively, especially those of water as turbulent systems of primal chaos from which all things are born and arise, we rejoice and celebrate death and chaos in their positive forms as regeneration and metamorphosis, rebirth and transformation, as the Conqueror Worm liberates us from the limits of our form.
On these three Nights of the Worm, fleeting herald of a new and liminal time of change and transformation, like a gate opening in the celestial spheres, letting angels through, or devils, and I welcome them both. For as Nelson Mandela once said we are not in a position to turn down help from anyone, and as the Ides of March resurface the battle cry of Sic Semper Tyrannis against the fall of the Old Republic to tyranny in the captured state of Vichy America as in Caesar’s Rome, and under the spell of an idiot madman, Nazi revivalist, and Russian agent whose criminal regime is all about the subversion of democracy and our enslavement to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the theft of our souls through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, this I say; if our angels will not help us, perhaps our devils will.
Let us go not quietly, for all Resistance is War to the Knife, and those who respect no limits and no laws may hide behind none.
As written by Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Prologue, part 5; “I tell you: one must still have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.” In the original; ”Ich sage euch: man muß noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können”.
Of the destabilization and destruction of order, law, and authority as revolutionary struggle and seizures of power I have written often and will again, for the songs of liberty are sung throughout all of history and the world and among all humankind; herein I wish to say to my comrades now dying in such struggles without number or simply of being human and the limits of our flesh as an imposed condition of struggle, there is nothing to fear in being destroyed and recreated, for death is nothing but freedom from the limits of our form.
As I said to my mother when I awakened in her arms at the age of nine from being cast out of my body by the force wave of a police grenade at Bloody Thursday 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley, and a moment of awareness beyond time wherein I contained myriads of possible futures, Most Sincerely Dead and then returned to the sidereal universe for reasons I can not understand; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing, nothing but awakening from an illusion.”
So many echoes and reflections of that moment of illumination and Awakening under the light of the Worm Moon now fill my thoughts, seize and shake me with wonder and terror as Rudolph Otto described immersion in the Infinite, of stories which take form in us and unfold as motivating, informing, and shaping sources; Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, Beowulf, and Poe’s The Conqueror Worm, which together form a manual of Rituals of the Worm.
This is also the night of the Hindu fire festival of dancing and ecstatic trance which precedes Holi, Holika Dahan which like the Festival of the Worm Moon celebrates transformation and rebirth, and curiously in India also the triumph of good over evil in the cannibalistic eating of a wicked king by a hero were-lion, which resonates with the diasporic cult of the Rakshasa demons whose role as a warrior brotherhood is to punish transgression by the mighty beyond the reach of the law, a form of revolution as justice which I call bringing a Reckoning.
First among my intertexts and references here is Poe’s beautiful allegory of death as liberation from a fallen world of madness, sin, and horror. Here human history is a theatrical performance for utterly alien and cruel tyrant gods whose designs for us must be resisted, a poem which founded the Absurdist-Surrealist universe within which H.P. Lovecraft lives, and the Worm a heroic liberator.
The Conqueror Worm
by Edgar Allan Poe
Lo! ’t is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly—
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Wo!
That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Out—out are the lights—out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
Here is the Project Gutenberg archive of Beowulf, the figure of Grendel’s Mother, a sea dragon who reigns over abyssal chasms of darkness in her cave, being a figure of the Worm near to the Biblical Leviathan or Melville’s Moby Dick. As Jean Genet said to me in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival; “When there is no hope, one may do impossible things, glorious things.”
And last of three parts of this liturgical assemblage of texts, is Carroll’s glorious Jabberwocky, in which the hero takes the place of the Conqueror Worm as a liberator in a battle with his shadow as a dragon which must be embraced and subsumed, completing the exchange of qualities and transpositions of symbols and metaphors which occur throughout Beowulf as a manual of shapechanging magic.
Jabberwocky
by Lewis Carroll
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
On the reverse face of this time of spring and rebirth with its many rituals from the vernal equinox to the Worm Moon to Easter, I have written in my post of June 1 2021, Death is a Secret Twin; Death is a secret twin which shares our face but not our dreams which lift and exalt us beyond the limits of our flesh, so Death must steal the echoes and reflections of ours, a thing of shadows filled with secret histories, unspoken truths, unsworn oaths, thousands of myriads of loyalties to private loves and desires betrayed by our failures to make them live and become real by action.
Death is the terror of all that we may have been but did not become, the loss of our disconnectedness and the emptiness of meaning in a world where love cannot redeem us, the grief for beauty which loses context when it is no longer shared and is lost with the fragments of memories which like the genie of perfume escape their bottle to trigger moments out of time and then evanesce like the ghost of a beloved hand which no longer grasps ours back.
We are tattered and broken things, our secret shadows and ourselves, who live in the incandescent now with these repositories of our beautiful dreams and our terrible nightmares, bearing them on into eternity; for this is the great secret of being, that our best selves are formed of all we would deny and keep hidden, and which live beyond us as figures of our glorious sins.
Death is an ambush predator made of our histories, memories, and identities, which must steal these things to become real in the moment of our awakening into its realm of beautiful and terrible dreams, a realm of true being beyond the illusions of our lives which bears names including the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism and the alam al mythal in Islam, called by Coleridge the Primary Imagination, the Logos in neo-Platonic philosophy and the Gospel of John, and by Jung the Collective Unconscious, and waits to seize us unawares and carry us off to eternity while it replaces us like a faery changeling with the image of our unrealized hopes and unexpressed desires.
Death is a unique and personal demon created by our denial of ourselves, such denial acting as a parasite which destroys its host and operates through a process of falsification like the distorted and captured images in a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, but it can become instead a symbiote, a terrible and monstrous guardian spirit and a guide of the soul which speaks from within our greatest darkness with Forbidden wisdom, like a remora borne by a shark on its journeys through chasms of the unknown not as its nemesis and conqueror but as a servant which grooms from us that which we must cast down from the thrones of our hearts; we humans and our silent and unseen partners the angels of our deaths whom we must wrestle not for victory, for everything in life is more powerful than we are, but to become Unconquered in resistance and free.
Thus may we bear without breaking the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, become greater and more real and alive than we were born, transcend the limits of our form, and become sublimed as figures of our truths in Sartrean total freedom and authenticity as an art of life, for all true art defiles and exalts.
Here is a faith which asks us to renounce nothing and embrace our true selves, to reimagine and transform ourselves; and offers a path of working with grief process and death transcendence not of control of our passions and dominion of nature, but as seizure of power and autonomy, of the embrace and celebration of our wildness as beings of nature and of those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
Let us embrace 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.”
How shall we answer death and the terror of our nothingness? Let us challenge and defy such death, and while it waits to claim us with its cold hand of entropy and unraveled time we must seize and shake our shadow and secret twin of longing to become, transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and perform our best selves, our hopes and our desires, as a guerilla theatre of identities upon the stage of the world in fearless grandeur, and let nothing be lost or remain untested among the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us answer death as Bringers of Chaos and Transformation, and make of our world and humankind a thing of beautiful, terrible truths written in our flesh, and of our dreams and nightmares a brave new world.
As I wrote in reflection on my mother’s death, now years ago; Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
As wrote in my post of May 28 2023, The True and False Crows: a Fable; A crow confronts his image in a pool of water, and as Nietzsche warned the darkness looks back. Of this I have written a paragraph on the Nietzschean idea of the Abyss, and of tragedy as failure to embrace our monstrosity and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh; the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
As Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil goes; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
It is also an origin of evil as the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; written in the tyrannies and systems of unequal power which hold humankind in their iron grip of force and control as Kristevan abjection and learned helplessness, and the ecological catastrophe which threatens our species extinction as disconnection from nature, control of nature as capitalist exploitation of resources and theft of the commons, carceral states of force and control as embodied violence, and our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the Wilderness of Mirrors.
All of this requires the renouncement of love, as Wagner’s figure of tyranny Alberich the Dwarf must do to seize the Ring of power and dominion, a story more familiar to us as Tolkien’s retelling of the Nibelungenlied in his trilogy of novels which recast World War Two as an allegory of the abandonment of addiction to power. This has a corollary; the redemptive power of love, like the power of poetic vision to reimagine and transform ourselves, can free us from the Ring of Power and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Jean Genet in Miracle of the Rose; “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”
Here follows the paragraph of my thoughts on seeing this image, which if considered as a poem I now think of as the True and False Crows: a fable.
Who is this imposter? If he is me, where now am I? Avaunt, my nemesis, for I shall pursue retribution for this theft of myself beyond all wrath now remembered, through death and hell and the terrors of our nightmares. Come and let us grapple for the truth of ourselves in this place where angels fear, and end not in silence but in exaltation and fire, with roars of defiance hurled against the chasms of our nothingness, supernal and magnificent as the Morningstar, and illuminate for all humankind the path of escape from this prison of illusions and lies.
To this my sister replied, Such poetry!
This is as direct as I can be, o my sister. Should I merit some kind of monument one day, an absurd fantasy as I mean nothing to history and will vanish from the world without a trace, and nothing to anyone beyond yourself as the remnants of family, Dolly as my partner, and those few friends and allies who know my true identity, inscribe this therein.
I have tried to salvage something of our humanity and to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world these past forty years since I was sworn to the oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet, and often failed, but this is not what is important.
What is important is to refuse to submit.
And one thing more; to act with solidarity in revolutionary struggle. As the Oath of the Resistance created in Paris 1940 by Jean Genet from the oath of the Foreign Legion in which he once served, and given to me in Beirut 1982 in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and which I offer to all of you as a tradition to bear forward into the future; “We swear ourselves to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
In this my chosen life mission I have held true, for if each and every one of us stands in solidarity with others regardless of how different they may be from ourselves, we will become liberators and guarantors of each other’s uniqueness, and in refusal to submit will be victorious and free.
He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, the Oath of the Resistance, but I often think of this in terms of a definition of the beauty of human beings; to become Unconquered and free as self created beings in refusal to submit to authority and its instruments of violence, force and control, and the repression of dissent, to refuse our dehumanization and the theft of our souls and autonomy and to do all of this in solidarity and absolute loyalty to each other.
As he once said to me; “Is this not the beauty of men, to resist and never yield, to cede nothing to the enemy, not love nor hope, not our history nor the chance for a future of our own choosing, neither our monstrosity nor our grandeur, nothing of our humanity nor of any human being whose life is in our power to harm or help, to live beyond all limits and all laws and to risk everything to do this for each other?”
I dream of a future something like the future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations; the idea first put forth in the episode Is There In Truth No Beauty?, described in the first issue of the fanzine Inside Star Trek as; “that beauty, growth, progress — all result from the union of the unlike. Concord, as much as discord, requires the presence of at least two different notes. The brotherhood of man is an ideal based on learning to delight in our essential differences, as well as learning to recognize our similarities.” As stated in the episode The Savage Curtain; “I am pleased to see that we have differences. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us.”
Liberty as freedom from authorized identities and truths, and equality and its corollary solidarity; these are the personal and social preconditions of democracy as a free society of equals.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did last spring in Mariupol and in the year of the fall of Afghanistan, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must embrace our darkness and claim our truths, and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Love is crucial both to poetic vision and as solidarity in action as processes of self-construal and becoming human; Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling; plus it contains a marvelous re-enactment of the myth of Persephone.
Let us always take the risks of our humanity, and place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
My friends, please feel free to perform and enact this spell with me; A Hymn to Chaos and Transgression:
I invoke Chaos, freedom, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human against Order, Authority, and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
I perform acts of transgression by which to break the chains of law and illusion woven by those who would enslave us, to seize our power and our autonomy from hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege, from authorized identities and divisions of exclusionary otherness, to create myself in the image of my own imagination and no other, and to shape human being, meaning, and value to the forms of my desires.
In this time of the turning of the tides I refuse and resist subjugation by force and control, I become Unconquered and free, I run amok and am ungovernable, and to Authority I reply with the Four Sacred Acts in pursuit of Liberty and Truth; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
By these invocations of Chaos and Transgression (Herein be free to make wishes, and to consecrate acts of defiance of tyranny, disruptions and subversions of good order and discipline, violations of normality, seizures of power, and celebrations of autonomy and living beyond all limits in the glorious embrace of our monstrosity, of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves) I curse all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, patriarchy, state terror and tyranny, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and inequalities of power.
On this night of the renewal of the world in which the old order is consumed in fire and the spirit world moves among us and is unified with our own in its reimagination and transformation, I name to my brothers and sisters of Chaos these enemies of humankind as rightful prey; first, upon all tyrants and their forces of repression of dissent and enforcement of the Law, for order appropriates, law serves power, and there is no just authority; second upon Donald Trump (herein please feel free to name tyrants whom you oppose and seek to cast down from their thrones; mine include Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and many others) and all who serve and support him and the cause of fascism, and all those who in voting for him in the Presidential election of November 3 2020 have signed the confession of their treason and allegiance to white supremacist terror, theocratic- patriarchal sexual terror, and to the tyranny and terror of a police state.
So upon Trump, his puppetmaster Vladimir Putin, and all who claim him as their own do I place my curse and invoke ruin upon their fortunes and their lives and destruction upon their cause. May they be forgotten and become nothing.
This I balance with equal blessing, protection, and good luck upon the lives, fortunes, and causes of liberty and equality upon all who are powerless and dispossessed, marginalized by exclusionary otherness, falsified, commodified, dehumanized, silenced and erased, and those who place their lives in the balance with them in solidarity as champions and bearers of the Torch of Liberty and a free society of equals.
Tonight our wildness will eat the moon and set it free.
Final Thoughts
Bury me at sea, for I belong to no nation but to the world
Send me out in flames, for this is how I have lived
Not silent but incandescent in the night
An agent of change and illumination, like fire itself
On the first of March 1692 the Salem Witch Trials began; and in some ways have never stopped, but expanded to become a pervasive and endemic harm which characterizes our society and the carceral state America has become. Patriarchy and theocracy are unequal power as sexual terror, and it is a systemic mechanism of control spun of lies, illusions, false histories, and alternate realities, a wilderness of mirrors which distort and capture our images, and a nightmare from which humankind must awaken.
Mass hysteria has assaulted truth with the sophisticated propaganda of social media and become a horrific new religion with QAnon, racism and patriarchal religious authoritarianism and intolerance has become Christian Identity fascism, conformism and the use of social force as show trials, torture, and terror have become state tyranny and terror on a vast institutional scale.
Othering those whom we vilify through divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite membership and belonging remains a primary instrument of repression of dissent and the subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement of labor to centralize wealth, power, and privilege. Just as with the historical witch trials, during which my family was driven out of Bavaria in 1586 for the crime of being werewolves, berserkergangr or shapechanging warriors who were figures of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, and witches, Drachenbräute or ‘the brides of the dragon’ as the witch hunting torturer and mass murderer Martin Luther described them, independent women free from the authority of any man, at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions and the start of the savage Cologne War between Catholics and Protestants, a prelude to the Thirty Years War which killed a third of German peoples.
There is no terror like religious terror, and no tyranny like authority which speaks for the unquestionable divine and whose armies and police are authorized as enforcers of divine law.
This is not an issue confined to the remote past as a vestigial legacy of patriarchal sexual terror, but the warning sign of an iceberg of hidden structural and systemic injustices and inequalities which surround us as a pervasive and endemic harm in our daily lives.
We can see the consequences of theocracy and state terror in America under Christian Identity White Nationalism as the ICE white supremacist terror force perpetrates a campaign of ethnic cleansing and women are dehumanized as chattel through the legal theft of rights of bodily autonomy, in Iran under the regime of the mullahs and any state ruled directly by priests, in Israel under a Jewish nationalist state, in Myanmar under the Buddhist Nationalist theocracy or India under a Hindu one, and in far too much of our history. The particulars may vary, like the languages in which one call out to the Infinite and is answered by the police, but the weaponization of faith in service to power as a system of oppression remains the same.
I witnessed what I hope was the last witch burning in America as a child in the 1960’s, growing up in a Reformed Church community an hour’s drive from San Francisco. There is no forgetting the smell of a burning human being; sweet and charcoal like barbecue pork ribs, which is why I do not eat meat, and am uneasy around others who are doing so; there is no difference between ourselves and other animals, not to me. We smell exactly the same, roasting humans and pig on the barbeque.
Religious terror and authoritarian tyranny are pervasive throughout the world; sectarian violence and faith weaponized as identity politics are responsible for the horrific massacres and ethnic cleansing of Islamic minorities in the twin Buddhist states of Sri Lanka and Burma and in India’s conquest of Kashmir, as well as the sectarian war in Yemen between Iran and the Arab-American Alliance, and combined horrifically with other forces in the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the genocidal Gaza War. Faith as submission to authority has always been a lever of subjugation by tyrants over their slaves, regardless of the form it takes.
There is always someone in a gold robe who claims to speak for God and anoints kings, armies, and police to enforce their dominion, authorizes elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and has fooled others into doing the hard and dirty work. This was called the Great Chain of Being in medieval Europe, and considered the natural order of things wherein some of us are better than others as chosen by God, and no one is created equal.
This is the world the American and French Revolutions were intended to overthrow, and our democracies designed to replace.
Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, which calls out the injustices of the McCarthy anticommunist era in the context of the Massachusetts Bay Colony witch hysteria of 1692–93, remains among the finest interrogations of state tyranny and terror ever written. I make an annual ritual of watching the beautiful 1996 film with the magnificent Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams.
Nor are witch hunts a thing of the past; here I think of the case of Nigeria.
As I wrote in my post of July 29 2020, Weaponized Religion, the Subversion of Democracy, Lunatic Anti-Science Propaganda, and the Legacy of American Imperialism; In the now enormous category of lies and disinformation campaigns against objective truth and scientific rationality, Trump’s recent endorsement of the lunatic claims of a Nigerian doctor now practicing medicine in Texas who is a member of a Pentecostal Church which promulgates religious and medical nonsense that has resulted in an epidemic of children murdered as witches by their parents and a violent pogrom against LGBT people in Nigeria stands near the pinnacle of our Clown of Terror’s crimes against humanity, one which would be hilarious if it were not real and so very dangerous.
As you may be aware, the years-long wave of children murdered by their parents as witches in Africa was perpetrated by American religious fanatics in a coordinated campaign of colonialist and imperialist destabilization. In Nigeria this has the full collaboration of the government, with the persecution and orchestrated violence against LGBT persons being a dual campaign of mass hysteria and state terror.
It parallels the seizure of Guatemala and El Salvador by Pat Robertson and other Gideonite fundamentalists through his front man Rios Montt and the subsequent Mayan Genocide. The masses of refugees at our border are a direct result of the latter, part of American sponsored political subversion and economic warfare responsible for the collapse of Venezuela, Columbia, Mexico, and Central America.
America has weaponized religion as an instrument of dominion, and it is this same network of Pentecostal and Charismatic organizations which have achieved the capture of the Republican Party and the subversion of democracy here at home. Their brutal campaign against the equality, freedom of bodily autonomy, and reproductive rights of women is the wedge issue the Republicans use to goad the poor into voting against their own interest, but it is only the home front of a global programme of patriarchal cultural, political, and economic warfare intended to seize and maintain an American hegemony of power and privilege.
God With Us; it is an old motto from the Crusades, and it has a complex and nefarious history. It has been used by the Inquisition against the Jews and Muslims, in the medieval witch hunts to transfer and consolidate patriarchal power as described by Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch and Witch-Hunting and Women. Gott Mitt Uns was the battle cry of the magnificent King Gustav Adolf of Sweden in his epochal victory over the Catholic forces of Imperial Austria at the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631 which liberated Protestant Germany during the horrific Thirty Years War, the monument of which reads ”Freedom of Religion for All Mankind” and is the origin of the doctrine of separation of church and state in America; Gott Mitt Uns was also appropriated by Hitler, who sought to recall the glorious legacy of his namesake.
There is no more dangerous person than one who believes God is on his side, for that belief can justify anything and conceal evil behind a mask of good.
As Agence France-Presse writes in scmp; “A Houston doctor who praised hydroxychloroquine as a miracle coronavirus cure in a viral video retweeted by President Donald Trump blames gynaecological problems on sex with evil spirits and believes the US government is run by “reptilians”.
Stella Immanuel’s viral speech has drawn attention to a little-known group calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” who appear to exist to promote the common antimalarial drug in the fight against Covid-19.”
“Immanuel was born in 1965, received her medical degree at the University of Calabar in Nigeria.”
“Nobody needs to get sick. This virus has a cure – it is called hydroxychloroquine,” Immanuel exclaimed Monday as she stood on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington at a so-called “White Coat Summit” of like-minded doctors.”
“Early on in the pandemic, scientists were eager to find out whether hydroxychloroquine’s antiviral properties would make it effective in real-world patients with SARS-CoV-2.
So far though, all the major clinical trials that have reported their findings on this question have found no benefit, and leading national health authorities have moved to restrict its use because of potential cardiac harm.”
“The clip was shared by Trump and described as a “must watch” by his son Donald Trump Jnr, but has since been deleted by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for promoting misinformation.
“Trump also complained about his plummeting approval ratings as compared to those of Dr Anthony Fauci, the top medical adviser on the White House coronavirus task force.”
“And the curious case of Immanuel and colleagues – first reported in depth by The Daily Beast – underscores just how far the drug’s advocates are willing to go.
The website for “America’s Frontline Doctors” was registered just 11 days ago, a web domain age checker revealed – and the site was taken down by Tuesday afternoon.
“Tea Party Patriots”, a right-wing political group backed by wealthy Republicans, said on its website it was responsible for organising the Washington summit.
Further research on Immanuel’s web page, now accessible only via an archived website viewer, as well as her YouTube account, reveal a long list of bizarre and unscientific beliefs.
These include that “tormenting spirits” routinely have “astral sex” with women, which in turn causes “gynaecological problems, marital distress, miscarriages” and more.
In a 2015 video, Immanuel, who leads a religious group called Fire Power Ministries, said: “There are people ruling this nation that are not even human,” describing them as “reptilian spirits” who are “half human, half ET.”
In the same video she rails against the use of “alien DNA” to treat sick people, which she said had resulted in human beings mixing with demons.
Other targets of her anger include gay marriage, which she said would result in adults marrying children.”
As written by Sady Dolye in her essay for In These Times, How Capitalism Turned Women Into Witches; “Sylvia Federici’s new book explains how violence against women was a necessary precondition for capitalism. Federici traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work.
The Italian socialist feminist Silvia Federici is mandatory reading to understand gender politics (today). The opening sentences of her 1975 pamphlet “Wages Against Housework”—“They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work”—will stick in your head and change your whole concept of family. Caliban and the Witch, her titanic 1998 work on witch trials as a tool of early capitalism, will take your head apart and put it back together.
Federici is not just relevant but getting more so every second. Throughout her work, she traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work; she excavates intimacy, uncovering all its toxic layers of lead paint and asbestos, until its exploitative foundations are clear. Her work is essential to decoding the present moment, as capitalism and patriarchy entwine to produce increasingly grotesque offspring: predatory adoption agencies coercing women into giving up their babies; the exorbitant cost of childcare causing single working mothers to go bankrupt; entire industries where the opportunity to abuse women with impunity is a perk for the powerful men up top. And, thank goodness, we seem to know it; half the young leftist women writing today are riffing on Federici’s work.
Federici’s latest, Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, updates and expands the core thesis of Caliban, in which she argued that “witch hunts” were a way to alienate women from the means of reproduction. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Federici argues, there was an intervening revolutionary push toward communalism. Communalist groups often embraced “free love” and sexual egalitarianism—unmarried men and women lived together, and some communes were all-women—and even the Catholic church only punished abortion with a few years’ penance.
For serfs, who tilled the land in exchange for a share of its crops, home was work, and vice versa; men and women grew the potatoes together. But in capitalism, waged laborers have to work outside the home all the time, which means someone else needs to be at home all the time, doing the domestic work. Gender roles, and the subjugation of women, became newly necessary.
Early feudal elites in rural Europe enclosed public land, rendering it private and controllable, and patriarchy enclosed women in “private” marriages, imposing on them the reproductive servitude of bearing men’s children and the emotional labor of caring for men’s every need. Pregnancy and childbirth, once a natural function, became a job that women did for their male husband-bosses—that is to say, childbirth became alienated labor. “Witches,” according to witch-hunting texts like the Malleus Maleficarum, were women who kept childbirth and pregnancy in female hands: midwives, abortionists, herbalists who provided contraception. They were killed to cement patriarchal power and create the subjugated, domestic labor class necessary for capitalism.
“The body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers,” Federici writes in Caliban, “the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance.”
The elegance of this argument, the neat way it knots together public and private, is thrilling. There are moments when Federici makes sense like no one else. In this passage, she explains how sexuality—once demonized “to protect the cohesiveness of the Church as a patriarchal, masculine clan”—became subjugated within capitalism: “Once exorcised, denied its subversive potential through the witch hunt, female sexuality could be recuperated in a matrimonial context and for procreative ends. …In capitalism, sex can exist but only as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male worker and as a means of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence.”
The pleasures of Witches occur in quick little bursts of illumination. Federici dips in and out of her famous argument, expanding it, updating it and finding new angles on it. Some essays work better than others. Her exploration of gossip and its criminalization is a stand-out; she traces a concise and damning history of how “a term commonly indicating a close female friend turned into one signifying idle, backbiting talk,” and how that act of women speaking to each other—often about men, and in a way those men might not like—became punishable by torture and public humiliation, as in the case of the “scold’s bridle.” This torture device, which was used until the early 1800s, was a mask with a bit (sometimes lined with spikes) that kept a woman from moving her tongue. Gossips, like witches, were criminalized for being women. Federici is always timely: Today’s “whisper networks,” in which women share the identities of abusers and harassers to keep each other safe, are gossip too. And, as accused rapist Stephen Elliott’s lawsuit against Moira Donegan and the Shitty Media Men list proves, plenty of men still want gossips hauled into court.
The point of reading Federici is not to agree with her at all times—it’s to let her knock the dust and cobwebs out of your mind, to open up new roads of thought and spark new curiosities. Opening this book at random will always bring you to a sentence that does that, as when Federici explains why witches are commonly old: “Older women [can] no longer provide children or sexual services and, therefore, appear to be a drain on the creation of wealth”; or ties witches to other historical insurrections: “the portrayal of women’s earthly challenges to the power structures as a demonic conspiracy is a phenomenon that has played out over and over in history down to our times” (Witches was published a few weeks before a Catholic exorcist held a special mass to protect accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh from … witches). Each sentence will also open doors into her other work.”
Excerpted from Caliban and the Witch; “The witch hunt rarely appears in the history of the proletariat. To this day, it remains one the most understudied phenomena in European history, or rather, world history, if we consider that the charge of devil worshipping was carried by missionaries and conquistadors to the “New World” as a tool for the subjugation of the local populations.
That the victims, in Europe, were mostly peasant women may account for the historians’ past indifference towards this genocide, an indifference that has bordered on complicity, since the elimination of the witches from the pages of history has contributed to trivializing their physical elimination at the stake, suggesting that it was a phenomenon of minor significance, if not a matter of folklore.
Even those who have studied the witch hunt (in the past almost exclusively men) were often worthy heirs of the sixteenth-century demonologists. While deploring the extermination of the witches, many have insisted on portraying them as wretched fools afflicted by hallucinations, so that their persecution could be explained as a process of “social therapy,” serving to reinforce neighborly cohesion, or could be described in medical terms as a “panic,” a “craze,” an “epidemic,” all characterizations that exculpate the witch hunters and depoliticize their crimes.
Feminists were quick to recognize that hundreds of thousands of women could not have been massacred and subjected to the cruelest tortures unless they posed a challenge to the power structure. They also realized that such a war against women, carried out over a period of at least two centuries, was a turning point in the history of women in Europe, the “original sin” in the process of social degradation that women suffered with the advent of capitalism, and a phenomenon, therefore, to which we must continually return if we are to understand the misogyny that still characterizes institutional practice and male-female relations.
Marxist historians, by contrast, even when studying the “transition to capitalism,” with very few exceptions, have consigned the witch hunt to oblivion, as if it were irrelevant to the history of the class struggle. Yet, the dimensions of the massacre should have raised some suspicions. as hundreds of thousands of women were burned, hanged, and tortured in less than two centuries.
It should also have seemed significant that the witch hunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, the beginning of the slave trade, the enactment of “bloody laws” against vagabonds and beggars and it climaxed in the interregnum between the end of feudalism and the capitalist “take off” when the peasantry in Europe reached the peak of its power but, in time, also consummated its historic defeat. So far, however, this aspect of primitive accumulation has truly remained a secret.
Witch-Burning Times and the State Initiative
What has not been recognized is that the witch hunt was one of the most important events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the modern proletariat. For the unleashing of a campaign of terror against women, unmatched by any other persecution, weakened the resistance of the European peasantry to the assault launched against it by the gentry and the state, at a time when the peasant community was already disintegrating under the combined impact of land privatization, increased taxation, and the extension of state control over every aspect of social life.
The witch hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline, thus redefining the main elements of social reproduction. Contrary to the view propagated by the Enlightenment, the witch hunt was not the last spark of a dying feudal world. Witch-hunting reached its peak between 1580 and 1630, in a period, that is, when feudal relations were already giving way to the economic and political institutions typical of mercantile capitalism. It was in this long “Iron Century” that, almost by a tacit agreement, in countries often at war against each other, the stakes multiplied, and the state started denouncing the existence of witches and taking the initiative of the persecution.
Before neighbor accused neighbor, or entire communities were seized by a “panic,” a steady indoctrination took place, with the authorities publicly expressing anxiety about the spreading of witches, and travelling from village to village in order to teach people how to recognize them, in some cases carrying with them lists with the names of suspected witches and threatening to punish those who hid them or came to their assistance.
But it was the jurists, the magistrates, and the demonologists, often embodied by the same person, who most contributed to the persecution. They were the ones who systematized the arguments, answered the critics, and perfected a legal machine that, by the end of the sixteenth century, gave a standardized, almost bureaucratic format to the trials, accounting for the similarities of the confessions across national boundaries. In their work, the men of the law could count on the cooperation of the most reputed intellectuals of the time, including philosophers and scientists who are still praised as the fathers of modern rationalism.
There can be no doubt, then, that the witch hunt was a major political initiative. The political nature of the witch hunt is further demonstrated by the fact that both Catholic and Protestant nations, at war against each other in every other respect, joined arms and shared arguments to persecute witches. Thus, it is no exaggeration to claim that the witch hunt was the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nation-states, the first example, after the schism brought about by the Reformation, of a European unification.
Devil Beliefs and Changes in the Mode of Production
A first insight into the meaning of the European witch hunt can be found in the thesis proposed by Michael Taussig in his classic work The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), where the author maintains that devil-beliefs arise in those historical periods when one mode of production is being supplanted by another. In such periods not only are the material conditions of life radically transformed, but so are the metaphysical underpinnings of the social order — for instance, the conception of how value is created, what generates life and growth, what is “natural” and what is antagonistic to the established customs and social relations.
Taussig developed his theory by studying the beliefs of Colombian agricultural laborers and Bolivian tin miners at a time when, in both countries, monetary relations were taking root that in peoples’ eyes seemed deadly and even diabolical, compared with the older and still-surviving forms of subsistence-oriented production. Thus, in the cases Taussig studied, it was the poor who suspected the better-off of devil worship. Still, his association between the devil and the commodity form reminds us that also in the background of the witch hunt there was the expansion of rural capitalism, which involved the abolition of customary rights, and the first inflationary wave in modern Europe.
These phenomena only led to the growth of poverty, hunger, and social dislocation, they also transferred power into the hands of a new class of “modernizers” who looked with fear and repulsion at the communal forms of life that had been typical of pre-capitalist Europe. It was by the initiative of this proto-capitalist class that the witch hunt took off, as a weapon by which resistance to social and economic restructuring could be defeated.
That the spread of rural capitalism, with all its consequences (land expropriation, the deepening of social distances, the breakdown of collective relations) was a decisive factor in the background of the witch hunt is also proven by the fact that the majority of those accused were poor peasant women — cottars, wage laborers — while those who accused them were wealthy and prestigious members of the community, often their employers or landlords, that is, individuals who were part of the local power structures and often had close ties with the central state.
In England, the witches were usually old women on public assistance or women who survived by going from house to house begging for bits of food or a pot of wine or milk; if they were married, their husbands were day laborers, but more often they were widows and lived alone. Their poverty stands out in the confessions. It was in times of need that the Devil appeared to them, to assure them that from now on they “should never want,” although the money he would give them on such occasions would soon turn to ashes, a detail perhaps related to the experience of superinflation common at the time.
As for the diabolical crimes of the witches, they appear to us as nothing more than the class struggle played out at the village level: the “evil eye,” the curse of the beggar to whom an aim has been refused, the default on the payment of rent, the demand for public assistance.
Witch-Hunting and Class Revolt
As we can see from these cases, the witch hunt grew in a social environment where the “better sorts” were living in constant fear of the “lower classes,” who could certainly be expected to harbor evil thoughts because in this period they were losing everything they had.
That this fear expressed itself as an attack on popular magic is not surprising. The battle against magic has always accompanied the development of capitalism, to this very day. Magic is premised on the belief that the world is animated, unpredictable, and that there is a force in all things so that every event is interpreted as the expression of an occult power that must be deciphered and bent to one’s will.
Magic was also an obstacle to the rationalization of the work process, and a threat to the establishment of the principle of individual responsibility. Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal of work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to power. The world had to be “disenchanted” in order to be dominated.
By the sixteenth century, the attack against magic was well under way and women were its most likely targets. Even when they were not expert sorcerers/magicians, they were the ones who were called to mark animals when they fell sick, heal their neighbors, help them find lost or stolen objects, give them amulets or love potions, help them forecast the future. Though the witch hunt targeted a broad variety of female practices, it was above all in this capacity — as sorcerers, healers, performers of incantations and divinations — that women were persecuted. For their claim to magical power undermined the power of the authorities and the state, giving confidence to the poor in their ability to manipulate the natural and social environment and possibly subvert the constituted order.
It is doubtful, on the other hand, that the magical arts that women had practiced for generations would have been magnified into a demonic conspiracy had they not occurred against a background of an intense social crisis and struggle. These were the “peasant wars” against land privatization, including the uprisings against the “enclosures” in England (in 1549, 1607, 1628, 1631), when hundreds of men, women and children, armed with pitchforks and spades, set about destroying the fences erected around the commons, proclaiming that “from now on we needn’t work any more.” During these revolts, it was often women who initiated and led the action.
The persecution of witches grew on this terrain. It was class war carried out by other means.
Witch-Hunting, Woman-Hunting, and the Accumulation of Labor
It seems plausible that the witch hunt was, at least in part, an attempt to criminalize birth control and place the female body, the uterus, at the service of population increase and the production and accumulation of labor-power. We can, in fact, imagine what effect it had on women to see their neighbors, friends, and relatives being burned at the stake, and realize that any contraceptive initiative on their side might be construed as the product of a demonic perversion.
From this point of view, there can be no doubt that the witch hunt destroyed the methods that women had used to control procreation, by indicting them as diabolical devices, and institutionalized the state’s control over the female body, the precondition for its subordination to the reproduction of labor-power. The witch hunt, then, was a war against women; it was a concerted attempt to degrade them, dehumanize them, and destroy their social power.
When this task was accomplished — when social discipline was restored, and the ruling class saw its hegemony consolidated — witch trials came to an end. The belief in witchcraft could even become an object of ridicule, decried as a superstition, and soon put out of memory. Just as the state had started the witch hunt, so too, one by one, various governments took the initiative in ending it.
Once the subversive potential of witchcraft was destroyed, the practice of magic could even be allowed to continue. After the witch hunt came to an end, many women continued to support themselves by foretelling the future, selling charms, and practicing other forms of magic. But now the authorities were no longer interested in prosecuting these practices, being inclined, instead, to view witchcraft as a product of ignorance or a disorder of the imagination.
Yet the specter of the witches continued to haunt the imagination of the ruling class. In 1871, the Parisian bourgeoisie instinctively returned to it to demonize the female Communards, accusing them of wanting to set Paris aflame. There can be little doubt, in fact, that the models for the lurid tales and images used by the bourgeois press to create the myth of the petroleuses were drawn from the repertoire of the witch hunt.”
And for reimagined faith as feminine centered seizure of power from the Patriarchy, and as a reconstructed Celtic fairy faith of pre Christian Europe, there are no finer sources than those written by Starhawk, who had the wisdom to honor both the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves:
The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess,
Starhawk was a real witch, with real powers at her command, which is to say that she was a human being capable of self creation through metaphorical truth and poetic vision.
All that is real and true is relative, nonexclusionary, and arbitrary, like magic; though of course all modern witchcraft is a poetic reimagination of paganism which has been near extinct for over a thousand years or never truly existed; any Goddess civilization as conjured by Maria GImbutas from her scraps of pottery vanished with the dawn of mass slave agriculture and the city states it created, and priest-kings who interpreted the will of ferocious and terrible warrior gods to keep the slaves at their work.
This does not mean that a future such civilization would not be better and more kind than our own; it truly cannot be any worse. And as all human being, meaning, and value are human creations and dreams of things which should be real and true even if they never were, our possibilities of becoming human require dreamers such as Starhawk.
Her writing is beautiful, and her reconstruction of the fairy faith alluded to by Shakespeare in Midsummer Night’s Dream is as useful as any other faith, all of which are the dreams of human beings attempting to reach beyond themselves.
She lived on the opposite side of a hill from one of my debate students, who was terrified of her because of the guardian who lived in her stream, with its enormous toothy jaws and green hide. This was only one of myriads of strange and unusual things which share our universe; as Lydia Deetz says in Beetlejuice; “I myself am strange and unusual.”
I have no doubts that magic lives and is real and true; for myself it is also utterly meaningless not because it is false, but because the universe is irrational and any systems of thought we create in attempts to control, order, and rationalize the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves are nothing more than that.
This also means that your truths and mine can both be real and true; for further inquiry I refer you to Akutagawa’s Rashomon Gate which demonstrates that all truths are relative, Korzybski’s General Semantics which explicates the operations and consequences of and/both non-Aristotelian logic, and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus-Logicus Philosophicus which proves that all rules are arbitrary.
The poetry of William Blake is as true as that of William Tyndale in the King James Bible, the writings of visionary madmen like Ryunosuke Akutagawa or Leonora Carrington are no more or less real than those of Marx and Freud.
Truth and reality are not exclusive, but a space of free creative play. We can make tyrannies with our freedom, in a universe without any imposed design, purpose, being, value, or meaning; but we can also create Beauty and Joy.
Among the last things Genet and I said to each other in Beirut 1982 were these: I codified our conversations over the last weeks with this; “How am I to live, now that I know that the world is a lie, that the history I have been taught and from which we are made is fiction; how am I to live?”
To which he replied, paraphrasing his famous quoter from Miracle of the Rose; “Live with grandeur.”
Live with grandeur, friends.
The Essential Akutagawa: Rashomon, Hell Screen, Cogwheels, a Fool’s Life and Other Short Fiction, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Seiji M. Lippit (Editor), Jorge Luis Borges (Foreword)
Torch of Liberty 