April 8 2025 National Library Week Part Two, Becoming Human Through Literature: Jay’s Revised Modern Canon of Literature

We celebrate National Library Week this year in a context of open hostility to education, a word from the Greek educatus which means to draw forth potential human being, meaning, and value rather than to stuff in facts, and which models and teaches not obedience but questioning, not falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the factory model of education as industrial production, but its opposite; citizenship in a democracy as the art of asking questions and testing answers.

Let us build citizens and not subjects.

There are historical reasons why our democracy was born in the Enlightenment and the scientific model of reason wherein we test claims of truth and take no authority at its word, and why tyranny is often a product of theocratic subjugation to authority.

If we are to be a free society of equals, wherein citizens are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights, universal education in which nothing is Forbidden as an area of experiment, inquiry, and debate is crucial; democracy requires freedom of information and communication including those of free speech and a free press.

In a time of darkness, book bans and burning, politization of school boards as subversion of democracy and repression of dissent, the forbidding of inquiry in areas which may threaten elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, we must write, speak, teach, and organize democracy as Resistance to fascist tyranny and as revolutionary struggle.

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

And our job as teachers and parents is to help, model, and guide our children in their ongoing self creation and choices about how to be human together and become citizens, not slaves.

We do not need to post and recite the Ten Commandments, pledge allegiance to gods or masters, or trade value with money which proclaims In God We Trust; because none of this is about our relationship with the Infinite, and everything to do with a state which wants to claim our obedience as its interpreter. Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.

We do need to learn as a nation and as a species to cherish our uniqueness and that of others, in solidarity and not division. And if we are to be a democracy, we need an education system founded on the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.

As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in literature and history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.

Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?

To this end I offer here updated versions of the reading lists I used throughout my years of teaching AP and other English classes in high school, as supplementary choice reading lists for American Literature and World Literature as our education system has structured classes, to stand alongside and apart from the limits of government and school board approval and control, both of curriculum and of our human possibilities.

This was the key to empowerment and self actualization, happiness, and stellar academic achievement among my students and to success later in life; a free space of play in which to discover and create themselves. If we offer only this to our students, children, and future generations of citizens, a free space of play in the creation of themselves bearing many possible authorized identities without hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, we have done our job as caretakers of the future. Each of us has one problem in common which we must solve in order to grow up and become ourselves; we must reinvent how to become human.

Find your bliss, as Joseph Campbell exhorts us to do; but first something must catch spark and engage our interest, provoke us to question and explore.

This is the role of literature, and why the canon is central to the project of civilization.

The canon represents nothing less than an authorized set of possible identities; this is why it must adapt and change with time, and why it is absolutely crucial that the canon be diverse and inclusive enough to reflect those who read it. If a student or reader cannot see themselves in the models of being human which are offered to them as possibilities of future selves, that work is worthless to them as a tool of identity construction and a forge of human being, meaning, and value.

I organized Modern American Literature as core lists by fiction, poetry, drama, science and other fictions, and also literature of the American South, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American, and Jewish American, and Hawaiian categories, as well as a nonfiction list I entitled A Useful Past: Contexts and Sources for Constructing an American Identity, part of which is the American Presidents Histories and Biographies list included here as I later abandoned attempts at sciences, art, and music.

The sciences component of the Contexts list is too large and changes too rapidly to do justice to so I long ago stopped updating it, though I taught annual Socratic seminars through the Gifted and Talented Program on Batesonian Holism, Chaos Theory, Godel’s Theorem, Fuller’s Synergetics, and Quantum Theory. Art and music have similar problems of scope, with issues of tribalization.

As Gertrude Stein invented the modern world after our civilization destroyed itself in World War One, my list begins with her. Where possible, superlative critical works accompany the primary sources from authors of world-historical significance.

World Literature is represented by 28 lists, including special universal studies lists for Feminism and Women’s Literature, Fairytales, Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology, Existentialism, and lists of National Literatures including Australia, New Zealand, & Canada, Austria, Germany, & Switzerland, Africa, Britain & Ireland, the Caribbean, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe, France, Greece, India, Iran, Islamic Peoples, Italy, Japan, Jewish People, Latin America, Netherlands, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, Scandinavia, and Spain.

Here I wish to signpost that nothing on my reading lists is chosen by any criterion other than quality as I so judge; in contrast to official reading lists chosen for reading level and objectives by grade and also appropriate age level content, because values are always negotiated truths and a ground of struggle, and in America the Texas Board of Education controls through purchasing power and ideological influence the publication of all textbooks nationally and is highly political and moreover falsified by the network of fundamentalist churches it represents, including the Pentecostal Church which is a propaganda organization of theocratic terror. Ever wonder why our history text books make no mention of slavery as a cause of the Civil War?

How do we use reading lists as teachers, parents, readers exploring unknowns, ourselves, and the boundaries of our maps of becoming and of human being, meaning, and value?

One ongoing project which I ran for many years using these lists in high school may also be useful for private reading or home study, groups, partners, and getting to know one’s neighbors; I asked students to choose the list of a group with which they identify and then choose partners from a different group, then select two books, one from each other’s list, to read together and give a presentation as partners about each book to the class.

This project, which I called Becoming Human Through Literature, has three goals; to develop a broad personal culture, to discover maps of how to become human, and to operate transcontextually as a global family member.

As an activity for partners in any stage of a relationship, reading books together and discussing them as you progress makes a wonderful way to explore each others values and ideas. You may surprise and delight one another; you may also surprise and reimagine yourself.

For all of these lists I began with immortal classics and added whatever I thought merited inclusion on the basis of quality alone; this is how I found myself teaching a broad and inclusive curriculum. Yes, this means I’ve read all of the books listed, many in their original languages, and with some the major critical works and essays about them; and often taught, discussed, scored student critical essays and written about them for many years. It also means that if your favorite book is not on a list, I may simply not have read it yet.

I am a product of a Great Books of the Western World education, a set of works published by Encyclopædia Britannica based on the great Mortimer J. Adler’s course at the University of Chicago, which I read entirely through during my high school years, a second time while I was at university as an undergraduate, and a third during my graduate studies in literature, Jungian psychology, history, and philosophy. It is a practice which I recommend to everyone as both a starting point and a lifelong journey. This and Harold Bloom’s list in The Western Canon formed my starting point; as a teenager I began keeping lists of books I liked with notes, and the current version, in constant revision during the last forty years, I call Jay’s Revised Modern Canon.

On these lists are the finest books I’ve discovered over a lifetime of reading, and I hope they will bring joy to your life as they have mine.

Why is a diverse and limitless field of reading and study necessary to creating ourselves and our identities as we grow up? How does our education shape our political and social decisions about who we are and how to be human together?

As I wrote in preface to my Becoming Human project, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature for 2022; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?

I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.

We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.

The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.

As I wrote in my post in celebration of Juneteenth, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.

There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.

Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.

Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?

Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.

Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?

Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, of submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?

America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, beauty, and constructions of identity, and from the force and control of the state, especially in this context as falsification, rewritten histories, lies, and illusions which serve the power of those who would enslave us.

What is this freedom? What does it mean for us as we grow up and create ourselves?

Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.

We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves as interdependent partners who exalt one another as guarantors of each others rights and humanity.

Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.

Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?”

As I wrote in my post of September 21 2020 History, Memory, Identity: Whose Story Is This?; Whose story is this? This question must be the beginning of a new pedagogy of education in history, and remain central to the project of its study. True education asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries and testing our ideas in experiment and debate; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.

Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.

Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America; this and all else we must always question. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?

As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.

Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790, Ritchie Robertson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49609421-the-enlightenment?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Aw0dev68C1&rank=13

The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950, (with Carmen Callil), Colm Tóibín

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1052650.The_Modern_Library_?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ETkuZfsJPf&rank=1

Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium

https://dollhouseparkconservatory.home.blog/

Modern American Literature

Modern American Fiction

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Revision

Modern American Poetry

American Poetry 2022 edition

Modern American Drama

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon American Drama

American Science and other fictions

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition American Science and other Fictions

Literature of the American South

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition Literature of the American South

Native American Literature

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition Native American History and Literature

African American Literature

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition African American History & Literature

Hispanic American Literature

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition Hispanic-American History & Literature

Jewish American Literature

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition Jewish American History & Literature

Asian American Literature

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition Asian American History & Literature

Modern American Literature: Hawai’I

Hawai’i: a reading list

A Useful Past: Contexts and Sources for Constructing an American Identity

Yes, I once attempted to synthesize all knowledge and historical memory of our civilization specific to America under this banner as a resource for my high school students, including arts and sciences. I didn’t get as far as did Diderot with his Encyclopédie, all 23 volumes of it. I may have been influenced in this mad Quixotic quest by reading through our family Encyclopædia Britannica several times in my teens and twenties; ah, the folly of youth. I wasn’t trying to learn everything; I was trying to remember everything, the universe whole and entire, as the emergence of ideal forms and potentialities hidden within us.

The great mystery of Being in Time is not that universals connect us, but that our memory and history allow us to conserve our identity while in constant processes of adaptation and change.

We need both conserving forces which buffer us from the shock of the new and as a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation across vast epochs of time without damage to our morphology of human being, meaning, and value, but also we need revolutionary or innovational forces which allow us to meet new threats and capitalize on chaos.

This is the only list of context readings I have been able to complete; my studies of art and music being arbitrary or determined by the circumstances in which I encountered them, and those of sciences changing too fast since the 1980’s for a definitive sum of knowledge.

Regarding art, I grew up with Chinese inkbrush calligraphy and Japanese Zen sumi-e, from my teenage years an enthusiast of French Surrealist literature and film as my parents let me run amok on my own all over Berkeley and San Francisco and in my twenties once spent a glorious summer attempting to make a film I had written. During university I painted that I might learn to see better; and studied Monet’s Impressionist techniques, Egon Schiele’s watercolors, and the Chinese landscapes of C.C. Wang from his magnificent studio book of forms published as Mind Landscapes: The Paintings of C. C. Wang, Jerome Silbergeld, Chi-Ch’ien Wang.

As to music, I grew up with the shakuhachi or Zen bamboo flute and enjoyed making strange instruments from things in nature like a Sea Horn from cured and formed seaweed.

I’ve spent my whole life enchanted by my partner Dolly’s beautiful piano music; she can play anything she hears, and when twelve returned from seeing Lawrence of Arabia at the theatre and played the entire score from memory. She has been a professional musician for over fifty years from the age of seventeen, playing piano and keyboards and singing; we reconnected and began building Dollhouse Park twenty three years ago now, and all the while I have been part of her musical world. So music has always been part of who I am, through my partner.

In terms of influence, I did not attend a full performance of Wagner’s Ring operas until I was at university and did not understand it til much later, but I would never have come to my analysis of the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force without it.

One day I may curate lists for film, music, and art; for now its just books about our Presidents.

America’s Presidents: History and Biography

February 15 2021 Among the Best and the Worst of Us: Our Presidents as Symbols and Figures of the American Soul

But with literature I am on my own ground of struggle, publish in over a dozen languages and can speak with authority on both Modern American and World literatures.

World Literature

Feminism and Women’s Literature

March 2 2021 Women’s History Month: Feminism as Revolutionary Struggle and a Reimagination of Humankind in Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Literary Theory, and Alternate Histories

Fairytales

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature Fairytales

Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology

Existentialism

Existentialism Reading List

Australia, New Zealand, & Canada

Australia, New Zealand, & Canada

Austria, Germany, & Switzerland

Austria, Germany, & Switzerland

Africa

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2020 edition

Britain & Ireland

Britain & Ireland

Caribbean

the Caribbean

China

China

Cuba

Cuba: A Reading List

Eastern Europe

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Eastern Europe

France

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: France

Greece

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Greece

India

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: India

Iran

Iran, a reading list

Islamic Peoples

Islamic Peoples

Italy

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Italy

Japan

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Japan

Jewish Peoples

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Jewish People

Latin America

Latin America

Netherlands

the Netherlands

Palestine

June 6 2021 Who Are the Palestinians?

Portugal

Portugal

Russia

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Russia

Scandinavia

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 edition World Literature: Scandinavia: Norway, Sweden. Denmark, & Iceland

Spain

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Spain

Where I began:

Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler (Editor)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Harold Bloom

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20941.The_Western_Canon?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=0zyT0e4Syb&rank=1

Harold Bloom’s magisterial list which follows below has for me some glaring limitations, both as a best books list and as representations of authorized identities and imaginal spaces to grow into and beyond.

First it excludes everything not central to the Western European Canon as historically construed.

Second it dismisses nearly all works by women and nonwhite authors as inferior in quality and a waste of time to study, something which by the mid 20th century should have been transparently biased and long abandoned.

Third it misunderstands modern American literature from World War One onward, ignores masterpieces of literature and includes irrelevant and ridiculous choices no one reads or needs to know.

Harold Bloom wrote the finest critical work on Shakespeare ever, and is reasonably trustworthy on works including the classics, British Romantics, and American Transcendentalists; but here his world ends, as do his maps of becoming human.

This is where we must begin, all of us, in the reimagination and transformation of the Canon and of our limitless possibilities of Becoming Human.

Harold Bloom’s List in The Western Canon, from the appendices:

“The Theocratic Age

Here, as in the following lists, I suggest translations wherever I have derived

particular pleasure and insight from those now readily available. There are

many valuable works of ancient Greek and Latin literature that are not

here, but the common reader is unlikely to have time to read them. As

history lengthens, the older canon necessarily narrows. Since the literary

canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical,

and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. I would

think that, of all the books in this first list, once the reader is conversant

with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial

work is the Koran. Whether for its aesthetic and spiritual power or the

influence it will have upon all of our futures, ignorance of the Koran is

foolish and increasingly dangerous.

I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary

texts, because of their influence on the Western Canon. The immense wealth

of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary

tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available

to us.

THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

Gilgamesh, translated by David

Ferry

The Egyptian Book of the Dead

The Holy Bible, Authorized King

James Version

The Apocrypha

Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke

Aboth), translated by R.

Travers Herford

ANCIENT INDIA (SANSKRIT)

The Mahabharata

There is an abridged

translation by William Buck,

and a dramatic version by

Jean·Claude Carriere,

translated by Peter Brook

The Bhagavad-Gita

The crucial religious section

of Mahabharata, Book 6,

translated by Barbara Stoler

Miller

The Ramayana

There is an abridged prose

version by William Buck, and

a retelling by R. K. Narayan

THE ANCIENT GREEKS

Homer

The Iliad, translated by

Richmond Lattimore

The Odyssey, translated by

Robert Fitzgerald

Hesiod

The Works and Days;

Theogony, translated by

Richmond Lattimore

Archilochos , Sappho, Aikman

translated by Guy Davenport

Pindar

The Odes, translated by

Richmond Lattimore

Aeschylus

The Oresteia, translated by

Robert Fagles

Seven against Thebes, translated

by Anthony Hecht and Helen

H. Bacon

Prometheus Bound

The Persians

The Suppliant Women

Sophocles

Oedipus the King, translated by

Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay

Oedipus at Co/onus, translated

by Robert Fitzgerald

Antigone, translated by Robert

Fagles

Electra

Ajax

Women of Trachis

Philoctetes

Euripides

(translated by William

Arrowsmith)

Cyclops

Heracles

Alcestis

Hecuba

The Bacchae

Orestes

Andromache

Medea, translated by Rex

Warner

Ion, translated by H. D. (Hilda

Doolittle)

Hippolytus, translated by Robert

Bagg

Helen, translated by Richmond

Lattimore

Iphigeneia at Aulis, translated by

W. S. Merwin and George

Dimock

Aristophanes

The Birds, translated by William

Arrowsmith

The Clouds, translated by

William Arrowsmith

The Frogs

Lysistrata

The Knights

The Wasps

The Assemblywomen (also called

The Parliament of Women)

Herodotus

The Histories

Thucydides

The Peloponnesian War

The Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus,

Empedodes)

Plato

Dialogues

Aristotle

Poetics

Ethics

HELLENISTIC GREEKS

Menander

The Girl from Samos, translated

by Eric G. Turner

“Longinus”

On the Sublime

Callimachus

Hymns and Epigrams

Theocritus

Idylls, translated by Daryl Hine

Plutarch

Lives, translated by John Dryden

Moralia

“Aesop”

Fables

Lucian

Satires

THE ROMANS

Plautus

Pseudo/us

The Braggart Soldier

The Rope

Amphitryon

Terence

The Girl from Andros

The Eunuch

The Mother-in-Law

Lucretius

The Way Things Are, translated

by Rolfe Humphries

Cicero

On the Gods

Horace

Odes, translated by James

Michie

Epistles

Satires

Persius

Satires, translated by W. S.

Merwin

Catullus

Attis, translated by Horace

Gregory

Other poems translated by

Richard Crashaw, Abraham

Cowley, Walter Savage Landor,

and a host of English poets

Virgil

The Aeneid, translated by

Robert Fitzgerald

Eclogues and Georgics,

translated by john Dryden

Lucan

Pharsalia

Ovid

Metamorphoses, translated by

George Sandys

The Art of Love

Epistulae heroidum or Heroides,

translated by Daryl Hine

Juvenal

Satires

Martial

Epigrams, translated by James

Michie

Seneca

Tragedies, particularly Medea;

and Hercules furens, as

translated by Thomas

Heywood

Petroni us

Satyricon, translated by William

Arrowsmith

Apuleius

The Golden Ass, translated by

Robert Graves

THE MIDDLE AGES: LATIN, ARABIC, AND THE VERNACULAR BEFORE DANTE

Saint Augustine

The City of God

The Confessions

The Koran

Al-Qur’ an: A Contemporary

Translation by Ahmad Ali

The Book of the Thousand Nights

and One Night

The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee

Hollander

Snorri Sturluson

The Prose Edda

The Nibelungen Lied

Wolfram von Eschenbach

Parzival

Chretien de Troyes

Yvain: The Knight of the Lion,

translated by Burton Raffel

Beowult translated by Charles W.

Kennedy

The Poem of the Cid, translated ·by

W. S. Merwin

Christine de Pisan

The Book of the City of Ladies,

translated by Earl Richards

Diego de San Pedro

Prison of Love

The Aristocratic Age

It is a span of five hundred years from Dante’s Divine Comedy through

Goethe’s Faust, Part Two, an era that gives us a huge body of reading in

five major literatures: Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. In this

and in the remaining lists, I sometimes do not mention individual works by

a canonical master, and in other instances I attempt to call attention to

authors and books that I consider canonical but rather neglected. From this

list onward, many good writers who are not quite central are omitted. We

begin also to encounter the phenomenon of “period pieces,” a sorrow that

expands in the Democratic Age and threatens to choke us in our own

century. Writers much esteemed in their own time and country sometimes

survive in other times and nations, yet often shrink into once-fashionable

fetishes. I behold at least several scores of these in our contemporary literary

scene, but it is sufficient to name them by omission, and I will address this

matter more fully in the introductory note to my final list.

ITALY

Dante

The Divine Comedy, translated

by Laurence Binyon in terza

rima, and by John D. Sinclair

1n prose

The New Life, translated by

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Petrarch

Lyric Poems, translated by

Robert M. Durling

Selections, translated by Mark

Mus a

Giovanni Boccaccio

The Decameron

Matteo Maria Boiardo

Orlando innamorato

Ludovico Ariosto

Orlando furioso

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Sonnets and Madrigals,

translated by Wordsworth,

Longfellow, Emerson,

Santayana, and others

Niccolo Machiavelli

The Prince

The Mandrake, a Comedy

Leonardo da Vinci

Notebooks

Baldassare Castiglione

The Book of the Courtier

Gaspara Stampa

Sonnets and Madrigals

Giorgio Vasari

Lives of the Painters

Benvenuto Cellini

Autobiography

Torquato Tasso

Jerusalem Delivered

Giordano Bruno

The Expulsion of the

Triumphant Beast

Tommaso Campanella

Poems

The City of the Sun

Giambattista Vico

Principles of a New Science

Carlo Goldoni

The Servant of Two Masters

Vittorio Alfieri

Saul

PORTUGAL

Luis de Camoens

The Lusiads translated by

Leonard Bacon

Antonio Ferreira

Poetry, in The Muse Reborn,

translated by T. F. Earle

SPAIN

Jorge Manrique

CoplasJ translated by Henry

Wadsworth Longfellow

Fernando de Rojas

La CelestinaJ translated by

James Mabbe, adapted by Eric

Bentley

Lazarillo de TormesJ translated by

W. S. Merwin

Francisco de Quevedo

Visions, translated by Roger

L’Estrange

Satirical Letter of Censure, in

J. M. Cohen’s Penguin Book

of Spanish Verse

Fray Luis de Leon

Poems, translated by Willis

Barns tone

St. John of the Cross

Poems, translated by John

Frederick Nims

Luis de Gongora

Sonnets

Soledades

Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote, translated by

Samuel Putnam

Exemplary Stories

Lope de Vega

La Dorotea, translated by Alan

S. Trueblood and Edwin

Honig

Fuente ovejuna, translated by

Roy Campbell

Lost in a Mirror, translated by

Adrian Mitchell

The Knight of Olmedo,

translated by Willard F. King

Tirso de Molina

The Trickster of Seville,

translated by Roy Campbell

Pedro Calderon de Ia Barca

Life Is a Dream, translated by

Roy Campbell

The Mayor of Zalamea

The Mighty Magician

The Doctor of His Own Honor

Sor Juana Ines de Ia Cruz

Poems

ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND

Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales

Troilus and Criseyde

Sir Thomas Malory

Le Marte D’Arthur

William Dunbar

Poems

John Skelton

Poems

Sir Thomas More

Utopia

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Poems

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Poems

Sir Philip Sidney

The Countess of Pembroke’s

Arcadia

Astrophel and Stella

An Apology for Poetry

Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke

Poems

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

The Minor Poems

Sir Walter Ralegh

Poems

Christopher Marlowe

Poems and Plays

Michael Drayton

Poems

Samuel Daniel

Poems

A Defence of Ryme

Thomas Nashe

The Unfortunate Traveller

Thomas Kyd

The Spanish Tragedy

William Shakespeare

Plays and Poems

Thomas Campion

Songs

John Donne

Poems

Sermons

Ben Jonson

Poems, Plays, and Masques

Francis Bacon

Essays

Robert Burton

The Anatomy of Melancholy

Sir Thomas Browne

Religio Medici

Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall

The Garden of Cyrus

Thomas Hobbes

Leviathan

Robert Herrick

Poems

Thomas Carew

Poems

Richard Lovelace

Poems

Andrew Marvell

Poems

George Herbert

The Temple

Thomas Traheme

Centuries, Poems, and

Thanksgivings

Henry Vaughan

Poetry

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Poems

Richard Crashaw

Poems

Francis Beaumont and

John Fletcher

Plays

George Chapman

Comedies, Tragedies, Poems

John Ford

‘Tis Pity She’s a W hare

John Marston

The Malcontent

John Webster

The White Devil

The Duchess of Malfi

Thomas Middleton and

William Rowley

The Changeling

Cyril Toumeur

The Revenger’s Tragedy

Philip Massinger

A New Way to Pay Old Debts

John Bunyan

The Pilgrim’s Progress

haak Walton

The Compleat Angler

john Milton

Paradise Lost

Paradise Regained

Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor

Poems

Samson Agonistes

Areopagitica

john Aubrey

Brief Lives

Jeremy Taylor

Holy Dying

Samuel Butler

Hudibras

john Dryden

Poetry and Plays

Critical Essays

Thomas Otway

Venice Preserv· d

William Congreve

The Way of the World

Love for Love

jonathan Swift

A Tale of a Tub

Gulliver’s Travels

Shorter Prose W arks

Poems

Sir George Etherege

The Man of Mode

Alexander Pope

Poems

john Gay

The Beggar’s Opera

James Boswell

Life of Johnson

Journals

Samuel Johnson

Works

Edward Gibbon

The History of the Decline and

Fall of the Roman Empire

Edmund Burke

A Philosophical Enquiry into

. . . the Sublime and Beautiful

Reflections on the Revolution

in France

Maurice Morgann

An Essay on the Dramatic

Character of Sir John Falstaff

William Collins

Poems

Thomas Gray

Poems

George Farquhar

The Beaux’ Stratagem

The Recruiting Officer

William Wycherley

The Country Wife

The Plain Dealer

Christopher Smart

Jubilate Agno

A Song to David

Oliver Goldsmith

The Vicar of Wakefield

She Stoops to Conquer

The Traveller

The Deserted Village

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The School for Scandal

The Rivals

William Cowper

Poetical W arks

George Crabbe

Poetical W arks

Daniel Defoe

Moll Flanders

Robinson Crusoe

A Journal of the Plague Year

Samuel Richardson

Clarissa

Pamela

Sir Charles Grandison

Henry Fielding

Joseph Andrews

The History of Tom Jones, a

Foundling

Tobias Smollett

The Expedition of Humphry

Clinker

The Adventures of Roderick

Random

Laurence Sterne

The Life and Opinions of

Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

A Sentimental Journey through

France and Italy

Fanny Burney

Evelina

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

The Spectator

FRANCE

Jean Froissart

Chronicles

The Song of Roland

Francois Villon

Poems, translated by Galway

Kinnell

Michel de Montaigne

Essays� translated by Donald

Frame

Fran�ois Rabelais

Gargantua and Pantagruel,

translated by Donald Frame

Marguerite de Navarre

The Heptameron

Joachim Du Bellay

The Regrets, translated by

C. H. Sisson

Maurice Sceve

De lie

Pierre de Ronsard

Odes, Elegies, Sonnets

Philippe de Commynes

Memoirs

Agrippa d’ Aubigne

Les Tragiques

Robert Gamier

Mark Antony, translated by

Mary (Sidney) Herbert,

Countess of Pembroke

The J ewesses

Pierre Comeille

The Cid

Polyeucte

Nicomede

Horace

Cinna

Rodogune

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Maxims

Jean de La Fontaine

Fables

Moliere

(translated by Richard Wilbur)

The Misanthrope

Tartuffe

The School for Wives

The Learned Ladies

(translated by Donald Frame)

Don Juan

School for Husbands

Ridiculous Precieuses

The Would-Be Gentleman

The Miser

The Imaginary Invalid

Blaise Pascal

Pensees

Jacques-Benigne Bossuet

Funerary Orations

Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

The Art of Poetry

Lutrin

Jean Racine

(translated by Richard Wilbur)

Phaedra

Andromache

(translated by C. H. Sisson)

Britannicus

Athaliah

Pierre Cadet de Marivaux

Seven Comedies

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Confessions

Emile

La Nouvelle Heloise

Voltaire

Zadig

Candide

Letters on England

The Lisbon Earthquake

Abbe Prevost

Manon Lescaut� translated by

Donald Frame

Madame de La Fayette

The Princess of Cleves

Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de

Chamfort

Products of the Perfected

Civilization, translated by

W. S. Merwin

Denis Diderot

Rameau’s Nephew

Choderlos de Lados

Dangerous Liaisons

GERMANY

Erasmus, a Dutchman living in

Switzerland and Germany,

while writing in Latin, is

placed here arbitrarily, but

also as an influence on the

Lutheran Reformation.

Erasmus

In Praise of Folly

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Faust� Parts One and Two,

translated by Stuart Atkins

Dichtung und Wahrheit

Egmont, translated by Willard

Trask

Elective Affinities

The Sorrows of Young Werther,

translated by Louise Bogan,

Elizabeth Mayer, and W. H.

Auden

Poems, translated by Michael

Hamburger, Christopher

Middleton, and others

Wilhelm Meister’s

Apprenticeship

Wilhelm Meister’s Years of

Wandering

Italian Journey

Verse Plays and Hermann and

Dorothea, translated by

Michael Hamburger and

others

Roman Elegies, Venetian

Epigrams, West-Eastern

Divan, translated by Michael

Hamburger

Friedrich Schiller

The Robbers

Mary Stuart

Wallenstein

Don Carlos

On the Naive and Sentimental

in Literature

Gotthold Lessing

Laocoon

Nathan the Wise

Friedrich Holderlin

Hymns and Fragments,

translated by Richard Sieburth

Selected Poems, translated by

Michael Hamburger

Heinrich von Kleist

Five Plays, translated by Martin

Greenberg

Stories

The Democratic Age

I have located Vico’s Democratic Age in the post-Goethean nineteenth century, when the literature of Italy and Spain ebbs, yielding eminence to

England with its renaissance of the Renaissance in Romanticism, and to a

lesser degree to France and Germany. This is also the era where the strength

of both Russian and American literature begins. I have resisted the backward

reach of the current canonical crusades, which attempt to elevate a number

of sadly inadequate women writers of the nineteenth century, as well as

some rudimentary narratives and verses of African-Americans. Expanding

the Canon, as I have said more than once in this book, tends to drive opt

the better writers, sometimes even the best, because pragmatically none of

us (whoever we are) ever had time to read absolutely everything, no matter

how great our lust for reading. And for most of us, the harried young in

particular, inadequate authors will consume the energies that would be

better invested in stronger writers. Nearly everything that has been revived

or discovered by Feminist and African-American literary scholars falls all

too precisely into the category of “period pieces,” as imaginatively dated

now as they were already enfeebled when they first came into existence.

ITALY

Ugo Foscolo

On Sepulchres, translated by

Thomas G. Bergin

Last Letters of ]acopo Ortis

Odes and The Graces

Alessandro Manzoni

The Betrothed

On the Historical Novel

Giacomo Leopardi

Essays and Dialogues, translated

by Giovanni Cecchetti

Poems

The Moral Essays, translated by

Howard Norse

Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli

Roman Sonnets, translated by

Harold Norse

Giosue Carducci

Hymn to Satan

Barbarian Odes

Rhymes and Rhythms

Giovanni Verga

Little Novels of Sicily, translated

by D. H. Lawrence

Mastro-Don Gesualdo,

translated by D. H. Lawrence

The House by the Medlar Tree,

translated by Raymond

Rosenthal

The She-Wolf and Other Stories,

translated by Giovanni

Cecchetti

SPAIN and PORTUGAL

Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

Poems

Benito Perez Gald6s

Fortunata and Jacinta

Leopoldo Alas (Clarin)

La Regenta

Jose Maria de E�a de Queir6s

The Maias

FRANCE

Benjamin Constant

Adolphe

The Red Notebook

Francois-Auguste-Rene de

Chateaubriand

Atala and Rene, translated by

Irving Putter

The Genius of Christianity

Alphonse de Lamartine

Meditations

Alfred de Vigny

Chatterton

Poems

Victor Hugo

The Distance, The Shadows:

Selected Poems, translated by

Harry Guest

Les Miserables

Notre-Dame of Paris

William Shakespeare

The Toilers of the Sea

The End of Satan

God

Alfred de Musset

Poems

Lorenzaccio

Gerard de N erval

The Chimeras, translated by

Peter Jay

Sylvie

Aurelia

Theophile Gautier

Mademoiselle de Maupin

Enamels and Cameos

Honore de Balzac

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Louis Lambert

The Wild Ass’s Skin

Old Goriot

Cousin Bette

A Harlot High and Low

Eugenie Grandet

Ursule Mirouet

Stendhal

On Love

The Red and the Black

The Charterhouse of Parma

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary, translated by

Francis Steegmuller

Sentimental Education

Salammbo

A Simple Soul

George Sand

The Haunted Pool

Charles Baudelaire

Flowers of Evil, translated by

Richard Howard

Paris Spleen

Stephane Mallarme

Selected Poetry and Prose

Paul Verlaine

Selected Poems

Arthur Rimbaud

Complete Works, translated by

Paul Schmidt

Tristan Corbiere

Les Amours jaunes

Jules Laforgue

Selected Writings, translated by

William Jay Smith

Guy de Maupassant

Selected Short Stories

Emile Zola

Germinal

L ‘Assommoir

Nana

SCANDINAVIA

Henrik Ibsen

Brand, translated by Geoffrey

Hill

Peer Gynt, translated by Rolf

Fjelde

Emperor and Galilean

Hedda Gabler

The Master Builder

The Lady from the Sea

When We Dead Awaken

August Strindberg

To Damascus

Miss julie

The Father

The Dance of Death

The Ghost Sonata

A Dream Play

GREAT BRITAIN

Robert Burns

Poems

William Blake

Complete Poetry and Prose

William Wordsworth

Poems

The Prelude

Sir Walter Scott

Waverley

The Heart of Midlothian

Redgauntlet

Old Mortality

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice

Emma

Mansfield Park

Persuasion

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poems and Prose

Dorothy Wordsworth

The Grasmere Journal

William Hazlitt

Essays and Criticism

Lord Byron

Don juan

Poems

Walter Savage Landor

Poems

Imaginary Conversations

Thomas De Quincey

Confessions of an English

Opium Eater

Selected Prose

Charles Lamb

Essays

Maria Edgeworth

Castle Rackrent

John Galt

The Entail

Elizabeth Gaskell

Cranford

Mary Barton

North and South

James Hogg

The Private Memoirs and

Confessions of a justified

Sinner

Charles Maturin

Me/moth the Wanderer

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poems

A Defence of Poetry

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Frankenstein

John Clare

Poems

John Keats

Poems and Letters

Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Death’s ]est-Book

Poems

George Darley

Nepenthe

Poems

Thomas Hood

Poems

Thomas Wade

Poems

Robert Browning

Poems

The Ring and the Book

Charles Dickens

The Posthumous Papers of the

Pickwick Club

David Copperfield

The Adventures of Oliver Twist

A Tale of Two Cities

Bleak House

Hard Times

Nicholas Nickleby

Dombey and Son

Great Expectations

Martin Chuzzlewit

Christmas Stories

Little Dorrit

Our Mutual Friend

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Poems

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Poems and Translations

Matthew Arnold

Poems

Essays

Arthur Hugh Clough

Poems

Christina Rossetti

Poems

Thomas Love Peacock

Nightmare Abbey

Gryll Grange

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Poems and Prose

Thomas Carlyle

Selected Prose

Sartor Resartus

john Ruskin

Modern Painters

The Stones of Venice

Unto This Last

The Queen of the Air

Walter Pater

Studies in the History of the

Renaissance

Appreciations

Imaginary Portraits

Marius the Epicurean

Edward FitzGerald

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

John Stuart Mill

On Liberty

Autobiography

John Henry Newman

Apologia pro Vita Sua

A Grammar of Assent

The Idea of a University

Anthony Trollope

The Barsetshire Novels

The Palliser Novels

Orley Farm

The Way We Live Now

Lewis Carroll

Complete W arks

Edward Lear

Complete Nonsense

George Gissing

New Grub Street

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Poems and Letters

Charlotte Bronte

jane Eyre

Villette

Emily Bronte

Poems

W uthering Heights

William Makepeace Thackeray

Vanity Fair

The History of Henry Esmond

George Meredith

Poems

The Egoist

Francis Thompson

Poems

Lionel Johnson

Poems

Robert Bridges

Poems

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Collected Poems

The Man Who Was Thursday

Samuel Butler

Erewhon

The Way of All Flesh

W. S. Gilbert

Complete Plays of Gilbert and

Sullivan

Bah Ballads

Wilkie Collins

The Moonstone

The Woman in White

No Name

Coventry Patmore

Odes

James Thomson (Bysshe Vanolis)

The City of Dreadful Night

Oscar Wilde

Plays

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Artist as Critic

Letters

John Davidson

Ballads and Songs

Ernest Dowson

Complete Poems

George Eliot

Adam Bede

Silas Marner

The Mill on the Floss

Middlemarch

Daniel Deronda

Robert Louis Stevenson

Essays

Kidnapped

Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Treasure Island

The New Arabian Nights

The Master of Ballantrae

Weir of Hermiston

William Morris

Early Romances

Poems

The Earthly Paradise

The Well at the World’s End

News from Nowhere

Bram Stoker

Dracula

George Macdonald

Lilith

At the Back of the North Wind

GERMANY

Navalis (Friedrich von

Harden burg)

Hymns to the Night

Aphorisms

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Fairy Tales

Eduard Morike

Selected Poems, translated by

Christopher Middleton

Mozart on His Way to Prague

Theodor Storm

Immensee

Poems

Gottfried Keller

Green Henry

Tales

E. T. A. Hoffmann

The Devil’s Elixir

Tales

Jeremias Gotthelf

The Black Spider

Adalbert Stifter

Indian Summer

Tales

Friedrich Schlegel

Criticism and Aphorisms

Georg B iichner

Danton’s Death

Woyzeck

Heinrich Heine

Complete Poems

Richard Wagner

The Ring of the Nibelung

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Birth of Tragedy

Beyond Good and Evil

On the Genealogy of Morals

The Will to Power

Theodor Fontane

Effi Briest

Stefan George

Selected Poems

RUSSIA

Aleksandr Pushkin

Complete Prose Tales

Collected Poetry, translated by

Walter Arndt

Eugene Onegin, translated by

Charles 1 ohnston

Narrative Poems, translated by

Charles 1 ohnston

Boris Godunov

Nikolay Gogo)

The Complete Tales

Dead Souls

The Government Inspector,

translated by Adrian Mitchell

Mikhail Lermontov

Narrative Poems, translated by

Charles 1 ohnston

A Hero of Our Time

Sergey Aksakov

A Family Chronicle

Aleksandr Herzen

My Past and Thoughts

From the Other Shore

Ivan Goncharov

The Frigate Pallada

Oblomov

Ivan Turgenev

A Sportsman’s Notebook,

translated by Charles and

Natasha Hepburn

A Month in the Country

Fathers and Sons

On the Eve

First Love

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes from the Underground

Crime and Punishment

The Idiot

The Possessed (The Devils)

The Brothers Karamazov

Short Novels

Leo Tolstoy

The Cossacks

War and Peace

Anna Karenina

A Confession

The Power of Darkness

Short Novels

Nikolay Leskov

Tales

Aleksandr Ostrovsky

The Storm

Nikolay Chernyshevsky

What Is to Be Done?

Aleksandr Blok

The Twelve and Other Poems,

translated by Anselm Hollo

Anton Chekhov

The Tales

The Major Plays

THE UNITED STATES

Washington Irving

The Sketch Book

William Cullen Bryant

Collected Poems

James Fenimore Cooper

The Deerslayer

John Greenleaf Whittier

Collected Poems

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature

Essays, first and second series

Representative Men

The Conduct of Life

Journals

Poems

Emily Dickinson

Complete Poems

Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass, first edition

Leaves of Grass, third edition

The Complete Poems

Specimen Days

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter

Tales and Sketches

The Marble Faun

Notebooks

Herman Melville

Moby-Dick

The Piazza Tales

Billy Budd

Collected Poems

Clare/

Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry and Tales

Essays and Reviews

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon

Pym

Eureka

jones Very

Essays and Poems

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

The Cricket and Other Poems

Henry David Thoreau

Walden

Poems

Essays

Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

Two Years before the Mast

Frederick Douglass

Narrative of the Life of

Frederick Douglass, an

American Slave

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Selected Poems

Sidney Lanier

Poems

Francis Parkman

France and England in North

America

The California and Oregon Trail

Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres

Ambrose Bierce

Collected Writings

Louisa May Alcott

Little Women

Charles W. Chesnutt

The Short Fiction

Kate Chopin

The Awakening

William Dean Howells

The Rise of Silas Lapham

A Modern Instance

Stephen Crane

The Red Badge of Courage

Stories and Poems

Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady

The Bostonians

The Princess Casamassima

The Awkward Age

Short Novels and Tales

The Ambassadors

The Wings of the Dove

The Golden Bowl

Harold Frederic

The Damnation of Theron Ware

Mark Twain

Complete Short Stories

The Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn

The Devil’s Racetrack

Number Forty-Four: The

Mysterious Stranger

Pudd’nhead Wilson

A Connecticut Yankee in King

Arthur’s Court

William James

The Varieties of Religious

Experience

Pragmatism

Frank Norris

The Octopus

Sarah Orne Jewett

The Country of the Pointed Firs

and Other Stories

Trumbull Stickney

Poems

And here is the list of the volumes of The Great Books of the Western World do read them as I did beginning in eighth grade at the age of fourteen, using Adler’s Ten Year Plan which took me three to four years during the three times I read it in my teens, twenties, and thirties, using his ten volume synopticon of the Great Books, the Great Ideas Program Series.

I spent around one sixth of my life in this study, and wouldn’t trade a moment of it. I hope you too may find joy in this.

How to Think about the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/136043.How_to_Think_about_the_Great_Ideas?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=K2QPaFnHoO&rank=12

“Comprised of the edited transcripts of the 1950s television series The Great Ideas produced by the Institute for Philosophical Research in San Fransisco, this book introduces laypeople to 52 great ideas of philosophy through dialogue between an interviewer and the philosopher Mortimer Adler.”

The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought, Mortimer J. Adler

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/136048.The_Great_Ideas?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=K2QPaFnHoO&rank=35

“Mortimer Adler sat down at a manual typewriter with a list of authors and a pyramid of books. Beginning with “Angel” and ending with “World,” he set out to write 102 essays featuring the ideas that have collectively defined Western thought for more than twenty-five hundred years. The essays, originally published in the “Syntopicon,” were, and remain, the centerpiece of Encyclolpaedia Britannica’s “Great Books of the Western World.”

The Great Ideas Program Series

https://www.goodreads.com/series/170535-the-great-ideas-program

As written in Wikipedia; “Originally published in 54 volumes, The Great Books of the Western World covers categories including fiction, history, poetry, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, drama, politics, religion, economics, and ethics. Hutchins wrote the first volume, titled The Great Conversation, as an introduction and discourse on liberal education. Adler sponsored the next two volumes, “The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon”, as a way of emphasizing the unity of the set and, by extension, of Western thought in general. A team of indexers spent months compiling references to such topics as “Man’s freedom in relation to the will of God” and “The denial of void or vacuum in favor of a plenum”. They grouped the topics into 102 chapters, for which Adler wrote the 102 introductions. Four colors identify each volume by subject area—Imaginative Literature, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, History and Social Science, and Philosophy and Theology. The volumes contained the following works:

Volume 1

The Great Conversation

Volume 2

Syntopicon I: Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, and Love

Volume 3

Syntopicon II: Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World

Volume 4

Homer (rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler)

The Iliad

The Odyssey

Volume 5

Aeschylus (translated into English verse by G.M. Cookson)

The Suppliant Maidens

The Persians

Seven Against Thebes

Prometheus Bound

The Oresteia

Agamemnon

Choephoroe

The Eumenides

Sophocles (translated into English prose by Sir Richard C. Jebb)

The Oedipus Cycle

Oedipus the King

Oedipus at Colonus

Antigone

Ajax

Electra

The Trachiniae

Philoctetes

Euripides (translated into English prose by Edward P. Coleridge)

Rhesus

Medea

Hippolytus

Alcestis

Heracleidae

The Suppliants

The Trojan Women

Ion

Helen

Andromache

Electra

Bacchantes

Hecuba

Heracles Mad

The Phoenician Women

Orestes

Iphigenia in Tauris

Iphigenia in Aulis

Cyclops

Aristophanes (translated into English verse by Benjamin Bickley Rogers)

The Acharnians

The Knights

The Clouds

The Wasps

Peace

The Birds

The Frogs

Lysistrata

Thesmophoriazusae

Ecclesiazousae

Plutus

Volume 6

Herodotus

The History (translated by George Rawlinson)

Thucydides

History of the Peloponnesian War (translated by Richard Crawley and revised by R. Feetham)

Volume 7

Plato

The Dialogues (translated by Benjamin Jowett)

Charmides

Lysis

Laches

Protagoras

Euthydemus

Cratylus

Phaedrus

Ion

Symposium

Meno

Euthyphro

Apology

Crito

Phaedo

Gorgias

The Republic

Timaeus

Critias

Parmenides

Theaetetus

Sophist

Statesman

Philebus

Laws

The Seventh Letter (translated by J. Harward)

Volume 8

Aristotle

April 7 2025 National Library Week Part One: What is a Library For?

In our current moment of book burnings and bans, rewritten histories and authorized identities, silencing and erasure of the witness of history and the repression of dissent, thought control and the electoral infiltration, subversion, and capture of public institutions crucial to the mission of democracy and the manufacture of an informed electorate able to question authority as co-owners of the state, our interdependent public schools and libraries have become a frontline in the struggle between tyranny and liberty.

What is a library for?

Libraries share with public schools the purpose of creating citizens, of education in its original Greek meaning to bring out the truth of ourselves, together with two other primary and crucial functions in a democracy; to provide free access to learning as both rights of information and a free press, which also parallel equality as annihilation of class and access to opportunity as a seizure of power, and to provide inclusive and diverse representations of self as revolutionary struggle against authorized identities, divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of race, gender, faith, and nationality.

At the heart of this process of identity construction lies the curation of reading lists and a personal library which represents and defines us in ways we have chosen for ourselves.

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

Memory, history, identity; the selves we choose among the limitless possibilities of becoming human. Here is a central problem of both libraries and the construction of ourselves as assemblages of stories; how shall we taxonomize, structure, and assign relative value to the texts we gather, in our personae and in our libraries as memory palaces? And in a realm of ideas and their consequences which is chaotic, shifting, ephemeral, impermanent, and full of dyadic opposites, relative truths, mutual interdependence and change?

Before all else, who decides? Public libraries and schools confront us with all of the issues about how to be human together which create, inform, motivate, and shape human societies, and democracies most especially as negotiated meaning and value.

This is why the curation of personal libraries and unauthorized reading lists are revolutionary acts, and a praxis of the values of democracy.

In aid of this process of decolonization and becoming autonomous I share with you now some ideas from writing in Aeon on How to Nurture and Grow a Personal Library, and a link to the wonderful community of librarians at LibraryThing.

As I wrote in preface to my reading lists, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?

Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?

Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?

Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?

As I wrote in my post of September 25 2024, Banned Book Week: Fighting Theocratic Fascist Terror and Tyranny In America; In a free society of equals, only we ourselves have the right to choose who we will become, and no one may authorize or limit our possible identities, for this is falsification, enslavement, and theft of the soul.

When subversive organizations of white supremacist terror, patriarchal theocratic sexual terror, and tyranny as the centralization of power to a carceral state of force and control with all its attendant evils and paraphernalia of thought control, surveillance, and repression of dissent infiltrate our institutions to enact book bans and other censorship, let us expose and challenge them for what they are; attempts to pervert education from the teaching of questioning to produce citizens who are co owners of the state and guarantors of each others rights into obedience to authority.

And remember children; they only ban books that can give you the power to see through the lies of those who would enslave us, and to free yourself from systems of oppression, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

For an example of how theocratic and fascist organizations pursue the subversion of democracy through book bans as part of a broad assault on our liberties and freedoms, we may look to the odious Moms For Liberty.

As written by Mark Romano in MSN, in an article entitled 10 Examples of How Moms for Liberty are the Real Threats to our Freedoms; “Moms for Liberty has positioned itself as a champion for parental rights and freedom in education, but their actions often tell a different story. This group, while claiming to advocate for liberty, promotes policies that restrict personal choice and challenge diverse perspectives in schools. Many parents and educators question how a movement that rallies against certain books and ideas can truly call itself a defender of freedom.

With chapters across 45 states, Moms for Liberty has gained visibility in education politics. Their push for influence in school districts raises concerns about the limits they want to place on curriculum and expression. This blog post explores ten notable examples that highlight how their agenda can contradict the very values of liberty and freedom they purport to support.

As this discussion unfolds, it becomes clear that the issues at stake go beyond educational choices. They touch upon broader themes of inclusivity, freedom of speech, and the diverse fabric of American society.

Defining ‘Liberty’ and ‘Freedom’

Liberty and freedom are often used interchangeably, but they have distinct meanings.

Liberty refers to the protection of individual rights and the absence of oppression. It’s about having the legal and social space to make choices.

Freedom, on the other hand, can mean the power to act, speak, or think without hindrance. It’s more about the ability to pursue personal desires.

In a democratic society, both are essential for human dignity.

Moms for Liberty positions itself as a champion of parents’ rights. Yet, their actions often contradict their claims about supporting true liberty and freedom for all.

By limiting access to certain books or topics in schools, they restrict the freedom of students to learn and explore. This creates a tension between their stated goals and the actual impact of their actions.

Understanding these terms helps clarify the debate around organizations like Moms for Liberty. It shows how their belief system can shape policies that may not align with broader definitions of liberty and freedom.

Educational Censorship

Educational censorship is a growing concern as different groups push to control what students learn. This movement often focuses on banning books and shaping classroom discussions, which can limit students’ exposure to diverse ideas.

Banning Books

Banning books has become a notable strategy. Groups like Moms for Liberty often target specific titles that address topics like race, gender, and sexuality. They argue that these subjects are inappropriate for students.

Many schools have faced pressure to remove certain books from libraries and reading lists. This action creates gaps in education. Students miss out on important discussions about society and history. For instance, classics that tackle civil rights issues may get pulled. This not only limits freedom of choice but also diminishes critical thinking skills in young readers.

Controlling Classroom Content

Controlling classroom content is another tactic used by Moms for Liberty. They advocate for removing lessons that introduce concepts related to social justice and identity. Their focus is often on ensuring that political views align with specific ideologies.

Teachers may find themselves restricted in how they address topics in class. This can lead to a watered-down curriculum that avoids important issues. For example, discussions about historical injustices might get minimized or skipped altogether. When educators cannot discuss various perspectives, students lose the chance to develop a well-rounded understanding of the world around them.

Opposition to Inclusive Policies

Moms for Liberty often challenges inclusive policies, focusing on LGBTQ+ rights and racial equity. Their stance leads to heated debates within communities, limiting the support for diversity in schools.

Resistance to LGBTQ+ Rights in Schools

Moms for Liberty has actively opposed policies that support LGBTQ+ students. This includes pushing back against discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation in classrooms.

They argue that these topics should not be part of school curriculums. Their campaigns often focus on banning certain books or materials that include LGBTQ+ narratives.

Many school board meetings see strong vocal opposition from Moms for Liberty members. Their influence raises concerns about students feeling safe and represented, as they push for a more traditional approach to education.

Challenging Racial Equity Initiatives

Moms for Liberty also opposes racial equity initiatives in schools. They argue that these programs create division.

Members often claim that teaching about systemic racism is anti-American or promotes “critical race theory,” even when such teachings are not part of the curriculum.

This opposition can lead to the rejection of programs aimed at promoting diversity and inclusion. They seek to eliminate discussions that highlight historical injustices, which can prevent students from understanding different perspectives.

This resistance can limit resources meant to support marginalized students, impacting overall school culture.

Parental Rights Overreach

Moms for Liberty often advocates for parental rights in ways that some see as overstepping boundaries. This can affect health and safety measures in schools and infringe upon the choices of other families. The implications of these actions are significant and raise questions about individual freedoms.

Health and Safety Measures

In their push for parental control, Moms for Liberty has challenged essential health and safety protocols in schools. One notable example is their opposition to mask mandates during health crises. They argue that parents should decide whether their children wear masks, but this stance can compromise the safety of the entire student body.

Additionally, this group has pushed back against vaccination requirements. By questioning established health guidelines, they risk creating environments where preventable diseases could spread. Their actions often ignore the broader public health implications, focusing solely on individual parental choice.

Infringing on Other Parents’ Choices

Moms for Liberty’s focus on parental rights can inadvertently affect other families’ rights. For instance, when advocating for book bans in schools, they impose their values on all students. This limits access to diverse perspectives and important topics, which can help shape young minds.

Moreover, their initiatives can place undue pressure on educators. Teachers may feel forced to avoid certain subjects to comply with parental demands, impacting the quality of education. In this way, the push for expanded parental rights can lead to a narrowing of educational content, which can harm all students.

Interference with Curriculum Development

Moms for Liberty often challenges curriculum decisions in schools. Their actions raise concerns about how their involvement affects educational choices.

Critique of Curriculum Experts

Moms for Liberty has taken steps to question the expertise of curriculum designers. They believe that parents should have a strong say in what children learn. This point of view often leads to dismissing input from educational professionals.

For example, when schools adopt certain materials, these parents might push back, labeling them as inappropriate. This can create tension between educators and parents.

The result? Educators may feel pressured to alter lesson plans to appease concerned parents. This interferes with the educational process.

Limiting Teacher Autonomy

Teacher autonomy can take a hit when groups like Moms for Liberty get involved. Teachers typically select materials and methods to suit their students’ needs. When parental groups pressure schools, it can limit educators’ choices.

For instance, teachers may shy away from diverse perspectives in literature or science due to fear of backlash. Instead of encouraging open discussions, they might stick to safer, less controversial topics.

This restricts students’ learning experiences. A narrow focus on certain viewpoints can limit critical thinking and understanding. It affects the overall educational environment, making it harder for students to explore complex issues.

Advocacy Against Evidence-Based Education

Moms for Liberty actively challenges the principles of evidence-based education. Their actions raise concerns about the reliance on established research and factual history in schools. Here’s a closer look at two significant aspects of this advocacy.

Rejecting Scientific Consensus

Moms for Liberty has been known to oppose scientific findings, especially those related to health and education. They tend to favor personal beliefs over the conclusions supported by experts.

For example, this group often questions the importance of mental health initiatives that rely on data-driven approaches. They argue against programs that highlight the impact of social and emotional learning, dismissing them as unnecessary. This kind of rejection can limit students’ understanding of crucial topics like mental health and wellness.

Promotion of Historical Misrepresentations

The group also promotes selective versions of history that misrepresent facts. In efforts to influence school curriculums, Moms for Liberty pushes for bans on teaching slavery and civil rights topics. They believe these subjects create discomfort for students and parents alike.

This advocacy can lead to an incomplete education. Omitting such key historical events prevents students from understanding the complexities of race and society. Instead, students may be presented with a sanitized view of history that ignores significant struggles and achievements.

Political Maneuvering

Moms for Liberty actively engages in political strategies to influence local education. They focus on targeting school boards and use emotional tactics to push policy changes.

Electioneering School Board Campaigns

Moms for Liberty aims to place their candidates on school boards across the country. They have launched campaigns to support candidates who align with their conservative values.

Their strategy involves grassroots efforts in communities, mobilizing parents and like-minded individuals. They organize events to drive voter turnout and raise awareness about school issues. This focus on local elections has made them a notable player in education politics.

With over 275 chapters in 45 states, they work to ensure representation that echoes their vision. This approach creates a network that can effectively challenge opposing views.

Policy-Making Through Fear

Another tactic employed by Moms for Liberty is using fear to influence policy decisions. They often highlight issues such as critical race theory and gender identity in schools. These topics can evoke strong emotions among parents.

Moms for Liberty calls for book bans and strict policies regarding curriculum content. By framing these actions as necessary for children’s safety, they gain support from concerned parents. This fear-based strategy is effective in achieving their goals.

Their messaging resonates with many who feel anxious about modern education. By capitalizing on these fears, they seek to reshape public education to fit their ideals.

Undermining Professional Educators

Moms for Liberty has been criticized for actions that challenge the authority and expertise of teachers. This approach can create a hostile environment for educators and diminish the quality of education students receive.

Dismissal of Teacher Expertise

Moms for Liberty often questions the qualifications and methods of professional educators. They argue that teachers are not to be trusted with sensitive topics, claiming these professionals push certain ideologies.

Teachers spend years studying and training to understand how to educate their students effectively. By undermining this expertise, the group can create a divide between parents and educators. This can lead to conflicts at school board meetings and an atmosphere of suspicion.

Such actions might result in teachers feeling unappreciated and undervalued. When teachers worry about their job security or reputation, it can lead to less effective teaching practices.

Encouraging Distrust in Educators

Moms for Liberty advocates for transparency in schools. While this sounds good, it often breeds distrust among parents towards educators.

By promoting ideas that teachers are responsible for indoctrinating students, they create fear and concern among parents. This makes parents more likely to challenge teachers’ decisions or methods without a clear understanding.

Such distrust can harm the classroom environment. Educators might feel the need to look over their shoulders, impacting their teaching style. Instead of focusing on learning, teachers may spend time justifying their choices to parents and school boards.

This breakdown in trust not only affects teachers but can also create a negative atmosphere for students trying to learn.

Stifling Student Expression

Moms for Liberty has faced criticism for actions that seem to limit student expression in schools. This includes restricting student speech and discouraging critical thinking. These actions raise concerns about how students engage with different ideas and perspectives.

Limiting Student’s Speech and Clubs

Moms for Liberty has been linked to efforts that restrict student speech. This includes challenges to student-organized clubs that promote diversity and inclusion.

For example, some schools have seen pushback against clubs that focus on LGBTQ+ issues. Members of these clubs often face strong opposition, limiting their ability to create a supportive environment.

Parents have voiced concerns about these clubs, saying they conflict with their values. Consequently, school administrators sometimes feel pressured to remove or limit these clubs.

This creates an environment where students may feel unsafe expressing their identities and beliefs. Many students cherish these clubs as their safe spaces to discuss important topics.

Discouraging Critical Thinking

Another concern is the trend of discouraging critical thinking in classrooms. Moms for Liberty promotes a certain viewpoint on various issues, often pushing back against curricula that include diverse perspectives.

For instance, they have challenged books and educational materials that present different historical viewpoints or explore complex social issues.

This can lead to a narrow understanding of important topics for students. It limits their ability to engage in discussions and form their own opinions.

When students are not exposed to a wide range of ideas, they miss out on essential skills needed for critical thinking. Encouraging curiosity and questioning is crucial for their development.

Promotion of Homogeneous Ideology

Moms for Liberty’s actions often reflect a consistent pattern of promoting a narrow set of beliefs. This approach can lead to a lack of diverse educational experiences for students. Here are two key areas where this ideology is evident.

Advocating for ‘One-Sided’ Learning

Moms for Liberty pushes for educational policies that favor specific viewpoints. This often means supporting curricula that highlight conservative perspectives while sidelining alternative ideas. For example, they have opposed lessons that include topics like critical race theory and sexual orientation.

This focus can create a limited view of history and social issues. When students only learn about one perspective, they might struggle to understand broader societal dynamics. Effective education thrives on presenting a variety of viewpoints.

Opposing Diverse Perspectives

The organization frequently challenges programs that aim to include diverse voices. They argue that introducing concepts related to race, gender, and LGBTQ+ identities threatens traditional values. For instance, Moms for Liberty has taken steps to block LGBTQ+ protections in schools, claiming these measures infringe on free speech.

Such actions can lead to an environment where students feel excluded or marginalized. By opposing a rich tapestry of perspectives, they limit students’ ability to engage with the world around them. This stance raises concerns about inclusivity and understanding in educational settings.”

As I wrote in my post of May 28 2022, On Libraries and Identity as a Ground of Struggle; “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” So Heinrich Heine has taught us, in his lyric drama of 1823, Almansor: A Tragedy. As described by Professor Shlomo Avineri in a lecture at CEU; “Almansor” is a tragic love story between an Arab man and Donna Clara, a Moroccan woman who’s forced to convert from Islam to Christianity. Taking place in Granada in 1492, the tragedy depicts the burning of the Qu’ran, the act that prompts the sentence now engraved in the ground of Berlin’s Opernplatz commemorating the horrifying book burning of 1933.

Heine’s lyrical poetry was well-loved in Germany, his most famous poem “Lorelei” even appeared in a collection of German folk songs, although the poet’s name was given as Anonymous. His books, together with the works of Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kastner, Karl Marx, Heinrich Mann and many other “un-German” authors, were also burned on May 10, 1933.”

Why was this early work of German Romanticism silenced and erased from the canon of literature for over a century? As a wiki article describes; “The performance turned into a fiasco and had to be canceled after tumultuous scenes in the auditorium. Since there are no immediate newspaper reports of the event, the trigger is not entirely clear and leaves room for speculation ranging from personal intrigue to anti-Semitism. According to Manfred Windfuhr, editor of the Düsseldorf Heine edition, the most likely explanation is the anecdote that the actor of Almansor Eduard Schütz later reported. According to this, a viewer asked about the author of the play during the last transformation towards the end of the performance and was whispered “Der Jude Heine” in response. In the erroneous assumption that an Israelite money changer of the same name from Braunschweig wrote the tragedy, he then exclaimed: “What? shall we listen to the silly Jew’s nonsense? We don’t want to tolerate that any longer! Let’s knock out the piece! ”And thus triggered the protests. simple confusion of names.”

Heine’s personal friends and influences included Goethe, Schlegel, Dumas, Hegel, and Marx, and his direct models were the world’s first historical novel Las Guerras de Granada by Ginés Pérez de Hita, which awaits translation into English, The Magic Ring by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, and the beautiful Arabic and Persian romance Layla and Majnoun which has been reimagined in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by the Afghan author Khaled Hosseini.

In Almansor, Heine writes in reference to the book burning of 1499 by the future Grand Inquisitor in the wake of the fall of Al-Andalus and the betrayal by the Catholic monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragón of the treaty which guaranteed freedom of religion for all, during which thousands of books were destroyed, including the Qu’ran and other works of Islamic, Jewish, and classical Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, history, and science, excepting only medical works from the flames. It seems they weren’t quite as crazy as our own science deniers and anti-vaccine Luddites, but nearly so, and the parallels do not end there.

And so, we come to this; the Republican Party, in public declaration of their origins and traditions in the Inquisition and the Nazis, have chosen to launch a national campaign of book burnings and bans and are waging a combined electoral and media campaign to monopolize public school and library boards to authorize identities and repress dissent. And only our public solidarity and will to resist subjugation stands between us and the year 2022 being remembered in history with those of 1499 and 1933.

As I wrote in my post of December 14 2021, Subversion of Democracy: Case of the Texas Book Ban;

Remaining on the Texas Public School Required Reading List:

Lynchings and Other Family Gatherings: the Joy of Community

Keep Your Pimp Hand Strong: Negotiating Gender Roles

Only Our Kind Are Truly Human: Why Values and Morals Only Apply To Us

Texas bans books from public schools and libraries in subversion of democracy and our values of freedom and equality of all humankind in an attempt to enforce imperiled hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege historically and systemically constructed along divisions of race and gender and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

The multifront assault on freedom of information and expression is about patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror under the fig leaves of Gideonite fundamentalist Christian Identity sectarianism and jingoistic nationalism, as it has always been.

The last time the state had the right to control its slave populations through access to learning civilization collapsed and was lost for a thousand years while the Church burned books which threated elite power, and we must be vigilant lest we give those who would enslave us the right and power to do so yet again, and cast the world into a Dark Age from which we may never recover.

As written by Ryan Cooper in The Week, in an article entitled The forgotten history of Republican book banning; “A conservative stock character is making a comeback: the book banner. For the past few years, Republicans have pretended they’re defending free speech and free inquiry in schools against censorious liberals with their safe spaces and trigger warnings. In reality, conservatives have a mile-long history of trying to suppress the teaching of books they find uncomfortable.

That record has resurfaced in the Virginia gubernatorial race, where Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin recently ran an ad in which a woman named Laura Murphy complained about not being able to dictate what was taught at her local high school. Murphy describes the issue as explicit material being shown to children without parental sign-off, but there’s much more to the story than the ad let on: Back in 2013, Murphy told The Washington Post that her son Blake (now an associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee) had night terrors after being required to read Toni Morrison’s book Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Beloved.

Murphy isn’t the only Republican with this censorious impulse. The American Library Association maintains an incomplete list of attempted book-banning events in recent history, and in the large majority of cases for which a motivation is explained, it is conservative: Right-wing parents in Columbus, Ohio, tried to ban Catcher in the Rye in schools in 1963 because it was “anti-white.” Other parents challenged The Grapes of Wrath in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1991 because it invoked God and Jesus in a “vain and profane manner.” Slaughterhouse-Five was suppressed in Oakland County, Michigan, in 1972, in a case in which a circuit judge called the book “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” Those are just three of dozens of examples.

Now, liberals have done the same thing on occasion, typically targeting books which contain racial slurs, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But the bulk of book banning incidents — parents complaining about sexual content, violence, skepticism of Christianity, cursing, or the history of racism and slavery — are straight out of the Moral Majority politics of the 1980s and 1990s. That habit seemed to vanish for awhile when Republicans nominated a thrice-divorced, credibly accused rapist for president. Now it’s coming back.

In recent months, Republican legislatures have passed de facto prohibitions of teaching the history of racism across the country. As a result, a Tennessee teacher was fired for assigning Ta-Nehisi Coates, while a Texas school board recently apologized for instructing teachers to present “opposing” views on the Holocaust while trying to obey a Republican law on curriculum content. Don’t let the brief reprieve fool you: They were always like this.”

As written by Amy Brady in Lithub, The History (and Present) of Banning Books in America: On the Ongoing Fight Against the Censorship of Ideas; “Like small pox and vinyl records, book banning is something many Americans like to think of as history. But according to the American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE), the practice persists. ABFE, which from its headquarters in White Plains fights book banning across the country, keeps a list of books challenged each year by American public libraries and schools. In 2016, that list includes Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Emily M. Danworth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Most of the titles are by LGBTQ authors and authors of color who write about life beyond white, straight, middle-class America.

One way ABFE fights book banning is to partner with other organizations in the publishing industry (including their parent organization, the American Booksellers Association) to host Banned Books Week, a seven-day celebration that takes place in bookstores and libraries all over the United States. This year, the event runs from September 25th to October 1st with a focus on “diversity,” a factor behind many book challenges. “There were over 300 book challenges in 2015,” said Chris Finan, Director of ABFE, in an interview. “And themes of race, ethnicity, and sexual preference have been a large part of why those books got challenged.”

On its website, ABFE acknowledges that diversity is difficult to define. One definition that has informed their thinking comes from the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom: Diversity includes “non-white main and/or secondary characters; LGBT main and/or secondary characters; disabled main and/or secondary characters; issues about race or racism; LGBT issues; issues about religion, which encompass in this situation the Holocaust and terrorism; issues about disability and/or mental illness; non-Western settings, in which the West is North America and Europe.”

Historically, other reasons for banning books include: sexual imagery, violence, and any content considered obscene. Indeed, arguments over obscenity—how its defined and how that definition relates to the First Amendment—have been at the heart of banned-book controversies throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Many historians point to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the first book in the United States to experience a ban on a national scale. The Confederacy barred the book from stores not only for its pro-abolitionist agenda, but because it aroused heated debates about slavery (some historians argue that the book catalyzed the Civil War).

A decade after the war, a carping moralist government official named Anthony Comstock convinced the United States Congress to pass a law prohibiting the mailing of “pornographic” materials. His definition of the term was murky at best. Anatomy textbooks, doctors’ pamphlets about reproduction, anything by Oscar Wilde, and even The Canterbury Tales were deemed too sexy to send through the mail.

These bans, or “comstockery,” as the practice became known, continued into the new century. But by the 1920s, shifts in politics and social mores led booksellers to see themselves as advocates for people’s right to read whatever they wanted. Then, in 1933, an influential court case—The United States v. One Book Called Ulysses—helped usher in a new era of legal interpretation of the First Amendment.

In that court case, Judge John M. Woolsey overturned a federal ban of James Joyce’s Ulysses—the ban had been in effect since 1922, and court transcripts reveal that the judge who banned the book also remarked that it was “the work of a disordered mind.” Woolsey, who admitted to not liking the novel, found legal cause to challenge the previous judge’s definition of pornography—and by extension, his definition of art. He ultimately ruled that the depiction of sex, even if unpleasant, should be allowed in serious literature. His final edict is at once hilarious and evident of a mind capable of separating legal philosophy from personal preference: “[W]hilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”

The case set an important precedent. However, Comstock Law remained on the books until 1957, when the Supreme Court tried Roth vs. The United States. The plaintiff was Samuel Roth, a writer and bookseller convicted for mailing pornographic magazines to subscribers. His trial forced the American legal system to once again reconsider its definition of obscenity. The Court’s final decision was bad for Roth: his conviction was upheld, and he remained in prison until 1961. But it was great for lovers of books: the definition was narrowed to apply to only that which is “utterly without redeeming social importance.” That narrowing made room for books depicting sex and violence. Even Judge Woolsey had found Ulysses to have social importance.

In the decades that followed, public officials would continue to challenge the Court’s 1957 definition of obscenity, including Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, whose personal definition famously began and ended with the declaration “I know it when I see it.” But in general, the 1960s and 70s witnessed a simultaneous drop in instances of book bans and rise in more explicit art. Artists and authors felt freer than ever to experiment. Consumers were more willing than ever to un-clutch their pearls and engage with racy material. Sex was mainstream in the novels of John Updike and Erica Jong. Then America elected Ronald Reagan.

“Reagan didn’t run on a campaign of anti-pornography,” Finan clarifies. “But he nevertheless ran an election that depowered those who fought for First Amendment freedoms. [His] election encouraged challenges by people who were unhappy with books in schools and libraries that were increasingly realistic in their depiction of life.” The number of challenges to books made by school boards and libraries rose dramatically: “Suddenly we were facing 700-800 challenges a year,” says Finan. In 1982, the ALA responded to this renewed culture of censorship with Banned Books Week. “The point of the event was to get people to understand that these books weren’t pornographic or excessively violent, but simply depicting the real world…and that many were classics of American literature,” Finan says. “Banned Books Week was the first real [American] celebration of the freedom to read.”

In those early days, Banned Books Week consisted almost entirely of libraries and bookstores hanging posters and displaying banned books. “Those displays were enormously effective communication tools,” says Finan, “because people would wander over and find out that the books they love had been challenged. Suddenly they understood that censorship isn’t just about fringe literature.” Today, those displays remain a centerpiece of Banned Books Week, but partnering sponsors are also seeking to involve readers in other ways. The Washington, DC Public Library, for example, hosts a city-wide scavenger hunt of banned books that began on September 1st and will continue until the end of the month. The books, which have been wrapped in black paper printed with words like “SMUT” or “FILTHY,” have been hidden on shelves in libraries and bookstores all over DC.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), another sponsor of Banned Books Week, has published a handbook that lists which comic books have been censored and outlines what readers can do to fight censorship. “Since 2011, at least one graphic novel has been included on ALA’s annual list of the ten most frequently challenged books,” said Betsy Gomez, Editorial Director of CBLDF, in an interview. “In 2015, CBLDF fought more than 24 attempts to ban books, including the comics Drama, This One Summer, The Sandman, Fun Home, Persepolis, Palomar. So far, in 2016, CBLDF has defended a dozen books.” The handbook includes programming ideas for educators and libraries to engage their communities in discussions about banned books throughout the year.

Organizations with no official connection to Banned Books Week are also getting involved. Wordier Than Thou, an open mic storytelling group in Pinellas Park, Florida, began presenting last year an annual burlesque show inspired by selected banned books. “[The show] definitely gets people talking about literature,” wrote Tiffany Razzano, founder of Wordier Than Thou, in an email. “[Last year], throughout the night people would come up to me and tell me about their favorite banned book.” The show, which features area burlesque favorite Mayven Missbehavin’, makes thematic sense: “It’s supposedly offensive material [interpreted by] scantily clad women performing classic burlesque stripteases,” she writes. For the sake of surprise, Razzano wouldn’t disclose which books would be featured this year. But last year’s performance included Gone with the Wind, 1984, and The Scarlet Letter.

It’s rare today for a book banning case to make it to the federal courts, but many challenges to books are still taking place on the state and local levels. At the time of this writing, ABFE has joined a protest against the Chesterfield County Public Schools in Virginia, which seeks to remove Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park and other titles from students’ voluntary summer reading lists. The proposed removal is “particularly outrageous,” says Finan, because the books aren’t a part of the school’s required curriculum.

If school administrators are attempting to limit even elective reading, what does the future hold for students who want access to all books, classic and contemporary—books that might broaden their understanding of the world? “The problem of book banning hasn’t gone away, and it probably won’t,” Finan laments. “There are always going to be struggles over the proper limits to free speech.”

Fahrenheit 451 1966 Trailer | Oskar Werner

Sarah Jessica Parker and “The Librarians” discuss the fight against book banning

Being a librarian was already hard. Then came the Trump administration

Already facing burnout and book bans, librarians face a ‘catastrophe’ for institutions deemed central to democracy

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/07/libraries-trump-administration?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawJg-BlleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHth7JbRMYnsiIlBD1W3Bp86zWDBnz5lr_6jr7lfjfNTeOz5E221IDn6C7k5v_aem_kkhGOQfyZon78j8CaQwkQQ

The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hanna Arendt

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/396931.The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Mf0iC3fEUL&rank=1

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, Dorian Lynskey

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41880043-the-ministry-of-truth?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=dGX298Jibu&rank=4

‘Civil rights fight of our time’: new film explores the battle over US libraries

This article is more than 2 months old

A Sarah Jessica Parker-produced documentary on the brave librarians fighting a wave of rightwing book bans has sparked conversation at Sundance

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jan/27/new-film-explores-book-bans-us-libraries?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawJg9l9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHk63FvDN0_98W53oS62c52cCiw1QJ4yge7w53-x_R_bCf67YddLxt-OE3Lbs_aem_8kV12wGo5Wz-ArwkBjUNDQ

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-life-and-style/attack-books-600-authors-publishers-groups-condemn-book-bans-rcna7910

https://theweek.com/talking-points/1006493/the-forgotten-history-of-republican-book-banning

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/school-librarians-speak-out-against-recent-upsurge-in-attempts-to-ban-books

https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics

https://time.com/6117685/book-bans-school-libraries/

All 850 Books Texas Lawmaker Matt Krause Wants to Ban: An Analysis

The History (and Present) of Banning Books in America

Click to access krausebooklist.pdf

Bannings and Burnings in History

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/tell-congress-stop-the-largest-book-ban-in-america

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/168894.The_Poem_That_Changed_America?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=aiUZqoQe91&rank=1

Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones

Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones

References on how to build your personal library

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-nurture-and-grow-a-personal-library-of-books?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=5492a510c0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_09_14_04_00&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_76a303a90a-5492a510c0-71612960

How 11 Writers Organize Their Personal Libraries

Libraries and Books, a reading list

Fahrenheit 451 60th Anniversary Edition, by Ray Bradbury

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13079982-fahrenheit-451?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=BMELCwRXYz&rank=4

Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge,

by Richard Ovenden

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51342996-burning-the-books

Library: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316550-library?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=UwBOBFV2Co&rank=1

A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53085.A_History_of_Reading?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=J46lmJ6cQq&rank=2

The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2452483.The_Library_at_Night?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=J46lmJ6cQq&rank=1

Books as History: The Importance of Books Beyond Their Texts, David Pearson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5177580-books-as-history?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=1ove706yQa&rank=13

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books,

Nicholas A. Basbanes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/791098.A_Gentle_Madness

Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the 21st Century, Nicholas A. Basbanes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/856281.Among_the_Gently_Mad

A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World,

Nicholas A. Basbanes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12181.A_Splendor_of_Letters

Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World,

Nicholas A. Basbanes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12180.Every_Book_Its_Reader

The Library: An Illustrated History, Stuart A.P. Murray, Nicholas A. Basbanes

(Foreword) Donald G. Davis (Introduction)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54156965-the-library

On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History, Nicholas A. Basbanes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17262099-on-paper

Heinrich Heine and his sources, a reading list

Songs of Love and Grief: A Bilingual Anthology in the Verse Forms of the Originals, by Heinrich Heine, Jeffrey L. Sammons (Foreword by)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28628.Songs_of_Love_and_Grief?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=4y0Pj6oXpD&rank=21

Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution, by George Prochnik

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52642120-heinrich-heine?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=4y0Pj6oXpD&rank=4

The Magic Ring, by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8554345-the-magic-ring?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=P0GbAZHJ8F&rank=32

A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128029.A_Thousand_Splendid_Suns?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=cCMHwMQfzg&rank=9

The Complete Majnun: Poems of Qays Ibn Al-Mulawwah and Nizami’s Layla & Majnun, by Qays ibn al-Mullawah, Nizami Ganjavi, Paul Smith (Translator)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37844651-the-complete-majnun

April 7, 2025 0

April 6 2025 How American Imperialism Created Our Humanitarian Crisis at the Border: Consequences of Operation Condor

Fifty one years ago this April, America launched Operation Condor, a global campaign to destabilize and repress socialist governments and movements, wage imperial conquest and dominion, impose and enforce capitalism as a hegemonic system of colonial oppression, and authorize and institutionalize its apex predators and its elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege.

This remains relevant to us today because it is the origin of many of the push forces driving waves of refugees to our border, and the horrific humanitarian crisis and test of our democracy created by American imperialism. So too with many European democracies, as migration is created and weaponized by fascists in service to power and the subversion of democracy.

Migration is a word which conceals both the conditions which trigger it and our own complicity in creating them as consequences of our decades long policies of colonialism, anticommunist military adventurism, and economic, political, and cultural warfare; ecological devastation with its drought, plagues, floods, and famine, the sixth age of extinction and the death of the seas, poverty, slavery, and social and political destabilization, an age of tyranny and state terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing, weaponized faith and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, and multigenerational wars.

In terms of refugees fleeing to America for safety and survival as well as liberty and equality we are mainly speaking of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, though the hell zone of Columbia and Venezuela now accounts for many, and with the collapse of central authority in Mexico and its degeneration into a region of warlords, oligarchs, and feudal crime syndicates we have refugees from Mexico itself as well as the traditional seasonal laborers.

Globally we have refugees of imperial wars of dominion, genocides, and civilizational collapse weaponized by tyrants to shift Europe toward fascist regimes, mainly by America’s key regional ally Turkey in Erdogan’s conflict with Russia for dominion of Syria and the Middle East and of Libya and the Mediterranean from which came the Third World War now ongoing in several theatres of conflict, a strategy established by the American model of Operation Condor which created conditions for the capture of the Republican Party in 1980 by a theocratic cabal under the crusader’s banner of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and then America with the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024 by the Fourth Reich.

Migrant labor is slave labor; this is the great truth America has never confronted and must now answer for in the suffering masses at our border. Entire sectors of our economy run on it; agriculture in which labor becomes a strategic resource as we starve without it, but also child and elder care, hospitality, and some manufacture. America’s wealth and power is created for us by others to whom we export the real costs of production, others who must remain invisible and exploitable as unregulated illegal labor to wring every ounce of value from them for our elites. Thus we weaponize economic disparity in service to power and privilege, and create and maintain hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and white supremacy.

In this crucial year of world-historical significance with the unrestrained sabotage of the institutions of the state by Traitor Trump and his clown show of freaks, white supremacist terrorists, theocratic patriarchal sexual terrorists, and amoral grifters, which I believe will determine the fate of humankind for the next several centuries and offers us possible futures of either an Age of Tyranny or a United Humankind, the issue of immigration will be among the binary choices which will continue to inform, motivate, and shape human being, meaning, and value.

Interests of elite hegemonies of wealth and power converge here with those of racial privilege and white supremacy in historic toxicity, in parallel with the rise of the carceral state and militarized police as an instrument for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor and the repression of the Civil Rights Movement, and have done so from their origins. One such origin point is America’s appropriation, concealment, and instrumentalization of Nazi war criminals in the repression of dissent and the conquest of the world.

The Fourth Reich of which Trump is a figurehead did not emerge from nothing like Athena from the head of Zeus, but was an invention of American imperialism. As such its history and character as a global threat to democracy can be studied in the crisis of refugees and migration to which it has given birth, and in the legacies of our nation’s use of fascism as an instrument of dominion in the Americas and everywhere on earth, for as we were using it to conquer others, it was using us to seize the United States of America and the world.

As I wrote in my post of February 18 2020, Guatemala: Our Heart of Darkness; As we abduct and lockdown refugees in concentration camps and secret prisons, and drive others back into a Mexico whose government is supine before the power of its criminal organizations which our gun industry has armed, we must reflect on the causes of this historic mass migration from Central America’s Dry Corridor of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; why is this happening, and what can be done to fix the problems which are driving it?

Drought and famine caused by global warming and climate change are clear immediate causes and triggering stressors of the current migration, as articulated by José García Escobar and Melisa Rabanales in The Guardian; “Martina García grinds just enough maize kernels to make a handful of tortillas which she serves to her children and grandson for breakfast with a sprinkling of salt.

García, 40, must ration the family’s last few sacks of tiny corncobs after drought and prolonged heatwaves linked to the climate emergency devastated crops across Guatemala.

As a result, record numbers of subsistence farming families are going hungry: health officials registered more than 15,300 cases of acute malnutrition in children under five last year – up nearly 24% from 2018. It’s the highest number of acute malnutrition cases since 2015, when a severe drought destroyed harvests across Central America.

Rural communities in the Dry Corridor – a region which stretches through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua – are bearing the brunt, with impoverished indigenous families like García’s in Jocotán, among the hardest hit.

“I’m lucky if I can find pumpkin flowers,” said the emaciated García. “But we mostly just eat tortillas.”

After an irregular rainy season and an unpromising harvest, almost 80% of maize grown in Guatemala’s highland region was lost, according to Oxfam. All that remains for many families are tiny corncobs studded with discoloured grains that look like rotten teeth.

In October 2109, a baby in a nearby community died after not eating for many days. At least 33,000 children need urgent medical treatment due to acute malnutrition, according to Oxfam Guatemala.

Central America is one of the world’s most dangerous regions outside a warzone, where a toxic mix of violence, poverty and corruption has forced millions to flee north in search of security.

Now, drought, famine and the battle for dwindling natural resources are increasingly being recognized as major factors in the exodus.

And it seems to be getting worse: 2019 was the driest year in a decade with only 65 days of rain, according to Guatemala’s National Institute of Seismology, Volcanology, Meteorology and Hydrology. Guatemala’s subsistence farmers depend on rainfall – which is increasingly erratic – and most lack alternative sources of water.

Around one million Guatemalans – 15% of the population – are currently unable to meet their daily food requirements, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).

Amid the growing threat of famine, almost 265,000 Guatemalans migrants searching for work, safety and food security were detained at the US southern border in 2019 – a 130% increase on the previous fiscal year.

Worsening hunger across the region is a factor in the rise in migrant caravans trying to reach the US overland, according to both analysts and migrants themselves.

The caravans have been met with repression and hostility by Mexican and American authorities who accuse the migrants and refugees of political subversion and criminality.

Hunger is not a new phenomenon in Guatemala: at least 60% of the population live in poverty, hundreds of thousands rely on food aid, and almost 50% of children suffer stunted physical and cognitive development due to chronic malnourishment.

But experts warn that the additional burden of extreme weather is overwhelming these communities, which have been long ignored and repressed by the government.

For García, the situation is desperate: food aid has yet to reach her canton, so once the maize runs out in March, she must find backbreaking work picking coffee – or else risk starvation. There’s no guarantee she’ll even find work, as a leaf-eating fungus known as roya – which thrives in warm conditions – has also devastated coffee crops.

García, who’s weak from chronic hunger, said: “I’ll get paid $4 a day. But if I pick less than 46kg, I won’t get paid.”

These conditions have worsened longstanding issues of endemic poverty and pervasive violence and criminality, legacies of historical colonialism and American imperialist and capitalist policies and interventions, which I have described in my post of September 4 2019; There is an interesting connection between the chaos we created in Central America which is driving a mass exodus of immigration to our borders and the conspiracy theory of Islamic replacement of Europeans which inspires white Christian Identity nationalism, our greatest terrorist threat today; many of the white supremacists who ruled Algeria as a colony of France, mainly former Nazi soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion after the end of World War Two, were after its fall in 1962 hired by the government of the United States to rule El Salvador and Guatemala as puppet regimes to protect our corporate profits.

With them came the same ideology and dream of a homeland and asylum for escaped Nazis, and a secure base of operations and launchpoint for the Fourth Reich, as with those who fled the fall of the colony of Algeria as a white ethnostate to France and blamed Charles de Gaulle for its abandonment, and whose descendants now form the core of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.

Among the direct effects of the secret partnership between America and our former Nazi adversaries include:

The 1954 seizure of Guatemala by Eisenhower’s CI.A., which replaced a Marxist who had seized land owned by United Fruit and redistributed it to Indian peasants with a furniture salesman from Honduras, Castillo Armas. During the course of this coup America bombed Guatemala City, killed 9,000 communists, disbanded the unions, drove off the squatters, drew up a blacklist of some 70,000 leftists, built death squads and secret prisons, gave torture and brigandage free reign, created an enduring political front, the MLN, and started making a profit from our plantations.

The 1961 seizure of Guatemala by C.I.A. officer Willauer leading 200 men, a Harvard lawyer who had flown as Chennault’s first officer with the Flying Tigers in China. Guatemala was the staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Throughout the 1960-63 period of a civil war which continued until 1996, America crushed a pro-Castro rebellion using six C.I.A. bombers, exiled Cuban shock troops, and Green Berets who used the opportunity to test counterinsurgency theories later used in Vietnam.

The 1974 accession of an officer of Armas named Alarcon to the Presidency of Guatemala, who institutionalized the MLN, declaring “I am a fascist, and I have tried to model my party on the Spanish Falange.” He was, of course, a C.I.A. agent. Nixon once brought him along on his annual pilgrimage to consult with what he called his spiritual advisor, the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.

The 1982 seizure of power and Presidency of Rios Montt, an evangelical Sunday school teacher and personal friend of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who suspended the constitution, replaced the courts with secret tribunals, escalated the scorched earth warfare, torture, and disappearances of his predecessors, and one thing more. During this the most terrible period of civil war throughout Central America, when Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were in fact a single nation ruled by remnants of the Nazis we had transplanted from French Algeria as American puppet regimes, and with the full authority of Ronald Reagan, Rios Montt weaponized Protestantism against encroaching Catholic Liberation theology.

During the 18 months of the Mayan Genocide, in which his death squads killed 3,000 people each month and annihilated 600 villages, he also instituted a system of forced labor in concentration camps modeled on the Apartheid system of South Africa and ruled by terror using former British police and Protestant Orange Militia units hired from Belfast, a mercenary force who had splendidly legal Hong Kong passports courtesy of the Thatcher government.

During over 35 years of civil war in Guatemala including Rios Montt’s genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native Indians, about half a million Indians were killed, over one million conscripted into military service and used against their own people, tens of thousands driven into Mexico as refugees, and most of the rest worked to death in the concentration camps. No American Army came to liberate them; they were not white, and no one cared so long as the profits flowed. Guatemala is America’s Belgian Congo; our heart of darkness.

I think of this every day as I eat my morning banana, for each one is the living form of a silent cry, the ghost of a tear, the memory of atrocity and horror, a thing like many others of fragile beauty and fleeting pleasure won by brutality and the theft of hope, pain and blood and death made manifest. For the dead and for wrongs past I can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged and the future that must be redeemed.

The 1981 founding of ARENA in El Salvador and the 1982-3 Presidency of Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, son of one of the original French Algerian OAS/Afrika Corps legionnaires and immigrants and leader of death squads since 1972, when he was trained at the US School of the Americas, often called a school for war criminals. During the peak of the civil war in 1983-84, about 8,000 people were killed every month in El Salvador.

The 1963-75 Honduran coup and military dictatorship of Arellano, for whose regime the term Banana Republic was coined, and of course the conduct of the Contra War beginning in 1980, which included the 1984 Honduran invasion of Nicaragua supported by 5,500 American troops.

Together Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were ruled for over a generation by America through our puppet tyrants and the ARENA and MLN parties we created. But there is more; much more, of which I will mention only four more brief examples here.

The 1964-85 rule of Brazil by the Arena Party and its legacy of torture and state terror which was ended by the total bankruptcy of the nation due to policies of privatization, deregulation, and corruption as exported by the Chicago Boys to Latin America generally as imperialist economic warfare.

The 1976 military coup in Argentina and the civil war which followed, during which some 20,000 persons were disappeared. Of our earlier involvements; Peron had been a protégé of Franco and Mussolini, and Evita was assassinated not by us but by Vatican Intelligence with radiation poisoning due to Peron’s campaign against the Church. The Vatican also ran the Swiss escape route used by Otto Skorzeny and other SS officers at the fall of the Third Reich whom we later hired. The most brazen flattery I have ever heard directed toward Oliver North was to compare him to Skorzeny.

The 1973 assassination of Allende in Chile and support of the monstrous Pinochet regime which killed as many as one in every hundred of its citizens.

Regarding Mexico, we long ago seized Texas and California, drew a line in the sand to weaponize disparity and create a mass resource of illegal and therefore exploitable quasi slave labor, and now call aliens everyone on the wrong side of it who comes here to pick the fruit, wash the dishes, and clean the toilets that our own nephews and nieces, children and grandchildren, would laugh in your face at the suggestion they get their hands dirty doing themselves.

Fascism is a sin of pride whose effects reverberate still, propagating outward in ever-widening circles as a force of contagion like the ripples of a stone cast into a pond. And we are all complicit in it, who call ourselves Americans.

We must make a better future than we have the past.

Operation Condor and the Pinochet regime, a reading list

The Condor Years: How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism To Three Continents, John Dinges

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/168270.The_Condor_Years?ref=rae_0

Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America, J. Patrice McSherry

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2039051.Predatory_States?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=hZRIZKu2IY&rank=1

Soldiers in a Narrow Land: The Pinochet Regime in Chile, Mary Helen Spooner

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4585482-soldiers-in-a-narrow-land?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Xc85TSFqze&rank=41

Chile: The Pinochet Decade: The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Boys, Phil O’Brien,

Jackie Roddick

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1358936.Chile?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Xc85TSFqze&rank=26

General Histories and Current Events

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent,

Eduardo Galeano, Isabel Allende (Introduction)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/187149.Open_Veins_of_Latin_America?ref=rae_19

The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now, Alma Guillermoprieto

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243148.The_Heart_That_Bleeds

Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America, Alma Guillermoprieto

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/361877.Looking_for_History

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/07/guatemala-hunger-famine-flee-north.

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/operation-condor-cia-latin-america-repression-torture

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/04/greg-grandin-empires-workshop-2021-edition-review-latin-america-us-policy/

https://time.com/5951532/migration-factors/

Spanish

6 de abril de 2025 Cómo el imperialismo estadounidense creó nuestra crisis humanitaria en la frontera: consecuencias de la Operación Cóndor

Este abril se cumplen cuarenta y nueve años de que Estados Unidos lanzó la Operación Cóndor, una campaña global para desestabilizar y reprimir gobiernos y movimientos socialistas, emprender la conquista y el dominio imperial, imponer y hacer cumplir el capitalismo como sistema hegemónico y autorizar e institucionalizar a sus principales depredadores y sus jerarquías de élite. de riqueza, poder y privilegios.

Esto sigue siendo relevante para nosotros hoy porque es el origen de muchas de las fuerzas de empuje que impulsan oleadas de refugiados hacia nuestra frontera, y de la horrible crisis humanitaria y prueba de nuestra democracia creada por el imperialismo estadounidense.

Migración es una palabra que oculta tanto las condiciones que la desencadenan como nuestra propia complicidad en crearlas como consecuencia de nuestras décadas de políticas de colonialismo, aventurerismo militar anticomunista y guerra económica, política y cultural; devastación ecológica con su sequía, plagas, inundaciones y hambrunas, la sexta era de extinción y muerte de los mares, pobreza, esclavitud y desestabilización social y política, una era de tiranía y terror estatal, genocidio y limpieza étnica, fe armada y su terror sexual patriarcal y guerras multigeneracionales.

En términos de refugiados que huyen a Estados Unidos en busca de seguridad y supervivencia, así como de libertad e igualdad, estamos hablando principalmente de Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua, aunque la zona infernal de Colombia y Venezuela ahora representa a muchos, y con el colapso de la región central autoridad en México y su degeneración en una región de señores de la guerra, oligarcas y sindicatos del crimen feudal, tenemos refugiados del propio México, así como trabajadores estacionales tradicionales.

A nivel mundial tenemos refugiados de guerras imperiales de dominio, genocidios y colapso de civilizaciones, armados por tiranos para hacer que Europa se dirija hacia regímenes fascistas, principalmente por Turquía, el principal aliado regional de Estados Unidos, en el conflicto de Erdogan con Rusia por el dominio de Siria y Libia, del que surgió la Tercera Guerra Mundial. Ahora en curso en diez teatros de conflicto, una estrategia establecida por el modelo estadounidense de Operación Cóndor que creó las condiciones para la captura del Partido Republicano en 1980 y luego de Estados Unidos con las Elecciones Robadas de 2016 por el Cuarto Reich.

El trabajo migrante es trabajo esclavo; Esta es la gran verdad que Estados Unidos nunca ha enfrentado y por la que ahora debe responder ante las masas que sufren en nuestra frontera. Sectores enteros de nuestra economía funcionan con él; agricultura en la que la mano de obra se convierte en un recurso estratégico mientras nos morimos de hambre sin ella, pero también el cuidado de niños y ancianos, la hospitalidad y algunas manufacturas. La riqueza y el poder de Estados Unidos son creados para nosotros por otros a quienes exportamos los costos reales de producción, otros que deben permanecer invisibles y explotables como mano de obra ilegal no regulada para exprimirles hasta el último gramo de valor para nuestras elites. De esta manera utilizamos la disparidad económica como arma al servicio del poder y los privilegios, y creamos y mantenemos jerarquías de alteridad excluyente y supremacía blanca.

En este año electoral crucial de importancia histórica mundial, que creo determinará el destino de la humanidad durante los próximos siglos y nos ofrece posibles futuros de una Era de Tiranía o de una Humanidad Unida, la cuestión de la inmigración estará entre las cuestiones binarias elecciones que continuarán informando, motivando y dando forma al ser humano, su significado y su valor.

Los intereses de las hegemonías de riqueza y poder de las élites convergen aquí con los del privilegio racial y la supremacía blanca en una toxicidad histórica, en paralelo con el surgimiento del estado carcelario y la policía militarizada como instrumento para volver a esclavizar a los ciudadanos negros como trabajadores penitenciarios y la represión del Movimiento por los Derechos Civiles, y lo han hecho desde sus orígenes. Uno de esos puntos de origen es la apropiación, el ocultamiento y la instrumentalización por parte de Estados Unidos de los criminales de guerra nazis en la represión de la disidencia y la conquista del mundo.

El Cuarto Reich del que Trump es una figura decorativa no surgió de la nada como Atenea de la cabeza de Zeus, sino que fue una invención del imperialismo estadounidense. Como tal, su historia y su carácter como amenaza global a la democracia pueden estudiarse en la crisis de refugiados y migraciones que ha dado origen, y en los legados del uso del fascismo por parte de nuestra nación como instrumento de dominio en las Américas y en todas partes del mundo. la tierra, porque así como la usábamos para conquistar a otros, ella nos estaba usando a nosotros para apoderarnos de los Estados Unidos de América y del mundo.

Como escribí en mi publicación del 18 de febrero de 2020, Guatemala: Nuestro Corazón de Tinieblas; Mientras secuestramos y encerramos a refugiados en campos de concentración y prisiones secretas, y expulsamos a otros de regreso a un México cuyo gobierno está inactivo ante el poder de sus organizaciones criminales, debemos reflexionar sobre las causas de esta histórica migración masiva desde el Corredor Seco de Guatemala en Centroamérica. , El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua; ¿Por qué sucede esto y qué se puede hacer para solucionar el problema?

¿Problemas que lo están impulsando?

La sequía y la hambruna causadas por el calentamiento global y el cambio climático son causas inmediatas claras y factores estresantes desencadenantes de la migración actual, como lo expresaron José García Escobar y Melisa Rabanales en The Guardian; “Martina García muele suficientes granos de maíz para hacer un puñado de tortillas que sirve a sus hijos y a su nieto en el desayuno con un poco de sal.

García, de 40 años, debe racionar los últimos sacos de diminutas mazorcas de maíz de la familia después de que la sequía y las prolongadas olas de calor relacionadas con la emergencia climática devastaran los cultivos en toda Guatemala.

Como resultado, un número récord de familias de agricultores de subsistencia pasan hambre: los funcionarios de salud registraron más de 15.300 casos de desnutrición aguda en niños menores de cinco años el año pasado, casi un 24% más que en 2018. Es el número más alto de casos de desnutrición aguda desde 2015, cuando Una grave sequía destruyó las cosechas en toda Centroamérica.

Las comunidades rurales del Corredor Seco –una región que se extiende a lo largo de Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua– son las más afectadas, y las familias indígenas empobrecidas como la de García en Jocotán se encuentran entre las más afectadas.

“Tengo suerte si puedo encontrar flores de calabaza”, dijo el demacrado García. “Pero la mayoría de las veces solo comemos tortillas”.

Según Oxfam, después de una temporada de lluvias irregular y una cosecha poco prometedora, casi el 80% del maíz cultivado en la región montañosa de Guatemala se perdió. Lo único que les queda a muchas familias son pequeñas mazorcas de maíz salpicadas de granos descoloridos que parecen dientes podridos.

En octubre de 2109, un bebé de una comunidad cercana murió después de no comer durante muchos días. Al menos 33.000 niños necesitan tratamiento médico urgente debido a la desnutrición aguda, según Oxfam Guatemala.

Centroamérica es una de las regiones más peligrosas del mundo fuera de una zona de guerra, donde una mezcla tóxica de violencia, pobreza y corrupción ha obligado a millones de personas a huir al norte en busca de seguridad.

Ahora, la sequía, la hambruna y la batalla por los menguantes recursos naturales se reconocen cada vez más como factores importantes del éxodo.

Y parece estar empeorando: 2019 fue el año más seco en una década con solo 65 días de lluvia, según el Instituto Nacional de Sismología, Vulcanología, Meteorología e Hidrología de Guatemala. Los agricultores de subsistencia de Guatemala dependen de las precipitaciones –que son cada vez más erráticas– y la mayoría carece de fuentes alternativas de agua.

Según el Programa Mundial de Alimentos (PMA), alrededor de un millón de guatemaltecos (el 15% de la población) actualmente no pueden satisfacer sus necesidades alimentarias diarias.

En medio de la creciente amenaza de hambruna, casi 265.000 migrantes guatemaltecos que buscaban trabajo, seguridad y seguridad alimentaria fueron detenidos en la frontera sur de Estados Unidos en 2019, un aumento del 130% con respecto al año fiscal anterior.

El empeoramiento del hambre en la región es un factor en el aumento de las caravanas de migrantes que intentan llegar a Estados Unidos por tierra, según analistas y los propios migrantes.

Las caravanas han sido recibidas con represión y hostilidad por parte de las autoridades mexicanas y estadounidenses, que acusan a los migrantes y refugiados de subversión política y criminalidad.

El hambre no es un fenómeno nuevo en Guatemala: al menos el 60% de la población vive en la pobreza, cientos de miles dependen de la ayuda alimentaria y casi el 50% de los niños sufren un retraso en su desarrollo físico y cognitivo debido a la desnutrición crónica.

Pero los expertos advierten que la carga adicional del clima extremo está abrumando a estas comunidades, que durante mucho tiempo han sido ignoradas y reprimidas por el gobierno.

Para García, la situación es desesperada: la ayuda alimentaria aún no ha llegado a su cantón, por lo que una vez que se acabe el maíz en marzo, deberá encontrar un trabajo agotador recogiendo café, o correr el riesgo de morir de hambre. No hay garantía de que encuentre trabajo, ya que un hongo que se alimenta de hojas conocido como roya, que prospera en condiciones cálidas, también ha devastado los cultivos de café.

García, que está débil por el hambre crónica, dijo: “Me pagarán 4 dólares al día. Pero si recojo menos de 46 kg, no me pagarán”.

Estas condiciones han empeorado problemas de larga data de pobreza endémica y violencia y criminalidad generalizadas, legados del colonialismo histórico y de las políticas e intervenciones imperialistas y capitalistas estadounidenses, que describí en mi publicación del 4 de septiembre de 2019; Existe una conexión interesante entre el caos que creamos en Centroamérica, que está provocando un éxodo masivo de inmigración a nuestras fronteras, y la teoría de la conspiración del reemplazo islámico de los europeos que inspira nuestra mayor amenaza terrorista hoy; Muchos de los supremacistas blancos que gobernaron Argelia como colonia de Francia, principalmente ex soldados nazis que se unieron a la Legión Extranjera después del final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, fueron contratados después de su caída en 1962 por el gobierno de los Estados Unidos para gobernar El Salvador y Guatemala como regímenes títeres para proteger nuestras ganancias corporativas.

Con ellos vino la misma ideología y el mismo sueño de una patria y asilo para los nazis fugitivos, y una base segura de operaciones y punto de lanzamiento para el Cuarto Reich, como ocurre con aquellos que huyeron de la caída de la colonia de Argelia como etnoestado blanco a Francia y culparon a Charles de Gaulle por su abandono, y cuyos descendientes ahora forman el núcleo del Frente Nacional de Jean-Marie Le Pen. .

Entre los efectos directos de la asociación secreta entre Estados Unidos y nuestros antiguos adversarios nazis se incluyen:

La toma de Guatemala en 1954 por la CIA de Eisenhower, que reemplazó a un marxista que se había apoderado de tierras propiedad de la United Fruit y las redistribuyó entre campesinos indios con un vendedor de muebles de Honduras, Castillo Armas. Durante el curso de este golpe, Estados Unidos bombardeó la ciudad de Guatemala, mató a 9.000 comunistas, disolvió los sindicatos, expulsó a los ocupantes ilegales, elaboró una lista negra de unos 70.000 izquierdistas, construyó escuadrones de la muerte y prisiones secretas, dio rienda suelta a la tortura y el bandolerismo, creó una sociedad duradera. frente político, el MLN, y empezamos a sacar provecho de nuestras plantaciones.

La toma de Guatemala en 1961 por la C.I.A. El oficial Willauer al frente de 200 hombres, un abogado de Harvard que había volado como primer oficial de Chennault con los Flying Tigers en China. Guatemala fue el escenario de la invasión de Bahía de Cochinos a Cuba. A lo largo del período 1960-63 de una guerra civil que continuó hasta 1996, Estados Unidos aplastó una rebelión pro Castro utilizando seis agentes de la CIA. bombarderos, tropas de choque cubanas exiliadas y boinas verdes que aprovecharon la oportunidad para probar teorías de contrainsurgencia utilizadas más tarde en Vietnam.

El ascenso en 1974 de un oficial de Armas llamado Alarcón a la Presidencia de Guatemala, quien institucionalizó el MLN, declarando “Soy un fascista y he tratado de modelar mi partido según la Falange Española”. Era, por supuesto, un agente de la CIA. agente. Nixon lo llevó una vez a su peregrinación anual para consultar con lo que llamó su consejero espiritual, el infame criminal de guerra nazi Josef Mengele.

La toma del poder y la presidencia en 1982 de Ríos Montt, un maestro evangélico de escuela dominical y amigo personal de Jerry Falwell y Pat Robertson, quien suspendió la constitución, reemplazó las cortes por tribunales secretos, intensificó la guerra de tierra arrasada, la tortura y las desapariciones de sus predecesores y una cosa más. Durante este, el período más terrible de la guerra civil en toda Centroamérica, cuando Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras eran de hecho una sola nación gobernada por restos de los nazis que habíamos trasplantado de la Argelia francesa como regímenes títeres estadounidenses, y con la plena autoridad de Ronald Reagan y Ríos Montt utilizaron al protestantismo como arma contra la invasión de la teología católica de la liberación.

Durante los 18 meses del genocidio maya, en el que sus escuadrones de la muerte mataron a 3.000 personas cada mes y aniquilaron 600 aldeas, también instituyó un sistema de trabajos forzados en campos de concentración inspirados en el sistema de apartheid de Sudáfrica y gobernados por el terror utilizando a antiguos británicos. unidades de policía y de la Milicia Naranja Protestante contratadas en Belfast, una fuerza mercenaria que tenía pasaportes de Hong Kong espléndidamente legales, cortesía del gobierno de Thatcher.

Durante más de 35 años de guerra civil en Guatemala, incluida la campaña genocida de limpieza étnica de Ríos Montt contra los indios nativos, alrededor de medio millón de indios fueron asesinados, más de un millón fueron reclutados para el servicio militar y utilizados contra su propio pueblo, y decenas de miles fueron expulsados a México. como refugiados, y la mayoría del resto trabajó hasta morir en los campos de concentración. Ningún ejército americano vino a liberarlos; no eran blancos y a nadie le importaba mientras las ganancias fluyeran. Guatemala es el Congo belga de Estados Unidos; nuestro corazón de oscuridad.

Pienso en esto todos los días mientras como mi plátano matutino, porque cada uno es la forma viva de un llanto silencioso, el fantasma de una lágrima, el recuerdo de la atrocidad y el horror, algo como muchos otros de frágil belleza y fugaz placer conquistado. por la brutalidad y el robo de la esperanza, el dolor, la sangre y la muerte se manifiestan. Por los muertos y por los agravios del pasado nada puedo hacer; son los vivos quienes deben ser vengados y el futuro el que debe ser redimido.

La fundación de ARENA en El Salvador en 1981 y la presidencia entre 1982 y 1983 de Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, hijo de uno de los legionarios e inmigrantes originales del Cuerpo Africano/OEA argelino francés y líder de escuadrones de la muerte desde 1972, cuando fue entrenado en el Escuela de las Américas de Estados Unidos, a menudo llamada escuela para criminales de guerra. Durante el pico de la guerra civil en 1983-84, alrededor de 8.000 personas fueron asesinadas cada mes en El Salvador.

El golpe de estado hondureño de 1963-75 y la dictadura militar de Arellano, para cuyo régimen se acuñó el término República Bananera, y, por supuesto, la conducción de la Guerra de la Contra a partir de 1980, que incluyó la invasión hondureña de Nicaragua en 1984, apoyada por 5.500 tropas estadounidenses.

Juntos, Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras fueron gobernados durante más de una generación por Estados Unidos a través de nuestros tiranos títeres y los partidos ARENA y MLN que creamos. Pero hay más; mucho más, de los cuales mencionaré aquí sólo cuatro breves ejemplos más.

El gobierno de Brasil de 1964-85 por el Partido Arena y su legado de tortura y terror estatal que terminó con la bancarrota total de la nación debido a las políticas de privatización, desregulación y corrupción exportadas por los Chicago Boys a América Latina en general como Guerra económica imperialista.

El golpe militar de 1976 en Argentina y la guerra civil que le siguió, durante la cual desaparecieron unas 20.000 personas. De nuestras participaciones anteriores; Perón había sido un protegido de Franco y Mussolini, y Evita fue asesinada no por nosotros sino por la Inteligencia del Vaticano con envenenamiento por radiación debido a la campaña de Perón contra la Iglesia. El Vaticano también dirigió la ruta de escape suiza utilizada por Otto Skorzeny y otros oficiales de las SS durante la caída del Tercer Reich a quienes contratamos más tarde. El halago más descarado que he oído jamás dirigido a Oliver North fue compararlo con Skorzeny.

El asesinato de Allende en Chile en 1973 y el apoyo al monstruoso régimen de Pinochet que mató a uno de cada cien de sus ciudadanos.

En cuanto a México, hace mucho tiempo nos apoderamos de Texas y California, trazamos una línea en la arena para convertir la disparidad en un arma y crear un recurso masivo de mano de obra cuasi esclava ilegal y, por lo tanto, explotable, y ahora llamamos extranjeros a todos los que están en el lado equivocado y vienen aquí a elegir. la fruta, lavar los platos y limpiar los baños que nuestros propios sobrinos y sobrinas, hijos y nietos, se reirían en tu cara ante la sugerencia de que se ensucien las manos haciéndolo ellos mismos.

El fascismo es un pecado de orgullo cuyos efectos todavía reverberan, propagándose hacia afuera en círculos cada vez más amplios como una fuerza de contagio como las ondas de una piedra arrojada a un estanque. Y de ello somos cómplices todos los que nos llamamos americanos.

Debemos crear un futuro mejor que el pasado.

April 6, 2025 0

April 5 2025 National Day of Protest and Mass Action Against the Trump Regime

A list of everything about Trump and his aberrant regime which is subhuman, degenerate, villainous, ridiculous and horrific would be an endless litany of woes and lamentations, a song of how far a man can fall from the limits of the human into bottomless chasms of darkness.

Trump begins as a thing consumed utterly and hollowed out by vices of pride and vanity, depravities and perversions, psychotic rages driven by Nazi ideologies of hate, and shaped by amoral nihilism and strange obsessions.

All of this and so much more is enacted now by his regime of sycophantic minions and grifters, like a freak show ruled by an evil clown which can be represented by JD Vance the Bearded Lady and Fake Jethro who believes in nothing and wishes only to gather the scraps of wealth and power like a remora riding a shark and who is willing to lie and show his belly to his master like Trump’s dog as are so many of the Party of Treason’s members of Congress, Pete Hegseth the Tattooed Man and Christian Identity nationalist who wishes to perform the Inquisition in America and the Crusades beyond our shores, and Elon Musk the Troll King who intends to destroy the state entirely and replace it with a fascist corporate hegemony free from ideas of humanity and the good in a Dark Enlightenment regime of profits before people. Then there are the Deplorables who are their voters, who may be represented by the zombified Kennedy who claims his brain was eaten by a worm and whose lunatic delusions decide our national healthcare policy; a mad idiot whose Pythian pronouncements determine the life or death of his mad idiot followers.

Today we seize the streets of our nation in over 1300 mass protests and the direct actions which will unfold in their shadows, in protest against the Trump regime and its mission of the subversion of democracy and theft of our citizenship and our humanity.

To the Trump regime and the Party of Treason’s Theatre of Cruelty we say No!

Let us give to fascist tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!

Join us.

Hands Off

https://handsoff2025.com/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJeSsJleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHiaGd0NdOmF-RW-Ett7fx4ekktJOsRF4vjTt8HgDeo9HoQkoqgdtaAurHz-L_aem_TIu_ieEl9L9AO8sf_zoU-A

The Second Trump Regime Thus Far

January 21 2025 Horror On Opening Night As Deranged Idiot Clown Show Returns to White House

January 21 2025 Horror On Opening Night As Deranged Idiot Clown Show Returns to White House

January 23 2025 We Have Our First Hero Of The Resistance To The Second Trump Regime, Now Called The Enshittification, Truth Teller Bishop Mariann Budde

January 23 2025 We Have Our First Hero Of The Resistance To The Second Trump Regime, Now Called The Enshittification, Truth Teller Bishop Mariann Budde

January 24 2025 The Six Coup Attempts of Traitor Trump; a Retrospective

January 24 2025 The Six Coup Attempts of Traitor Trump; a Retrospective

January 30 2025 Anniversary of The Return of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Most Successful Russian Agent to Ever Attack America, Figurehead of the Fourth Reich in the Global Subversion of Democracy, and Now Once Again Our Rapist In Chief, Who Began His 2024 Presidential Campaign on this the Anniversary of His Idol Hitler’s Seizure of Power as Chancellor of Germany

January 30 2025 Anniversary of The Return of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Most Successful Russian Agent to Ever Attack America, Figurehead of the Fourth Reich in the Global Subversion of Democracy, and Now Once Again Our Rapist In Chief, Who Began His 2024 Presidential Campaign on this the Anniversary of His Idol Hitler’s Seizure of Power as Chancellor of Germany

January 31 2025 Trump Unfurls His Tongue of Lies

January 31 2025 Trump Unfurls His Tongue of Lies

February 6 2025 We Rise and Resist: We Seize the Streets In Mass Actions and Protests Throughout America Against Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and Closure of US Aid, Against Musk the Troll King’s Information Warfare, and Against Capture and Dismantling of the State By the Fourth Reich

February 6 2025 We Rise and Resist: We Seize the Streets In Mass Actions and Protests Throughout America Against Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and Closure of US Aid, Against Musk the Troll King’s Information Warfare, and Against Capture and Dismantling of the State By the Fourth Reich

February 7 2025 Troll King Elon Musk and the Great American Bank Robbery: the Theft of Our Private Records As Hostage Taking, Information Warfare, and Subversion of Democracy

February 7 2025 Troll King Elon Musk and the Great American Bank Robbery: the Theft of Our Private Records As Hostage Taking, Information Warfare, and Subversion of Democracy

February 8 2025 Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians

February 8 2025 Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians

February 10 2025 Resist ICE By Any Means Necessary; If They Come For One Of Us, Let Them Be Met With All Of Us

February 10 2025 Resist ICE By Any Means Necessary; If They Come For One Of Us, Let Them Be Met With All Of Us

February 16 2025 Anniversary of Judgement In the Trump Organization Civil Trial: New York Casts Out the Trump Crime Family

February 16 2025 Anniversary of Judgement In the Trump Organization Civil Trial: New York Casts Out the Trump Crime Family

February 17 2025 Among the Best and the Worst of Us: Our Presidents as Symbols and Figures of the American Soul, and Our Glorious Mass Actions and Protests In All Fifty Of Our State Capitals On This Day Against the Trump Regime’s Campaign To Destroy Our Democracy

February 17 2025 Among the Best and the Worst of Us: Our Presidents as Symbols and Figures of the American Soul, and Our Glorious Mass Actions and Protests In All Fifty Of Our State Capitals On This Day Against the Trump Regime’s Campaign To Destroy Our Democracy

February 23 2025 How It All Began; World War Three, the Capture of America and the Subversion of Democracy by Traitor Trump and the Fourth Reich, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and the Fall of Civilization

February 23 2025 How It All Began; World War Three, the Capture of America and the Subversion of Democracy by Traitor Trump and the Fourth Reich, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and the Fall of Civilization

February 28 2025 On this Day of National General Boycott of Trump Co Conspirators In Fascist Tyranny and Terror and the Subversion of Democracy, Let Us Bring A Reckoning To Those Who Would Enslave Us In Honor Of Mangione the Avenger

February 28 2025 On this Day of National General Boycott of Trump Co Conspirators In Fascist Tyranny and Terror and the Subversion of Democracy, Let Us Bring A Reckoning To Those Who Would Enslave Us In Honor Of Mangione the Avenger

March 4 2025 Anniversary of Our Supreme Court Putting Trump, An Insurrectionist, Russian Agent, and Nazi Revivalist Who Conspired In the Murders of Police Officers and Attempted Hanging and Guillotining of Members of Congress, On Our Election Ballots

March 4 2025 Anniversary of Our Supreme Court Putting Trump, An Insurrectionist, Russian Agent, and Nazi Revivalist Who Conspired In the Murders of Police Officers and Attempted Hanging and Guillotining of Members of Congress, On Our Election Ballots

March 5 2025 Trump Is An Illusion Made Of Lies, But How Is He Constructed and How Can He Be Unmade? Case of Trump’s Address to Congress

March 5 2025 Trump Is An Illusion Made Of Lies, But How Is He Constructed and How Can He Be Unmade? Case of Trump’s Address to Congress

March 6 2025 A Russian Agent Whose Mission Is the Subversion of Democracy Unmasks Himself In the Trump-Zelenskyy Incident

March 6 2025 A Russian Agent Whose Mission Is the Subversion of Democracy Unmasks Himself In the Trump-Zelenskyy Incident

March 11 2025 Free Speech Versus State Sponsorship of Genocide and Repression of Dissent: Case of Mahmoud Khalil

March 11 2025 Free Speech Versus State Sponsorship of Genocide and Repression of Dissent: Case of Mahmoud Khalil

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

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

March 25 2025 An Outrageous and Pathetic Clown Show: Case of the Trump Regime War Secrets Shared With The Atlantic On the Eve of Battle

March 25 2025 An Outrageous and Pathetic Clown Show: Case of the Trump Regime War Secrets Shared With The Atlantic On the Eve of Battle

March 29 2025 A Two Front War Against Democracy In Palestine and America: the Case of Rumeysa Ozturk

March 29 2025 A Two Front War Against Democracy In Palestine and America: the Case of Rumeysa Ozturk

April 2 2025 Hope For Changing of the Tides: Warnock Shames Trump Regime and Wisconsin Renounces Elon Musk’s Efforts to Buy Our Elections

April 2 2025 Hope For Changing of the Tides: Warnock Shames Trump Regime and Wisconsin Renounces Elon Musk’s Efforts to Buy Our Elections

April 3 2025 Trump’s Liberation From Prosperity Day Signals the Second Great Depression and the Fall of Global Human Civilization

April 3 2025 Trump’s Liberation From Prosperity Day Signals the Second Great Depression and the Fall of Global Human Civilization

April 5, 2025 0

April 4 2025 How Can We Live the Truth Taught to Us By Martin Luther King?

On this anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King by agents of the American government, we re-evaluate how we can honor the truths he revealed and bore witness to, and bring meaning to the sacrifices of our martyred sacred dead.

For myself and possibly for us all, the meaning of this as a signifier of our shared history which binds us together as a nation has been forever changed by its connection with one of the most important trials in American history, which links Martin Luther King with George Floyd and with every Black American murdered, tortured, re-enslaved as prison labor, and marginalized, silenced, and erased by the carceral state and its forces of repression and white supremacist terror.

How can we bear forward his message and live the truth he taught us?

America watched aghast and hypnotized at the litany of evils exposed by the George Floyd trial, our shock, grief, and rage at the complicity of our police in racist violence comparable to that of the Nuremberg Trial, as a secret truth becomes horrifyingly clear; our America, our government and its institutions and structures, and our broader sociocultural systems which form their context, has become the enemy America was founded to defend us from.

And while this national reckoning plays out, the Party of Treason enacts laws to silence the voices of the people with vote suppression in a panicked and last-ditch effort to maintain an elite hegemony of white power and privilege, and the killology of the police proceeds unimpeded.

A Kafka-esque absurdity of the trial of George Floyd’s murderer, a policeman whose family name gave us the word chauvinism, is the claim of the defense that the authorization of kneeling on the breathing passage of handcuffed prisoners in the official training manual of the police absolves police of murder in its use. It is instead damning proof of institutional torture and murder, and all police officers who have accepted employment under the direction of a torture and murder manual are complicit in its crimes, as are all bureaucrats, administrators, and elected officials who have with these rules and procedures authorized and legitimized a culture of racist killology and sciences of death and terror.

Our police are a cult of death, a criminal syndicate, and an instrument of white supremacist terror.

Within our police, criminal syndicates and networks of white supremacist infiltration rule our cities in feudal dominion, acting from within the shield of immunity which has made police an unaccountable and independent force of repression of dissent, racist violence, and state terror since the origins of police forces in slavecatching and the founding of the carceral state as a system for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor.

Abolition and disarmament of the police, prison abolition and justice system reform, and control of gun violence are three linked issues of racial justice and equality, which we can honor the memory of Martin Luther King in action to achieve.

Let this be the last year in which the police and other forces of state terror and tyranny can assassinate and murder our citizens with authorized immunity as instruments of elite wealth, power, and privilege.

Who bears arms bears death, and who does so with badges and the authorization of the state as its enforcers of inequality and tyranny also bears terror.

Choose life, and a free society of equals.

As I wrote in my post of April 4 2020, America’s Racist Death Squads: How Prosecutors and the Police Enact Ethnic Cleansing; On this the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, iconic figure of liberty and Gandhian nonviolent resistance, my thoughts turn to the distance we have yet to go to achieve his dream of a just society undivided by race.

There is no betrayal of public trust more terrible than that of those with whom we entrust our security and justice; police shootings, the unchecked power of the Prosecutor’s office in the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor, and a racialized system of justice designed to enact white supremacist terror and ethnic cleansing runs on and on, undisturbed by mass protests and national political action.

The school to prison pipeline itself is prejudicial and an innate public harm, corrupting and subverting key institutions of public service into a malign shadow state through the counterinsurgency model of policing, which enculturates officers to respond to any disturbances of civil order as if all criminals were terrorists.

By such means has our vast bureaucracy of courts, police, Homeland Security, and other assets armed with guns and legal writs been turned from the cause of our protection from unequal power to that of our subjugation to it, from a guarantor of our democracy and equality to an instrument of state terror, and to the insidious, pervasive, and endemic evil of the re-enslavement of our Black citizens.

And this we must resist.

The Other America: Martin Luther King Speaks

Transcript of The Other America

Martin Luther King Jnr’s “The Other America” speech reflects on America’s failure to grapple with its original sin of anti Black racism

Selma film trailer

Inspiring Scenes from the film Selma

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/04/mlk-martin-luther-king-poor-peoples-campaign

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/martin-luther-king-mlk-nonviolence-direct-action-protests

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/police-riot-brutality-george-floyd-protests

https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history/?fbclid=IwAR0jePj01BREhWuxt0aQZvKvI3ziEtyMQBxwnLKTDoWPuzSqgNkRe531gkk

Martin Luther King, a reading list

A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches, by Martin Luther King Jr., James Melvin Washington (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53360.A_Testament_of_Hope?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=XzrYKm5FqU&rank=1

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., by Martin Luther King Jr., Clayborne Carson (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42547.The_Autobiography_of_Martin_Luther_King_Jr_?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Wgist9qwec&rank=7

The Martin Luther King, Jr., Encyclopedia, by Clayborne Carson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2657092-the-martin-luther-king-jr-encyclopedia?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Wgist9qwec&rank=18

Martin’s Dream: My Journey and the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.,

by Clayborne Carson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15794242-martin-s-dream?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Wgist9qwec&rank=9

America in the King Years Series, Taylor Branch

https://www.goodreads.com/series/65742-america-in-the-king-years

His Truth Is Marching on: John Lewis and the Power of Hope, Jon Meacham, John Lewis (Afterword)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15794242-martin-s-dream?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Wgist9qwec&rank=9

April 4, 2025 0

April 3 2025 Trump’s Liberation From Prosperity Day Signals the Second Great Depression and the Fall of Global Human Civilization

Among the recursive forces at work in the disaster now unfolding are the consequences of the death struggle of capitalism in its terminal phase, when all wealth flows to the apex predators in the top one percent, as capitalism begins to collapse from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions and attempts to free itself from its host political system, which fuels the subversion of democracy as it transforms into totalitarian forms of autocracy and tyranny.

This explains the Trump regime, but also the political, social, and economic trajectory of the whole death phase of democracy since the capture of the Republican Party in 1980 by the theocratic Christian Identity nationalism of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and its figurehead Ronald Reagan.

Here I must signpost that this period of our death spiral, which in some ways parallels that of the late Roman Republic before it became an empire, includes the disaster of the Patriot Act and the Third Imperial Phase of American history as hegemonic elites weaponized the 911 tragedy to centralize all power to a police state through militarization and the counterinsurgency model of policing leveraged by technology as pervasive surveillance, big data, propaganda and information warfare waged by the state against its own citizens.

Together our twin disasters of centralization of wealth and power to the ruling class and the state have combined horrifically to produce the aberrant Trump regime which conspires to utterly destroy the institutions of democracy, and the situation we now face, balancing on an ever-narrower wall on the edge of an Abyss.

And as Nietzsche warns, the Abyss has begun to look back at us.

As written by Callum Jones in The Guardian in an article entitled Liberation from what? Trump promised lower prices – his tariffs risk the opposite; “For weeks, Donald Trump and his aides sought to brand Wednesday as “liberation day” in America. Many in the US could be forgiven for wondering what exactly they’ve just been liberated from.

After much hype, the president unveiled his plan for a new era in global trade: a blanket 10% tariff on goods imported into the US starting Saturday, and higher “reciprocal” tariffs (of up to 49%) on countries taxing US exports starting next Wednesday.

“April 2nd 2025 will be forever remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again,” according to Trump.

Historians will be the judge of that. But before anyone writes this chapter, millions of Americans need to navigate the present.

Trump was re-elected last November after years of heightened inflation, and upward pressure on the cost of living. On the campaign trail he pledged, repeatedly and unambiguously, to rapidly liberate the nation from higher prices.

But tariffs, his administration has conceded, risk doing the opposite. The treasury secretary recently dismissed cheap goods as “not the essence of the American dream” after acknowledging that costs may rise as a result of Trump’s aggressive trade strategy: music to the ears of anyone seeking liberation from lower prices.

Anyone sitting in the White House Rose Garden might be reassured. “Prices are way down,” the president has claimed, since his return to office.

Anyone who has visited a grocery store in that time might feel differently. Most prices have, in fact, not fallen since January; inflation is still rising well above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2% per year.

“Now it’s our turn to prosper,” he proclaimed. But many US firms are bracing for problematic, not prosperous, effects of this action: higher costs they warn will be passed on to their customers.

“What we have heard from business of all sizes, across all industries, from around the country is that these broad tariffs are a tax increase that will raise prices for American consumers and hurt the economy,” said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the US Chamber of Commerce, the corporate lobby group.

Trump likes to present the world as black and white. The US is either winning or losing. A policy, deal or plan is the best or the worst. A person, country or company is supporting or screwing you.

There is rarely space for nuance, time for complexity or tolerance for inconvenient facts. The simplicity of this narrative is its power.

By Trump’s telling, the US is about to raise trillions of dollars for the federal government by taxing the world, not its citizens: a typically black-and-white choice.

But reality is often more complex than rhetoric. There are myriad shades of grey.

Import tariffs are not paid by other countries. They are paid by importers – in this case, US firms and consumers – buying goods from overseas. These costs often trickle down through the economy, raising prices at every clink in the chain.

Trump promised lower prices. He is betting his tariffs won’t raise them too high, for too long.

“This is going to be a big moment,” he said on Wednesday. “I think you’re going to remember today.”

He may well be right.”

As written by Graham Russell in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s tariffs – five key takeaways: Donald Trump has upended decades of US foreign policy by bringing in a vast array of tariffs that threaten to disrupt international trade. Here are some initial key points; “Countries across the world are racing to absorb the new way of doing business with the US, after Donald Trump unveiled tailored tariffs that looks set to ignite a global trade war.

Trump has made clear the goals he wants to accomplish through the tariffs: bring manufacturing back to the US; respond to unfair trade policies from other countries; increase tax revenue; and incentivise crackdowns on migration and drug trafficking.

However, the EU and China have promised countermeasures, while South Korea has vowed an “all-out” response. The damage done at a political level with allies such as the UK may also carry its own cost, as billions are wiped off economic growth.

Here are some early points to note in the wake of Wednesday’s wideranging announcement:

1. Firms are bracing for what ‘liberation’ means

The US president sold the idea of global tariffs with a celebratory air, making good on his campaign trail promise to liberate the nation from higher prices. The president has claimed “prices are way down” since his return to office but anyone who has visited a grocery store in that time might feel differently.

And US firms are apprehensive about the wider effect of this move: higher costs, they warn, will be passed on to their customers. “What we have heard from business of all sizes, across all industries, from around the country is that these broad tariffs are a tax increase that will raise prices for American consumers and hurt the economy,” said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the US Chamber of Commerce, the corporate lobby group.

2. The China link?

China has been hit particularly hard by the new tariffs, which take the total levy on Chinese imports to over 50%, as well as struggling nations in South-east Asia, including war-torn and earthquake-hit Myanmar.

One theory being put forward is that countries linked to sizeable Chinese investments are being targeted. Dr Siwage Dharma Negara, a senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, said: “The [Trump] administration thinks is that by targeting these countries they can target Chinese investment in countries like Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Indonesia. By targeting their products maybe it will affect Chinese exports and the economy,” he said.

“The real target is China but the real impact on those countries will be quite significant because this investment creates jobs and export revenue.”

The tariffs comes as many countries in South-east Asia are already grappling with the fallout from the cuts to USAid, which provides humanitarian assistance to a region vulnerable to natural disasters and support for pro-democracy activists battling repressive regimes.

3. Key trade partners Canada and Mexico are spared – but will still feel the pain

Canada and Mexico have been exempted from the latest round of tariffs, but, as prime minister Mark Carney and business leaders reminded everyone, 25% tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, as well as on automobiles, came into effect hours after Wednesday’s announcement.

Carney warned that while Trump had preserved key elements of the bilateral relationship, the global tariffs announced earlier in the day “fundamentally change the international trading system”.

The two countries have been hit by previously declared 25% tariffs on many goods over border control and fentanyl trafficking issues, the White House said in a fact sheet.

Mexico president Claudia Sheinbaum said on Wednesday that her country would not pursue a “tit-for-tat on tariffs” but would rather announce a “comprehensive program” on Thursday.

4. This is a big gamble

Trump himself appears prepared for the announcement to spark a lot of turbulence in markets across the world, saying recently: “There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big.” The universal tariffs come into effect on 5 April, and the reciprocal ones on 9 April, so countries around the world now have a very short space of time in which to choose their path. Some may try to cut a deal with Trump, others may respond with retaliatory tariffs, but a continuing theme will be uncertainty.

5. Absolutely nowhere is immune

Heard Island and McDonald Islands are some of the most remote places on Earth, inhabited only by an array of wildlife, yet they are among the “external territories” of Australia listed separately for a 10% tariff.

Norfolk Island, which lies just of Australia’s east coast, was slugged with a tariff of 29% – or 19 percentage points higher than the rest of Australia, prompting Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese to say on Thursday: “I’m not quite sure that Norfolk Island, with respect to it, is a trade competitor with the giant economy of the United States, but that just shows and exemplifies the fact that nowhere on earth is safe from this.”

As written in The Guardian editorial entitled The Guardian view on Trump’s tariffs: a monstrous and momentous act of folly: The US president has expelled his own country from the rules-based global trade system that America itself created; “or the world’s already embattled trading system, it is as though an asteroid has crashed into the planet, devastating everyone and everything that previously existed there. But there is this important difference. If an asteroid struck the Earth, the impact would at least have been caused by ungovernable cosmic forces. The assault on world trade, by contrast, is a completely deliberate act of choice, taken by one man and one nation.

Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on every country in the world is a monstrous and momentous act of folly. Unilateral and unjustified, it was expressed on Wednesday in indefensible language in which Mr Trump described US allies as “cheaters” and “scavengers” who “looted”, “raped” and “pillaged” the US. Many of the calculations on which Mr Trump doled out his punishments are perverse, not least the exclusion of Russia from the condemned list. The tariffs mean prices are certain to rise in sector after sector, in the US and elsewhere, fuelling inflation and perhaps recession. Mr Trump will presumably respond as he did when asked about foreign cars becoming more expensive: “I couldn’t care less.”

The tariffs – a minimum of 10% on all imports to the US, with higher levies on 60 nations that Mr Trump dubbed the “worst offenders” – throw a grenade into the rules-based global trading order. These are large hikes, not small ones, even for nations like Britain that have escaped the higher tariffs. They are indiscriminate between sectors, but highly discriminatory against nations, all of them, even to the extent of penalising uninhabited islands in Antarctica.

They overturn the trading system established – under US leadership – at Bretton Woods after the second world war. In effect, the nation that has underpinned the global economy for the last 80 years has expelled itself from the trading system it always led. That system’s cardinal principle – that countries in the World Trade Organization should treat one another equally – was blown apart on Wednesday.

The announcement ceremony conveyed the thrill Mr Trump derives from bullying and domination. A month after shutting down US development aid, his punishment list embodies special contempt for the world’s poor – 47% tariffs on Madagascar, the world’s ninth poorest country, for instance, or 44% on devastated Myanmar. While much pre-announcement rhetoric was directed at China, some of the toughest tariffs have been inflicted on countries such as Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Laos. The impact on US soft power is likely to be devastating.

The British government is trying to keep calm and carry on. Like its trustworthy trading allies, Britain must do what it can to maintain the rules-based trading system. But economic war is clearly beckoning. The trade secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said on Thursday that even the UK is now preparing a list of reciprocal tariffs on US goods. It is particularly vital that Britain defends its interests in food and health systems, and against digital tech giants.

Any idea that Britain is a kind of winner in these circumstances, thanks to Brexit, is nonsensical. This country’s supposedly closest ally, the US, has just hiked the cost to British exporters by 10%, with an even greater rise of 25% in the case of steel, aluminium and cars. The consequences of Mr Trump’s tariffs will not be restricted to world trade but will impact on the global economic system more generally. This is a macro moment. It will require macro responses.”

Liberation from what? Trump promised lower prices – his tariffs risk the opposite

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/trump-tariffs-analysis?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawJbmBZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHSBHxnRDjZOomozftaK-7iRpAJaIBiOGah4nzBqEzBdxVe_P4q8kupvc4A_aem_12ONkKiGQtnInw8_dMQyHg

Trump’s tariffs – five key takeaways

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/trump-tariffs-key-takeaways-impact-global-trade-china-canada-mexico-norfolk-island?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawJbqjBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHatJDHHPEAo3ogFDQaiYFshWyVzr4uD5u9rgkaqElOEOde6rAAS1k7d7hA_aem_iuvNp3__3876N2zVDHjSGQ

The Guardian view on Trump’s tariffs: a monstrous and momentous act of folly

Editorial

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/03/the-guardian-view-on-trumps-tariffs-a-monstrous-and-momentous-act-of-folly?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawJcIg5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHS7Z3NBZq-PlA2ypThfa7Z1k9faCqo7NzQFuXB8J-v3AlLx51UewUJZJWA_aem_UFV4mK59AhFO_DITt3Ha1A

Trump’s wall of tariffs is likely to raise prices and cause chaos for business

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/donald-trump-builds-a-wall-made-of-tariffs-enclosing-the-whole-us?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawJbqKNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHYtVfgOCOxUOhHahItnR-2iUxSEbh55AZ933zxuOXlimk4gbIfqOX__bag_aem_tnqQx4FoeYvKg1Wb5sT_FQ

Global stock markets fall and dollar dives after Trump announces sweeping tariffs

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/trump-tariffs-see-stocks-dive-and-investors-scramble-to-bonds-gold-and-yen?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawJbq_5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHbIt737QzMXlqlP7cylAhWe5Qi1BvQoxde_iMXa3VeQtm61RB3IQqIqkDA_aem_RsWZihZmaFHwU9KDwZnK2Q

Trump goes full gameshow host to push his tariff plan – and nobody’s a winner

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/trump-tariffs-white-house-sketch?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawJbqXlleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHRrnrdPDhlzJ4sn7qwCV9IVvZNNdYqf_Bcw1ox_c5NrvkPz1slAY4IopJw_aem_Wn1hFJMsvKZ_NsuYEWJXaA

Trump tariff global reaction – country by country

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump-global-trade-tariff-rates-by-country-breakdown-asia?fbclid=IwY2xjawJbl9VleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdEW3ONZ1CTF2IMGHdKA5Ql4UzZ7SZjiQHEd2iUBHXfdX6n4R54gJ5T_dQ_aem_pgzbXddsK3pZlD0s868gDQ

Asian countries riven by war and disaster face some of steepest Trump tariffs

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump-tariffs-us-administration-countries-biggest-rates-china-myanmar-mandalay?fbclid=IwY2xjawJbqGZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHcwIun2rzv1sMR7YHIbB6Ubdvk3A2LEh8DRylbllk8UdKMdMXQzLO6ZJcQ_aem_41B7W8aBSj1UUealnN7DFQ

Macron suggests pause on US investment as EU leaders condemn Trump tariffs

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/fundamentally-wrong-european-leaders-condemn-trump-tariffs?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawJbq7BleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHSwWQxW1bdefIotJqsqpLLBFy1nIFGvzr8ywFur-FUsyEfNIrx1rYvn9sQ_aem_1kIlFFjO6cS944sdQopnyg

Trump’s ‘idiotic’ and flawed tariff calculations stun economists

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/trumps-idiotic-and-flawed-tariff-calculations-stun-economists?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawJbq21leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHXJ1j5c14p9UcaTWwIJQ0sbyMQdJiobdGzZqEjfJz_Wj8CePXnxL21davw_aem_X3MWu2ZQctjWtvtlgmzRxg

April 3, 2025 0

April 2 2025 Hope For Changing of the Tides: Warnock Shames Trump Regime and Wisconsin Renounces Elon Musk’s Efforts to Buy Our Elections

We celebrate today the dual victories of democracy over fascist tyranny won for us by the American Lion Ralph Warnock in his historic speech in which he shamed the Trump regime and the Party of Treason, and the people of Wisconsin’s renouncement of Elon Musk’s efforts to buy our elections in a referendum vote on the whole bizarre and pathetic freak show of the Trump regime.

Together our champions have won us all hope for the changing of the tides and the rebirth of our nation and our global civilization which enshrines the equality of all human beings in the institutions, values, and ideals of democracy, a fragile, ephemeral, and often illusory thing but one worth living for and can yet be realized.

Our humanity hangs in the balance in this moment and Gordian Knot of Rashomon Gate Events, under relentless attacks by an aberrant enemy which has captured the state and experiments on us as what Artaud described as Theatre of Cruelty, for Trump is our Doctor Mengele and all America is strapped to his vivisection table as he takes us apart piece by piece.

Yet we refuse to submit and die quietly, and claw pour way out of the ruins to make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival, and to bring a Reckoning to forces of fascism and tyranny and to those who would enslave us.

Mass protests seize the streets of our cities, AOC and Bernie toured the nation with historic and enormous rallies organizing resistance, Trump’s spurious and performative executive orders are defeated in court time and time again, the Republican voters are in open rebellion in town hall meetings everywhere, and endorsement by Trump and association with Musk has become toxic in our elections.

America awakens, and I am reminded of the Edward Markham poem my father had me memorize as a child;

“The Man with the Hoe

By Edwin Markham

Written after seeing Millet’s World-Famous Painting

God made man in His own image,

in the image of God made He him. —Genesis.

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,

The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.

Who made him dead to rapture and despair,

A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,

Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?

Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?

Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?

Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave

To have dominion over sea and land;

To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;

To feel the passion of Eternity?

Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns

And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?

Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf

There is no shape more terrible than this—

More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed—

More filled with signs and portents for the soul—

More fraught with danger to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!

Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him

Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?

What the long reaches of the peaks of song,

The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?

Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;

Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;

Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,

Plundered, profaned and disinherited,

Cries protest to the Judges of the World,

A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

is this the handiwork you give to God,

This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched ?

How will you ever straighten up this shape;

Touch it again with immortality;

Give back the upward looking and the light;

Rebuild in it the music and the dream;

Make right the immemorial infamies,

Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

How will the Future reckon with this Man?

How answer his brute question in that hour

When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?

How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—

With those who shaped him to the thing he is—

When this dumb Terror shall reply to God

After the silence of the centuries?”

As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled Booker makes a stand against Trump – and doesn’t stop for 25 hours: Democrats have appeared lame and leaderless for 72 days, but then Cory Booker stood up and did something; ““Would the senator yield for a question?” asked Democratic leader Chuck Schumer.

Senator Cory Booker, who on a long day’s journey into night had turned himself into the fighter that many Democrats were yearning for, replied with a wry smile: “Chuck Schumer, it’s the only time in my life I can tell you no.”

But Schumer wasn’t taking no for an answer. “I just wanted to tell you, a question, do you know you have just broken the record? Do you know how proud this caucus is of you? Do you know how proud America is of you?”

New Jersey’s first Black senator had just shattered the record for the longest speech in Senate history, delivered by South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, an arch segregationist who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

In the normally sombre Senate chamber, around 40 Democrats rose to their feet in effusive applause. A few hundred people in the public gallery, where the busts of 20 former vice-presidents gazed down from marble plinths, erupted in clapping and cheering and whooping. The senator took a tissue and mopped perspiration from his forehead.

Since Booker’s obstruction did not occur during voting on any bill it was not technically a filibuster. But it marked the first time during Donald Trump’s second term that Democrats have deliberately clogged up Senate business.

Indeed, after 72 days in which Democrats have appeared lame and leaderless, Booker stood up and did something. He said his constituents had challenged him to think differently and take risks and so he did. In an attention economy so often dominated by the forces of Maga, his all-nighter offered a ray of hope in the darkness.

Some Democrats have desperately tried to be authentic with cringeworthy TikTok videos such as a “Choose Your Fighter” parody. Booker, by contrast, went old school: one man standing and talking for hour after hour on the Senate floor in a display of endurance reminiscent of a famous scene in the 1939 film Mr Smith Goes to Washington starring Jimmy Stewart.

It had all begun at 7pm on Monday when, wearing a US flag pin on a dark suit, white shirt and black tie as if dressed for the funeral of the republic, Booker vowed: “I rise tonight with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able.

“I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis … These are not normal times in America and they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate. The threats to the American people and American democracy are grave and urgent, and we all must do more to stand against them.”

What followed was a tour de force of physical stamina. The 55-year-old, who played tight end for Stanford University’s American football team, asked a Senate page to take away his chair so he was not tempted to sit down, which is barred by the Senate rules. The chair could be seen pushed back against a wall.

Above Booker the words “Novus Ordo Seclorum” – a Latin phrase meaning “a new order of the ages” or “a new order of the centuries” – were inscribed in the Senate chamber above a relief depicting a bare chested hero wrestling a snake.

Booker leaned on his desk and sipped from a glass of water. He shifted from foot to foot or paced to keep the blood circulating in his legs. He wiped away sweat with a white handkerchief. He plucked a tissue from a blue-grey tissue box, blew his nose and dropped it into a bin. He persisted.

Alexandra De Luca, vice president of communications at the liberal group American Bridge, tweeted: “I worked for Cory Booker on the campaign trail and (and I say this with love) that man drinks enough caffeine on a normal day to stay up 72 hours. This could go a while.”

Booker may also be a great advert for veganism. He could be jocular, bantering with old friends in the Senate about sport and state rivalries. He could be emotional, his voice cracking and his eyes on the verge of tears, especially when a letter from the family of a person with Parkinson’s disease reminded him of his late father.

He could also be angry, channeling the fury of those who feel their beloved country slipping away. Yet to the end his mind was clear and his voice was strong. This was also a masterclass in political rhetoric, which Schumer rightly praised for its “crystalline brilliance”.

There were recurring themes: Trump’s economic chaos and rising prices; billionaires exerting ever greater influence; Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, slashing entire government programmes without consent from Congress and inflicting pain on children, military veterans and other vulnerable groups.

Booker read dozens and dozens of letters from what he called “terrified people” with “heartbreaking” stories. As the day wore on, he quoted from a fired USAid employee who told a devastating story of broken dreams and warned: “The beacon of our democracy grows dim across the globe.”

The senator also warned of tyranny: Trump disappearing people from the streets without due process; bullying the media and trying to create press corps like Vladimir Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; seizing more executive power and putting democracy itself in grave peril.

A few times he inverted former president John F Kennedy’s famous phrase to warn that today it’s no longer “ask not what your country can do for you. It’s what you can do for Donald Trump.”

He acknowledged that the public want Democrats to do more. But he insisted that can only go so far and, as during the civil rights movement, the American people must rise up. He frequently referred to a “moral moment” and invoked the late congressman John Lewis, famed for causing “good trouble”.

“This is not who we are or how we do things in America,” Booker said. “How much more can we endure before we, as a collective voice, say enough is enough? Enough is enough. You’re not going to get away with this.”

The Senate chamber contains 100 wooden desks and brown leather chairs on a tiered semicircular platform. For most of the marathon nearly all the seats were empty and only a handful of reporters were in the press gallery.

But Democrat Chris Murphy accompanied Booker throughout his speech. “We’ve passed the 15-hour mark,” Booker observed. “I want to thank Senator Murphy because he’s been here at my side the entire time.”

Other Democrats took turns to show up in solidarity, asking if Booker would accept a question. He agreed, reading from a note to ensure he got the wording right: “I yield for a question while retaining the floor.”

Occasionally he would quip: “I have the floor. So much power, it’s going to my head!”

Just after 10.30am Schumer, the minority leader, told Booker: “Your strength, your fortitude, your clarity has just been nothing short of amazing and all of America is paying attention to what you’re saying. All of America needs to know there’s so many problems, the disastrous actions of this administration.”

They discussed Medicaid cuts before Booker responded: “You heaped so many kind things on me. But never before in the history of America has a man from Brooklyn said so many complimentary things about a man in Newark.”

Angela Alsobrooks, the first Black senator from Maryland, entered the chamber, caught Booker’s eye and raised a clenched fist in a shared act of resistance.

As Booker approached the 24-hour mark, most Senate Democrats took their seats and Democrats from the House of Representatives, including minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, sat or stood in the chamber. The public and press galleries swelled.

Booker once again channelled Lewis, the civil rights hero. “I don’t know what John Lewis would say, but John Lewis would do something. He would say something. What we will have to repent for is not the words and violent actions for bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of good people. This is our moral moment.”

As Booker closed in on Thurmond’s record, Murphy noted that this speech was very different. “Today you are standing not in the way of progress but of retreat,” he told his friend.

Booker commented: “I could break this record of the man who tried to stop the rights upon which I stand. I’m not here, though, because of his speech; I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.”

Even when the record was beaten he carried on. “I want to go a little bit past this and then I’m going to deal with some of the biological urgencies I’m feeling,” he said.

Finally, after 25 hours and four minutes, Booker declared: “This is a moral moment. It’s not left or right. It’s right or wrong. Madam President, I yield the floor.”

Again the chamber erupted in cheers and Democrats mobbed their new unofficial leader. No one who was there will ever forget it. Booker had delivered a vivid portrait of a great nation breaking promises to its people, betraying overseas allies and sliding off a cliff towards authoritarianism. He had also made a persuasive case that an inability to do everything should not undermine an attempt to do something.

His was a primal scream of resistance.”

As written by Emma Brockes in The Guardian, in an article entitled After months of surrender, the Democrats have finally stood up to Trump – thank you, Cory Booker: Watching the New Jersey senator hold court for 25 hours felt radical and cathartic; “One of the problems beleaguering political opponents of Donald Trump has been finding a form of protest that, given the scale of his outrages, doesn’t seem entirely futile. You can parade outside a Tesla showroom. You can hold up dumb little signs during Trump’s address to Congress inscribed with slogans such as “This is not normal” and “Musk steals”. You can, as Democrats appear to have been doing since the election, play dead.

Alternatively, you can go for the ostentatious, performative gesture. On Monday evening, Cory Booker, the Democratic senator for New Jersey who carries himself like someone who’d have been happier in an era when men wore capes, started speaking on the floor of the Senate and carried on for 25 hours and five minutes, breaking the chamber’s record by almost 50 minutes and delivering – finally – a solid, usable symbol of rebellion.

This wasn’t a filibuster per se; no legislation was being passed. Booker decided to speak for “as long as I am physically able”, he said, in general protest against Trump and in what he described as a “moral moment” – a claim that, when he ended his speech on Tuesday evening, hoarse of voice and teary-eyed, didn’t seem to me an exaggeration.

The power of the filibuster is vested in the iron-man stamina required to perform it: in Booker’s case, standing for longer than a direct flight between Washington DC and Sydney, without food, rest or toilet breaks. It puts him in a category of protest that floats somewhere between a sit-in and a hunger strike, a measure of commitment that demands a kind of default respect, as does the technical challenge of filling the airtime. A few hours into his speech, Booker asked a Senate page to remove his chair and with it the temptation to sit down. Democratic senators were permitted to ask him questions or make short remarks to give him brief respite from speaking. Mostly, however, it was on Booker to keep talking and talking, which he did – it should be noted, quite easily – by enumerating all the terrible things Trump has done in his first three months in office.

There was something immensely satisfying – cathartic, even – in watching Booker protest against Trump via a form of dissent that, while radical and pushed to its absolute limit, still fell within congressional norms. Part of the fallout from Trump and his cohorts’ behaviour has been the shocking realisation that you can ditch standards and protocols, ignore judges and bin entire social and scientific programmes created by Congress, and, at least in the immediate term, nothing will happen. (In the medium to long term, of course, people will die.)

It could be argued that Trump’s extraordinary, norm-busting behaviour requires protest that meets it in the extra-political realm. Democrats aren’t going to storm the Capitol, but I have friends who have talked about withholding their federal taxes this tax season. Teslas aren’t only being boycotted but set on fire. Beyond the US, Europe is targeting Republican states in particular with reciprocal tariffs – Alabama beef and soybeans from Louisiana – to inflict personal economic pain on Trump and his supporters.

Still, it is the direct political victories that matter the most. In a ringing blow to Trump this week, the election of judge Susan Crawford over her Musk-backed rival for the Wisconsin supreme court – in a race that garnered a huge turnout from voters – highlights the power of boring, process-observant political pushback over more flamboyant gestures. This race was critical in determining the state’s congressional lines, gerrymandered by the Republican-controlled state Senate to favour Republican outcomes. But it also sent a more broadly cheering message: that the involvement of Elon Musk – who, along with affiliated groups, ploughed more than $20m into trying to get Brad Schimel elected – ended up motivating the Democratic vote more emphatically than the Republican.

Meanwhile, Booker kept talking. It was telling that, during and after his marathon speech, neither Musk nor Trump acknowledged him on their various social media platforms, although a White House spokesman did derisively refer to Booker’s performance as a “Spartacus” moment. Over the course of the 25 hours, people drifted in and out to watch his feat of endurance, while his staff kept his face wipes replenished and placed folders of material before him to read from. To date, the art of the political spectacle has been almost exclusively Trump’s for the taking. It was a relief, finally, to see a Democrat seize and hang on to the mic.”

In balance with the Lion’s glorious speech is the victory of Susan Crawford in the Wisconsin judicial election that Elon Musk tried to buy with million dollar cheques handed out to voters.

As written by Sam Levine and Lauren Gambino in The Guardian, in an article entitled Wisconsin supreme court race: liberal Susan Crawford beats Musk-backed candidate: Liberal judge says victory is against ‘unprecedented attack on our democracy’; “Susan Crawford won the race for a seat on the Wisconsin supreme court on Tuesday, scoring a major victory for Democrats who had framed the race as a referendum on Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s popularity.

Crawford, a liberal judge from Dane county, defeated Brad Schimel, a former Republican attorney general and conservative judge from Waukesha county, after Musk and groups associated with the tech billionaire spent millions to boost his candidacy in what became the most expensive judicial contest in American history.

“Today Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy,” Crawford said in a speech at her victory night event in Madison. “Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.”

With more than 84% of the vote tallied, Crawford led Schimel by nearly 10 percentage points.

In remarks on Tuesday night, Schimel said he and his team “didn’t leave anything on the field” and announced that he had conceded the race in a call to his opponent before taking the stage. When his supporters began to boo, Schimel stopped them. “No, you gotta accept the results,” he said, adding: “The numbers aren’t gonna turn around. They’re too bad, and we’re not gonna pull this off.”

Musk said hours after the result that “the long con of the left is corruption of the judiciary” and that the most important thing was that a vote on the addition of voter ID requirements passed.

Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s running mate for the Democrats in the 2024 presidential election, was succinct on Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

“Wisconsin beat the billionaire,” he posted.

The result means that liberals will keep a 4-3 ideological majority on the state supreme court. That majority is hugely significant because the court will hear major cases on abortion and collective bargaining rights. The court could also potentially consider cases that could cause the state to redraw its eight congressional districts, which are currently drawn to advantage Republicans.

Crawford speaks to supporters at her election night headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin. Photograph: Vincent Alban/Reuters

Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city, reported “historic turnout” for a spring election, with election officials saying in a statement on Tuesday evening that due to the “unprecedented high turnout”, seven polling places ran out of ballots. The city’s elections commission said it was working to replenish resources to voters during the evening rush.

Combined, more than $80m was spent on the race, topping the previous record of about $51m that was spent in the 2023 Wisconsin state supreme court race. Elon Musk and affiliated groups spent more than $20m alone. Musk reprised some of the tactics that he used last fall to help Trump win, including offering $100 to people who signed a petition opposing “activist judges” and offering $1 million checks to voters.

Pointing to the potential to redraw House districts, Musk had said the race “might decide the future of America and western civilization”.

Democrats seized on Musk’s involvement in the race to energize voters who were upset about the wrecking ball he and his unofficial “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, have taken to federal agencies. They raised the stakes of an already high-stakes contest by holding out Wisconsin as a test case for Musk, saying that if he succeeded, he would take his model across the country.

“Growing up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, I never thought I would be taking on the richest man in the world for justice,” Crawford said on Tuesday night. “And we won.”

After Musk’s involvement became public, Democrats saw an explosion in grassroots donations and people “coming out of the woodwork” to get involved in the race, Ben Wikler, the state’s Democratic party chair, said last month. When the party tested its messaging, Wikler said, messages that highlighted Musk’s involvement in the race motivated voters who were otherwise disengaged from politics.

Elizabeth Warren, Democratic senator for Massachusetts and a former presidential candidate, posted on X: “Wisconsin cannot be bought. Our democracy is not for sale. And when we fight, we win.”

The Democratic party’s official X feed was unabashed in its snarkiness. It posted simply: “loser”.

The post accompanied a large picture of Musk at a rally in Green Bay last weekend wearing the kind of humorous “cheese head” hats that Wisconsinites, celebrating the state’s dairy industry, like to wear to sporting events.

On Tuesday night Crawford won Brown county, where Green Bay is and where Trump won by eight points in last November’s election, Politico said.

Jeannine Ramsey, 65, voted in Madison on Tuesday for Crawford because she said the “Elon Musk-supported Brad Schimel” wouldn’t rule fairly on the issues most important to her.

“I think it’s shameful that Elon Musk can come here and spend millions of dollars and try to bribe the citizens,” Ramsey said. “I don’t think it should be allowed. He doesn’t live in our state, and I don’t think he should be able to buy this election. It makes me angry.”

Trump won Wisconsin in the presidential election in November by less than one percentage point – the closest margin of any battleground state.

Because turnout in a state supreme court election is lower than that of a typical election and those who vote tend to be highly engaged, experts have cautioned against trying to read too much into the election results for national political sentiment. Still, there were encouraging signs for Democrats.

“The hard work of reaching the voters who pay the least attention to politics is going to take years for Democrats to build that kind of communications strength that can puncture the Republican propaganda bubble,” Wikler said in March. “But for laying the groundwork for flipping the House and the Senate in 2026 and winning governorships and state legislative majorities, the supreme court race can really point the way.”

Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, also celebrated the result.

“Tonight, the people of Wisconsin squarely rejected the influence of Elon Musk, Donald Trump and billionaire special interests. And their message? Stay out of our elections and stay away from our courts,” he said in a statement.

In Madison, Crawford said she was ready to turn from the campaign trail, which she described as a “life-altering experience”, to the bench, where she promised to “deliver fair and impartial decisions”. Concluding her remarks, Crawford wished her mother, watching from home, a happy birthday and quipped: “I know how glad you are to see the TV ads end.”

Booker makes a stand against Trump – and doesn’t stop for 25 hours

Democrats have appeared lame and leaderless for 72 days, but then Cory Booker stood up and did something

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/senator-cory-booker-takes-a-stand-speech-donald-trump-25-hours?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawJaoMJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHbT7KbXtfL0xlaCJC8Q5m2mqAMHOuzGo0uOJEXpSjVZAVelKE3IqPNRG-A_aem_i_-6rkUmcNEAE9viBf6RtA

After months of surrender, the Democrats have finally stood up to Trump – thank you, Cory Booker

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/02/cory-brooker-25-hour-speech-donald-trump-democrats?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawJarSpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHbeMKG5daUhcvwGbfE0NT9TqmfJTtzFZktCvP-IhDCxgUSlIleZV7oT7fA_aem_ZJEMAbQBCjVC8pV77-t0vw

Wisconsin supreme court race: liberal Susan Crawford beats Musk-backed candidate

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/wisconsin-supreme-court-election-result-race

‘Loser’: Musk endures wave of gloating on X after liberal judge wins Wisconsin race: Democrats seize on result as a referendum on Musk and an emphatic repudiation of Trump’s richest supporter and ally

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/democrats-wisconsin-supreme-court-win-election?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawJaqjpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHf_tV78K9xYaLgqhEvPC1AFyDmUKwrtURgkCdzpoQiVp1wjb8fNMe_l-qg_aem_GMJtSetE6FYy8838_wVNeQ

April 2, 2025 0

April 1 2025 Let Us Enact Reversals of Order and Bring the Chaos: April Fool’s Day

A joke on April Fools Day, because no one would ever do to police terrorists what they do to us all the time.

How to deal with ICE, in a Bizarro World where everything we know is reversed and there is justice for all:

Never let them abduct anyone.

Say nothing to the enemy, and hear nothing they say, because everything the enemy says is a lie.

Never obey, for we are not their property.

Flood them with false leads, fragment their efforts, send up general alarms regarding their movements and actions, set them against each other, rescue and escort their targets to safety, and render them useless and harnless.

Flash mob and capture them. Send them to Russia.

Follow them home and publish their names and addresses.

If they come for us, we come for them.

This ends the prank part of this communication, which does not authorize direct action in resistance and liberation struggle like Nelson Mandela did against the Apartheid regime on December 16 1977 by underlining a passage of the play Julius Caesar in the Robben Island Bible, a copy of Shakespeare passed among the prisoners;

“Cowards die many times before their deaths.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear,

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.”

Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.

On this April Fool’s Day, let us enact reversals of order, play tricks which open the gates of our prisons to paths of transformational change, pursue the sacred calling of the truth teller, perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority, and let us bring the Chaos.

Live with grandeur; so Jean Genet teaches us, and prescribes the embrace of our own darkness as a path of liberation in the discovery and performance of our true and best selves.

We all of us who in refusal to submit to Authority become Unconquered and bring the chaos as Living Autonomous Zones must question everything, ourselves most of all, if we are to dream new possibilities of becoming human.

A maker of mischief, I; who sabotages authority and systems of unequal power in any ways I can imagine and whenever possible as part of a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.

Once as a prank while teaching American History in high school I switched the textbook, a compendium of national memory, identity, and authorized truth, with the alternative American history trilogy by William S. Burroughs;

Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands. I was hoping someone would call me on it, but no one ever did, so I went right on teaching the whole semester how insectoid aliens from Venus secretly rule earth through the Algebra of Need and our addiction to wealth and power. I think we had more fun in American History class that year than is usual.

If games of transgression, unauthorized identities, and transformation you would play, I invite you to play a game of chance with me. Write down six characters you would like to play, traditionally in chaos magic this would be three male and three female characters though clearly here as in life all rules are arbitrary and I encourage you to create your own and change them at random, and throw a six sided dice to choose who you will be today. No matter who you live as today, you will have five other possible selves in reserve, and tomorrow is another day and another throw of the dice. All identity is theatrical performance.

In accord with Virginia Woolf’s principle that if we cannot tell the truth about ourselves we cannot tell the truth about others, here are some of the voices I hear in my thoughts as my own internal dialogue and character roles on which I have modeled myself in various contexts as performance of identity; Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard when I must lead and command, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes when I need to find hidden connections to assemble meaning, be hyper aware and vigilant in complex, obscured, and time compressed situations, or profile and assess character and motives, and as a teenager working through the trauma of my near execution in 1974 Brazil by police my role model was Leonard Nimoy’s self-disciplined Spock, surviving at the edge of an Abyss by ruthless control.

Celebrate with me April Fool’s Day as a liminal and transformative time of exploring unknowns beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the defiance of authority, the sabotage of elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, seizures of power from systems of oppression and carceral states of force and control, the violation of norms, and liberation from other people’s ideas of virtue.

By such acts we do give answer to the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.

Let us run amok and be ungovernable.

As I wrote in my post of November 25 2020, Using Chaos and Transgression as Revolutionary Acts to Transform Law and Order Into Liberty and Equality; I am against law and order because law serves power, order appropriates and divides us into hierarchies of elite belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, whereas Chaos autonomizes and transgression empowers liberation struggle, delegitimation of authority, and seizures of power.

Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.

Let us restore the balance to systems of unequal power and unjust authority; for no inequality is fair, and there is no just authority.

Rejoice with me in this time of reversals of order through the performance of Acts of Transgression and Chaos. Let us dance our best and secret selves on the stage of the world, forge new truths, destroy and create ourselves anew in the ways we ourselves have chosen, and transform the systems and structures of oppression and tyranny, patriarchy and white supremacist terror, forces of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, into a diverse and inclusive free society of equals.

Dance with us in joy, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.

As I wrote in my post of April 1 2020, There Is No Return To Normal; There is no return to normal if and when the Doom of Man pandemic ends. Normal doesn’t live here anymore.

Once there was an illusion of mirrors, echoes, distorted surfaces without meaning, hollow and beautiful like a gossamer web of lies and irresistible as a gingerbread house.

It calls to us, this thing of no escape, this American Dream, with promises of wealth and the power to choose the condition of our own lives. Our songs are of meritocracy, upward mobility, and an inclusive society, but concealed within are harsh realities of unequal power and opportunity limited by authorized identities and divisions of caste or class, race, gender, faith, and nationality.

We are lured with belonging and membership, but offered only identitarian tribalization and exclusionary boundaries of otherness.

We are seduced with the guarantee of our right to the pursuit of happiness, but our society can produce only material diversions which commodify and dehumanize us.

We are offered security from intrusive forces at the price of our freedom and equality, and submission to authority and tyrannies of force and control. But security is an illusion, often one manufactured through fear by those who would enslave us as a pretext for the centralization of power to tyranny.

Throughout American history since our founding we have ever been a free society of equals, co-owners of our own government, each of us a king of his own life, but only on paper. The American Revolution has yet to be achieved; it is an ongoing process in which each of us must negotiate the alignment and boundaries between freedom and authority and between the ideal and the real.

In this struggle we are the prize; our agency or enslavement, our authenticity or the capture and limitation of the possibilities of our identity, our liberty both as individuals and as interdependent members of humankind.

And we must act now to save ourselves and our civilization, for we are running out of time. We are in a contest of survival against plutocratic corporate greed and our extinction as a species on one hand and against fascist tyranny and the fall of democracy and global civilization on the other.

Let us free ourselves from the illusions of our normality.

“If we burn, you burn with us” scene from Mockingjay part 1

One of Us scene in the 1932 film Freaks

The American Trilogy, William S. Burroughs

https://www.goodreads.com/series/65214-the-red-night-trilogy

My Possible Best Selves and Role Models of Identity Performance

Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard

Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes

Leonard Nimoy as Spock

The great question of being human, as Kirk puts to alternate universe Spock; “In every revolution, there is one man with a vision”.

the Idea of “Let the Dice Decide”

The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70912.The_Dice_Man?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=yyNxxfsDMY&rank=1

Absurdist literature for inspiration: how to answer the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom

April Fool’s Day, Josip Novakovich

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/612572.April_Fool_s_Day?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=2sLAjaOGcU&rank=10

Kangaroo Notebook, Kōbō Abe

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/748538.Kangaroo_Notebook?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=vHDue3B4Vn&rank=1

Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28381.Dead_Souls?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_10

April 1, 2025 0

March 31 2025 A Founding Mother of America: Mary Katherine Goddard

On the final weekend of Women’s History Month, my thoughts turn to those heroes and exemplars who won for us what freedom and equality we now enjoy; and so I celebrate now the Founding Mother of America, Mary Katherine Goddard.

Witness and reporter of the Revolutionary War and participant in the discussions which created our nation, printer of the Declaration of Independence and probably among its many authors, editors, researchers, and contributors, as well as those of The Federalist Papers, she brought the radical activist tradition of printers long established in Europe to our shores, founded the American Fourth Estate, and began our heritage of journalism as a sacred calling to reveal the truth as our first war and political correspondent.

She originated the media as a free and independent institution of our society, and a citizen’s balance to the structural power of the three branches of our government.

Thomas Carlyle originated the term Fourth Estate in his book of 1837, French Revolution; “A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up; increases and multiplies, irrepressible, incalculable.” He restated this in his lectures of 1840-1841 published as On Heroes and Hero Worship; “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.” The other Estates under the ancient regime were clergy, aristocrats, and everyone else, and it was the free press and its radical educated guild of printers and the literate society they created that put the heads of the first two in the guillotine, and made us all equal.

I write of her today not only because of her key role in creating America, but because she is a stunning case of the silencing of women and their erasure from history by the Patriarchy; otherwise we would all learn her name and story along with that of Jefferson and Paine. I think its time to change that.

In this time of menacing darkness and the subversion of our democracy, as the treasonous and criminal Trump regime wages a terror campaign of thought control, repression of dissent, the abduction and imprisonment without trial of student protestors and journalists, and theft of our rights both as citizens and as human beings it is important to remember always that our nation was founded not in submission to authority but in defiance and challenge, resistance and revolutionary struggle against it and our dehumanization and enslavement.

America was founded and remains an embodiment of our inalienable human rights and of our rights as citizens and co-owners of the state rather than subjects, and as an instrument of our guarantorship of each other’s rights, and we must never let anyone take our rights and our humanity from us.

The Fourth Reich of the Trump regime has captured the state and we now live in Vichy America which serves not the people but Trump, his Russian puppetmaster, capitalist hegemonic elites of wealth power, and white male privilege and the forces of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror through which they subjugate their Deplorables as voters and enforcers of unequal power and systems of oppression; but we overthrew those who would enslave us at our founding, in the Civil War, in World War Two, and countless other liberation struggles throughout our history, and we can do so again now.

If we all stand together in solidarity of action, united.

America began as the witness of history, journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and our rights of free speech and protest, especially our right and duty to speak truth to power even at the risk of our lives.

We can take back our power and our rights the same way.

To Trump and his absurd clown show of freaks I say with Ahab; “To the end I shall grapple with thee.”

Let us declare together Non Serviam and Sic Semper Tyrannis. I Do Not Serve, from the rebel angel’s line in Milton’s Paradise Lost which renounces all subjugation to authority in refusal to submit as vassal or slave and all such relationships of unequal power, and Ever Thus To Tyrants, spoken in a historical moment which parallels our own in the capture of the state by Trump and his subversion of our democracy, by the assassins of Rome’s first emperor as he overthrew the Old Republic and declared himself tyrant and god as written in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

For there are no ways back to a Restoration of America from this point; but there are ways forward to a United Humankind.

And if we unite in solidarity of action and in Resistance and revolutionary struggle, in bringing a Reckoning and in war to the knife and make these two principles the basis of a new humankind, Non Serviam and Sic Semper Tyrannis, we can create better ways of being human together than even Thomas Jefferson dreamed when he created America with the Declaration of Independence.

For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.

As written in the Chicago Tribune for Independence Day; “This Fourth of July, look closely at one of those printed copies of the Declaration of Independence.

See it? The woman’s name at the bottom?

It’s right there. Mary Katherine Goddard.

If you’ve never noticed it or heard of her, you aren’t alone. She’s a Founding Mother, of sorts, yet few folks know about her. And some of America’s earliest bureaucrats did their best to shut her down. Same old, same old.

Goddard was fearless her entire career as one of America’s first female publishers, printing scoops from Revolutionary War battles from Concord to Bunker Hill and continuing to publish after her offices were twice raided and her life was repeatedly threatened by haters.

Yup, she faced down the Twitter trolls of 1776.

In her boldest move, Goddard put her full name at the bottom of all the copies of the Declaration that her printing presses churned out and distributed to the colonies. It was the first copy young America would see that included the original signer’s names – and Congress commissioned her for the important job.

Her fiery editorials, had, after all, set the tone for pivotal moments in the revolution.

“The ever memorable 19th of April gave a conclusive answer to the questions of American freedom,” she wrote in her Maryland Journal editorial after the start of the Revolutionary War. “What think ye of Congress now? That day. . . evidenced that Americans would rather die than live slaves!”

Until Goddard got the assignment from Congress to print and distribute copies of the Declaration, it was more like an anonymous internet post than a document of record.

Sure, there’s the famous original copy in Thomas Jefferson’s elegant penmanship.

Beautifully written, boldly stated, it was famously signed by the Founding Fathers on July 4th. But neither Americans nor the British saw that copy.

Instead, days and weeks later, they got a hastily-printed, mistake-laden, nearly anonymous document that was the 1776 version of the ALL CAPS EMAIL signed by PATRIOT1776. Signing your name to something like this was considered treason.

It was done on the night of that July 4, when the founders asked Irish immigrant John Dunlap to print 200 copies. The only names on it were John Hancock and secretary Charles Thomson, who was listed as a witness. It was read to troops on the front lines and a copy was sent to England.

But without all the names of the founders, the Declaration was less devastating.

Goddard’s edition changed that.

And by including her name at the bottom, “Baltimore, in Maryland: Printed by Mary Katherine Goddard,” she became a patriot worth remembering.

Goddard wasn’t always so bold declaring her name.

When she ran the Baltimore newspaper that her brother had abandoned, she used the gender-neutral M.K. Goddard.

She was also quietly named the first female postmaster in the colonies in 1775, running the busy and crucial Baltimore Post Office as well as a bookstore, printshop and newspaper. At the time, Congress was meeting just down the street from her office. So she was basically the pipeline for a lot of information during our nation’s founding years – her little shop was a combination Washington Post, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram from 1775 to 1784. (It’s now a Rite Aid.)

Goddard eventually lost her job as publisher after her brother married and returned to Baltimore in 1784, taking over the Maryland Journal and ousting his sister.

But she was still the Baltimore postmaster, and ran that office with efficiency and aplomb for a total of 14 years until the newly appointed national Postmaster General moved to replace her with someone with no experience, one of his political pals.

U.S. Postmaster Samuel Osgood said he didn’t think a woman could handle all the travel associated with the job, that she didn’t have the, ahem, stamina. Remember, it’s a job she’d successfully done – along with publishing a newspaper and printing the Declaration of Independence – for more than a decade.

The folks who knew her were outraged and more than 200 merchants and residents in Baltimore sent the postmaster a petition asking to keep her in place. But Osgood held firm and though Goddard fought for reinstatement for years, it was to no avail.

She continued to run her bookstore in Baltimore until her death in 1816.

On this Independence Day, let’s also celebrate the story of a forgotten patriot who used the power of the press to help build this nation.”

As written in the History of American Women site; “First Female Newspaper Publisher (1775).

Mary Katherine Goddard (1738-1816) is famous for printing the first copy of the Declaration of Independence that included the names of all the signers. Like her younger brother William, Mary Katherine was educated by her mother, Sarah Updike Goddard, who taught them Latin, French and the literary classics. Mary Katherine’s father, Dr. Giles Goddard, was postmaster of New London, Connecticut, and the family was living there when Dr. Goddard died in 1757, leaving a sizable estate.

William Goddard completed an apprenticeship in the printing trade, and when he came of age, the family moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where Sarah Goddard lent her son the money to begin a printing business – the first in that colony. Both mother and daughter also began their careers as printers there in 1762, when Mary Katherine was 24.

Although the younger William was supposedly in charge, he traveled a great deal, and it was Sarah Goddard who was the true publisher of the Providence Gazette and Country Journal. The first issue was produced in October 1762. Mary Katherine took a great interest in the business, and gave up the usual activities for young ladies to work as a typesetter, printer and journalist.

The mother/daughter team made their print shop a hub of activity at a time when newspapers exerted great political influence. They added a bookbindery, and in addition to the Gazette printed almanacs, pamphlets and occasionally books.

William left for Philadelphia in 1765, where he began another print shop and began publishing the Philadelphia Chronicle and Universal Advertiser, again with financial assistance from his mother. Sarah and Mary Katherine joined him there in 1768 and helped run the newspaper.

After Sarah Goddard’s death in 1770, Mary Katherine kept the business running, because William was frequently jailed for public outbursts and controversial articles in the newspaper.

In May 1773, William started another newspaper in Baltimore, the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, once again bringing a young city its first ever newspaper. The paper was extremely popular and quickly became one of the best papers in the colonies.

Mary Katherine ran the Philadelphia business until the following February, when the Philadelphia Chronicle was discontinued. Moving to Baltimore, she once more took over her younger brother’s newspaper and ran it while William set up a colonial postal system.

Mary Katherine Goddard finally assumed the title of publisher of the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser. She put “Published by M.K. Goddard” on the masthead on May 10, 1775, and ran the newspaper singlehandedly from 1775 to 1785.

The year 1775 brought a second milestone, when Mary Katherine Goddard became the first postmistress in Baltimore and in colonial America, a position she held for 14 years. Being both postmistress and a newspaper printer often enabled her to publish news more quickly than her competitors – the Journal was one of the first newspapers to report the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord that prompted the Revolutionary War.

Newspapers were becoming essential forms of communication, and their numbers quickly doubled as colonists turned to them to spread revolutionary ideas and keep up with the quickly developing conflict. Unlike her brother, who used the paper to promote his own opinions, Mary Katherine used a more objective and professional tone.

During the war, inflation hurt the printing business, so she ran a bookbindery to supplement her income and accepted food from those who couldn’t afford to pay their subscription to the paper.

Not everybody appreciated the newspaper, however. In May of 1776, Mary Katherine complained to the Baltimore Committee of Safety about threats and abuse she was receiving. Troublemakers wanted to control what she was printing. A radical group called the Whig Club were constantly harassing Mary Katherine and threatening her.

Members of this club raided her offices twice. They were threatening to run Mary Katherine out of state but she appealed to the legislators in Annapolis, who were in favor of freedom of the press. The Whig Club was censured and eventually banned by the State Assembly.

Mary Katherine never missed an edition of the paper, while many other papers did during the American Revolution. On July 12, 1775, she printed a 3 column account of the Battle of Bunker Hill. It was less than a month after the actual battle had occurred, which was considered a scoop at that time.

During times of confusion about whether the colonial or the revolutionary government was in control of Baltimore, she also kept the mail going by occasionally paying post riders with her own money.

As we know, independence was declared in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, and John Hancock led other members of the Continental Congress in signing the handwritten document. By doing so, these men were declaring treason against the established government, and they would have been executed had they been caught.

For the next six months, printed copies of the Declaration of Independence circulated throughout the new nation without the names of the signers. In January 1777, Mary Katherine Goddard published the first copy of the Declaration with the identities of the signers revealed. It not only was a big news scoop, it also had political impact in forcing all the signers to match their words with deeds.

While the Founding Fathers went on to the fame she had literally thrust upon them, Mary Katherine Goddard sank into obscurity. William was never able to become successful at any occupation, and was jealous of his sister’s success.

In 1784, Mary Katherine’s name disappeared from the Journal, and William most likely forced his sister to quit, and she filed five lawsuits against him. She sold her interest in the paper in 1785, severing all ties with the newspaper she had helped found and had run solely for so many years.

In 1789, the Postmaster General decreed that the head of the Baltimore Postal system must be a man. This news shocked more than Mary Katherine herself. The entire city was in an uproar. Two hundred Baltimore men, including the governor of Maryland, signed a petition to retain her position. They cited that her service was impeccable and appealed to the senate to reinstate her in the job.

Mary Katherine herself also wrote an appeal to President George Washington, complaining that she had been removed from office without cause. He declined to intervene in the state’s decision and in October of 1789, she was officially relieved of duty.

Mary Katherine stayed in Baltimore and ran the bookshop she had begun as an adjunct to the printing business. She was an energetic and popular personality in Baltimore and she maintained her bookshop there for 20 years, until 1810, when she retired, having been a trailblazer in both printing and the postal service.

Mary Katherine Goddard died in Maryland on August 12, 1816, at the age of 78, a woman of achievement who had taken an important stand for freedom of speech and the rights of women in the young United States. She is buried in the graveyard of the historic St. Paul’s Parish.

A copy of the Declaration of Independence that she printed is at the Maryland Hall of Records.”

As written by Erick Trickey in Smithsonian Magazine, entitled: “Mary Katharine Goddard, the Woman who Signed the Declaration of Independence.

Likely the United States’ first woman employee, this newspaper publisher was a key figure in promoting the ideas that fomented the Revolution.

As British forces chased George Washington’s Continental Army out of New Jersey in December 1776, a fearful Continental Congress packed the Declaration of Independence into a wagon and slipped out of Philadelphia to Baltimore. Weeks later, they learned that the Revolution had turned their way: Washington had crossed the Delaware River on Christmas Day and beaten the redcoats at Trenton and Princeton. Emboldened, the members of Congress ordered a second printing of the Declaration – and, for the first time, printed their names on it.

For the job, Congress turned to one of the most important journalists of America’s Revolutionary era. Also Baltimore’s postmaster, she was likely the United States government’s first female employee. At the bottom of the broadside, issued in January 1777, she too signed the Declaration: “Baltimore, in Maryland: Printed by Mary Katharine Goddard.”

For three years after taking over Baltimore’s six-month-old Maryland Journal from her vagabond, indebted brother, Goddard had advocated for the patriot cause. She’d editorialized against British brutality, reprinted Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and published extra editions about Congress’ call to arms and the Battle of Bunker Hill. In her 23-year publishing career, Goddard earned a place in history as one of the most prominent publishers during the nation’s revolutionary era.

“The ever memorable 19th of April gave a conclusive answer to the questions of American freedom,” Goddard wrote in the Journal after the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. “What think ye of Congress now? That day. . . evidenced that Americans would rather die than live slaves!”

Born June 16, 1738, into a Connecticut family of printers and postmasters, Goddard was taught reading and math by her mother, Sarah, a well-tutored daughter of a wealthy landowner. She also studied Latin, French, and science in New London’s public school, where girls could receive hour-long lessons after the boys’ schooling was done for the day.

In 1755, the family’s fortunes changed when Goddard’s father, postmaster Giles Goddard, became too ill to work. Sarah sent Goddard’s younger brother, 15-year-old William, to New Haven to work as a printer’s apprentice. Seven years later, after Giles’s death, the Goddards moved to Providence, and Sarah financed Rhode Island’s first newspaper, the Providence Gazette. William, then 21, was listed as publisher. “[It] carried his imprint,” wrote Sharon M. Murphy in the 1983 book Great Women of the Press, “but displayed from the start his mother’s business sense and his sister’s steadiness.”

Over the next 15 years, William, a restless and impulsive young entrepreneur, moved from Providence to Philadelphia to Baltimore to start newspapers, always putting his mother or sister in charge of his previous businesses as he went. In 1768, William sold the Providence paper and convinced Sarah and Mary Katharine to move to Philadelphia to help run his Pennsylvania Chronicle. In 1770, Sarah died, and William, who was feuding with his financial partners, left the Chronicle in his sister’s hands.

“She was dependable and he brilliantly erratic,” Ward L. Miner wrote in his 1962 biography, William Goddard, Newspaperman. Mary Katharine kept her brother’s businesses running while he did time in debtor’s prison in 1771 and 1775. In February 1774, William handed control of his fledgling Maryland Journal over to her. That allowed him to concentrate on building his most enduring business: a private postal service, free of British control, which later became the U.S. Post Office.

Mary Katharine Goddard took over the Maryland Journal just as the colonists’ anger at British rule surged toward revolution. By June 1774, she was publishing reports on Britain’s blockade of Boston Harbor. In early April 1775, she endorsed the women-led homespun movement against British textiles, encouraging women to raise flax and wool and embrace frugality. She published Common Sense in two installments in the paper, and covered the Revolution’s first battles with fervor. “The British behaved with savage barbarity,” she wrote in her edition of June 7, 1775.

That July, the Continental Congress adopted William Goddard’s postal system, then promptly appointed the more reliable Benjamin Franklin as postmaster general. Mary Katharine was named Baltimore’s postmaster that October, which likely made her the United States’ only female employee when the nation was born in July 1776. When Congress turned to her to print copies of the Declaration the following year, she recognized her role in a historical moment. Though she usually signed her newspaper “M.K. Goddard,” she printed her full name on the document.

The war years were tough on Goddard’s businesses. Because of its meager treasury, Congress often failed to pay her, so she paid post riders herself. She published the Maryland Journal irregularly in 1776, probably because of paper shortages. In 1778, she announced her willingness to barter with subscribers, accepting payment in beeswax, flour, lard, butter, beef or pork. Yet she was able to boast, in a November 1779 issue, that the Journal had as extensive a circulation as any newspaper in the United States.

Goddard “supported her Business with Spirit and Address, amidst a Complication of Difficulties,” wrote her brother and his new partner, Eleazer Oswald, in a 1779 advertisement. In the same broadsheet, they declared that their new paper mill would not interfere “in the smallest Degree” with Goddard’s business.

But in January 1784, William Goddard apparently forced his sister out of the business and took her position as publisher of the Maryland Journal for himself. Later that year, the siblings published competing almanacs. William included a screed that attacked his sister as “a hypocritical character” and insulted her “double-faced Almanack,” “containing a mean, vulgar and common-place Selection of Articles.”

There’s no evidence that Goddard and her brother ever spoke again. When William got married in Rhode Island in 1786, Mary Katharine did not attend. A mutual friend, John Carter, wrote her a letter describing the wedding and suggesting, probably in vain, that the siblings reconcile. “Dear Miss Katy,” begins the letter — a rare window into her personal relationships.

In October 1789, she lost her job as postmaster of Baltimore. The newly appointed postmaster general, Samuel Osgood, replaced her with John White of Annapolis. John Burrell, Osgood’s assistant, justified the move on sexist grounds. Since supervision of nearby post offices was being added to the job description, Burrell said, “more travelling might be necessary than a woman could undertake.”

Two hundred prominent Baltimore residents signed a letter demanding Goddard’s reinstatement. Goddard herself appealed to President George Washington and the U.S. Senate for her job back. Her petition echoes the disappointment she must’ve also felt when her brother pushed her out of the Journal.

“She hath been discharged without the smallest imputation of any Fault,” Goddard wrote, in the third person, to the Senate in January 1790, when she was 51. “These are but poor rewards indeed for fourteen Years faithful Service, performed in the worst of times,” she argued. Her “little Office,” Goddard added, was “established by her own Industry in the best years of her life, & whereon depended all her future Prospects of subsistence.”

Washington refused to intervene, and the Senate never answered Goddard’s letter. She spent the next 20 years running a bookstore in Baltimore and selling dry goods. Never married, she died in Baltimore on August 12, 1816, at age 78, leaving her property to her servant, Belinda Starling, “to recompense the faithful performance of duties to me.”

Goddard, as a contemporary of hers declared, was “a woman of extraordinary judgment, energy, nerve, and strong good sense.” Though sex discrimination and her ne’er-do-well brother ended her career too soon, Goddard left a mark as one of the Revolutionary era’s most accomplished publishers and a female pioneer in the U.S. government. None of Goddard’s letters survive, and she revealed little about herself in her journalism. Instead, our best evidence of her personality is her work, steady yet animated by a passion for American liberty.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-woman-declaration-of-independence-20170703-story.html

Mary Katherine Goddard

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/mary-katharine-goddard-woman-who-signed-declaration-independence-180970816/

Letter from Mary Katharine Goddard to George Washington 23 December 1789

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-04-02-0302

March 31, 2025 0

March 30 2025 Eid al Fitr

ودام الفرح والسلام بينكم وبينكم

May joy and peace be with you and yours

May you find love to balance and redeem us from fear, joy to balance the terror of our nothingness, hope to balance despair, beauty to balance the horror of war and violence, vision and illumination with which to reimagine and transform ourselves and liberate us from systems of unequal power, and the faith to use all of this to heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.

As written by Kahlil Gibran in The Gravedigger; “Once, as I was burying one of my dead selves, the grave-digger came by and said to me, “Of all those who come here to bury, you alone I like.”

Said I, “You please me exceedingly, but why do you like me?”

“Because,” said he, “They come weeping and go weeping—you only come laughing and go laughing.”

In this celebration of Eid Al Fitr, love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, bring joy, hope, and faith in solidarity with others.

With Ramadan ends the time of truce, and as I now contemplate the possibilities for making mischief for tyrants such as Netanyahu and his criminal regime of genocide, ethnic cleansing, kleptocracy, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and his co conspirators in America including the criminal Trump regime, questions of justice in its myriad forms and dimensions arise yet again to shape my ideas of struggle in the liberation of Palestine.

Nor will I forget or abandon my sacred calling to bring a Reckoning for my brothers and sisters in resistance and revolutionary struggle in Kashmir, Myanmar, and wherever men hunger to be free.

Herein a Gordian Knot of dilemmas and conflicting values, goals, and ideals shift and change like a mirage; bringing a Reckoning to perpetrators of violence and restoration of balance to their victims, in a world with few innocent and many who are both perpetrators and victims.

ن عادلا في الميزان كما يوجه سورة 55 الرحمن 9 من القرآن الكريم

Be just unto the balance as Surah 55 Ar Rahman 9 of Holy Quran directs

How may we be just unto the balance with those who do not regard us as fellow human beings, and to whom all outsiders beyond whatever boundaries of us and them are not truly human and merit no human rights?

Where does the balance of justice and of our humanity lay?

When confronted by Rashomon Gate Events wherein we choose our fates and the sets of possibilities of becoming human within which we will live, how may we disambiguate that which exalts us from that which degrades and dehumanizes?

Always we are captives of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, from which only love has the power to redeem us and return to us our souls.

In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.

Sheikh AbdurRahman Sudais-Surah Ar-Rahman w/ English Trans

The Madman: His Parables and Poems, Kahlil Gibran

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/820151.The_Madman?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=3gO5rxXSQZ&rank=1

Arabic

٠ مارس ٢٠٢٥ عيد الفطر

ودام الفرح والسلام بينكم وبينكم

ليحل عليكم وعلى أحبائكم الفرح والسلام.

أتمنى أن تجدوا الحب الذي يُوازننا ويُخلصنا من الخوف، والفرح الذي يُوازن رعب العدم، والأمل الذي يُوازن اليأس، والجمال الذي يُوازن رعب الحرب والعنف، والرؤية والنور الذي نُعيد بهما تصور أنفسنا ونُغيرها ونُحررها من أنظمة القوة غير المتكافئة، والإيمان الذي يُمكّننا من استخدام كل هذا لشفاء عيوب إنسانيتنا وكسر العالم.

كما كتب خليل جبران في “حفار القبور”: “ذات مرة، بينما كنت أدفن أحد موتاي، مر بي حفار القبور وقال لي: من بين جميع الذين يأتون إلى هنا للدفن، أنتَ وحدك من يُعجبني.”

قلتُ: “أنت تُرضيني كثيرًا، ولكن لماذا تُحبني؟”

“لأنهم”، كما قال، “يأتون باكين ويذهبون باكين، وأنت تأتي ضاحكًا وتذهب ضاحكًا فقط.” في هذا الاحتفال بعيد الفطر، أحبّوا كما ضحكتم في وجه جلادكم، وانشروا الفرح والأمل والإيمان تضامنًا مع الآخرين.

مع حلول رمضان، ينتهي زمن الهدنة، وبينما أتأمل الآن في إمكانيات إلحاق الأذى بالطغاة مثل نتنياهو ونظامه الإجرامي القائم على الإبادة الجماعية والتطهير العرقي والفساد وجرائم الحرب والجرائم ضد الإنسانية، وشركائه في أمريكا، بمن فيهم نظام ترامب المجرم، تتجدد أسئلة العدالة بأشكالها وأبعادها المتعددة لتشكل أفكاري عن النضال من أجل تحرير فلسطين.

هنا، تتشابك المعضلات والقيم والأهداف والمُثُل المتضاربة وتتغير كالسراب؛ محاسبة مرتكبي العنف وإعادة التوازن لضحاياهم، في عالم قليل الأبرياء وكثير من الجناة والضحايا.

ولن أنسى أو أتخلى عن دعوتي المقدسة لمحاسبة إخوتي وأخواتي في المقاومة والنضال الثوري في كشمير وميانمار، وفي كل مكان يتوق فيه الرجال إلى الحرية.

ن عدلا في الميزان كما يُوجَّه سورة الرحمن 55 من القرآن الكريم

اعدلوا في الميزان كما يُوجَّه سورة الرحمن 55 يوجهنا القرآن الكريم في الآية التاسعة:

كيف نُنصف في الميزان مع من لا يعتبروننا بشرًا، والذين لا يُعتبرون جميع الغرباء، مهما كانت حدودنا، بشرًا حقيقيين، ولا يستحقون أي حقوق إنسانية؟

أين يكمن ميزان العدل وإنسانيتنا؟

عندما نواجه أحداث بوابة راشومون التي نختار فيها مصائرنا ومجموعات الاحتمالات لنصبح بشرًا ونعيش في ظلها، كيف نُميز بين ما يُعلينا وما يُهيننا ويُجرّدنا من إنسانيتنا؟

دائمًا ما نكون أسرى لخاتم فاغنر من الخوف والقوة والجبروت، الذي وحده الحب قادر على تخليصنا منه وإعادة أرواحنا إلينا.

في النهاية، كل ما يهم هو ما نفعله بخوفنا، وكيف نستخدم قوتنا

March 30, 2025 0