On the American front of a two front war of tyranny versus liberty, wherein would-be tyrants Netanyahu and Trump seek to centralize all power to their regimes and to carceral states of force and control in the subversion of democracy and the transformation of two of the world’s guarantor states of our universal human rights and rights as citizens into prison states of theocratic and racial elite hegemony and ethnic cleansing, the regime of Traitor Trump is now abducting, torturing, and disappearing without trial dissidents who speak out against our complicity in the genocide of the Palestinians as our tax dollars buy the deaths of children.
This is among the horrors of tyranny and state terror America was founded to escape and prevent, and if we the people do nothing in reply, even fight a second American Revolution if necessary, our citizenship and our humanity will be lost.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence, and no matter where you begin with divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
To this and to all fascist tyrants let us say; Never Again!
Let us unite in solidarity and reclaim our rights as citizens and not subjects, and as human beings and not masters and slaves.
Here we stand at the Rashomon Gate of our possible futures, and we must choose.
In one future lies a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights; in another an Age of Tyrants and centuries of wars ending in human extinction. May we choose life and not death, democracy and not tyranny, equality and not hierarchies and divisions of belonging and otherness, coexistence and not state terror and wars of imperial conquest and dominion, love and not hate.
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled The US government is effectively kidnapping people for opposing genocide: Rumeysa Ozturk, a visa holder, was snatched off the streets by Ice agents and sent to a detention center 1,000 miles away for opposing war crimes in Gaza; “The abductors wore masks because they do not want their identities known. On Tuesday evening, Rumeysa Ozturk exited her apartment building and walked on to the street in Somerville, Massachusetts – a city outside Boston – into the fading daylight. Ozturk, a Turkish-born PhD student at Tufts University who studies children’s media and childhood development, was on her way to an iftar dinner with friends, planning to break her Ramadan fast.
In a video taken from a surveillance camera, she wears a pink hijab and a long white puffer coat against the New England cold. The first man, not uniformed but wearing plain clothes, as all the agents are, approaches her as if asking for directions. But he quickly closes in and grabs her by the wrists she has raised defensively toward her face.
She screams as another man appears behind her, pulling a badge out from under his shirt and snatching away her phone. Soon six people are around her in a tight circle; she has no way to escape. They handcuff her and hustle her into an unmarked van. Attorneys for Ozturk did not know where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the US homeland security department that has become Trump’s anti-immigrant secret police, had taken the 30-year-old woman for almost 24 hours.
In that time, a judge ordered Ice to keep Ozturk, who is on an F-1 academic visa, in Massachusetts. But eventually, her lawyers learned that their client had been moved, as many Ice hostages are, to a detention camp in southern Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) from where she was abducted.
In the video, before she is forced into the van, Ozturk looks terrified, confused. She may well have thought she was being robbed by street thugs; she did not seem to understand, at first, that she was being kidnapped by the state. She tries to plead with her attackers. “Can I just call the cops?” she asks. “We are the police,” one of the men responds. Ozturk remains imprisoned; she has been charged with no crime. In the video of her arrest, a neighbor can be heard nearby, asking: “Is this a kidnapping?”
The answer is yes. Ozturk is one of a growing number university students who have been targeted, issued arrest warrants, or summarily kidnapped off the streets by Ice agents. She joins the ranks of include Mahmoud Khalil, the Syrian-born Palestinian former graduate student and green card holder from Columbia University; Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian-born mechanical engineering doctoral student at the University of Alabama; Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia undergraduate who was born in South Korea but has long been a green card holder after immigrating to the United States with her parents at the age of seven; and Momodou Taal, a dual British and Gambian citizen who is studying for a graduate degree at Cornell University and has gone into hiding after receiving a summons from Ice to turn himself in for deportation proceedings.
Many of these students had some connection – however tenuous – to anti-genocide protests on campuses over the past year and a half. Taal and Khalil, in different capacities, were leaders of protests for Palestinian rights at their respective universities. Chung attended one or two demonstrations at Columbia. Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper that cited credible allegations that Israel was violating international human rights law in Gaza and called on the university president to take a stronger stance against the genocide. In a statement regarding her arrest, a DHS spokesperson said: “Investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” They meant the op-ed.
The state department claims that some of these students have had their visas or permanent resident status rescinded – in a video of the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, taken by his pregnant wife, agents proclaim that his student visa has been revoked, but when they are informed that he has a green card, they say: “We’re revoking that too.” This unilateral revocation of green card protections, without notice or due process, is illegal. But that is not the point – the Trump administration clearly thinks of immigrants as a population with no rights that they need respect.
Rather, the point is that Trump administration’s promise to crack down on student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has the effect of articulating a new speech code for immigrants: no one who is not a United States citizen is entitled to the first amendment right to say that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, or that the lives of Palestinians are not disposable by virtue of their race.
It is up to those us who do have citizenship to speak the truth that the Trump administration is willing to kidnap people for saying: genocide is wrong, Israel is committing it against Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians, like all people, deserve not only the food and medicine that Israel is withholding from them, and not only an end to Israel’s relentless and largely indiscriminate bombing, but they deserve freedom, dignity and self-determination. This has become an unspeakable truth in Trump’s America. Soon, there will be other things we are not allowed to say, either. We owe it to one another to speak these urgent truths plainly, loudly and often – while we still can.
Here is another truth: that the US’s treatment of these immigrants should shame us. It was once a cliche to say that the US was a nation of immigrants, that they represented the best of our country. It is not a cliche anymore. For most of my life as an American, it has been a singular source of pride and gratitude that mine was a country that so many people wanted to come to – that people traveled from all over the world to pursue their talent, their ambition and their hopefulness here, and that this was the place that nurtured and rewarded them.
It may sound vulgar to speak of this lost pride after Ozturk’s kidnapping – all that sentimentality did nothing, after all, to protect her, and may in the end have always been self-serving and false. But as we grapple with what America is becoming – or revealing itself to be – under Donald Trump, I think we can mourn not only the lost delusions of the past but the lost potential of the future.
Ozturk – a student of early childhood education, and someone brave enough to take a great personal risk in standing up for what she thought was right – seems like a person the US would be lucky to have. Instead we are punishing her, terrorizing her, kidnapping her and throwing her away. She deserves better, and so do all of our immigrants – hopeful, struggling people who mistook this for a place where they could thrive. Who, in the future, will continue to think of the US as a place where immigrants can make a difference, can prosper? Who will share their gifts with us now?”
As written by Kenan Malik in The Guardian, in an article entitled Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets: Arrests, blacklists and deportations are chilling reminders of the red scare that transformed America; “‘Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed by his son, John Huston. That line was to have appeared on screen at the beginning of the film. It didn’t, on orders from the studio, Warner Bros. “It was all on account of the word ‘labor’,” John Huston later reflected. “That word looks dangerous in print, I guess.”
It was a relatively insignificant moment in the drama of America’s postwar red scare. McCarthyism proper had still to take flight. Yet, so deep ran the fear already that a single, everyday word could create consternation in Hollywood.
McCarthyism, the historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, “was a peculiarly American style of repression – nonviolent and consensual. Only two people were killed; only a few hundred went to jail.” Yet it constituted “one of the most severe episodes of political repression the United States ever experienced”.
Sackings and legal sanctions created such fear that, in the words of the political philosopher Corey Robin, society was put “on lockdown”, with people so “petrified of being punished for their political beliefs” that “they drew in their political limbs”.
It was not just communists who were silenced. “If someone insists that there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, or that there is an inequality of wealth,” claimed the chair of one state committee on un-American activities, “there is every reason to believe that person is a communist.” This at a time when Jim Crow still held the south in its grip. The red scare paused the civil rights movement for more than a decade and drew the teeth of union radicalism.
Fear has always been a means of enforcing social order, most obviously in authoritarian states, from China to Saudi Arabia, Turkey to Russia, where repression becomes the foundation of political rule. In liberal democracies, order rests more on consensus than overt brutality. But here, too, fear plays its role. The worker’s fear of being sacked, the claimant’s of being sanctioned, the renter’s of being made homeless, the fear of the working-class mother facing a social worker or of the black teenager walking past a policeman – relations of power are also relations of fear, but fears usually so sublimated that we simply accept that that’s the way the system works.
It is when consensus ruptures, when social conflict erupts, or when the authorities need to assert their power, that liberal democracies begin wielding fear more overtly as a political tool to quieten dissent or impose authority. Think of how the British state treated Irish people in the 1970s and 1980s, or miners during the great strike of 1984/85.
Seventy years on from McCarthyism, America seems to be entering such a moment. Over the past month, we have seen the mass deportation to a notorious foreign jail of hundreds of people declared to be illegal immigrants and gang members, without evidence or due process; the arrest, detention and threatened deportation of foreign students, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal and Yunseo Chung, for protesting about the war in Gaza; the blacklisting of law firms representing clients of whom Donald Trump does not approve; the mass sackings of federal workers.
Fear works here in two ways. The targets of repression are groups about whom it is easier to create fear, and so easier to deprive of rights and due process. Doing so then creates a wider climate of fear in which people become less willing to speak out, and not just about Palestine. Already, “whole segments of American society [are] running scared”, as one observer put it.
Institutions such as universities, Schrecker concluded about the 1950s, “did not fight McCarthyism” but “contributed to it”, not only through dismissals and blacklists but also through accepting “the legitimacy of what the congressional committees and other official investigators were doing”, thereby conferring “respectability upon the most repressive elements” of the process.
It’s a process repeating itself today. Earlier this month, after cancelling $400m (£310m) in federal grants and contracts, Trump made a series of demands of Columbia University, including that it change its disciplinary rules, place the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership” and adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism that its own lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, condemns as having been “weaponised” into “a blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemite” and to “go after pro-Palestinian speech”. Last week, Columbia capitulated.
Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, one of the few academic leaders willing to speak out, decries “the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era”, describing “anticipatory obedience” as “a form of cowardice”. Cowardice, though, has become the defining trait, most university leaders “just happy that Columbia is the whipping boy”. Columbia may be the first university in Trump’s crosshairs, but it won’t be the last. Keeping silent won’t save them.
In his incendiary speech in Munich in February, the US vice-president, JD Vance, harangued European leaders to worry less about Russia than “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values”, especially free speech. The same, it would seem, applies to America, too. Many of those who previously so vigorously upheld the importance of free speech have suddenly lost their voice or now believe that speech should be free only for those with the right kinds of views. The brazen hypocrisy of Vance, and of the fair-weather supporters of free speech, should nevertheless not lead us to ignore the fact that, from more intrusive policing of social media to greater restrictions on our ability to protest to the disciplining, even sacking, of workers holding “gender-critical views”, these are issues to which we urgently need to attend.
“I live in an age of fear,” lamented the essayist and author EB White in 1947, after the New York Herald had suggested that all employees be forced to declare their political beliefs to retain their jobs. He was, he insisted, less worried “that there were communists in Hollywood” than to “read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control”. It is a perspective as vital now as it was then, and as necessary on this side of the Atlantic as in America.”
The Crucible trailer
The US government is effectively kidnapping people for opposing genocide
I have no words to offer in this time of darkness, as Israel unleashes the Nothing and erases the witnesses of her brutal campaign of dehumanization, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, in the amoral conquest and dominion of Palestine, other than this; remember, and bring a Reckoning.
This refusal to submit, this witness of history, this solidarity of action embodied in the life of our fallen comrade; this, this, this.
As written by Sharif Abdel Kouddous in Dropbox; “{Hossam Shabat is dead. I am beyond rage and despair as I write these words. The Israeli military bombed his car this morning as he was traveling in Beit Lahia. Videos fill my screen of his body lying on the street, carried to the hospital, grieved by his colleagues and loved ones. These are the kinds of tragic scenes Hossam himself would so often document for the world. He was an exemplary journalist: brave, tireless, and dedicated to telling the story of Palestinians in Gaza.
Hossam was one of a handful of reporters who remained in northern Gaza through Israel’s genocidal war. His ability to cover one of the most brutal military campaigns in recent history was almost beyond comprehension. He bore witness to untold death and suffering on an almost daily basis for seventeen months. He was displaced over twenty times. He was often hungry. He buried many of his journalist colleagues. In November, he was wounded in an Israeli airstrike. I still can’t believe I am referring to him in the past tense. Israel obliterates the present.
When I contacted Hossam in November to ask him to write for Drop Site News, he was enthusiastic. “Greetings habibi. May God keep you. I am very happy to have this opportunity,” he wrote. “There are so many ideas, scenes, stories.”
His first dispatch for Drop Site was a searing account of a vicious mass expulsion campaign by the Israeli military in Beit Lahia that forced thousands of Palestinian families to flee one of the last remaining shelters in the besieged town:
Some of the wounded fell on the road with no hope of getting treatment. “I was walking with my sister in the street,” said Rahaf, 16. She and her sister were the sole survivors in their family of an earlier airstrike that killed 70 people. “Suddenly my sister fell due to the bombing. I saw blood pouring from her, but I couldn’t do anything. I left her in the street, and no one pulled her out. I was screaming, but no one heard me.”
His writing was lyrical and arresting. I struggled to translate and edit his pieces—to do them justice, to convey his emotive use of Arabic into something relatable in English. In the typical editorial see-saw back and forth of finalizing a piece, I would often return to him with clarifications and questions, asking him for additional details and direct quotes. He was always quick to respond despite his extraordinary circumstances.
In January, Hossam filed a piece about the three days between when the “ceasefire” deal was announced and when it was scheduled to be implemented, a period when Israel escalated its bombing campaign across Gaza:
They targeted the al-Falah school; they bombed an entire residential block in Jabaliya; they killed families, like the Alloush family, whose bodies have not yet been recovered and still lie under and over the rubble. The children I saw that night appeared happy but they were no longer living, their faces frozen in a mix of smiles and blood.
In early December, when writing a preamble to one of his articles, I asked him to confirm his age. “Hahaha. I’m young. 24,” he wrote. Then moments later he clarified: “Actually, I haven’t turned 24 yet. I’m 23.” I told him he was young in age only, but in experience he was old (it sounds better in Arabic). “I’m really tired,” he responded. “I swear I have no strength left. I can’t find a place to sleep. I’ve been displaced 20 times.” He continued: “Did you know that I am the only one in my family who lives alone in the north?” Last month, during the “ceasefire,” he was reunited with his mother for the first time in 492 days.
In October, the Israeli military placed Hossam and five other Palestinian journalists on a hit list. At the time, he said it felt like he was “hunted.” He called on people to speak out using the hashtag #ProtectTheJournalists: “I plead everyone to share the reality about Journalists in order to spread awareness about the real plans of the Israeli occupation to target journalists in order to impose a media blackout. Spread the hashtag and talk about us!”
In December, after the Israeli military killed five journalists in an airstrike on their vehicle, I messaged to check in on him.
“Our job is only to die,” he responded. “I hate the whole world. No one is doing anything. I swear I’ve come to hate this job.” About his surviving colleagues he wrote, “We’ve started saying to each other: “Ok, whose turn is it?…Our families consider us already martyred.”
When Israel resumed its scorched earth bombing last week, I messaged again to check in on him. He responded with one word: “Death.”
Throughout it all, Hossam would message with ideas for stories, or just to relay what was happening in the north. In his messages and voice notes, he often somehow still managed to be warm and funny—a kind of rebellion against the death all around him.
After the “ceasefire” went into effect, he returned to his hometown of Beit Hanoun on the northeastern edge of Gaza. Hardly a structure was left standing, but he was determined to stay and document the destruction.
He messaged me late Sunday night, just hours before he was killed. He had been forced to leave his hometown of Beit Hanoun on the day of Israel’s renewed assault last week and was forcibly displaced yet again—this time to Jabaliya. We had agreed on him writing a piece about the attack last week and what he had witnessed.
“Habibi,” he wrote. “I miss you.” I asked him what the situation was like in Jabaliya. “Difficult,” he said.
He sent his piece, and I read through it, sent my follow-up questions. He only answered one before going offline. I messaged him again as soon as I woke up this morning. I didn’t yet know that he had been killed.
What you are about to read is Hossam’s last article. I translated it through tears.”
—Sharif Abdel Kouddous
Report from the Frontline of Israel’s War of Annihilation
Story by Hossam Shabat
BEIT HANOUN, GAZA—The night was dark and cautiously quiet. Everyone fell into an anxious sleep. But the tranquility was quickly shattered by deafening screams. As the bombs rained down, the wails of neighbors announced the first moments of the resumption of Israel’s military campaign. Beit Hanoun was plunged into panic and terror. Cries of distress rose amid the screech of the shells in a scene that reflected the magnitude of the disaster engulfing the city. This was only the beginning. The massacre of entire families quickly followed. Columns of smoke rose everywhere. The bombing did not cease for a moment, drowning everything in a relentless hail of fire and suffering.
The Israeli attack is continuing. The occupation is practicing its brutality with unprecedented bombardment leaving behind horrific scenes of destruction and bloodshed. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the number of martyrs over the past six days has topped 700, reflecting the degree of such immense human suffering. OCHA also reports how Gaza is suffering from a severe shortage of medicines and medical aid, exacerbating an already dire situation.
In the first six days of this renewed military operation, northern Gaza witnessed four bloody massacres. The most notable was the Mubarak family massacre, which took place as the family was gathering in mourning to offer their condolences to Dr. Salim Mubarak. In an instant, their collective grieving was turned into a sea of blood and body parts. The entire family was killed: Dr. Salim, his wife, his children, his parents. No one survived. One eyewitness summed it up plainly: “They were all killed.” The victims were not on a battlefield but in a house of mourning. It was a crime in every sense of the word.
This massacre was not the only one—it was followed by successive attacks on other families, including the Abu Nasr family, then the Abu Halim family—bringing to mind the vicious bombardment in the very beginning of the war after October 7. The aggression is ongoing, relentless, targeting innocent civilians indiscriminately, leaving behind only destruction and death.
When I arrived on the scene, I wasn’t ready for the horror before my eyes. The streets were filled with the dead. Under every stone lay a martyr. Dozens were crying for help from underneath the rubble of their homes but there was no one to respond. Screams filled the air while everyone stood helpless. My tears didn’t stop. The scenes were more than any human being could bear. The ambulances were filled with corpses, their bodies and limbs piled on top and intertwined with one another. We could no longer distinguish between children and men, between the injured and the dead.
At Al-Andalus hospital the scene was even more painful. The hospital was filled with martyrs. Mothers bid silent farewells to their children. Medical staff worked in horrific conditions, trying to treat the injured with only the most basic means available. It was an impossible situation with massive numbers of dead and wounded being brought in at a terrifying rate.
Israel’s aggression continues. Massacre after massacre, leaving only the screams of mothers in its wake and the dreams of children that have turned to ash. There is no justification for this. Everything is being crushed: the lives of innocent people, their dignity, and their hopes for a better future.
* Translation by Sharif Abdel Kouddous
Statement from Drop Site News on Israel’s Murder of Our Colleague Hossam Shabat: We Hold Both Israel and the U.S. Government Responsible
Today, March 24, 2025, Israel killed journalist Hossam Shabat, a reporter for Al Jazeera Mubasher and a contributing reporter to Drop Site News, in what witnesses described as a targeted strike. Hossam was a tremendous young journalist who exhibited remarkable courage and tenacity as he documented the U.S.-facilitated genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. One of the few journalists who didn’t leave the northern Gaza Strip, Hossam was murdered in Beit Lahia, the site of some of the most intense Israeli bombing and mass killing operations.
Drop Site News holds Israel and the U.S. responsible for killing Hossam. The journalist Mohammad Mansour, a correspondent for Palestine Today, was also killed Monday in an Israeli attack on a house in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. More than 200 of our Palestinian media colleagues have been killed by Israel—supplied with weapons and given blanket impunity by most Western governments—over the past seventeen months.
“If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed—most likely targeted—by the Israeli occupation forces,” Hossam wrote in a statement posted posthumously by his friends on his social media accounts. “For [the] past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents—anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side.”
Hossam, who was just 23, filed poetic and painful dispatches from Gaza. He never separated himself from the people whose lives and deaths he documented. “Time now is measured not in minutes, but in lifetimes of pain and tears” as people in Gaza waited for the implementation of the ceasefire, Hossam wrote in an article for Drop Site in January. “With every passing moment the anxiety and tension of the people here grows, as they wonder whether they will stay alive long enough for the fire to cease.”
As Palestinian journalists in Gaza continue to document the genocide against their families and their people, most of the world encounters their work only through their video reports on social media. They are so much more than those videos. Hossam was born into a period of escalating Israeli annexation, siege, and genocide. Unflagging in the face of constant deprivation and violence, Hossam once summarized his life’s dedication in an interview: “I say to the world, I am continuing. I am covering the events with an empty stomach, steadfast and persevering. I am Hossam Shabat, from the resilient northern Gaza Strip.”
Hours before he was killed, Hossam filed a story for Drop Site about Israel’s resumption of its scorched earth bombing of Gaza last week that killed over 400 people, including nearly 200 children in a matter of hours. He was eager to publish. “I want to share the text urgently,” he wrote in Arabic. He always wanted to get the story out—to report what was happening on the ground. About a year ago, Hossam wrote, “Before this genocide started, I was a young college student studying journalism. Little did I know I would be given one of the hardest jobs in the world: to cover the genocide of my own people.”
In October 2024, the Israeli military placed Hossam and five other Palestinian journalists on a hit list. Hossam regularly received death threats by call and text. What we have witnessed for nearly a year and a half is the Israeli military engaging in a systematic campaign to kill Palestinian journalists, as well as members of their families. Hossam leaves behind his beloved mother and his people, whose lives he tirelessly worked to represent and protect.
During this unprecedented killing campaign against journalists, the silence of so many of our colleagues in the Western media is a stain on the profession. The International Federation of Journalists has put out a list, by name, of many of the journalists and media workers who have been killed or injured in Gaza. In a just world, those who helped to kill Hossam—and all of our Palestinian colleagues—would be brought to justice and tried for their crimes. We call on all journalists to raise their voices to demand an end to the killing of our Palestinian colleagues who have risked, and often given, their lives so that the truth itself can live.
This night the gates of infinity are opened, letting angelic figures of our true selves and possibilities of becoming human through; wishes may come true, visions be realized, the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world find healing in our defining and inherent human powers of faith, hope, and love.
On this night over one thousand four hundred years ago a man looked into the future and made it real, to use the phrase from the film The Great and Powerful Oz, or believed an impossible thing and set it free to become so in Lewis Carroll’s terms and the famous line in Tim Burton’s film Alice in Wonderland. Both reference moments of exaltation and vision such as the event celebrated tonight throughout the Islamic world as a tidal change and Defining Moment of humankind, which finds echo in ibn Arabi’s idea of the alam al mythal, the Logos in the Biblical book of John the Evangelist, the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism’s Book of the Dead, Coleridge’s Primary Imagination, and Jung’s Collective Unconscious. In such ideologies we are negative spaces, shadows, dreams, echoes and reflections of ideal forms within the unknowable Infinite, ourselves and our reality transforms of messages and a field of being as abstract information which unfold into actualities; as in Yoda’s line which paraphrases Einstein; “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”
If true, we can know nothing directly about the Reality which creates and interpenetrates us, for we are its shadows, or so Plato describes in the Allegory of the Cave; yet poetic vision and metaphorical truth allow us to escape the limits of our form. Holy Quran is a record of one such journey, a reimagination of Abrahamic faith which unfolded for the Prophet Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him, over twenty three years of conversations with the being of illumination which manifested to him as Jibril.
Any origin story which founds a new religion defines its meaning and is also a negotiated truth and a ground of struggle for those who claim it and each other as their own, and the story of the Message is no exception, having been argued and fought over ever since and sciences of abrogation and hermeneutics evolved from the same text, but for myself what is most important is the Message as an event and a thing in itself and not its claims and interpretations; the emergence of transpersonal consciousness as transcendence, vision, and its transformational effects as Awakening.
Herein the Infinite seizes and shakes us in its jaws like a lion, and all is forever changed.
For with poetic vision we may win freedom from the limits of our form, escape the legacies of our history, birth new futures and ways of being human together, and create and define ourselves anew.
Go up into the gaps and embrace the dreams of the Infinite.
Surat Al-Qadr (The Power) | Mishary Rashid Alafasy | مشاري بن راشد العفاسي | سورة القد
The Illuminated Hafiz: Love Poems for the Journey to Light
by Hafez, Michael Green (Illustrator), Saliha Green (Illustrator), Nancy Barton (Editor), Omid Safi (Foreword), Coleman Barks (Translator), Robert Bly (Translator), Peter Booth (Translator), Meher Baba (Translator)
Suhrawardi: The Shape of Light, by Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, Tosun Bayrak (Preface), Shaykh Muhammad Sadiq Naqshbandi Erzinjani (Afterword), Hadrat Abdul-Qadir al-Jilani (Foreword)
Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes, by Fakhruddin Iraqi, William C. Chittick (Translator), Peter Wilson (Goodreads Author) (Translator), Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Foreword)
The Four Last Great Sufi Master Poets: Selected Poems, by Paul Smith (Translator), Shah Latif, Nazir Akbarabadi, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Muhammad Iqbal
27 مارس 2025 ليلة القدر المباركة: ليلة بهيجة من الرؤية الشعرية وإعادة تصور وتحويل إمكانياتنا اللانهائية في أن نصبح بشرًا
في هذه الليلة ، تفتح أبواب اللانهاية ، مما يسمح لأشكال ملائكية وشيطانية من ذواتنا الحقيقية وإمكانيات أن نصبح بشرًا ؛ قد تتحقق الأمنيات ، وتتحقق الرؤى ، وتجد عيوب إنسانيتنا وانكسار العالم الشفاء في قوتنا المميزة للإيمان والرجاء والمحبة.
في هذه الليلة منذ أكثر من ألف وأربعمائة عام ، نظر رجل إلى المستقبل وجعله حقيقيًا ، باستخدام العبارة المأخوذة من فيلم أوز العظيم والقوي ، أو صدق شيئًا مستحيلًا وحرره ليصبح كذلك وفقًا لشروط لويس كارول. والخط الشهير في فيلم تيم بيرتون أليس في بلاد العجائب. يشير كلاهما إلى الحدث الذي تم الاحتفال به الليلة في جميع أنحاء العالم الإسلامي باعتباره تغييرًا مدًا للجزر وتحديد اللحظة للبشرية ، والتي تجد صدى في فكرة علم الميثال ، والشعارات في الكتاب المقدس ، وباردو في البوذية التبتية ، ومخيلة كوليردج الأولية ، وفكرة يونغ. اللاوعي الجماعي. في مثل هذه الأيديولوجيات نحن فضاءات سلبية لأشكال مثالية داخل الغيب ، يحولنا نحن وواقعنا الرسائل التي تتكشف إلى حقائق ؛ كما في سطر يودا الذي يعيد صياغة آينشتاين ؛ “كائنات مضيئة هي نحن، وليس هذا الأمر الخام.”
إذا كان هذا صحيحًا ، فلا يمكننا معرفة أي شيء بشكل مباشر عن الواقع الذي يخلقنا ويخترقنا ، لأننا ظلاله ، أو هكذا وصف أفلاطون في قصة الكهف ؛ ومع ذلك ، فإن الرؤية الشعرية والحقيقة المجازية تسمح لنا بالتهرب من حدود شكلنا. القرآن الكريم هو سجل لواحدة من هذه الرحلات ، إعادة تصور للإيمان الإبراهيمي الذي انكشف للنبي محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم ، على مدى ثلاث وعشرين عامًا من الأحاديث مع كينونة النور التي تجلت له على أنها جبريل.
أي قصة أصل تؤسس دينًا جديدًا تحدد معناها وهي أيضًا حقيقة متفاوض عليها وأرضًا للنضال لمن يدعيها ويطالب كل منهم الآخر بكونه ملكًا له ، وقصة الرسالة ليست استثناءً ، حيث تم الجدل والنزاع حولها. منذ ذلك الحين ، ولكن الأمر الأكثر أهمية بالنسبة لي هو الرسالة كحدث وشيء في حد ذاته وليس ادعاءاتها وتفسيراتها ؛ ظهور الوعي العابر للشخص باعتباره السمو والصحوة.
هنا يمسكنا اللانهائي ويهزنا بين فكيه مثل الأسد، ويتغير كل شيء إلى الأبد.
لأنه من خلال الرؤية الشعرية قد نربح الحرية من حدود شكلنا ، ونولد مستقبلًا جديدًا وطرقًا لكوننا بشرًا معًا ، ونخلق ونعرف أنفسنا من جديد.
اصعد إلى الفجوات واحتضن أحلام اللانهائي.
كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 21 مارس 2023 ، حول الرؤية الشعرية كإعادة تخيل وتحويل لإمكانياتنا في أن نصبح بشرًا ؛ هنا في خمسة أعمال كما في أداء مسرحي لنفسي ، أقدم أفكاري في يوم الشعر.
فعل واحد
تعريف للمصطلحات أو ما هو الشعر؟
أولا وقبل كل شيء يجب أن تكون الأسماء الحقيقية للأشياء.
الكلمات مهمة. يمكنهم تقسيمنا ، ويمكنهم توحيدنا. يمكن للكلمات أن تمجد وتدنس. يمكنهم تشكيل صورنا وإمكانياتنا في أن نصبح بشرًا وإنشاء عوالم نطمح إليها أو تقييدها ، ويمكنهم استبدال الحجارة التي نرميها على بعضنا البعض وعلاج أمراض انفصالنا.
كنز الكلمات دائمًا ، لأنها تمثل أنواع الأفكار التي يمكننا امتلاكها وإيواء قوة إبداعية خيالية. نتحملها إلى الأمام كذكريات وتواريخ وهويات ، مثل أصداف مخلوقات بحرية رائعة ؛ الأصوات التي هي تشبيه بالشكل أو ما أسماه غاستون باشيلارد coquilles au parole.
هكذا هم أيضًا يدفعوننا إلى الأمام ، وينتظرون لحظة يقظتهم كبذور للصيرورة.
الفصل الثاني
كونه اعتذارًا عن استطرادي ars poetica ؛ أسلوبي في الكتابة خاص وغريب ، لكن أنا كذلك.
بمجرد أن أبحرت في بحيرة الأحلام ، استغلت بيوتي لكن فيجن تطالب بها ؛ وفي مثل هذه الرؤى سقطت في بحر من الكلمات والصور والأغاني والتاريخ ، متعدد الطبقات ومتشابك مع بعضها البعض مثل شبكة من الانعكاسات وأصداء الأصوات المفقودة في الوقت المناسب ، برية من المرايا التي تلتقط أنفسنا وتشوهنا وتوسعنا إلى ما لا نهاية. في جميع الاتجاهات.
إليكم ظل ذاتي لتاريخنا نتجول فيه وراء أنفسنا مثل حكاية ذيل الزواحف غير المرئية ، والموروثات التي يجب أن نخرج منها لنخلق أنفسنا من جديد وتلك التي لا يمكننا التخلي عنها دون أن نفقد من نحن.
هنا تظهر نصوصي البينية ، تشدني وتهزني بأصوات صاخبة وأغراض غير جديرة بالثقة ، إلى أين ينتهي تاريخنا ونبدأ؟
لا يمكننا الهروب من بعضنا البعض ، أنا وظلي.
الفصل الثالث
عرض ، سريع الزوال كذكريات يحملها العطر ومتصاعدًا في الريح ، يصل إلى فجوات الواقع عبر بوابات أحلامنا ، إلى اللانهائي ، الخالي من أعلام بشرتنا ، التي لم يبق منها سوى أصداء وانعكاسات محفورة عليها تاريخنا من خلال برق التنوير لتحقيق التوازن ضد رعب العدم لدينا.
اصوات وصدى
ذات مرة كان هناك صوت
بدون قذيفة لترددها
لا الهدير الهائل والرعد
التابع
وموجات المد والجزر لها
الفوضى وولادة الأكوان
متموجة بروعة الحياة
في كل ما لدينا من آلاف الملايين
احتمالات لا حدود لها في أن تصبح
الرقص مع المستحيل في نشوة الطرب والرعب
الأمل واليأس ، الإيمان ببعضنا البعض كتضامن للعمل
مقابل علم أمراض انفصالنا
والبرق يحطمنا بالكسر والاضطراب ،
يسمو فجوات الظلام التي ضلنا فيها
نفي وهو أيضًا عطية
فتح مساحات للعب الإبداعي الحر
هذا هو اعتناق الموت كتحرير
من حدود شكلنا ،
عيوب إنسانيتنا ،
وانكسار العالم.
نهرب من حلزونات قوقعتنا
حلق بين الأجرام السماوية
تعظموا ودنسوا
حرة ومجهولة مثل الأشياء البرية
أنا سليم وصدى
تركت القشرة التي غنيت نفسي منها
اين انا الأن؟
الفصل الرابع
بيان العمل ؛ الشعر كنضال ثوري.
كما كتبت في مقالتي في 14 أكتوبر 2021 ، حول الفن كرؤية شعرية ، والتعدي ، والاستيلاء على السلطة ، وإعادة التخيل ، والتحول: بيان ؛ لماذا أكتب؟
أقدم هنا بيانًا للفن كرؤية شعرية ، وإعادة تخيل وتحويل في سياقات أداء الهويات وفي مسرح حرب العصابات للعمل السياسي والنضال الثوري.
يعتبر الفن عدوانيًا عندما يتحدى وينتهك أفكارنا عن الحياة الطبيعية واستبداد أفكار الآخرين عن الفضيلة ، إنه استيلاء على السلطة ورفض الخضوع للهويات المرخصة التي تمنح الحرية والاستقلالية من خلال أن تصبح ذاتية الإنشاء ومملوكة للذات ، لا يُقهر ويتجاوز القهر بالقوة والسيطرة ، وهو رؤية شعرية كإعادة تخيل وتغيير سريالي عندما يصور ويوجه مرورنا عبر متاهة الزمن والتاريخ والذاكرة وتزوير صورنا الملتقطة والمشوهة في برية المرايا والأكاذيب والأوهام ، لتفعيل نشوة الاختطاف والتمجيد ، وتجاوزنا في عوالم الحلم والرؤية حيث لا تنطبق القواعد ، وعندما تصطادنا بالحقائق الجوهرية في الطبيعة والمكتوبة في جسدنا.
كل الفن الحقيقي ينجس ويمجد ، يسلّخنا بالنشوة والرعب أمام الحقائق اللامحدودة والسرية لأنفسنا.
يهدف الفن إلى التشكيك في قواعد وجوهر الإنسان ومعناه وقيمته وتغييرها ؛ لاكتشاف داخل الحدود والواجهات ، أماكن التغيير الصامتة والفارغة وإمكانات التكيف اللامحدودة للأنظمة ، والمجهول ، والانفصال ، والتجاور المنحرف وزوايا الرؤية الغريبة ، وإمكانيات جديدة للتحول إلى إنسان.
كما نتعلم من جون كيج في الموسيقى ، وهارولد بينتر في المسرح ، وبيت موندريان في الفن ، فإن المساحات الفارغة هي التي تحدد المعنى وترتبها ؛ وفي التاريخ ، يجب أن نستمع إلى الأصوات التي تم إسكاتها ومحوها بعناية ، لأن الفراغ هنا يتحدث إلينا عن القوة السرية والوظائف والعلاقات الرئيسية التي يجب أن تخفيها السلطة للحفاظ على هيمنتها علينا.
مساحة اللعب الحرة هذه ، للمجهول على أنها مساحة غير مُطالب بها وإمكانات تكيفية لنظام ، حدوده مثل الشواطئ المعروفة على خرائطنا في أن تصبح إنسانًا تشكل إطارًا لمجموعة الخيارات وتعمل كهويات مصرح بها وحدود جوهرية للحرية كمستقبل الاحتمالات ، تظل خارج وخارج كل حدود وأنظمة المعرفة ، مثل نظرية جوديل ؛ بغض النظر عن مقدار ما تعلمناه ونغير حدود الكون المعروف ، فإن اللانهائي يظل شاسعًا كما كان من قبل ، مما يحافظ على الجهل.
إذا كان الأمر كذلك ، فإن مهمة أن تصبح إنسانًا تتضمن جلب الفوضى ؛ إعادة التخيل والتحول ، وانتهاك الأمور الطبيعية وتجاوز حدود المحظور لتحريرنا من استبداد أفكار الآخرين حول الفضيلة والهويات المرخصة ، وخلق إمكانيات لا حدود لها لتصبح بشرًا مثل الاستيلاء على السلطة.
ترتيب يخصص ؛ الفوضى تستقل.
نحن ما أسماه غاستون باشيلارد أصداف الكلام ، وحمل المشروط ، وحاملي القصص كذاكرة ، وتاريخ ، وهوية ، شكلنا بمرور الوقت وترابطنا مع بعضنا البعض على شكل استباقيات أو تواريخ يتم التعبير عنها في أشكالنا عن كيفية حلنا. مشاكل التكيف والتغيير.
ألسنا القصص التي نرويها عن أنفسنا وعن أنفسنا وعن بعضنا البعض؟
لا يمكننا بعد ذلك تغيير وتحويل أنفسنا بقصصنا من خلال إعادة تخيل ورؤية شعرية ، كأشياء جديدة وجميلة تحررت من تراث تاريخنا وحدود أفكار الآخرين عن الفضيلة والجمال والحقيقة؟
دعونا نغتنم القصص التي صنعناها ، ونصبح مجيدًا.
كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 24 أغسطس 2020 ، القوة التحويلية للفن: بيان ؛ القوة التحويلية للفن ، وقدرته على إعادة صياغة أفكارنا عن الذات والآخر ، لتغيير الحدود ، وإعادة تعيين القيم ، واستعادة التاريخ والهوية من الصمت ، والمحو ، والتهميش ، وإجازة عدم المساواة
أفعال القوة وتقسيمات الآخر الإقصائي ؛ هذه من بين الوظائف الحيوية التي تجعل الفن نشاطًا إنسانيًا واجتماعيًا أساسيًا.
الفن كرؤية شعرية يسبق السياسة ويوازيها كوسيلة لتغيير حضارتنا وإمكانيات الإنسان والمعنى والقيمة ؛ إنه يمثل سلطة يمتلكها أفراد ومجتمعات مستقلة ضد استبداد قوة الدولة وسيطرتها. السياسة هي فن اجتماعي أساسي لطبيعتنا البشرية المترابطة وعمليات التحول إلى إنسان. من خلال كلماتنا وصورنا وأدائنا يمكننا التشكيك في السلطة والاستهزاء بها وفضحها وتحديها والتحريض على الآخرين وإثارتهم وإزعاجهم في إحداث تغيير تحويلي في الأنظمة والهياكل التي نترسخ فيها ، وآمل أن نحررنا منها.
الفن هو الحياة ، لأنه يشركنا بشكل شخصي ومباشر في عمليات النمو التكيفي وفي إعادة التفاوض بشأن عقودنا الاجتماعية وعلاقاتنا مع الآخرين ، على الصعيدين الشخصي والسياسي ، ويعلمنا ويحفز أداء هوياتنا.
إذا وقعنا في لعبة مزورة ، يجب علينا تغيير قواعد وشروط النضال. “تم وضع القواعد ليتم كسرها” لإعادة صياغة الجنرال ماك آرثر ؛ زعزعة استقرار النظام ، ونزع شرعية السلطة ، واستجواب الأنظمة والهياكل التقليدية ، وتجاوز الحدود ، ومقاومة القوة والسيطرة والتخلي عنها ، وتزوير الحقائق الجديدة ، واكتشاف احتمالات التحول إلى إنسان.
يجب علينا أن نشكك في السلطة ونكشفها ونهزأ بها ونخربها ونتجاوزها ونتحدىها عندما يتعلق الأمر بمطالبتنا. لأنه لا توجد سلطة عادلة.
دعونا نتحكم في سردنا وتمثيلنا وذاكرتنا وتاريخنا وهويتنا.
دعونا نكون غير مهزومين ، بلا إتقان ، وأحرار.
دعونا نكون قادرين على الفوضى والفرح والتحول والثورة.
كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 30 كانون الأول (ديسمبر) 2021 ، The Year in Review ؛ أكتب هنا كدعوة مقدسة للسعي وراء الحقيقة ، وفي الدور الذي وصفه فوكو بأنه راوي الحقيقة في إشارة إلى الحس والواجبات الأساسية الأربعة للمواطن ؛ للتشكيك في السلطة ، وكشف السلطة ، والتحايل على السلطة ، وتحدي السلطة.
خلال سنوات عملي كمدرس للطب الشرعي ومدرب للمناظرات ، بدأت في اليوم الأول من كل عام جديد بإظهار الهدف. على مكتبي كنت أضع قاعدة صلبة بالكلمات ؛ “هذه نقطة ارتكاز”. عبرها كنت أضع ترنحًا يتأرجح قائلاً ؛ “إنه يوازن بين رافعة.” وأخيراً “عندما يسألك والداك عما تتعلمه في الطب الشرعي ، أخبرهم أنك تتعلم أن تصبح نقطة ارتكاز وتغيير ميزان القوى في العالم.” هذا هو أملي الآن لنا جميعًا.
إن قول الحقيقة كقصة شعرية تدور حول القوة التجديدية والتحويلية للحقيقة بالمعنى الذي استخدمه كيتس عندما تحدث عن الجمال ، “أنا متأكد من قداسة عواطف القلب وحقيقة الخيال – ما هو الخيال يعتبر أن الجمال يجب أن يكون حقًا – سواء كان موجودًا من قبل أم لا – لأن لدي نفس فكرة كل عواطفنا كما في الحب ، فكلها في سامية ، وخلاقة في جمالها الأساسي. ” أو كما يعلمنا الرومي. “دع الجمال الذي تحبه يكون ما تفعله.”
لكن قول الحقيقة يتعلق أيضًا بالرؤية الشعرية باعتبارها إعادة تخيل وتحويل ؛ أن نحلم بشيء مستحيل ونجعله حقيقيًا ، كما تعلمنا أليس عند سرد الأشياء الستة المستحيلة في معركتها مع Jabberwocky. في طريقها لمحاربة تنين ، ورؤيته لأول مرة مروعة ، تشير أليس إلى ماد هاتر في فيلم تيم بيرتون الجميل ؛ “هذا مستحيل.”
الذي يقول له حتر ، “فقط إذا كنت تؤمن بذلك”.
“في بعض الأحيان ، أؤمن بستة أشياء مستحيلة قبل الإفطار.”
“هذه ممارسة ممتازة ، ولكن الآن فقط ، قد ترغب حقًا في التركيز على Jabberwocky.”
هكذا فقط.
الفصل الرابع
دعاء
أتمنى أن تكون أيامك أيام مجد وحرية ، وتجاوزات مضيئة ، وتمجيد للروح البشرية التي لا تُقهر ، وقول الحقيقة والوحي ، وأداء هويات غير مصرح بها كمسرح حرب العصابات والاحتفالات الجماعية بتنوعنا والإمكانيات اللامحدودة للإنسان معنى وقيمة نشوة النشوة ورؤية العيش خارج كل الحدود ، حيث لا شيء ممنوع.
في النهاية كل ما يهم هو ما نفعله بخوفنا وكيف نستخدم قوتنا ؛ افعل شيئًا جميلًا معك.
Tomorrow we commemorate the resistance of the peoples of Myanmar to the Japanese Occupation during World War Two, while the military junta which has seized the nation as a vassal state of the Chinese Communist Party, much like that of Pol Pot and other tyrants of genocide and war crimes, instrumentalizes the occasion to glorify itself while changing its meaning in service to its own authority as a carceral state of force and control, the peoples it has enslaved rise up in resistance and reclaim its original meaning.
The world’s tenth largest military has failed utterly to consolidate power and repress dissent, despite massive brutal and genocidal war crimes. In the fighting before the annual Resistance Day, renamed by the regime as Armed Forces Day, the actual Resistance emerged victorious in battles across the nation.
There is a calculus of fear by which tyrannies seize power or fall; while a little may enforce order and obedience for a time, fear beyond hope of survival and horror beyond the limits of the human creates resistance. Those who would enslave us should have learned the hollowness of power and the Newtonian recursion of the use of force from the example of Nanking.
Politics is about fear as the basis of human exchange, as my father once told me, as a ten year old boy who in reaction to the insult of someone putting a piece of bubble gum on my chair at school mixed up everything with a skull and crossbones on the bottle from my chemistry set during recess and poured it down the spigot of the classroom drinking faucet in revenge. When several boys ran outside to throw up, I was horrified because I realized I could have killed everyone, and I told my father the story that night. He said; “You have discovered politics. Politics is the art of fear. Fear is a terrible master and a dangerous and untrustworthy servant; the question is, whose servant will it be?”
As the principle by which I have lived since it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in Beirut 1982 goes; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
So may we find the will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. In Burma, to use her pre-regime name, a whole nation has found such a will, a nation forged under the terrible hammer of tyranny and state terror, but one which begins to emerge from the legacies of its history as a free society of equals united in diversity and solidarity.
May we dream better futures than we have the past.
Where do we stand today?
As written by Moe Sett Nyein Chan in The Irrawaddy, in an article entitled Mapping the Myanmar Junta’s Gains, Losses, and Stalemates Since Operation 1027; “Myanmar’s civil war has intensified since the launch of Operation 1027 in 2023, forcing the junta into a defensive stance as it lost dozens of towns and hundreds of bases.
However, in 2024, regime forces switched to a more dynamic strategy, employing mobile defensive tactics and launching counteroffensives across the country. The following is a breakdown of battlefield situations across the country.
Kachin State
Key battles are ongoing in Bhamo and Mansi. The regime withdrew three battalions from Mansi to bolster its defense of Bhamo, a district-level town. Junta defensive operations in Bhamo are being coordinated by the 21st Military Operations Command (MOC). They are relying heavily on warplanes and drones to recapture lost bases wherever possible. This marks a strategic shift from static defense to a more mobile and proactive defensive approach.
As a result, the KIA and its allies are being forced to attack junta bases repeatedly, delaying their offensive.
Elsewhere in Kachin, small columns of junta troops are counterattacking in Mohnyin, Hopin, Hpakant, Waingmaw, Myitone and Tanai, but have failed to achieve significant gains.
Sagaing Region
Last year, the regime regained control of Kawlin but again lost control of Pinlebu Township. Resistance forces have also secured most of Inndaw town, where junta troops have retreated to an old underground hospital dug into a hillside. Despite efforts, resistance forces have yet to penetrate the position.
In Tigyaing, fighting has subsided after resistance forces paused their offensive.
However, clashes have erupted in northern Tamu, southern Kale, and Paungbyin near the Indian border, with resistance groups targeting junta bases.
Guerrilla-style assaults on junta troops, including mine attacks, have become commonplace in Sagaing. The military usually responds with single-column operations, often employing scorched-earth tactics against villages believed to support resistance forces. Despite these raids, the regime has been forced to abandon smaller outposts across the region.
Caution defines the regime’s movements due to resistance ambushes in Budalin, Depayin, Wetlet, and Chaung-U townships. Counterattacking the highly mobile resistance forces has proven increasingly challenging for the regime.
Mandalay Region
In northern Mandalay, resistance forces captured northern Madaya, Singu, Thabeikkyin, Tagaung, Mabein, Mogok, and Mongmit in 2024. However, three major military bases and a hospital remained under military control in Thabeikkyin Township. Troops from these bases recently recaptured an area close to Mogok, known as Myanmar’s “Ruby Land”, after being bolstered by airdrops of weapons and ammunition. No fighting in Mogok has been reported so far.
Fierce daily clashes are reported in western and northeastern Madaya, as regime troops seek to reclaim the areas from Mandalay PDFs.
Further south, resistance forces successfully ambushed a junta column in Myingyan Township earlier this month.
Northern Shan State
The regime reclaimed artillery battalions in Taunghkam, Nawnghkio Township from the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) late last month. Taunghkam is a two-hour drive from Pyin Oo Lwin, which is home to the regime’s elite military academies.
However, TNLA forces remain near Taunghkam, where they are launching guerilla-style attacks.
The junta’s recapture of Taunghkam means TNLA forces are now at risk of being encircled in the area.
Southern Shan State
Supported by the local Pa-O National Organization (PNO) militia, the regime is conducting a counteroffensive in Moebye on the Shan-Karenni border.
Regime troops have forced the anti-regime Pa-O National Liberation Army out of Hsihseng and are chasing them to their base in Mawkmai. From Hsihseng, the regime is transporting supplies by road to Loikaw, the capital of Karenni State. The regime’s assault in southern Shan is thus supporting its counteroffensive in Karenni.
Magwe Region
After seizing Ann town in Rakhine State, the Arakan Army and its allies are advancing into neighboring Magwe Region. Numerous junta troops fleeing from Ann, and also Natyaykan on the Bago side of the border, have been killed by local resistance ambushes.
Incapable of repulsing the AA’s advance, the junta has responded by raiding resistance bases in Pakokku, Minbu and Thayet districts to prevent potential attacks on its ordnance factories in the area. However, the raids have had minimal impact on local resistance forces, as they rely on guerilla-style operations.
Chin State
The majority of Chin State remains under resistance control. The regime maintains a foothold in Hakah, Thantlang, and Tedim. Chin resistance forces continue to attack Falam, where junta forces have been reduced to just one major battalion headquarters. In Thantlang, the regime’s counterattack has resulted in a back-and-forth battle with no decisive gains.
Rakhine State
The Arakan Army (AA) controls most of Rakhine State, except for the capital Sittwe, Kyaukphyu, and Manaung. The AA recently launched offensives in Sittwe and Kyaukphyu, home to a Chinese-backed Special Economic Zone and port project, forcing the regime into a defensive posture in those towns.
The AA and its allies are also advancing over the border from Rakhine into Magwe, Bago and Ayeyarwady regions. The regime has been unable to repulse the advancing AA troops.
Karenni State
The regime recaptured most of Loikaw Township last year after Karenni resistance forces withdrew, apparently due to ammunition shortages.
Fighting has been raging for months in Pekon Township’s Moebye, on the Shan-Karenni border, with both sides suffering heavy casualties. Karenni forces have so far held their ground.
In Hpruso, Bawlake, Hpasawng, and Demoso, the regime has primarily resorted to defensive positions.
Karen State
The junta’s Operation Aung Zeya, launched in April last year, has failed to achieve its objectives. The large-scale counteroffensive, involving more than 1,000 troops from the 55th Light Infantry Division, aims to recapture the main trade route between Kawkareik and Myawaddy on the Thai border.
As the offensive nears its one-year mark, junta troops remain stuck in the Dawna Hills, suffering heavy casualties. Despite these setbacks, the regime continues to reinforce its troops and press on with the offensive.
Bago and Tanintharyi
Resistance forces continue to wage guerilla warfare in Bago and Tanintharyi regions, where regular junta military operations have failed to curb armed revolt.
This pattern extends to Sagaing, Magwe, and Mandalay regions, where the regime has been unable to conduct large-scale offensives or achieve decisive victories. Instead, their strategy relies heavily on air support and single-column ground operations. However, rather than directly attacking guerrilla forces, the regime appears to be mainly targeting civilians suspected of supporting the resistance movement.
Since last year, the regime has employed a combination of strategies to counter resistance offensives, utilizing static defensive positions, mobile defensive maneuvers, and counteroffensives. Despite these efforts, its achievements on the national scale remain limited. To date, the military has managed to reclaim only a handful of areas, including Kawlin, Hsihseng, Twin Nge (near Mogok), and Taunghkam.
Despite heavy junta propaganda promoting these territorial gains, the reclaimed areas collectively account for less than 1% of territory, towns, and camps previously seized by resistance forces. Additionally, the reclaimed areas remain under constant threat, encircled by resistance forces, which continue to undermine the regime’s control.
However, in northern Mandalay, weak coordination between various resistance factions – including PDFs allied with the KIA, the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front (ABSDF), and TNLA-allied PDFs – presents a major challenge. Further caution is needed to prevent tensions between the TNLA and KIA from destabilizing broader resistance efforts in the region.
Territories reclaimed by the junta include Twin Nge and Taunghkam, which were TNLA-controlled zones. The junta’s ongoing pressure on other TNLA strongholds signals a persistent threat to resistance control.
In Loikaw, although the regime has regained control, it continues to face strong resistance from highly organized Karenni forces. Meanwhile, in southern Shan State’s Hsihseng Township, the junta appears to have gained the upper hand, leveraging support from PNO militias.
Since 2024, the regime has increasingly relied on mobile defensive strategies and counteroffensives to confront resistance forces. However, these tactics have yet to produce meaningful or decisive victories on a wider scale.
Nevertheless, resistance forces must stay vigilant against the junta’s advanced weaponry, including drones and paragliders, while adapting strategies to combat these threats in specific conflict zones. Developing robust, region-specific solutions to counter the military’s evolving tactics will be crucial for maintaining momentum against the regime.”
As I wrote in my post of March 28 2022, Tyranny Throws Itself a Party, But No One Comes To the Ball: Burma/Myanmar; Tyranny throws itself a party in Burma, but no one comes to the ball. Nor am I surprised, for the fascist military junta that has imprisoned a nation, plunders the public wealth in partnership with criminal syndicates protected under the patronage of the Chinese Communist Party, and attempts to annihilate all differences of ethnicity and faith in campaigns of genocide against tribal peoples; the apex predators of Myanmar and I know each other well.
Over thirty years ago now we first met in battle, the circumstances of which I shall once again recount here; I have been thinking of this today, as I go about my work making mischief for tyrants and those who would enslave us in the tunnels beneath Mariupol. If I must be a tunnel rat, I remain a rat who comes back no matter how many times you try to flush him.
The Mayor of Mariupol has today ordered the total evacuation of the city, as it is in enemy hands; I however am in no one’s chain of command, recognize no authority, and obey no orders as things beneath my contempt. I shall fight on, when and where and in the manner I choose, and I will bet my refusal to submit against any force of subjugation.
It’s always worked for me before; thank you for that Jean Genet, who set me on my life’s path in 1982 Beirut, with the Oath of the Resistance; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows”, and the strategic principle by which I have lived for nearly forty years; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
As my intermittent and questionable satellite link permits, news of the junta’s celebration and of Min Aung Hlaing’s declaration of his regime’s intent to “annihilate them to (the) end” regarding his brutal repression of the tribal peoples and the democracy movement now united in the liberation of Burma, has captivated my attention because the moment the world now faces in Ukraine parallels that of Burma. Sadly, there is nothing unique in this.
The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is portrayed to the world as an anomaly, a vast crime against humanity of racist and sectarian hate which happened in 2017 and is unrelated to Myanmar’s current apartheid ethnic and religious policies. But this is a lie.
Here is how I came by accident to be fighting with indigenous peoples in the Shan States of northern Burma against a campaign of slave raiding and genocide by the Burmese government; I awoke on the veranda of my stilt house one morning to what was later tallied as eight hundred rounds of one hundred millimeter Russian mortar fire, and mounted my elephant to escape, who panicked and went the wrong way, uphill to the enemy positions on the reverse side of the ridge. I was yelling “Run away!” when one of the Karen tribesmen handed me a spear as I rode past and shouted in S’gaw; “The American is charging the enemy! Take the mortars! Charge!” and we became more than a dozen elephants leading a human wave assault.
After participating in a cavalry charge on the back of an elephant carrying a spear and our capture of the mortars, I discovered we were behind the lines of the advancing Myanmar Army in one of their annual campaigns of slave raiding and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous tribes including those with whom I had been living; exactly where I belong and prefer to be if there is no escape from conflict, and ideally positioned to disrupt their advance. To run amok and make mischief in the enemy’s rear area of operations is a special joy, and an opportunity not to be wasted.
The policy of genocide and its periodic campaigns of death and fear have been part of the fascist tyranny of the Burmese state since the liberation from Japan, one designed to provide a pretext for military rule through the creation of a national identity of religious and racial purity. The junta’s partner in this is the same Buddhist nationalist organization which also co-rules Sri Lanka, and this wedding of military and theocratic monastic rule in the cause of nationalism and ethnic purity is crucial to the strategy of power of modern fascism as it now encircles the globe. In the case of the Karen, a Christian ethnic minority and former British allies, as with the Islamic Rohingya who immigrated from India, all three fascist boxes of exclusionary otherness are checked; blood, faith, and nationality.
Its possible this bears the force and authority of tradition, and has for centuries been a key strategy of state power in Burma as it has to a degree in virtually all human civilizations. As George Washington once said; “Government is about force; only force.”
Fear, power, force; it is a universal circle of dehumanization and subjugation by authoritarian elites. So pervasive and endemic is the Ring of Power that it seems a human constant.
But it need not be so. From all that I have seen and all that I have learned, from all that I am and for all that we may become, I tell you this one true thing; our addiction to and captivity by the Ring of Power is not a flaw of our natural condition or of an evil impulse, but a sum of our history and of choices we have made over time about how to be human together.
As Wagner illustrates with his great theme of renunciation of wealth and power and abandonment of force in Der Ring des Nibelungen, only those who foreswear love can seize dominion over others. This principle has a negative space which is also true; love can liberate us from systems of oppression and redeem the flaws of our humanity, beauty can balance the brokenness of the world, hope can empower us to emerge victorious against overwhelming force, and faith can answer the terror of our nothingness.
I hope that one day humankind will discover that such things as love, compassion, mercy, loyalty, trust, and faith in one another are not weaknesses but strengths, and awaken to the beauty of our diversity and the necessity of our interdependence.
As I wrote in my post of February 1 2022, Anniversary of the Military Coup in Myanmar; A Day of Silence and national strike made silent the cities of Burma today, in the face of threats of death and arrest by the regime of tyranny and state terror which has captured the state for a year now, after a morning of mass protests and defiant marches, and while these performances of liberty and guerrilla street theatre valorized resistance and democracy and unified the peoples of Burma in solidarity against those who would enslave them, liberation forces took the fight to the enemy in direct actions against police and military targets as demonstrations of the powerlessness of carceral states of force and control against a people not divided by sectarian and ethnic hierarchies of otherness and belonging or driven in to submission by learned helplessness and brutal repression, but united in the cause of liberty and refusal to submit.
Last night the enforcers of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the beneficiaries of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil could sleep secure from the will of the people and the reckoning of their victims, confronted by a protest movement of limited political goals and no true threats to the cabal of monarchists, oligarchs, and militarists which have ruled Burma since the fall of the colonial empire of Britain in 1948; today they awake to a new day in which all of this has changed forever, for the Revolution has come to Burma.
Democracy fell one year ago in Myanmar to a military coup by tyrants of brutal repression and theft of citizenship and perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing in an ongoing campaign against ethnic and religious minorities, often tribal peoples living in areas the junta wishes to plunder of natural resources.
Here is a litany of woes repeated endlessly throughout history and the world, of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the inquisitions and holocausts of those whom divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite belonging dehumanize as monsters to be cast out.
Gathering forces of change have swept the nation this last year, mobilizing not only tribal armies of the Chin, Karen, Shan, Arakan, and other peoples but also mass protests in every major city organized by the Civil Disobedience Movement, national strikes- especially that of hospitals and doctors, a boycott of the military, the emergence of a National Unity Government, pressure from both Catholic and Buddhist organizations, actions of international solidarity by President Biden and Pope Francis, and the resurgence of the Communist Party of Burma’s People’s Liberation Army after thirty years.
This in resistance to state terror and tyranny, in which about 12,000 democracy activists have been arrested and about 1400 killed by the military and police since the coup, and a campaign of ethnic cleansing which in 2021 alone created 400,000 refugees and killed several thousand. We have seen death and state terror on this scale in Burma during the Rohingya Genocide in 2017, which in a few months killed 25,000 and drove a million refugees to Bangladesh and another million to North Africa.
But the use of social force obeys the Third Law of Motion, and for every act of oppression there are equal and opposite forces of resistance.
A regional democracy movement, the Milk Tea Alliance, has emerged to unify action in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Burma, and has now become a global liberation movement in the Philippine Islands, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, with important networks and organizations in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and allied movements in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Iran.
The three finger salute from The Hunger Games adopted by the Thai democracy revolution in 2014 was embraced a year ago in Burma, and one week after the coup was seen among the mass protests in Yangon. As the Thai democracy leader Sirawith Seritiwat described it in The Guardian; “We knew that it would be easily understood to represent concepts of freedom, equality, solidarity.”
This is what we must offer the peoples of Burma now, and wherever men hunger to be free, all those throughout the world whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and to whom our Statue of Liberty offers a beacon of hope to the world with the words of a poem written by a Jewish girl, Emma Lazarus, in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes;
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Freedom, Equality, Solidarity; let us reclaim America as a guarantor of liberty and redeem our promise to the world and to the future of humankind.
The Hunger Games Salute of the Revolution
Arakan Army holds the key to breaking Myanmar’s junta
Rebel outfit closing in on total Rakhine state control while threatening to shock military forces in nearby crucial central heartland
Absurd clown show of Trumpian idiots and lunatics conspire in secret cabal to inflict war crimes on the people of Yemen, and share their conversations online with The Atlantic; truth is stranger than fiction in Vichy America held captive by the fascist Trump regime of treasonous and dishonorable freaks.
With their mission of the fracture, destabilization, and subversion of democracy, Trump’s minions need understand nothing about the areas of government they are in charge of, but only be loosed upon our institutions to sabotage and destroy us.
So rare it is that the monsters who hunt us are also utterly incompetent buffoons who sabotage themselves and derail their own maleficent plans.
Confusion to the enemy.
As written by Andrew Roth in The Guardian, in an article entitled Stunning Signal leak reveals depths of Trump administration’s loathing of Europe: Messages inadvertently shared with Atlantic journalist lay bare the unvarnished truth about how Vance and Hegseth feel about European allies; “If Europe wasn’t already on notice, the extraordinary leak of deliberations by JD Vance and other top-level Trump administration officials over a strike against the Houthis in Yemen was another sign that it has a target on its back.
The administration officials gave Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic a front-row seat to the planning for the strike against the Houthis – a stunning intelligence leak that has caused anger against Republicans who called for criminal investigations against Hillary Clinton and others for playing fast and loose with sensitive information.
On the face of it, the strike against the Houthis had far more to do with the administration’s policies on protecting maritime trade and containing Iran than its concerns about Europe freeloading on US defense spending and military prowess.
But Vance appears determined to push that angle as a reason to postpone the strike.
“I think we are making a mistake,” wrote Vance, adding that while only 3% of US trade goes through the Suez canal, 40% of European trade does. “There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary,” he added. “The strongest reason to do this is, as [Trump] said, to send a message.”
Vance was contending that once again the United States is doing what Europe should be. It is consistent with his past arguments that the US is overpaying for European security and the derision he displayed toward European allies (almost certainly the UK and France) when he described them as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”. (Both fought in Afghanistan and the UK fought alongside the US in Iraq).
It was during this policy discussion, Goldberg wrote, that he was convinced that he was reading remarks by the real Vance, as well as defense secretary Pete Hegseth, national security advisor Michael Waltz, and senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller.
Then Vance went a step further. He tacitly admitted a difference between his foreign policy and Trump’s saying that the strike would undermine the president’s Europe policy – one that has been led by Vance in his divisive speech at the Munich Security Conference where he accused European leaders of running from their own electorates and of his Eurosceptic comments on Fox News.
“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” Vance wrote. “There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”
Those designated on the call also reflect the vice-president’s growing clout in foreign policymaking circles. Vance named Andy Baker, his national security advisor who helped lead the transition team at the Pentagon, as his representative. Hegseth named Dan Caldwell, a leading proponent of “restraint” in the exercise of US foreign power abroad to protect Europe and counter rivals like Russia, indicating the Vance team’s presence at high levels of the Pentagon as well.
At heart, the disagreement indicated that Vance’s views of foreign policy are not quite aligned with Trump. Trump broadly sees the world as transactional and optimists in Europe have claimed he could force a positive outcome by forcing those nations to spend more on defense budgets. But Vance appears far more confrontational and principled in his antipathy toward the transatlantic alliance, and has attacked European leaders for backing values that he says are not aligned with the US.
That makes Vance even more of a concern for Europe. Kaja Kallas, the European foreign policy chief, accused Vance of “trying to pick a fight” with European allies. Another European diplomat said: “He is very dangerous for Europe … maybe the most [dangerous] in the administration.” Another said he was “obsessed” with driving a wedge between Europe and the US.
Back on the chat some sought – carefully – to talk Vance down. Hegseth said the strike would promote “core” American values including freedom of navigation and pre-establish deterrence. But he said the strikes could wait, if desired. Waltz, a foreign policy traditionalist, said: “It will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes.” But he agreed that the administration sought to “compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans”.
“If you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again,” Vance replied. Hegseth agreed that “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.” But, he added, “we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this.”
Miller, the Trump confidant, effectively ended the conversation by saying that the president had been clear. “Green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return.”
Broadly, the administration’s policies on Europe are coming into focus. And there are few stepping up to voice backing for Nato or for Europe writ large. On a podcast interview this weekend, the senior Trump envoy Steve Witkoff mused about the potential for the Gulf economies to replace those of Europe. “It could be much bigger than Europe. Europe is dysfunctional today,” he said.
Tucker Carlson, the host and another Trump confidant, agreed. “It would be good for the world because Europe is dying,” he said.”
As written by Peter Beaumont in The Guardian, in an article entitled White House security leak: who’s who in the Signal group chat;
“Pete Hegseth, US defense secretary
The appointment of the Fox News host to head the Pentagon was highly controversial. A former Army National Guard officer, Pete Hegseth, 44, has faced allegations of sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement and alcohol abuse.
His contributions to the group chat include suggesting that because Americans were unfamiliar with the Houthi armed group in Yemen that messaging could instead focus on the alleged failures of the former US president Joe Biden
He also appeared to be one of the most gung-ho participants, warning: “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza ceasefire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms.” Hegseth also makes references to enforcing “100%” operational security in the event the action was paused, despite the fact it was already compromised by a journalist’s presence in the group.
Most alarming, however, was Hegseth’s sharing of a “TEAM UPDATE” the Atlantic decided not to publish because of the risk it said that it posed to US servicemen and operations in the Middle East.
JD Vance, US vice-president
The 40-year-old served as a press officer in Iraq for six months in a non-combat role before studying law at Yale and beginning his political career after the success of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
In the chat, Vance, who has often appeared as Trump’s tag team partner, not least in the Oval Office pile-on of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, displays more independence of thought in the conversation.
“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate-to-severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”
Later in the chat he reinforces his animus towards Europe, previously seen at the Munich Security Conference, in a message responding to Hegseth: “If you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.”
Stephen Miller, Senior Trump adviser
Miller, 39, a longtime bete noire for liberals due to his incendiary views on immigration and other issues, was also seen as an intellectual architect of efforts to block the election of Joe Biden in 2020, suggesting publicly that slates of “alternate” electors be sent to Congress.
Identified by the Atlantic as SM in the conversation, he intervenes to insist that the president has already been clear about the decision to attack Yemen, suggesting that he speaks for Trump and with his authority.
“As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. Eg, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”
Michael Waltz, National security adviser
A former Republican member of Congress and special forces soldier who served overseas, Waltz, like other former military personnel in the chat, including Vance, Hegseth, and the director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, should have been aware of the breach of operational security involved in the chat.
It was Waltz, the Atlantic suggests, who erroneously invited Jeffrey Goldberg on Signal to take part in the war planning group.
Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy to the Middle East, is also involved in negotiations with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, over a Ukraine ceasefire plan. Witkoff contributes congratulatory emojis after the Yemen attack. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, reported contribution amounts largely to offering congratulations on the operation, and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, offers “kudos”.
As written in The Guardian editorial entitled The Guardian view on the Signal war plans leak: a US security breach speaks volumes; “It is jaw-dropping that senior Trump administration figures would accidentally leak war plans to a journalist. But the fundamental issue is that 18 high-ranking individuals were happy discussing extremely sensitive material on a private messaging app, highlighting the administration’s extraordinary amateurishness, recklessness and unaccountability.
The visceral hostility to Europe spelt out again by the vice-president, JD Vance, was glaring. So was the indifference to the potential civilian cost of the strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, designed to curb attacks on Red Sea shipping. The Houthi-run health ministry said that 53 people including five children and two women were killed. The response by the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, to the attacks was to post emojis: a fist, an American flag and fire. The lack of contrition for this security breach is also telling. Individually and together, these are far more than a “glitch”, in Donald Trump’s words. They are features of his administration.
Mr Waltz appears to have organised the Signal chat and inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic. The magazine says that the secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, posted details of the timing and sequencing of attacks, specific targets and weapons systems used, though the administration denies that classified information was shared. Other members included Mr Vance; the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard; the CIA director, John Ratcliffe; Steve Witkoff, special envoy to the Middle East; and “MAR”, the initials of the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
These conversations would normally take place under conditions of high security. While Signal is encrypted, devices could be compromised. Foreign intelligence agencies will be delighted. Legal experts say using Signal may have breached the Espionage Act.
The hypocrisy is glaring. Mr Trump’s first presidential campaign – and several members of this Signal group – lambasted Hillary Clinton for using a private email server to receive official messages that included some classified information of a far less sensitive nature, and for the autodeletion of messages. These Signal messages too were set to disappear, though federal records laws mandate the preservation of such data.
In many regards, this leak hammers home what US allies already knew, including this administration’s contempt for Europe, which the chat suggests will be expected to pay for the US attacks. The vice-president characterised an operation carried out to safeguard maritime trade and contain Iran as “bailing Europe out again”. Mr Hegseth responded that he “fully share[d] your loathing of European free-loading”. Concerns about information security are familiar territory too. In his first term, the president reportedly shared highly classified information from an ally with Russia’s foreign minister, and after leaving office he faced dozens of charges over the alleged mishandling of classified material, before a judge he had appointed threw out the case against him.
The UK and others cannot simply walk away when they are so heavily dependent on and intermeshed with US intelligence capabilities. Their task now is to manage risk and prepare for worse to come. It may be that this breach is not chiefly distinguished by its severity, but by the fact that we have learned about it.”
Portraits of the Trump Regime: a gallery
(American Horror Story: Freak Show Season 4 Trailers)
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.
Argentina’s new President Javier Milei has begun the rewriting of history, the whitewashing of the crimes against humanity of his brutal and depraved role model during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, and the erasure of its victims.
Like all fascist tyrants, Milei attempts to capture us in a killing jar of echoes and reflections, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use former CIA Chief of Counter Intelligence Angleton’s iconic metaphor of falsification through propaganda and thought control.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda which devours truths. This I disambiguate in comparison with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred calling to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, racism, and capitalism, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was also true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
The Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat uses the phrase, in a story about the creation of a fictitious officer bearing documents designed to trick the Nazis into preparing for the invasion of Europe somewhere other than Sicily, a series I watched with rapt attention because each of us is created by our stories exactly like this false identity attached to the body of a derelict. Within each of us, a team of authors create our personae through stories, a network of memories, histories, and identity; and as systems in which we are embedded they do so for their own purposes, which we do not always understand and is not always iun our best interests.
As T. S. Eliot has written in Gerontin, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities”
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as Shakespeare teaches us in Act IV, Scene 1 of The Tempest, a line spoken by Ariel. For if we are ephemeral and insubstantial beings, constructions of our stories, this also means that the ontological nature of human being is a ground of struggle which can be claimed by seizures of power.
The first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
Our goal in revolutionary struggle is to seize the legitimacy and authority of the enemy, to take their power, by claiming the moral high ground, shaping opinion through control of the narratives and building solidarity by championing the people against those who would enslave us.
For who stands alone, dies alone; and who stands in solidarity and abandons not his fellows becomes unstoppable as the tides.
When tyrants come to steal our souls with their web of lies, let them find a humankind not divided by fear or abject in despair and learned helplessness, but united in our solidarity and guarantorship of each other’s universal human rights and Unconquered in refusal to submit.
As written by Facundo Iglesia in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Justification of dictatorship’: outcry as Milei rewrites Argentina’s history; “Human rights groups in Argentina have raised the alarm over President Javier Milei’s attempts to rewrite history on the eve of the annual day of remembrance for the thousands of victims of the country’s brutal 1976-1983 dictatorship.
Thousands of protesters will take to the streets on Sunday to mark the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice in Argentina, a holiday commemorating the 30,000 victims of the dictatorship, called “desaparecidos”. The date usually sees Argentina’s largest demonstrations of the year, with millions of citizens flooding the country’s streets to declare: “Nunca más” (never again).
However, this 24 March will be different as it will be the first under Milei, a far-right libertarian who has consistently denied Argentinians’ long-standing consensus over the dictatorship’s crimes.
“There were no 30,000,” Milei said provocatively during a presidential debate ahead of his election triumph last November. “For us, during the 70s, there was a war where excesses were committed.”
Numerous Argentinian media outlets have reported that the government plans to release a video with its “official version” of what happened during the dictatorship before the 24 March mobilizations. The video will allegedly include an interview with Luis Labraña, a former member of the Montoneros Peronist organization, who has claimed he “made up” the 30,000 number. Some journalists have also claimed that the government plans to pardon incarcerated regime officials, although both Milei and his vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, have denied this.
Lucía García Itzigsohn, the daughter of two desaparecidos, said: “We are very worried. Beyond our political positioning and the fact that history crosses us personally, this implies breaking the democratic pact.”
“President Javier Milei and the highest authorities of the country repeat forms of denialism and relativism of state terrorism,” the Center of Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a human rights organization founded in 1979, said in a statement.
Villarruel has been even more outspoken in her defense of Argentina’s former military rulers. She is the niece of Ernesto Guillermo Villarruel, who was in charge of the Vesubio clandestine detention center during the dictatorship. Like Milei, she has said that the dictatorship was “a war” between “terrorists” and the armed forces.
Ezequiel Adamovsky said such ideas were fringe in the 1990s, when only small far-right groups put the crimes of the guerrillas on the same level as those committed by the military regime, but became somewhat normalized under president Mauricio Macri. But he warned that the Argentinian right wing has further radicalized its discourse regarding the dictatorship. “What we are talking about now is no longer denialism, it is directly a justification of the dictatorship,” Adamovsky said.
Analysts and human rights groups warn that this discourse has consequences: CELS said tributes were now being paid in military barracks to regime officials convicted of crimes against humanity with the endorsement of the political authorities.
On Wednesday, the organization Hijos – which was founded by the children of desaparecidos – reported that one of its activists had been tied, beaten and sexually assaulted in her home, in what they called a “politically motivated attack”.
The attackers painted “VLLC” on one of the walls, the acronym for Milei’s catchphrase “Viva la libertad, carajo” (“Long live freedom, dammit”). “We are here to kill you,” they reportedly told her.
“Hate speech is the breeding ground for violent actions and crimes,” tweeted the campaign group Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, which was created in 1977 by grandmothers seeking their grandchildren, born in captivity and kidnapped by the dictatorship, and often raised within military families.
García Itzigsohn, a member of Hijos, said Milei had not called the victim or the organization to condemn the attack. Nor has he done so publicly.
Moreover, Milei’s head digital strategist during his presidential campaign, Fernando Cerimedo, claimed on X that the attack was a fabrication. “People want the truth,” Cerimedo said in an interview. “And [the fact that there were] 30,000 is a lie.”
Adamovsky said questioning the number was “an act of bad faith”. “The number is an estimation that was made with the very little information available at that moment,” he said, adding that military documents that were declassified in 2006 revealed that the military had disappeared or killed close to 22,000 people between 1975 and 1978, a whole five years before the end of the dictatorship.
Due to the illegal nature of the repression and the fact that there was a pact of silence in the military, the exact number cannot be attained, Adamovsky said. “The right wing exploits the seeming gap between the reported cases and the symbolic number to imply human rights groups are lying,” he added.
This week Milei’s defense minister, Luis Petri, appeared in a photograph with the wives of imprisoned dictatorship officials, who are demanding their husbands be freed. Argentina held its first trial against such criminals in 1985, and they are still taking place to this day. A spokesperson for the minister claimed Petri appeared in the picture “by chance” and had spoken with them for “less than two seconds”.
García Itzigsohn said that Argentinians would not back down despite the government’s provocations. “There are 40 years of democratic tradition in our country that cannot be thrown away only because these people have a provocative style,” she said. “There are regulations, there are laws, and there will also be a people marching on 24 March who will make it very clear to them.”
As I wrote in my post of November 27 2023, A Fascist Shadow Captures Argentina: Javier Milei; Tyranny now speaks to us through a new mask, as El Loco takes center stage in Argentina. The maelstrom of fear, power, and force which creates tyrannies of force and control, births wars of imperial conquest and dominion, and finds its final form in genocides and dehumanization are universal systems of oppression, legacies of our history from which we must emerge.
Evil originates in fear, often overwhelming and generalized fear given form and a target by authorities in service to power. The centralization of power to carceral states is inherent in human societies because its causes are; hence the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which rely on hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness and the subjugation of slave castes.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
Politics is the Art of Fear, as my father taught me, and in Argentina our fear speaks to us as an echo and reflection of our own, and reveals the parasitism of America’s relationships with the world throughout our history.
Herein I speak of the Red Scare, the Hollywood Blacklist, and other nationalist forms of social force which used fear to manufacture consent, centralize power, and legitimize authority in the wake of the Second World War.
This was our Second Imperial Period, from the end of World War Two to the Fall of the Soviet Union, influenced by our assimilation of the Nazi elite into our intelligence and special forces communities at their founding, as the OSS became the CIA and the Jedburg teams became the Green Berets.
The First American Empire being the Conquest and policies of Manifest Destiny which began with the genocide of the Native Americans, become global with the war against the Barbary Pirates of North Africa which founded the Marines, reached apogee in our 1898 conquest of the Spanish Empire which gave us The Philippine Islands, Cuba, and Guam while we stole the Hawaiian Islands because we could, and ended with the fall of civilization in The War to End All Wars.
The Third Empire or Imperial Period of American history begins with Nine Eleven and the antidemocratic Patriot Act, and possibly ends with our abandonment of Afghanistan; this remains unwritten, and rests now in our hands.
How has the anticommunist hysteria of the post World War Two era, which I call the Second Empire, reshaped America and the world?
First a cultural total war waged by the state against its own citizens which gave us reversals of our values like In God We Trust on our money which asks us not to believe in the Infinite but in the authority of the state to speak in His name, the Pledge of Allegiance which substitutes the state for ourselves as its co-owners as the source of authority in a free society of equals and for our loyalty to one another as solidarity and a band of brothers, sisters, and others.
Second a war of imperial dominion which enforces elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege throughout the world, sometimes focused on seizures of oil as a strategic resource but also simply occupying spaces as in a game of go. Examples of America’s global campaign of terror and tyranny through proxy states proliferates quickly from the codification of the Jakarta Method by the CIA in 1965 versus Sukarno, and become an endless litany of woes, atrocities, depravities, genocides and slave labor; the Mayan Genocide in Guatemala and the covert Central American wars which resulted in the Iran-Contra Scandal, America’s ferocious and depraved alliance with the Apartheid regime of South Africa, the Thousand Day War in Vietnam, a whole Gordian Knot of nastiness and interventions including our mad assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and other heroes of liberation struggle whom an America true to our founding ideals would have hailed as brothers in anticolonial revolution and stood with rather than against.
In Argentina, the echoes and reflections of our history confront us with the consequences of failure of empathy as the subversion of democracy, and we should all pay attention to the man behind the curtain as the lights of liberty wink out and fall into darkness one by one across the world.
For as George Santayana teaches us in The Life of Reason; “Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”
As written by Tom Phillips in The Guardian, in an article entitled Who is Javier Milei? Argentina’s new far-right president ‘El Loco’ takes the stage
Likened to Wolverine and Trump and nicknamed ‘the madman’, the former TV pundit is known for his prolific swearing and pledge to take a chainsaw to the machinery of state; “Friends and foes of Argentina’s next president compare him to his fellow right-wing populists Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. Others have called the wild-haired economist a mix of Boris Johnson and the killer doll Chucky.
But when Javier Milei’s image consultant conceived his unorthodox hairdo, she had two different men in mind: Elvis Presley and Wolverine.
“He looks like Wolverine. He acts like Wolverine. He’s like an anti-hero,” Lilia Lemoine, a professional cosplayer turned congresswoman-elect, said of her anti-establishment ally during a recent interview in Buenos Aires.
Lemoine, whose stage name is Lady Lemon, said she saw striking similarities between Argentina’s president-elect and the volatile Marvel character.
“[Wolverine] is very loyal and brave … He can get really mad and be aggressive with his enemies – but only when he’s attacked. He will never ever kill someone or attack someone for no reason,” the 43-year-old said, insisting Milei also had a softer side.
“He’s adorable,” Lemoine claimed in a pre-election interview, calling the far-right libertarian “the most wanted man in Argentina right now”.
That has not always been the case. An unauthorised biography of Milei – who on Sunday trounced his Peronist rival in Argentina’s most important election in decades – paints him as a mercurial loner who suffered a childhood of parental abuse and schoolyard bullying during the 1980s and was given the nickname El Loco (The Madman). “More than Milei’s ideas, what worries me is his state of mind and emotional stability,” said the book’s author, Juan Luis González.
A music-lover, Milei was the lead singer of a Rolling Stones cover band called Everest and, according to Lemoine, also enjoys Bob Marley and Verdi. “He loves opera. He sings opera. He’s not very good – but don’t say I said that,” she confided.
Milei was more successful as a media personality, finding fame as an economic pundit on Argentinian TV shows where he would pontificate about both the misery of inflation and the joy of tantric sex. “Each man has his own dynamic. In my particular case, I ejaculate every three months,” Milei once boasted on air.
Such titillating declarations – and Milei’s propensity for attention-grabbing foul-mouthed outbursts – made him a household name and helped him kickstart a career in politics around five years ago. The libertarian economist was elected to congress in 2021 for his party Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances) party and was swept into the presidency this week by an tsunami of voter fury at the corruption and mismanagement that millions of voters blame for Argentina’s worst economic crisis in two decades.
“The vote represents a desperate attempt at something new, come what may,” said Benjamin Gedan, an Argentina specialist from the Wilson Centre. “The option [voters had] was more of the same in catastrophic economic conditions or a radical gamble on a potentially bright future with a lot of downside risk.”
Gedan believed there would be “a lot of buyer’s remorse in Argentina” if Milei pursued even a small fraction of his ideas. Those ideas include legalising the sale of human organs, dramatically slashing social spending, downplaying the crimes of Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship, and cutting ties with Argentina’s two most important trade partners, Brazil and China. On the campaign trail, Milei vowed to abolish Argentina’s central bank and dollarise the economy, and brandished a chainsaw intended to symbolise ferocious cuts he believes will help stabilise the economy and “exterminate” rampant inflation.
Milei’s biography suggests some of those ideas may have come from his five cloned mastiff dogs who are named after economists including Murray Rothbard and Robert Lucas. “They are like two metres tall, they weigh like 100kg … He calls them his four-legged children,” said Lemoine, laughing off claims that Argentina’s future leader takes political advice from those animals.
Many experts believe Milei will be forced to moderate after taking power next month and will struggle to implement his more controversial proposals. Milei’s party controls just 38 of 257 seats in Argentina’s lower house and eight of 72 in the senate.
But on Sunday night Milei showed little sign of diluting his vision for South America’s second largest economy. “The changes this country needs are drastic,” he declared, announcing Trumpian plans to make Argentina great again.
Even before Milei’s victory was complete, Lemoine said she was certain her friend – and his sideburns – would prevail.
“I’m just happy because I saw it from the beginning. It’s nice to know that you were right even when nobody believed in it,” she said.”
What is the meaning of this disruptive event? As written by Tom Phillips, Josefina Salomón, and Facundo Iglesia in The Guardian, in an article entitled Argentina presidential election: far-right libertarian Javier Milei wins after rival concedes: Victory for TV celebrity turned politician catapults South America’s second-largest economy into an unpredictable future; “Javier Milei, a volatile far-right libertarian who has vowed to “exterminate” inflation and take a chainsaw to the state, has been elected president of Argentina, catapulting South America’s second largest economy into an unpredictable and potentially turbulent future.
With more than 99% of votes counted, the Mick Jagger impersonating TV celebrity-turned politician, who is often compared to Donald Trump, had secured 55.69% of the vote compared with 44.3% for his rival, the centre-left finance minister Sergio Massa.
“Today the reconstruction of Argentina begins. Today is a historic night for Argentina,” Milei told jubilant supporters at his campaign headquarters in Buenos Aires, calling his victory a “miracle”.
Milei promised “drastic changes” to tackle Argentina’s “tragic reality” of soaring inflation and widespread poverty. He also sent a message to the international community: “Argentina will return to the place in the world which it should never have lost.”
Earlier, Massa – who received 11.5m votes to Milei’s 14.4m – conceded defeat.
“Argentinians have chosen another path,” said Massa, who said he had called Milei to congratulate him on his victory and hinted he would retire from frontline politics.
“Obviously these are not the results we hoped for and I have spoken to Javier Milei to congratulate him because he’s the president that the majority of Argentines have chosen for the next four years,” added Massa, whose Peronist movement has governed for 16 of the last 20 years.
Pro-Milei activists rejoiced at the triumph of their 53-year-old leader, whom they describe as an economic visionary poised to lead Argentina out of one of the country’s worst economic crises in decades.
“[I’m] happy, happy, happy,” said Francisco Jiménez, a 30-year-old delivery driver and Milei activist from Villa Soldati, a working-class area outside Buenos Aires.
As he set off to join the party at Milei’s campaign HQ, Jiménez said he knew the result was likely to send Argentina’s peso tumbling against the dollar and cause more economic pain. “But I don’t think there is another option than trusting him. Now more than ever,” he added. “The situation is dire.”
During his campaign, Milei – who will take office on 10 December – vowed to abolish the central bank and dollarise the economy in order to overcome a financial calamity that has left 40% of Argentina’s 45 million citizens in poverty and pushed inflation to more than 140%. “I know how to exterminate the cancer of inflation,” Milei proclaimed during last Sunday’s final presidential debate which most pundits believed Massa had won.
Milei’s victory was celebrated by other big beasts of the global far-right including Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, who had championed his campaign and has promised to attend his inauguration. “Hope is sparkling in South America once again,” Bolsonaro wrote on X, hailing what he called a victory for “honesty, progress and freedom”.
The former US president Donald Trump wrote: “The whole world was watching! I am very proud of you. You will turn your country around and truly Make Argentina Great Again.”
His victory was also celebrated by X’s owner Elon Musk, who posted: “Prosperity is ahead for Argentina”.
Brazil’s leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who Milei has repeatedly insulted as a corrupt “communist” – recognised Milei’s victory in a tepid social media post. “Democracy is the voice of the people and must always be respected,” Lula wrote, without mentioning Milei by name. “I wish the next government good luck and success. Argentina is a great country and deserves our complete respect,” Lula added.
Colombia’s leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, lamented: “The extreme right has won in Argentina … [It is] sad for Latin America.” “Now say it without crying,” El Salvador’s right-wing president, Nayib Bukele, posted ironically in response.
Milei’s leftwing opponents reacted with shock and dejection to the election of a notoriously erratic figure whose radical ideas include legalising the sale of organs, cutting ties with Argentina’s two biggest trade partners, Brazil and China, and closing more than a dozen ministries.
Milei – a climate-denying populist who is known by the nickname El Loco (the Madman) – has also enraged millions of Argentinians by questioning the four-decade consensus over the crimes of its 1976-83 dictatorship, during which an estimated 30,000 people were killed by the military regime. His vice-presidential running mate is Victoria Villarruel, an ultra-conservative congresswoman who has played down the dictatorship’s sins.
“He is way more excessive and unstable than [Jair] Bolsonaro and Trump. So it’s highly unpredictable what this person could do [in power],” Federico Finchelstein, an Argentinian historian who studies the global far right, said on the eve of Sunday’s election.
Benjamin Gedan, the head of the Wilson Centre’s Argentina Project, said he believed one word explained the scale of Milei’s victory: desperation.
“This vote just reeks of desperation. A lot of Argentines voted knowingly against their economic interests because they recognise that the status quo is catastrophic. And there was no reason to believe that the current finance minister could plausibly be the answer,” Gedan said. “It’s a huge gamble but not a completely irrational one.”
Gedan said the election of such a radical and inexperienced political outsider thrust Argentina into uncharted waters.
“The real risk is that Argentina melts down in his attempt to radically transform the economy. That would look like massive social unrest, national strikes by unions, potential political violence and stresses against the democratic institutions. There is a pretty dark scenario if in fact he pursues aggressively his maximalist vision for Argentina.”
After hours of tension, there was an explosion of noise on the streets of Buenos Aires as news of the result spread and citizens reacted with a mixture of joy, apprehension and anger.
“Vamos Milei, the change is coming!” one woman could be heard shouting from a balcony in Recoleta, not far from the president-elect’s campaign HQ.
“Never again!” a male voice bellowed, in reference to the human rights violations that took place under Argentina’s military regime. “Milei is the dictatorship”.”
As a historical force, Milei represents anti-Peronist and anti-Catholic capitalism very like that which America exported in Operation Condor, which included the assassination of the glorious Salvador Allende, and echoes the anti Liberation Theology rhetoric and ideology once used to capture Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras as de facto colonies under the Reagan Plan.
As written by Uki Goñi in The Guardian, in an article entitled The ‘false prophet’ v the pope: Argentina faces clash of ideologies in election; “ In one corner of the ring stands Javier Milei, 52, self-described former tantric sex coach, outsider anarcho-capitalist and frontrunner in Argentina’s upcoming presidential elections; in the other, his compatriot Pope Francis, 86, world champion of the poor, repeatedly derided by Argentina’s likely next president as “a fucking communist” and “the representative of the evil one on Earth” for promoting the doctrine of “social justice” to aid the underprivileged.
Milei, a political unknown until 2020, has pledged to wage a “cultural battle” to transform Argentina into a libertarian paradise where capitalist efficiency replaces social assistance, taxes are reduced to a minimum and cash-strapped individuals are allowed to sell their body organs on the open market.
From Rome, Pope Francis has expressed grave concern about the rise of such callous policies in his home country. “The extreme right always reconstructs itself, it is the triumph of selfishness over communitarianism,” he said in a television interview in March when asked about Argentina’s upcoming elections.
In words that seemed to be referring to Milei, the only candidate in the 22 October vote with no political experience prior to 2021, the pope added: “I am terrified of saviours of the nation without a political party history.”
The pope’s doctrine of social justice is synonymous to theft in Milei’s Liberty Advances party because it relies on tax revenues. “Jesus didn’t pay taxes,” Milei once tweeted, tagging the Pope’s official account.
In a vein-popping victory speech after Argentina’s open primaries on 13 August, a tousle-haired Milei promised the demise of government benefits because they are “based on that atrocity that says that where there is a need, a right is born, its maximum expression being that aberration called social justice”.
Milei has trolled Francis with repetitive toxic tweets calling him a “communist turd”, a “piece of shit” and accusing the pontiff of “preaching communism to the world”.
Juan Grabois, a progressive Peronist with close links to the pontiff, and who lost the Peronist candidacy to current economy minister Sergio Massa, calls Milei a “false prophet” but attributes his rise to Argentina’s dire economic crisis.
“With inflation over 115% plus a 25% drop in the purchasing power of informal workers in the last seven years, voters would have to possess impossible political maturity to vote again for those who have failed them so completely,” Grabois told the Observer.
Voters disenchanted with both the rightwing Together for Change party, which held office up to 2019, and the incumbent Peronists have migrated in droves to newcomer Milei. “The music of the pied piper sounds sweet to those who have lost all hope. But there’s no point in blaming voters or the pied piper himself, we have to address the mistakes made by those of us who have a humanist concept of politics,” says Grabois.
Humanist is not a term that could be applied to Milei’s economics. Apart from legalising the sale of body organs, his spiky agenda proposes “dynamiting” the Central Bank, abolishing Argentina’s tuition-free public education system and disbanding free public health services. Milei is also treading fearlessly into anti-woke territory saying he will reinstate the ban on abortion, legalised in 2020, shut down the ministry of women, gender and diversity, as well as the ministries of science – “climate change is a socialist lie” – health, education, labour and public works, and will legalise the sale of firearms.
Despite this heady mix, Milei is broadly considered the undisputed shoo-in president appealing particularly to young underprivileged men. Milei took 30% of the vote in the open primaries earlier this month against 28% for Patricia Bullrich of United for Change and 27% for Peronist candidate Massa. Milei’s rise has been nothing short of mesmerising. A long-time economist for Argentinian billionaire Eduardo Eurnekian, he became a television star five years ago as a wild-haired economist and tantric sex coach who boasted on air about his sexual stamina and his taste for threesomes, assuring him wall-to-wall appearances on daytime talkshows.
These televised outbursts have many wondering if Milei could become unhinged under the stress of an eventual presidency.
“What happens if an unstable country is ruled by an unstable leader?”, asks journalist Juan González, author of a Milei biography titled El Loco (The Madman) published last month. “I’m worried he will actually try to push through his impracticable economic theories further devastating the economy and provoking violent social unrest.”
Milei is aware of the likelihood of violent street protests. “I’m going to put the leaders of those who throw stones in jail and if they surround the Casa Rosada [the presidential palace] they’re going to have to carry me out dead,” he said recently. More pragmatically, he has announced plans to incorporate the military into battling the “new threats” of narco gangs, human traffickers and possibly internal strife.
In a country that will celebrate four decades of uninterrupted democracy after decades of military rule when the new president takes office on 10 December 10, the prospect of the military reassuming a role in “internal conflicts” is raising alarms.
“The remiliarisation of security and intelligence is being proposed with military commandos ready for quick strategic intervention at the national level: this idea of national security is very problematic,” said Paula Litvachky, director of the Centre for Legal and Social Studies human rights organisation.
The pope has not said if Milei’s tirades have got under his skin. “I know they say things about me but I ignore it for my mental health,” he said in a television interview. “I will pray for them.”
To place this disruptive event in historical context, we must see it as an echo and reflection of Operation Condor.
As I wrote in my post of January 19 2023, Echoes and Reflections of American Imperialism and Operation Condor in South America’s Destabilized Democracies; By my writing desk hangs a reproduction of Théodore Géricault’s painting of 1818, The Raft of the Medusa, so brilliantly interrogated in Julian Barnes’ History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, which I think marvelous and a perfect allegory of our current political, economic, and environmental dilemma as a metaphor of capitalism and fascism as forms of cannibalism of humankind and of democracy, the primary causes of the immanent collapse of our civilization, and possibly also of the extinction of our species. Just to remind myself of what is at stake in this moment of history and in revolutionary struggle, and in my writing here as a witness of history and a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.
Monstrous evils of systemic inequality have yet again emerged from the darkness like an ambush predator to seize the nations of Central and South America in its jaws, and it is no accident but by design. Tyranny seeks the fall of democracy through the falsification, infiltration, and subversion of its institutions, in an echo and reflection of the CIA’s Operation Condor which once enacted imperial conquest and dominion of our hemisphere as Manifest Destiny.
In the destabilization and capture of the state through economic, social, and political warfare in Peru, the ruin of Venezuela in relentless assaults which have rendered it a failed state, and in the absurd and horrific January Insurrections in Brazil and in America itself two years ago led by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, the United States of America has acted as a proxy and sock puppet of the Fourth Reich.
Far more than this can be laid at our door, including the collapse and ruin of Central America and the Columbia-Venezuela no man’s land of barbarism, the failed state of Mexico and the monumental challenges facing the people of Chile, all results of American intervention driven by the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which our nation serves.
These are the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle we now face throughout the Americas and the world. We are abandoned by our leaders and those who would enslave us and adrift on a tiny raft of civilization founded in the forum of Athens as a free society of equals which questions itself, as we are eating each other in learned helplessness and despair.
To this existential crisis of faith in one another and hope for our future we may answer with the powers which yet remain to us as human beings; love, hope, faith, refusal to submit to authority, and solidarity of action in resistance.
Here is the great test of our humanity posed by the Rashomon Gate Event of our historical moment; who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves doomed to failure and nothingness, or a United Humankind living now at the dawn of our glory?
Of Operation Condor I have written in my journal of April 7 2021, How American Imperialism Created Our Humanitarian Crisis at the Border; Forty six years ago this April, America launched Operation Condor, a global campaign to destabilize and repress socialist governments and movements and defend capitalism as a hegemonic force and its elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege. This remains relevant to us today because it is the origin of many of the push forces driving waves of refugees to our border, and the horrific humanitarian crisis and test of our democracy created by American imperialism.
Migration is a word which conceals both the conditions which trigger it and our own complicity in creating them as consequences of our decades long policies of colonialism, anticommunist militarism, and economic warfare; ecological devastation with its drought and famine, poverty and social and political destabilization, an age of tyranny and state terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing, weaponized faith and its patriarchal sexual terror, and multigenerational wars.
In terms of refugees fleeing to America for safety and survival as well as liberty and equality we are mainly speaking of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, though the hell zone of Columbia and Venezuela now accounts for many, and with the collapse of central authority in Mexico and its degeneration into a region of warlords, oligarchs, and feudal crime syndicates we have refugees from Mexico itself as well as the traditional seasonal laborers.
Migrant labor is slave labor; this is the great truth America has never confronted and must now answer for in the suffering masses at our border. Entire sectors of our economy run on it; agriculture in which labor becomes a strategic resource as we starve without it, but also child and elder care, hospitality, and some manufacture. America’s wealth and power is created for us by others to whom we export the real costs of production, others who must remain invisible and exploitable as unregulated illegal labor to wring every ounce of value from them for our elites. Thus we weaponize economic disparity in service to power and privilege, and create and maintain hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and white supremacy.
Interests of elite hegemonies of wealth and power converge here with those of racial privilege and white supremacy in historic toxicity, in parallel with the rise of the carceral state as an instrument for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor and the repression of the Civil Rights Movement, and have done so from their origins. One such origin point is America’s appropriation, concealment, and instrumentalization of Nazi war criminals in the repression of dissent and the conquest of the world.
The Fourth Reich of which Trump was a figurehead did not emerge from nothing like Athena from the head of Zeus, but was an invention of American imperialism. As such its history and character as a global threat to democracy can be studied in the crisis of refugees and migration to which it has given birth, and in the legacies of our nation’s use of fascism as an instrument of dominion in the Americas, for as we were using it to conquer others, it was using us to seize the United States of America and the world.
As I wrote in my post of February 18 2020, Guatemala: Our Heart of Darkness; As we abduct and lockdown refugees in concentration camps and secret prisons, and drive others back into a Mexico whose government is supine before the power of its criminal organizations, we must reflect on the causes of this historic mass migration from Central America’s Dry Corridor of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; why is this happening, and what can be done to fix the problems which are driving it?
Drought and famine caused by global warming and climate change are clear immediate causes and triggering stressors of the current migration, which are rooted in the history of American colonialism and capitalist economic warfare. These conditions have worsened longstanding issues of endemic poverty and pervasive violence and criminality, legacies of historical colonialism and American imperialist and capitalist policies and interventions, which I have described in my post of September 4 2019; There is an interesting connection between the chaos we created in Central America which is driving a mass exodus of immigration to our borders and the conspiracy theory of Islamic replacement of Europeans which inspires our greatest terrorist threat today; many of the white supremacists who ruled Algeria as a colony of France, mainly former Nazi soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion after the end of World War Two, were after its fall in 1962 hired by the government of the United States to rule El Salvador and Guatemala as puppet regimes to protect our corporate profits.
With them came the same ideology and dream of a homeland and asylum for escaped Nazis, and a secure base of operations and launchpad for the Fourth Reich, as with those who fled the fall of the colony of Algeria as a white ethnostate to France and blamed Charles de Gaulle for its abandonment, and whose descendants now form the core of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.
Among the direct effects of the secret partnership between America and our former Nazi adversaries include:
The 1954 seizure of Guatemala by Eisenhower’s CI.A., which replaced a Marxist who had seized land owned by United Fruit and redistributed it to Indian peasants with a furniture salesman from Honduras, Castillo Armas. During the course of this coup America bombed Guatemala City, killed 9,000 communists, disbanded the unions, drove off the squatters, drew up a blacklist of some 70,000 leftists, built death squads and secret prisons, gave torture and brigandage free reign, created an enduring political front, the MLN, and started making a profit from our plantations.
The 1961 seizure of Guatemala by C.I.A. officer Willauer leading 200 men, a Harvard lawyer who had flown as Chennault’s first officer with the Flying Tigers in China. Guatemala was the staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. One day I may explore this incident with all of you, but in this context I wish only to cite a source and witness of history; for my cousin Raymond Eigell trained and led the force which landed in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs.
Throughout the 1960-63 period of a civil war which continued until 1996, America crushed a pro-Castro rebellion using six C.I.A. bombers, exiled Cuban shock troops, and Green Berets who used the opportunity to test counterinsurgency theories later used in Vietnam and against American dissidents including the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and the Students For A Democratic Society.
The 1974 accession of an officer of Armas named Alarcon to the Presidency of Guatemala, who institutionalized the MLN, declaring “I am a fascist, and I have tried to model my party on the Spanish Falange.” He was, of course, a C.I.A. agent. Nixon once brought him along on his annual pilgrimage to consult with what he called his spiritual advisor, the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.
The 1982 seizure of power and Presidency of Rios Montt, an evangelical Sunday school teacher and personal friend of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who suspended the constitution, replaced the courts with secret tribunals, escalated the scorched earth warfare, torture, and disappearances of his predecessors, and one thing more. During this the most terrible period of civil war throughout Central America, when Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were in fact a single nation ruled by remnants of the Nazis we had transplanted from French Algeria as American puppet regimes, and with the full authority of Ronald Reagan, Rios Montt weaponized Protestantism against encroaching Catholic Liberation theology.
During the 18 months of the Mayan Genocide, in which his death squads killed 3,000 people each month and annihilated 600 villages, he also instituted a system of forced labor in concentration camps modeled on the Apartheid system of South Africa and ruled by terror using former British police and Protestant Orange Militia units hired from Belfast, a mercenary force who had splendidly legal Hong Kong passports courtesy of the Thatcher government.
During over 35 years of civil war in Guatemala including Rios Montt’s genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native Indians, about half a million Indians were killed, over one million conscripted into military service and used against their own people, tens of thousands driven into Mexico as refugees, and most of the rest worked to death in the concentration camps. No American Army came to liberate them; they were not white, and no one cared so long as the profits flowed. Guatemala is America’s Belgian Congo; our heart of darkness.
I think of this every day as I eat my morning banana, for each one is the living form of a silent cry, the ghost of a tear, the memory of atrocity and horror, a thing like many others of fragile beauty and fleeting pleasure won by brutality and the theft of hope, pain and blood and death made manifest. For the dead and for wrongs past I can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged and the future that must be redeemed.
The 1981 founding of ARENA in El Salvador and the 1982-3 Presidency of Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, son of one of the original French Algerian OAS/Afrika Corps legionnaires and immigrants and leader of death squads since 1972, when he was trained at the US School of the Americas, often called a school for war criminals. During the peak of the civil war in 1983-84, about 8,000 people were killed every month in El Salvador.
The 1963-75 Honduran coup and military dictatorship of Arellano, for whose regime the term Banana Republic was coined, and of course the conduct of the Contra War beginning in 1980, which included the 1984 Honduran invasion of Nicaragua supported by 5,500 American troops.
Together Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were ruled for over a generation by America through our puppet tyrants and the ARENA and MLN parties we created. But there is more; much more, of which I will mention only four more brief examples here.
The 1964-85 rule of Brazil by the Arena Party and its legacy of torture and state terror which was ended by the total bankruptcy of the nation.
The 1976 military coup in Argentina and the civil war which followed, during which some 20,000 persons were disappeared. Of our earlier involvements; Peron had been a protégé of Franco and Mussolini, and Evita was assassinated not by us but by Vatican Intelligence with radiation poisoning due to Peron’s campaign against the Church; very like the fate of the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian of Mexico whose scheme to seize Church property created a mass revolt and abandonment by European allies, except for France which sent the Foreign Legion whose atrocities delegitimized colonial rule. 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, in intact units at their former ranks, and blended with their counterparts to create the CIA and Special Forces. The most brazen flattery I have ever heard directed toward Oliver North was to compare him to Skorzeny.
The 1973 assassination of Allende in Chile and support of the Pinochet regime which killed as many as one in every hundred of its citizens.
Regarding Mexico, we long ago seized the southwest including 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.
The ‘false prophet’ v the pope: Argentina faces clash of ideologies in election:
Javier Milei, a culture war populist and sex coach who won country’s open primary, rages at ‘communist’ pontiff as he sets his sights on becoming president
24 de marzo de 2025 Día del Recuerdo de la Verdad, la Justicia y la Falsificación de la Historia en Argentina
El nuevo presidente de Argentina, Javier Milei, ha comenzado a reescribir la historia, a blanquear los crímenes de lesa humanidad cometidos por su brutal y depravado modelo durante la dictadura de 1976-1983 y a borrar a sus víctimas.
Como todos los tiranos fascistas, Milei intenta capturarnos en un frasco asesino de ecos y reflejos, mentiras e ilusiones, historias reescritas, identidades autorizadas y realidades alternativas; el desierto de los espejos, para utilizar la metáfora icónica de la falsificación a través de la propaganda y el control del pensamiento del ex jefe de contrainteligencia de la CIA, Angleton.
El desierto de los espejos, una frase de T.S. El Gerontin de Eliot lo uso para describir la patología de la falsificación de nosotros mismos a través de propaganda, mentiras e ilusiones, historias reescritas, secretos de estado, realidades alternativas, fe autoritaria que devora verdades. Esto lo desambiguo en comparación con su opuesto, el periodismo y el testimonio de la historia como búsqueda sagrada de la verdad. Nos convertimos en falsificaciones de nosotros mismos por sistemas de poder hegemónico de élite como el patriarcado, el racismo y el capitalismo, y por aquellos que nos esclavizarían, mediante la captura de nuestras historias como robo del alma.
James Angleton, en quien John Le Carré basó su personaje de George Smiley, también usó la frase en este sentido de manera infame, y se ha universalizado en toda la comunidad de inteligencia en la que moldeó e influyó durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial y sus secuelas, la Guerra Fría. En referencia a la biografía que David Martin escribió sobre sí mismo, titulada Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton la describió como una “infinidad de estratagemas, engaños, artificios y todos los demás dispositivos de desinformación que el bloque soviético y sus servicios de inteligencia coordinados utilizan para confundir y dividir al mundo”. Oeste… un paisaje siempre fluido donde la realidad y la ilusión se fusionan”. Y, por supuesto, todo lo que atribuyó a los soviéticos también se aplicaba a él mismo, a su propia agencia y también a Estados Unidos, y a todos los estados, porque todos son casas de ilusión.
La telenovela de Netflix Operación Carne Picada usa la frase, en una historia sobre la creación de un oficial ficticio que porta documentos diseñados para engañar a los nazis para que se preparen para la invasión de Europa en algún lugar que no sea Sicilia, una serie que vi con gran atención porque cada uno de nosotros es creado por nuestras historias exactamente como esta identidad falsa adherida al cuerpo de un abandonado. Dentro de cada uno de nosotros, un equipo de autores crea nuestras personas a través de historias, una red de recuerdos, historias e identidad; y lo hacen para sus propios fines, que no siempre entendemos.
Como escribió T. S. Eliot en Gerontin: “Después de tal conocimiento, ¿qué perdón? Piensa ahora
La historia tiene muchos pasajes astutos, corredores artificiales
Y los problemas, engañan con ambiciones susurrantes,
Nos guía por vanidades”
Somos la materia de la que están hechos los sueños, como nos enseña Shakespeare en el acto IV, escena 1 de La tempestad, una línea pronunciada por Ariel. Porque si somos seres efímeros e insustanciales, construcciones de nuestras historias, esto también significa que la naturaleza ontológica del ser humano es un terreno de lucha que puede ser reclamado mediante tomas de poder.
La primera pregunta que cabe plantearse ante una historia es: ¿de quién es ésta?
Siempre persiste la lucha entre las historias que contamos sobre nosotros mismos y las que cuentan otros sobre nosotros; las máscaras que hacemos para nosotros y las que otros hacen para nosotros.
Esta es la primera revolución en la que todos debemos luchar, la lucha por la propiedad de nosotros mismos.
¿En quiénes entonces nos convertiremos? Se pregunta a nuestro yo por superficies, imágenes y máscaras que en cada momento negocian nuestros límites con los demás.
A lo que responde nuestro yo secreto, el yo de la oscuridad y de la pasión, el yo que vive más allá del espejo y no conoce límites, libre de tiempo y espacio e infinito en posibilidades; ¿En quién quieres convertirte?
Nuestro objetivo en la lucha revolucionaria es apoderarnos de la legitimidad y la autoridad del enemigo, tomar su poder, reclamando autoridad moral, moldeando la opinión a través del control de las narrativas y construyendo solidaridad defendiendo al pueblo contra aquellos que nos esclavizarían.
Porque quien está solo, muere solo; y quien se solidariza y no abandona a sus semejantes se vuelve imparable como las mareas.
Cuando los tiranos vengan a robar nuestras almas con su red de mentiras, que encuentren una humanidad no dividida por el miedo ni abyecta en la desesperación y la impotencia aprendida, sino unida en nuestra solidaridad y garantía de los derechos humanos universales de cada uno e invicta en la negativa a someterse.
27 de noviembre de 2023 Una sombra fascista captura a Argentina: Javier Milei
La tiranía ahora nos habla a través de una nueva máscara, mientras El Loco ocupa un lugar central en Argentina. La vorágine de miedo, poder y fuerza que crea tiranías de fuerza y control, genera guerras de conquista y dominio imperial y encuentra su forma final en genocidios y deshumanización son sistemas universales de opresión, legados de nuestra historia de los cuales debemos emerger.
El mal se origina en el miedo, miedo a menudo abrumador y generalizado al que las autoridades al servicio del poder han dado forma y objetivo. La centralización del poder en estados carcelarios es inherente a las sociedades humanas porque sus causas son; de ahí las hegemonías de riqueza, poder y privilegios de las élites que se basan en jerarquías de pertenencia y alteridad excluyente y la subyugación de las castas de esclavos.
Hacer una idea sobre un tipo de personas es un acto de violencia.
La política es el arte del miedo, como me enseñó mi padre, y en Argentina nuestro miedo nos habla como un eco y reflejo del nuestro, y revela el parasitismo de las relaciones de Estados Unidos con el mundo a lo largo de nuestra historia.
Aquí hablo del Terror Rojo, la Lista Negra de Hollywood y otras formas nacionalistas de fuerza social que utilizaron el miedo para fabricar consentimiento, centralizar el poder y legitimar la autoridad después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Este fue nuestro Segundo Período Imperial, desde el final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta la caída de la Unión Soviética, influenciado por nuestra asimilación de la élite nazi a nuestras comunidades de inteligencia y fuerzas especiales en el momento de su fundación, cuando la OSS se convirtió en la CIA y la Jedburg. Los equipos se convirtieron en los Boinas Verdes.
Siendo el Primer Imperio Americano la Conquista y las políticas de Destino Manifiesto que comenzaron con el genocidio de los Nativos Americanos, se globalizaron con la guerra contra los Piratas de Berbería del Norte de África que fundaron la Infantería de Marina, y alcanzaron su apogeo en nuestra conquista del Imperio Español en 1898, que nos dio las Islas Filipinas, Cuba y Guam mientras robamos las islas hawaianas porque pudimos, y terminó con la caída de la civilización en La guerra para acabar con todas las guerras.
El Tercer Imperio o Período Imperial de la historia estadounidense comienza con Nueve Once y posiblemente termine con nuestro abandono de Afganistán; esto no está escrito y ahora está en nuestras manos.
¿Cómo ha remodelado Estados Unidos y el mundo la histeria anticomunista de la era posterior a la Segunda Guerra Mundial, que yo llamo el Segundo Imperio?
Primero, una guerra cultural total emprendida por el estado contra sus propios ciudadanos que nos dio reversiones de nuestros valores como In God We Trust on our money, que nos pide que no creamos en el Infinito sino en la autoridad del estado para hablar en Su nombre. el Juramento a la Bandera que sustituye al Estado por nosotros mismos como sus copropietarios como fuente de autoridad en una sociedad libre de iguales y por nuestra lealtad mutua como solidaridad y un grupo de hermanos, hermanas y otros.
En segundo lugar, una guerra de dominio imperial que impone hegemonías de riqueza, poder y privilegios por parte de las élites en todo el mundo, a veces centradas en la apropiación del petróleo como recurso estratégico, pero también simplemente en la ocupación de espacios como en un juego de go. Los ejemplos de la campaña global de terror y tiranía de Estados Unidos a través de estados proxy proliferan rápidamente a partir de la codificación del Método de Yakarta por la CIA en 1965 contra Sukarno, y se convierten en una interminable letanía de males, atrocidades, depravaciones, genocidios y trabajo esclavo; el Genocidio Maya en Guatemala y las guerras encubiertas en Centroamérica que resultaron en el Escándalo Irán-Contra, la alianza feroz y depravada de Estados Unidos con el régimen del Apartheid de Sudáfrica, la Guerra de los Mil Días en Vietnam, todo un Nudo Gordiano de maldades e intervenciones incluyendo nuestra locos intentos de asesinato contra Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba y otros héroes de la lucha por la liberación a quienes un Estados Unidos fiel a nuestros ideales fundacionales habría aclamado como hermanos en la revolución anticolonial y habría apoyado en lugar de estar en contra.
En Argentina, los ecos y reflejos de nuestra historia nos confrontan con las consecuencias del fracaso de la empatía como subversión de la democracia, y todos deberíamos prestar atención al hombre detrás de la cortina mientras las luces de la libertad se apagan y caen en la oscuridad una a una. uno en todo el mundo.
Porque como nos enseña George Santayana en La vida de la razón; “Quienes olvidan su historia están condenados a repetirla”.
Para ubicar este evento disruptivo en un contexto histórico, debemos verlo como un eco y reflejo de la Operación Cóndor.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 19 de enero de 2023, Ecos y reflejos del imperialismo estadounidense y la Operación Cóndor en las democracias desestabilizadas de América del Sur; Junto a mi escritorio cuelga una reproducción del cuadro de Théodore Géricault de 1818, La balsa de la Medusa, tan brillantemente interrogado en la Historia del mundo en diez capítulos y medio de Julian Barnes, que creo que es maravilloso y una alegoría perfecta de nuestra actual situación política y económica. y el dilema ambiental como metáfora del capitalismo y el fascismo como formas de canibalismo de la humanidad y de la democracia, las causas principales del colapso inminente de nuestra civilización, y posiblemente también de la extinción de nuestra especie. Sólo para recordar lo que está en juego en este momento de la historia y en la lucha revolucionaria, y en mis escritos aquí como testigo de la historia y un llamado sagrado en la búsqueda de la verdad.
Los monstruosos males de la desigualdad sistémica han surgido una vez más de la oscuridad como un depredador de emboscada para apoderarse de las naciones de América Central y del Sur en sus fauces, y no es casualidad sino intencionalmente. La tiranía busca la caída de la democracia a través de la falsificación, infiltración y subversión de sus instituciones, en un eco y reflejo de la Operación Cóndor de la CIA que una vez promulgó la conquista imperial y el dominio de nuestro hemisferio como Destino Manifiesto.
En la desestabilización y captura del Estado a través de la guerra económica, social y política en Perú, la ruina de Venezuela en ataques implacables que la han convertido en un Estado fallido, y en las absurdas y horribles insurrecciones de enero en Brasil y en los propios Estados Unidos hace dos años. Liderados anteriormente por Nuestro Payaso del Terror, el Traidor Trump, los Estados Unidos de América han actuado como representantes y títeres del Cuarto Reich.
Se nos puede achacar mucho más que esto, incluido el colapso y la ruina de Centroamérica y la tierra de nadie de barbarie entre Colombia y Venezuela, el estado fallido de México y los desafíos monumentales que enfrenta el pueblo de Chile, todos ellos resultados de la intervención estadounidense. impulsado por las hegemonías de élite de riqueza, poder y privilegios a las que sirve nuestra nación.
Estas son las condiciones impuestas de la lucha revolucionaria que enfrentamos ahora en todo el continente americano y el mundo. Estamos abandonados por nuestros líderes y aquellos que nos esclavizarían y a la deriva en una pequeña balsa de civilización fundada en el foro de Atenas como una sociedad libre de iguales que se cuestiona a sí misma, mientras nos devoramos unos a otros en erudita impotencia y desesperación.
A esta crisis existencial de fe mutua y de esperanza en nuestro futuro podemos responder con los poderes que aún nos quedan como seres humanos; amor, esperanza, fe, rechazo a someterse a la autoridad y solidaridad de acción en resistencia.
Aquí está la gran prueba de nuestra humanidad planteada por el Evento de la Puerta Rashomon de nuestro momento histórico; ¿en quién queremos llegar a ser los humanos? ¿Amos y esclavos condenados al fracaso y a la nada, o una Humanidad Unida que vive ahora en los albores de nuestra gloria?
Sobre la Operación Cóndor escribí en mi diario del 7 de abril de 2021, Cómo el imperialismo estadounidense creó nuestra crisis humanitaria en la frontera; En abril de este año hace cuarenta y seis años, Estados Unidos lanzó la Operación Cóndor, una campaña global para desestabilizar y reprimir a los gobiernos y movimientos socialistas y defender el capitalismo como fuerza hegemónica 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 políticas de colonialismo, militarismo anticomunista y guerra económica que duran décadas; devastación ecológica con su sequía y hambruna, pobreza 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.
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 ya que pasamos hambre sin ella, pero también el cuidado de niños y ancianos, la hospitalidad y algunas manufacturas. amer La riqueza y el poder de Ica 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.
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 como instrumento para volver a esclavizar a los ciudadanos negros como trabajo penitenciario y la represión de la 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 fue 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, durante tanto tiempo. lo usábamos para conquistar a otros, 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 los problemas que lo provocan?
La sequía y la hambruna causadas por el calentamiento global y el cambio climático son causas inmediatas claras y factores desencadenantes de la migración actual, que tienen sus raíces en la historia del colonialismo estadounidense y la guerra económica capitalista. 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 de operaciones segura y plataforma de lanzamiento para el Cuarto Reich, como el de aquellos que huyeron de la caída de la colonia de Argelia como un etnoestado blanco a Francia y culparon a Charles de Gaulle por su abandono, y cuyos descendientes forman ahora 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. Quizás algún día explore este incidente con todos ustedes, pero en este contexto sólo deseo citar una fuente y un testimonio de la historia; porque mi primo Raymond Eigell entrenó y dirigió la fuerza que desembarcó en Cuba durante la Bahía de Cochinos.
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 y contra disidentes estadounidenses, incluidos los Panteras Negras, el Movimiento Indio Americano y los Estudiantes por una Sociedad Democrática.
El ascenso en 1974 de un funcionario de Armas nombró a Alarcón para la presidencia de Guatemala, quien institucionalizó el MLN, declarando “Soy 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 la muerte 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 a 1985 por el Partido Arena y su legado de tortura y terror de Estado que terminó con la quiebra total de la nación.
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; muy parecido al destino del emperador Habsburgo Maximiliano de México, cuyo plan para apoderarse de las propiedades de la Iglesia provocó una revuelta masiva y el abandono de los aliados europeos, excepto Francia, que envió la Legión Extranjera cuyas atrocidades deslegitimaron el dominio colonial. 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, en unidades intactas en sus antiguas filas, y se fusionaron con sus homólogos para crear la CIA y las Fuerzas Especiales. 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 régimen de Pinochet que mató a uno de cada cien de sus ciudadanos.
En cuanto a México, hace mucho tiempo nos apoderamos del suroeste, incluidos 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 mundo.
Por otro lado, quien viene aquí a recoger la fruta, lavar los platos y limpiar los baños, nuestros propios sobrinos y sobrinas, hijos y nietos, se reirían en la cara ante la sugerencia de que se ensucien las manos 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.
We celebrate the final day of National Fragrance Week, a hobby of mine because with perfumes we may interrogate the Platonic Ideal Forms of our thoughts, free from the limits of form as imposed conditions of struggle.
I see perfumes as analogies of things which may exalt us beyond ourselves, up into the gaps of the celestial spheres toward the Infinite in all its wonder and terror. Fragrances are instruments of ecstatic being and poetic vision, like rising with the curling smoke of incense.
And I am endlessly fascinated by how something smells different to different people, because its smell is composed of our unique and private memories, histories, and identities. Fragrances are made of our stories, encoded and triggered by the structure of chemicals as they unfold for us.
My custom shelves on the social media community Fragrantica recall and give form to my memories, stories, and ideas of things which are precious to me and part of who I am; things which I seek out to relive once more beyond the bounds of time.
The first of these I have named Dreams of Love, Acts of Desire; including Cherry Oud by Guerlain, the iconic and now rare liquorice Lolita Lempicka Au Masculin, the exquisite Ambre Narguile by Hermès, the wicked and delightful La Couche du Diable by Serge Lutens, Aziyade by Parfum d’Empire which speaks of forbidden love, Musc Ravageur by Frederic Malle with its wildness, and the magnificent Sauvage Elixir by Dior.
Next I have Équipage du Chevalier, which holds four timeless and beautiful leather fragrances; Habit Rouge Privé by Guerlain, near to the original given to me by my partner Dolly on our first date in 1974, Les Exclusifs de Chanel Cuir de Russie, Cuir Mauresque by Serge Lutens, and the iconic Ambre Russe by Parfum d’Empire.
Evenings at the Club is a selection of the finest tobacco fragrances, which convey to me safety and contemplation as I am transported to childhood and the scent of my father’s pipe by the fire of an evening; Chergui by Serge Lutens, Ombre Noire by Lalique, Tobacco Honey by Guerlain, Tobacco Vanille by Tom Ford, and Vanille Havane by Les Indemodables which reproduces the scent of Virginia Cavendish aged in rum precisely.
Imaginal Calling Cards is a category for fragrances I choose to represent myself when meeting people who are crucial to win over, especially as a first impression; New York Intense by Nicolai, Le Tres Homme de Caron, Écrin de Fumée by Serge Lutens, La Myrrhe by Serge Lutens, and Dior Homme Parfum. These are for meeting to which you wear your thousand dollar Montblanc glasses and custom grey pinstripe suit; when everything is on the line and you need your word to be taken seriously.
Cocktails at the Apothecary is my shelf for virtual drinks one inhales rather than sips; Islay by Floris which reproduces the singular Scotch, The Dandy by Penhaligon’s, Old Fashioned by Kilian, Bourbon by Hendley, 1697 by Frapin, and Speakeasy by Harlem Perfume Co.; fragrances to carouse with.
Ports of Call are a category of fragrances which remind me of my adventures; Indigo Smoke by Arquiste, Timbuktu by L’Artisan Parfumeur, and Zellige Limited Edition: Ambre Sultan by Serge Lutens.
Also there is my signature scent, and everyone should have one, Chanel’s Egoiste, and my second Vetiver by Guerlain.
This leaves my custom shelf named Virtual Boutonnières, and brings us back to my theme of the garden as a symbol of serenity which I can take with me into the world.
Fragrances can invisibly encode the stories we bear and are made of, allowing us to recontextualize our lived experience as memory, history, and identity within the moment and change the meaning of the now as it unfolds; among these virtual worlds which I choose to bear with me into the unknown are a category of special use fragrances I call Virtual Boutonnières, the idea of home and of a garden of refuge and serenity.
Guerlain’s lovely Après L’Ondée is one of these gardens of the imagination; a near-feminine floral oriental from 1906. Spicy liquorice tinged anise, refreshing limoncello redolent of Naples and the Amalfi coast, gorgeous bergamot, neroli, and the bitter cinnamon of cassia take the stage as the curtain opens, and situates us in a glorious golden summer.
Notes of the second act include a symphonic harmony of violet, orris root, carnation, and sandalwood, cooled by the green splendor of ylang-ylang, vetiver, and mimosa which conjures the secret caverns of a beach cabana wherein lovers may explore their depths and horizons with privacy and abandon, and the ravishing beauty of rose and jasmine which lies at its heart.
As the curtain falls we are offered iris, a heliotrope tilting toward amaretto, vanilla, musk, benzoin, styrax and amber; notes which impress upon our flesh like living brands the memories of our glorious sins, never to be forgotten, and which we might bear with us into dark and unknown futures.
Many experience Après L’Ondée similarly to its younger sibling L’Heure Bleue, as existentialist melancholy balanced with sophisticated and luxurious beauty, the euphoria of stolen moments with a lover and of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden, with the grief of lost loves. But this is exactly its beauty; the ephemeral moments which make all the rest worth living, joy to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
We are petals on the wind, but we soar; this is our beauty, and it is all that matters.
What remains of this masterpiece in the 2021 reformulation? Guerlain describes it on their website as; “Après l’Ondée opens with aniseed notes displaying their many shades and nuances. It then blossoms into a bouquet of powdery flowers spiced with iris and violet accord and vanilla notes.” “Guerlain’s carnation accord combines notes of rose and spice.”
The great shock is that it is now a powdery violet-carnation at the heart, like something on a grand lady’s makeup table, having lost its glorious rose-jasmine accord. Though the carnation still sings its aria, spicy and warm with sharpness and clarity, a phantom of rose and spice as Guerlain claims, and therefore the fragrance remains suitable for my own purposes.
The candy anise and bitter cassia accord at the opening remain the same, an accord which to me always conjures absinthe; my partner Dolly loves liquorice and so this is a special interest of mine, and I love suggestions of cocktail bitters, though the marvelous menage a trois of lemon, neroli, and bergamot has left the stage, leaving their shadows to dance.
The reformulated Après L’Ondée is still a great perfume, and if you never had its original there’s nothing to miss; it has lost some of its nuance, complexity, and depth, and for myself no longer lands a punch in the same way. But judged on its own merits, it is still beautiful.
Après L’Ondée, now more a stranger in reformulation, being my alternate for Lanvin’s Arpege Pour Homme, now discontinued, I am searching for a replacement. This leaves Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue which conveys the mood beautifully and is exquisitely composed, being a development and direct successor of Après L’Ondée, and as an alternate Boucheron’s Jaipur Homme in the avowed category of carnation-forward floral orientals which are without sweetness and not explicitly feminine; my search continues. There is also the new perfume Wilde by Floris, which summons his green carnation of infamous repute, and has received mixed reactions; the concept is marvelous, and I look forward to testing it. And recently due to mention in a Fragrantica article I have discovered a glorious straight up carnation in Royal Oeillet Oriza L. Legrand, a phantasm conjured from “rose, black pepper and myrrh; middle notes are geranium, cloves, pink pepper and cedar; base notes are black pepper, bitter orange, violet leaf and sandalwood” as the brand describes.
My requirements herein include carnation because it is necessary to signal the illusion of an invisible flower in a lapel, freshly plucked from home, but if I am reproducing my own gardens I would use roses and lilacs as the primary duet. I love roses and keep one hundred eighty of them, mainly unique specimens, and none of them smell alike. One could build an endless Hall of Mirrors curving out of sight into infinity from scents of roses. And I have seventeen French lilacs, big enough to take shade under, and when in bloom they perfume the whole of my hill.
In the lapel of my suits I wear carnations, but also roses, peonies, sprigs of lilac and cherry blossoms; whatever is in bloom and has a scent.
As to the Platonic Ideal of a garden, this and much else may yet serve.
The image of the Garden has an interesting history; in the Koran it is called Hasht Bihesht, the Eight Paradises visited by Mohammed on his Night Journey. Like the labyrinth-gardens of medieval Europe, the Islamic water garden reflected the order of a universe unfolding according to divine will, represented a plan of progress on the pilgrim’s journey toward the Infinite, and provided an immediate metaphor of rebirth in its cycles of decay and growth.
The English word “Paradise” has its roots in the Persian pairi, around, and deiza, wall; a walled garden. Its Greek form, paradeisoi, comes from Xeonophon’s Socratic discourse, the Oeconomics, the founding work of economics and a social history of Athens which is also a work of moral philosophy. Virgil referred to the sacred groves around Roman temples as a paradisus. The word first appeared in Middle English as paradis in 1175 in a Biblical passage” God ha hine brohte into paradis.”
The identification of Paradise with the Garden of Eden happened quite early, during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews from which they were released by Cyrus the Great in 538 B.C. During this time, Judaism assimilated the Sumerian-Babylonian mythos and its Paradise, the Garden of the Gods, from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh describes his vision of the Garden: “In this immortal garden stands the Tree, with trunk of gold and beautiful to see. Beside a sacred fount the Tree is placed, with emeralds and unknown gems is graced.”
Thus, at the end of the human journey we are brought to the beginning again. From its earliest times, Indo-European myth has held the idea of the afterlife as a return to the source and origin of life, imagined as a garden.
I write to you now from Dollhouse Park, my cottage and refuge from the world between adventures, set among two acres of gardens on a hill overlooking a city among alpine forests in the American Pacific Northwest near the Canadian border.
Last night it rained, and happy tree frogs were singing in my gardens here at Dollhouse Park; lightning played in circles all around my hill overlooking the lights of the city, as it will in storms, like dancing angels.
With dawn came a chorus of song birds, the call of the blue heron from the wetlands at the foot of my hill and the croaking of the kingdom of frogs over which he reigns, and soon the ringing of the bells at the old Jesuit monastery on a nearby hilltop which magnificently occupies my view in one direction from the front of my cottage, the other a spectacular panorama of the distant lights of the city at night. My partner Dolly wanted a park, which I’ve been building it for over twenty years now, hence the name Dollhouse Park, and for us its just right.
I designed and created it based mainly on Gertrude Jekyll’s designs for grand manor gardens, but on a comparatively miniature scale, using tricks to make it seem like it goes on forever. We can see the hill where we first kissed from our home, on a wagon ride in the snow driven by her father; she was twelve, I was a very precocious eight.
My refuge from the world in which I recover between adventures is idyllic and serene, a private wildlife sanctuary with rolling greens dotted by seventy shade and fruit trees and enormous evergreens, tea gardens with one hundred eighty roses, clematis climbing on spiderwebs of fishing line to the roofs, phlox, daylilies, peonies, towering hollyhocks and riotously colorful columbines, irises, lilacs, Colorado Blue Spruce set against flaming barberry and gold spirea.
A long curving boundary line of rounded granite boulders and mountain ash mixed with mugo pine, bird’s nest spruce, and shrub juniper, burning bush, potentilla, Japanese snowball bush, ferns, spirea, barberry, lilacs, irises, hostas, and roses, winds along my dirt road.
A cherub fountain ornaments the front lawn by the arbor at the start of the curving rose walk which leads around the Cat Tower to the terraces. Yes, it’s just for cats, twelve hundred square feet of it on three levels with two flights of stairs, with connecting doors to the main floor of the cottage and doors at the mid and lower levels which open outside. There Amok holds court, he of the ringed tail; he reminds us to run amok and be ungovernable, break some rules, violate norms, and bring the Chaos.
A bird bath of entwined swans offers water at the feeding area just outside my bay windows where we can watch the city lights at night from a sofa. The paths are marked with pyramidal Alberta spruce and arbors of climbing roses, clematis, and Mandarin honeysuckle, and defined with processions of roses and boxwood shaped to green orbs. Stone terraces of roses, phlox, daylilies, raspberries, blackberries, lilacs, and columbines descend the hillside behind my cottage into a secret valley.
Here live eighteen deer, a family of racoons, over a hundred quail, twelve wild turkeys, five Great Horned Owls, woodpeckers, crows, robins, magpies, doves, goldfinches, chickadees, sparrows, and visited by other birds including ducks and Canadian geese, and in the hills of pine forest which wind up the gulch beyond the wetlands to one side live bear, mountain lion, moose, porcupine, fox, and bald eagles, and on the other in sight of the monastery on its nearby hill along a creek in a ravine whose cliffs are unscalable by them a pack of coyotes who think they are my family and will sometimes accompany us on our nightly walks, talking to me in yips and howls. As the line in Coppola’s magnificent film Dracula goes; “There is much to be learned from beasts.”
Let us embrace the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves. But we must recognize the difference between gardens and wilderness; for one is controlled and symbolizes Order, the other beyond human control and represents Chaos. In the chiaroscuro of garden and wilderness is great beauty, and a space of free creative play in the boundaries and interfaces between.
Such is the garden where I live, and which also lives within me; a Platonic ideal of refuge and a space of free creative play which I bring out into the world with me as a sanctuary in the form of perfumes as a virtual boutonniere; this has become a special use category of fragrances for me.
Fragrances which remind me of home are part of my ritual arming for battle, an Armor of Light like that of the Roman poet Virgil, and my Virtual Boutonniere is usually Lanvin’s Arpege Pour Homme or Guerlain’s Après L’Ondée, the second of which I chose because of its utter lack of sweetness and a refined and complex bouquet of floral notes, like a garden in bloom.
Others in my repertoire of Virtual Boutonnières include the delectable Sacrebleu Intense by Nicolai, Boutonniere No. 7 by Arquiste which recalls the white gardenias which were once de rigeur as white tie boutonnieres in the days when top hats were a uniform and not a costume, and those previously mentioned.
These I wear to lost causes and forlorn hopes of love and war; fights I don’t believe I can return from but cannot abandon others to fight alone, to gather memories to bear with me as talismans of joy into the dark, and when as Nietzsche warned in Aphorism 146 of Beyond Good and Evil, the Abyss begins to look back at me.
What does one wear to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Land Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival? I choose to bring with me an idea of beauty and joy with which to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
“Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein”
In this time of shared public trauma as our nation and our civilization begin to collapse and fall, and the Age of Democracy passes into the Age of Tyrants, and as our values and ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice are violated and inverted and our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and our universal human rights are stolen from us, resilience becomes key to our survival.
While solidarity of action and refusal to submit to authority remain fundamental to our humanity and becoming human, we must also find joy to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
Such safe spaces of play and means of returning to ourselves under imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle designed to inflict despair, abjection, and submission through learned helplessness will be as unique as we are, but herein I wish to share an example from my own life, on the principle of Virginia Woolf that “If we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, we cannot tell the truth about anyone else.”
Though I greatly relish and glory in my own aesthetics of total transparency regarding my lived truths, in which I am inspired by that of Kenzaburo Oe whose public display of his private life is regarded as terrifying in Japan and part of his personal legend, my offering and example of finding joy as a survival and adaptive strategy today involves nothing more transgressive than gardening.
One can often measure the burden of moral harm and disfigurement of the soul a human being bears by the quietude of their hobbies; for Nietzsche’s warning that the Abyss begins to look back at you remains horrifically true.
What is important about my gardens at Dollhouse Park, so named because my partner Theresa whose childhood nickname was Dolly wanted a park, is that it is an act of love offered to my partner; that I designed and created an idyll of serenity and reflection meticulously constructed to appear natural from a deep personal need for a retreat from the world is secondary.
Relationships are primary because the modern pathology of disconnectedness makes us vulnerable to despair, crushing loneliness, compulsive and self destructive behaviors, and harms our capacity to adapt to change and heal from harm.
Despair and submission is what the enemy wants from us, and this we must Resist.
Find or create spaces of your own, bracketed off from your ordinary life and sandboxed from your public identity and the roles you must play, and you will find it easier to rise from the ashes once again.
So, here is a tour of the world I have made in which to recover between adventures; yours will be different, but you must find or build one of your own if you must fight monsters without becoming one. I tell you this in recognition that it is a mission which I have failed like so many others, for I am a monster who hunts other monsters, and after forty years of living so there is very little humanity left to me.
I am without pity, fear, or remorse, and this is not who you wish to become.
Find your joy, my friends.
My refuge from the world in which I recover between adventures is idyllic and serene, a private wildlife sanctuary with rolling greens dotted by shade and fruit trees and enormous evergreens, tea gardens with one hundred eighty roses, leaning toward David Austin varieties, clematis of blues, purple, and wine red climbing on spiderwebs of fishing line to the roofs, phlox, daylilies, towering hollyhocks and riotously colorful columbines, irises, lilacs, Colorado Blue Spruce set against flaming barberry and gold spirea.
A long curving boundary line of softly rounded granite boulders spaced at eight feet and mountain ash full of white flowers and red berries in their season at sixteen feet defines the Park along a dirt road in the cliffside view direction, mixed with bristling evergreens of mugo pine, bird’s nest spruce, ferns brooding in their darkness, and aromatic shrub juniper, color spots of burning bush, potentilla, Japanese snowball bush festooned with white pom poms, rose glow barberry, goldflame spirea, vivid carnival colours of lilacs, irises, hostas, and roses.
A bird bath of entwined swans offers water at the feeding area just outside my bay window where we can watch the city lights at night from a sofa. The paths are marked with Alberta spruce and arbors of climbing roses, clematis, and Mandarin honeysuckle, and defined with processions of roses and boxwood shaped to green orbs, and stone terraces of roses, phlox, daylilies, raspberries, blackberries, lilacs, and columbines descend the hillside terraces behind my cottage into a secret valley. Here live eighteen deer, a family of racoons, over a hundred quail, eight wild turkeys, five Great Horned Owls, woodpeckers, crows, robins, magpies, doves, goldfinches, chickadees, sparrows, and visited by other birds including ducks and Canadian geese, and in the hills of pine forest which wind up the gulch beyond the wetlands and the frog pond where the blue heron reign to one side live bear, mountain lion, moose, porcupine, fox, and bald eagles, and on the other in sight of the monastery on its nearby hill along a creek in a ravine whose cliffs are unscalable by them a pack of coyotes who think they are my family and will sometimes accompany me on my nightly walks, talking to me in yips and howls. As the line in Coppola’s magnificent film Dracula goes; “There is much to be learned from beasts.”
Our Park is a highly controlled, purpose built, and artificial paradise which I designed to look like a natural landscape, with curving lines of sight to make it seem endless though it is only two acres of gardens among the true wilderness.
Dollhouse Park did not begin this way, as a private park and nature preserve nestled among alpine forest, but as a bare and rocky hill with a view, and shared ideas of home from childhood enthusiasms for fantasies of gothic romance like the Addams Family house, and in Dolly’s case the European grand hotels, castles, musical theatres, and cruise ships she spent twenty years playing piano and living in; museums and theatrical stages for the performance of our relationship full of curiosities, antiquities, and wonders. Dolly sat in a chair watching the sun set from different views for several days, and the one she liked the best was where we sited and built the house, with the front toward the setting sun and the city lights, and the back toward the rising moon, our secret valley, and the hills beyond.
I designed and created it based mainly on Gertrude Jekyll’s designs and some ideas from Penelope Hobhouse. We can see the hill where we first kissed from our home, on a wagon ride in the snow driven by her father; she was twelve, I was a very precocious eight.
A cherub fountain ornaments the front lawn by the arbor at the start of the curving Rose Walk, planted with roses at both sides under dark pink Montana Rose stone and in high summer flanked by walls of hollyhocks with their dinner plate size flowers, which leads around the Cat Tower to the terraces. Yes, it’s just for cats, twelve hundred square feet of it on three levels with two flights of stairs, with connecting doors to the main and lower floors of the cottage and to the Tiki Bar deck overlooking the terraces and secret valley with a forested stream at the rear of the house, where we can watch the moon rise. There in the Cat Tower Amok holds court, he of the ringed tail; he reminds us to run amok and break some rules, violate norms, and bring the Chaos.
He has four new companions in his posse this year; Oscar Wild, so named because he is beautifully striped but wild and very strong and will run all the way up walls, Biscuit who is named for being sweet though I also call her Pwetty Pwincess, the elegant and regal Fluffy who prefers her own company unless her brother Oscar is on hand as guard, and Socks who showed up a couple weeks ago, greeted me on the front porch by putting his paws on my shoulders and head butting me, and now lives in the garage; his fur is morning-coat dove grey. There is also Beebo but like nephews he only shows up for dinner and then goes walkabout.
We also have an enormous German Shepherd named Mala we inherited from her father; it means garland in Hindi, possibly an artifact of a job he had in India as a young engineer, building their national irrigation system. Mala thinks the cats are her herd and follows them protectively, nosing them apart when they wrestle, and they snuggle up with her in front of the fire in the evening. She’s with us always, and patrols the territory with us on our nightly two and a half mile walks; our primary line of defense should something choose to hunt us.
Dollhouse Park is situated in the foothills of the Cascade mountains, in an alpine forest region home to bear, mountain lion, wolf, coyote, fox, porcupine, racoon, hawk, Great Horned Owl, Blue Heron, and the American Bald Eagle; full of predators who would be formidable opponents. A mountain lion, for example, can jump fifteen feet up and forty feet out, and carry five times its body weight in its jaws, and will attack exactly like an African lion. When asked what I would do if a bear, symbol here of near-unstoppable force, took an unhealthy interest in me, I say “I shall sing the Bear Song, and we will dance the Bear Dance.”
But as someone who has lived alone in the bush by subsistence hunting all over the world, I follow the principle of three plus three; having three contact and three distance weapons on my person at all times. Mala counts as a distance weapon and alarm system, and my walking stick counts as a contact weapon as I can use it like a saber, katana, jian, assegai, or escrima fighting stick. In the bush my primary weapon is the Winchester Model 70 Safari Express in 375 Holland & Holland, my backup is a Ruger Redhawk, and as a final resort I carry a kukri with which I can field dress a moose or behead rascals. Beyond the boundaries of my hill the imposed conditions of struggle determine who I can be and how I must meet the moment, but on my own ground I am untouchable and can dream better dreams.
This is why democracies throughout the world are falling to tyrannies; the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force operates the same on personal and national levels, especially when overwhelming and generalized fear is created and weaponized by authority in service to power, birthing carceral states of force and control and imperial wars of conquest and dominion as consequences of identitarian nationalism.
Beware always those who claim to speak and act in your name, for this is a primary strategy of fascism, and the next step in the tyrant’s process of subjugation is to commit unforgiveable acts in which you are complicit as a forge of identities of blood, faith, and soil.
Hence Modi’s conquest of Kashmir, Putin’s of Ukraine, and countless other atrocity exhibits and failures of humanity throughout history, including Netanyahu’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in the conquest of Palestine in which both Biden and Trump have made all of us Americans complicit as our tax dollars buy the deaths of children and other innocent civilians.
As my father taught me, politics is the Art of Fear.
Subjugation to authority is an escalating spiral of commitment through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by those who would enslave us and steal our souls.
And it always collapses in ruin because of a simple truth; security is an illusion. Systems of oppression entrap us in the Ring of Power and its recursive forces to create false security from existential threats by the siren call of becoming so powerful we can not be threatened, and I know all too well the seduction of power and of becoming the arbiter of virtue.
As a Freshman in high school, during my first political action in which I staged a student walkout because the local Reformed Church tried to close our Forensics class and debate team for asking inconvenient questions about Apartheid, I actually told I my fellow students; “I am your Sheriff, and when we are trespassed against come to me and we will settle it together.” And then I quoted an unforgettable line from a comic book which for years was my guiding principle, spoken by Dr Doom, a villain I had mistaken for the hero; “Only I can bring order to this world of chaos.” When we won and our classes were reinstated, nearly the whole student body carried me on their shoulders through the hallways in triumph.
But these things cannot free us from systems of oppression which perpetuate themselves; only love can do that, as Wagner teaches us in his great opera. I did not see the entire Ring cycle performed until I had graduated high school, and only much later did I begin to understand.
Love, solidarity of action, community, interdependence, mutual aid, and our stewardship and duty of care for each other; these things can free us from the yoke of fear by which elites have stolen our power since the rise of mass slave agriculture and the priest-kings who harnessed us to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
To paraphrase Freud; Civilization begins when we cast words instead of stones. So if I meet a bear in the forest, I will sing the Bear Song if I can.
If the fear between us, which divides us and binds us together in the Ring of Power and mutual violence, can be transcended by the love which animates all living beings and makes of us partners in the struggle to become and allies in the struggle to free ourselves from the systems of oppression which seek to enslave us as the raw material of engines of power and destruction.
If we can escape the fate chosen for us by the legacies of our history and those who would subjugate us to meet in battle as brother warriors to find the truths of ourselves, but instead meet in solidarity of action to dismantle those systems of unequal power which are our true and mutual enemy.
If we can see beyond the flags of our skin and the limits of ourselves and embrace the truths and uniqueness of others no matter how different from ourselves.
If we can imagine and discover and create among the limitless possibilities of becoming human truths and uniqueness which exalts that of others in a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and co-owners of the state and as human beings.
If, brother bear, we can come together without fear and do the Bear Dance not as each other’s destroyers, but as each other’s liberators.
Here in five acts as in a theatrical performance of myself do I offer my thoughts on Poetry Day.
Act One
A definition of terms, or What is Poetry?
First before all must be the true names of things.
Words matter. They can divide us, and they can unite us. Words can exalt and defile; they can shape our images and possibilities of becoming human and create or limit the worlds to which we can aspire, they can replace stones we hurl at one another and heal the pathology of our disconnectedness.
Always treasure words, for they represent the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and harbour imaginal creative power. We bear them forward as memories, histories, identities, like the shells of fantastic sea creatures; sounds which are analogies of form or what Gaston Bachelard called coquilles au parole.
So also do they bear us forward, and await their moment of wakefulness as seeds of becoming.
Act Two
Being an Apology for my digressive ars poetica; my writing style is idiosyncratic and strange, but so am I.
Once I sailed on the Lake of Dreams, was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision; and in such visions I fell into a sea of words, images, songs, histories, layered and interconnected with one another like a web of reflections and the echoes of voices lost in time, a wilderness of mirrors which capture and distort and extend ourselves infinitely in all directions.
Here is a shadow self of our histories which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tale and tail, legacies from which we must emerge to create ourselves anew and those which we cannot abandon without losing who we are.
Here my intertexts are manifest, seize and shake me with tumultuous voices and untrustworthy purposes, for where do our histories end and we begin?
We cannot escape each other, my shadows and I.
Act Three
An offering, ephemeral as memories borne by perfume and soaring on the wind, up into the gaps of reality through the gates of our dreams, to the Infinite, free from the flags of our skin, of which only echoes and reflections remain, etched upon our histories by the lightning of illumination to balance against the terror of our nothingness.
Sounds and Echoes
Once there was a sound
Without a shell to echo it
Not the vast roar and thunder
Of the sea
And her moonstruck tides
Chaos and the birth of universes
Undulating with the splendor of life
In all our thousands of myriads
Limitless possibilities of becoming
Dance with the Impossible in rapture and terror
Hope and despair, faith in each other as solidarity of action
Versus the pathology of our disconnectedness
And the lightning shatters us with fracture and disruption,
Sublimes the chasms of darkness we are lost in
A negation which is also a gift
Opening spaces of free creative play
Such is the embrace of death as liberation
From the limits of our form,
The flaws of our humanity,
And the brokenness of the world.
We escape the spirals of our shell
Soar among celestial spheres
Become exalted and defiled
Free and nameless as wild things
I am sound and echo
Abandoning the shell I have sung myself free from
Where am I now?
Act Four
Manifestoes of Action; poetry as revolutionary struggle.
As I wrote in my post of October 14 2021, On Art as Poetic Vision, Transgression, Seizure of Power, Reimagination, and Transformation: a Manifesto; Why do I write?
I offer here a manifesto of art as poetic vision, reimagination and transformation in the contexts of the performance of identities and in the guerilla theatre of political action and revolutionary struggle.
Art is transgressive when it challenges and violates our ideas of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, it is a seizure of power and refusal to submit to authorized identities which confers freedom and autonomy through becoming self-created and self-owned, Unconquered and beyond subjugation by force and control, and it is poetic vision as Surrealist reimagination and transformation when it depicts and guides our passage through the labyrinth of time, history, memory, and the falsification of our captured and distorted images in the wilderness of mirrors, lies, and illusions, to enact our rapture and exaltation, our transcendence into realms of dream and of vision wherein rules do not apply and when it seizes us with truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Art is intended to question and transform the rules and substance of human being, meaning, and value; to discover within the boundaries and interfaces, the silent and empty places of change and the limitless adaptive potential of systems, of unknowns, disconnects, misaligned juxtaposition and strange angles of view, new possibilities of becoming human.
I first understood the power of the unknown as a force of liberation as a boy whose bedroom wall was a collage of Bosch prints, curious and strange, which I would project myself into as dream gates. William S. Burroughs, beatnik friend of my father the counterculture theatre director, would show up for dinner without warning and tell weird fairytales into the night; he also drew curious figures into the collage of heavens and hells, and here was a definition of art and of its purpose; transformation of the possibilities of becoming human through reimagination and ecstatic poetic vision.
This is why I claim as the purpose of my writing to incite, provoke, and disturb; change and growth originate in disruption, fracture, and chaotization, and in the four primary duties of a citizen; to question, mock, expose, 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 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.
This free space of play, of the unknown as unclaimed space and the adaptive potential of a system, whose boundaries like the known shores on our maps of becoming human frame the range of choices and act as authorized identities and an intrinsic limit on freedom as future possibilities, remains outside and beyond all limits and systems of knowledge, like Gödel’s Theorem; no matter how much we learn and shift the boundaries of the known universe, the Infinite remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance.
If so the task of becoming human involves Bringing the Chaos; reimagination and transformation, the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
As I wrote in my post of December 21 2022, We Are the Toys of Santa’s Workshop, and We Are Made of Words; On this day of winter solstice, darkest of all our days, and possibly as democracy itself begins to die from lack of faith as Tinkerbell warns us with the ritual command to clap our hands lest the faeries die, as Russia and China test our will and threaten to unleash global nuclear war and the fall of civilization, as the survival or extinction of our species hangs in the balance under threats of war, pandemic, and ecological catastrophe, as the Pentagon on this day only one year ago issued rebukes without accountability as tacit authorization to the fascist infiltrated and subverted military units on the brink of mutiny and civil war, it is good to remember who we are, who we have chosen to be, and who we wish to become.
Now is the time to rage against the dying of the light.
When those who would enslave us come for any one of us, let them find an America and a humankind not subjugated with learned helplessness or divided by exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united in solidarity and resistance.
And in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free.
Owning our stories as the songs of ourselves is a primary human act in which we become autonomous and self-created beings; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
The first question we must ask of our stories is this; whose story is this?
If we imagine the processes of our construction as a vast workshop like that of Santa’s elves, I believe that the parts of our assemblage are words and the rules for using them to create meaning as grammar.
As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake, a work which he began in 1922 with the German publication of the TLP and which occupied the rest of his life, as a response like that of Yeats in The Second Coming and of T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland to the collapse of civilization in three successive waves of mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
He envisioned a united humankind wherein war is no longer possible, a world without emperors and kings or the carceral states and colonialist empires they rule with their silly little flags and terrible divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game.
Joyce was a master of languages and chose this as his instrument for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and for the rebirth of civilization.
And this love of languages as free creative play in which we ourselves are the artifact and product of our art is what caught my attention and created my teenage identification with Joyce. For I love languages and had grown up with three voices; English as my primary and home language, though shaped by immersion in the rhythms and phrases of the King James Bible and the Dutch language of the Reformed Church which surrounded me in the town where I was raised. Languages are a hobby of mine, often grounded in reading books which have immeasurably shaped my own writing and speaking style and turn of phrase.
Chinese is my second language from the age of nine, study which included Traditional Chinese inkbrush calligraphy and conversation with my teacher of martial arts, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and much else, who spoke, in addition to superb British English full of Anglo-Indian and Shanghailander idiom, the Wu dialect of Shanghai and the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, as well as Mandarin, Japanese, and other languages, having served in the Chinese military from 1920 when he joined the Whampoa Military Academy through the Second World War, escaping the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in 1969 when my father arranged for him to teach me. He was a window into other worlds and times to me, was Sifu Dragon.
As my third language I studied French in school rather than English from seventh grade through high school. This Defining Moment bears interrogation; during seventh grade I took the AP English test given to high school seniors for university credit and tested out of English classes through senior year of high school. This was among tests arranged by my parents and teachers who conspired to force me into high school two years early, and had tried with math the previous year, which I absolutely refused but for one class, where I traded seventh grade English for Freshman French literature and language, a chance I fell upon with ravenous delight.
The French teacher was a blonde goddess, and here imagine the reporter Rita Skeeter played by Miranda Richardson who corners Harry Potter in the broom closet in The Goblet of Fire, who motivated her students by offering a trip to Paris, with her, after graduation from high school for the best senior French student each year; competition for this honor was fierce, and I was a very, very good student. Thanks for the soft landing in high school, Miss Starring.
Brazilian Portuguese was my fourth language, though limited to conversational proficiency, legacy of a formative trip in the summer of my fourteenth year just before starting high school.
It was during that summer, my first solo foreign travel, to train as a fencer with a friend from the tournament circuit for the Pan American Games planned to be held there the following year, that I witnessed a crime against humanity, the massacre of street children who had swarmed a food truck, a trauma and disruptive event followed by weeks in which I helped them evade the police bounty hunters who ruled the streets as apex predators.
From the moment I saw what the guards were shooting at beyond the walls of the palace in which I was a guest, I chose my side, and I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
We all seek paths of healing from trauma, and of hope and the redemptive power of love in transforming the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. I found such paths in literature as poetic vision, and in our languages and our stories as instruments with which we can operate directly on our psyche and take control of our adaptation and the evolution of human consciousness as an unfolding of intention. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and for this primary insight I owe the effects of reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions. I had begun my search for meaning and my Freshman year of high school by reading Anthony Burgess’ Napoleon Symphony, a novel which questioned my hero Napoleon and illuminated two of my other heroes Beethoven and Klimt, then turned to the study of language itself; S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, and Wittgenstein’s TLP, before discovering Joyce.
James Joyce’s linguistics scholarship was immense; he took Italian as his third academic language, taught himself Dano-Norwegian as a teenager to read his adored Ibsen in the original, and his modern languages degree cites Latin, Italian, French, German, and Norwegian. He loved languages and studied them as a game, as do I; his adult fluency included Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Russian, Finnish, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Modern Greek.
All of this went into his masterpiece Finnegans Wake, written in a private language filled with games and experiments of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety according to the principle of Wittgenstein that because all rules are arbitrary they can be reimagined and changed at will and ourselves with them, a language densely layered with literary allusions and references, loaned and invented words, and of signs with multiple meanings like the paths of a labyrinth. You need a working knowledge of several languages to get the jokes; no wonder I loved him.
I’m not sure it’s intended to communicate anything, so coded and laden with puzzles is his new language; like the notation for the principles of a system by which to create and order the universe. He spent the rest of his life searching for the lost runes able to break and reforge the oaths and bindings of existence, to renew ourselves and our world; perhaps he found them.
Though I may claim no such realization of a guiding vision of our limitless possibilities of becoming human nor Quixotic quest to create and affirm that which is human in us as he, Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake demonstrated for me a great truth which has illuminated my understanding ever since; we are made of our ideas and of our stories, and forged with our words and our languages.
We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?
Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?
Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2020, The Transformative Power of Art: a Manifesto; The transformative power of art, its ability to reframe our ideas about self and other, to shift boundaries, reassign values, reclaim history and identity from silence, erasure, marginalization, and the authorization of inequalities of power and divisions of exclusionary otherness; these are among the vital functions which make art a primary human and social activity.
Art as poetic vision precedes and parallels politics as a means of changing our civilization and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; it represents a power held by autonomous individuals and communities against the tyranny of state force and control. Politics is a social art which is primary to our interdependent human nature and processes of becoming human. Through our words, images, and performance we can question, mock, expose, and challenge authority and incite, provoke, and disturb others in bringing transformational change to the systems and structures within which we are embedded, and I hope liberate us from them.
Art is life, for it involves us personally and directly in processes of adaptive growth and in renegotiation of our social contracts and relationships with others, both personal and political, and informs and motivates the performance of our identities.
If we are caught in a rigged game, we must change the rules and terms of struggle. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, authority delegitimized, traditional systems and structures interrogated, limits transgressed, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities of becoming human discovered.
We must question, expose, mock, subvert, transgress, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. For there is no just authority.
Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As I wrote in my post of December 30 2021, The Year in Review; In these last days of 2021, my thoughts turn to the year in review; to Defining Moments, both for myself as a witness of history and for the world as informing, motivating, and shaping forces of human being, meaning, and value and of memory, history, and identity, the stories of which we are made, and to the causes I have championed and the threats to our future possibilities of becoming human which remain.
Herein I write as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and in the role Foucault described as a truth teller in reference to parrhesia and the four primary duties of a citizen; to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty proclaims, my intent is to provoke, incite, and disturb, and I hope that you have found my daily journal useful as a resource for international antifascist action and resistance, revolutionary struggle, liberation and democracy movements, forging networks of allyship and solidarity, founding autonomous zones, and seizures of power both personal and political.
During my years as a Forensics teacher and debate coach, I began the first day of each new year with a demonstration of purpose. On my desk I would place a solid base with the words; “This is a fulcrum”. Across it I would set a teeter totter saying; “It balances a lever.” And finally; “When your parents ask you what you’re learning in Forensics, tell them you’re learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.” Such is my hope now for us all.
Truth telling as an ars poetica is about the regenerative and transformational power of truth in the sense that Keats used when he spoke of beauty, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”
But truth telling is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky. On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
Act Four
A benediction
May yours be days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
Act Five
A coda in the form of Modern American Literatures reading lists, which like all reading lists that claim to represent a canon of literature is nothing less than a set of authorized identities.
Here I have disambiguated Modern American Poetry from authors who cannot be represented among the six ethnicities to make it easier for people to find authors who speak for them and offer spaces to grow into, as the original purpose of my lists, which eventually included 27 national literatures, was for choice reading for high school students free from state and school board control or any criteria other than quality.
Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, Jim Perlman (Editor)
Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein
Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, Lisa Cole Ruddick
Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, James R. Mellow
The Poetry of Robert Frost, Robert Frost, Latham ed
Robert Frost: A Life, Jay Parini
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (edited by Thomas H. Johnson), Emily Dickinson
The Passion of Emily Dickinson, by Judith Farr
Complete Poems, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition 8 Volume Set (Ronald Schuchard Editor), T.S. Eliot
Dove Descending: A Journey into T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Thomas Howard
T.S. Eliot’s the Waste Land (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations), Harold Bloom
T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Lyndall Gordon
The Complete Poems 1927-1979, Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, Susan McCabe
W.H. Auden; poems selected by John Fuller
W.H. Auden: a commentary, John Fuller
Collected Poems, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (Bloom’s Major Poets) Harold Bloom ed
Opus Posthumus, Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Harold Bloom
Collected Poems, 1912-1944, Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion, Helen in Egypt, Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall and Advent, HERmione, Palimpsest, White Rose and the Red, The Sword Went Out to Sea: Synthesis of a Dream, (as Delia Alton), H.D.
The H.D. Book, Robert Duncan
The Dream Songs, John Berryman
A, Complete Short Poetry, Le Style Apollinaire: The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire, Bottom: On Shakespeare, Prepositions +: the Collected Critical Essays, Louis Zukofsky
Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, Mark Scroggins
The Collected Poems, The Bell Jar, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
(Karen V. Kukil Editor), Sylvia Plath
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Heather Clark
Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Judith Kroll
Selected Poems, 1945–2005, Robert Creely
Collected Poems 1947-1997, Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems, Deliberate Prose – Essays 1952 to 1995, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996, The Fall of America Journals, 1965–1971, Alan Ginsberg
The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, Jason Shinder ed
I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, Bill Morgan
Revolutionary Letters 50th Anniversary Edition, Spring and Autumn Annals, The Poetry Deal, Diane di Prima
Mountains and Rivers Without End, The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, Gary Snyder
A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems, I Praise My Destroyer: Poems, Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire, Diane Ackerman
Selected Poems, Michael McClure
The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton: A Biography, Diane Wood Middlebrook
The Maximus Poems, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems (George F. Butterick Editor), Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews, Charles Olsen
What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson’s “The King-Fishers”, Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography, Ralph Maud
The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition, Stephen Fredman
Ground Work I: Before the War, Ground Work II: In the Dark, Selected Poems, Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan
Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, Bertholf editor
Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness, Peter O’Leary
On Opening the Dreamway, James Hillman
A Poet’s Mind: Collected Interviews with Robert Duncan 1960-1985, Wagstaff
An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle, Michael Duncan
The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, Amy Clampitt
The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons: Volume 1 (1955-1977), Volume 2 (1978-2005), Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues, A.R. Ammons
The Collected Poems, New & Selected Essays, Tesserae: Memories & Suppositions, Denise Levertov
A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov, Donna Hollenberg
The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia
Hypodermic Light: The Poetry of Philip Lamantia and the Question of Surrealism, Steven Frattali
The Dead and the Living, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002, Stag’s Leap: Poems, Arias, Sharon Olds
Selected Poems, Robert Bly
Collected Poems: 1950-2012, Adrienne Rich
The Problem of the Many, Timothy Donnelly
Averno, The Triumph of Achilles, Faithful and Virtuous Night, Proofs and Theories, American Originality, Louise Gluck
The Lost Spells, Robert Macfarlane
Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015, Just Kids, M Train, Year of the Monkey, Devotion, Patti Smith
We welcome and celebrate this first day of spring, which follows the vernal equinox of last night’s glorious darkness under a silver moon like the eye of a terrible and mad god, a night filled with the wailing of the numberless dead children cast upon seas of unknowable despair and horror in Gaza, Ukraine, the eight other theatres of World War Three and dozens of other conflicts not of their making throughout the world.
This is our normal; and as I have often written, normality is deviant.
As their names are erased and become nothing by the rain of death sent by monstrous tyrants to whom only people like themselves are truly human, I feel each like a brand on my flesh which I must now bear forward into the future.
Speak to me of “good people on both sides” when you have held the dying who do not know why they have been killed.
Since the first bandit king enslaved others to do the hard and dirty work in creating his wealth and glory, and set armed thugs and overseers to keep them in service to power, humankind has suffered under the brutal enforcement of law and order which maintains the engines of our commodification, falsification, and dehumanization.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just Authority.
Wars of imperial conquest and dominion, colonialism and occupation, and of ethnic cleansing and genocide such as we now witness unfolding in Gaza and Ukraine are forms and consequences of far more massive and near universal systems of unequal power and oppression, and this we must resist.
Let us “place our bodies on the gears of the machine” of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as Mario Savio teaches us, and our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth. Only then, in solidarity, can we begin to realize our possibilities of becoming human.
Such are my thoughts among endless chasms of darkness, as the seasons change this night.
But with the dawn came a day of songbirds, the first flowers of crocuses and the budding of lilacs, rebirth, change, and the joy of total freedom to balance the terror of our nothingness. Such is the magic of nature, for with spring returns hope.
Soon my cherry trees will flower, and though the blossoms will also fall their great and precious beauty is in part defined by their ephemeral and transitory nature, unique and irreproducible as is ours, and one day we will soar with them on the wind. If we are lucky, and know enough to surrender control to the tides of change and go with them, to ride among the unknowns.
Once while leading a discussion in my English class on identities as imposed conditions of struggle, a student asked, in reference to ethnicity and the histories of our possessing ghosts, “What are you?” I answered, quoting the death poem of the kamikaze pilots; “I am a leaf on the wind.” Over twenty years later it showed up as the signature line of Hoban Washburne in the telenovela Firefly and the film Serenity and now is pervasive in pop culture; I know the line found its way into film from a student in that class because the character is replied to by another exactly as I was; “What does that mean?” Regardless of the context as my personal history, the principle remains true for all of us fragile and mortal beings who in living surf the vast and unfathomable probability waves of unfolding futures; how to live with grandeur under imposed conditions of struggle in which everything in life is more powerful than we are.
Among the natural cycles of change of which we are expressions, Spring offers us the chance for reimagination and transformation, and begins the festival of Ostara we now celebrate as Easter or Day of the Bunny Goddess.
All things are now possible; how shall we use this power?
Here are some of my previous interrogations of the idea of hope, which I preface with a brief history of the praxis or action of the value of hope in my life mission to discover and engage the origins of evil and in the reimagination and transformation of myself and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value as transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, seizures of power from authority, violations of normality, and freedom from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue.
How does hope work? As resilience and a sustaining function, what is its adaptive value in survival under our imposed conditions of struggle?
As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession; As a student of the origins of evil I studied everything, but especially the nexus of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, and wrote, spoke, taught, and organized always, for democracy and liberation from systems of unequal power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, for our universal human rights and against dehumanization, tyranny, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for the values of a free society of equals; among them liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
During vacations from graduate school and teaching English, Forensics, and Socratic seminars in various subjects through the Gifted and Talented Education program at Sonoma Valley High School and my practice as a counselor, I wandered the world in search of windmills that might be giants at which to tilt.
One day I crossed beyond our topologies of meaning and value and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden into the unknown, the blank places on the maps of our becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, and never returned. I live now where the dragons dwell, and I wouldn’t trade a moment of the life I have lived for any treasure on earth, for I am free.
It happened like this; one day I was driving from my day job teaching high school in Sonoma as a sacred calling to pursue the truth to my side gig in San Francisco where I practiced the repair of the world as a healer of the flaws of our humanity, things I loved but had begun to feel determinative of my scope of action, when the lightning of insight struck. In that moment of illumination I realized that I was literally in Hell, trapped in Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, for I had lived the same day more times than I could remember and was about to do so yet again. And I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this.
I recalled a line of poetry from a book on the game of Go, handwritten variously in Chinese, Japanese, and English which had mysteriously been left at the front door of our home when I was in seventh grade; “This is a message from your future self; I return from living fifty thousand years rapturous in sky, to find you living in a box. Seize the heavens and be free.”
We had just brought down the Berlin Wall, and all things had become possible. So I wondered, what if we brought down all the other walls, beginning with my own?
So I escaped from Hell and took a wrong turn to the airport where I bought a ticket to the Unknown; the agent asked me where I wanted to go, and I said the other side of the world. I had no idea where I was flying to, and when I arrived in glittering Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where the possibilities of epicurean delights were ones I could have explored at home in San Francisco had I wished, I once again found a Forbidden Door to the Unknown in a bus station beside a temple of Ganesha with a map that showed where all the roads ended in nothingness, an enormous empty space along the spine of the Malay Peninsula. I didn’t want to do what everyone else did; I wanted to do what no one else did. So I took a bus to where the road ends, where a dirt track led into the forest of the Cameron Highlands, and with nothing but whatever happened to be in my pockets began walking into an unmapped wilderness.
So began a journey from which I have never truly returned, which may be described with the words of Obi Wan to Luke Skywalker as “some damn fool idealistic crusade.”
Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something of our humanity might be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.
Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.
What if we told students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all, and the best you can do is survive another day in refusal to submit and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the Abyss since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.
Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have sometimes forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
Refusal to submit is the primary human act. We can be killed, tortured, starved and imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated so long as we refuse to obey. This is our victory, in which we seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, and nothing can take this from us. In our refusal to submit, disobedience, disbelief, and defiance of authority we become unstoppable as the tides, for force fails at the point of disobedience and authority has no power which is not granted to it by those it claims, and once questioned, mocked, exposed, and challenged as illegitimate the illusions with which it seduces or terrorizes us vanish into the nothingness from which they came.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?
Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another last stand, there is hope.
And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the Unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.
Such is the only possible response to the terror of our nothingness and its weaponization by those who would enslave us; the roar of defiance, as wild things who are masterless and free.
So for examples of the action of hope in my life, and my witness of history. Why then do we hope? What good is it, that we evolved such a thing?
All I have to offer in this are words, ephemeral and impermanent as leaves taking flight in the wind; a poor substitute for the golden coins which should be laid upon our eyes to bear us to unknown shores where we may be free from the limits of our form and the material basis of our lives under unequal power as imposed conditions of struggle.
We must struggle against such authoritarian forces of coercion as a universal process of becoming human, and against tyranny and terror our best defense is solidarity, loyalty, mutual aid and interdependence, faith in each other, and our duty of care for each other. If these should fail, those who would enslave us win.
A maker of mischief, I; and a bringer of Chaos, bearing songs of liberation. I cannot free us from the systems of unequal power which entrap us, but I can illuminate their limits, flaws, and internal contradictions which will inevitably bring about their collapse, and if we all of us act together we may seize our power to reimagine and transform our possibilities of becoming human and the choices we make about how to be human together.
And maybe one thing more; a spell, if you will, or a wish; I reach once more into Pandora’s Box to problematize and interrogate hope as a balance for despair.
As I wrote in my post of September 27 2020, What Do We Need Now to Forge A Future For Humankind?; We live in interesting times, a phrase attributed in popular culture as Chinese but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong; beset by complex and interdependent problems; existential threats to democracy and to our survival as a species, and confronted by a political crisis of identity driven by pervasive and overwhelming fears and the modern pathology of disconnectedness. This is a moment of decision, with extinction and civilizational annihilation hanging in the balance, of the wonder and terror of total freedom, and our choices will gloriously expand the possibilities of becoming human or cast us into oblivion.
History begins with us, or ends with us.
What do we need now if we are to forge a future for humankind?
So I asked the question three years ago, which I revisit now to recontexualize the praxis of hope as historical and political as well as personal and psychological, one which shapes us both as individuals and as nations.
Here follows a Book of Hope, to balance against despair in surviving life disruptive events, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
What is hope, and how is it useful?
Hope is power, an inherent and defining quality of human being, and a primary force of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization.
Hope dances with faith and love as parts of us which cannot be taken from us, a final space of free creative play which escapes the darkness and those who would enslave us, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and resistant to our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their carceral states of force and control.
Hope is also a fulcrum of change not only for ourselves in becoming human, but also of seizures of power in revolutionary and liberation struggle, a form of poetic vision which allows us to see beyond the limits of our material and social conditions to diagnose systemic flaws and contradictions and find new ways of being human together.
These aspects of hope as recursive processes of change, adaptation, and growth in living systems, social, political, and psychological as well as biological ecologies which construct us, make of hope a kind of freedom inborn in us, and interconnected with ideas of agency, autonomy, and liberty.
How can we find the will and power to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival? This has been the great question of my life posed by existential threats in the first three Last Stands which created and defined me; first when the police opened fire on the student protestors my mother and I were among at Bloody Thursday in People’s Park Berkeley 1969, second when I was nearly executed by police bounty hunters in Brazil in 1974 for refusal to stand aside from the street children they were authorized to kill for being who the system made them, and third in Beirut 1982 when I was given the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet as we refused to surrender to the soldiers who had just set fire to our café and expected to be burned alive.
In my very long journey to becoming who I am now, I began from the position of Camus regarding hope that it is an instrument of our subjugation to authority through faith weaponized in service to power and the falsification of lies, illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use Angleton’s iconic metaphor. Hope for me then must be abandoned if we are to become free; with time I began to see instead hope as a form of freedom, one crucial to our defiance of authority and seizures of power.
If the Wilderness of Mirrors is our prison, it is also our arena; and here we must escape being prey for those who would enslave and dehumanize us, and become the hunters.
First, here is the place from which I began, as I wrote in my post of August 20 2019, On Becoming Human; This morning I was rereading my favorite stories by H.P. Lovecraft on his birthday and writing some thoughts about his work in my literary blog Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium, sister site to this one, when I realized that his surreal mythology illuminates the existential crisis of meaning and values which confronts us in America today and in the world at large in what is rapidly becoming a post-democracy global civilization under the Fourth Reich, and that we have faced similar peril after both World Wars as western civilization destroyed and recreated itself; how can we go on when the values of the Enlightenment, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, have failed us? It is as if we looked to the heavens for signs and portents of guidance, only to find writ large the words, “I do not exist.”
One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre and Marx or a Lovecraftian one of Absurdist faith, referential to classical sources, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign, tyrannical, and hostile to humanity, ideal figures of Trump and his lunatic presidency of Absurdist-Nihilist Theatre of Cruelty whose acts reference Artaud and Pirandello, rests with our solution to the riddle of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils?
Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope in its negative form directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen as we so often do with liberators who become tyrants, or like T.S. Elliot of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bear the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation.
True freedom requires disbelief. Freedom means self-ownership and the smashing of the idols.
Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop lightningbolt awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”
It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.
Now imagine humanity after civilization destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars, and is now in the process of doing so again in an undeclared World War Three being savagely fought in ten theatres of war, facing that same awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country, exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one but herself.
Who do we want to become, we Americans, we human beings; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
Our responses to this awakening to possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.
Everyone possesses and uses both forces just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of structural form as identity, or ruptures to our prochronism, the history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.
For both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their connections and relationships including the means of exchange. And these three principles, which concern our self-construal, history and memory, and social interconnectedness in multiple frames, can produce conflicts with each other which must be negotiated in liberation struggle.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of January 20 2021, The Turning of the Tide: With Inauguration Day Comes the Return of Hope; With this Inauguration Day comes the return of hope as a fulcrum of resilience and renewal; now begins the great work of reimagining America and ourselves.
I have a complex relationship with the idea of hope, with the ambiguity, relativity, and context-determined multiple truths and simultaneity of meaning which defines hope, that thing of redemption and transformative power which remains in Pandora’s Box after all the evils have escaped, as either the most terrible of our nightmares or the gift of the miraculous depending on how we use it.
As Dorothy says to the Wizard of Oz and makes him admit of himself, hope is a humbug, but it is also a power which cannot be taken from us by force and control, and like faith of which it is a cipher holds open the door of our liberation and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Hope is a seizure of power.
As we believe, so we may become.
Human being, meaning, and value originate in this uniquely human capacity to transcend and grow beyond our limits as an act of transformation, rebirth, and self-creation, and as a seizure of power over our identities. Among other things it allows us to escape the flags of our skin and inhabit that of others; to forge bonds through empathy and compassion and enact altruism and mercy.
This is what is most human in us, a quality which defines the limits of what is human, and which we must cherish and conserve as our most priceless gift.
Hope is the thing which can restore us to ourselves and each other, unite a divided nation and begin to heal our legacies of historical inequalities and injustices, and it can be wielded as an instrument which counters fear. Hope is the balance of fear, and fear is a negative space of hope; and because fear births hate, racism, fascism, hierarchies of elite privilege and belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, hope is a power of liberation and of revolutionary struggle.
What do I hope for now, watching the Inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as love triumphs over hate and diversity and inclusion over racism as national policy? I hope that the ideals and values we have embraced today as symbols will in time become real.
And I hope that the peaceful transfer of power and the viability and resilience of democracy will never again be threatened or called into question by any act of treason, tyranny, or terror.
Regarding that I have a story to share with you about a previous election, during which the Cambodian refugees who had been assigned for acculturation to my mother as a high school English teacher with a facility for languages, all vanished overnight from the town. They returned to her classroom in family groups two to three weeks later, and she asked them where they went. One of them answered; “To the hills. New President, soldiers come now.” She told them that can’t happen here, and the reply was “That’s what we thought before Pol Pot.” I imagine that’s what most of us thought, before Trump.
President Biden and Vice President Harris bring us hope and promise of a Restoration of democracy and our universal human rights, and to work toward unity and healing the nation. In this great cause let us work together with them to restore honor to our nation and create a free society of equals built on objective and testable truth, impartial and fair justice, liberty, equality, and a secular state.
Let us raise again the fallen cause of the American Revolution, and bear it forward into the future.
Amanda Gorman, America’s National Youth Poet Laureate, a cum laude graduate of Harvard in Sociology, delivered a brilliant and visionary inaugural address in which hope is a major theme with her poem, The Hill We Climb. In an NPR interview she said she studied the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Winston Churchill in writing it, and has signposted her references to the play Hamilton on Twitter, a poem completed on the most terrible night of our history, when Trump unleashed a mob of white supremacist terrorists under a Confederate battle flag to seize our capitol and execute our representatives in the January 6 Insurrection;
“We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
It can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith we trust.
For while we have our eyes on the future,
History has its eyes on us.”
Her article in Harper’s articulates her major source and reference as she describes herself writing The Hill We Climb in terms of occupying the same historical space as Emily Dickenson did in writing her great meditation on hope as the Civil War began in 1861, “Hope” is the thing with feathers”; “I’ve come to realize that hope isn’t something you give to others. It’s something you must first give to yourself. This year has taught us to find light in the quiet, in the dark, and, most importantly, how to find hope in ourselves. 2020 has spoken, loud and clear as a battle drum. In 2021, let us answer the call with a shout.”
Here is the text of her poem This Place (An American Lyric):
“There’s a poem in this place—
in the footfalls in the halls
in the quiet beat of the seats.
It is here, at the curtain of day,
where America writes a lyric
you must whisper to say.
There’s a poem in this place—
in the heavy grace,
the lined face of this noble building,
collections burned and reborn twice.
There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square
where protest chants
tear through the air
like sheets of rain,
where love of the many
swallows hatred of the few.
There’s a poem in Charlottesville
where tiki torches string a ring of flame
tight round the wrist of night
where men so white they gleam blue—
seem like statues
where men heap that long wax burning
ever higher
where Heather Heyer
blooms forever in a meadow of resistance.
There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant
of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising
its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago—
a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil,
strutting upward and aglow.
There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas
where streets swell into a nexus
of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown,
where courage is now so common
that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters.
There’s a poem in Los Angeles
yawning wide as the Pacific tide
where a single mother swelters
in a windowless classroom, teaching
black and brown students in Watts
to spell out their thoughts
so her daughter might write
this poem for you.
There’s a lyric in California
where thousands of students march for blocks,
undocumented and unafraid;
where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom
in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community.
She knows hope is like a stubborn
ship gripping a dock,
a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer
or knock down a dream.
How could this not be her city
su nación
our country
our America,
our American lyric to write—
a poem by the people, the poor,
the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,
the native, the immigrant,
the black, the brown, the blind, the brave,
the undocumented and undeterred,
the woman, the man, the nonbinary,
the white, the trans,
the ally to all of the above
and more?
Tyrants fear the poet.
Now that we know it
we can’t blow it.
We owe it
to show it
not slow it
although it
hurts to sew it
when the world
skirts below it.
Hope—
we must bestow it
like a wick in the poet
so it can grow, lit,
bringing with it
stories to rewrite—
the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated
a history written that need not be repeated
a nation composed but not yet completed.
There’s a poem in this place—
a poem in America
a poet in every American
who rewrites this nation, who tells
a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth
to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time—
a poet in every American
who sees that our poem penned
doesn’t mean our poem’s end.
There’s a place where this poem dwells—
it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell
where we write an American lyric
we are just beginning to tell.”
I am a leaf on the wind; scene from Serenity
Amanda Gorman reads her poem at inauguration
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus
Torch of Liberty 
