We celebrate the founding of the Black Panthers on October 15 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in Oakland, California, a visionary organization of revolutionary struggle, resistance to tyranny, and liberation from white supremacist terror and the legacies of slavery.
As we look forward to the great work ahead, the abolition of divisions of exclusionary otherness from our society and the restoration of democracy throughout the world, as the injustices and inequalities of our civilization are exposed, as our government is threatened by the return of Trump’s fascist tyranny of state force and control which has betrayed and subverted our liberty, as we rise up and resist our enslavement and dehumanization and the theft of our universal rights, as we join together to question and challenge authority as is the primary role and responsibility of citizens in a free society of equals, the most important thing we can say to one another now is direct and simple; I stand with you.
In this moment of peril, let us swear ourselves to one another in the cause of our liberty and in mutual aide of our rights and freedoms as citizens and as human beings.
This is the time to forge of ourselves a true Band of Brothers, Sisters, and Others, and all varieties of humanity as yet undreamed, to reach toward an America of allyship united in our diversity and the common needs of our human condition. Of this mission much remains to be discussed and explored, and it will continue to change with time.
Such is the great lesson of the Black Panthers, who maintained a principle of bottom unity, of diversity inclusive of all who challenge and resist those who would enslave us, as brothers and sisters in liberation and revolutionary regardless of gender, color, or class, or the nuances of ideology. As Nelson Mandela once said of his alliance with Cuba and the Soviet Union against Apartheid; “We are not in the position to refuse help from anyone.”
But mine is not the voice that needs to be heard in this context, for I cannot speak from within this realm of lived experience. So instead I recall to all of us the wisdom of our elders in the words of an exemplar of resistance and a champion of the people, the great and visionary Huey Newton, in the proclamation of the Ten Point Program of the Black Panther Party as written in October 1966 and published in War Against the Panthers:
“We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine
The Destiny Of Our Black Community.
We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
We Want Full Employment For Our People.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
We Want An End To The Robbery
By The Capitalists Of Our Black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of Human Beings.
We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
We Want Education For Our People That Exposes
The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society.
We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History
And Our Role In The Present-Day Society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
We Want All Black Men To Be Exempt From Military Service.
We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
We Want An Immediate End To
Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People.
We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self- defense.
We Want Freedom For All Black Men
Held In Federal, State, County And City Prisons And Jails.
We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
We Want All Black People When Brought To Trial To Be Tried In
Court By A Jury Of Their Peer Group Or People From Their Black
Communities, As Defined By The Constitution Of The United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and are being, tried by all-White juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black community.
We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education,
Clothing, Justice And Peace.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect of the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
How relevant and filled with creative potential for our future his words remain for us now, anchored to the principles and values of the American Revolution as an ongoing process and experiment in becoming human.
For further reading I recommend Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, by Bloom & Martin, and The Black Panthers Speak, Foner editor.
Stanley Nelson -“Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” film trailer
Nietzsche who awakens, Nietzsche who challenges, Nietzsche who illuminates and inspires; these are the three Nietzsche’s who have been my companions throughout life, my guides and muses, and whom I offer you as a Song of Orpheus and Ariadne’s Thread whereby to find your way through the labyrinth of life.
As the world rips itself apart at the point of fracture between theocratic tyranny and democracy as a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and co-owners of the state in the bifurcated realities of Democratic and Republican America and its mirror Israel and Palestine as we struggle to emerge from the legacies of our history, and those who would enslave us weaponize fear in service to power and act with amoral brutality in committing crimes against humanity as interpreters of the will of death gods, the illumination of Nietzsche and his songs of liberation become newly relevant.
Protean in his forms, he may take whatever shape is needed in your quest; and will play his roles as befitting at different stages of the journey. There are many Nietzsche’s, who like an endless series of dancing Schrodinger’s Cats offer possibilities which echo and reflect those of his readers as an inkblot test. Who is Nietzsche to me?
Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a space in my life and imagination like no other shaping, motivating, and informing source, because my discovery of him in the year before I began high school was the final break of the Great Chain of Being which bound me to the will of authority and my fellow schoolmates ideas of virtue, truth, and beauty in a theocratic, patriarchal, and racist society aligned with the Apartheid regime of South Africa, and set me free to create myself in a universe without imposed meaning or value; then helped me to process a primary trauma which became a Defining Moment as I joined the liberation struggle of a foreign land whose glittering citadels of splendor concealed horrible truths.
Nietzsche it was who helped me to balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.
We will need such balance all of us, as we confront our complicity in systems of oppression both in America’s sponsorship of our imperial colony Israel and its seventy years of Occupation of Palestine, and throughout the world and history, for we are all caught in the gears of a machine of elite wealth, power, and privilege, and systems of oppression which are special to nothing, though conflicts often illuminate the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
When I speak of the enforcement of normality as an evil to be resisted, it is with the voice of the old woman burned alive in her home as a witch by a mob which included fellow children I grew up with. To fully understand Nietzsche, you must inhabit the historical space of liberation from systemic tyranny which his anti-authoritarian iconoclasm represents. Much of our world still lives in such darkness, and many of its evils originate in theocratic sources.
There is always someone in a gold robe who claims to speak for the Infinite, and with this false and stolen authority of lies and idolatry transfers the true cost of production of the wealth he appropriates to himself while others do the hard and dirty work. The particulars of such claims are meaningless; only the fact of unequal power and systems of oppression are real.
I grew up in such a world, a premodern world bound to the laws of a cruel and implacable Authority of alien and unknowable motives and those who would enslave us and claim to speak in his name as a tyranny of the Elect, whose hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege rely on our commodification as weaponized disparity and theft of the commons, falsification through lies and illusions, subjugation through learned helplessness and divisions of exclusionary otherness, fear as an instrument of the centralization of power by carceral states of force and control through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and faith weaponized in service to power as theft of the soul.
Such atavisms of barbarism hold dominion still over much of humankind and possess us as legacies of our history, bound by embedded tyrannies of many kinds, a world America was founded to replace as a free society of equals. Ours is a very fragile civilization, defined by its ability to question itself but threatened always by chasms of darkness which surround us and with relentless, pervasive, and systemic enemies in fascist tyranny, patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, the fetishism of death and violence in identitarian nationalism and its police states and imperial militarism, and dehumanization. This we must resist, and I read Thus Spake Zarathustra as a luminous song of resistance.
Among the great loves of my literary life, I first discovered him after reading through all the works of Herman Hesse in seventh grade, in whom I found resonance with the Taoist poetry and Zen riddles which were among my subjects of formal study, then abandoning fiction after the nightmare of Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties and its implied erotic horror, which I had chosen after reading his stunning novel of my favorite game after chess, The Master of Go, and turned thereafter to Plato whom I adored, and read voraciously all his works throughout my eighth grade year. The Trial of Socrates founded our civilization as a self-questioning system of being human together, and in the dialectics of Socratic method offered me tools of self-construal and reinvention which became central to my identity.
My father, who was a theatre director as well as my English, Drama, and Forensics teacher, Debate Team coach, and my Fencing Club coach throughout high school, and who taught me fencing and chess from the age of nine, suggested I might like the discussion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; Nietzsche’s vision of civilization as a struggle between passion and reason, chaos and order, conserving and revolutionary forces, which interlinks with that of Kawabata and of Herman Hesse in The Glass Bead Game to form a unitary vision of a process of becoming human, and informs my reading of literature, politics, and all human activity, to this day.
So it was that during the summer of my fourteenth year before I began high school I discovered with unforgettable joy and recognition a book written by someone who spoke for me, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Wedded in my imagination to the context of my encounter with his work was the grand adventure and disruptive trauma of my first solo foreign travel, to Brazil to train for the Pan American Games with fellow fencers.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen to train with a group of fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there; I was the San Francisco Bay Area champion in saber and foil in my age division of under 16, as I had been in the under 14 and remained through high school in the under 20 division. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial arts and sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls, and I have been living beyond the walls ever since.
Remembering this Defining Moment now, the day I looked beyond my limits and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden to discover and question the basis of my own privilege and reach across divisions of authorized identities of class and race in solidarity with those who do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us and create our wealth, to whom we have exported the true costs of production and excluded from its benefits as our de facto slaves, what fixes my imagination is that I lived an allegory of awakening which recapitulates the story of the Buddha and has become a world myth as the Prince in the Golden Cage. I had no charioteer to answer my questions and create order and meaning from my trauma of witness; I had a whole tribe of them, the Matadors. We’ll get to that part shortly.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, and a jar of tagged ears. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; that fully ten percent of Brazilians were abandoned and orphaned street children on whom bounties had been placed as a solution, that a quarter of the population lived in shantytowns, that life expectancy for 80% of the people was 35 years, that 350,000 children died before the age of five each year and only 13% finished primary school, that nearly half the people were illiterate.
And yet it was a rich nation; the Brazilian gold boom of the 1700’s created Europe’s industrial revolution, and at this same time of pervasive and systemic poverty and racism Brazil was the worlds number one coffee, sugar, orange, and gasohol producer, #2 cocoa, and #3 timber and beef producer. But over half of the wealth was owned by less than two percent of its people, like the family who were my gracious hosts.
Above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we buy the products of an unjust system, remain silent as witnesses of history to injustices, or abandon our duty of care toward others when evil unfolds before us and by a mission of action we may safeguard others from harm. This is the true mission of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege; to disrupt our interdependence and the solidarity of our universal brotherhood as a precondition of unequal power.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a second near death experience, this time similar though not as formal as those of Maurice Blanchot’s mock execution by the Nazis in 1944 and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s by the Czar’s secret police in 1849; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was my Ring of Fire and the first of more Last Stands than I can now clearly remember, and I find hope for us all in the instinctive duty of care of the young boy I once was to whom it never occurred to run, to surrender, or to abandon a stranger to harm, and like Wagner’s great hero Siegfried chose instead the fire.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did in Mariupol from March 22 to April 18 2022 and at Panjshir in Afghanistan from the last week of August til September 7 2021, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling.
When the disembodied voice of my executioner reached out from the darkness of the purgatorial labyrinth in which we were trapped to order my surrender, with the life of a stranger in the balance, I asked how much to let us walk away, and he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who had been arrested the previous year. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
As one of my rescuers phrased it; “Come with us. You are one of us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
May we all be granted the gift of vision of our interdependence and the universality of our humanity, and wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Throughout all of this, Nietzsche’s great song of liberation pulled me into its heart and ignited in me a will and vision to transgress beyond our boundaries into the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons.
I thereafter read all his works, though Thus Spake Zarathustra remained a kind of sacred text to me; I used to quote it in refutation to my fellow students who quoted the Bible to me as an instrument of subjugation to authority.
Redolent with the cadences of poetic oratory and a phraseology which echoes that of the beautiful King James Bible, pervasive in my town of Reformed Church stalwarts whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, it was both familiar and utterly strange, an empowering work of liberation proclaiming the death of Authority and the limits of the Forbidden. How I cherished it, this treasure and marvel; by summer’s end I could recite it entirely by memory so many times had I read it.
May we all find such books, which illuminate our imagination and offer to us the Promethean fire.
Read therefore the immortal classics of Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Geneology of Morality, The Case of Wagner, The AntiChrist, Twilight of the Gods, and Ecce Homo.
American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen provides an insightful overview.
Maurice Blanchot’s lifelong engagement with Nietzsche can be illuminating and wonderful; The Step Not Beyond, a reply to Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle which references Deleuze, The Writing of the Disaster, and The Infinite Conversation all center on his reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return as an Existentialist principle in which the negation of presence is a path of total freedom. In the pivotal 1945 essay On Nietzsche’s Side, Blanchot reimagines Karl Jaspers’ seminal thesis on Nietzsche; thereafter his works interrogate Nietzschean themes including the Will to Power, the nature of time, ecstatic vision and the Dionysian principle, the Death of God as symbol and metaphor of the emptiness of tyranny and the illusion of authority, and the relativity of meaning and value.
A student of the philosopher Henri Bergson, Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis “Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State” interrogates the reimagined doctrine of Original Sin as the innate Depravity of Man, which is the basis of all our law and an apologetics of authoritarian power which both Nietzsche and Kazantzakis made a life mission of overthrowing, a theme which continued to inform Kazantzakis throughout his life and is central to understanding his unique brand of Existentialism. In large part his works explore the implications of the Nietzschean conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian as personal and social struggle.
Do read also C.G. Jung’s work Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, notes from the 86 seminars he chaired over 11 university terms exploring the great epic poem which seized and shook me awake. An engagement with Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-gospel and Zarathustra as a figure of Liberation like Milton’s rebel angel, as for both Jung and myself, will lead you as it did me to the works of William Blake and his rebel figure Los; Milton, Nietzsche, and Blake form a line of transmission which unfolds gloriously in Jung’s Red Book.
Last of all I must cite the influence which prefigured and later reinterpreted the meaning of Nietzsche for me, the great storyteller of my childhood William S. Burroughs, whose own ideology was shaped by his friend Georges Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche. Bataille’s On Nietzsche brilliantly interrogates the problem of the Deus Absconditus, the god who bound us to his laws and abandoned us to free ourselves from them, in a fearless reimagination of the will to power as a will to transgress. The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology, compiles the secret documents of his occult circle, disciples of Nietzsche who attempted to reimagine civilization and whose ritual transgressions echo de Sade and Jean Genet.
The influence of Bataille on William S. Burroughs cannot be overstated. Burroughs derived his Anarchist Trilogy, The Wild Boys, The Cat Inside, and the Revised Boy Scout Manual, from Bataille’s synthesis of Nietzsche, de Sade, and Freud, though its central premise, The Algebra of Need, references Marx.
This is the Burroughs with whom I found connection as a teenager; the anarchist philosopher for whom the Wolfman was a figure of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, whose novel on the subject, The Wild Boys, was written during the period of his visits at our home and possibly influenced by my father’s tales of our family history.
For Burroughs, writing was conjuration; an act of chaos magic and liberation struggle in which the tyranny of authorized identities and orders of human being, meaning, and value can be destabilized as fracture, disruption, and delegitimation, and created anew through poetic vision.
In this mission William S. Burroughs was the successor and reinterpreter of of Bataille and of their shared model Nietzsche, as ritual transgression, the delegitimation of authority and seizures of power as liberation struggle, poetic vision and ecstatic trance as the reimagination and transformation of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Burroughs also believed himself to be the literal successor of Nietzsche as the possessed avatar of a chthonic underworld god, a Shadow figure in Jungian terms which represents his animal nature and inchoate desires as a beast with a beast’s soul, unconquerable and free, in reference to the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow and that Burroughs’ Welsh nanny had cursed him with as a child. A powerful guardian spirit and otherworld guide to be offered, as was I in reciting together the line with which Burrough’s often ended his bizarre versions of Grimm’s fairytales, a line written by Shakespeare in The Tempest for Prospero, who says of Caliban; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
So the circle of meaning returns to swallow its own tail like an Ouroboros or an infinite Mobius Loop in the embrace of our darkness as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and of the balance we must find for the terror of our nothingness in the joy of total freedom in a universe without imposed meaning, wherein the only being, meaning, and value that exists are those we create for ourselves, even if we must seize them from those who would enslave us.
Walk Through the Fire, song from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode Once More With Feeling
Looking Into the Abyss: the Hamas-Israel War of October 2023
Biden’s Speech asking Congress to fund Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing
(General Ursus speech from Beneath The planet of the Apes)
“The only thing that counts in the end is POWER! Naked merciless FORCE!”
15 Oktober 2024 Lieder der Befreiung vom theokratischen Terror: Zur Feier Nietzsches
Nietzsche, der erweckt, Nietzsche, der herausfordert, Nietzsche, der erleuchtet und inspiriert; Dies sind die drei Nietzsches, die mein ganzes Leben lang Begleiter, meine Führer und Musen waren und die ich Ihnen als Lied des Orpheus und Ariadne als Faden anbiete, um Ihren Weg durch das Labyrinth des Lebens zu finden.
Während die Welt an der Schnittstelle zwischen theokratischer Tyrannei und der Demokratie als einer freien Gesellschaft von Gleichen, die sich gegenseitig die universellen Menschenrechte garantieren und Miteigentümer des Staates sind, in den gespaltenen Realitäten Israels und Palästinas auseinanderbricht, während wir darum kämpfen Wenn wir aus den Hinterlassenschaften unserer Geschichte hervorgehen und diejenigen, die uns versklaven wollen, die Angst im Dienste der Macht als Waffe einsetzen und mit amoralischer Brutalität Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit als Interpreten des Willens der Todesgötter begehen, wird die Erleuchtung Nietzsches und seiner Befreiungslieder zu neuem Leben erweckt relevant.
Er ist in seinen Formen vielfältig und kann jede Form annehmen, die Sie für Ihre Suche benötigen. und wird seine Rollen in den verschiedenen Phasen der Reise angemessen spielen. Es gibt viele Nietzsches, die wie eine endlose Reihe tanzender Schrödingers Katzen Möglichkeiten bieten, die als Tintenkleckstest die seiner Leser widerspiegeln. Wer ist Nietzsche für mich?
Friedrich Nietzsche nimmt einen Platz in meinem Leben und meiner Vorstellungskraft ein wie keine andere prägende, motivierende und informierende Quelle, denn meine Entdeckung von ihm im Jahr vor Beginn meiner Schulzeit war der letzte Bremspunkt der Großen Kette des Seins, die mich an den Willen band der Autorität und der Vorstellungen meiner Mitschulkameraden von Tugend, Wahrheit und Schönheit in einer theokratischen, patriarchalischen und rassistischen Gesellschaft, die mit dem Apartheidregime Südafrikas verbündet ist, und mir die Freiheit gab, mich in einem Universum ohne aufgezwungene Bedeutung oder Wert zu erschaffen; Dann half er mir, ein primäres Trauma zu verarbeiten, das zu einem entscheidenden Moment wurde, als ich mich dem Befreiungskampf eines fremden Landes anschloss, dessen glitzernde Zitadellen der Pracht schreckliche Wahrheiten verbargen.
Nietzsche war es, der mir half, den Schrecken unseres Nichts mit der Freude der völligen Freiheit in Einklang zu bringen.
Wir alle werden ein solches Gleichgewicht brauchen, wenn wir uns unserer Komplizenschaft in Unterdrückungssystemen stellen, sowohl bei der Unterstützung unserer imperialen Kolonie Israel durch Amerika und ihrer siebzigjährigen Besatzung Palästinas als auch in der ganzen Welt und in der Geschichte, denn wir sind alle darin gefangen Getriebe einer Maschine aus elitärem Reichtum, Macht und Privilegien und Unterdrückungssystemen, die nichts Besonderes sind, obwohl Konflikte oft die Mängel unserer Menschlichkeit und die Zerbrochenheit der Welt ans Licht bringen.
Wenn ich von der Durchsetzung der Normalität als einem Übel spreche, dem man widerstehen muss, dann mit der Stimme der alten Frau, die in ihrem Haus als Hexe von einer Meute, zu der auch meine Mitkinder gehörten, mit denen ich aufgewachsen war, lebendig verbrannt wurde. Um Nietzsche vollständig zu verstehen, müssen Sie den historischen Raum der Befreiung von der systemischen Tyrannei bewohnen, den sein antiautoritärer Bildersturm darstellt. Ein Großteil unserer Welt lebt immer noch in dieser Dunkelheit, und viele ihrer Übel haben ihren Ursprung in theokratischen Quellen.
Ich bin in einer solchen Welt aufgewachsen, einer vormodernen Welt, die den Gesetzen einer grausamen und unversöhnlichen Autorität aus fremden und unerkennbaren Motiven und denen verpflichtet war, die uns versklaven und behaupten würden, in seinem Namen zu sprechen, als Tyrannei der Auserwählten, deren Hegemonien des Reichtums Macht, Macht und Privilegien beruhen auf unserer Kommerzialisierung als bewaffnete Ungleichheit und Diebstahl von Gemeingütern, auf Fälschung durch Lügen und Illusionen, auf Unterwerfung durch erlernte Hilflosigkeit und Spaltungen ausschließender Andersartigkeit, auf Angst als Instrument der Machtzentralisierung durch kerkerhafte Gewalt- und Kontrollzustände durch Faschismen von Blut, Glauben und Boden und Glauben, der im Dienst der Macht als Diebstahl der Seele bewaffnet wird.
Solche Atavismen der Barbarei beherrschen immer noch einen Großteil der Menschheit und besitzen uns als Vermächtnisse unserer Geschichte, gebunden durch tief verwurzelte Tyranneien verschiedenster Art, einer Welt, die Amerika als freie Gesellschaft von Gleichen ersetzen sollte. Unsere Zivilisation ist sehr zerbrechlich und wird ständig von den Abgründen der Dunkelheit, die uns umgeben, und von unerbittlichen, allgegenwärtigen und systemischen Feinden in der faschistischen Tyrannei, dem patriarchalischen Sexualterror, dem Terror der weißen Rassisten, dem Fetischismus von Tod und Gewalt im identitären Nationalismus und seinen Polizeistaaten bedroht und imperialer Militarismus und Entmenschlichung. Dem müssen wir widerstehen, und ich lese „So sprach Zarathustra“ als ein leuchtendes Lied des Widerstands.
Unter den großen Lieben meines literarischen Lebens entdeckte ich ihn zum ersten Mal, nachdem ich in der siebten Klasse alle Werke von Herman Hesse gelesen hatte, bei dem ich Resonanz mit der taoistischen Poesie und den Zen-Rätseln fand, die zu meinen formalen Studienfächern gehörten, und gab dann die Fiktion auf nach dem Albtraum von Kawabatas „Das Haus der schlafenden Schönheiten“ und dem darin enthaltenen erotischen Horror, für den ich mich entschieden hatte, nachdem ich seinen atemberaubenden Roman über mein Lieblingsspiel nach dem Schach, „Der Meister von Go“, gelesen hatte, und wandte mich danach an Plato, den ich verehrte, und las alles gierig sein w Orks während meines achten Schuljahres. Der Prozess gegen Sokrates begründete unsere Zivilisation als ein sich selbst hinterfragendes System des gemeinsamen Menschseins und bot mir in der Dialektik der sokratischen Methode Werkzeuge zur Selbstkonstruktion und Neuerfindung, die für meine Identität von zentraler Bedeutung wurden.
Mein Vater, der Theaterregisseur sowie mein Englisch-, Theater- und Forensiklehrer, Debate-Team-Trainer und mein Fechtclub-Trainer während der gesamten High School war und der mir ab meinem neunten Lebensjahr Fechten und Schach beibrachte, schlug vor, dass es mir gefallen könnte die Diskussion des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen in Friedrich Nietzsches „Die Geburt der Tragödie“; Nietzsches Vision der Zivilisation als ein Kampf zwischen Leidenschaft und Vernunft, Chaos und Ordnung, bewahrenden und revolutionären Kräften, die sich mit der von Kawabata und Herman Hesse im Glasperlenspiel zu einer einheitlichen Vision eines Prozesses der Menschwerdung verbindet und informiert meine Lektüre von Literatur, Politik und allen menschlichen Aktivitäten bis heute.
So kam es, dass ich im Sommer meines vierzehnten Jahres, bevor ich mit der High School anfing, mit unvergesslicher Freude und Anerkennung ein Buch entdeckte, das von jemandem geschrieben wurde, der für mich sprach: Also sprach Zarathustra. In meiner Vorstellung war mit dem Kontext meiner Begegnung mit seiner Arbeit das große Abenteuer und das zerstörerische Trauma meiner ersten Alleinreise ins Ausland verbunden, nach Brasilien, um mit anderen Fechtern für die Panamerikanischen Spiele zu trainieren.
Lassen Sie mich dies in einen Kontext stellen; Brasilien war mein erstes alleiniges Reiseerlebnis im Ausland. Als ich vierzehn war, flog ich nach Sao Paulo, um mit einer Gruppe von Fechtern für die Panamerikanischen Spiele zu trainieren, die dort stattfinden sollten. Ich war in meiner Altersklasse San Francisco Bay Area-Meister im Säbel und Florett. Ich hatte etwas neu erlerntes Konversations-Portugiesisch, eine Einladung, bei einem Jungen zu übernachten, den ich aus der Zeit bei Fechtturnieren kannte und mit dem ich den lokalen Unfug entdecken konnte, und Visionen von Strandpartys.
So betrat ich eine Welt voller höfischer Manieren und weißbehandschuhter Diener, liebenswürdiger und brillanter Gastgeber, die lokale Koryphäen waren und einen großartigen formellen Ball veranstalteten, um mich und einen Freund vorzustellen, mit dem ich eine verrückte Leidenschaft für Kampfkunst und Sport teilte , aber auch eine Welt voller hoher Mauern und bewaffneter Wachen.
Mein erster Blick über diese Illusion hinaus erfolgte durch die Geräusche des Gewehrfeuers der Wachen; Als ich von meinem Balkon aus schaute, um zu sehen, wer das Eingangstor angriff, stellte ich fest, dass die Wachen auf eine Menge Bettler, hauptsächlich Kinder, schossen, die einen Lastwagen mit den wöchentlichen Lebensmittelvorräten überfallen hatten. An diesem Tag unternahm ich meinen ersten geheimen Ausflug über die Mauern hinaus, und seitdem lebe ich außerhalb der Mauern.
Ich erinnere mich jetzt an diesen entscheidenden Moment, an den Tag, an dem ich über meine Grenzen hinausschaute und die Grenzen des Verbotenen überschritt, um die Grundlage meines eigenen Privilegs zu entdecken und in Frage zu stellen und über Grenzen autorisierter Klassen- und Rassengrenzen hinweg in Solidarität mit denen zu blicken, die das Harte tun und Drecksarbeit für den Rest von uns und Schaffung unseres Reichtums, an den wir die wahren Kosten der Produktion exportiert und als unsere De-facto-Sklaven von ihren Vorteilen ausgeschlossen haben, was meine Vorstellungskraft anregt, ist, dass ich eine Allegorie des Erwachens gelebt habe, die die Geschichte von der Buddha und ist als Prinz im Goldenen Käfig zu einem Weltmythos geworden. Ich hatte keinen Wagenlenker, der meine Fragen beantwortete und aus meinem Zeugentrauma Ordnung und Sinn schaffte; Ich hatte einen ganzen Stamm von ihnen, die Matadore. Zu diesem Teil kommen wir gleich.
Welche Wahrheiten verbergen sich hinter den Mauern unserer Paläste, über die hinauszuschauen es verboten ist? Es ist leicht, den Lügen der Autoritäten zu glauben, wenn man der Elite angehört, in deren Interesse sie angeblich Macht ausüben, und die eigenen Motive und die privilegierte Stellung nicht in Frage zu stellen. Erschreckend leicht zu glaubende Lügen, wenn wir die Nutznießer von Hierarchien ausschließender Andersartigkeit, von Wohlstands- und Machtunterschieden und Ungleichheiten sind, die im Dienste der Macht systematisch hergestellt und als Waffe eingesetzt werden, sowie von Völkermord, Sklaverei, Eroberung und Imperialismus.
Achten Sie immer auf den Mann hinter dem Vorhang. Denn es gibt keine gerechte Autorität, und wie Dorothy im Zauberer von Oz sagt, ist er „nur ein alter Humbug“, und seine Lügen und Illusionen, seine Gewalt und Kontrolle dienen nur seinen eigenen Interessen.
Als naiver amerikanischer Junge hielt ich es für meine Pflicht, den Vorfall zu melden; Aber auf der Polizeistation hatte ich Schwierigkeiten, mich zu verständigen. Sie dachten, ich sei dort, um bei einem monatlich stattfindenden Wettbewerb, bei dem Polizisten die meisten Straßenkinder erlegten, auf meine Wachsamkeit zu wetten; Dafür gab es an der Bahnhofswand eine Tafel und ein Glas mit markierten Ohren. Bei einem weiteren Wettspiel namens „The Big One“ traten Polizisten den schwangersten Mädchen in den Bauch und zählten zu den zehn häufigsten Todesursachen für Mädchen im Teenageralter in Brasilien, die ausnahmslos in Slumgebieten lebten, in denen die ärmsten und meisten Schwarzen lebten Bürger; dies in einer Stadt, die von entflohenen afrikanischen Sklaven als freie Republik gegründet wurde.
In den folgenden Wochen habe ich viel gelernt heiraten; dass ganze zehn Prozent der Brasilianer verlassene und verwaiste Straßenkinder waren, auf die als Lösung Kopfgelder ausgesetzt worden waren, dass ein Viertel der Bevölkerung in Elendsvierteln lebte, dass die Lebenserwartung für 80 % der Menschen bei 35 Jahren lag und dass zuvor 350.000 Kinder gestorben waren jedes Jahr fünf Jahre alt waren und nur 13 % die Grundschule abschlossen, bedeutete, dass fast die Hälfte der Menschen Analphabeten waren.
Und doch war es eine reiche Nation; Der brasilianische Goldboom im 18. Jahrhundert löste die industrielle Revolution Europas aus, und in dieser Zeit allgegenwärtiger und systemischer Armut und Rassismus war Brasilien der weltweit größte Kaffee-, Zucker-, Orangen- und Benzinproduzent, der zweitgrößte Kakaoproduzent und der drittgrößte Holz- und Rindfleischproduzent Hersteller. Aber über die Hälfte des Reichtums befand sich im Besitz von weniger als zwei Prozent der Menschen, wie etwa der Familie, die meine liebenswürdigen Gastgeber waren.
Vor allem habe ich erfahren, wer für diese Ungleichheiten verantwortlich ist; Wir sind es, wenn wir die Produkte eines ungerechten Systems kaufen, als Zeugen der Geschichte zu Ungerechtigkeiten schweigen oder unsere Fürsorgepflicht gegenüber anderen aufgeben, wenn sich das Böse vor uns abspielt, und durch eine Mission des Handelns andere vor Schaden bewahren können. Dies ist die wahre Mission elitärer Hegemonien von Reichtum, Macht und Privilegien; unsere gegenseitige Abhängigkeit und die Solidarität unserer universellen Bruderschaft als Voraussetzung ungleicher Macht zu zerstören.
In den Nächten meiner Abenteuer jenseits der Mauern und bei Aktionen zur Unterstützung der Banden von Kinderbettlern und zur Behinderung der Kopfgeldjagd der Polizei hatte ich eine zweite Nahtoderfahrung, dieses Mal ähnlich, wenn auch nicht so formell wie die Scheinhinrichtung von Maurice Blanchot durch die Nazis 1944 und Fjodor Dostojewskis durch die Geheimpolizei des Zaren im Jahr 1849; Sie flüchteten mit einem verletzten Kind unter anderem vor der Verfolgung durch ein Tunnelgewirr und wurden im Freien von zwei Polizeischützen gefangen, die flankierende Positionen einnahmen und auf uns zielten, während der Anführer hinter der Kurve eines Tunnels zur Kapitulation aufrief. Ich stand vor einem Jungen mit einem verdrehten Bein, der nicht rennen konnte, während die anderen sich zerstreuten und flüchteten oder Verstecke suchten, und der sich weigerte, beiseite zu treten, als er dazu aufgefordert wurde. Dies war mein Ring des Feuers und der erste von mehr letzten Kämpfen, an die ich mich jetzt nicht mehr genau erinnern kann, und ich finde Hoffnung für uns alle in der instinktiven Fürsorgepflicht des kleinen Jungen, der ich einst war und dem es nie in den Sinn kam, wegzulaufen, sich zu ergeben , oder einen Fremden dem Leid auszusetzen, und wie Wagners großer Held entschied sich Siegfried stattdessen für das Feuer.
Mit all den Schrecken, die ich in einem Leben erlebt habe, das ich in den unbekannten Räumen unserer Karten der Menschwerdung gelebt habe, markiert Here Be Dragons, jenseits der Grenzen des Menschlichen und der Grenzen des Verbotenen, durch Kriege und Revolutionen als Unheilstifter für Tyrannen und ein Monster, das andere Monster jagt, um etwas von unserer Menschlichkeit zu retten, obwohl ich dabei oft versage, wie ich es in Mariupol vom 22. März bis 18. April 2022 und in Panjshir in Afghanistan von der letzten Augustwoche bis zum 7. September getan habe Im Jahr 2021 weigert sich etwas in uns, sich der Erniedrigung und erlernten Hilflosigkeit autoritärer Systeme zu unterwerfen, ungeachtet der Zerrüttung der Welt und der Mängel unserer Menschlichkeit, und strebt nach Erhöhung und Freiheit. Ob diese Hoffnung ein Geschenk oder ein Fluch ist, muss jeder von uns in der Art und Weise, wie er sein Leben lebt, herausfinden.
Am Ende kommt es nur darauf an, was wir mit unserer Angst machen und wie wir unsere Kraft nutzen.
Siegfried geht durch das Feuer und wird menschlich. Eine gute Nacherzählung davon gibt es in der Musicalfolge „Once More With Feeling“ von Buffy – Im Bann der Dämonen.
Als die körperlose Stimme meines Henkers aus der Dunkelheit des Fegefeuerlabyrinths, in dem wir gefangen waren, meine Kapitulation anordnete, mit dem Leben eines Fremden auf dem Spiel, fragte ich, wie viel wir gehen lassen sollten, und er befahl seinen Männer zum Feuern. Aber es gab nur einen Schuss statt einer Demonstration von Kreuzfeuer, und zwar ein Fehlschuss; er hatte Zeit zu fragen: „Was?“ bevor es zu Boden fällt.
Und dann zeigten sich unsere Retter, die sich von hinten an die Polizei herangeschlichen hatten; die Matadors, die man als Bürgerwehr, kriminelle Bande, revolutionäre Gruppe oder beides bezeichnen könnte, gegründet von Brasiliens berüchtigtem Bürgerwehrmann und Verbrecher Pedro Rodrigues Filho, der im Vorjahr verhaftet worden war. In dieser furchterregenden Bruderschaft wurde ich willkommen geheißen, und in diesem Sommer war ich nie wieder allein auf den Straßen von Sao Paulo.
Von dem Moment an, als ich sah, wie die Wachen der Adelsfamilie, bei der ich zu Gast war, auf die Menge obdachloser Kinder und Bettler feuerten, die den Lebensmittelversorgungswagen am Tor des Herrenhauses bevölkerten, nackt und ausgehungert, vernarbt und verkrüppelt und missgestaltet von unbekannten Krankheiten an alle Menschen, für die Gesundheitsversorgung und Grundnahrung kostenlose und garantierte Voraussetzungen des universellen Rechts auf Leben sind und die verzweifelt auf eine Handvoll Lebensmittel angewiesen sind, die einen weiteren Tag zum Überleben bedeuten könnten; In diesem Moment habe ich mich für meine Seite entschieden, und mein Volk sind die Machtlosen und Enteigneten, die Zum Schweigen gebrachten und Ausgelöschten.
Wie einer meiner Retter es ausdrückte; “Komm mit uns. Du sind einer von uns. Wir können nicht alle retten, aber wir können uns rächen.“
Möge uns allen die Gabe der Vision unserer gegenseitigen Abhängigkeit und der Universalität unseres Menschseins geschenkt werden, sowie der Wunden, die uns für den Schmerz anderer öffnen.
Während all dem zog mich Nietzsches großartiges Lied der Befreiung in sein Herz und entfachte in mir den Willen und die Vision, über unsere Grenzen hinaus an die unbekannten Orte mit der Aufschrift „Here Be Dragons“ vorzudringen.
Ich habe danach alle seine Werke gelesen, obwohl „So sprach Zarathustra“ für mich eine Art heiliger Text blieb; Ich habe es als Widerlegung gegenüber meinen Kommilitonen zitiert, die mir gegenüber die Bibel als Instrument der Unterwerfung unter Autoritäten zitierten.
Mit dem Klang poetischer Reden und einer Phraseologie, die an die wunderschöne King-James-Bibel erinnert, die in meiner Stadt mit Anhängern der reformierten Kirche allgegenwärtig ist und deren Mund voll von „Du“ und „Du“ war, war es sowohl vertraut als auch völlig seltsam, ein kraftvolles Werk der Befreiung verkündet den Tod der Autorität und die Grenzen des Verbotenen. Wie ich es schätzte, diesen Schatz und dieses Wunder; Am Ende des Sommers konnte ich es vollständig auswendig aufsagen, so oft ich es gelesen hatte.
Mögen wir alle solche Bücher finden, die unsere Fantasie erhellen und uns das prometheische Feuer schenken.
Lesen Sie daher die unsterblichen Klassiker von Friedrich Nietzsche, „Also sprach Zarathustra“, „Die Geburt der Tragödie“, „Die fröhliche Wissenschaft“, „Jenseits von Gut und Böse“, „Über die Geneologie der Moral“, „Der Fall Wagner“, „Der Antichrist“, „Götterdämmerung“ und „Ecce Homo“.
„American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas“ von Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen bietet einen aufschlussreichen Überblick.
Maurice Blanchots lebenslange Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsche kann aufschlussreich und wunderbar sein; „The Step Not Beyond“, eine Antwort auf Klossowskis „Nietzsche und der Teufelskreis“, die sich auf Deleuze, „The Writing of the Disaster“ und „The Infinite Conversation“ bezieht, dreht sich allesamt um seine Neuinterpretation von Nietzsches „Ewige Wiederkehr“ als existentialistisches Prinzip, in dem die Negation der Präsenz ein Weg ist der völligen Freiheit. In dem entscheidenden Aufsatz „On Nietzsche’s Side“ von 1945 interpretiert Blanchot Karl Jaspers‘ bahnbrechende These über Nietzsche neu; Danach hinterfragen seine Werke Nietzsches Themen wie den Willen zur Macht, die Natur der Zeit, ekstatische Vision und das dionysische Prinzip, den Tod Gottes als Symbol und Metapher für die Leere der Tyrannei und die Illusion von Autorität sowie die Relativität von Bedeutung und Wert .
Nikos Kazantzakis, ein Schüler des Philosophen Henri Bergson, hinterfragt in seiner Dissertation „Friedrich Nietzsche über die Philosophie des Rechts und des Staates“ die neu interpretierte Lehre von der Erbsünde als der angeborenen Verderbtheit des Menschen, die die Grundlage unseres gesamten Rechts und eine Apologetik davon ist autoritäre Macht, deren Sturz sowohl für Nietzsche als auch für Kazantzakis eine Lebensaufgabe war, ein Thema, das Kazantzakis sein ganzes Leben lang prägte und für das Verständnis seiner einzigartigen Art des Existenzialismus von zentraler Bedeutung ist. In seinen Werken geht es zum großen Teil um die Implikationen des nietzscheanischen Konflikts zwischen dem Apollinischen und dem Dionysischen als persönlichen und sozialen Kampf.
Lesen Sie auch C.G. Jungs Werk Nietzsches Zarathustra, Notizen aus den 86 Seminaren, die er in 11 Semestern an der Universität leitete und die sich mit dem großen epischen Gedicht befassten, das mich packte und wachrüttelte. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Also sprach Zarathustra als Gegenevangelium und Zarathustra als Befreiungsfigur wie Miltons Rebellenengel, sowohl für Jung als auch für mich, wird Sie wie mich zu den Werken von William Blake und seiner Rebellenfigur Los führen; Milton, Nietzsche und Blake bilden eine Übertragungslinie, die sich in Jungs Red Book prächtig entfaltet.
Zu guter Letzt muss ich den Einfluss anführen, der für mich die Bedeutung von Nietzsche vorwegnahm und später neu interpretierte: den großen Geschichtenerzähler meiner Kindheit, William S. Burroughs, dessen eigene Ideologie vom Nietzsche-Kult seines Freundes Georges Bataille geprägt war. Batailles „Über Nietzsche“ hinterfragt auf brillante Weise das Problem des Deus Absconditus, des Gottes, der uns an seine Gesetze band und uns verließ, um uns von ihnen zu befreien, in einer furchtlosen Neuinterpretation des Willens zur Macht als Willen zur Übertretung. „The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology“ stellt die geheimen Dokumente seines okkulten Kreises zusammen, Schüler Nietzsches, die versuchten, die Zivilisation neu zu erfinden und deren rituelle Übertretungen an de Sade und Jean Genet erinnern.
Der Einfluss von Bataille auf William S. Burroughs kann nicht hoch genug eingeschätzt werden. Burroughs leitete seine Anarchisten-Trilogie „The Wild Boys“, „The Cat Inside“ und „The Revised Boy Scout Manual“ aus Batailles Synthese von Nietzsche, de Sade und Freud ab, obwohl sich die zentrale Prämisse, „The Algebra of Need“, auf Marx bezieht.
Das sind die Burroughs, mit denen ich als Teenager eine Verbindung gefunden habe; der anarchistische Philosoph, für den der Wolfsmann eine Figur der Wildheit der Natur und der Wildheit von uns selbst war, dessen Roman zu diesem Thema, The Wild Boys, in der Zeit von geschrieben wurde
seine Besuche bei uns zu Hause und möglicherweise beeinflusst durch die Erzählungen meines Vaters über unsere Familiengeschichte.
Für Burroughs war Schreiben eine Beschwörung; ein Akt der Chaosmagie und des Befreiungskampfs, in dem die Tyrannei autorisierter Identitäten und Ordnungen des menschlichen Seins, der Bedeutung und des Wertes als Bruch, Störung und Delegitimierung destabilisiert und durch poetische Vision neu geschaffen werden kann.
In dieser Mission war William S. Burroughs der Nachfolger und Neuinterpret von Bataille und ihrem gemeinsamen Modell Nietzsche, als rituelle Übertretung, Delegitimierung von Autorität und Machtergreifung als Befreiungskampf, poetische Vision und ekstatische Trance als Neuinterpretation und Transformation unseres unbegrenzte Möglichkeiten, Mensch zu werden.
Burroughs glaubte auch, dass er der buchstäbliche Nachfolger Nietzsches sei, als besessener Avatar eines chthonischen Unterweltgottes, einer Schattenfigur in jungianischen Begriffen, die seine tierische Natur und seine unentwickelten Wünsche als ein Tier mit einer Tierseele, unbesiegbar und frei, darstellt Die Kröte Nietzsche fürchtete, er müsse schlucken und Burroughs‘ Kindermädchen habe ihn als Kind verflucht. Ein mächtiger Schutzgeist und ein jenseitiger Führer, der angeboten werden muss, ebenso wie ich, als ich gemeinsam die Zeile rezitierte, mit der Burrough seine bizarren Versionen von Grimms Märchen oft beendete, eine Zeile, die Shakespeare in „Der Sturm für Prospero“ geschrieben hat und der von Caliban sagt; „Dieses Ding der Dunkelheit erkenne ich als meins an.“
So kehrt der Kreis der Bedeutung zurück, um seinen eigenen Schwanz zu verschlucken wie ein Ouroboros oder eine unendliche Mobius-Schleife in der Umarmung unserer Dunkelheit als der Wildheit der Natur und der Wildheit von uns selbst, von Wahrheiten, die der Natur immanent und in unserem Fleisch geschrieben sind, und von der Wir müssen für den Schrecken unseres Nichts ein Gleichgewicht in der Freude der völligen Freiheit in einem Universum ohne auferlegte Bedeutung finden, in dem das einzige Wesen, die einzige Bedeutung und der Wert, die existieren, diejenigen sind, die wir für uns selbst erschaffen, auch wenn wir sie denen entreißen müssen, die sie haben würde uns versklaven.
History as authorized identity has always been key to the idea of nation and the power of the state. Today we celebrate a unique holiday, a contested ideological ground of revolutionary struggle against divisions of exclusionary otherness which are designed to create a disparity of wealth and power by those who would enslave us, a holiday which forces decision and sets each of us in an arena of competing and mutually exclusive narratives of American identity.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, racism and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are embedded in our triumphalist narratives of the European Conquest of the Americas celebrated as a national holiday as Columbus Day. The same events are mourned as a national shame and origin of historical legacies of genocide and the theft of a continent as Indigenous People’s Day. We live now in both nations simultaneously, our two souls riven asunder by history and locked in a titanic struggle across generations and centuries as epigenetic trauma.
We dwell in two realms which are discontiguous, defined by power asymmetries and the echoes of tragedies and atavisms of instinct which we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails.
Monet once said, “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world. One looks outward, but the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.” He meant this literally, as metaphysics, and his art was an attempt to demonstrate the processes by which consciousness creates reality, but his primary insight applies equally to the narrative function of identity.
The great struggle for ownership of ourselves between autonomous individuals and the ideas of other people as authorized identities imposed by state force and control is driven by three principles; each of us must reinvent how to be human, humans create themselves over time, and humans create themselves through other humans.
We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to other people. The question we must ask of any such story is simple; whose story is this?
As written for National Geographic; By Debra Adams Simmons, Executive Editor, HISTORY; “Today is a federal holiday in the U.S., but what are we celebrating?
The first national Indigenous Peoples’ Day honors “America’s first inhabitants and the Tribal Nations that continue to thrive today,” President Joe Biden said, highlighting the resilience of native people and recommitting to honor the government’s treaty obligations to Tribal Nations.
Biden also issued a Columbus Day proclamation acknowledging the contributions of Italian Americans as well as “the painful history of wrongs and atrocities” that resulted from European exploration.”
The dissonance in the two proclamations is hard to fathom. In recent years there’s been a pivot away from recognizing Columbus Day and toward Indigenous Peoples’ Day (pictured above, an early celebration in 1992 in Berkeley, California). In the move, the origins of Columbus Day at times have been lost. Erin Blakemore writes about how the day came to be:
“In 1890 anti-Italian sentiment boiled over in New Orleans after police chief David Hennessy, reputed for his arrests of Italian Americans, was murdered. In the aftermath, more than a hundred Sicilian Americans were arrested. When nine were tried and acquitted in March 1891, a furious mob rioted and broke into the city prison, where they beat, shot, and hanged at least 11 Italian American prisoners.
None of the rioters who lynched the Italian Americans were prosecuted. It remains one of the largest mass lynchings in the nation’s history,” Blakemore writes.
This soured U.S. diplomatic relations with Italy. In an attempt to appease Italy and acknowledge the contributions of Italian Americans on the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival, President Benjamin Harrison in 1892 proclaimed a nationwide celebration of “Discovery Day,” recognizing Columbus as “the pioneer of progress and enlightenment.” Eventually, the nations mended their relationship and the U.S. paid $25,000 in reparations. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated it a national holiday.
For many, especially Indigenous people, the Columbus Day holiday is offensive—a celebration of invasion, theft, brutality, and colonization. The arrival celebrated by some as a day of triumphant discovery was the beginning of an incursion onto their homeland.
Columbus and his crew enabled and perpetrated the kidnapping, enslavement, forced assimilation, rape, and sexual abuse of Native people, including children. The Native American population shrank by about half after European contact.
Today, 21 states and many cities celebrate Columbus Day. Others, including Columbus, Ohio—the largest city named for the explorer—have shifted to Indigenous Peoples’ Day. It is now a paid state holiday in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon (which celebrates both Columbus Day and Native American Day), South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
“We must never forget the centuries-long campaign of violence, displacement, assimilation, and terror wrought upon Native communities and Tribal Nations throughout our country,” Biden said in his proclamation. “
As I wrote in my post of November 6 2023, Native American Heritage Month: A Reading List; Freud defined civilization when he wrote; “The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” The idea of civilization as the degree to which we have abandoned the social use of force and a measure of a society’s equality, diversity, and inclusion, expressed by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek as “infinite diversity in infinite combination”, is central to the American experiment toward creating a true free society of equals as democracy.
The consequences of failure to act as each other’s guarantors of our universal human rights can be seen now in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the terror and tyranny of Israeli imperial dominion and Occupation of her neighbors, an echo and reflection of the European Conquest of the Americas along with many other conflicts of faith and ethnicity weaponized in service to power throughout history and the world, wherein colonial powers conquer, enslave, and erase in genocidal terror indigenous peoples, and the heroic Resistance of all those who refuse to be subjugated, assimilated, commodified, falsified, and ultimately become nothing, silenced and erased like the lost languages of stolen histories.
Both on national and personal levels we ourselves may be measured by our embrace of otherness and our solidarity in resistance to authority and the weaponization of fear in service to power, to divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging, and to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
So also are we forged by how we bring a reckoning for the historical legacies and epigenetic multigenerational trauma and harm of inequalities and injustices which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail, especially those of colonialism and imperialism, racism and patriarchy, and the systems and structures of oppression which still persist.
But we are also shaped by our seizures of power and the limits of our vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization; how to be human together and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
In the end we are defined by what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
Native American History
500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians, Josephy
The Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, American West, Dee Brown
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, David Treuer
Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, Peter Nabokov (editor)
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, Thomas King
Native American Mythology, Hartley Burr Alexander
Pocahontas, Paula Gunn Allen
This Land is Their Land, David J. Silverman
The Cherokee Nation; a history, Robert J. Conley
One Vast Winter Count, The Indian World of George Washington, Colin Calloway
Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides
Empire of the Summer Moon, S.C. Gwynne
The Comanche Empire, Lakota America: a new history of indigenous power, Pekka Hamalainen
The Killing of Crazy Horse, Thomas Powers
Crow Dog: Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men, Leonard Crow Dog
Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement, Richard Erdoes
The Apache Wars, Paul Andrew Hutton
The Serpent’s Tongue: Prose, Poetry, and Art of the New Mexico Pueblos, Nancy Wood
The Trickster: A Study In American Indian Mythology, Paul Radin, Karl Kerényi, C.G. Jung
Native American Literature
Secrets from the Center of the World, How We Become Human: poems 1975-2002, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: poems, Soul Talk Song Language: conversations, Crazy Brave, Joy Harjo
Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means
Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog
Black Elk Speaks
The Man Made of Words: essays, stories, passages, N. Scott Momaday
Night Flying Woman, Ignatia Broker
Fool’s Crow, James Welch
Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, Louise Erditch
Our Stories Remember: history, culture, & values through storytelling, Joseph Bruchac
Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Storyteller, Turquoise Ledger, Leslie Silko
Blue Highways, William Least-Heat Moon
Firesticks, Primer of the Obsolete, Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha, Uprising of Goats, Designs of the Night Sky, The Mask Maker, Stories of the Driven World, American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays, The Dance Partner, The Dream of a Broken Field, Diane Glancy
The Journey of Crazy Horse, John Marshall III
Houdini Heart, Ki Longfellow
You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Blasphemy: new and selected stories, Sherman Alexie
Two Old Women, Bird Girl & the Man Who Followed the Sun, Velma Wallis
The Voice of Rolling Thunder, Sidian Morning Star Jones
Spirit and Reason: the Vine Deloria, Jr Reader
Aurum, Santee Frazier
Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz
As I wrote in my post of November 25 2023, History, Identity, Power: On Native American Heritage Day, Falsification, and the Echoes of the Conquest In Our Lives; The Gordian Knot of history, memory, and identity as a function of narrative has always been a ground of struggle between autonomy and authority, between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves, in which power silences and erases the voices of those it wishes to enslave and uses sophisticated techniques of disinformation and propaganda to falsify the identities of those it claims to represent as well as those it disavows.
The torturer and his prisoner are both victims of authority, and the instruments of unequal power and divisions of exclusionary otherness with which it sets them against each other in subjugation to an elite hegemony and dominion.
It only gets worse from there; unless it begins to get better.
Our story, of America and of humankind, is a lamentation, a howl of loneliness and despair, of unutterable pain, disconnectedness, horror; but also of survival of those horrors, and the roar of defiance against fathoms of darkness and unanswerable force, of the triumph of the unconquerable will to become.
Who resists becomes Unconquered and free.
This is the forge of the spirit, this place beyond fear of death or hope of victory, and those who live here are transformed and liberated by our seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves as autonomous and self-created individuals.
Each of us who refuses to submit to authority and its laws which serve power becomes a living Autonomous Zone.
And this is why we will make a better future than we have the past; because tyrannies of force and control have no power over us unless we consent to give it to them. Each of us who in resistance is beyond compulsion opens the door to limitless unknowns and possibilities of becoming human, and this no authoritarian regime can survive. For authority must colonize, assimilate, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us, and if it cannot it has failed.
This is the great secret of power; its emptiness. Power requires complicity, for it is stolen from those it subjugates and enslaves.
As to Native American Heritage Day, let us reclaim our stories and our ownership of identity. Thanksgiving is one notable example of lies and illusions designed to serve state power and create a national identity of imperialism; as written in Time by Olivia Waxman, “early days of thanks celebrated the burning of a Pequot village in 1637, and the killing of Wampanoag leader Massasoit’s son”.
Such stories are numberless as the stars in the heavens; time to reclaim the truth behind the illusions, and free ourselves from the grip of authorized histories and identities.
I have often written that we in the sacred pursuit of truth, including those truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature in the discovery and creation of our uniqueness and of truths made for us by others against which we emerge in struggle, often against vast historical and systemic forces and inequalities, confer twin responsibilities and rights upon us all which are both seizures of power and duties of care for others as guarantors of each others universal human rights and our inherent freedom to create ourselves and how we choose to be human together as we ourselves decide to construct human being, meaning, and value; remembrance and reckoning.
For only this offers escape from the Wilderness of Mirrors; lies and illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, falsification, dehumanization, and theft of the soul whereby those who would enslave us enact our subjugation.
So for the legacies of our history from which we must emerge; the truths we must keep and those we must escape in liberation struggle, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Of our many possible futures I can only say this; all is not yet lost, nor is anything past redemption when the will to resist and to become can be found.
So I leave you with the words of Alan Moore from V for Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
As written by Kisha James, The Lilly, in Popular Resistance, in an article entitled My Grandfather Founded the National Day of Mourning; “ I’m Carrying On His Legacy.
Every Year, I March To Tell The True History Of The European Conquest Of The United States.
On Thursday, millions of families across the United States will celebrate Thanksgiving without giving much thought to the truth behind the heavily mythologized and sanitized story taught in schools and promulgated by institutions. According to this myth, 400 years ago, the Pilgrims were warmly welcomed by the “Indians,” and the two groups came together in friendship to break bread. The “Indians” taught the Pilgrims how to live in the “New World,” setting the stage for the eventual establishment of a great land of liberty and opportunity.
In the usual narrative, no further mention is made of the Native people, as if they all faded away. By sanitizing the English invasion of Wampanoag homelands, the Thanksgiving myth blatantly disregards the true history of the Pilgrims’ arrival in America and the centuries of violence and oppression that Indigenous peoples have endured as a result of the colonization of the Americas.
I know the Thanksgiving myth well. For my entire life — 22 years — I have gathered annually with hundreds of other Native Americans and supporters in Plymouth, Mass., on the fourth Thursday in November. We gather and march to challenge this myth, to tell the true history of the European conquest of the United States, to speak about the devastating and continuous impacts of colonization on Indigenous peoples. We gather to declare Thanksgiving a National Day of Mourning for Native Americans.
The protest was founded in 1970 by my grandfather, Wamsutta Frank James, a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah).
His story of the founding of the National Day of Mourning goes like this: In 1970, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts invited my grandfather to give a speech at a banquet celebrating the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims. However, when state officials saw an advance copy of his speech, they refused to allow him to give it, labeling it as too “inflammatory.” My grandfather had revealed in his speech the truth about the Pilgrims and their treatment of the Wampanoag, the often-unnamed “Indians” in the Thanksgiving myth.
He described how the English even before 1620 had brought diseases that caused a “Great Dying” — nearly decimating our people — and how they took Wampanoag people captive, selling them as slaves in Europe.
The meal Thanksgiving dinner is modeled after is misremembered, too. Although there may have been a meal provided largely by the Wampanoag in 1621, it was not a “thanksgiving”; and the Wampanoag people certainly weren’t invited. Rather, the first official “thanksgiving” has its origins in 1637, when White settlers massacred hundreds of Pequot men, women and children on the banks of the Mystic River in Connecticut.
Within 50-odd years of the arrival of the Pilgrims and other Europeans, the Wampanoag and many other tribes had been nearly wiped out because of warfare and disease, and had been dispossessed of most of their ancestral lands. Those who resisted were killed and their families enslaved.
State officials offered to rewrite my grandfather’s speech to ensure that it presented a more sanitized version of history, but he refused to have words put into his mouth and was disinvited from the banquet. His suppressed speech was printed in newspapers across the country.
But that wasn’t enough: My grandfather and other organizers decided that something had to be done in Plymouth to ensure that the truth about the Pilgrims would be loud and clear.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1970, Wamsutta Frank James, along with other Native activists and allies, gathered on a hill above Plymouth Rock to speak about the true history of Thanksgiving, the violent history of the European settlement of the United States, the lasting impacts of colonization, and the social and political issues faced by Indigenous peoples.
They declared it a National Day of Mourning for the millions of Indigenous peoples killed as a result of European colonization. United American Indians of New England (UAINE), the organization that my grandfather founded and led for decades, has continued for more than 50 years to organize National Day of Mourning and challenge the mainstream Thanksgiving narrative, as well as highlight the modern-day struggles faced by Indigenous peoples.
My grandfather was heroic, and I am proud to be his granddaughter and help lead UAINE as we continue our work. But I also have noticed over the years, and especially while going through old newspaper clippings, that for decades the media often focused solely on the men as spokespeople and organizers of National Day of Mourning.
Women from the Boston Indian Council and other organizations played a key organizing role from 1970 on. My grandmother Priscilla helped write my grandfather’s 1970 speech. A Native activist, Judy Mendes, was attacked by police dogs in 1972 for wearing an upside-down American flag.
My mother, Mahtowin Munro, has been a major contributor to the National Day of Mourning and a tireless advocate for Indigenous rights. She and my late father, Moonanum James, became the co-leaders of UAINE in 1994. My twin brother and I learned from a young age how to patiently explain to non-Native peers and adults why we did not celebrate the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. We are not against giving thanks or family gatherings, I’d tell my classmates; in fact, we are taught to give thanks every day. But we will not give thanks for the invasion of the Pilgrims and other Europeans, nor for the ongoing colonialism and genocide that our communities continue to face.
Now, I am the co-organizer of the National Day of Mourning along with my mother. I feel a great sense of pride in my family’s role in the Indigenous rights movement and in sharing the truth about Thanksgiving, and I look forward to continuing to raise awareness about contemporary front-line Indigenous issues such as climate justice, the preservation and expansion of tribal sovereignty, and the ongoing demand for the return of our ancestral lands.
In recent years, my mother and I have worked to ensure that women’s voices, as well as those of Two-Spirit and LGBTQ people, are amplified at the National Day of Mourning. When I look at the Line 3 struggle or at the Indigenous people who were on the streets in Glasgow demanding climate justice, I see Indigenous people of all ages, and especially women and Two-Spirit leaders, as part of a continuum of resistance leading into the future.
Women have long been at the center of Indigenous activism, and are respected and revered within many traditional Indigenous cultures as leaders and culture-bearers — even if they were silenced by settlers. That’s why it’s crucial for our voices to be amplified within modern-day movements, especially because settler-colonial violence continues to disproportionately impact women, as evidenced by the ongoing epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in the United States and Canada.
On this National Day of Mourning, I am honored to walk not only in the footsteps of my grandfather, but also in the footsteps of all the Indigenous women who have led the way for my generation.
We will not stop telling the truth about the Thanksgiving story and what happened to our ancestors.”
Here is the speech that turned the tide of history for lies in the service of white power to truth which offers equality, diversity, inclusion, remembrance and possibly hope for a Reckoning:
“THE SUPPRESSED SPEECH OF WAMSUTTA (FRANK B.) JAMES, WAMPANOAG
To have been delivered at Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1970
ABOUT THE DOCUMENT: Three hundred fifty years after the Pilgrims began their invasion of the land of the Wampanoag, their “American” descendants planned an anniversary celebration. Still clinging to the white schoolbook myth of friendly relations between their forefathers and the Wampanoag, the anniversary planners thought it would be nice to have an Indian make an appreciative and complimentary speech at their state dinner. Frank James was asked to speak at the celebration. He accepted. The planners, however, asked to see his speech in advance of the occasion, and it turned out that Frank James’ views — based on history rather than mythology — were not what the Pilgrims’ descendants wanted to hear. Frank James refused to deliver a speech written by a public relations person. Frank James did not speak at the anniversary celebration. If he had spoken, this is what he would have said:
I speak to you as a man — a Wampanoag Man. I am a proud man, proud of my ancestry, my accomplishments won by a strict parental direction (“You must succeed – your face is a different color in this small Cape Cod community!”). I am a product of poverty and discrimination from these two social and economic diseases. I, and my brothers and sisters, have painfully overcome, and to some extent we have earned the respect of our community. We are Indians first – but we are termed “good citizens.” Sometimes we are arrogant but only because society has pressured us to be so.
It is with mixed emotion that I stand here to share my thoughts. This is a time of celebration for you – celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People.
Even before the Pilgrims landed it was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe and sell them as slaves for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn and beans. Mourt’s Relation describes a searching party of sixteen men. Mourt goes on to say that this party took as much of the Indians’ winter provisions as they were able to carry.
Massasoit, the great Sachem of the Wampanoag, knew these facts, yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers of the Plymouth Plantation. Perhaps he did this because his Tribe had been depleted by an epidemic. Or his knowledge of the harsh oncoming winter was the reason for his peaceful acceptance of these acts. This action by Massasoit was perhaps our biggest mistake. We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.
What happened in those short 50 years? What has happened in the last 300 years?
History gives us facts and there were atrocities; there were broken promises – and most of these centered around land ownership. Among ourselves we understood that there were boundaries, but never before had we had to deal with fences and stone walls. But the white man had a need to prove his worth by the amount of land that he owned. Only ten years later, when the Puritans came, they treated the Wampanoag with even less kindness in converting the souls of the so-called “savages.” Although the Puritans were harsh to members of their own society, the Indian was pressed between stone slabs and hanged as quickly as any other “witch.”
And so down through the years there is record after record of Indian lands taken and, in token, reservations set up for him upon which to live. The Indian, having been stripped of his power, could only stand by and watch while the white man took his land and used it for his personal gain. This the Indian could not understand; for to him, land was survival, to farm, to hunt, to be enjoyed. It was not to be abused. We see incident after incident, where the white man sought to tame the “savage” and convert him to the Christian ways of life. The early Pilgrim settlers led the Indian to believe that if he did not behave, they would dig up the ground and unleash the great epidemic again.
The white man used the Indian’s nautical skills and abilities. They let him be only a seaman — but never a captain. Time and time again, in the white man’s society, we Indians have been termed “low man on the totem pole.”
Has the Wampanoag really disappeared? There is still an aura of mystery. We know there was an epidemic that took many Indian lives – some Wampanoags moved west and joined the Cherokee and Cheyenne. They were forced to move. Some even went north to Canada! Many Wampanoag put aside their Indian heritage and accepted the white man’s way for their own survival. There are some Wampanoag who do not wish it known they are Indian for social or economic reasons.
What happened to those Wampanoags who chose to remain and live among the early settlers? What kind of existence did they live as “civilized” people? True, living was not as complex as life today, but they dealt with the confusion and the change. Honesty, trust, concern, pride, and politics wove themselves in and out of their [the Wampanoags’] daily living. Hence, he was termed crafty, cunning, rapacious, and dirty.
History wants us to believe that the Indian was a savage, illiterate, uncivilized animal. A history that was written by an organized, disciplined people, to expose us as an unorganized and undisciplined entity. Two distinctly different cultures met. One thought they must control life; the other believed life was to be enjoyed, because nature decreed it. Let us remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white man. The Indian feels pain, gets hurt, and becomes defensive, has dreams, bears tragedy and failure, suffers from loneliness, needs to cry as well as laugh. He, too, is often misunderstood.
The white man in the presence of the Indian is still mystified by his uncanny ability to make him feel uncomfortable. This may be the image the white man has created of the Indian; his “savageness” has boomeranged and isn’t a mystery; it is fear; fear of the Indian’s temperament!
High on a hill, overlooking the famed Plymouth Rock, stands the statue of our great Sachem, Massasoit. Massasoit has stood there many years in silence. We the descendants of this great Sachem have been a silent people. The necessity of making a living in this materialistic society of the white man caused us to be silent. Today, I and many of my people are choosing to face the truth. We ARE Indians!
Although time has drained our culture, and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts. We may be fragmented, we may be confused. Many years have passed since we have been a people together. Our lands were invaded. We fought as hard to keep our land as you the whites did to take our land away from us. We were conquered, we became the American prisoners of war in many cases, and wards of the United States Government, until only recently.
Our spirit refuses to die. Yesterday we walked the woodland paths and sandy trails. Today we must walk the macadam highways and roads. We are uniting We’re standing not in our wigwams but in your concrete tent. We stand tall and proud, and before too many moons pass we’ll right the wrongs we have allowed to happen to us.
We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we must work towards a more humane America, a more Indian America, where men and nature once again are important; where the Indian values of honor, truth, and brotherhood prevail.
You the white man are celebrating an anniversary. We the Wampanoags will help you celebrate in the concept of a beginning. It was the beginning of a new life for the Pilgrims. Now, 350 years later it is a beginning of a new determination for the original American: the American Indian.
There are some factors concerning the Wampanoags and other Indians across this vast nation. We now have 350 years of experience living amongst the white man. We can now speak his language. We can now think as a white man thinks. We can now compete with him for the top jobs. We’re being heard; we are now being listened to. The important point is that along with these necessities of everyday living, we still have the spirit, we still have the unique culture, we still have the will and, most important of all, the determination to remain as Indians. We are determined, and our presence here this evening is living testimony that this is only the beginning of the American Indian, particularly the Wampanoag, to regain the position in this country that is rightfully ours.
And finally, on the principle of Virginia Woolf that “if we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, we cannot tell it about anyone else” here follows my interrogation of my own Native American ancestry; November 2 2023, Native American Heritage Month and the Hidden Costs of Unequal Power in the Falsification and Erasure of History as Authorized Identities: Day of the Dead Part Two, Case of the Phantom Ancestor
In contemplation of the echoes of our past as multigenerational history and of our ancestors as ghosts who possess us, literally as our DNA and metaphorically as family stories, I find intriguing the effects of falsified and erased history on self-construal and the creation of identity.
We bear the shape of our stories as a prochronism, a history expressed in out form of how we have made choices in adaptation to change across vast epochs of time, under imposed conditions of struggle.
How if intrusive forces impose conditions of struggle which interfere with this process as assimilation, silence and erasure, or internalized oppression?
Here I have a ready example in the case of a phantom Native American ancestor substituted for an erased African one as internalized oppression under conditions of survival and resistance to slavery.
November is Native American Heritage Month, a subject shaped by vast historical forces of conquest and resistance and the ambiguous and often violent relationships between indigenous peoples and European empires as a ground of struggle which authorizes identity, here I shall begin the questioning of my own historical identity as an example.
As Virginia Woolf teaches us; “If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”
As I wrote in my post of January 25 2021, The Search for Our Ancestors and a Useful Past: Family Histories as Narrative Constructions of Identity; One of the great riddles of history is untangling the knots of meaning, often shaped by erasures, silences, lies, and misdirections, which arise from the motives of our sources.
Today is my sister Erin’s birthday; I sent her a greeting which referenced some of the Defining Moments of her personal history as I remember them; “I remember our family’s discovery when you were in seventh grade that you were writing poems and stories in some of Tolkien’s invented languages, had puzzled out his sources and taught yourself a working knowledge of several ancient languages in order to write in them (Old Norse, Old Welsh, Gothic, and Old English), when you gave the Valedictorian Address for the International College at UC Santa Cruz as a graduate in Soviet Foreign Policy and Russian Language. and then became Pushkin Scholar at a Soviet University in Moscow, when Rolling Stone called your reporting on the Fall of the Soviet Union the best political writing in America, and when we celebrated your six hundredth publication. I have always been glad that in writing and the world of literature you have found your bliss.”
Among the messages which followed Erin posted a photograph which symbolizes her search for belonging, membership, and connection through the family history of our ancestors, a typically American quest for meaning as many of us share a trauma of historical abandonment and displacement, and pathologies of identity falsification and disconnectedness from relationships with families and communities, anchorages which in traditional societies nurture wellness and growth. These maladaptive disruptions and obfuscations often result from intentional breaks with the past as liberation on the part of new immigrants who wish to create themselves in no image but their own; but often they are legacies of denial, silencing, and erasure by authority as well.
Our family history claimed Cherokee as the identity of an ancestor who we recently discovered was not a Native American but African, and probably a slave of the Cherokee, the descendants of which the tribe refuses to recognize as tribal members. As the only nonwhite General in the Confederate Army was a Cherokee, this erasure of disturbing history and inconvenient truths is unsurprising; and authorized lies can become truths when there are no counternarratives.
It is also possible that this ancestor was among the Haitian professional revolutionary soldiers whom an ancestor of mine fought alongside in the War of 1812; an origin which would explain the family faith of my father being Voodoo.
And an entirely different ancestor of mine became Shawnee by marriage during the American Revolution, this one historically authenticated by the Shawnee tribe though no less complex than my phantom ancestor.
The truths with which authority is uncomfortable are the ones which are crucial to seizures of power and liberation, and it is to the empty spaces in our narratives of identity, the voices of the silenced and the erased, and to stories which bear the scars of rewritten history, to which we must listen most closely.
The Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Mock Authority, Expose Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Erin has claimed Native American Cherokee as her racial and historical identity since childhood, enthralled with the story of an Indian great grandmother, studied traditional drumming and made pilgrimages to pow wows, learned to the point of obsession what vestiges of Cherokee language and culture she could find, and as an adult went to the tribal archives in search of our ancestor.
There she hit a wall of silence; no records of such a tribal member exist. Worse, no living speakers of Sa La Gi could be found; when asked where the native language speakers were, the curator of the tribal historical archive pointed to an old vinyl record which held the voices of the last known bearers of an extinct language. All was dust, lost on the Trail of Tears.
No crime against humanity can be more terrible than the erasure of an entire people and civilization, as the United States of America perpetrated against many indigenous peoples both on our continent and throughout the world as imperial conquest and colonial dominion. Like slavery with which it is interdependent and parallel, colonial imperialism is a central legacy of our history for which we have yet to bring a Reckoning.
Like many tribes and peoples, the Cherokee had been eaten by our systems of unequal power as human sacrifices, and had no truths or songs of becoming human to offer. Here was an unanswerable tragedy of loss of meaning and belonging, which finds echo in our modern pathology of disconnectedness.
Or was deliberate obfuscation; what didn’t they want known?
Like many Americans, Erin pursued our elusive history and ambiguous identity for decades through genealogical research and recently the Pandora’s Box of DNA testing, where she struck gold; her test revealed no discoverable Indian ancestry, but instead an intriguing African heritage. Near her fifth decade of life, suddenly she was no longer Native American and Cherokee, a discovery which must have been a life disruptive event, but one balanced with the gift of an unlooked-for membership and belonging.
More importantly as regards race and other constructions of identity, who decides? And what happens if those you claim do not in turn claim you?
Of Non-European DNA; 1.2% sub-Saharan Africa, including: .9% Ghana / Liberia / Ivory Coast / Sierra Leone and .3% Senegambian and Guinean. There is also an Islamic Diaspora component; .7% North Africa, including: .2% Egypt and Levant and .5% broadly West Asia and North Africa, and .5% Central and South Asia including: .2% North India and Pakistan and .3% South India and Sri Lanka. These probably represent two different lines of descent, occurring at between five and eight generations of separation respectively.
Who were these mysterious and wonderful ancestors, and where was the cherished Native American heritage? Like much of nature, DNA is tricky; each generation is a total randomization of information potential, so you can inherit traits from ancestors anywhere in your history back to the dawn of humankind, in virtually any proportion of traits from any combination thereof.
On average, you will have a quarter from each grandparent at two generations of separation, and if grandmother only passes on 20%, grandfather must pass on 30%. Sometimes gene sequences are not passed on, so its possible for a known ancestor to be unconfirmable by a DNA test, and for siblings to have differences. I look like our mother, of Austrian family with hazel eyes though sadly I did not inherit her glorious red hair; my sister looks like our father whose black hair fell in tight wringlets around his shoulders.
At seven generations distance you will probably inherit less than one percent from each of the 128 ancestors in that generation, or be undetectable; the percentages are 12.5 for great grandparents at the third generation from you, 6.25 at the fourth, 3.12 at the fifth, 1.56 at the sixth, and .78 at the seventh.
DNA tests from cousins can be used with a family tree to triangulate and identify which DNA components came from which ancestors; a female cousin from one of my father’s two brothers tests as 70% Northwestern Europe and England/Wales, 19% Ireland and Scotland, 6% Sweden, and 5% Norway. A male cousin from my father’s second brother tests as 1% Benin and Togo and 1% Cameroon, Congo, and Southern Bantu peoples, an approximate match with my sister’s Sub Saharan Africa descent, the remainder being 47% Northwestern Europe and England/Wales, 32% Norway, 11% Ireland & Scotland, and 4% Sweden. My sister’s European DNA tests as 44.7% French & German, and why these are scientifically identical boggles the imagination, 24.8% British & Irish, 19.5% broadly northwestern European, .2% Scandinavian, and 5.8% southern European, which includes 3.1% Italian and 1.1% Spanish and Portuguese.
Illustrative of the vagaries of inheritance are the differing proportions among three first cousins, two of whom inherit nothing from a paternal grandmother shared by all three, whose family came from Genoa Italy after the Napoleonic Wars. They were still living in an enormous stilt house in Bayou La Teche built from their ship, guarded by ancient cannon, when my mother visited them in 1962.
But the best way to discover our origins is through family history, which can be consistent over great epochs of time. So we come to the origin story of the photograph and of my family in America, well documented as Kentucky and Revolutionary War history whose dates can be confirmed precisely by public records, of how a mixed and diverse community of Revolutionary War survivors came to be living in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
A direct patrilineal ancestor of mine, Henry, had been captured along with much of his family in the June 21 1780 British assault on Ruddle’s Fort during Bird’s Invasion of Kentucky. One hundred fifty British Regulars of the 8th and 47th Regiments, Detroit Militia, and six cannon of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, with one thousand or more warriors from the Shawnee, Huron, Lenape, and other tribal allies of Britain, compelled the surrender of the fort by cannon fire and a guarantee of status as British prisoners of war offered by Bird, who when the gates were opened broke his word and loosed the native troops to sack the fort and take slaves.
Over two hundred pioneers were killed in the attack; the remains of twenty of them were later put in iron caskets specially made in Philadelphia and sealed in a cave by a descendant of one of my family’s survivors who had moved back near the site of Ruddle’s Fort, where they remain today. The inscription on the stone archway on a cliff overlooking the Licking River reads, “Please do not disturb the rest of the sleeping dead, A.D. 1845”. I have often wondered what was so terrifying about ones own family that they needed to be entombed in iron and sealed in a cave, and why they are called “the sleeping dead’.
Near the site of the burial chamber was The Cedars, a stone home rebuilt in 1825 at a cost of $40,000 by Charles Lair, a Ruddles Fort descendant using one of the many variants of our family name. The Cedars burned in 1930; it had fifteen rooms including six bedrooms and two kitchens, a drawing room with a carved mantel, dining room, library, and a hall with a staircase.
Henry and his brothers George Jr and Peter were listed among the 49 men of the Ruddle’s Fort garrison, and many had their families with them. Survivors were marched with those of other raided forts, four hundred seventy in all, to the heartland of the Shawnee nation in Ohio and to villages of their captors along the way, though Bird still had 300 prisoners with him when he reached his base at Fort Detroit, six hundred miles from Kentucky; some were then sent another 800 miles to Montreal. Britain did not release its prisoners until fifteen years after the war, and many never found their families again.
Henry was held as a slave and/or prisoner of war until he married into the tribe four years later, making him fully Shawnee under tribal law though he was by modern constructions of race an ethnic European. His story is interwoven with that of his childhood friend and neighbor Daniel Boone, and he was among those with whom Boone discovered a route through the Cumberland Gap and explored Kentucky. I like to imagine Henry as the hero in the film Last of the Mohicans, a fictionalization of the July 14 1776 abduction and subsequent rescue of Boone’s daughter Jemima and two daughters of Colonel Richard Callaway, Elizabeth and Frances, from Chief Hanging Maw of the Overhill Cherokee, leading a mixed band of Cherokee and Shawnee.
Henry joined George Washington’s army, possibly during the retreat from the Battle of Long Island in the fall of 1776, fought in the Battles of Trenton and Princeton that December, at Brandywine on September 11, 1777, and in the victory at the Second Battle of Saratoga on October 7 1777 which nearly ended the war and brought help from France.
Among the family members at Ruddle’s Fort were Henry’s two brothers. Peter, who was killed in action, his wife Mary who was captured with their two daughters, of whom Katarina was rescued in 1786 and another is mentioned as married and living in Sandwich Canada in an open letter written by Mary published in the Kentucky Gazette on April 7 1822 to their third child Peter, who vanished after the battle and whose fate is unknown. It reads in part; ”I was taken at Fort Licking commanded by Captain Ruddle, and was brought into upper Canada near Amherstburgh (Fort Malden) where I now live having been 16 years among the Indians. Your eldest sister is now living in Sandwich, but the youngest I could never hear of. Now, my dear son, I would be very glad to see you once more before I die, which I do not think will be long, as I am in a very bad state of health, and have been this great while. I am married to Mr Jacob Miracle (fellow captive from Ruddle’s Fort Jacob Markle) for whom you can enquire.” These are the words of a woman who had been coerced into marrying one of her captors by torture and had a son by him whom she raised with her youngest daughter by a husband who died defending her and their children from capture, two of whom had vanished in the cauldron of war and whose fates she never learned, though her youngest daughter was safe with George Jr’s family.
Also present were Henry’s second brother George Jr and his wife Margaret, who were captured and later freed, and their children Johnny, George III, Eva, Margaret, and Elizabeth. Johnny, 1776-1853, four years old when captured, was raised with Tecumseh and fought at his side as a British ally through the War of 1812. He married Mary Williams in 1799; they had eight children. Of Margaret we know only that she survived to marry Andrew Sinnolt in 1793. Eva, captured when 14 years old and taken to Canada, ran the gauntlet to win her freedom after six years of enslavement and two years later in 1788 married fellow Ruddles Fort survivor Casper Karsner.
Elizabeth Lale, 1752-1832, eldest of the children at 28, escaped from the Shawnee capitol city of Piqua on the Great Miami River in Ohio and survived a solo trek of hundreds of miles through the wilderness back to the colonies, then with Washington and Jefferson planned and guided General Clark with 970 soldiers in a raid which liberated many of the other prisoners of war held as slaves at the Battle of Piqua, August 8 1780. With her was Daniel Boone, who had also been held captive at Piqua by Blackfish, Great Chief of the Shawnee, between his capture at the Battle of Blue Licks on February 7, 1778 and his escape six months later in June. In 1783 Elizabeth married John Franks; they had two children.
And George III, 1773-1853, captured when seven years old, was taken in 1781 to a camp in Cape Girardeau Missouri, base of a Shawnee trade empire from which the entire Mississippi basin could be navigated, becoming the first white pioneer in the region, near the land which in 1793 was granted by Baron Carondelet to the Black Bob Band of the Hathawekela Shawnee.
Nearby was a Spanish land grant awarded to Andrew Summers for service in the Cape Girardeau Company of the Spanish-American Militia by Governor Lorimier, during a six week campaign in 1803. Andrew Summers had married Elizabeth Ruddle, daughter of Captain George Ruddle and granddaughter of Isaac Ruddle; Andrew and Elizabeth moved with their family to their land in Cape Girardeau after the War of 1812; later her father joined them, as did George Lale III and his wife Louisa Wolff. George and Louisa’s seven children were born there; the old Summers cemetery where George III is buried lies two miles SW of Jackson Missouri.
Many of my family who survived the Revolutionary War moved to Cape Girardeau where the families of George III Lale and Andrew Summers had established a community of pioneers and former slaves of Indians, apparently both African and European, and the Indians they had fought alongside and against, been captured by and intermarried with. In the end I think they understood each other better than those who had not survived the same collective trauma and shared history.
Our great grandmother Lilly Summers could claim direct patrilineal descent from the Summers family of Fairfax Virginia, descended from Sir George Summers, who commanded the Sea Venture, one of the ships which brought over the Jamestown colony in 1607, through the first settler in Alexandria, John Summers, who lived from 1687 to 1790 and had at the time of his death four generations of descendants, including some four hundred individuals. Lilly was equally descended from her mother, M.B. Croft who is listed as Dutch which probably means German, and her father John William Summers, of English lineage but designated as Cherokee in family records, which we now know is a fiction describing descent from a probable African slave of the Cherokee.
It is also possible that this ancestry came into the Summers line from fellow soldiers who served with them during the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, among them free Black militia companies which pre-existed the war, including slaves promised freedom and armed by Andrew Jackson as the first Black company of the American army, a former Spanish colonial Black militia with whom Andrew Summers had served alongside against France, and Major D’Aquin’s Battalion of Free Men of Color from Haiti who were elite professional revolutionaries and soldiers who had once been part of the French army. The origin of this DNA can be no nearer than Lilly’s paternal grandmother, at five generations separation from my sister and I.
Among the documents of my genealogy and family history research I have a daguerreotype from the 1840’s of Elizabeth Lale, named for her ferocious aunt, daughter of parents from opposing sides of the Revolutionary War, Me Shekin Ta Withe (White Painted Dove) of the Shawnee and Henry Lale.
Born in 1786, Elizabeth had four sisters and two brothers including my ancestor George Washington Lale, named for the future President with whom Henry crossed the Delaware, and whose battle cry at Trenton in 1776, Victory or Death, Henry adopted as our family motto on our coat of arms.
My sister and I are the fifth generation from Henry, and sixth from the original immigrant Hans George Lale who arrived with his family in Philadelphia in 1737 on the ship Samuel, sailing from Rotterdam.
As our family history and myth before coming to America is beyond the subject of my inquiry here, epigenetic trauma and harms of erasure and internalized oppression in the case of a phantom ancestor in the context of relations between indigenous and colonial peoples, I will question this in future essays.
Here are the generations of our family in America; my parents A.L. Lale and Meta (Austrian), Enoch Abraham Lale and Gertie Noce (Italian), Andrew Jackson Lale 1840-1912 and Lilly Summers, George Washington Lale 1790-1854 and Elizabeth Ross, Henry Lale 1754-1830 and White Painted Dove, and Hans George Lale 1703-1771 and Maria Rudes.
But its never as simple as that, each of us a link in a chain of being which encompasses the whole span of human history; migrations, wars, and the rise and fall of civilizations. Often our ideas of identity as nationality and ethnicity would have been incomprehensible to the people we claim membership with.
Take for example my family name; its original form is on Trajan’s Column in Rome, and Cicero wrote his great essay on friendship, Laelius de Amicitia, about an ancestor of mine; Gaius Laelius, whose political and military career as an ally of Scipio Africanus spans the Iberian campaign of 210- 206 BC where he commanded the Roman fleet at New Carthage, the African campaign of 204-202 commanding the cavalry at Zama, enjoyed two terms as praetor of Sicily from 196 and was granted the province of Gaul about 190, and in 160 BC met the historian Polybius in Rome, becoming his eyewitness source for the Second Punic War in The Histories.
Here I signpost that all of us are connected with the lives of others across vast millennia of history, often in surprising ways. If I accounted my identity and ethnicity as where my ancestors immigrated to America from, I would be German and not Roman, but it would not be the whole truth. We lived in Bavaria for generations until 1586, when we were driven out as werewolves during the start of an eighty year witchburning craze; Martin Luther called us Drachensbrute, Brides of the Dragon. During this time we absorbed many of the pre Christian myths gathered as Grimms Fairytales as family history. And still a half truth, as this tallies only my patrilineal descent, and nothing of the half of myself from my mother, whose stories I will tell another time.
As events become more remote in time and memory, the boundary between historical and mythopoeic truth becomes ambiguous, interdependent, and co-evolutionary with shared elements which reinforce each other. This is true for narratives of national identity as well as self-construction in the personal and family spheres, in which such processes may be studied in detail. Stories are a way of doing exactly thing; both creating and questioning identity.
Often with family history we are confronted with discontiguous realms of truth as self-representation and authorized identity, always a ground of struggle as a Rashomon Gate. Such stories are true in the sense that we are their expressions as living myths, but are these narratives we live within and which in turn inhabit us also history?
Who are we, we Lales?
Native American, yes, if to a lesser degree and from different sources than we had previously imagined as an authorized identity and historical construction, Shawnee rather than Cherokee and generations more distant. Indian also in the sense of an ancestor from Mughal India over three hundred years ago, great grandmother of Henry the revolutionary, and that complex. Who this grand and mysterious ancestor and source of our Indian and Eqyptian-Levantine DNA was remains an open question, though she claimed to have once been a courtier of the Mughal princess and poet Zeb-un-Nissa which is another story. And in the place of the phantom Cherokee great grandmother, an African voice among the cacophony of multitudes sings of liberation.
In retrospect, that my father practiced Voodoo as the traditional family faith should have been an enormous clue to his ethnicity, Louisiana Creole of mixed European-African-Native American ancestry. He described himself as Cajun, which means French speaking and is a cultural and historical claim.
Of my father who is my link to this history of the founding of America as a reborn Rome with all of its shifting ideas of nationality and identity, who in this our Day of the Dead I honor among my ancestors, I say this; he was my high school English, Forensics, and Drama teacher, who taught me fencing and chess and took me to martial arts lessons from the age of nine, gave me a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra in eighth grade which became a counter text to the Bible for me, and was an underground theatre director who collected luminaries like William S. Burroughs who told fabulous stories after dinner and Edward Albee whose plays he directed while I sat beside them as a child and listened with rapt attention to their conversations. He it was who taught me the principle of action; “Politics is the art of fear”. For one day he was arguably the greatest swordsman in the world, having defeated all the national champions at an international reclassification tournament, and went on to become a coach of Olympic fencers. He grew up fencing and playing the treasured family Stradivarius, and his favorite story from childhood was how he got his nickname, Gator Bait; grandpa used to tie a rope around his waist and throw him in the swamp to splash about and attract alligators to shoot. One story he never told but his friend from the Korean War did, was that they had escaped a North Korean POW camp with three others, one of whom died in the breakout, and the four survivors carried the dead soldier all the way back to South Korea. His last years were spent in seclusion flyfishing on a remote wilderness mining claim in Montana.
Before immigration to America, European and originally Roman, unquestionably; along the way from Gaius Laelius and the conquest of Carthage to myself, our family once briefly ruled what is now France, Germany, Spain, and the British Isles, in the Gallic Empire of 260-274 A.D. As a university student influenced by classical studies I responded to questions about my historical identity, nationality, and ethnicity in this way; “I am a citizen of the Roman Empire; that it has not existed for fifteen hundred years is irrelevant.”
I did so once to the wife of a poetry professor, who immediately whipped out a notebook and thereupon began taking notes on our conversations; this was Anne Rice, who based her character of Mael in Queen of the Damned on me as I was in my junior year at university, over forty years ago now, before the summer of 1982 which fixed me on my life course as a hunter of fascists and a member of the Resistance.
Its always interesting to see ourselves through the eyes of others, and how we are transformed by their different angles of view; such changes and transforms of meaning are the primary field of study in history and literature as songs of identity and a primary ground of revolutionary struggle.
Anne Rice’s idea of Mael as the caretaker of Those Who Must Be Kept came from a comment of mine about the dead white men whose books created our culture for both good and ill during a discussion of the canon of literature; There are those who must be kept, and those from whom we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not the same.
Who are we, we Americans, we humans?
Identity, history, memory, which includes changing constructions of race and nationality; these hinge on questions which often have no objective answers.
We are as we imagine ourselves to be; the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and the groups and historical legacies in which we claim membership, and who claim us in return.
Family history is always a personal myth of identity, though it may also be history. We bear within us thousands of other lives, in multiple states of time across vast gulfs of history, possessed by the ghosts of our ancestors literally as DNA and metaphorically as stories; we are legion.
As with all history, as narratives of authorized identities and in struggle against them as seizures of power, autonomy and self-ownership, and self-creation, a Rashomon Gate of relative and ambiguous truths, the most important question to ask of a story is this; whose story is this?
In this liminal time of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves, of questioning human being, meaning, and value, and of its praxis as revolutionary struggle during these Mad Hatter Days, I celebrate madness as a force of redemption and liberation in its three primary forms as love, transgression, and vision.
With Renfield in Dracula we may say of ourselves; “I’m not a mad man. I’m a sane man fighting for my soul.” Madness in literature and history has always been a metaphor of resistance and revolutionary struggle against authority and systems of unequal power, as with Lewis Carroll’s magnificent and truly strange allegories and his figure of the Rebel, the Mad Hatter.
Today I perform sacred acts of violation of normalities, reversals of authorized identities, transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden, and changing the rules of the games by which we live. This I do to free myself from the legacies of my history and disrupt my own ideas, expectations, and routines; but we must all do the same as seizures of power from authority and liberation from systemic inequalities on a national and civilizational scale as well. As Max Stirner wrote; Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.
Let us frighten the horses; let us run amok and be ungovernable.
As I wrote in my post of March 31 2022, How Does My Happiness Hurt You? On Transgender Day of Visibility; The frightening of the horses; it is a phrase I use often to describe the performance of identity as a form of theatre, and public spectacle as protest and challenge against authority, force, and control. Herein I reference a quote by George Bernard Shaw’s muse, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the actress who played Eliza Doolittle, with which she replied in 1910 to someone who thought the display of affection between two male actors was indecent; “”My dear, I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”
Here is a quote from one of George Bernard Shaw’s letters to her, which celebrates and defines love as freedom, inchoate wildness, transformation, reimagination, liberation, rapture, and exaltation; “I want my dark lady. I want my angel. I want my tempter, I want my Freia with her apples. I want the lighter of my seven lamps of beauty, honour, laughter, music, love, life and immortality. I want my inspiration, my folly, my happiness, my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my final sanity and sanctification, my transfiguration, my purification, my light across the sea, my palm across the desert, my garden of lovely flowers, my million nameless joys, my day’s wage, my night’s dream, my darling and my star.”
To see and be seen, to hear and be heard; this is what it means to become human, and why interdependence is at the heart of becoming human. When we see and hear others we empower and validate their process of becoming human, and they do the same for us.
Our processes of becoming human operate by three principles; we must each reinvent how to be human, humans create themselves over time, and humans create themselves through others. We choose our friends, partners, and sometimes our families from among those who can help us become who we wish to be, a process which occurs in tension with the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, and the boundaries of the Forbidden, and from this primary struggle to create ourselves emerges human being, meaning, and value.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
And as George Bernard Shaw and his muse Mrs. Patrick Campbell taught us, there is a force of liberation written in our flesh with which we can free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; that of love.
Love is dangerous because it is free, uncontrollable, wild. Love redeems, transforms, and reimagines; love totalizes and transcends. Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioners, because that is exactly what it is.
As I wrote in my post of February 15, Monsters, Freaks, Transgression of the Forbidden, the Sacred Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves: On Chaos as Love and Desire; Watching the sunrise overlooking Hong Kong from Lion Rock, seized many times in recent years by democracy protesters and revolutionaries in the struggle for liberation and independence from China, in the wake of the last celebrations of Chinese New Year and several nearly sleepless nights of making mischief for tyrants under cover of the festival, my thoughts turn to the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature, of ourselves as wild and glorious things, of love and desire as anarchic forces of liberation, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden and the violation of norms as seizures of power from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and the refusal to submit to authority.
Freedom, and all that comes with it; above all freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, as defiance of authorized identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of love and desire as liberating forces of Chaos, and all of this as sacred acts of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
And of our myriad possible futures, sorting themselves out in our daily lives like a hurricane governed by the flight of a hummingbird; tyranny or liberty, extinction or survival.
Order and its forms as authority, power, capital, and hegemonic elites of patriarchy and racism, class and caste, which arise from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, which appropriates and subjugates us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization and weaponizes hierarchies of otherness and belonging and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and creates states as embodied violence, tyrannies of force and control, carceral states of police and military terror, and dominions of imperial conquest and colonial assimilation and exploitation; all of these systems and structures are born in fear, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and submission to authority, have a key weakness without which they cannot arise and perpetuate unequal power, for this requires the renunciation of love.
Chaos has as its champion the totalizing and uncontrollable divine madness of love, which leaps across all boundaries to unite us in solidarity of action against those who would enslave us.
Love exalts us beyond the limits of ourselves and the flags of our skin, disrupts authorized identities and narratives as imposed conditions of struggle, seizes power as ownership of ourselves, and reveals the embodied truth of others.
Once we have a definition of democracy as a free society of equals and a praxis of love, there are some principles which can be derived as an art of revolution and seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
Order is unequal power and systemic violence; Chaos is liberty, equality, interdependence, and harmony.
Order subjugates through division and hierarchy; Chaos liberates through equality and solidarity.
Authority falsifies; speaking truth to power or parrhesia as Foucault called truth telling and performing the witness of history confer authenticity to us in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, and delegitimize tyrants.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s just an old humbug.
The four primary duties of a citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
There is no just Authority.
Law serves power and authority; transgression and refusal to submit confer freedom and self-ownership as primary acts of becoming human and Unconquered.
Always go through the Forbidden Door. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Such is my art of revolution and democracy as love; there remains poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our limitless possibilities of becoming human, and love and desire as unconquerable informing, motivating, and shaping forces and innate human realms of being and powers which cannot be taken from us as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, anarchic and ungovernable as the tides, and it is love and desire as forms of wildness and embodied truth which offer us a definition of freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
For a brilliant interrogation of madness as a means of social control and repression of dissent I turn to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which parallels many of the themes of Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization as well as Orwell’s 1984. As I wrote in my post of October 8 2021, The Uses of Madness as Repression of Dissent and Authorization of Normality and a Consensus Model of What is Real and True; Madness as joyous transgression and seizure of power and madness as an instrument of social control, repression of dissent, the authorization of identities, enforcement of normalities and the boundaries of the Forbidden; Sides of a coin of power bearing Janus-like faces of tyranny and liberty, madness and sanity are a ground of struggle. Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for autonomy and the ownership of ourselves.
Herein I offer a simple test by which to disambiguate madness from sanity; whose truth is this? Who defines, owns, and controls this reality?
For all who own and live their truth are sane, and all who are falsified and subjugated by authority are mad.
Who possesses and controls himself is sane; who is possessed and controlled by others is mad.
Our passions are useful servants and terrible masters. There is nothing wrong with anything you may feel, even negative emotions such as rage or despair; but you must be their master.
As I wrote in my post of June 31 2020, Paradigms of Madness as Thought Control and Class Struggle; “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” “Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.” So wrote the visionary George Orwell in the great novel which prophecies the terminus of the arc of history of the American Empire as it has unfolded since the end of World War Two, 1984.
As the final arbiters of what is real and what is not, psychiatrists are the apex predators of our society and its most privileged class; no other persons hold the power to abduct and imprison others by authority of a signature, nor to conduct treatments, research, or experiments which may be considered torture or theft of memory, identity, and the soul such as surgical or electroshock personality interventions, or confinement in isolation and in secret without right of redress.
Media moguls may shape our ideas of self and other and overwhelm the truth with propaganda and lies, politicians may fatten themselves on the miseries of others and spin illusions for the benefit of their paymasters, plutocrats and oligarchs may control their workers well being and quality of life and fund the subversion and corruption of democracy, and our police and security services may hunt and kill us with impunity to enforce the power asymmetries of elite wealth, race, and gender which divide us in the service of tyranny, patriarchy, and white supremacy so long as they have concealment and immunity of judicial and political collaborators, but only the modern priesthood of medical professionals of the mind are answerable to none but their peers and are masters of them all.
With this absolute and secret power pervasive throughout the carceral state in both our prisons and educational systems acting as a success filter and authoring force of identity and repression of dissent, our mental healthcare system reinforces the power asymmetries of the status quo. The differences between our system and those of the Nazi health courts and the psychiatric institutions of the historical Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party today are those not of kind, but of degree. Just compare them to the torture and interrogation program designed by Spokane’s own Mengele for use in Guantanamo Bay and the secret political prisons operated by our intelligence services throughout the world.
Guantanamo is important because it provides a glimpse into our future, a future in which the state can imprison people without charging them with a crime for 18 years, enact crimes against humanity while the torturers go bowling next door after work, a tyranny of force and control and a fascism of blood, faith, and soil. Here dwell monsters, and they are not behind bars.
As reported in the Spokesman Review by Thomas Clouse; “Two Spokane psychologists who devised the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that a federal judge later said constituted torture,” “James E. Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen” whose “company was paid about $81 million by the CIA for providing and sometimes carrying out the interrogation techniques, which included waterboarding, during the early days of the post 9/11 war on terror.”
“Both Mitchell and Jessen were deposed but were never forced to testify as part of a civil suit filed in 2015 in Spokane by the ACLU on behalf of three former CIA prisoners, Gul Rahman, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud.
According to court records, Rahman was interrogated in a dungeon-like Afghanistan prison in isolation, subjected to darkness and extreme cold water, and eventually died of hypothermia. The other two men are now free.
The U.S. government settled that civil suit in August 2017 just weeks before it was scheduled for trial in Spokane before U.S. District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush.
That suit was based on a 2014 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report that found ample evidence that Mitchell and Jessen provided the CIA with torture methods, including prolonged sleep deprivation, confinement in small, enclosed spaces and waterboarding that were used on dozens of detainees yet produced no useful intelligence.”
“Mitchell no longer lives in the Spokane area, but Jessen is believed to still reside in the area. They got their start at Fairchild Air Force base as survival trainers who formed a company to help train military personnel to resist interrogations. They reverse-engineered their training and devised a program drawn from 1960s experiments involving dogs and the theory of “learned helplessness.”
Sometimes it is not the prisoner, but the state which is mad.
As I wrote in my post of March 8 2022, International Women’s Day: Interrogating the Idea of Woman and Identities of Sex and Gender As Performance Art and Revolutionary Struggle; What is a woman or a man, and how are such identities constructed?
On this International Woman’s Day, I am wondering how we define such a thing, and how our idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty shape our range of choices in the performance of ourselves.
I am thinking of these things in the context of a conversation in which a friend described the primary trauma of realizing they were imprisoned in a body whose sex did not match their gender, and in this vulnerable space was multiply attacked on grounds of falsely identifying as female in order to appropriate female spaces of performance.
It seems to me that trans exclusion reinforces and originates in a narrow definition of gender restricted to biology, and one which privileges signs and forms over hormones and inner experience; this ignores social construction of identity entirely, and also perpetuates systemic inequalities and authorized identities of sex and gender.
Gender is always fluid, relational, ambiguous, and a ground of struggle. It is also, like sexual orientation, distinct from biological sex and not a spectrum with endpoint limits but an infinite Moebius Strip where we are born and exist everywhere at once as polymorphosly perverse, to use Freud’s delicious phrase; except where identity is chosen as seizure of power or imposed by other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
To be an outcast is a terrible thing; but to be forced to create your own forms because you fit in no one else’s bottles can be a wonderful thing as well, though never an easy one.
Sartre described this with the phrase; ”We are condemned to be free,” in his 1946 lecture Existentialism Is A Humanism, and what this means is that in a universe empty of all meaning and value other than that which we ourselves create, we must balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of our total freedom.
In such a universe, free of imposed meaning and of purpose, all rules are arbitrary and can be changed, rules which are legacies of our histories and the fictional laws of false and unjust authorities, wherein all normalities are negotiable, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human may be pursued as our uniqueness through the reimagination and transformation of poetic vision and metaphorical truths.
Life is a performance art, and we all have one problem in common; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
This process of becoming human or individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their interdependence.
Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
Our identities, including those of sex and gender, are literally masks; social constructs and artifacts of our process of adaptation and becoming human. Herein the primary shaping, informing, and motivating source is the interface between authority and autonomy as an unknown and unclaimed potential, a blank space of limitless possibilities of the reimagination of humankind, like the places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Let us pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Our performance of identities of sex and gender is a theatre of possibilities, of negotiations and dances with normativity and the transgression of boundaries, of the questioning and reimagination of idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of self-creation as liberation and autonomous total freedom, a quest for our uniqueness and for the human transcendent, and of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
This need not be determinative or prescriptive, but a space of free creative play.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As written by Amy M. Vaughn on the Surrealist site Babou691; “I love genderfuck. I love watching the disruption of enculturated norms, which is what genderfuck does to traditional notions of the male/female, masculine/feminine dichotomy.
While genderfuckery has had a place in both gay culture and, to a lesser extent, punk rock since the ’70s, it remained mostly underground until drag hit mainstream media. I am, of course, referring to RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR).
These days drags serves as an umbrella term for the work of several different types of performance artists. The most well-known of these are drag queens, who perform as women, and drag kings, who perform as men. Sometimes this traditional type of drag is campy, sometimes it’s realistic, but it’s always based on the idea of the gender binary—fucking with the binary, but still within it. Genderfuck rejects the binary, often aggressively, sometimes playfully, always purposefully.
I believe there may be something to gain from looking at these performative manipulations of gender though the ideas of the Surrealists of the early 20th century. The Surrealists saw themselves as a revolutionary cultural movement. Their goal was to free people from false and restrictive conceptions of reality. In other words, they wanted to disrupt enculturated norms. And their method was the juxtaposition of disparate entities with the intention of creating a surprising or startling effect.
I don’t think it’s too far a leap to say performative genderbending fits this approach. Whether we’re talking about overlaying feminine characteristics on a masculine form or vice versa, or combining the genders together in incongruous ways, done well, the effect is literally stunning.”
“And RPDR has provided a platform for genderfuck, but because the goal of the competition is to find the “next drag superstar”—a person who can represent RuPaul’s polished, feminine brand to the world— genderfuck queens rarely excel. “May the best woman win,” has been one of the show’s catchphrases, repeated every episode until the current season. Now RuPaul says, “May the best drag queen win.” We could speculate that this change is due to the casting of the first ever trans contestant, though the point remains the same—RPDR is a safe space for gay males to express themselves through female impersonation.
Which is drag but not genderfuck.
However, something even more subversive has entered through the door that RPDR opened: The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, an “alternative drag competition” based on the principles of horror, filth, and glamour. And the Boulets’ stage is far more welcoming of genderfuck.
While drag has traditionally been dominated by gay men performing as women, genderfuck is not gender specific or sexual-orientation specific. Disasterina, on season two of Dragula, described himself as hetero-fluid and is married to a woman, while season three featured two AFAB contestants: Landon Cider, a lesbian drag king, and Hollow Eve, who identifies as nonbinary.
At this point, spelling out all of these distinctions seems more than a little cumbersome and like a whole lot of nunya bizness, as if these descriptions have no place in the discussion of genderfuck because genderfuck is beyond them. In fact, jabs at traditional drag culture are not rare on Dragula, as can be seen in Evah Destruction’s disposable razor bikini on her hirsute body, a look which would not have a place in RPDR.
The Surrealists believed that art could bring about revolutionary social change through the process of the Hegelian dialectic—thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If we examine the recent history of drag and genderfuck through this lens, while vastly simplified, it might look something like this: the thesis that there are two heteronormative genders was met with the antithesis of an artform superimposing one gender over another to provoke the surreal effect of juxtaposing opposites in order to startled people out of ingrained cultural constructs. The synthesis has been greater acceptance of gay male culture and freedom of expression. Worthy goals, no question.
The dialectic for genderfuck, which I see as following traditional drag to further the same and expanded goals, would also start with the thesis that there are two genders but it would add three sexual identities (gay, straight, and bi). The antithesis is the performance of multiple expressions of gender and sexuality, provoking the surreal effect, and leading to the synthesis of radical freedom of expression and an existence untethered to preconceived cultural definitions—gay, straight, or otherwise.”
“Real progress has been made through queer art in providing a surrealist antithesis to the idea of a gender dichotomy, and the result has been to guide mainstream culture toward not just tolerance or acceptance but celebration of gender differences.”
All the best people are
The Mad Hatter’s Revolution; a montage in two parts
Rewrite the Stars; song by Zendaya and Zac Efron, with montage of Alice and the Mad Hatter
Mad Hatter – A Case Study in Borderline Personality Disorder
You who are fearless, unconquered, and free, who have seized ownership of your identities and made of your lives enactments of beauty and of defiance; know that you shall never stand alone, while we who love liberty yet remain.
You are not invisible. And to all those who transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden, who in the performance of themselves challenge and defy the authorization of identities including those of sex and gender, and by their representation champion the silenced and the erased as heroic figures of autonomy and liberation, I salute you.
On this second day of the Festival of Loki inclusive of Coming Out Day as Breaking the Silence, we celebrate Transgression of Authorized Identities and the Seizure of Ownership of Ourselves and Our Possibilities of Becoming Human.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
Go ahead; frighten the horses.
As I wrote in my post of June 30 2019, Truths Written in our Flesh: Freedom as the Struggle for Ownership of Identity; Here is a marvelous set of nested boxes of ideas regarding identity, communication and language, history and memory, psychology and transhistoric and epigenetic trauma, politics and aesthetics, the necessity of pride and self-ownership and the art of being human.
Writing in The Paris Review of the art and meaning of David Wojnarowicz, Patrick Nation interrogates the borders of self and other in an inspired meditation on the use of pronouns, the we and I, in both essays and persons as self-referential systems.
His words become a labyrinth, an echo of values which are immanent in nature like the spirals of a seashell, truths written in our flesh awaiting our discovery, an evocation of a virtual third realm and interface between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves, as two essences of perfume will create together a new and prodigal scent.
It is precisely this uniqueness and surprise, and the transitory nature of experience, which confers value on the moments of our lives and on art as a motive force and a fulcrum of our passion and our vision.
Art, like one’s persona, is not an object but an experience; not a fixed quality but an adaptive process in motion and subject to change.
Gender and sexual personae are a performance, both a struggle for ownership of identity between self and other and an event occurring in the free space of play between these bounded realms.
I myself have been lucky to have found in my childhood friend and life partner Dolly, whom I bonded with the moment my mother brought me home from the hospital after being born and put me in her arms as she uttered the magic spell “Can I keep him?”, someone to share that liminal space of imaginal and transformative power with me, with whom to explore the limitless possibilities of becoming human. We saw each other, and when this is true nothing else matters.
May all of us find the gaze of the other in which our truths are realized by the redemptive and liberating powers of love, joy in our uniqueness and the journey to become human, and hold such space for others as guarantors of each other’s humanity.
And here following are my three part series of posts regarding the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test as a tool of discovery of one’s own identity:
June 13 2021, Masquerade: Identities of Sex and Gender as Culture, Ethnicity, and Performance; A friend has written a brilliant, insightful, and very emotionally charged essay on the subject of queer identity, finding ones tribe, and being ostracized by ones role models due to the fracture and balkanization of identities of sex and gender in queer culture, consequences of the imposed conditions of struggle against systems of oppression. To be a Painted Bird is a tragedy on the scale of a private Holocaust, and some of this seems to me to be a result of increasing specialization and siloing of LGBT subcultures as a negative tribalization or struggle to build community as exclusivity, and also a shocking failure of solidarity. And it is a special case of a general condition , like the ideological fracture which broke the power of the Left to oppose fascism a century ago. If those who are marginalized by normative society do not stand united, surely they will become vulnerable to silencing and erasure.
I am not a member of this community, and can not speak from within this space, nor have I studied what seem to be a highly diverse, nuanced, and complex set of authorized identities, as evidenced by the curious tribal identities offered by a cursory examination of Grinder, so am utterly clueless about how such representations and choices are negotiated. I suspect this is true for many potential allies who would stand with any human who stands alone, but may not know how to do so, or recognize when someone is in pain or needs help.
Sadly, it may be also be true for those whose awareness of desire, sexual orientation, and identities of sex and gender are emerging, and who may feel confusion, ambiguity, and dislocation not as freedom and joy but as crisis and trauma, especially those who become aware of differences and chasms of meaning between themselves and others, and must cope with isolation and disconnectedness at best and shame, unworthiness, and ostracism at worst as consequences of negotiating identities in a social context of judgement, ridicule, and massively unequal power.
The universal human struggle for autonomy here collides disastrously with authorized identities and a Patriarchal-Theocratic value system which reinforces heteronormative narratives as submission to authority, in parallel with the need for belonging and membership in the quest to find a tribe within a society riven with hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, wherein our negotiations between self and others are mediated by elite hegemonic forces of dominion, whose lies and illusions, like a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, can falsify and steal our souls.
The awakening to total freedom as a self created being can be both wonderful and terrible. How do we safeguard that freedom? What does our duty of care for each other require of us as mentors and stewards for each other’s limitless possibilities of becoming human?
So I ask all of you for guidance in this matter, for whom celebrations such as Coming Out Day and Pride Month are personal and intimate, part of your story and a celebration of survival and resilience, and not merely an aspect of Resistance in general, defiance of authority, and transgression of the Forbidden as it is for me as an agent of Chaos and a revolutionary; beyond amplifying your voices and standing in solidarity when called on for help, how can we help you champion each other?
We also have a need for another kind of work, one whose intention is to provide guidance in finding ones tribe among the full spectrum of multilayered and wonderfully diverse smorgasboard of choices available in our society now, chess pieces in a great game of human being, meaning, and value, and reveals and opens the limitless possibilities of becoming human and discovering communities of wellbeing and mutual aid which can foster such a journey of introspection for the young and curious, without authorizing a prescriptive set of identities.
Identity is not a static frame into which one must fit oneself regardless of our pluralities; we are all pluralities, we are all in processes of change and growth, and our nature, to paraphrase Freud’s delightfully wicked phrase “polymorphously perverse”, obeys but one law; anything goes.
Are we not both Harley Quinn and the Joker, Beauty and the Beast, bound together in one flesh?
Does the range of choices act as an intrinsic limit on autonomy? If so the task of becoming human involves chaos, disruption, reimagination, and transformation, as I believe; 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 Guillermo del Toro wrote in Carnival Row; Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.
Audubon publishes a wonderful field guide to birds, which usefully describes their glorious and beautiful differences and uniqueness’s without suggesting it is better to be a falcon than a dove; each have a niche in the system of life, as do we all. We need a version for humans; Queer Tribes, and How to Find Yours.
This raises the question of how we discover who we want to become. If I were designing an instrument for this purpose in terms of sexual orientation, I would base the process not on prescriptive authorization of identities like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, which involves both submission to authority and overdetermination as a limiting factor as the great question of being remains Who Chooses, but on descriptive taxonomy and a tool with which I am very familiar, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which could easily be modified for the discovery of identities of sex and gender.
Our masquerade of identities of sex and gender as culture, ethnicity, and performance can be played as a game or as live action theatre as well as enacted as transformation magic or guerilla theatre as political action; here I offer you a ritual act of Chaos and Transformation which is useful in disrupting order and randomizing the masks we wear. Write down three masculine and three feminine characters you know well enough to perform, roll a six sided dice to find today’s persona, and live as that character until tomorrow, when you can become someone entirely different. And regardless of who you are today, you will have five more selves in reserve.
Such constructions of identity as performance flow from the nature of self as a development of the persona or Greek theatrical mask characters speak through; a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we solved problems in adaptation, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle to create ourselves.
And what of the underlying forces of love and desire from which such structures and figures are made?
Milan Kundera, paraphrasing Plato in Phaidos, wrote; “Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost”. To this I would add a conditional which directs us to the function of love in the construction of identity; love also reveals us to ourselves, for we choose those we love as figures of who we wish to become.
We choose those we love and share our lives with in part because they represent potential selves and qualities we aspire to realize within ourselves, as informing and motivating sources and shaping forces. This is what it means to become human, and why interdependence is at the heart of becoming human. Our values are revealed in our circle of partners and friends.
Love is dangerous because it is free, uncontrollable, wild. Love redeems, transforms, and reimagines; love totalizes and transcends. Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioners, because that is exactly what it is.
As I once said to Jean Genet, it is a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.
When you begin to question the boundary and interface between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery. May the new truths you forge bring you joy.
As I wrote in my post of July 17 2021, A Sorting Hat of One’s Own: A General Theory of Identities of Sex and Gender as Processes and Functions of Personality; In my previous post in this series of June 13 2021, Masquerade: Identities of Sex and Gender as Culture, Ethnicity, and Performance, I posed a question of how we discover who we want to become. As a joke I imagined a field guide and called it Queer Tribes, and How to Find Yours.
As Mary Oliver framed the question; “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
In the following paragraph I speculated about what such a work might involve; If I were designing an instrument for this purpose in terms of sexual orientation and identities of sex and gender, I would base the process not on any precut selection of labels or prescriptive authorization of identities like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, which involves both submission to authority and overdetermination as a limiting factor, but on descriptive taxonomy and a tool with which I am very familiar, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which could easily be modified for the discovery of identities of sex and gender.
How does that work? With nothing more than a change of emphasis in terms, though I’m sure diagnostic questions specific to sexual orientation and desire can be written for the purposes of finding oneself, viable partners, and communities where one belongs.
We must first define what we mean when we speak of identities of sex and gender. By gender I mean who you are; as identity a confluence of holistic and interdependent and evolving relations between all four categories of being, which include nature, thinking, feeling, and nurture, and as expression, social, cultural, and historical constructions of values and ideals of masculine and feminine beauty and gender roles as performances. By sex I mean biology including evolutionary influences, genetics, and hormones, and by sexual orientation I mean whom and what one desires, which can be influenced by both sex and gender but is determined by neither. Such identities are complex, layered, nuanced, and ambiguous, shifting and protean, as our identities of sex and gender shape each other as adaptive processes of change.
As I’ve often said, this is a primary ground of struggle, of life, growth, adaptation, and individuation, and the creation of ourselves as autonomous beings in revolution against authority and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and beauty, and idealizations of masculinity and femininity.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.
Let us answer the question of who we are with grandeur and the frightening of the horses; let us claim, I am a Bringer of Chaos and Transformation, I am a fulcrum of change, and like Napoleon declare I am the Revolution. And with Loki the Trickster let us say;
“I am burdened with a glorious purpose.”
If we are to map the topologies of identities of sex and gender as possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, we must consider as distinct classes the social and interpersonal sphere of action and relations or gender expression and in a limited sense sexual behavior, what one does, as opposed to sexual orientation, what one wants, which include as motivating, informing, and shaping forces authorized gender identities and role models offered us by history, society, and culture, which are arbitrary and ephemeral, and those of the intrapersonal, our processes of thinking and feeling, which arise from within us rather than being imposed from without, but which are then shaped and conditioned by role modeling and how we are treated, especially by our parents.
I say again, gender identity is an artifact of being influenced by all four levels of self.
These dyadic forces of sex and gender function interdependently to create and shape the highly relational and context-determined thing we call our selves; a dance of potentialities as feminine anima and masculine animus, and our persona or the masks we wear.
For such a mapping system and wayfinding compass, I turn first to Jung’s magisterial work Psychological Types, and to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which was developed from it. It is a precision tool, which allows us to locate ourselves and others through our constellations of traits along the infinite Moebius Loop of human possibilities of sex and gender with predictive and explanatory power in terms of our relationships in romance, friendships, and work.
By direct word substitution of descriptors in the Jungian personality quadrants, we find a useful general theory of sexual and gender identity as a function of the interfaces between the bounded realms of biological determinants including neurotransmitters and epigenetic or multigenerational historic legacies, and historical, cultural, and sociopolitical contexts which balances nature and nurture.
We begin at birth with sexual identity, which stands outside the system of personality but influences it, primarily through relative prenatal exposure to testosterone and estrogen in the intrapersonal sphere, which we can broadly think of as gender identity with awareness that identity is complex and nondeterminative, and dopamine and serotonin in the interpersonal sphere of gender performance. Everyone has degrees of both masculinity and femininity, just as a whole person possesses both a conscious self and an unconscious self which is of the opposite gender, our animus and anima. These anima-animus relations and processes are found at all four levels of being, of which we may or may not be aware and so have limited volitional control of or personal responsibility for, meaning that we cannot simply choose to be other than we are.
This means that any relationship is quadratic and includes our own relationship with our unconscious which is figuratively of the opposite gender from our conscious selves, our partner’s internal relations, our conscious relationship with our partner’s waking self, and our submerged unconscious relations of which we are not aware but which shape our conscious ones. Simple, no?
And we wonder why relationships can be laden with issues, when the answer is simple; relationships are complex because we are.
Jung’s primary layer of personality, mind, maps directly onto this dyadic anima-animus relation, and is a measure of masculinity or independent self construal, as Extroversion which includes dominance and assertiveness, and femininity or interdependent self construal, as Introversion or nurturance.
Masculine traits of Extroversion include Initiating, Active, Expressive, Gregarious, and Enthusiastic; the first two related to dominance and assertiveness, and the last three components of sociability.
Feminine traits of Introversion include Receiving, Contained, Intimate, Reflective, and Quiet.
This fundamental dichotomy is inborn and manifests in infants as preferences for attention, interests, and play; in boys for things and how they work as objects and motion, and in girls for human facial expressions and imaginative doll play.
Jung’s second layer of personality and the next to develop as a childhood stage of growth, energy, describes how we conceptualize the world and process information, a balance of feminine Intuitive and masculine Observant traits.
Masculine Observation involves part to whole reasoning, quantitative analysis, and how things work; logical-mathematical-mechanical cognition.
Jung’s third layer of personality, nature, describes how we make decisions and process emotions; here we have traits shaped most directly by hormonal factors, though hormones influence all three of our first layers of personality as developmental stages. Otherwise gender identity would be a function of this third layer, when it is a coevolutionary product of all four successive layers of personality. This area measures our Thinking, influenced by testosterone or masculinity, and our Feeling, influenced by estrogen or femininity.
Masculine Thinking traits influenced by testosterone include: decisive, focused, direct, logical-analytical, strategic thinkers, bold, competitive, excel at rule bound systems such as machines, math, and music.
Feminine Feeling traits influenced by estrogen include: holistic and contextual thinking, imaginative, superior at verbal skills and executive social skills like reading expressions, posture, gestures, and tone of voice; also nurturing, sympathetic, intuitive, and emotionally expressive.
In the fourth layer of personality, that of gender performance and expression or one’s strategic and tactical approach to life, relationships, and work; here we have traits shaped by acculturation and historical factors. This area measures our balance of structure versus spontaneity; our Perceiving, influenced by dopamine and corresponding to masculinity, and our Judging, influenced by serotonin and corresponding to femininity.
Masculine Perceiving or Prospecting traits influenced by dopamine include: seeking novelty, risk taking, spontaneity, curiosity, creativity, mental flexibility, optimism.
Feminine Judging traits influenced by serotonin include: calm, social, cautious, persistent, loyal, orderly, fond of rules and facts.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test gives us four categories of personality types, of four types each.
The Analyst Group contains the Architect (INTJ), Logician (INTP), Commander (ENTJ), and Debater (ENTP) types.
The Diplomat Group contains the Advocate (INFJ), Mediator (INFP), Protagonist (ENFJ), and Campaigner (ENFP) types.
The Sentinel Group contains the Logistician (ISTJ), Defender (ISFJ), Executive (ESTJ), and Consul (ESFJ) types.
The Explorer Group contains the Virtuoso (ISTP), Adventurer (ISFP), Entrepreneur (ESTP), and Entertainer (ESFP) types.
What does this look like in the context of real people? Here I will use myself as an example and case, for as written by Virginia Woolf; “If you cannot tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”
I test as an ENFP or Campaigner; in my most primal layer of personality I am 65% Extrovert over 35% Introvert. This manifests in me as a love of risk and adventure, and a natural leadership and people-centeredness which has been useful in my professional career as a teacher and counselor. I instinctively and reflexively seek to dominate and seize power in any situation, even when consciously trying to keep myself in check as Extroversion favors competition over cooperation though my ideology construes this as a negative. My Extroversion also influences my idea of life as a game of transgression and chaos, to be played with creative freedom, improvisation, fearlessness, and a gourmet aesthetics which valorizes both the monstrous and the beautiful; you can count on me to ignore authority, change the rules of any game, delight in the violation of norms, and to play our games of human being, meaning, and value without any boundaries whatever.
I remain the boy who upon hearing the term Original Sin for the first time from a friend, said; “I’ll think of some new ones we can play, games of our very own.”
In the layer of Energy, how we direct our thoughts and passions, I am 83% Intuitive over 17% Observant, a balance toward femininity. This means that I reason holistically and infer hidden relationships and patterns as a strength, that interpretation and qualitative analysis comes more easily than quantitative or mechanical tasks, and that I think outside the box and draw outside the lines, which makes me good at solving unknowns. On a team I’m the one you want as the fire brigade handling unforeseen issues, so long as I have a good forensic investigator for failure reconstruction and analysis at my right and a staff officer to handle logistics and planning at my left. I’m a natural at intelligence and policy functions, putting puzzles together and guessing what the picture they make could mean and how to use it to achieve goals.
In the third layer of Nature, how we make decisions and process emotions, I am 92% Feeling and only 8% Thinking. This is an extreme score, statistically anomalous and my strongest personality trait; a preference for empathy and ungoverned passion. As an influence in relationships it makes me the caretaker of partnerships, and professionally I’m a natural at quickly reading people and profiling motives and intentions, sifting for truth, and assessing character.
In the fourth layer of personality, that of Tactics or one’s approach to life and work, I am 57% Prospecting and 43% Judging. This means my masculine/feminine balance in terms of gender performance and roles, the most outwardly visible part of oneself and the layer of being others interact with most often, is toward masculinity, and informs how I read to others as a system of signs.
To restate how I interpret my personality; both my intrapersonal gender identity and interpersonal gender performance as an observable external cueing system, the mask I wear in the social performance of myself, in my case controlled by my Extroversion and Prospecting traits in the first and fourth layers of personality, is masculine or animus, which makes my unconscious self, always a mirror image, feminine or anima, and comprised of the layers of personality which are internal and hidden, as reflected in my Intuitive and Feeling traits. I regard this as an achievement of integration and the work of finding balance and wholeness, though I am an extreme case as most people are around 50/50 or differ only marginally in both realms of being. Because my masculine score is extreme in the conscious areas, so my unconscious scores extremely feminine. These two pairs of traits face Janus like as sides of a whole person in dynamic balance, and together form a quadratic personality type which can take 16 forms, which reflect and organize relative masculinity and femininity as adaptive processes.
As to type compatibility and the use of the MBTI system in sifting for partners, in general opposites attract in the first and fourth layers of personality, Introverts with Extroverts and Prospectors with Judges, dyadic masculine-feminine pairs and aspects of personality revealed in gender performance, and like aligns with or has no influence in the second and third layers, which are mainly concealed from public view and correspond to the unconscious.
The surfaces of ourselves and the masks we wear in our dances with others are but images and reflections moving atop a vast and bottomless sea, within whose chasms of darkness we are all interconnected.
And none of this tells you anything about the interdependent realm of love and desire as informing and motivating sources and shaping forces which both act on us as their subject and through us as their figures and agents, though it tells us everything we need to know about what we would be like as a romantic partner, friend, colleague at work or comrade in action. A human being is a work of art shaped by such forces of our nature as well as history, like stone sculpted by the action of wind and water.
Insightful work in the influence of neurotransmitters on personality has been pioneered by Dr. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who built chemistry.com’s matching systems from her studies. Her schema, which modernizes and maps directly onto the Jungian theory of personality as I have described, dispenses with Jung’s first two categories, the Introvert/Extrovert primary layer and the Intuitive/Observant secondary layer, and yields a simple dominant and recessive binary personality type rather than the 16 types in the Myers-Briggs scale. This is why I am inclined to incorporate Fisher’s studies of hormone and neurotransmitter biochemistry into the Jungian model of personality and use her test as a quick reference tool in addition to the MBTI rather than a replacement; the Fisher model lacks predictive power because it is flawed. Personality is a developmental process which unfolds in stages as a child becomes a person, and if you ignore this and the first two stages of growth the results become unreliable. The Fisher model can be a useful tool for matching with partners using the test and essay together, if you don’t take it too seriously, but for a tool of self discovery I turn to the Myers-Briggs test.
Her Word Type study asked people to describe themselves in an essay for Chemistry.com and found the ten most common words each type used.
Explorers, Jung’s masculine Perceivers, used adventure most often, with the other ten in descending order being; venture, spontaneous, energy, new, fun, traveling, outgoing, passion, and active.
Builders, Jung’s feminine Judges, used family most often, then honesty, caring, moral, respect, loyal, trust, values, loving, and trustworthy.
Negotiators, Jung’s feminine Feelers, used passion most often, then real, heart, kind, sensitive, reader, sweet, learn, random, and empathetic.
Directors, Jung’s masculine Thinkers, used intelligent most often, then intellectual, debate, geek, nerd, ambition, driven, politics, challenging, and real.
Here you can take the Fisher Personality Type Test; read each statement and record the answer that best applies to you. Acronyms are Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree.
Scale 1
1. I find unpredictable situations exhilarating.
2. I do things on the spur of the moment.
3. I get bored when I have to do the same familiar things.
4. I have a very wide range of interests.
5. I am more optimistic than most people.
6.I am more creative than most people.
7. I am always looking for new experiences.
8.I am always doing new things.
9. I am more enthusiastic than most people.
10. I am willing to take risks to do what I want to do.
11. I get restless if I have to stay home for any length of time.
12.My friends would say I am very curious.
13. I have more energy than most people.
14. On my time off, I like to be free to do whatever looks fun.
Total
Scale 2
1.I think consistent routines keep life orderly and relaxing.
2. I consider and reconsider every option thoroughly before making a plan.
3. People should behave according to established standards of proper conduct.
4. I enjoy planning way ahead.
5. In general, I think it is important to follow rules.
6. Taking care of my possessions is a high priority for me.
7. My friends and family would say I have traditional values.
8. I tend to be meticulous in my duties.
9. I tend to be cautious, but not fearful.
10. People should behave in ways that are morally correct.
11. It is important to respect authority.
12. I would rather have loyal friends than interesting friends.
13. Long established customs need to be respected and preserved.
14. I like to work in a straightforward path toward completing the task.
Total
Scale 3
1. I understand complex machines easily.
2. I enjoy competitive conversations.
3. I am intrigued by rules and patterns that govern systems.
4. I am more analytical and logical than most people.
5. I pursue intellectual topics thoroughly and regularly.
6. I am able to solve problems without letting emotion get in the way.
7. I like to figure out how things work.
8. I am tough-minded.
9. Debating is a good way to match my wits with others.
10. I have no trouble making a choice, even when several alternatives seem equally good at first.
11. When I buy a new machine (like a camera, computer, or car) I want to know all of its technical features.
12. I like to avoid the nuances and say exactly what I mean.
13. I think it is important to be direct.
14. When making a decision, I like to stick to the facts rather than be swayed by people’s feelings.
Total
Scale 4
1. I like to get to know my friends deepest needs and feelings.
2. I highly value deep emotional intimacy in my relationships.
3. Regardless of what is logical, I generally listen to my heart when making important decisions.
4. I frequently catch myself daydreaming.
5. I can change my mind easily.
6. After watching an emotional film, I often still feel moved by it several hours later.
7. I vividly imagine both wonderful and horrible things happening to me.
8. I am very sensitive to people’s feelings and needs.
9. I often find myself getting lost in my thoughts during the day.
10.I feel emotions more deeply than most people.
11. I have a vivid imagination.
12. When I wake up from a vivid dream, it takes me a few seconds to return to reality.
13. When reading, I enjoy it when a writer takes a sidetrack to say something beautiful or meaningful.
14. I am very empathetic.
Scoring the test
0 for each SD, 1 for each D, 2 points for each A and three for SA. Add each section separately.
Scale 1 measures Masculinity as Dominance, the degree to which you are butch or an Explorer based on your Perceiving traits.
Scale 2 measures Femininity as Submissiveness, Judging traits or the degree to which you align with Fisher’s Builder personality type.
Scale 3 measures Masculinity as logical-mathematical-mechanical cognition, Thinking quadrant traits or what Fisher calls the Director personality type.
Scale 4 measures Femininity as linguistic-emotional-interpersonal cognition or Feeling traits on the Myers-Briggs scale which Fisher calls the Negotiator personality type.
The two top scores are your primary and secondary traits.
For further study of the idea of gender, I refer you to the works of Judith Butler; including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Undoing Gender, and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, and to those of Anne Fausto-Sterling; Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, and Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men.
The nature versus nurture debate can be explored in the oppositional works of Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine, and Human Diversity: Gender, Race, Class, and Genes by Charles Murray.
In histories, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century,
by Charles King.
In biography, Monsieur d’Eon Is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade by Gary Kates.
In fiction, we have Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Joseph Cassara’s House of the Impossible Beauties, Jordy Rosenberg’s Confession of the Fox, and Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, by T. Fleischmann.
As I wrote in my post of July 18 2021, Of Love and Desire as Forces of Autonomy and Liberation; In my previous journal entry of yesterday I provided a brief outline of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test as a tool of discovery and description of the processes of masculinity and femininity as interdependent aspects of a whole personality, in the context of gender identity and performance.
So we come to the final category of our interest here, sexual orientation. The most important thing to know about human sexuality as a dimension of experience is that it involves the whole person. Whereas a personality test can tell you who you are, and who others are or wish to represent themselves as, it cannot tell you who or what you desire. Desire remains ambiguous, and that is its great power as a force of liberation and autonomy.
The second is that desire is uncontrollable as the tides, an inherently anarchic and chaotic force of nature which is nonvolitional and for which we cannot be held responsible, unlike our actions toward others.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must claim our truths and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As I wrote in my post of March 13 2021, A Year of Quarantine in Retrospect;
The quality of our humanity is not fixed, but always in motion, like the turbulent systems da Vinci studied in his fountain and which later with new mathematics came to be described as chaos theory. Identity is a process which is fluid, and our emotions are instruments with which it creates itself.
We create ourselves over time, through our history of defining moments; human being is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation. What we call our self or our soul is no different in kind from the exoskeleton of an insect or the shell of a sea creature.
And we create ourselves through our interdependence with others, our relationships, friends, families, communities, and the systems of signs thereof.
Human being has in this scheme three orders of relationships; persona, history, and interdependence, and all of it is in motion, dynamic and inherently unstable.
Impermanence is the defining quality of nature and the material universe; so also is the controlling metaphor and condition of human nature, being, and identity our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’ fragmented mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, reveals endless possibilities of becoming human; the inward and outward halves of the cosmos also create and define each other in mutual coevolution, like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
Humans are naturally polyamorous and are enculturated to be otherwise; we are shaped by sociohistorical forces in the sphere of gender identity and sexual orientation to deny our true nature. It is normality which is deviant, and from which misogyny, the system of Patriarchy, and other destructive illnesses of the spirit arise; fear weaponized in service to power, fear and of otherness but also of nature and ourselves. Here is the true origin of evil as the social use of force and violence in self-hatred.
As Goethe wrote in Faust; “Let us extend our lives through our bodies in all directions possible”.
For me the origin of human evil is in unequal relationships and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, pathologies of violence and dominion which as with the figure of Alberich the dwarf require the renunciation of love as their price; not in the violation of taboos, the transgression of the Forbidden, or the defiance of Authority, three things I count as sacred acts in pursuit of the truth of ourselves, but in the systemic and structural injustices and inequalities of hegemonic elites, their lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls, and the state tyranny and terror of brutal force and control which we must resist and refuse to submit to, that we may become autonomous and free as self- created and self-owned beings; for power and force are meaningless when met with disobedience, and in the moment of our refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free.
I say again; human sexual orientation is not a spectrum with endpoint limits, but a Moebius Loop of infinite possibilities, and we are born and exist by nature everywhere along it at once. All else is limitation and control imposed artificially as dominion, captivity, and falsification by authorized identities, or a seizure of power and self-ownership in revolutionary struggle against such narratives, hierarchies, and divisions.
Writing of love in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka gives us this witness; “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your door in Vienna, and say, Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.
Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
Here is the true origin of Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return as a test and praxis of Authenticity, and it recalls to me something I once said to Jean Genet. He had sat down at my table after my friends and I made our morning race against death, crossing a sniper alley to reach a cafe in Beirut that had the best strawberry crepes in the world.
“I’m told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To which I replied, “It’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said,” I agree”; this was the beginning of our conversations at breakfast in the days of the terrible siege, which would reset the path of my life.
My wish for all of us is that we may find such friends who can reveal to us our true selves and offer figural spaces into which to grow; such is my functional definition of love.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
We celebrate Coming Out Day as a national holiday in America, in honor of a courageous marginalized community and in solidarity of liberation struggle with all those who perform their true and best selves on the stage of the world and our history, as exemplars of seizure of power from authorized identities including those of sex and gender and of the grandeur of self ownership and the infinite possibilities of becoming human.
I am not a member of this queer LGBT community, nor do I speak for them or with the voice of lived experience, though I am formed in part by three personal relationships with those who did so, William S. Burroughs who taught me magic and storytelling as a child, Susan Sontag who during my early university days taught me how to see beauty in art and life, and Jean Genet who set me on my life’s path by swearing me to the Oath of the Resistance during the second of my numberless Last Stands in Beirut 1982 as we were about to be burned alive by the Israeli Army and refused to surrender.
But I can speak regarding the broader meaning of this holiday, Breaking the Silence.
The image of Silenced Loki, a totemic ritual statue called the Snaptun Stone which depicts the Trickster god and titan (in Old Norse, a class of beings literally termed “Devourer” and commonly translated as Giants) with his mouth sewn shut as a ritual sacrifice to silence his power to reorder the universe and change, subvert, manipulate, or evade its laws, has become part of our popular culture through the influence of Marvel comics and films, and a subject of discussion.
What does it mean? Why would a god whose power is imprisoned in his flesh and useless be an object of worship? Why has this part of his myth, so near a parallel to that of Prometheus, become central to Viking culture and assimilated into our own at this moment of history?
Silence equals Death, as the AIDS activist movement of decades ago constructed Elie Weisel’s Silence is Complicity. As he teaches us in his Nobel Prize Speech; “I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
I remember: he asked his father: “Can this be true?” This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?
And now the boy is turning to me: “Tell me,” he asks. “What have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?”
And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remain silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”
Primarily I see this in terms of Loki’s role as what Foucault called a truthteller, parrhesia in classical terms, like the Jester of King Lear, as in the Lokasenna when he satirizes and mocks the gods. I call this the four primary duties of a citizen in a free society of equals; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority. For there is no just authority, and our mission as Bringers of Chaos is to subvert and delegitimize tyrants, be they gods or men who would enslave us.
Secondarily this relates to Loki’s role as a source of poetic vision and inspiration, here in the context of his grand trick, the Wager of Loki, which resulted in the forging of Mjolnir as embodied lightning and other signature powers of the gods, the price of which was having his mouth sewn shut to seal his power, but of course he like Ulysses outwits the gods and escapes to reclaim his power of true speaking. This myth makes him a patron of smiths and creative arts, not a maker, but a muse; also a patron of truth tellers. And it teaches us that top give a thing form as for example by speaking or writing it is to create it, make it live, and become real.
The image of Silenced Loki, terrible though it may be, refers to his willing sacrifice to forge the truths of others, to abandon power over others in favor of equality and the empowerment of others, and to guide others seizure of power as liberation. As such it was probably used by smiths to avert the dangers of their profession, a lightning rod and totemic patron.
Magic, like revolutionary struggle, always has a cost; among the first things one will need is something to bear that cost for us. Such is the purpose of Silenced Loki.
Loki is a patron of outlaws, especially those of sex and gender, who finds reflection in Virginia Woolf’s gender changing immortal time traveler Orlando, of revolutionaries and anarchists in his guise as Milton’s rebel angel in Paradise Lost, the primary text of the iconic Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, of gamblers, chance, and luck as a figure of Fortune, of lost causes and forlorn hopes and the unknown heroes who fight for them, of all those who survive not by force but by wit and guile and changing the rules of play, and of us all as the source of our idea of the devil and his fairytale version as Rumpelstiltskin. What god or devil was ever more terrible than the Maker of Deals?
Above all else, Loki is a patron of outcasts and exiles, the abandoned and the vilified, a champion and liberator who places his life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, and of their vengeance and revolutionary struggle. In this aspect he resembles Frankenstein’s monster, a child abandoned because he is imperfect, bearer of a sacred wound which opens him to the pain of others, an innocent child trapped in the same flesh with a tortured and demonized thing of rage and pain, who wonders why others find him monstrous.
But he is also a god and daemon of creativity, inspiration, poetic vision, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization, a bringer of Chaos who disrupts order, frees us from the tyranny of authority, and bears the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us embrace our monstrosity and say with Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
As written by Olivia Lang, in an essay entitled A Stitch in Time: Enforced Silence, or some thoughts on a mouth sewn shut in history and literature; ” The enduring symbolism of a sewn mouth, from the works of David Wojnarowicz to recent protests by refugees; “The light’s behind them. Four men, somewhere on the border between Greece and Macedonia. They can’t go forward, can’t go back. The man on the left has his eyes closed. He’s unshaven, a single freckle on his temple. The light is tangling in his hair, running down his forehead and catching on his chin. Head bowed, careful as a surgeon, the man opposite him is sewing up his mouth. The blue thread runs from lip to hand. The sewn man’s face is absolutely still, upturned to the sun. I don’t know where I first saw this photograph. Maybe it washed up on my Twitter feed. Later, I searched for it again, typing ‘refugee lip sewing’ into Google. This time, there were dozens of images, almost all of men, lips sewn shut with blue and scarlet thread. Afghan refugee, Athens. Australian immigration centre in Papua New Guinea. Stuck on the Balkan borders, a first smattering of snow.
The mouth is for speaking. But how do you speak if no one’s listening, if your voice is prohibited or no one understands your tongue? You make a migrant image, an image that can travel where you cannot. An Afghan boy who spent three years at the beginning of the millennium on Nauru – the off-shore processing camp for refugees attempting to reach Australia – told the website Solidarity.net.au: ‘My brother didn’t sew his lips but he was part of the hunger strike. He became unconscious and was sent to the hospital. Every time someone became unconscious we would send a picture to the media.’
The first time I encountered lip sewing as protest was in Rosa von Praunheim’s extraordinary 1990 AIDS documentary, Silence = Death. One of the interviewees was the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. A former street kid, a gay man who had recently been diagnosed with AIDS, he talked with great eloquence and fury about the different kinds of silence ranged against him. He spoke of what it had been like to grow up queer; the need to keep his sexuality secret because of the omnipresent threat of violence. He spoke of the silence of politicians, whose refusal to confront AIDS was hastening his own oncoming death. And, as he talked, footage he’d collaged together appeared on screen: a kaleidoscope of distress, which was later given the title A Fire in My Belly (1986–87). Ants crawl over a crucifix; a puppet dances on its strings; money pours from bandaged hands; a mouth is sewn shut, blood trickling from puncture wounds. What is the stitched mouth doing? If silence equals death, the biting slogan of AIDS activists, then part of the work of resistance is to make visible the people who are being silenced. Carefully, carefully, the needle works through skin, self-inflicted damage announcing larger harm. ‘I think what I really fear about death is the silencing of my voice,’ Wojnarowicz says. ‘I feel this incredible pressure to leave something of myself behind.’ You make an image to communicate what is unsayable in words. You make an image to go on beyond you, to speak when you no longer can. The image can survive its creator’s death, but that doesn’t mean it is immune to the same forces of silencing that it protests. In 2010, nearly two decades after Wojnarowicz died of AIDS at the age of 37, A Fire in My Belly was removed from a landmark exhibition of gay art at the Smithsonian, in Washington DC, following complaints from right-wing politicians and the Catholic League. This time, the stitched mouth became a symbol of censorship. At protests, people held up posters of Wojnarowicz’s face, lantern-jawed, implacable, five stitches locking shut his lips. Both images are in front of me now: stitches in time, reporting from the past. Wojnarowicz is dead; God knows where the man on the Greek border is. In other photos from the same protest, men sit or stand on train tracks, holding hand-lettered signs on scraps of dirty cardboard: ONLY FREEDOM and OPEN THE BORDER. They are bare-chested, wrapped in blankets, ranked against police with riot shields and bulletproof vests. The word ‘stitch’ is a double-edged prayer. It means the least bit of anything – the stigmatized, say, or the devalued. And it means to join together, mend or fasten, a hope powerful enough to drive a needle through bare flesh.”
As written by Doug Dorst in his blog Monkeys and Rabbit Holes, which annotates his magnificent translation and metafictional commentary on the novel Ship of Theseus by the mythic and possibly fictional revolutionary V. M. Straka, in an article entitled Enforced Silence, or some thoughts on a mouth sewn shut in history and literature;” In Ship of Theseus, S. sails on a ship with sailors whose mouths are sewn shut. Eventually he joins them and undergoes the procedure himself. It is a continuous motif in SOT and appears several times.
Typically a mouth sewn shut is a motif more at home in the horror genre, body modification enthusiasts, and more recently as a form of actual political protest as google brought up several pages of such events.
Loki may be the first victim of this practice. Loki had his mouth sewn shut with wire after loosing a bet with some dwarves. He had wagered his head in the bet (which Loki then lost), but refused to let the dwarves take his head if they couldn’t remove his head without leaving his neck intact. Instead, the dwarves sewed his mouth shut for his slick way with words. According to wikipedia, this myth is the basis for the logical fallacy “Loki’s wager,” which “is the unreasonable insistence that a concept cannot be defined, and therefore cannot be discussed.”
The next instance is found in Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. The first installment, published in 1605, is considered one of the world’s great masterworks. At one point in the book, Sancho tells Don Quixote, “Senor Don Quixote, give me your worship’s blessing and dismissal, for I’d like to go home at once to my wife and children with whom I can at any rate talk and converse as much as I like; for to want me to go through these solitudes day and night and not speak to you when I have a mind is burying me alive. If luck would have it that animals spoke as they did in the days of Guisopete, it would not be so bad, because I could talk to Rocinante about whatever came into my head, and so put up with my ill-fortune; but it is a hard case, and not to be borne with patience, to go seeking adventures all one’s life and get nothing but kicks and blanketings, brickbats and punches, and with all this to have to sew up one’s mouth without daring to say what is in one’s heart, just as if one were dumb.”
In 1827, it appears again in the Atheneaum. The piece is titled Painters-Authoresses-Women, but it is not attributed to any author. “It was easier to look in the glass than to make a dull canvas shine like a lucid mirror; and, as to talking, Sir Joshua used to say, a painter should sew up his mouth.”
Here is the illuminating essay written by Patrick Nathan in The Paris Review; “For David Wojnarowicz, this decade has been a renaissance. He plays a guiding spirit in Olivia Laing’s 2016 internal travelogue, The Lonely City, and haunts the 2011 music video for Justice’s “Civilization.” In last year’s retrospective, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, the Whitney Museum reminded us that Wojnarowicz “came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes.” We recognize that decade in our own, and, with it, Wojnarowicz’s anger. Our present is magnetized to his past. His art, as Hanya Yanagihara wrote, “reminds you that there is a distinction between cynicism and anger, because the work, while angry, is rarely bitter—bitterness is the absence of hope; anger is hope’s companion.” In truth, renaissance is a cruel word to give to someone who died at thirty-seven. But we do love him. We do need him.
Some things to know about who we are:
We are trapped in a moment of political terror. We are dangerously close to cynicism, but angry enough to have hope. We are no longer interested in compromise. Men, we agree, have had their chance. White women we can no longer trust to uphold feminism, not while they cling to white supremacy. We are antiracist and antifascist and prison abolitionists; we rejoiced when Bill Cosby received his sentence. We canceled Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, and Al Franken with equal fervor. We are uninterested in what they think.
Welcome to we: a disingenuous pronoun that both paid and unpaid pundits alike brandish without consent. I’m often guilty, too: my points are more convincing if I ventriloquize your voice alongside mine. Are we really doing this? Is this what we want? When did we decide this was okay? As usual, Adorno said it best: “To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.” More often than not, we is an erasure, a linguistic illusion that you or I have endorsed some third person’s opinion, politics, or decisions. Deployed in politicized spaces, the subtext of we—i.e., I didn’t need to ask you—is a violation of political agency.
What’s dangerous in maligning we, however, is how badly I—a cisgender white man living in America—need to hear these voices. Often, the contemporary we is a backlash against centuries of a white cishet male monolith, which includes the we in the Constitution. It’s a backlash voiced by women, people of color, trans and nonbinary persons, and persons with disabilities. As Wesley Morris wrote for the New York Times last year, “Groups who have been previously marginalized can now see that they don’t have to remain marginalized. Spending time with work that insults or alienates them has never felt acceptable. Now they can do something about it.” Morris casts this moment as an inversion of the culture wars of the eighties and nineties, when artists like Wojnarowicz faced censorship and humiliation from the religious right. After pushing their work to extremes and waging costly legal and political campaigns—including, in Wojnarowicz’s case, the very right to survive as a queer artist—the oppressed are now closer to power than ever. “This territory,” Morris writes, “was so hard won that it must be defended at all times, at any costs. Wrongs have to be righted. They can’t affect social policy—not directly. They can, however, amend the culture.” It’s in this sense that we becomes linguistic action. We cosign or cancel speech, endorse or excoriate art, all the while presuming that any I can borrow any you. We amplifies our voices as one, an assumption of power.
While Morris’s essay is a sensitive, observant, and smart examination of ethics in contemporary art, and while I’m grateful to have read and reread it, my first impulse upon seeing its subheading (“Should art be a battleground for social justice?”) was to throw the magazine across the room and tweet something like, “Do we really need another man whispering ‘art for art’s sake’ as he pins us against the wall?” This is what our politics has done to me as a queer artist. I carry so much anger that even the threat of some man saying, Let’s not get carried away, triggers rage.
Or perhaps more exact: revenge.
I want to believe we need Wojnarowicz’s art, but I can only say that I need it. I burn for its juxtapositions, the shadows in his photographs, and the narrative ambition of his paintings—exuberant perversions of renaissance epics. Close to the Knives, his “memoir of disintegration,” immolates me entirely. Like many queers in the seventies, Wojnarowicz grew up neglected and abused, prostituting his body by the time he was fifteen. As an artist, he received no formal training—only critique from other queer artists, including his one-time lover, Peter Hujar, whose body became one of his subjects. Hujar’s face and hands and feet, photographed on his deathbed in 1987, found their way into one of Wojnarowicz’s collages, lacquered over with a fiery indictment of the society that let this happen to a man he loved; and then Wojnarowicz, too, died, with so much art left unmade.
Reading Wojnarowicz today—that is, in his words, “in a country where an actor becomes the only acceptable president … a man whose vocation is to persuade with words and actions an audience who wants to believe whatever he tells them”—empowers me. Art “can be reparatory,” Morris writes, “a means for the oppressed and ignored to speak,” and Wojnarowicz’s anger makes me feel as if it’s my right to demand silence from those I perceive to have oppressed queer people, or even those who just don’t have the luck of being queer. I feel as if it’s my right to shun artworks in which I don’t recognize myself or my friends. To not see oneself mirrored in culture feels like abuse, every renewed act of erasure newly unbearable.
While Morris writes about art specifically, his essay reflects a tendency in discourse overall toward separating, totally, that which we call bearable from that which we decide is not. This is the subject of Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. “At many levels of human interaction,” she writes, “there is an opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.” As social creatures, communication and negotiation are human responsibilities. Activities that work against communication—shunning, silencing, and enlisting the power of the state to punish rather than resolve—shirk this responsibility, and are unfortunately common among vulnerable persons, for whom withdrawal and refusal are often the only communication skills they possess. This leaves both parties trapped—one behind a locked door they won’t open, the other outside. Schulman describes her struggle to understand her colleagues, who, despite their liberal politics, have developed an “almost prescribed instinct to punish, using the language originated initially by a radical movement but now co-opted to deny complexity, due process, and the kind of in-person, interactive conversation that produces resolution.” This language is that of “abuse,” which has a perpetrator and a victim.
In situations of abuse (ask yourself: is this a power struggle or does this person have power over me?), victims are indeed blameless. But Schulman’s thesis outlines how what often feels like abuse is instead conflict—a point of pain in need of resolution, arrived at only through honest and open communication, which can, and often does, hurt: “the collapse of Conflict and Abuse is partly the result of a punitive standard in which people are made desperate, yet ineligible, for compassion.” The state and its systems of power withhold assistance and compassion from those who are not “eligible.” This creates a system where the identity of victim is desired, if only to ensure one is met with compassion instead of derision. “This concept,” Schulman writes, “is predicated on a need to enforce that one party is entirely righteous and without mistake, while the other is the Specter, the residual holder of all evil.” Anyone who endured the punditry after the 2016 elections will understand why labeling oneself an economic or demographic victim can be toxic. In a sociological refusal to communicate, 63 million voters escalated decades of capitalist-driven conflict by turning their pain into a sacrosanct identity, regardless of how it would, and has, hurt millions of people far more severely than any pain, however legitimate, those voters felt.
Schulman’s ideas on conflict, communication, escalation, abuse, and repair encourage us to accept individual responsibility, however small, for as many of the conflicts in one’s life as we can stand. Yet it remains necessary to distinguish these conflicts from abuse. What’s interesting about Schulman’s essay is how it intersects with urgent questions of speech, de-platforming, and “cancelation.” Her insistence upon open and respectful communication seems like an inversion of the tactics of silence, shunning, exclusion, and sometimes of violence used by antifascist groups for decades to combat authoritarian politics. The strategies of antifascism contradict everything Schulman says in her plea toward mutual understanding and conflict resolution, but only in the way that shouting over Ann Coulter, for example, seems like an infringement upon her right to incite violence through “free speech.” The error here is to call fascism a conflict.
A primary goal of Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook is to illuminate the “trans-historical terror of fascism,” which is never a “defeated” enemy but a constant reactionary threat as long as inequality and suffering are tolerated. History is not fixed or written but being written. The post-Holocaust slogan—“Never again!”—is not a fact, observation, or conclusion, but a plea for understanding. As Bray writes, “History is a complex tapestry stitched together by threads of continuity and discontinuity… [Anti-fascism] is an argument about the historical continuity between different eras of far-right violence and the many forms of collective self-defense that it has necessitated across the globe over the past century.” It could indeed happen again—maybe tomorrow—and one needs to recognize it, contain it, and drive it back out of sight. These tactics don’t seek to understand the conflict and work toward resolution because there is no understanding, nor resolution; there is, in fact, no conflict. Fascism is abuse, and its evangelists know it. As Bray says, “The point here is not tactics; it is politics.” Just as an abusive parent or partner has no right to demand that his victim sit down and hear his case (again: “power over,” not “power struggle”), a political system that is predicated on the oppression and elimination of human beings from the populace based on race, legal history, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship, or ability has no right to a national platform, and merits resistance over resolution. Fascism assumes a false mask of victimhood—one that seems like a “politics in conflict”—in order to undermine those who’d speak against it. But fascism is not a politics in conflict: it is a politics of abuse on a national and transnational scale. Antifascism seeks a way out of trauma; fascism governs with it.
At the Morgan Library in New York, I saw Peter Hujar’s portrait of David Wojnarowicz, gaunt and severely shadowed, dark-eyed, a cigarette in mid drag; and I felt it, around my neck. Love there, and admiration. Grief. Seeing how Hujar saw his ex-lover, friend, and fellow artist seized me entirely. I didn’t understand why I was trembling. It just happened as these things happen—and, for me, are happening more and more. Last year, T magazine ran a special issue on the early eighties in New York. On one page, Edmund White remembered friends, writers, and artists who’d died young: “I was just thinking of Allen Barnett, who lived to publish one book of stories … He was so angry that he had to die.” On another page, the faces of over a hundred artists, choreographers, writers, performers, designers, and cinematographers “lost” to HIV related illnesses. I had no choice: I sobbed. The same thing happened with Tom Bianchi’s Polaroids of Fire Island in the early eighties, in which young men, naked or mostly naked, smile there on the sand, playing and drinking and fucking and loving each other with no idea what awaits them. “I could not have imagined,” Bianchi writes, “that my Polaroids would so suddenly become a record of a lost world—my box of pictures a mausoleum, too painful to visit. When I reopened the box decades later, I found friends and lovers playing and smiling. Alive again.” Even this, reread so many times, is hard to transcribe.
I began having sex with men in 2006. HIV is not only a treatable illness, but, thanks to PrEP, easier to avoid contracting than ever. I’ve lost no one to AIDS. I was a child when it decimated queer communities across the world. Because of this, it’s taken me a long time to understand that there is still trauma here, that for me to look back and see what has happened, and to see the people—the Reagan administration, state and local governments, charity organizations, and “normal Americans”—who stood by and let it happen, is for me a trauma I’m allowed to feel. It’s traumatic to know how many influential figures called it punishment, called it God, and how many millions nodded along with them. It’s traumatic that I believed, long after the documented success of antiretroviral therapy, that HIV was certain death. It’s traumatic to imagine myself and my friends in that other decade, losing all the men in my life I love and have loved, all while someone laughs on television, where they are paid to say, You had it coming.
Yes, they called me faggot, bullied me and threatened me; yes, I pushed myself so deeply into the closet that I thought I was someone else, hurting a lot of people in the process; and yes, I carry scars from those years when I craved physical pain instead of pain I couldn’t articulate. But no one I love died, not like that. Nor do I understand these intense reactions as merely empathetic, because I feel them a hundredfold more strongly than when I encounter the pain of people suffering in other situations. Instead—to adapt a phrase from Bray—this feels like transhistorical queer trauma. Not long ago, people like me suffered unimaginably and died in isolation, cut off not only from civil and social apparatuses but often their families; and this happened because those people were like me. Through shunning, violence, intimidation, and legislation, a society had so othered LGBTQ individuals that their drawn out and brutal deaths seemed permissible, even desirable. And alongside those deaths, what was a few million drug users, homeless persons, and black Americans living in abject poverty? Because of white supremacist and heteropatriarchal ideologies, a virus became a weapon of the state, allowed first to proliferate and then, once activists had pushed back hard enough, to be contained, managed, and controlled by federal subsidies and corporate pharmaceutical research.
I’m not stupid enough to think “never again” calls for anything but constant vigilance. In February of 2018, the White House proposed a 20% cut in the nation’s global HIV/AIDS fund, which would lead, according to a report issued by ONE.org, to “nearly 300,000 deaths and more than 1.75 million new infections each year.” On June 1 of this year, the president logged onto Twitter and mentioned how we would “celebrate LGBT Pride Month and recognize the outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation,” despite everything his administration and party have done to strip trans persons of their safety and their rights, to obstruct federal and state protections for queer families and workers. It’s especially tempting to ask this transphobic autocrat what he believes the T stands for when he reminds the nation to celebrate LGBT people, but that’s beside the point. It’s not ignorance that emanates from the White House. It is not a politics in conflict. No matter how many rainbow emoji the president tweets, his queer politics is death, hate, and exclusion. It is a legacy of abuse, and perhaps it’s only natural to feel it across generations, to break down sobbing when I discover another artist or writer or human being who was, not that many years ago, “so angry that he had to die.”
Those 63 million votes: was each an act of abuse? I want to say yes—I believed they were for a long time. As Bray indicates, “It is clear that ardent Trump supporters voted for their candidate either because of or despite his misogyny, racism, ableism, Islamaphobia, and many more hateful traits.” For me and the people I love, these votes felt cruel, and while I’m no longer sure about saying yes, I don’t question my choice to end every relationship I had with anyone who used their vote to inflict such irresponsible, widespread harm.
Every fascist regime has snuck into power through legal means with a relatively small majority. In the 1930 elections, shortly before Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Reichstag, the Nazis received 18.3% of the vote. When Vittorio Emanuele III appointed Mussolini as prime minister in 1922, after 30,000 blackshirts marched theatrically on Rome, the PNF only held thirty-five of more than five hundred seats. In 2016, Trump received over 2.8 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. As I write this, there are thirty-one states—plus D.C.—with party registration. In those states, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 12 million; yet Republicans currently control sixty-seven of the ninety-nine state legislative bodies and hold a majority in the Senate. Supremacist ideologies don’t need that many fervent supporters; what they do need is indifference. In the case of Trump voters, Bray continues, “it is always important to distinguish between ideologues and their capricious followers, yet we cannot overlook how these popular bases of support create the foundations for fascism to manifest itself.”
Here is where the difference between conflict and abuse becomes a societal urgency. I’m not going to mince words. The Republican party, championing Islamophobia, denying and exacerbating climate change, stripping trans persons of their rights, supporting police brutality against the black community, incarcerating immigrants and separating children from their families—in short, committing crime upon crime against humanity—is a global terrorist organization rooted not only in white supremacy, but the supremacy of wealth. It’s hard to see class in America—to see poverty as an identity—because the American fabrication is that today’s poor, through obedience and hard work, will be rich tomorrow. It’s a story that hides an oppressed class in plain sight of people who serve as a ready-made voting base for the rich, as long as the rich grant them whiteness, heteronormativity, male supremacy, or some other power over those more deeply oppressed. These are those who might not champion the oppression of others, but go along with it as a price paid for a seat at the table.
It’s difficult to accept responsibility for this transaction, so enticing is its reward: state-sponsored victimhood. To take an example from Schulman, the white queer community doesn’t want to hear that today, “with gay marriage and parenthood prevalent, and the advent of gay nuclear families and normalized queer childbirth … white queer families realign with the state that held them in pervasive illegality less than a generation ago.” At the same time, this community still sees itself as unable to do harm, so entrenched is its history with victimhood. To challenge this is perceived as antiqueer ideology: of course we have the right to families, to suburbs, to lattes and plaid. But so, too, do white queers, in their newfound positions of power, have newfound responsibility to uphold the greater community, and to use their privilege to resolve conflicts with the trans community and queers of color, not to mention other oppressed and persecuted communities.
There is a similarity in action, Schulman says, in both the supremacist and the victim. This is born of refusal: “For the Supremacist, this refusal comes from a sense of entitlement; that they have an inherent ‘right’ not to question themselves. Conversely, the unrecovered traumatized person’s refusal is rooted in a panic that their fragile self cannot bear interrogation.” For the conflicted, seeing their pain mirrored in another can become a way to justify pain: at least she feels what I feel, or even at least he’s worse off than me. What this creates is an ongoing and mutually reflective theater of trauma in which everyone is a victim, exempt from responsibility, beyond repair.
We live in a misogynistic, racist, homo- and transphobic, ableist, violent, and viciously unequal country whose relatively small population (4.4% of the world) and vast wealth (25%) leave us, individual voters, responsible for the fate and future of this planet as its oceans rise and reefs die, as its air grows increasingly contaminated and water less potable. To feel so powerless and yet accountable for the future of the human race means that the sheer number of traumatized persons living in America is staggering. We are rooted in a country created by two concurrent genocides and supported by two centuries of wars, spectacular terrorism, theft, and global oppression. What’s worse, as Schulman argues, traumatized persons, through their actions, amplify and spread trauma to others by shunning, bullying, silencing, scapegoating, and threatening; they cling to what little they’re given as payment for their complicity in worldwide destruction at the profit of a small minority of white, wealthy men.
What use am I, and who is profiting from my trauma? How has my pain been weaponized and turned against others to stoke greater conflict? These are questions every American should ask themselves, particularly as we enter the nauseating theater of the 2020 elections and what lies beyond.
Conflict is profitable. Not only is this obvious in two hundred years of U.S. foreign policy, but in millennia of art and entertainment: escalation is dramatic, and drama, if it doesn’t affect us directly, is cathartic. It’s fun to say, Did you see what he said about her? and to watch a conflict get worse. There’s a reason journalists crank the apocalypse up to eleven every time the president tweets. It keeps readers coming back. Resolution is boring. Resolution is unprofitable. A played-out resolution is not a drama but an education: you too are responsible, rather than, watch this. Resisting this is not easy, fast, or efficient—three values Americans cherish. To be conflicted, to explore one’s accountability in a relationship, this is not what makes an individual spectacularly eligible for compassion. Only victimhood opens that coffer, and whoever screams loudest gets the prize.
What is needed is a queering of compassion. To move beyond the truly rare (but extant) binaries of perpetrator and victim, it’s important that every individual recognizes their existence in a continuum of conflict, and seeks to resolve and repair rather than escalate and destroy. We—and here I do mean every single one of us—must question individual guilt, which is rooted in action, rather than shame, which is entrenched in identity. Because when we insist upon the binary—that everyone is either perpetrator or victim—the cost is literal human life. One need only to look to all the Black Americans murdered by police, summoned by a white neighbor’s perceived victimhood, amplified by the aesthetics of entertainment.
The we I want to belong to is the we that recognizes our vast diversity of pain—the we that understands we’ve been assigned this pain for someone else’s profit, and that we need no longer give them want they want. To reserve compassion only for victims deemed eligible is to accept an arbitrary division, one in which the state can deem some of us worthy of aid and exclude others, meanwhile ensuring that the victims never speak to one another, competing as they must to remain in their places. Is it so revolutionary to say that every human being is eligible for compassion? That men and women of any gender or sexuality, any skin color, any ability, any legal or migratory status, any age, receive the same compassionate understanding as any other, responsible only for their actions and not the identities coerced upon them by others? To believe otherwise is to let fascism shatter our society.”
Loki montage to the song Would You Turn Your Back On Me? (Monster)
David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side, by Giancarlo Ambrosino, Sylvère Lotringer (Editor), Chris Kraus (Editor), Hedi El Kholti (Editor), Justin Cavin (Editor), Jennifer Doyle (Afterword)
So wishful I was when I wrote these words on April 29 2019, Trumps Ten Thousand Lies; On this day we count ten thousand lies since Trump has taken office as President of the United States; obviously he is a pathological liar who is unable to tell the difference between truth and lies.
The sounds he makes are as meaningless as the squeals of a mindless gluttonous brute animal that he so resembles.
His words mean nothing; he also means nothing, and we do not hear him.
If only we like Ulysses beset by the sirens could stop our ears, and free ourselves from capture by the tide of lies unleashed upon us by Traitor Trump and his Fourth Reich minions which include the Republican Party.
But it is never simple, liberation struggle against systems of oppression and thought control, alternate realities, myriads of lies and illusions, phantasms of subjugation to authority and the weaponization of fear in service to power, and the legacies of history from which we must emerge if we are to become human, self created and self owned beings, glorious and Unconquered.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We ourselves are the primary ground of struggle between tyranny and liberty, for what we choose to believe and how we judge the choices and stories offered to us determines our subjugation to authority or our liberation from it. And truths are ambiguous, ephemeral, relative, and constantly shifting and in processes of change, and can be Rashomon Gate Events which shatter time into myriads of possible futures.
We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, echoes and reflections which capture and distort like the images of ourselves in a funhouse mirror labyrinth, and the only guidance I can offer you is to ask; Whose story is this?
So it is with the disinformation campaign surrounding the twin hurricanes which have devastated Florida and the work of FEMA and other humanitarian aid workers in savings the lives of our citizens from a disaster unleashed by the greed for wealth and power of those who would enslave us.
Trump rambles witlessly before the world once again, displaying his freakish monstrosity as an idiot madman of delusions and perversions. For beneath the mask lies the demon whom he worships and to whom he would sacrifice America and us all; Moloch the Seducer, Fount of Lies.
For an excellent interrogation of how tyranny operates through falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, and conspiracy theories in our subjugation, enslavement, and the theft of the soul, see Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season one, episode 8; I, Robot…You, Jane. Crucial to the understanding of conspiracy theories is that Moloch, whose name means King, is claimed as the Big Bad of QAnon; the first principle of propaganda is deflection or to claim your enemies are doing whatever you actually are. The second is to assault the idea of truth itself by exaggerating claims to the point where belief becomes an act of perverted faith and a loyalty test.
For a brilliant fictionalization of how conspiracy theories work as falsification in the context of QAnon’s previous iteration, the Nazi blood libel against the Jews, read Umberto Eco’s magisterial novel The Prague Cemetery.
In disambiguating truth from lies, consider the source and who benefits. And remember always the First Rule of Resistance; everything the enemy says is a lie.
Of our history, memory, and identity there are those which must be kept, and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
As I wrote in my post of November 17 2020, Lies, Delusions, and the Subversion of Democracy: the Legacy of Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty; As our Clown of Terror’s Theatre of Cruelty prepares to surrender the keys to a kingdom which no longer open any doors and the lights begin to wink out one by one, I reflect on the legacy of the Stolen Election of 2016 and the illegitimate Trump Presidency which has so crippled America and devoured the hearts of her people as a disease of the spirit; lies, delusions, and the subversion of democracy.
Fascism, patriarchy, and the corrupt kleptocracy of a plutocratic and oligarchic regime of elites has been turned back with the dark tide of atavistic barbarism of hate and greed on which it is borne, and for now we the people have triumphed; but we must be vigilant lest it return.
Trump has been the most successful agent any foreign power has ever fielded against America, and he has damaged our ability to respond to threats more than any event in our history, exceeding even Pearl Harbor and 9-11. Yet like those who planned the attack on Pearl as a pre-emptive strike to render us powerless to oppose conquest and dominion, our enemies have underestimated the resilience of democratic institutions and the unconquerable will of a free and united people.
Let us celebrate our victory over fascism and the glorious defiance of authority by which we won; let us also give no opportunity nor moment of rest to the enemy, for he is always at the gate, testing our weaknesses and biding his time, and we must give him nothing to exploit.
As I wrote in my post of November 13 2020, The Trump Era: A Legacy of Shame, Amorality, Fear, Tyranny, Lies and Delusions, and Now We Are Become Ridiculous; Traitor Trump has already sabotaged America’s role as a guarantor of democracy and the universal rights of man, and with it any fig leaf of moral supremacy and our global hegemony of power and privilege which derives from it.
The Trump regime has been a parallel of the Salt Tax in India which brought down the British Empire; a delegitimizing event which exposes the amoral hollowness of our rapacious imperialism and any apologetics of power.
While I welcome the death of the American Empire of capitalist plunder and military colonialism, this unintended consequence of the Fourth Reich’s subversion of democracy does not offset the loss of our freedom, equality, and human rights.
Our Clown of Terror has long since made America a figure not of hope but of fear, not of liberty but of tyranny; now he has made us ridiculous as well.
As I wrote in my post of September 16 2020, A Wilderness of Mirrors: Lies, Illusions, and the Theft of the Soul; As truth becomes uncertain and malleable through the instruments of media and reduces everything to identitarian partisanship, as reality becomes a social consensus model authorized for us by others, as we wander in a wilderness of mirrors, distorted images as if in a funhouse which falsify and abstract us from ourselves in infinite reflections, of misdirects, lies, and illusions, we become colonized by these falsehoods and shaped to the uses of their puppetmasters and those who would enslave us. Thus do we become puppets of the thieves of souls.
And somewhere in the funhouse, a Clown of Terror laughs.
Among the most successful propaganda campaigns of this election season is the QAnon conspiracy narrative, a modern reformulation of the charges against the Jews during the Inquisition which were later repurposed by the Nazis. Of the many great works on this subject, I recommend beginning with a novel by Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery; you can read reviews about it here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10314376-the-prague-cemetery?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=KceYbFP18A&rank=1
“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”; so argues Oscar Wilde in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying, a Socratic dialogue in which he deconstructs Aristotle’s theory of mimesis, memory as the basis of identity, and also a critique of Marx’s historical determinism. In this he expanded Keat’s Idealism, “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not”, into an anarchist humanism embracing both political and personal spheres, in which self-creating autonomous individuals are the origin of all meaning and value.
As such Wilde prefigures Sartre and forms a link between Romantic Idealism and Existentialism; I digress to point this out because Wilde’s breaking of the Great Chain of Being and causality, from the Infinite to kings and priests and then to their subjects, levels hierarchy and social station, interrogates authorized truth, democratizes the ownership of ourselves, and seizes and reclaims our power of choice regarding bodily autonomy and identities of sex and gender.
In Oscar Wilde’s solution to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, reality and its imitation shape each other as a recursive process, circular and infinite; and between these mutual negative spaces which create one another like Escher’s Drawing Hands is a liminal interface, full of possibilities and transformative power. The nature and relativity of time, order as an emergent function of chaos, the polymorphism of identity, and the necessity of rebellion against authority which interposes itself between the free conscience and ideas of autonomous individuals and our direct relationship with the Infinite in order to enslave us; all these are major themes of Oscar Wilde; but what is important to us in the context of designed lies and illusions by authority in a political context is that he signals a way out of the maze of propaganda and control which enforces falsification and dehumanization, or simply put the theft of the soul by those who would enslave us.
If fictions can enslave us to the ideas of other people, our own fictions can also liberate us from them.
At its best, true art allows us to transcend the limits which ensnare and diminish us; to rise above the troughs of our social position and of exclusionary categories of otherness and divisions from each other and to see the true shape of our possibilities and the seas in which we must swim from the crests of its waves.
Art is revolutionary struggle which reconnects us and transforms human relationships, reveals new possibilities of becoming human together as yet undreamed, and with these functions of vision, self-ownership, transformation, and seizure of power becomes an instrument and process of Liberty.
Let us forge an art of being human which returns to us our true selves.
As I wrote in my post of August 3 2019, The Age of Lies and Illusions; We live in the funhouse of mirrors, images which reflect lies and illusions and which steal our souls through falsification. The truth is the frontline in the battle for freedom against tyranny and fascism, requiring new definitions of freedom in the age of digital propaganda and subversive disinformation targeting social media microcommunities.
Part of our vulnerability to influence messaging is its ability to disguise its source and masquerade as communication from friends; another dimension is the ease with which big data can be gathered and deployed against an electorate with precisely targeted messages, as for example Netflix benignly and brilliantly uses viewing habits to sort people into thousands of preference categories and suggest other shows they might enjoy. These first two vulnerabilities can be rendered harmless if we have the political will to do so; but what truly terrifies me is the context in which modern propaganda occurs, in an overwhelming and pervasive environment of lies.
Ours is a world in which Big Brother is not only watching, he wears the masks of our most trusted friends and lives in our pocket, following us everywhere, listening, reporting our location constantly, and sending our information home to whoever buys it. We have become commodities and resources as well as markets; we are the greatest frontier of our age, gold mines for oligarchs and tyrants.
Information is not only the best defense of democracy; it is also its greatest existential threat. How we balance these dual aspects of our freedom will determine the survival of freedom, and the possibilities of our future humanity.
As I wrote in my post of August 25 2020 Welcome to Bizarro World, Where Truth and Lies Change Places and All Our Values Are Reversed
The Republican Party held up a mirror to America in the figure of Trump at last night’s National Convention, and I’m hoping most of us didn’t like what we saw.
A funhouse mirror, filled with distorted images, a thing of surfaces without substance which offering a mirage of illusions, lies, and reflections into infinite regress of our atavisms of fear and hate, shadows which we drag behind us in our wake like an invisible reptilian tail, and which like the picture of Dorian Grey reveal our disfigured souls and our failures as Americans and as human beings.
It is an image designed to terrorize us into submission, and to steal our souls.
Among the freaks and monsters, the litanies of victimhood and retribution, of dominion, white supremacy, patriarchy, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil sung by the barkers and screaming johnnies who warmed up the main show, among all these and reigning over them like a ringmaster was the tyrant himself, Traitor Trump, spewing abominations and depravities as the puppet of the demons he worships, the lies of those who would enslave us.
Thanks for showing us what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Trump’s God: Moloch the Deceiver, Demon of Lies
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 1 episode 8, I Robot You Jane
Degenerate buffoons of Trumpian idiocies goggle in stupefaction at the terrible proof of climate change as nature’s fury hammers Florida in storms of doom.
All that humankind has built, all we have dreamed, will be destroyed by our greed, our vanity, and our addiction to wealth and power in the war against nature and the nature of ourselves we call civilization.
And that day is coming sooner than anyone has guessed. In Florida it is happening now.
None of this is inevitable, but a result of political choices we have made about how to be human together which have captured and enmeshed us all in systems of oppression and commodification in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
It is happening now because the systems and mechanical failures and collapse of civilization from its internal contradictions is linked to the terminal phase of capitalism which centralizes all wealth and power to authoritarian elites, and if we are to survive as a species we must free ourselves from those who would enslave us.
I have called this fearsome double hurricane a divine punishment because of the irony that it threatens to annihilate the bastion of Republican science denial, white supremacist terror, and theocratic-patriarchal sexual terror that is Florida, den of a fossilized gerontocracy under the spell of the Fourth Reich Fuhrer Trump from the Southern White House at Mar a Lago, and at the end of his ridiculous election campaign.
My hope is that this storms and the many like it and more terrible still to come, like the fires and floods which devastate us in other seasons and places, will serve as a kiss which awakens us from our poisoned sleep to realization of the existential threats we now face as consequences of systems of unequal power.
Wishful thinking has me imagining the hurricane homing in on Mar a Lago, but of course it is the poor who suffer most in any disaster, for the wealthy export the true costs of production to the slave classes as a strategy of responsibility avoidance.
For the good people of Florida and throughout the world, I wish only the very best of fates and escape from systems of oppression through seizures of power.
But for those who do not renounce their complicity in tyranny and terror and the extinction of humankind, in America all who in remaining members of the Republican Party authorize the lies and perversions, the cruelties and the amoral degeneracy of Trump and the Party of Treason, and therefore sign the warrant of their complicity in the subversion of democracy and the extinction of humankind, on these I invoke the doom and the total destruction of their lives, their wealth, and their power to harm us.
May the Nothing eat their hearts.
As written by Damian Carrington in The Guardian, in an article entitled Earth’s ‘vital signs’ show humanity’s future in balance, say climate experts; “Many of Earth’s “vital signs” have hit record extremes, indicating that “the future of humanity hangs in the balance”, a group of the world’s most senior climate experts have said.
More and more scientists are now looking into the possibility of societal collapse, says the report, which assessed 35 vital signs in 2023 and found that 25 were worse than ever recorded, including carbon dioxide levels and human population. This indicates a “critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis”, it says.
The temperature of Earth’s surface and oceans hit an all-time high, driven by record burning of fossil fuels, the report found. Human population is increasing at a rate of approximately 200,000 people a day and the number of cattle and sheep by 170,000 a day, all adding to record greenhouse gas emissions.
The scientists identified 28 feedback loops, including increasing emissions from melting permafrost, which could help trigger multiple tipping points, such as the collapse of the massive Greenland icecap.
Global heating is driving increasingly deadly extreme weather across the world, they said, including hurricanes in the US and 50C heatwaves in India, with billions of people now exposed to extreme heat.
The scientists said their goal was “to provide clear, evidence-based insights that inspire informed and bold responses from citizens to researchers and world leaders – we just want to act truthfully and tell it like it is.” Decisive, fast action was imperative to limit human suffering, they said, including reducing fossil fuel burning and methane emissions, cutting overconsumption and waste by the rich, and encouraging a switch towards plant-based foods.
“We’re already in the midst of abrupt climate upheaval, which jeopardises life on Earth like nothing humans have ever seen,” said Prof William Ripple, of Oregon State University (OSU), who co-led the group. “Ecological overshoot – taking more than the Earth can safely give – has pushed the planet into climatic conditions more threatening than anything witnessed even by our prehistoric relatives.
“Climate change has already displaced millions of people, with the potential to displace hundreds of millions or even billions. That would likely lead to greater geopolitical instability, possibly even partial societal collapse.”
The assessment, published in the journal Bioscience, says the concentrations of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere are at record levels. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, 80 times more powerful than CO2 over 20 years, and is emitted by fossil fuel operations, waste dumps, cattle and rice fields.
“The growth rate of methane emissions has been accelerating, which is extremely troubling,” said Dr Christopher Wolf, formerly of OSU, who co-led the team.
While wind and solar energy grew by 15% in 2023, the researchers said, coal, oil and gas still dominated. They said there was “stiff resistance from those benefiting financially from the current fossil-fuel based system”.
The report includes the results of a Guardian survey of hundreds of senior climate experts in May, which found that only 6% believed that the internationally agreed limit of 1.5C of warming would be adhered to. “The fact is that avoiding every tenth of a degree of warming is critically important,” the researchers said. “Each tenth places an extra 100 million people into unprecedented hot average temperatures.”
The researchers said global heating was part of a wider crisis that included pollution, the destruction of nature and rising economic inequality. “Climate change is a glaring symptom of a deeper systemic issue: ecological overshoot, [which] is an inherently unstable state that cannot persist indefinitely. As the risk of Earth’s climate system switching to a catastrophic state rises, more and more scientists have begun to research the possibility of societal collapse. Even in the absence of global collapse, climate change could cause many millions of additional deaths by 2050. We need bold, transformative change.”
Among the policies the scientists recommend for rapid adoption are gradually reducing the human population through empowering education and rights for girls and women; protecting, restoring or rewilding ecosystems; and integrating climate change education into global curriculums to boost awareness and action.
The assessment concludes: “Only through decisive action can we safeguard the natural world, avert profound human suffering and ensure that future generations inherit the livable world they deserve. The future of humanity hangs in the balance.”
The world’s nations will meet at the UN’s Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in November. Ripple said: “It’s imperative that huge progress is made.”
As written by Dharna Noor in The Guardian, in an article entitled Double punch of hurricanes could become common due to climate crisis; “Less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene lashed the Florida coastline, an even more powerful hurricane is hurtling toward the state.
It’s the kind of double hit becoming more common as the climate crisis persists, further complicating hurricane preparation, experts say.
Hurricane Milton strengthened into a dangerous category 5 hurricane on Monday, according to the National Weather Service, and is forecast to batter Florida’s Gulf coast midweek. It’s the third most powerful hurricane in US history, federal officials told reporters on Monday.
The storm could drop 15in of rain on some parts of Florida, with life-threatening storm surges of up to 12ft expected in the city of Tampa. Helene killed a dozen people in the Tampa area.
Millions of Floridians are preparing to evacuate, with mandatory evacuation orders in place across several counties on Monday, including Tampa’s Hillsborough county, and voluntary evacuation orders in place elsewhere.
Swaths of Florida are still lined with piles of broken appliances, smashed furniture and other detritus from Hurricane Helene. Emergency managers are scrambling to deal with the debris before Milton’s strong winds turn it into projectiles and are asking residents to help.
“We’re going to do our best to pick it up. If you do feel that it is going to become a projectile, you can secure that pile. Put it up against a tree, put it behind a fence,” Tim Devin, the Clay county emergency management director, told WJXT television station in Jacksonville.
Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, has asked the state’s emergency management and transit divisions to help remove the piles, and some 4,000 national guard troops are also helping with the efforts. The state’s emergency management department is establishing a base camp at Tropicana Field in St Petersburg to support those debris operations.
Back-to-back hurricanes could also strain the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which has sent over 1,500 personnel to the south-east to help with Helene relief.
In response to swirling misinformation that Fema has drained its budget, the agency has said it has enough funding to address the immediate needs of Helene’s victims, noting Congress recently replenished its disaster recovery fund. Helene could cost upwards of $34bn, according to economic analysis firm Moody’s Analytics.
“We want to assure everyone we have the resources to respond to both Helene and Milton,” Keith Turi, Fema’s acting associate administrator for response and recovery, told reporters on Monday.
Yet the agency’s funding for long-term disaster recovery efforts is running low, federal officials are warning, and Milton could compound that challenge.
Congress is on recess until after election day to place the focus on presidential campaigns, but Joe Biden on Friday warned that he may reconvene lawmakers to approve additional funding.
Storms in quick sequence can also put pressure on personnel levels, whether from local government groups or mutual aid groups, charities and other private aid organizations.
“You’ve got a limited number of people in any one place who can pick up trash, who can fix utilities, who can fix roofs and plumbing,” said Sarah Labowitz, disaster expert and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “You can deploy people from around the region to help in the recovery, especially if they are not affected as badly. But when you layer on top of that a second storm, the number of people who are out of their homes or without power or childcare goes up.”
Another challenge: managing insurance costs. Estimates show Hurricane Helene caused up to $47.5bn in losses for property owners, and some Florida residents could face additional damage due to Milton.
“Insurance markets already under siege from climate-related disasters are likely to buckle further under the weight of claims from these back-to-back storms,” said Rachel Cleetus, climate and energy policy director at the environmental non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists.
Repeat disasters can also put huge strain on local economies, healthcare systems and social networks. Hurricanes can result in thousands of additional deaths over the coming years, an analysis published in the journal Nature on Wednesday suggests.
As the planet continues to warm, primarily due to emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, back-to-back hurricanes are expected to become more common.
In some areas, including the Gulf coast, such one-two punches could occur as often as once every three years, according to a 2023 article from researchers at Princeton University.
Some regions have already seen multiple disasters in quick succession. In 2008, parts of Louisiana faced Hurricanes Ike and Gustav, and in 2005, many Louisianans were hit by Hurricane Rita shortly after the historically destructive Katrina.
A resident of Houston, Texas, Labowitz has seen these challenges firsthand. This July, Hurricane Beryl pounded the area, just weeks after a powerful derecho. Many as a result endured two power outages in two months, and the psychological toll was also “major”, said Labowitz.
“That kind of back-to-back disaster, it just compounds every aspect of recovery,” she said. “It puts a strain on local resources and equipment and technology and the power grid … and it also puts a real strain on people and communities.”
In preparation for more repeat disasters in the coming years, lawmakers should increase disaster preparedness efforts and invest in improved forecasting, said Cleetus. And boosting climate resilience funding “to keep communities safe ahead of time is also paramount”, she said.
Right now, the primary goal is to “minimize any potential loss of life”, Turi said on Monday’s press call.
“We can rebuild, we can repair, we can deal with the aftermath,” he said. “If we can’t keep people safe in these few days, there’s nothing we can do about it after that.”
As written by Bill McKibben in The Guardian, in an article entitled Our dystopian climate isn’t just about fires and floods. It’s about society fracturing; “Even as the good people of Florida’s west coast pulled the soggy mattresses from Helene out to the curb, Milton appeared on the horizon this week – a double blast of destruction from the Gulf of Mexico that’s a reminder that physics takes no time off, not even in the weeks before a crucial election. My sense is that those storms will help turn the voting on 5 November into a climate election of sorts, even if – as is likely – neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump spend much time in the next 25 days talking about CO2 or solar power.
That’s because these storms show not only the power of global heating (Helene’s record rains, and Milton’s almost unprecedented intensification, were reminders of what it means to have extremely hot ocean temperatures). More, they show what we’re going to need to survive the now inevitable train of such disasters. Which is solidarity. Which is something only one ticket offers.
I confess that I’ve been all in to beat Trump for any number of reasons – Third Act, the group I founded to organize Americans over age 60 for action on climate and democracy, has been flooding the swing states with hundreds of thousands of postcards, and our silver wave door-knocking tour hits Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada in the days ahead But if there was one way to sum up what this election means to me, it would be: solidarity. In the 40 years since Ronald Reagan’s election, we’ve gone a long way down the path of hyper-individual, everyone for themselves. Joe Biden has tried to wrench the wheel back towards the FDR America-as-group-project model with tools like the spending in the Inflation Reduction Act, but it’s a work in progress. The climate crisis, above all, requires the return of that solidarity.
That’s because there’s no way to keep it from getting worse without joint public action: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us we have five years left to cut emissions in half, which means it will not be accomplished one Tesla at a time; it requires aggressive public action of the kind the current White House is coordinating, as it sets up battery factories and shepherds new transmission lines through various regulatory fences.
But there’s also no way to survive it, even in its current form, without intense cooperation. To give one example: Florida’s insurance system is clearly breaking down, as one storm after another drives private insurers out of the state.
As the Tampa newspaper put it in June: “As the crisis escalates, state leaders are desperately trying to convince insurance companies to stick around. States are offering them more flexibility to raise premiums or drop certain homes from coverage, fast-tracking rate revisions and making it harder for residents to sue their insurance company.” But as that seawall begins to fail, “a flood of new policyholders are joining state-backed insurance ‘plans of last resort’, leaving states to assume more of the risk on behalf of residents who can’t find coverage in the private sector.”
Indeed, so many people are swamping the “state-backed insurance plans” they’re becoming overloaded with risk. Ten months ago, the Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse and his budget committee colleagues wrote to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, to ask for proof that Florida’s public Citizens Insurance could survive disasters like the one now bearing down on Tampa. DeSantis may have given his most eloquent response in May, when he signed a bill essentially outlawing the phrase “climate change” in Florida statutes. “I’m not a global warming person,” he explained.
Meanwhile, across the upland terrain drenched by Helene, rightwing forces have been relentlessly spreading rumors: most prominently, that the Federal Emergency Management Administration (Fema) spent all its money on migrants and has none left for Americans. This is not true. (Indeed, its closest approach to truth came during the Trump years when Fema did divert relief funds to “tighten the border”.) But it’s one more way to divide people, to use their very real trauma for political gain.
The dystopian future is not just about the endless fires and floods; it’s also about a society that pulls apart in their face, where people can’t work together because they’ve been so divided by disinformation and hate. It feels like Harris and Tim Walz are offering, above all, one last chance at an America where people actually work together on things, a United States. They even imagine a world where the world keeps working together, imagine that – one where we have, say, effective climate negotiations. That these things seem farfetched to us now is probably the strongest proof of how much they’re needed.”
As written by Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian, in an article entitled Hurricane Helene is a humanitarian crisis – and a climate disaster: Behind the violence of extreme weather is that of the fossil fuel industry, and Americans are suffering for it; “The weather we used to have shaped the behavior of the water we used to have – how much and when it rained, how dry it got, when and how slowly the snow in the heights melted, what fell as rain and fell as snow. Climate chaos is changing all that, breaking the patterns, delivering water in torrents unprecedented in recorded history or withholding it to create epic droughts, while heat-and-drought-parched soil, grasslands and forests create ideal conditions for mega-wildfires.
Water in the right time and quantity is a blessing; in the wrong ones it’s a scourge and a destroying force, as we’ve seen recently with floods around the world. In the vice-presidential debate, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, noted that his state’s farmers “know climate change is real. They’ve seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods, back to back.” Farmers around the world are dealing with flood, drought and unseasonable weather that impacts their ability to produce food and protect soil.
The rainfall from Hurricane Helene turned into a torrent on the Nolichucky River in east Tennessee that at its height was almost twice the normal flow of Niagara Falls. The water in that river and others overtopped dams and triggered fears that they might break. In western North Carolina, the French Broad River, which runs through Asheville, crested at an unprecedented level, thanks to dozens of inches of rain in the surrounding mountains draining fast into its tributaries.
Water became a violent force tearing apart buildings, streets and neighborhoods, and drowning humans and animals, while winds toppled trees across the region, the grip of their roots weakened by the rain-saturated soil. Roads, bridges, transmission lines and crucial infrastructure were swept away or smashed. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimate that “climate change may have caused as much as 50% more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. Furthermore, we estimate that the observed rainfall was made up to 20 times more likely in these areas because of global warming.”
The sheer amount of water Helene dumped across its 500-mile path is staggering: 40tn gallons, one scientist calculated, the equivalent of pouring the entire contents of Lake Tahoe over the region, enough water to cover the entire state of North Carolina in water 3.5ft deep. “Water is life” became a key slogan at the Dakota Access pipeline protests in 2016, but it can also be a deadly force. One of the ironies of the current situation in Asheville, North Carolina, and other hurricane-and-flood-impacted towns is that water is everywhere – muddy, contaminated water – but with broken water mains, power outages and contaminated sources, water to drink and wash with is scarce.
Floods are not new, but the intensity and frequency of catastrophic flooding is. The climate crisis is a water crisis
There have been deluges in the region before, but this was a climate disaster. Around the world, catastrophic flooding is wrecking whole regions – perhaps the worst of all were the 2022 floods that covered a third of Pakistan, but the April-May floods in southern Brazil were a catastrophe that “displaced more than 80,000 people, led to over 150,000 being injured and, on the 29th of May, to 169 fatalities with 44 people still missing” as of June.
Repeated floods in New England and the Houston region are among the US’s climate disasters, while the UK and continental Europe, Japan and several African nations, including Mozambique and Kenya this year, have been hit hard by flooding.
Only last month, according to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, “In Chad, where an estimated 1.5 million people have been affected, initial assessments point to the destruction of over 164,000 homes, with all 23 provinces of the country involved, and Tandjile, Mayo-Kebbi Est, Logone and Lac among the most afflicted provinces. Over 259,000 hectares of croplands have been wiped out, heightening the risk of food shortages in a country already grappling with chronic food insecurity.” Floods are not new, but the intensity and frequency of catastrophic flooding is. The climate crisis is a water crisis.
We now live on a more violent planet than the one we left behind a few decades ago, the one we will look back on as peaceful, gentle, predictable. More violent, more unpredictable, more chaotic, more destructive, more dangerous. Some of that danger is heat itself, but water is proving to be a major part of climate crisis. The basic equation cited by climate scientists is that warmer air holds more water. “For every degree celsius that Earth’s atmospheric temperature rises, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere can increase by about 7%, according to the laws of thermodynamics,” says Nasa.
Which means more warming will create more rainfall – but the climate crisis also shifts wind and ocean currents, making how and where that rainfall arrives unpredictable. The old terminology of “hundred-” and “thousand-year” events no longer makes sense, now that they are happening so often.
Behind the violence of climate-driven extreme weather is the violence of the fossil fuel industry, whose scientists clearly recognized climate change’s coming impact and whose leaders decided to go for it. Their signature is on these storms, on the smashed homes and smashed lives, the miles of mud, the pools of filthy water, the broken power stations and broken forests.
We now understand climate change, both causes and impacts, with precision, and we know what the solutions are, and we also know the obstacles to those solutions. None is greater than the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who serve it.”
Earth’s ‘vital signs’ show humanity’s future in balance, say climate experts
Record emissions, temperatures and population mean more scientists are looking into possibility of societal collapse, report says
Israel unleashes the Nothing to consume us all in tides of nihilistic savagery, atrocities, terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, fiendishly designed by Hitler and Franco as the doctrine of Total War and tested at Guernica to subjugate us through abjection, despair, and learned helplessness, for Israel is an empire of dehumanization and theft of the soul.
All of this I defy.
In Palestine and Lebanon, and throughout a world shadowed by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and imprisoned, Occupied, or in the path of imperial conquest and dominion by carceral states of force and control, enemies of humankind and our universal human rights sow division, weaponizing ideas of faith, race, and national identity in service to power.
This we must resist.
When they come for us, as those who would enslave us always have and will, let them find not a humankind which has abandoned hope and each other, but a United Humankind and a band of brothers, sisters, and others who are unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit. Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
This let us defend.
“When there is no hope, one can do impossible things, glorious things”; so said Jean Genet to me in Beirut 1982, as we refused to surrender to IDF and were about to be burned alive as they had set fire to our cafe. I have lived by this principle for forty two years of liberation struggle, as the nations of Lebanon and Palestine do now, and I with them once again and always.
This I advise as a principle of action, with one thing more; Solidarity. If we abandon not our fellows, and refuse to submit, we become Unconquered and free. And we will one day seize power from those who would enslave us. For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of October 17 2023, Chaos Is the Great Hope of the Powerless: Case of the Hamas-Israel War; A wise friend has questioned my valorization of Chaos as a principle of change in the context of Black Saturday, a term which describes the Hamas attack on Israel and the immense forces of terror, death, destruction, fracture, grief, rage, and revenge it unleashed, becoming a single tide of darkness.
Thank you once again for your kindness and your wisdom.
In this moment of tragedy I am thinking of Chaos as a disruptive force of fracture and change which has stripped us bare of our ideologies to reveal the fragile humanity beneath, and may be leveraged for liberty or tyranny by how we respond as a species and global civilization. As Guillermo del Toro writes in Carnival Row, Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.
What do I hope for now, for the peoples of Israel and Palestine? That both may unite to free each other, but first we will need universal humanitarian aid to any one on either side of these lines of division, and a Reckoning for the war crimes of both Hamas and Israel. For Israel took the bait, and gave Hamas the victory; they are now equal as war criminals without legitimacy.
Israel took the bait, and the world is calling them out for war crimes; this may be end of the Netanyahu alt right regime and the dawn of a new Middle East. I was absolutely expecting Biden and allies to enable Israel’s Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem; in this I rejoice to be wrong about human nature. Maybe the idea of human rights is not dead. As my mother used to sing to students who asked her to make authorizing statements about anything, artifact of a Shakespeare in Thirty Minutes theatrical show that toured nationally with some of her students in it, bouncing her open hands left and right; Maybe, maybe not, Maybe, maybe not.
No one seems to have noticed publicly that this means Israeli intelligence has been infiltrated. It is also possible that unknown puppetmasters have infiltrated and seized control of both Hamas and Israel, for purposes which are unclear and antithetical to the interests and well being of either. We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, friends.
What Reckoning, for crimes against humanity by an organization of terror which has long been a vanguard of anticolonial revolutionary struggle under the imposed conditions of Occupation, slavery, and a genocidal Blockade?
Not the totalization of the general population of Palestinians in a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing as Netanyahu wishes and Hamas intends as a strategy of delegitimation of the Israel state in the moral equivalence of terror, for if Israel, her patron America, and the international community accept the terms of struggle offered by Hamas they too become organizations of terror, and Hamas wins.
This is a decolonial revolution, and victory goes to the side who can establish the legitimacy and moral supremacy of their story. As my father taught me, Never play someone else’s game.
Hamas also wishes in this provocation to weld the peoples of Gaza to them; this is a primary strategy of fascism and tyranny, to make the people in whose name you claim to act complicit in unforgiveable crimes. Always beware those who claim to speak and act in your name as a strategy of your subjugation.
A third layer of meaning here is the ambiguity of the geopolitical and world-historical forces beyond the Holy Land; Russia, her ally Iran and the Iranian Dominion of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, especially the Assad regime of Syria which has sent forces into Israel as a client state of Russia and Iran, and Hezbollah, which offers many of the social services of a government and may be in the process of emergence as an independent state, or a true empire in the transnational sense like the Holy Roman Empire. The great question here is; has Russia opened a new front of her plan of global conquest and made this a theatre of World War Three?
How does one answer all of this? How bring a Reckoning for the terror of Hamas without authorizing and becoming complicit in the greater terror of Israel’s looming genocide of the Palestinians?
The forms that might take give me pause, for they will determine our future, and though I know what I myself must do, I do not like it, and am calling out here in my journals, where I work through the consequences of my decisions before acting on them, for unknown possibilities I myself cannot envision.
Yes, my friend, Chaos has profoundly destructive forms; death among them, ruin and civilizational collapse, the negation of all we have claimed as our identity, but all are also measures of the adaptive range of systems, and can give birth to new forms from this liberated energy. And as you point out, all forces operate in opposite directions at once, creating their own opposition. These are not moral forces in balance, but ambivalent forces which contain each other in recursion.
So, while our nations try to shatter each other’s truths with overwhelming force and mass terror, I must find a path of least force to salvage what I can of our humanity, and I hope I will not fail as I did at Mariupol and Panjshir.
This may be all we have as humans lost in chasms of darkness and a Wilderness of Mirrors, this refusal to abandon each other to dehumanization, but like our refusal to submit to authority it is a power which cannot be taken from us, even in imposed conditions of struggle designed to produce abjection and learned helplessness, or rage and tribalization as identity politics and the manufacture of consent to be fed into engines of death for the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and tyrannies.
Such ephemeral and insubstantial things, like whispered prayers to abyssal unknowns, figments of love, hope, faith, which belong to the shadows, the delusions of grandeur of beasts harnessed to systems of oppression by others who yet dream that we might become more.
Dream with me.
Embrace our absurdity as flawed things wrestling with immense forces of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization in a mad quest to become human, under imposed conditions of struggle typified by atrocities designed to produce abjection, learned helplessness, and despair, as we are consumed by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege whose primary weapon is division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as identity politics and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Against all of this we have only our solidarity with each other, the redemptive power of love, our refusal to submit or to believe and trust authority which frees us as Unconquered and self created beings and Living Autonomous Zones, and our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves. Powers which cannot be taken from us, and which can seize the power of those who would enslave us.
This is why I practice the art of believing impossible things, but only those I myself have chosen or created. And crucially, act to make them real. And in this case we must bring a Reckoning to the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity regardless of who they may be or in the name of what cause they act, and silence the drums of war.
Dream with me, but act in solidarity to make it real.
As the Mad Hatter says to Alice; “That is an excellent practice, but right now you might want to focus on the Jabberwock.”
Just so.
Confronting the Jabberwock
Arabic
6 أكتوبر 2024 حول حرب إسرائيل ضد الإنسانية
تطلق إسرائيل العنان للعدم لتلتهمنا جميعًا في موجات من الوحشية العدمية والفظائع والإرهاب والتطهير العرقي والإبادة الجماعية، التي صممها هتلر وفرانكو بوحشية باعتبارها مبدأ الحرب الشاملة واختبرتها في جيرنيكا لإخضاعنا من خلال الذل واليأس والعجز المكتسب، لأن إسرائيل إمبراطورية نزع الإنسانية وسرقة الروح.
أتحدى كل هذا.
في فلسطين ولبنان، وفي جميع أنحاء العالم الذي تخيم عليه فاشيات الدم والإيمان والأرض والسجن والاحتلال، أو في طريق الغزو الإمبراطوري والهيمنة من قبل دول السجن والقوة والسيطرة، يزرع أعداء البشرية وحقوق الإنسان العالمية الانقسام، ويسلحون أفكار الإيمان والعرق والهوية الوطنية في خدمة السلطة.
هذا يجب أن نقاومه.
عندما يأتون إلينا، كما فعل أولئك الذين يريدون استعبادنا دائمًا وسيفعلون، فلن يجدوا بشرًا تخلوا عن الأمل وعن بعضهم البعض، بل بشرًا متحدين ومجموعة من الإخوة والأخوات وغيرهم ممن لا يمكن قهرهم في التضامن ورفض الاستسلام. لماذا يجب أن نكون سجانين لبعضنا البعض، وليس محررين لبعضنا البعض؟
دعونا ندافع عن هذا.
Hebrew
6 באוקטובר 2024 על מלחמת ישראל מול האנושות
ישראל משחררת את הכלום כדי לצרוך את כולנו בגאות של פראות ניהיליסטית, זוועות, טרור, טיהור אתני ורצח עם, שתוכנן באכזריות על ידי היטלר ופרנקו כדוקטרינת המלחמה הטוטאלית ונבדקה בגרניקה כדי להכניע אותנו באמצעות חוסר אונים, ייאוש וחוסר אונים נלמד. , כי ישראל היא אימפריה של דה-הומניזציה וגניבת נפש.
את כל זה אני מתריס.
בפלסטין ולבנון, וברחבי העולם המוצל על ידי פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה וכלואים, כבושים, או בדרך של כיבוש ושליטה אימפריאלית על ידי מדינות קרסראליות של כוח ושליטה, אויבי המין האנושי וזכויות האדם האוניברסאליות שלנו זורעים. חלוקה, מימוש רעיונות של אמונה, גזע וזהות לאומית בשירות לשלטון.
לזה עלינו להתנגד.
כשהם באים בשבילנו, כפי שתמיד עשו וירצו מי שיעבדו אותנו, הבה ימצאו לא מין אנושי שנטש את התקווה וזה את זה, אלא המין האנושי המאוחד וחבורת אחים, אחיות ואחרים שאי אפשר לכבוש בסולידריות. וסירוב להגיש. מדוע עלינו להיות כלואים זה של זה, ולא המשחררים זה של זה?
זה נותן לנו להגן.
Progressive Democrats bring resolution calling for ceasefire in Israel-Hamas war
In Palestine and Lebanon, our taxes buy the deaths of children. And their mothers, among other civilian noncombatants.
Among all of the negation of our truths which Israel’s War Against Humanity has wrought, here are two truths which emerge from the legacies of our unfolding history we will never again be able to unsee or to avoid confrontation with; there is no right of defense against a people you are Occupying, and no moral equivalence between the violence used by a slavemaster and the violence used by a slave to break his chains.
In the face of mass protests throughout America and the world, met with repression of dissent and propaganda by the state and both our political parties in a Great Wall of Silence, we persist in refusing to de escalate the conflict using the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of Israel to end a genocide in which we are complicit.
America has abandoned our principles of universal rights and our duty of care for others, and any pretense to morality or legitimacy as a democracy; this was among the many goals of Black Saturday, and both Israel and America took the bait.
Where the Party of Treason and Tyranny is an enthusiastic sponsor of autocracies and state terror globally including Israel, the Democratic Party has maintained a strategic silence regarding our complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity, refusing to acknowledge it as a historical fact or the peace movement which drove Genocide Joe out of the election but replaced him with an overseer of the carceral state who wishes to rain doom upon the helpless migrants at our border and on the Palestinians whose nation is a Bantustan of slave labor and a concentration camp Occupied by an enemy to whom only their fellow Jews are truly human.
I’m calling her Kommandant Kamala, unless of course the salvation of both the Israelis and the Palestinians as equals and fellow human beings becomes the center of her campaign, rather than enforcement of our dominion at our border and in our colony of Israel.
Of course this is due to the nature and dynamics of power, and the recursive forces of fear, power, and force which act to centralize power to authority and subjugate slave castes through fear, thought control, and violence. All states are embodied violence, and in this democracies are no better than tyrannies.
We have changed so little since the Pharaohs and priest-kings of the first city-states set themselves above all others as interpreters and spokesmen of the gods, and hired brutal thugs with aristocratic titles to keep the slaves at their work. I was hoping we were better than that.
Civilization falls with the derelict antiquity of Palestine and Lebanon, as our capacity for empathy withers under forces of degradation and dehumanization. Soon we too will become nothing, like the children we murder from a sanitized remove, for whom we feel no pity, mercy, or compassion, as they not white and therefore beyond the circle of belonging and otherness on which our elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege are constructed.
The enemies of liberty wish to enslave us through divisions of ethnicity, faith, and historical national identity, and through strategies of commodification, falsification, and dehumanization, to hollow out the values of democracy through subversion and capture of our ownership of ourselves and of human being, meaning, and value. This too we must Resist.
This has been a terrible year as our humanity becomes a Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror; that which unites us as human beings has been shattered, and we are captive in the strange reflected images of its discontiguous surfaces. But we need not let this stand.
Among the first questions which confront us in bringing a Reckoning to any systems of oppression, tyranny and carceral states of force and control, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, subjugation to hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege, and violations of our universal human rights is that of just cause or casus belli; who is responsible for these crimes against humanity?
Within days of Black Saturday I was at the scene hunting the perpetrators, and what I found was a nest of vipers. What happened was a set of recursive and interdependent causes allied in a primary event of fracture and disruption which remain occluded still; including a coup within Hamas against its leadership, especially those targeted for assassination later by Israel on a false claim of having ordered the attack, by a Hamas faction opposed to peace in conspiracy with Netanyahu’s regime perpetrated this tragedy, but not alone. Several other groups, at least two who are nominally enemies, a criminal syndicate with no political ideology whatever, plus a IDF Recon team, Sayaret Shaked or a successor force, which specializes in committing atrocities against Islamic groups while disguised as Arabs to sow division, were in the lead elements of the attack force, and joined quickly by opportunists of various kinds. Within days the special operations forces of several nations were in the mix, including allies of Palestine from the Iranian Dominion of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq as well as Russian intelligence and special operations forces, possibly with some of their African allies. This means Hamas cannot free all the hostages, because some are held by groups beyond their control.
But there is more, much more; an unknown third party infiltrated both Israeli and Palestinian organizations to play them off against each other for purposes I cannot guess but are obviously inimical to both, and to global peace and security. This is a long game, and our opponent as yet remains in the shadows.
Who has both the skill and the motive to do this? Cui bono?
Netanyahu benefits, because this keeps him in power and gives him a causus belli for the imperial conquest and dominion of the Middle East and the Final Solution of the Palestinians; and his key ally Trump benefits in our election by staining the armour of Biden and Harris with cruelty and complicity in genocide, though both are trapped by decades old policies and alliances and kept in check by the vast wealth and political power of AIPAC, and both Trump and Netanyahu benefit by making the idea of human rights meaningless.
But the legitimacy of Israel and America are a cost no one in either nations governments or intelligence and special operations communities would trade for these wins, and though the Fourth Reich, by which I mean a network of descendants of actual Nazis who have infiltrated the American state and others for seventy years, of which Trump is a figurehead and the de facto Fuhrer, clearly has the Long Game plans, the resources, and the genius, evil though it may be, to do this, no Nazi would ever help the Zionist state of Israel become an empire. This leaves the Russian FSB and other intelligence agencies and Spetznaz forces, also with both the patience or vision, resources, and skill to do this, which may have been developing for decades; but Russia is committed to advancing her ally Iran’s dominion of the Middle East, which makes her the primary enemy of Israel and the Arab-American Alliance, and we have fought savage proxy wars in Syria and elsewhere to prove it.
No, our nemesis and the true perpetrator of Black Saturday is not Russia or Iran, nor the Fourth Reich, and only partially and directly Trump and Netanyahu equally with the jihadist faction of Hamas which I believe to originate with its blood enemy and rival for control of Gaza Al Qaeda; we face an unknown enemy willing to engineer a genocide to advance its mysterious goals, and all I can tell you about them is that they are far from done with us.
We live in interesting times.
Let us return to First Principles with a simple question; Who is suffering and in need of mercy? It is a similar question to the one I ask to determine when and how to use force and violence, Who holds power?, but with a very different direction as to the unfolding of our future.
Here in a Holy Land divided by the sectarian particulars of how to be human together in accord with the will of the Infinite as universal brotherhood and love, crimes which define the limits of the human are perpetrated against our most innocent, utterly powerless, and incapable of threatening anyone; children. Children whom the enemy of our humanity, the state of Israel and its sponsors including America, either brutalize and kill with glee in the hysteria of power or refuse to see and recognize in complicity. And our history surfaces one figure to represent all of the children sacrificed to power and hate, and doomed by the complicity of silence.
I ask you now, all of humankind, to abandon the path of our dehumanization and renounce genocide, ethnic cleansing, wars of conquest and dominion, and crimes against humanity.
I ask, I beg, I demand; I ask you in the name of Anne Frank.
As I wrote in my post of October 10 2024, Black Saturday: A Nation Divided Against Itself In Service To Power By Weaponized History, Faith, Race, and National Identity; Palestine Versus Israel, Liberation Struggle Versus Imperial Colonial Occupation, Round Ad Nauseum In An Endless Litany of Woes, Atrocities, and Horrors;
Forward: to my comrades in the Palestinian Resistance:
Hello everyone;
I have some thoughts on the recent events in Gaza, Gaza where I have fought and lost someone I loved, and actions by Hamas whom I have fought alongside and count as my brothers in revolutionary struggle; actions of October 7 or Black Saturday which include the taking of hostages and murder of families, war crimes which have made peace impossible in the near future and have delegitimized the cause of liberation of Palestine by making it ambiguous with dehumanization and atrocities. Such is the nature of power, and of fear weaponized in service to power.
This now is my Resistance in the cause of the peoples of Palestine and Israel, a people divided by history and sectarian theocratic terror. I question the origins and motives of such actions, which trade a tactical goal of demonstrating that Netanyahu’s alt-right monsters cannot deliver the security by which they subjugate Israel, for a strategic one of legitimacy, and will not only weld American support to the tyrant but grant him permission and immunity for the Final Solution of the Palestinian problem he has long dreamed of.
How can we salvage something of our humanity from this?
Herein I invite question, and dreams of a better future than we have the past.
Thank you for hearing me.
Hamas has brought the Chaos to the American Empire and disrupted the legitimation of Israel by the Arab American Alliance versus the Imperial Dominion of Iran, and in reaction to the relentless genocide of the Palestinians by the state of Israel now captured by Netanyahu and his alt right band of thieves.
Here now is the fulcrum of change and reckoning for seventy years of Israeli state terror and imperial conquest in an amoral and loathsome apartheid regime which inverts the values of its founding by becoming the death camps its citizens escaped, and betrays the hope and ideal of a refuge from hate and sectarian division as a reflection of the nazis from whom they have internalized oppression as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Hamas has shattered all of this, potentially, with the myth of state surveillance and control as useful and effective means of subjugation of the slave castes of any state, and the myth of the invincibility and supremacy of Israeli intelligence and military hegemony of which it is a figure of the might of carceral states, tyrannies, and empires, and the calculated reprisals by Israel which will follow are designed by Hamas in this provocation to delegitimize Israel and fracture the solidarity of her allies and collaborators in terror, of which America remains the principal sponsor and villain.
So many of the reactions to this tragedy both here among my friends and in the news media seem baffled, caught in the forks of a classic dilemma in which our heroes and our villains trade places, for in this stunning slave rebellion wherein the victims of genocide and erasure have attacked their masters, the Wretched of the Earth with whom we might normally empathize have violated two of our most cherished moral values and rules of conduct; they are not defending but attacking, which makes justifications for war and the use of social force irrelevant though this ahistorical interpretation of events ignores seventy years of oppression and authorizes the conqueror by classifying the liberation struggle of their victims as terrorism, an argument we can therefore nullify as pro Israeli misdirection and the apologetics of power, and a second and far more serious point; Hamas has taken hostages and killed civilians including children, war crimes which violate our universal human rights and place the perpetrators beyond all laws and all limits.
A friend has written an apology for statements born of compassion which might be confused with support of Israel as a state rather than as a people, a distinction which makes all the difference; and to this I have written the following reply:
There are no good guys in this story, just a people divided by history brutalizing each other with a savagery that threatens our humanity itself. I have fought in Gaza and lost someone there, and from my witness of history I say there is only one kind of truth which does not become a Rashomon Gate when faith is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, and this is true of both sides in this or any war; Who is bleeding? Who is suffering? Who requires acts of grace and mercy?
Not who merits compassion, for often there are no innocent, and as Shaw teaches us in Pygmalion with the iconic speech of Alfred Doolittle this places a moral burden on victims which is unjust; merely who is suffering and needs our help, in this moment, always the only time we have.
Solidarity of action, resistance, and liberation struggle all come after this; Tikkun Olam, a Jewish concept of reparative justice and praxis or the action of values, which I often describe as healing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
You have nothing to apologize for; states work very hard to confuse and conflate legitimation of the state with defense of those in whose name it claims to act, using narratives of victimization, for who wears the white hat is a hero and beyond question. All states do this, for it is the nature of power to become centralized to authority as force and control. Among the true horrors of identity politics is awakening to realize that one is the beneficiary of a genocide, of slavery, of patriarchy, of unequal power in any form.
So we are lost in Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, rewritten histories, falsification. But it is my fate to question all things, and many of them do not bear the test of unbelief.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
In this case I question the origins and motives of a blitzkreig which demonstrates the vulnerability of Israel, a tactical objective, at the cost of strategic goals; the immediate results include unifying global support of Israel and dividing the crucial solidarity between the anti-Netanyahu democracy and peace movements within Israel from the liberation struggle of their slave caste, the Palestinians, which was until this disruptive event in the process of becoming one united nation.
Cui Bono? Neither Palestinians nor Israelis, though in the imperial totalitarian state of Israel and its fascisms of blood, faith, and soil they share a common enemy. Netanyahu and his regime benefit, though his promise of security for the people of Israel has been proven illusory and the feared Israeli intelligence and military a paper tiger as Hamas intended; whether this weakens or strengthens his hand is yet to be seen.
Security is an illusion, one convenient for tyrants in the manufacture of consent to be subjugated. In this area of liberation struggle the victory of Hamas in breaching the Wall has been an unambiguous good.
Bring down the Wall, all the walls. Not only the walls of our borders and prisons, but the walls of ideas between peoples most of all. In the long run, only this will bring us peace and a United Humankind.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
No matter where you begin with divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Why, O Israel, reproduce the conditions of your historic trauma as the prison guards, with others cast in your former role? Why, when we could be guarantors of each other’s universal human rights in a free society of equals?
Let us emerge from the legacies of our history, and create ourselves anew.
What happens next?
Disruptive and polarizing events often confront us with a choice; who is your white hat and who your black hat in this story? Whose play will you back when they enter the arena at high noon? We will begin to become human when we free ourselves of this tyranny of good and evil, so vulnerable to the lies and misdirection of those who would enslave us and who claim to speak and act in our name, especially in theocracies. For as Voltaire wrote; “Those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities”. Gott Mitt Uns; it is the most terrible battlecry, for it authorizes anything.
Today the empire begins to strike back, as Biden declares that America will stand with Israel, with the state in exacting revenge through conquest and not her people in freeing the hostages mind you, in the abominable reprisals Netanyahu promises, having been handed by his enemies immunity and sanction for the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem he has so long dreamed of. Both this immediate trigger event of Total War as a doctrine created by Hitler and Franco and tested at Guernica and the conditions which created it are consequences of American complicity, for we as a nation have failed to enact the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction policies against Israeli state terror and tyranny which might have prevented it, and if we are to be liberators and not conquerors we must at minimum now pressure Israel to lift the Blockade of Gaza and recognize Hamas as its legitimate government. Let us send humanitarian aid, not armies.
If we send warships to help Israel conquer Palestine, and not humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, America loses and our enemies win.
Netanyahu and Biden have declared intentions to answer force and fear with greater force and fear, as Israel accepts the offer of the moral equivalence of terror by her partner in this dance, Hamas. This will bring not lesser but greater terror, not democracy and a free society of equals but the centralization of power to totalitarian states of force and control. From the perspective of Israel and America or of any state, this is the true purpose of external threats.
As my father once said; “Politics is the art of fear, and fear is the basis of human exchange. Fear is an untrustworthy servant and a terrible master; so, whose instrument will it be?”
Of the recursive forces of fear, power, and force which are the true origin of evil and of its forms as violence, war, and police states, I say to you this one true thing; fear and force cannot answer fear and force. Only love can do this, and the redemptive power of love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of Power, from falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Why are we each others jailors, and not each others liberators?
Here is the memorial I wrote for my friend, assassinated in Gaza by an Israeli sniper during the fighting in 2021; June 21 2022, We Balance the Terror of Our Nothingness With the Joy of Total Freedom, the Flaws of Our Humanity With the Redemptive Power of Love, and the Brokenness of the World With Our Absurd Hope For the Limitless Possibilities of Becoming Human; Death is the ultimate life disruptive event, the mirror image of Chaos as creative force and the adaptive potential of a system.
This day I have re-enacted the stages of grief process as I relive an event of a year ago, caught in the labyrinth of its story, and as always with such complexes of memory, history, and identity I emerge through its passage with changed perspective.
Some stories can shatter our lives, but also free us from the legacies of history and the limits of our former selves.
This is a story which has become interwoven with my annual reading of Sartre’s works in celebration of his birthday, a juxtaposition which I find wholly appropriate, illuminating, and strangely hopeful.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
We choose our friends and lovers from among those reflections which embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves or fully integrate into our consciousness and personality; and it is the interface between these two bounded realms, the Ideal and the Real, which I am driven to interrogate today.
Here is where the art of questioning lives, at the intersection of Socratic method and classical rhetoric, the dialectics of history, and the problematization of our motives, feelings, and processes of ideation through the methods of psychotherapy.
We speak of the juxtaposition of imaginal and actual realms of being as a form of Dadaist collage as pioneered by Tristan Tzara and instrumentalized as methodology by William S. Burroughs which creates the universe of our experience, of the discontiguous, relative, ambiguous, and ephemeral nature of truth described by Akutagawa in Rashomon Gate and the methods of fiction exemplified by Raymond Queneau as applied to identity and self construal, and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty as dyadic forces of the psyche which work themselves out through our relationships with ourselves and with others. These three parallel and interdependent processes shape who we become, and how we instrumentalize others in our self creation.
We must first own the fact that dealing with our memories of someone is not the same as the lived experience of our history; it is all one sided and has been moved into an interior space of performance, and in which reimagination and transformation is ongoing. The map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski teaches us, nor is our idea of a person equal to the actual person themselves.
What parts of myself do I embody as a figural space into which to grow in the character whom I have thought of as Cleopatra, with all of the ambivalence, power, legacies of cultural history, and liminality such an identification implies, how do I imagine her now, and what kind of story have I cast us in?
I think of her now in terms of Rachel McAdams’ wily, sophisticated, and transgressive Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, as she became throughout the twelve years of our work in liberation struggle for the independence of Palestine, with elements of Millie Bobby Brown’s fearless, brilliant, and utterly without boundaries Enola Holmes as she began, bearing onward the colours of a beloved and presumed martyred family member in the course of investigating his disappearance. I am reasonably certain that this is not how she saw herself.
For illumination as to how a Palestinian woman might imagine herself, the characters she may choose to play as role models and the stories she may embody as ritual enactments, even a highly unusual one such as she, we may look to the wonderfully rich culture of Palestine’s female film directors and authors; of auteurs Annemarie Jacir, Maysaloun Hamoud, Mai Masri, and Farah Nabulsi, and of novelists Susan Abulhawa, Liana Badr, Ghada Karmi, Sahar Khalifeh, Hala Alyan, and Sahar Mustafah.
Bearing in mind that all such reading lists are nothing less than a set of authorized identities. As Margaret Atwood so splendidly demonstrates in her works, our intertexts are primary in the construction of our identities, including those of sex and gender, as mimesis and as dialectical processes of history.
And this is where it never ceases to be fascinating, the study of human being, meaning, and value and the limitless possibilities of becoming human. For in the sphere of our relationships with others, parallel and interdependent with our relationships between the masculine and feminine halves of our psyche, each co-evolves with the other in recursive processes of growth and adaptation to change in the construction of identity.
I say again; we interpret the actions of others and form relationships on the basis of our self-construal and ideas of ourselves, and we use our relations with real people to shape who we wish to become.
How does this work out in real life? As a personal example of the discontiguous gaps of meaning in the interfaces between bounded realms of masculine and feminine personae, a free space of creative play, I offer the artifacts of memory of a figure which may or may not align with the martyr I know only by her Code Name: Cleopatra.
Of the Last Stand in which we met and forged an alliance, betrayed and caught in a trap which we turned against our enemies who had trapped themselves in with us, which I think of as the final battle scene in the film Mr & Mrs Smith, this operatic quest was set in motion by the conflict of dominion between Hamas and al Qaeda in Gaza during August of 2009, during which the forces of light prevailed over those of darkness in the victory of Hamas, with Israel playing each against the other through infiltration agents, spies, deniable assets, and use of a special Recon team masquerading as various Arab factions to commit atrocities against presumed rival Arab groups in a classic policy of divide and conquer. This space of play was complicated by clan vendettas such as hers, and the usual political and religious fragmentation, crime syndicates, mercenary forces, tribalism, corruption, and the shadow wars of foreign states.
Our paths crossed several times over the next twelve years, always in memorable circumstances, sometimes as allies and others as rivals, often as both. Which of these is the real and true version of her, or of myself? Such iterations of our images are without number, like the captured and distorted selves in funhouse mirrors aligned to reflect into infinity.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I contrast with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, evil genius of the C.I.A.’s Counterintelligence Service on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
The Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat uses the phrase, in a story about the creation of a fictitious officer bearing documents designed to trick the Nazis into preparing for the invasion of Europe somewhere other than Sicily, a series I watched with rapt attention because each of us is created by our stories exactly like this false identity attached to the body of a derelict. Within each of us, a team of authors, archetypes and transpersonal figures like the anima which concerns us here, create our personae through stories, a network of memories, histories, and identity; and they do so for their own purposes, which we do not always understand.
As T. S. Eliot has written in Gerontin, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities”
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as Shakespeare teaches us in Act IV, Scene 1 of The Tempest, a line spoken by Ariel. For if we are ephemeral and insubstantial beings, constructions of our stories, this also means that the ontological nature of human being is a ground of struggle which can be claimed by seizures of power.
The first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
As I wrote in my post of June 21 2021, The Hope of Humankind: On Becoming Autonomous Zones as Agents of Chaos and Transformative Change; A friend has written in despair of our significance and hope for the liberation of humankind, of the impactfulness of our lives and our struggles which balance the flaws of our humanity against the monstrous and vast forces of a system of dehumanization, falsification, and commodification; for to be human is to live in a state of existential crisis and struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Today is the birthday of Jean Paul Sartre, and so this event finds me reading once again his magnificent reimagination of Jean Genet in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr; Genet who set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982.
Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.
We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said “Fix bayonets?”
And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty nine years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the first of many Last Stands.
This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell with its iconic crack, I am broken open to the suffering of others and the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.
This morning I awoke to a call to identify the body of a friend missing and believed killed in Gaza by Israeli terrorists in the savage street fighting which followed the rocket attacks of last week, which I was unable to do; I searched for my friend in this sad and ruined form, like the skin of a wild thing which has sung itself utterly away, and could recognize nothing.
Where is my friend, agile, lithe, mercurial, fearless, insightful and quick witted, who always had four scenarios running and three escape routes, who survived against impossible odds through improvisation and leveraging chaos, whose vision could discern true motives within the secret chambers of the human heart and play them like an instrument as songs of rapture and terror, who chameleon-like and protean could shift identities as needed and behind their masks move among her enemies unseen?
I never knew her true name; perhaps she no longer had one, as is true for so many of us who play the Great Game of futures and the possibilities of becoming human, a term popularized by Rudyard Kipling in the novel Kim. My own names are numberless as the stars, like those of an actor who has played multitudes of roles in films and theatres of many kinds.
She first entered my orbit during the victorious struggle of Hamas against al Qaeda for dominion of Gaza in August of 2009 in Rafah, an Egyptian Palestinian drawn into the maelstrom of war like countless others by family duty and vendetta.
Yet she said no to Israeli authority at great peril when she could have said yes and become a slave, stood in solidarity with others when she could have run; this was a choice, one which confers agency, autonomy, and self-ownership as a seizure of power in a limited and deterministic context. Refusal to submit is the primary human act, one which cannot be taken from us, wherein we become Unconquered and free, and able to liberate others.
So it is that we may escape the wilderness of mirrors in which we wander, a realm of lies and illusions, captured and distorted images, falsification and the theft of the soul. For the authentic self, the image which we seize and claim as our own, flies free of its mad circus of seductions and traps. Hence we achieve our true selves and form, in rapture and exaltation as beings of our own uniqueness.
Impossible that such grandeur could be reduced to its material form, like the abandoned shell of a fantastic sea creature which has grown beyond its limits and moved on, to realms unknown.
The lines spoken by Hamlet while holding the skull of his friend Yorick came unbidden to my thoughts; “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?”
For twelve years you danced with death, and danced away laughing, until today.
Farewell, my friend; I’ll see you in the eyes of the defiant ones, who bear your fire onward into the unknown, and with it I hope your laughter. Our successors will need both fire and laughter, if the future we win for them is to be equal to its price, and worth living in.
Our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus from which warriors arise; from each, multitudes. For we live on as echoes and reflections in the lives of others, in the consequences and effects of our actions, in the good we can do for others which gathers force over time, and in the meaning, value, and possibilities we create.
How can choosing death and freedom be better than submission to authority and its weaponization of fear and force?
My experience of accepting death in confronting force and violence finds parallels in the mock executions of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maurice Blanchot, and I’m not done challenging state terror and tyranny and forces of repression. I’m going to stand between people with guns and their victims in future, as I have many times in past, and here I find resilience among my motivating and informing sources; Sartre’s total freedom won by refusal to submit, and Camus’ rebellion against authority which renders force meaningless when met by disobedience, give me the ability to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
And all who are mortal share these burdens with me. In this all who resist subjugation by authority are alike as Living Autonomous Zones, bearing seeds of change; we can say with the figure of Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
We are all Nikolai Gogol’s hero in Diary of a Madman, caught in the wheels of a great machine he services, like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. But we know that we are trapped and enslaved, and we know how and why; we know the secrets of our condition which our masters would keep silent, and in refusing to be silent we can free ourselves and our fellows. This Michel Foucault called truth telling; a poetic vision of reimagination and sacred calling to pursue the truth which bears transformative power.
So here I offer all of you words of hope for moments of despair, the horror of meaninglessness, the grief of loss, and the guilt of survivorship.
Your voice has defied our nothingness, and resounds throughout the chasms of a hostile and dehumanizing world; gathering force and transformative power as it finds a thousand echoes, and begins to awaken refusal to submit to authority and to heal the pathology of our falsification and disconnectedness.
The voice of even one human being who bears a wound of humanity which opens him to the pain of others and who places his life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who in resistance to tyranny and terror, force and control, becomes unconquered and free, such a voice of liberation is unstoppable as the tides, an agent of reimagination and transformation which seizes the gates of our prisons and frees the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Despair not and be joyful, for we who are living Autonomous Zones help others break the chains of their enslavement simply by condition of being as well as action; for we violate norms, transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, expose the lies and illusions of authority, and render the forces of repression powerless to compel obedience.
This is the primary revolutionary struggle which precedes and underlies all else; the seizure of ownership of ourselves from those who would enslave us.
Such is the hope of humankind.
Diary of Anne Frank full movie 2009
The Wilderness of Mirrors; why are we each others jailors, and not each others liberators?
“The White House has released a statement from the US president, Joe Biden, on the anniversary of the Hamas-led 7 October attacks on southern Israel.
Biden said:
On this day last year, the sun rose on what was supposed to be a joyous Jewish holiday. By sunset, October 7 had become the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Today marks one year of mourning for the more than 1,200 innocent people of all ages, including 46 Americans, massacred in southern Israel by the terrorist group Hamas. One year since Hamas committed horrific acts of sexual violence.
One year since more than 250 innocents were taken hostage, including 12 Americans. One year for the survivors carrying wounds, seen and unseen, who will never be the same. And one year of a devastating war. On this solemn anniversary, let us bear witness to the unspeakable brutality of the October 7th attacks but also to the beauty of the lives that were stolen that day…
I believe that history will also remember October 7th as a dark day for the Palestinian people because of the conflict that Hamas unleashed that day. Far too many civilians have suffered far too much during this year of conflict — and tens of thousands have been killed, a human toll made far worse by terrorists hiding and operating among innocent people.
We will not stop working to achieve a ceasefire deal in Gaza that brings the hostages home, allows for a surge in humanitarian aid to ease the suffering on the ground, assures Israel’s security, and ends this war. Israelis and Palestinians alike deserve to live in security, dignity, and peace.”
Statement by Vice President Harris Marking One Year Since the October 7th Attack
“I will never forget the horror of October 7, 2023. 1,200 innocent people, including 46 Americans, were massacred by Hamas terrorists. Women raped on the side of the road. 250 people kidnapped. It was the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. What Hamas did that day was pure evil – it was brutal and sickening. And it has rekindled a deep fear among the Jewish people not just in Israel, but in the United States and around the world.
The long, extraordinary arc of Jewish history is full of pogroms and prejudice, slaughter and separation. And now, in our own generation, there is another moment that the world must never forget.
I am devastated by the loss and pain of the Israeli people as a result of the heinous October 7 attack. Doug and I pray for the families of the victims and hope they find solace in remembering the lives their loved ones lived.
We also pray for the safety of Jewish people all around the world. We all must ensure nothing like the horrors of October 7 ever happen again. I will do everything in my power to ensure that the threat Hamas poses is eliminated, that it is never again able to govern Gaza, that it fails in its mission to annihilate Israel, and that the people of Gaza are free from the grip of Hamas. I will never stop fighting for the release of all the hostages, including the seven American citizens, living and deceased, still held: Omer, Edan, Sagui, Keith, Judy, Gad, and Itay. I will never stop fighting for justice for those who murdered Hersh Goldberg-Polin and other Americans. And I will always ensure Israel has what it needs to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists like Hamas. My commitment to the security of Israel is unwavering.
Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7 launched a war in Gaza. I am heartbroken over the scale of death and destruction in Gaza over the past year—tens of thousands of lives lost, children fleeing for safety over and over again, mothers and fathers struggling to obtain food, water, and medicine. It is far past time for a hostage and ceasefire deal to end the suffering of innocent people. And I will always fight for the Palestinian people to be able to realize their right to dignity, freedom, security, and self-determination. We also continue to believe that a diplomatic solution across the Israel-Lebanon border region is the only path to restore lasting calm and allow residents on both sides to return safely to their homes.
Today, as we mourn the lives lost on October 7, I know many Jews will be reciting and reflecting on the Jewish prayer for mourning – the Kaddish. The words of the Kaddish, however, are not about death. The prayer is about still believing in God and still having faith. I know that is difficult amidst so much trauma and pain. But it is with that spirit that I commemorate this solemn day. We will not forget, and we will not lose faith. And in honor of all those souls we lost on October 7, we must never lose sight of the dream of peace, dignity, and security for all.”
World leaders mark first anniversary of 7 October attack on Israel
في فلسطين ولبنان، تشتري ضرائبنا موت الأطفال. وأمهاتهم، من بين المدنيين غير المقاتلين الآخرين.
من بين كل إنكار حقائقنا الذي أحدثته حرب إسرائيل ضد الإنسانية، هناك حقيقتان تنبثقان من إرث تاريخنا المتكشف لن نتمكن أبدًا من تجاهلهما أو تجنب المواجهة معهما؛ لا يوجد حق للدفاع ضد شعب تحتله، ولا يوجد تكافؤ أخلاقي بين العنف الذي يستخدمه سيد العبيد والعنف الذي يستخدمه العبد لكسر سلاسله.
في مواجهة الاحتجاجات الجماهيرية في جميع أنحاء أمريكا والعالم، والتي قوبلت بقمع المعارضة والدعاية من قبل الدولة وكلا حزبينا السياسيين في جدار الصمت العظيم، نستمر في رفض تصعيد الصراع باستخدام مقاطعة وسحب الاستثمارات وفرض العقوبات على إسرائيل لإنهاء الإبادة الجماعية التي نحن متواطئون فيها.
لقد تخلت أمريكا عن مبادئنا المتعلقة بالحقوق العالمية وواجبنا في رعاية الآخرين، وأي تظاهر بالأخلاق أو الشرعية كديمقراطية؛ وكان هذا من بين الأهداف العديدة للسبت الأسود، وقد ابتلعت كل من إسرائيل وأمريكا الطُعم.
حيث يعتبر حزب الخيانة والاستبداد راعيًا متحمسًا للأنظمة الاستبدادية والإرهاب الدولي على مستوى العالم بما في ذلك إسرائيل، فقد حافظ الحزب الديمقراطي على صمت استراتيجي فيما يتعلق بتواطؤنا في الإبادة الجماعية والجرائم ضد الإنسانية، رافضًا الاعتراف بها كحقيقة تاريخية أو حركة السلام التي طردت جو من الانتخابات ولكنها استبدلته بمشرف على الدولة السجنية التي ترغب في إنزال الدمار على المهاجرين العاجزين على حدودنا وعلى الفلسطينيين الذين تعتبر دولتهم بانتوستانًا للعمل القسري ومعسكر اعتقال يحتلها عدو لا يعتبره سوى إخوانهم اليهود بشرًا حقيقيين.
إنني أطلق عليها لقب القائدة كامالا، ما لم يكن خلاص الإسرائيليين والفلسطينيين باعتبارهم متساوين وبشراً مثلها يصبح محور حملتها، بدلاً من فرض هيمنتنا على حدودنا وفي مستعمرتنا إسرائيل.
وبالطبع يرجع هذا إلى طبيعة القوة وديناميكياتها، والقوى المتكررة للخوف والقوة والعنف التي تعمل على تركيز القوة في يد السلطة وإخضاع طبقات العبيد من خلال الخوف والسيطرة على الفكر والعنف. إن كل الدول تجسد العنف، وفي هذا لا تختلف الديمقراطيات عن الطغيان.
لقد تغيرنا قليلاً منذ وضع الفراعنة والملوك الكهنة في دول المدن الأولى أنفسهم فوق كل الآخرين كمترجمين ومتحدثين باسم الآلهة، واستأجروا بلطجية وحشيين يحملون ألقاباً أرستقراطية لإبقاء العبيد في عملهم. كنت أتمنى أن نكون أفضل من ذلك.
إن الحضارة تنهار مع سقوط فلسطين ولبنان، حيث تذبل قدرتنا على التعاطف تحت قوى الإهانة والنزعة الإنسانية. وسرعان ما نصبح نحن أيضاً لا شيء، مثل الأطفال الذين نقتلهم من مكان معقم، والذين لا نشعر تجاههم بالشفقة أو الرحمة أو التعاطف، لأنهم ليسوا من ذوي البشرة البيضاء وبالتالي خارج دائرة الانتماء والاختلاف التي بنيت عليها هيمنتنا النخبوية على الثروة والسلطة والامتياز.
إن أعداء الحرية يرغبون في استعبادنا من خلال الانقسامات العرقية والإيمانية والهوية الوطنية التاريخية، ومن خلال استراتيجيات التسليع والتزوير والنزعة الإنسانية، لتفريغ قيم الديمقراطية من خلال التخريب والاستيلاء على ملكيتنا لأنفسنا وللوجود البشري والمعنى والقيمة. وهذا أيضاً يجب أن نقاومه.
لقد كان هذا عاماً رهيباً حيث أصبحت إنسانيتنا مرآة مكسورة؛ لقد تحطم ما يوحدنا كبشر، وأصبحنا أسرى للصور المنعكسة الغريبة لأسطحه المتفرقة. ولكن لا ينبغي لنا أن ندع هذا الأمر قائماً.
من بين الأسئلة الأولى التي تواجهنا في محاسبة أي أنظمة قمع واستبداد ودول سجنية تعتمد على القوة والسيطرة، وفاشية الدم والإيمان والأرض، والخضوع للنخب المهيمنة القائمة على الثروة والسلطة والامتياز، وانتهاكات حقوق الإنسان العالمية، هو السؤال عن السبب العادل أو ذريعة الحرب؛ من المسؤول عن هذه الجرائم ضد الإنسانية؟
بعد أيام من السبت الأسود، كنت في مكان الحادث أطارد الجناة، وما وجدته كان عشًا من الأفاعي. ما حدث كان مجموعة من الأسباب المتكررة والمترابطة المتحالفة في حدث أساسي من الانقسام والاضطراب الذي لا يزال مخفيًا حتى الآن؛ بما في ذلك الانقلاب داخل حماس ضد قياداتها، وخاصة أولئك المستهدفين بالاغتيال لاحقًا من قبل إسرائيل بناءً على ادعاء كاذب بأنهم أمروا بالهجوم، من قبل فصيل حماس المعارض للسلام بالتآمر مع نظام نتنياهو الذي ارتكب هذه المأساة، ولكن ليس وحده. هناك العديد من المجموعات الأخرى، اثنتان منها على الأقل أعداء ظاهريًا، وعصابة إجرامية ليس لها أيديولوجية سياسية على الإطلاق، بالإضافة إلى فريق استطلاع تابع لجيش الدفاع الإسرائيلي، أو فرقة شاكيد أو قوة خليفة، والتي تتخصص في ارتكاب الفظائع ضد الجماعات الإسلامية بينما تتخفى في هيئة عرب لزرع الانقسام.
ولكن هناك المزيد، المزيد والمزيد؛ فقد تسلل طرف ثالث غير معروف إلى كل من المنظمات الإسرائيلية والفلسطينية لتأليبهما ضد بعضهما البعض لأغراض لا أستطيع تخمينها ولكنها معادية لكليهما وللسلام والأمن العالميين. هذه لعبة طويلة، ولا يزال خصمنا في الظل حتى الآن.
من لديه المهارة والدافع للقيام بذلك؟ من المستفيد؟
نتنياهو يستفيد، لأن هذا يبقيه في السلطة ويعطيه سببًا للحرب من أجل الغزو الإمبراطوري والسيطرة على الشرق الأوسط والحل النهائي للفلسطينيين؛ ويستفيد حليفه الرئيسي ترامب في انتخاباتنا من تلطيخ درع بايدن وهاريس بالقسوة والتواطؤ في الإبادة الجماعية، على الرغم من أن كلاهما محاصر بسياسات وتحالفات عمرها عقود من الزمان ويخضع لسيطرة الثروة الهائلة والقوة السياسية للجنة الشؤون العامة الأمريكية الإسرائيلية، ويستفيد كل من ترامب ونتنياهو من جعل فكرة حقوق الإنسان بلا معنى.
لكن شرعية إسرائيل وأمريكا هي تكلفة لا يمكن لأحد في حكومات الدول أو مجتمعات الاستخبارات والعمليات الخاصة أن يتاجر بها من أجل هذه الانتصارات، وعلى الرغم من أن الرايخ الرابع، الذي أعني به شبكة من أحفاد النازيين الفعليين الذين تسللوا إلى الدولة الأمريكية وغيرها لمدة سبعين عامًا، والتي يعد ترامب زعيمها والزعيم الفعلي لها، لديه بوضوح خطط طويلة المدى والموارد والعبقرية، مهما كانت شريرة، للقيام بذلك، فلن يساعد أي نازي دولة إسرائيل الصهيونية على أن تصبح إمبراطورية. وهذا يترك جهاز الأمن الفيدرالي الروسي ووكالات الاستخبارات الأخرى وقوات سبيتزناز، أيضًا مع الصبر أو الرؤية والموارد والمهارة للقيام بذلك، والتي ربما كانت تتطور لعقود من الزمن؛ ولكن روسيا ملتزمة بتعزيز هيمنة حليفتها إيران على الشرق الأوسط، وهو ما يجعلها العدو الأول لإسرائيل والتحالف العربي الأميركي، وقد خاضنا حروباً بالوكالة وحشية في سوريا وأماكن أخرى لإثبات ذلك.
لا، إن عدونا الحقيقي والجاني الحقيقي لأحداث السبت الأسود ليس روسيا أو إيران، ولا الرايخ الرابع، بل ترامب ونتنياهو بشكل جزئي ومباشر على قدم المساواة مع الفصيل الجهادي حماس الذي أعتقد أنه نشأ مع عدوها اللدود ومنافسها على السيطرة على غزة القاعدة؛ نحن نواجه عدواً مجهولاً على استعداد للهندسة لإبادة جماعية لتعزيز أهدافه الغامضة، وكل ما يمكنني أن أخبرك به عنهم هو أنهم بعيدون كل البعد عن الانتهاء منا.
نحن نعيش في أوقات مثيرة للاهتمام.
دعونا نعود إلى المبادئ الأولى بسؤال بسيط؛ من يعاني ويحتاج إلى الرحمة؟ إنه سؤال مشابه للسؤال الذي أطرحه لتحديد متى وكيف نستخدم القوة والعنف، من يملك السلطة؟، ولكن باتجاه مختلف تمامًا فيما يتعلق بتطور مستقبلنا.
هنا في أرض مقدسة مقسمة حسب التفاصيل الطائفية لكيفية أن نكون بشرًا معًا وفقًا لإرادة اللانهائي كأخوة وحب عالميين، تُرتكب جرائم تحدد حدود الإنسان ضد أبريائنا، وعجزنا التام، وغير قادرين على تهديد أي شخص؛ الأطفال. أطفال يعذبهم ويقتلهم عدو إنسانيتنا، دولة إسرائيل ورعاتها بما في ذلك أمريكا، بسرور في هستيريا القوة أو يرفضون رؤيتهم والتعرف عليهم بالتواطؤ. ويبرز تاريخنا شخصية واحدة تمثل كل الأطفال الذين ضحوا بالسلطة والكراهية، وحُكم عليهم بالموت بتواطؤ الصمت.
أطلب منكم الآن، كل البشرية، التخلي عن مسار نزع الإنسانية عنا والتخلي عن الإبادة الجماعية والتطهير العرقي وحروب الفتح والسيطرة والجرائم ضد الإنسانية.
أطلب، وأتوسل، وأطالب؛ أطلب منكم باسم آن فرانك.
Hebrew
באוקטובר 2024 אנחנו הופכים למראה השבורה
בפלסטין ובלבנון, המיסים שלנו קונים מוות של ילדים. והאמהות שלהם, בין אזרחים אחרים שאינם לוחמים.
בין כל שלילת האמיתות שלנו שחוללה מלחמת ישראל נגד האנושות, הנה שתי אמיתות שעולות מתוך מורשת ההיסטוריה המתגלגלת שלנו, שלעולם לא נוכל שוב להתעלם או להימנע מעימות איתן; אין זכות הגנה נגד עם שאתה כובש, ואין שוויון ערך מוסרי בין האלימות שמשתמש באדון עבדים לבין האלימות שמשתמש עבד כדי לשבור את שלשלאותיו.
לנוכח הפגנות המוניות ברחבי אמריקה והעולם, שנתקלו בדיכוי של התנגדות ותעמולה על ידי המדינה ושתי המפלגות הפוליטיות שלנו בחומה גדולה של שתיקה, אנו ממשיכים לסרב להסלים את הסכסוך באמצעות החרם, ההסרה וההסרה. סנקציה של ישראל לסיום רצח עם שאנו שותפים בו.
אמריקה נטשה את עקרונות הזכויות האוניברסליות שלנו וחובתנו לדאוג לאחרים, וכל יומרה למוסר או לגיטימציה כדמוקרטיה; זה היה בין השערים הרבים של השבת השחורה, וגם ישראל וגם אמריקה לקחו את הפיתיון.
כאשר מפלגת הבגידה והעריצות היא נותנת חסות נלהבת לאוטוקרטיות וטרור מדינות ברחבי העולם כולל ישראל, המפלגה הדמוקרטית שמרה על שתיקה אסטרטגית בנוגע לשותפותנו ברצח עם ופשעים נגד האנושות, ומסרבת להכיר בכך כעובדה היסטורית או כתנועת השלום. מה שהוציא את רצח העם ג’ו מהבחירות אך החליף אותו במשגיח על המדינה הגופנית שרוצה להמטיר אבדון על המהגרים חסרי האונים בגבולנו ועל הפלסטינים שאומתם היא בנטוסטן של עבודת עבדות ומחנה ריכוז שנכבש על ידי אויב שרק אחיהם היהודים הם בני אדם באמת.
אני קורא לה קומנדנט קמאלה, אלא אם כן, כמובן, הגאולה של הישראלים והפלסטינים כבני-אדם שווים ועמיתים תהפוך למרכז הקמפיין שלה, ולא אכיפת השליטה שלנו בגבולנו ובמושבה שלנו ישראל.
כמובן שהדבר נובע מהטבע והדינמיקה של הכוח, והכוחות הרקורסיבים של פחד, כוח וכוח הפועלים לריכוז כוח לסמכות ולהכפיף את קסטות העבדים באמצעות פחד, שליטה במחשבות ואלימות. כל המדינות מגולמות באלימות, ובכך דמוקרטיות אינן טובות יותר מעריצות.
השתנינו מעט מאז שהפרעונים והכוהנים-מלכים של הערים הראשונות הציבו את עצמם מעל כולם כמתורגמנים ודוברי האלים, ושכרו בריונים אכזריים בעלי תארים אצולה כדי לשמור על העבדים בעבודתם. קיוויתי שאנחנו יותר טובים מזה.
הציוויליזציה נופלת עם העת העתיקה הנטושה של פלסטין ולבנון, כאשר יכולת האמפתיה שלנו קמלה תחת כוחות של השפלה ודה-הומניזציה. בקרוב גם אנחנו נהיה כלום, כמו הילדים שאנו רוצחים ממקום מחוטא, שאין אנו חשים כלפיהם רחמים, רחמים או חמלה, מכיוון שהם לא לבנים ולכן מעבר למעגל השייכות והאחרות שעליו ההגמוניות האליטה שלנו של העושר, נבנים כוח וזכות.
אויבי החירות מבקשים לשעבד אותנו באמצעות חלוקות של אתניות, אמונה וזהות לאומית היסטורית, ובאמצעות אסטרטגיות של סחורה, זיוף ודה-הומניזציה, לחלול את ערכי הדמוקרטיה באמצעות חתרנות ותפיסת הבעלות שלנו על עצמנו ועל האדם. הוויה, משמעות וערך. גם לזה עלינו להתנגד.
זו הייתה שנה נוראית כשהאנושות שלנו הופכת למראה השבורה של הובגובלין; מה שמאחד אותנו כבני אדם התנפץ, ואנו שבויים בתמונות המשתקפות המוזרות של משטחיו הבלתי רציפים. אבל אנחנו לא צריכים לתת לזה לעמוד.
בין השאלות הראשונות העומדות בפנינו בהבאת חשבון נפש לכל מערכות של דיכוי, עריצות ומצבים קרסראליים של כוח ושליטה, פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה, הכנעה לאליטות ההגמוניות של עושר, כוח וזכות, והפרות של זכויות האדם האוניברסאליות שלנו הן של סיבה צודקת או קאזוס באלי; מי אחראי לפשעים האלה נגד האנושות?
בתוך ימים של שבת השחורה הייתי במקום לצוד את העבריינים, ומה שמצאתי היה קן של צפעים. מה שקרה היה קבוצה של סיבות רקורסיביות ותלויות הדדיות הקשורות באירוע ראשוני של שבר והפרעה, שנותרו עדיין חסומות; לרבות הפיכה בתוך חמאס נגד הנהגתו, במיוחד אלו שנועדו להתנקשות מאוחר יותר על ידי ישראל בטענה שקרית שהזמינה את התקיפה, על ידי פלג חמאס המתנגד לשלום בקנוניה עם משטרו של נתניהו שביצע את הטרגדיה הזו, אך לא לבד. כמה קבוצות אחרות, לפחות שניים אויבים למיניהם, סינדיקט פלילי ללא אידיאולוגיה פוליטית כלשהי, פלוס צוות סיור של צה”ל, סיירת שקד או כוח יורש, המתמחה בביצוע זוועות נגד קבוצות איסלאמיות בעודם מחופשים לערבים כדי לזרוע חילוקי דעות.
יון, היו בגורמים המובילים של כוח התקיפה, והצטרפו אליהם במהירות אופורטוניסטים מסוגים שונים. תוך ימים ספורים היו כוחות המבצעים המיוחדים של כמה מדינות מעורבות, כולל בעלות בריתה של פלסטין מהדומיניון האיראני של לבנון, תימן, סוריה ועיראק וכן כוחות מודיעין ומבצעים מיוחדים הרוסיים, אולי עם כמה מבעלי בריתם האפריקאים. המשמעות היא שחמאס לא יכול לשחרר את כל החטופים, מכיוון שחלקם מוחזקים על ידי קבוצות שאינן בשליטתם.
אבל יש עוד, הרבה יותר; צד שלישי לא ידוע חדר לארגונים ישראליים ופלסטינים כאחד כדי לשחק אותם זה מול זה למטרות שאינני יכול לנחש אך הן ללא ספק עוינות לשניהם, ולשלום ולביטחון העולמיים. זה משחק ארוך, והיריב שלנו עדיין נשאר בצל.
למי יש גם את המיומנות וגם את המניע לעשות זאת? קוי בונו?
נתניהו מרוויח, כי זה מחזיק אותו בשלטון ונותן לו סיבת באלי לכיבוש האימפריאלי והשליטה במזרח התיכון ולפתרון הסופי של הפלסטינים; ובן בריתו המרכזי טראמפ מרוויח בבחירות שלנו בכך שהוא מכתים את השריון של ביידן והאריס באכזריות ושותפות ברצח עם, אם כי שניהם לכודים במדיניות ובריתות בנות עשרות שנים ונשמרות על ידי העושר העצום והכוח הפוליטי של אייפא”ק, ושניהם. טראמפ ונתניהו מרוויחים בכך שהם הופכים את רעיון זכויות האדם לחסר משמעות.
אבל הלגיטימיות של ישראל ואמריקה היא עלות שאף אחד בממשלות או בקהילות מודיעין ומבצעים מיוחדים לא יסחר תמורת הזכיות הללו, ולמרות הרייך הרביעי, שבאמצעותו אני מתכוון לרשת של צאצאים של נאצים אמיתיים שחדרו לאמריקאים. מדינה ואחרות במשך שבעים שנה, שטראמפ הוא דמות דמות שלהן ולפיהרר דה פקטו, יש בבירור את תוכניות המשחק הארוך, המשאבים והגאונות, גם אם היא רעה, לעשות זאת, אף נאצי לעולם לא יעזור לציוני. מדינת ישראל הפכה לאימפריה. זה משאיר את ה-FSB הרוסי וסוכנויות מודיעין אחרות וכוחות ספצנאז, גם עם הסבלנות או החזון, המשאבים והמיומנות לעשות זאת, שאולי התפתחו במשך עשרות שנים; אבל רוסיה מחויבת לקדם את השליטה האיראנית של איראן במזרח התיכון, מה שהופך אותה לאויבת העיקרית של ישראל והברית הערבית-אמריקאית, ונלחמנו במלחמות פרוקסי פראיות בסוריה ובמקומות אחרים כדי להוכיח זאת.
לא, הנמסיס שלנו והמבצע האמיתי של השבת השחורה הוא לא רוסיה או איראן, ולא הרייך הרביעי, ורק באופן חלקי ומישיר טראמפ ונתניהו באותה מידה עם הפלג הג’יהאדיסטי של חמאס, שלדעתי מקורו באויב הדם שלו ויריבו לשליטה של אל-קאעידה בעזה; אנו עומדים בפני אויב לא ידוע שמוכן להנדס רצח עם כדי לקדם את מטרותיו המסתוריות, וכל מה שאני יכול לומר לך עליהם הוא שהם רחוקים מלהסתיים איתנו.
אנחנו חיים בזמנים מעניינים.
הבה נחזור לעקרונות הראשונים בשאלה פשוטה; מי סובל וזקוק לרחמים? זו שאלה דומה לשאלה שאני שואל כדי לקבוע מתי וכיצד להשתמש בכוח ובאלימות, מי מחזיק בכוח?, אבל עם כיוון שונה מאוד לגבי התפתחות העתיד שלנו.
כאן בארץ קדושה מחולקת לפי הפרטים העדתיים של איך להיות אנושיים יחד בהתאם לרצון האינסופי כאחווה ואהבה אוניברסליים, פשעים המגדירים את גבולות האדם מבוצעים נגד התמימים ביותר שלנו, חסרי הכוח וחסרי היכולת שלנו. של איומים על מישהו; יְלָדִים. ילדים שהאויב של האנושות שלנו, מדינת ישראל ונותני החסות שלה כולל אמריקה, או מתאכזרים והורגים בשמחה בהיסטריה של הכוח או מסרבים לראות ולהכיר בשותפות. וההיסטוריה שלנו מעלה דמות אחת שמייצגת את כל הילדים שהוקרבו לכוח ולשנאה, ונידונו בשל שותפות השתיקה.
אני מבקש מכם כעת, כל המין האנושי, לנטוש את נתיב הדה-הומניזציה שלנו ולוותר על רצח עם, טיהור אתני, מלחמות כיבוש ושליטה ופשעים נגד האנושות.
אני שואל, אני מתחנן, אני דורש; אני שואל אותך בשם אנה פרנק.
Negotiating the Interface Between Bounded Realms, a Study in Film and Literature: the Anima or Inner Woman of my Platonic Ideal Versus the Ghosts of Memory of a Lost Friend
How I remember our meeting, betrayed and standing together against the world: Mr & Mrs Smith final gunfight scene
How I imagine her now:
Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes Montage to Britney Spears’ version of Bobby Brown’s My Perogative
Enola Holmes Montage to Fifth Harmony’s That’s My Girl
Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Torch of Liberty 