We celebrate Christmas today as a universal secular holiday which has largely shed its historical legacies as a religious festival, like a serpent shedding its skin, or reawakened its ancient origins as a midwinter rite of renewal while accumulating layers of meaning which have now become traditional in our culture; the adornment of a sacrificial tree of life with beautiful decorations which once represented wishes and now confer status as tokens of wealth, the baking of idolatrous Gingerbread Men in mockery of the Biblical prohibition against human images which are eaten as parody of the substitutive sacrifice and ritual cannibalism at the heart of the myth of Christ, the figure of Santa Claus marketed by Coca-Cola but originating as a symbol of the hallucinogenic amanita muscara mushroom in the shamanic rites of the Sami people with their reindeer driven sleighs, feasting and gifts which echo the carnivalesque elements of the cult of Saturn and his proxy the Lord of Misrule, the annual family viewing of a performance of the Nutcracker Ballet which depicts the death of a child as a battle against mice and the journey of the soul through the gates of dreams as an American Book of the Dead, and listening to some of the most beautiful music ever written.
For myself and in the historical tradition of my family, Christmas Day has another meaning as well, for on this day in 1776 General Washington dreamed an impossible thing and made it real, and in his victory at the Battle of Trenton saved the American Revolution and reclaimed the idea of a free society of equals lost since the Fall of Rome.
Beyond the peculiarities of its historical stories, Christmas may come to mean one thing more to humankind, as it does for myself and the descendants of those who stood with Washington on that fateful day, or on any of countless other days throughout history and the world wherein a single individual, as flawed as any other, refused to submit to tyranny against impossible odds and in so doing changed the fate of humankind and won the hope of a better future for us all; so long as we remain Unconquered, the possibilities of becoming human are truly limitless.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
As I wrote in my post of July 4 2021, What Does Freedom Mean Now?; As we celebrate Independence Day, I offer you a meditation on the contradictions of power, the frailty of order, the illusion of authority, the relativity of truth and the falsification of history in service to power and authority in the form of a story, originally written as a demonstration of Gogol’s method of creating symbols and referential to Ionesco, Kafka, and Akutagawa.
It also contains a true retelling from my family history of a decisive moment when the fate of humankind hung in the balance, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on Christmas of 1776, as related to me by my father and to him from his before from the witness of my ancestor, Henry Lale, who fought at his side.
A Declaration of Liberty
I woke that fateful morning, ready to join the other rhinoceroses on the parade ground, when fussing with the shiny bits on my uniform I chanced to meet my own gaze in the mirror, and to my horror discovered that my horn had gone missing.
It was a magnificent horn, a horn of vainglorious strutting, of midnight blue and royal purple like the stains of grandeur and of marvelous sins. In its place was this soft monkey nose, useless in butting heads; worse, someone might think it funny, and I’d have to bring the pain- but how to maintain order without a horn?
It was all the fault of the Devil Weed I had consumed the night before, in an excess of drunken salute to one of the original members of my command, lost in a nameless action in a fight for freedom the world will never know the true history of. Even his name is unknown, an identity assigned upon enlistment; we are the night watch, who hold an invisible line that others may sleep and live in happy ignorance of the chaos and relentless existential threats which surround us.
Throughout much of my life my nation has been the man to my left and the man to my right, fellow bearers of secrets; maybe I’ve been wrong about that.
As to the Devil Weed, it was grown from magic seeds, seeds of transformation, change, and renewal handed down, planted & re-harvested every few years, from the hand of George Washington to an ancestor of mine as payment for a wager just after crossing the Delaware on Christmas of 1776 under cover of night and a storm.
Washington had said, “We’ve eaten all the dogs, burned all the wood, and my balls are frozen to my last bit of lead shot. We can’t cross against the ice floes, and if we stay on this side of the river we die and the Revolution dies with us.”
And Henry my ancestor said “If you go I’m coming with you, but who will come with us? Do these men have another fight in them? Frozen, starving, too many barefoot in the snow, with one man in three in hospital and unfit for duty? Whoever isn’t drowned or crushed by the ice landing a ten mile night march through ice and snow to the enemy, and then an attack on a fortified garrison with neither powder nor ammunition? I’ll bet you we can’t cross that river and survive, and I’ll buy a night at the best whorehouse in Philadelphia for the whole army if you can pull that off.”
Everything became still as the attention of the whole camp was riveted.
Washington stood, naked but for a red blanket he had wrapped about himself like a toga, and for long moments met the eyes of his men. “Done, and I’ll give you and every man with us a pouch of George’s Own Devil Weed if we live to celebrate. Starved, frozen, and down to the last bullet, I’ll still take that bet. We are no longer ragged misfits and outcasts begging scraps from our masters feet like dogs; from this moment forward we are not colonial subjects divided against each other by a distant empire but Americans united in our Liberty.”
There were cheers, but not yet a race to the boats. They really were starving and frozen, and for many the coming fight would be down to the knife and tomahawk. So Washington put in his set of false teeth, the pointy cannibal ones made by the Indians he once lived among who taught him how to fight and how to lead. He grinned his terrible grin, and said, “Imagine the Hessians at Trenton, eating and drinking their way through winter with storehouses full of everything we need, firewood, food, fine boots and woolen uniforms, guns and powder, all waiting for men bold enough to take them. Warm they are, with fat goose and roast beast. I’m coming to dinner with the enemy. Who’s coming with me?”
And they rose cheering, and followed him into folly and into glory. Victory or Death, Washington’s password at the Battle of Trenton, became our family motto ever after; certainly it described the conditions of the fight, of the Revolution, and of the fragile nature of liberty and America.
But there were other stories, things no one made a heroic painting of to hang in a national gallery, both of our origins and throughout our history. Sometimes because the cover story is so much better than the truth, as with the abominable and tragic fate of Amelia Earhart, abused and cannibalized by her Japanese captors; and sometimes because the truth is ambiguous and a relativistic multiplicity which depends on who’s telling it, a Rashomon Gate which transforms us as we go through.
Liberate the Dominican Republic with only a printing press, a radio station, and an airplane to drop leaflets, with the loss of a single foreign national and no American casualties, weighed against the countless deaths of the landing at Inchon? Wonderful. But who can really claim a monster like Trujillo as a friend, as we had for decades before?
Often it is also horrible, something necessary to survival which betrays the ideals and goals we work to achieve and protect, an accommodation with evil. And it is this last category of secrets which provides leverage for our enemies, propagating outward across time like the leprous tracks of an invisible and malign corruption.
Our lives have reflected one another, Henry and I, the revolutionary and the secret agent, as in a dark mirror. We cannot escape each other.
My ancestor helped win the Revolutionary War and create America; I helped bear the message of that Revolution to unknown shores as a Promethean fire and seeds of transformation, and a Reckoning to those who would enslave us, among many other things.
The dream of America; a free society of equals, Liberty, Equality, Truth, and Justice, a firewall against tyranny and fascism, a new idea of humankind in which no one is better than any other by reason of birth and the age of inequalities is ended, free from colonialism and empires, from slavery and identitarian nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and all the kings and tyrants toppled from their thrones. All too often revolutionary struggle has been corruptive of its own ideals, heroes become tyrants, and Liberation becomes imperial conquest.
The American Revolution, an anti-colonial struggle against an Empire and the system of aristocracy, and the tidal wave of revolutionary struggles it unleashed to reimagine and transform the world and human being, meaning, and value in thousands of myriads of mutinies and rebellions of the new Humanist order against the old Authoritarian paradigm of church and state, in every corner of the earth and among all its peoples, a glorious Liberation of the infinite possibilities of becoming human.
A turning of the tides which changed the order of the world, and the consequences of the triumph of liberty over tyranny in the end of the age of kings and the fall of colonial empires, and its echoes in our victory over fascism in the Second World War, the emergence of an American imperial global hegemony and dominion, and the Fall of the Soviet Union. None of these things happened in the way you have been told.
If I could go back to the beginnings of things, to the Original Lie that founded America as a free society of equals without changing its systems of unequal power and the consequences and events that tipped the balance of the world toward fascism, could all the wrongs that came after be redressed? From the failure to renounce slavery and bring a reckoning to inequalities in the leveling of all social classes and of patriarchy, the centralization of authority to a carceral state of force and control from the Whiskey Rebellion onward, the rise of imperial global dominion and wars for control of strategic resources and the elite hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege, the history of America has been one of the subversion of democracy by forces of unequal power behind the smoke and mirrors of America as a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world.
Could we win back our freedom, Truth, Justice, and the American Way, redeem the promise of a free society of equals, and relight the torch of Liberty?
So I scribbled a note retiring my captaincy in the Deniable Forces of the secret police, stepping through the mirror into the monkey world and transforming as I had so many times before, though never before alone.
I had some wrongs to put right.
And here are some thoughts of mine on the subject of Liberty; Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty:
To all those who like myself prefer to run amok and be ungovernable to the alternative of submission to authority, who align on the side of Prometheus, rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, I offer here a manifesto for bearers of the Torch of Liberty.
As I wrote in my post of March 28 2019, in the wake of the Christchurch white supremacist terror and the direct threat of a copycat atrocity against our local mosque here in Spokane; I’ve thought about the origins of evil, of violence and power in the relationships between fear, anger, hate, and other negative emotions as illnesses, for a long time now and in many roles and contexts.
Here are some things I have learned:
First, the process by which violence operates as a system is the same for all spheres of action and levels of scale; within personal and social contexts and in intimate relationships and families as well as nations and historical civilizations.
The precondition of violence as hate crime, and of both tyranny and terror,
is overwhelming and generalized fear as shaped by submission to authority.
Structures and figures of authorized power feed on fear and hate, grow stronger by the cycle of power and violence and the negative emotions and forces of darkness to which they give form and through which they subjugate others.
We must question, challenge, mock, and subvert authority whenever it comes to claim us. For there is no just authority.
Victory or Death; so said George Washington at the Battle of Trenton of the Revolution against tyranny and the idea that some persons are by right of birth better than others.
Victory or Death; so must we ever answer tyrants and those who would enslave us.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, conformity with transgression, and division with solidarity.
Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.
Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious diversity, democracy, and a free society of equals.
Let us be Bringers of Chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her wonderful daily newsletter of December 19 2021; “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
These were the first lines in a pamphlet called The American Crisis that appeared in Philadelphia on December 19, 1776, at a time when the fortunes of the American patriots seemed at an all-time low. Just five months before, the members of the Second Continental Congress had adopted the Declaration of Independence, explaining to the world that “the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled…do…solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”
The nation’s founders went on to explain why it was necessary for them “to dissolve the political bands” which had connected them to the British crown.
They explained that their vision of human government was different from that of Great Britain. In contrast to the tradition of hereditary monarchy under which the American colonies had been organized, the representatives of the united states on the North American continent believed in a government organized according to the principles of natural law.
Such a government rested on the “self-evident” concept “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Governments were created to protect those rights and, rather than deserving loyalty because of tradition, religion, or heritage, they were legitimate only if those they governed consented to them. And the American colonists no longer consented to be governed by the British monarchy.
This new vision of human government was an exciting thing to declare in the heat of a Philadelphia summer after a year of skirmishing between the colonial army and British regulars, but by December 1776, enthusiasm for this daring new experiment was ebbing. Shortly after colonials had cheered news of independence in July as local leaders read copies of the Continental Congress’s declaration in meetinghouses and taverns in cities and small towns throughout the colonies, the British moved on General George Washington and the troops in New York City.
By September, the British had forced Washington and his soldiers to retreat from the city, and after a series of punishing skirmishes across Manhattan Island, by November the Redcoats had pushed the Americans into New Jersey. They chased the colonials all the way across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.
By mid-December, it looked bleak for the Continental Army and the revolutionary government it backed. The 5000 soldiers with Washington who were still able to fight were demoralized from their repeated losses and retreats, and since the Continental Congress had kept enlistments short so they would not risk a standing army, many of the men would be free to leave the army at the end of the year, further weakening it.
As the British troops had taken over New York City and the Continental soldiers had retreated, many of the newly minted Americans outside the army were also having doubts about the whole enterprise of creating a new, independent nation based on the idea that all men were created equal. Then, things got worse: as the American soldiers crossed into Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress abandoned Philadelphia on December 12 out of fear of a British invasion, regrouping in Baltimore (which they complained was dirty and expensive).
“These are the times that try men’s souls.”
The author of The American Crisis was Thomas Paine, whose January 1776 pamphlet Common Sense had solidified the colonists’ irritation at the king’s ministers into a rejection of monarchy itself, a rejection not just of King George III, but of all kings. In early 1776, Paine had told the fledgling Americans, many of whom still prayed for a return to the comfortable neglect they had enjoyed from the British government before 1763, that the colonies must form their own independent government.
Now, he urged them to see the experiment through. He explained that he had been with the troops as they retreated across New Jersey and, describing the march for his readers, told them “that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centered in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back.”
For that was the crux of it. Paine had no doubt that patriots would create a new nation, eventually, because the cause of human self-determination was just. But how long it took to establish that new nation would depend on how much effort people put into success. “I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake,” Paine wrote. “Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.”
In mid-December, British commander General William Howe had sent most of his soldiers back to New York to spend the winter, leaving garrisons across the river in New Jersey to guard against Washington advancing.
On Christmas night, having heard that the garrison at Trenton was made up of Hessian auxiliaries who were exhausted and unprepared for an attack, Washington crossed back over the icy Delaware River with 2400 soldiers in a winter storm. They marched nine miles to attack the garrison, the underdressed soldiers suffering from the cold and freezing rain. Reaching Trenton, they surprised the outnumbered Hessians, who fought briefly in the streets before they surrendered.
The victory at Trenton restored the colonials’ confidence in their cause. Soldiers reenlisted, and in early January, they surprised the British at Princeton, New Jersey, driving them back. The British abandoned their posts in central New Jersey, and by March, the Continental Congress moved back to Philadelphia. Historians credit the Battles of Trenton and Princeton with saving the Revolutionary cause.
There is no hard proof that Washington had officers read The American Crisis to his troops when it came out six days before the march to Trenton, as some writers have said, but there is little doubt they heard it one way or another. So, too, did those wavering loyalists.
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” Paine wrote in that fraught moment, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”
What is to be done? Alice Slays the Jabberwocky:
Common Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings
by Thomas Paine, Sidney Hook (Introduction), Jack Fruchtman Jr. (Foreword)
Tis the night before Christmas, a liminal time throughout the diaspora of our civilization which was reshaped historically by Paul’s reimagination of classical mystery faiths and Judaism as they collided and transformed each other, a night of magic, the redemptive and totalizing power of love, the rapture and terror of dreams and the power of wishes to redefine us and our possibilities of becoming human.
Clustered in dense layers around this time are rituals and symbols whose roots in our collective psyche are ancient and powerful, among them the family singing of Silent Night, a carol of great beauty composed in 1818 and made a universal cultural heritage by Bing Crosby’s recording in 1935. Its primary meaning remains the same; while the world sleeps, we are recreated anew and reborn with the dawn, to a new life wherein all things are possible. Choose wisely what you wish for, and who you wish to become.
As Kurt Vonnegut teaches us in Mother Night; “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Tonight I write to you not of the freedom and autonomy conferred by such acts of self-creation, nor of poetic vision as a sacred path in pursuit of Truth or of Orphic dream navigation as an art of transformative change, but of the art of making wishes itself. For wishes are a form of what Foucault called truth telling, though he wrote in the context of the witness of history and the primary duties of a citizen to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority. In wishes we speak the truth of ourselves, and shape our lives into an unfolding of our intentions as we have named and so created them, naming, defining, and claiming ourselves as Adam named the beasts. Wishes are a performance of our best selves, and of the truths we have chosen to become and embody; truths written in our flesh.
Herein the key and most precious and unique human act is to perform and make your dreams real.
We must never allow truths to be silenced, nor our souls stolen by those who would enslave us. True faith is living your truth; this sometimes means resistance to falsification and authorized identities as seizures of power and revolutionary struggle, but it always means living authentically and on your own terms, for only you can discover your own best self, and in this you are the only authority and the sole arbiter of choices and decisions, and of human being, meaning, and value.
In the arena of struggle between truth telling and the complicity of silence, I wish for us all Nevermore a Silent Night, for silence is complicity.
To silence in the face of evil there can be but one reply: Never Again.
As I wrote in my post of January 16 2021, Silence Is Complicity: No One Gets to Sit This One Out; A post in which I quote Adam Parkhomenko elicited an interesting reaction from someone, one which makes me question how the rhetoric of fascist and racist privilege creates complicity; the quote is in reference to the massive responsibility avoidance and denial on the part of the Republican lawmakers who refuse to join the call impeach our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his rabble of murderous barbarians.
Here is the quotation; “I have a very simple message for Republicans calling for unity without accountability: the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.”
This was the reaction; first, repetition of the very call for unity without accountability, which I would characterize as granting permission through failure to consequent behaviors, which the quote calls out; “These words are just creating more divisions!”
Second, an attempt at silencing dissent; “Please Stop!”
Third, an attempt at blame shifting; “Whenever one person thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong you are the problem!”
And Fourth, the very worst of the apologetics of historical fascism, a claim of moral equivalence; “Everyone just needs to stop all of these posts because there are good people on both sides!”
And this last I cannot let pass, for on the last occasion of its general use this propagandistic lie and rhetorical device led directly to the Holocaust and the global devastation of total war.
I am unclear which good people she could be referring to; the ones who were going to capture and hang or guillotine members of Congress, the ones who murdered a police officer and attempted to bomb both the Democratic and Republican offices, the white supremacist terrorists who have rallied to the cause of treason and armed sedition, or the mad tyrant who commanded them?
To this I replied; You are wrong. Treason, terror, and the murder of police officers has no excuse. You are either with us as American patriots or against us; no one gets to sit this one out and be counted among the honorable, the moral, and the loyal.
Silence is complicity.
Such is the Talmudic principle, “Shtika Kehoda”, famously paraphrased by Einstein in his 1954 speech to the Chicago Decalogue Society as “If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity”, and referenced by Eli Weisel as “the opposite of love is not only hate, it is also indifference.”
Martin Luther King said it this way in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story; “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
John Stuart Mill expressed a related idea in his 1867 Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews; “Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
Leonardo da Vinci formulated it as resistance to tyranny, with which he was very familiar in the wars of dominion between the princes of Renaissance Italy; “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
Silence is complicity.
Should this concept require further clarification, please refer to the following recording and transcript of Elie Wiesel’s Millennium Lecture at the White House, on April 12 1999, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton:
“Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President — Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others — and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people.
Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary — or Mrs. Clinton — for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations — Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin — bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting — more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.
Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner,” as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.
Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God — not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps — and I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance — but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.
And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader — and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death — Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us.
No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history — I must say it — his image in Jewish history is flawed.
The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo — maybe 1,000 Jews — was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back.
I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people — in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?
But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the “Righteous Gentiles,” whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war?
Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.
Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?
What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them — so many of them — could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.”
In my thirties I realized I had never read the Bible, though I had read into most everything else including the Zen Buddhism and Taoism I was raised with in formal study for ten years beginning at the age of nine, Kabbalah and European grimoires of magic during my teenage years as part of an obsession with Wittgenstein and the idea of language as a field of information which underlies material reality and influenced by the Surrealist William S. Burroughs and the weird variant rituals and magical performances devised by he and my father, the study of Jungian psychology and Joseph Campbell’s comparative mythology from my senior year of high school onward though I read the entire folklore study The Golden Bough by Frasier in sixth grade, a reading through the works of Shankara and Ramakrishna in freshman year at university followed by an apprenticeship with a priestess of Kali in my mid twenties, enthusiasms for Coleridge, Keats, and Blake around the same time, followed by a mad love for the poetry of Rumi which led me into studies of Islam and Sufism, and as I turned thirty I had begun a twin study in Nepal as a monk of the Buddhist Kagyu Vajrayana order and in Kashmir of Islam as a scholar of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism.
When I realized I had never read the Bible or anything of Christianity other than the splendid Quatrains of T.S. Eliot, because of my revulsion for how it was instrumentalized as theocratic terror and patriarchal sexual terror, crusades and Inquisitions, the Divine Right of Kings, submission to authority, repression of dissent, and the valorization of slavery and imperial conquest both historically and among the hideous Apartheid community of the Reformed Church in which I grew up as an outsider, symbolized for me by the burning of an old woman as a witch when I was a boy by a mob which included fellow children whom I knew from school, I then set forth a plan of study and interrogating historical source materials to answer a question; Who was the historical Jesus, and how does he differ from the mythic Jesus?
My notes from this project, in part written during my travels through the Holy Land, here follow.
Who was the historical Jesus, how does he differ from the Jesus of myth, and what did the authors who created him as a character of fiction do to shape him to their own purposes?
So much of this story is fiction stolen from a broad spectrum of older sources and faiths which Christianity assimilated and replaced, or invented over the last two millennia, that it is difficult to disambiguate between historical and mythic truths which have been presented by authorities in service to power as simple truths without nuance.
I have never been a Christian, and no member of my immediate family has ever been a Christian while I was living, my mother having left the Church at the age of twelve because a nun broke her finger with a ruler for asking too many questions. She walked out of Catholic school that day and never returned, either to the faith or its institutions of force and control. During her many years of teaching High School English, she always told that story on the first day of school every year, and would then hold up her broken finger to the class and say; “We are not silent. We question authority, and we test all claims of truth.”
This story of the life of a historical and mythic Jesus I shall try to question, using the instruments of both literary and historical criticism which I normally apply to politics and current events, from original sources.
The Visit of the Magi bearing gifts to the baby Jesus is a retelling of the visit of Tiridates to the future Emperor Nero.
Matthew appropriates titles and claims regarding Jesus from the official cult of the Roman god-emperors, part of his idea of Jesus as god rather than a man.
Matthew also uses the story to explain away the prophecy that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem with the fact that Jesus was from Nazareth.
The plot of Herod, setting of the story, is fiction which has no mention in Herodian records.
On the subject of the baptism of Jesus, the story of the dove as a symbol of the Shekinah or Wisdom is an appropriation of the shamanic trance recorded in the Magical Papyrus of Paris, and typical of magic universally. The story is a vision quest, but not that of Jesus.
The phrase “son of god” is a title of the Roman Emperor attributed to Jesus by later admirers.
“Holy Spirit”, an appropriation from the Hebrew Shekinah which erases the feminine half of the original deities, is another term from Egyptian magic.
The bird which deifies baby Jesus in the story is a messenger of the gods in Egyptian myth, like the Greco-Roman Hermes, which also grants powers of mystical flight to the heavens and resurrection of the spirit after death.
This is also the origin of the belief, popular during his life, that Jesus was possessed by the Spirit of the Air, Beelzebub.
Jesus “could do no miracles” in his hometown, because his miracles all relied on the belief of his audiences, and those who actually knew him knew he had no magic powers at all. It is the belief of the subject, not the powers of the psychosomatic healer, which are at work in his miracles, though they were also not performed by Jesus historically but appropriated from the miracles or medicine shows of others.
Jesus says “Your faith has healed you”, also he is unable to do miracles in the presence of the uncredulous.
This was before his followers, long after his death, invented the story of the virgin birth appropriated from Hellenic sources to deify him.
Jesus’ hostile attitudes toward his mother and other family are understandable for a boy who was well known to be an illegitimate bastard of a Roman soldier.
The mythic Jesus shares several symbols in common with the shadow figure in Jungian terms. Like Prometheus, he defies the Law of the gods to bring the sacred fire to humankind, is torn apart in the Passion like the Old King in alchemy and remade, an eternal recurrence of dissolution and rebirth as punishment also similar to Loki. He is a light bringer, like Lucifer, and like the Instructor or serpent in the Garden of Eden with which he is identified renews himself in shedding his skin.
Symbols of the Christ figure or mythic Jesus include the viper, raven, lion, night-heron, eagle, and fish.
The fish as a symbol of Christ identifies him with Saturn, the cannibal father of the gods whose festival Christmas appropriates.
The fish or ichthys is also a symbol of the Babylonia fish god Oannes. In India the fish symbolizes the Redeemer Mari. The Thracian Riders had a Eucharistic fish rite, as did the Phoenician fish goddess Atargatus.
Saturn is the Star of Israel, meaning justice, which is set atop our Christmas trees. The Sabbath is held on Saturn’s Day, and both Saturn and Ialdabaoth, the highest arcon, had lion’s faces.
Saturn is a “black star” identified with the Dragon or Leviathan, and a symbol of the Demiurge which creates the universe.
Saturn is also identified with the ass, Israel’s totem god as well as that of the Syrian donkey god whose title Jesus sometimes uses when invoking god.
Also a symbol of the sun god and of Apep and Set in Egypt.
It is possible to interpret the mythic Jesus as having a double nature, one of heaven and one of the depths, which echoes the relationship of the historical Jesus and his twin brother Thomas, and his story one of integration and becoming whole.
In the Pistus Sophia, Mary says that a spirit descended to Jesus as a child, an exact doppelganger, and when Jesus kissed the spirit they became one.
The Temptation, then, is clearly a struggle to wholeness with the Shadow or unconscious self, who like the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow we must embrace or be possessed by as an intrusive force.
Christ is called the fish to identify him as an indwelling presence in the depths of the oceanic Great Mother, a light in the vast darkness of the sea. He is born in Pisces, dies as a lamb in Aries, and describes the procession of the equinoxes, displaying his relation to both hunting and gathering mythologies. His followers are fishes and “fishers of men”, he feeds multitudes with fish and is himself eaten as a fish, and whole followers were named pisciculi or Little Fishes.
Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany follow the universal pattern of mystery religions of rebirth; he is a type of Osirus and of Odin, hanging on the Tree of Life at Midwinter to renew the earth.
Baptism by water is a recapitulation of this mystery, and a rebirth; “You were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him”, Col. 2:12.
The water of baptism reenacts birth and symbolizes the universal congress of potentialities, which precedes all form and creation. Christ is clearly immersed in the transpersonal psyche.
“In mysteries of rebirth, the individual is initiated by the spirit mother, the feminine creative principle. This is the totality of nature in its original unity, from which all life arises and unfolds, assuming in its highest transformation the form of spirit,” as Newman writes.
Jonah “sees the light” which is Christ in the belly of the sea monster. As the son of the Shekinah and her figure as Mary, whose designation as a virgin refers to the original meaning of the word as “a woman under her own authority”, Jesus has a shared authority to baptize others with the Holy Spirit, where John had only symbolic water.
During his own baptism in a vision, Jesus sees the Holy Spirit or power of the Shekinah descending from the heavens as a dove, and thereafter commands spirits and heals in the name of the Mother.
Christ thus re-enacts the Lekha Dodi as performed in Jerusalem, restoring the Shekinah to Israel as does every Jewish home on the Sabbath. When he says; “There is no approach to the Father, but through me,” he means there is no approach to the Father but through the Mother, symbolized by the dove.
Images of the Bride of God as Wisdom or the Shekinah include Hosea 2:19, Amos 5:2, Isaiah 1:8 and 10:32, Jeremiah 4:31, 18:13, and 15, Lamentations 1:15 and 2:13, Micah 4:10, Zephaniah 3:14 and 15, Zechariah 2:10 and 9:9, Baruch 3:9 to 4:1, Ecclesiasticus, and the Song of Solomon.
In Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom’s descent into the Abyss parallels the underworld journey of Anath, the virgin goddess of Canaan and a probable original version of the Jewish goddess.
Before 600 BC, Jerusalem harbored worshippers of Astarte, who bears the title Queen of Heaven which became part of the Shekinah and later of Mary’s myth, a faith discovered by Jeremiah in Egypt and assimilated into Judaism, J 7:18 and 44:15-19.
Much of the story of Judaism is of its interdependence with and assimilation of Egyptian mythology, which was swallowed entire by Christianity as a third epoch of faith. Another is the civilizational shift as patriarchy replaced the original matriarchal faiths as interrogated by Maria Gimbutas.
A stele of Anath’s faith in Egypt hails her as “Queen of Heaven and master of all the gods,” titles assimilated to the figure of Mary Theotikos or God-Bearer.
Papyri from the 5th century BC show Jews at Aswan worshipped Yahweh and Anath together in the same temple, origin of the twin altars of Yahweh and the Shekinah in later Judaism.
A Phoenician inscription on Cyprus reads; “To Anath, strength of Life.” Here she was equated with Athene, both virgin warriors.
In Sumeria, she is Nin-Kursag the Life Giver, Mother of All, Queen of the Gods, and also Inanna.
In Babylon she had a monstrous form before creation, and a bright one after as Ishtar.
Syrians worshipped her as Astarte, a version of Asherah.
In Egypt she was primarily Neith, and secondarily Isis.
In Asia Minor she appears as Cybele, Lady of the Animals.
In Rome she was Diana, Lady of the Moon.
Over time and in practice, all of these myths and forms of the Great Mother became one, assimilated into Christianity as the Mother of God and her sacrificial son, Baal and Asherath, Isis and Osirus, Cybele and Attis, Mary and Jesus, and all of these reflections of Yahweh and the Shekinah as a quaternity.
Beside the vast question of sources and the transformations of meaning over time with assimilation of previous mythologies, any Biblical scholarship must wrestle with the numerous questions of contradictions in statements of fact arising both from differing ideologies and intentions on the part of the authors of the gospels and the time frame as they were written between forty and 70 years after the death of Jesus, and the inventor of Christianity as a religion, Paul, had never met him and freely reimagined Jesus as a literary character drawn from classical mystery faiths.
Did Jesus disrupt the temple market at the start of his career as in John 2:13-16, or at the end as in Mark 11:15-17?
Was he crucified before as in John 18:27 or after the Passover meal?
Beyond discrepancies in the narrative, there is the question of whether the four gospels originating from the Q document were designed to obscure rather than reveal, to evade Roman authorities? Clearly those who wrote of the secret doctrines shared by Jesus only with his disciples, called the Keys to the Kingdom, summoning spirits and opening gateways to imaginal realms, believed so. There are over twenty fragments of works repressed by the Church in the Apocrypha of the New Testament.
Some changes in translation were deliberate as well; changing “young woman” and “woman under her own authority beholden to no man” as descriptors of Mary to “virgin” in the sexual sense move Jesus into the space of a Greek demigod, often born of a virgin.
“Almah” in Hebrew means “young woman”, which during the third century translation into Greek was given as “parthenoi” or virgin. This was based on a translation of Isaiah 7:14, and found only in Matthew 1:23, a deliberate gloss as parthenoi cannot be derived from almah. The story we know as the Bible is filled with such misdirections and falsifications.
Jesus was never referred to as Son of the Virgin, and there are reasons for this. Court records of Rabbi Eliezar name Miriam the Hairdresser as an adultress with a Sidonian archer in the Roman legion named Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, who while stationed in Palestine became the father of her twin sons Thomas and Jesus. There is only one individual soldier by that name in Imperial records, and he is buried at Bingerbruck in Germany. The mother of Jesus was also prosecuted in Roman court as an adultress by the family of her husband Joseph.
Jesus ben Pantera figures in Rabbinical literature as a healer. His mother is recorded as subsequently making her living by spinning while wandering in exile as an adultress.
When the book of Matthew gives the genealogy of Jesus as “son of Mary” rather than of Joseph, it clearly means father unlawful. The forebears list includes only four other women; Rahab, the madam of a brothel, Tamar, a temple prostitute whose children were born of incest, Ruth who was a fornicator, and Bathsheba, another adultress. The meaning here is quite clear.
We have two truths, of a historical Jesus who was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier, and of a mythic Jesus born of a virgin and a god.
The birth story in the Gospels is also unreliable and contradictory; did the good news of his birth come to Joseph in a dream as in Mt, or did the angel Gabriel bring it to Mary as in Luke?
In Luke Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem for a Roman census, in Matthew they already lived in Bethlehem; both cannot be true.
The census under Quirinus’ Governorship did not take place until 6 AD at the earliest possible date, when Judea came under Roman rule.
In Herodian records there is no mention of killing children; this is a clear fiction stolen from the story of Moses, intended to identify Jesus with Moses as a fellow bearer of God’s word.
Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55 is an obvious retelling of the song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2:1-10, and she is closely modeled on Hannah generally in Luke.
What may we say of the myth of Christ as a literary character without ambiguity, once he is freed from the limits of the historical Jesus?
Christ is the Logos or Word of God, which I identify as the undiscovered universal language of Wittgenstein and James Joyce, the Primary Imagination of Coleridge, the alam al mythal of Ibn Arabi, and the Bardo in Buddhism. Christianity appropriated the idea of the Logos from Philo of Alexandria, a Jew, and from the tradition of Platonic philosophy which continued to shape the new faith.
Christianity split the Queen of Heaven into two figures, mother and wife of Jesus, to circumvent the classical configuration of the avatar of the Infinite and sacrificial man-god being both the son and husband of the goddess as it was originally throughout the ancient world.
Mary is the English equivalent of the Hebrew Miriam, name of both the mother of Jesus and of the Magdalene who is now generally imagined to have been his wife. But Mary or Miriam was not a personal name at all, but a title; the Egyptian prefix meri- combined with the Hebrew Yam as a name of God to produce Meri-Yam, Beloved of God, a title of the Shekinah.
It is a title shared by the Magdalene, who since Robert Graves book King Jesus has been thought of as his bride at the Wedding at Cana, to fullfill the requirements of Davidic kingship. I myself regard the idea of Jesus as the legal heir of the throne of Israel as beyond the chance of possibility. He was the despised bastard child of an enemy soldier, and there are four other breaks in the line of succession as given, so not only was he perceived as illegitimate and possibly as a non-Jew, the claim of Davidic kingship is counterfactual.
Christian mythology casts Jesus in the role of a classical dying and resurrected man-god; Jesus is Baal to Asherath, Adonis to Aphrodite, Attis to Cybele, Osirus to Isis, and also Orpheus who descends to the underworld to redeem the dead, Thoth-Hermes who is a guide of the soul, and the god of ecstatic trance and poetic vision, Dionysus.
The syncretic nature and construction of Christianity guaranteed its success as an instrument of assimilation and the imperial conquest and dominion of the Roman Empire. This was the true purpose and design of its inventor, Paul of Tarsus, whose mission as an agent of the empire was to transform a Jewish independence and anti-colonial insurrection into a tool of subjugation and control.
There are also problems with the narrative which bear directly on the identification of Jesus with the Messiah of Judaism and of being the Son of God.
First, claiming to be the Son of God was not a crime under Jewish law, so the whole story of trial by the Sanhedrin and of the Crucifixion is fictive.
During the Second Jewish Revolt of 132 AD, Rabbi Akiba acclaimed the rebel leader Simon Bar Kochba; “This is the King Messiah.” Akiba was laughed at, but the claim itself was no offense.
Use of the phrase “Son of the Blessed” or “Son of God” in reference to oneself or others was no capital crime, not in Mishnah nor in pre-Mishnah law. These expressions are often found in Jewish literature; the reference to sitting at the right hand of power in Mark 14:62 is no different from King David’s sitting at the right hand of God in Psalm 110:1.
Therefore the story of the charge of blasphemy against Jesus is fiction, written by a non-Jew with no knowledge of Jewish law.
The charge which Pilate was compelled to act on was that of being a magician, as Jesus was popularly believed to exorcise demons by the power of Beelzebub which possessed him. In other words, a madman prosecuted as a charlatan.
When asked; “Which is the first of all commandments?” in Mark 12:29-30, Jesus does not call for belief in himself but repeats the Shema Israel in Deuteronomy 6:4-5, as might any Jew.
Jesus then offers another commandment; “Love your neighbor as yourself, Mark 12:30. This is a quote from Leviticus 19:18, found again in Ecclesiastes and a paraphrase of the commandment in the Tobit 4:15; “Do to no one what you would not want done to you.”
Rabbi Hillel, when asked by a gentile to teach him the whole of the Law while he stood on one foot, said; “Whatever is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
Herein the teachings of Jesus are strictly Jewish within the historical context of its literature, which I would hold as credible to the historical Jesus.
The mythic Jesus as created by Paul and later authors does not even speak of the Jewish god, but of pagan gods.
Here we return to the bird in the vision of Jesus, an Egyptian element and messenger of the gods thought to grant spiritual flight and resurrection of the soul after death.
Similarly, the “Living God” to which Jesus refers as “Io” or donkey is Osirus, sacrificial and ever-resurrecting god who is both son and husband of the Great Mother, and also linked to the Syrian donkey god.
The Father possibly refers to not one but two gods, a Trickster figure like the serpent or Instructor who is both guardian and guide, and the Living God whose death and rebirth Christ recapitulates.
During his Vision Quest, Jesus encounters the Instructor, the serpent of Eden who far later was identified with Satan the rebel angel, whom Jesus defeats in a Sphinxian riddle contest, crossing the underworld threshold which he guards and acquiring him as a guardian and familiar. Jesus should always be depicted in art with his Serpent, for from this moment in his story they are linked much as Buddha is depicted with the monkey at his feet who symbolizes his animal nature and is his theriomorphic form.
The figure of Christ as Logos belongs to a much later period of neo-Platonic philosophy. This series of transformations over time of the figure of Jesus raises the question of the purpose, origin, and relationships with competing narratives and faiths of the Christian Church.
There is almost no congruence between the historical Jesus and the myth of Christ invented by his followers. This was largely due to the influence of Paul, who had never met Jesus and was free to imagine him in any way he thought useful to his mission. Paul was before his vision on the road to Damascus a hunter of Christians for the Roman Empire which regarded the new cult as a rebellion, and may have been a Roman intelligence agent throughout his institutionalization of the church whose purpose in inventing the Christian faith as we know it now was to transform a threat into an asset by changing the narrative, as a revolutionary cult of Jewish anticolonial liberation became through Paul’s reimagination a classical cult of a sacrificial man-god which authorized the Imperial state.
In any case this was certainly the effect of Paul’s intervention in history.
Paul waged a campaign against the churches founded by the family of Jesus, his twin brother Thomas who by 4 AD was in India and founded the Church which the Portuguese were surprised to discover in 1498, the Church of his elder brother James in Jerusalem, and the Nazarean Church founded by his mother in Syria, historically important because originally this was the Church of the Prophet Mohammed, and the idea of Jesus as a prophet and not a god in the Quran originates with the Nazareans in Syria.
Paul and the Church he founded suppressed or falsified the story of Jesus as an instrument of political power; a close reading of the life of Jesus reveals the process of his assimilation to Hellenic mystery faiths and instrumentalization to the legitimation of Roman Imperial colonial rule.
Only in those Churches outside the Church of Rome did any reliable account of his teaching truly survive; in India, Syria, Persia, Egypt, and Ireland.
I believe it is more useful to us to read “Jesus the Messiah” as Jesus the Liberator.
Here we must question the idea of Messiah to mean King of Israel, and the claim to Jesus to the throne as championed so memorably by Robert Graves.
This is not unique; every King of Israel of the House of David is referred to as a Messiah.
Many pretenders to the throne assumed royal titles and privileges; Messiah was a claim of rulership and not of divinity.
Herod, a non Jew ruling in the name of a Roman Emperor who required worship as a god, set the stage for a Davidic restoration and anticolonial revolt.
Luke and Matthew attempt to legitimize the claim of Jesus to Davidic kingship by citing a genealogy broken by four women, and fail to mention that Jesus was well known not as a royal prince but as the bastard of an enemy soldier whose mother was exiled as an adultress.
Regarding the social position and class membership of Jesus, which would have been crucial to his later leading an all-class revolution against the Empire, carpenter in Greek means a craft or guild master; skilled labor probably owning his own shop and tools and with apprentices.
Jesus was literate in Pharisaic sources, not a professional scholar or Rabbi but educated and middle class. His stepfather Joseph was also a carpenter, so this was a family trade in which he grew up.
Some of Jesus’ followers were wealthy and influential members of the elite; Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and Joanna, wife of Herod’s steward.
Matthew and Mark describe the Wedding at Canae as a royal wedding; the 300 denari worth of spikenard alone would be nearly ten thousand pounds Sterling today. John states that Mary of Bethany performed the ritual, sister of Lazarus. The following day Jesus entered Jerusalem in a triumphal parade like a victorious Roman general, which was attended by anti-Herodian partisans and like a royal investiture.
The Apostles provide an illuminating window into the social and political context of the life of Jesus, and the character of his acts. Here emerges a historical Jesus with whom I can identify and find common cause.
Simon the Zealot, as named in the Acts and in Luke, among a number of the Apostles so identified, Zealot being a member of the revolutionary council at war with the Roman Empire and engaged in struggle against the Vichy regime of Herod.
Simon bar Jonas as given in John, a name meaning Simon the Anarchist.
Simon Called Peter, a man operating under an alias meaning the Rock.
Of course there is Judas Iscariot of whom we have the beautiful Gospel of Judas, the Sicari or Daggermen being an organization of assassins.
Luke the Doctor, who wrote of Paul’s conversion while in prison together in Rome. Paul broke with the Nazarean churches which held that Jesus was a man and not divine, and created Christianity from fragments of Mithraism, the cult of the Roman army, as well as the Egyptian cult of Osirus, and others including the Orphic Mysteries and faiths of Tammuz and Zoroaster.
Thomas the Twin, twin brother of Jesus who traveled through Parthia, Persia, and India founding churches, and died at Mylapore in India near Madras.
James the Just, elder brother of Jesus and head of the church in Jerusalem. Simeonon, cousin of Jesus, assumed control of the Nazarean Church after the execution of James by Rome as a revolutionary, and moved the church to Syria and Iraq. The Prophet Mohammed was a member, and the Quran reflects its doctrines.
Mary Magdalene, presumed wife of Jesus, buried in a tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea with other relatives and notable characters from the story. Her Gospel is interesting indeed.
Jesus of course escaped capture by Rome at the Battle of Gethsemane when a cohort of the legion raided his base of freedom fighters, the whole idea and narrative of his Trial and Crucifixion being fictional; Jesus is enshrined where he died in Kashmir, in full Roman armor.
Regarding how he was understood by his followers decades after the failure of his independence revolution and escape, in the stories written by them Jesus was crucified between two Lestai or freedom fighters.
Acts 21:20 claims that the Christians of Jerusalem were known as “Zealots for the Law” meaning Jewish rather than Roman law.
With disambiguation of the historical from the mythic Jesus arises the question of his miracles and exorcisms, and of his possession or madness.
In John 7:20 and 8:52 a crowd says of him; “You have a demon,” meaning he was a madman but also reflecting the popular idea of him as being possessed by Beelzebub. John 10:20 says “He has a demon and is insane,” Luke 4:23 has “Doctor, heal thyself.”
Other sources in which Jesus is thought to heal the possessed or mad through command of a demon which possesses him include Matthew 9:34, 10:25, and 12:27, Luke 11:19, and John 8:48. Obviously his traveling medicine show was quite memorable; it was his recruiting tool for freedom fighters.
The phrase “the Holy Spirit” is sometimes used like calling the sidhe the Little Folk in Ireland or the Fates the Kindly Ones; the followers of Jesus did not wish to anger the demon which possessed him.
Mark 6:14 is a prayer to Horus stolen directly from Egyptian sources.
Jesus was during his ministry or medicine show thought by his followers to own the spirit by which John the Baptist had performed similar miracle cures.
Jesus never claims to be sent by god, never uses “thus saith the lord” to authorize his own words. Only once in the Gospels does he call himself; “Christ, son of the Blessed”, and this is an invention of the author of Mark 14:6. In fact Jesus avoids direct questions of this kind.
The claim of his divinity as a sacrificial man-god hinges on the Night Trial and Crucifixion, which is an impossibility. This is claimed to occur during Passover, when Jews cannot leave their homes, and as I have pointed point, claiming to be the Messiah is not blasphemy. Blasphemy would have been punished by stoning, not being handed over to a foreign occupier.
Roman records charge him with using a title of the Roman Emperor and as a charlatan and magician.
The account in John is more accurate; there is no trial before the Sanhedrin, and no Messianic claims which would have bothered no one. This version of events has Jesus arrested at a nocturnal meeting, and his followers were armed.
Jesus was identified by his tattoos or tribal scarification, the “marks of Jesus” which he gave to at least one of his disciples; this is interesting because you cannot be buried in a Jewish cemetery if you have a tattoo. This was an act of defiance which would have made him an Outsider, and not a member of the Jewish community much less a leader of it.
Jesus promises to send a “spirit of truth” to “be in you” and “foretell things to come” after his death, John 14:16 and 26.
In John 20 and 22 he sends a spirit into his followers by blowing on them. This conferred the power to exorcise demons or cure illness to his followers, who cast out demons by his name in Luke 10:17.
His disciples also practiced black magic, sending demons into enemies in I Corinthians 5:33.
Jesus clearly sends the spirit of Satan to Judas in the communion bread during the Last Supper; “I have judged to give him to Satan for destruction.”
To shake the dust from ones shoes is the casting of a curse.
Jesus used dividing spells to set followers against their families so they would come under his power in Matthew 10:35. Also, conversion was won by use of love spells.
Cures of psychosomatic illnesses, quieting hysterics, and rousing from hysterical coma or raising the dead were among the tricks of his medicine show used to win followers.
Some of the miracles of Jesus are simple retellings of cures from the life of Apollonius; for example, the story of the Youth of Nain parallels Apollonius’ raising of a dead girl in Lucian.
Jesus calming a storm is appropriated from the lives of Pythagoras and Empedocles.
The feeding of multitudes miracles are literary fictions intended to compare him with Elisha, who fed a hundred where Jesus fed thousands.
Turning water to wine is a story borrowed from the Dionysian festival at Sidon.
The escapes and invisibility spell of Jesus is also appropriated from Apollonius, who escaped the court of Domitian.
In Matthew 16:19 Jesus gives his disciples the Keys to the Kingdom Within; powers to “bind” and “loose” or command spirits.
The title “Son of the Living God” belongs to Osirus, the direct model of the mythic Jesus; and also associated with Iao, the Sacred Donkey whom he invokes.
There are 232 miracles in the synoptic gospels, omitting all parallels in Matthew and Luke to Mark, all in Luke to Matthew, and all general prophecies.
A number of Dionysian elements drive the narrative of Jesus’ story; the symbolic cannibalism of the Eucharist has no precedents in Judaism, but recalls the rites of the Bacchae and the rituals of Dionysus. Jesus used dancing, feasts, and wine in ritual performances throughout his traveling medicine show, and if he or his followers intended to create a cult of ecstatic trance much becomes clear.
The visions of the Disciples, of Jesus walking on water, flying, meeting the prophets on the mountain, are cases of visions induced by hallucinogens administered surreptiously at communion or feasts and proclaimed as miracles.
The early Church offered feasts, dancing, wine, often communal living, visions and spectacles of healing and exorcism; possibly also the original version of the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.
The exorcisms were clear and specific; “This kind cannot be made to leave by anything but a secret prayer”, Mark 9:28.
In Mark 1:12, “the spirit drove him to the wilderness”; after the Temptation “angels served” him, as he had won the command of spirits.
The Temptation is an apologetic story intended to explain away the fact that Jesus did nothing expected of the Messiah; not the military conquest of anywhere, providing food for all, or abolishing death and disease.
The god by which Jesus conjures, Io, donkey god of the dead in Egyptian and Essene faiths, who was cast into the abyss on which the city of Qumran is built.
I do not believe the claim that Jesus was a member of the Essene community, and the Essene Teacher of Righteousness lived a hundred years too soon to be identical with Jesus, though he or some of the authors of the gospels were clearly influenced by Essene doctrines.
Jesus also conjured by command of Obot, spirits of the Underworld, ghosts or gods like that conjured by the Witch of Endor. “Son of God” was in some cases originally “son of Ob” or of Spirits, denoting that he had undergone a shamanic underworld initiation and was possessed by and in command of spirits.
What did Jesus teach? His faith or system of magic seems to me to consist of a series of mystery initiations like those throughout the classical world; rites for acquiring a spirit guardian, secret names of Powers by which to conjure, and the rites of vision by which to travel to imaginal realms as described in the Kabala, the ascent of the soul through the Tree of Life. Herein disciples escaped the bounds of Mosaic Law by awakening an inner Adamic man beyond sin, becoming gods.
The problem with this is that Jesus never wrote anything; we have only what is said about him by others, all of whom have their own motives and their own idea of Jesus. The Jesus of Gnostic and Neo-Platonic philosophers is a philosopher bearing secret wisdoms and often a magician as well, the Jesus of anticolonial revolutionaries is an ideologist of revolutionary struggle, and the Jesus of tyrants is a tyrant.
The Jesus of Paul, the Christian faith he invented, and the Church which he founded are something else entirely. And inescapable.
We could do much worse than follow the path of Tolstoy, who made the Sermon on the Mount the whole of his faith and basis of his work in the world. Regardless of who Jesus was or what the historical Jesus may or may not have said and done, the Sermon on the Mount is worthy of the Infinite and as guidance in becoming human.
If so, the Jesus whom we aspire to realize in our lives as the Imitation of Christ or otherwise taught universal brotherhood and love, nonviolence, and the equality of all human beings.
Beyond this we have only the Wilderness of Mirrors and the legacies of our history.
Ascending and descending,
The Angels move in two directions
Along Jacob’s Ladder,
-Light and darkness conjoined.
Climb this Ladder
The above and the below,
Which is the body of
The Unknowable Infinite!
Anything can be an Angel,
Were we to wrestle it.
In the dance of the historical and mythic Jesuses we now trade partners to question the implications of his teachings as philosophy.
First is the Inclusive Principle, which paraphrases Rabbi Hillel who is the primary source of things the historical Jesus might have actually said; “You shall love the lord god with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind”, Matthew 22:37. This is identical to Isaiah’s First Principle, the Unity of Being, which establishes a three part modality of being with soul as a unifying force between eros and logos.
Second is the direct commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” in Matthew 22:39, which reinforces the Inclusive Principle.
The Infinite is in this ideology a gestalt or universal wholeness, which underlies our reality and our individual souls; an idea familiar as Jung’s collective unconscious, Coleridge’s Primary Imagination, ibn Arabi’s alam al mythal, and the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism. Herein love is boundless.
These two ideas are both a metaphysics and an ethics; each of us is an image of the Infinite which we bear within us, and our actions toward one another should honor the Infinite within the other.
The idea of New Creation in Christianity, that we are returned to the sinless state of Adam before the Fall in Christ, is a prototype of the Doctrine of Impermanence in Islam, borrowed from Maimonides, that man is free though the Infinite is timeless and limitless because God destroys and recreates the universe with each moment, and God cannot know the future til it happens.
So, what function does Christ serve which is unique?
Not the redemption from sin, for he is unnecessary for this; but the union of opposites and restoration of balance through transformative processes of the Tree of Life as a Universal Man who represents us all as we mount through its spheres and subsume their qualities.
As Isaiah 53:5, “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” is referenced by Rabbi Shimon; “When God wants to heal the world, he strikes one righteous man with affliction, through him bringing healing to all.”
In other words, in Judaism there is nothing unique or special about what Christian doctrine calls substitutive atonement, nor of the story of the Passion which is central to Christianity; it is a role which may be performed by anyone. The world is redeemed through any ordinary human, who is merely righteous, in each generation; whereas the importance of the Christ figure for Christians is that he performs the roles of the sin eater, scapegoat, and sacrifice. The uniqueness of Jesus as Christ is true for Christians, and no one else.
So we return to the question of the meaning of calling Jesus the son of god. First, all Jews are sons of God. There is a secondary meaning in Kabbalah where son of god refers to a sephirah called Beauty of Israel.
“The Blessed Holy One has one son who shines from one end of the world to another. He is a great and mighty tree, whose head reaches toward heaven and whose roots are rooted in the holy ground,“ Zohar 2:105a.
Here also is another point of divergence, for where in Christianity Jesus is identified with Adam, in Kabbalah the Son of God, meaning all humankind, is identified with the Tree of Life.
The Cosmology of the Kabbalah symbolized by the Tree of Life contains the following spheres; Keter or nothingness, annihilation, and undifferentiated emanation, Hokmah or Wisdom, Dinah which is the Mother principle or totality of all individuation, Hesed or Love, Gevurah or Power, Fiferet or Beauty which balances Power and Love, Neza or endurance, Hoda or majesty, Yesod or the Axis of the World as written in Proverbs 10:25, Malkuth or the Shekinah and hierosgamos of the divine opposites. Above the sephiroth is the Ein Sof or Unknowable Infinite. Also there is the Knesset Israel, the community of faith; “One who enters must enter through this gate”, Zohar 1:76.
What have we learned?
I remain unclear about the idea of god as written in the Bible and primary sources; sometimes it speaks of “obot” or spirits which are the same as gods and demons, sometimes the word used is “ruach”, specifically the ghost of the dead. At other times the specific powers of the Judaic god are invoked by their names, as in Adonai and Jehovah. Sometimes the reference is to the Canaanite donkey god, sometimes it is the Living God, a title of Osirus. Here the epochs of history may be peeled like the layers of an onion to reveal the construction of the idea of the Infinite in Abrahamic faiths as a prose of adaptation and change.
Was Jesus attempting a syncretic reformation of Judaism from its Egyptian sources, or are the broadly classical sources of the gospels and their Hellenizing authors at work?
We know that some of the gospels are direct quotes and paraphrases of older sources, the Gospel of John shaped by the Dead Sea Scrolls, Mary’s Magnificat from the story of Hanna, with direct copy of passages from Egyptian magical works. Parts of the story of Jesus are stolen from the lives of pagan magicians, and major elements of Christianity are assimilations from pagan sources, the Mithraic Eucharist being a prime example.
What of his miracles?
Miracles such as the suppression of hysterical symptoms and hallucinations induced by trance and psychotropics in the traveling medicine show of Jesus have been reproduced under laboratory conditions through hypnosis. Many of the skin conditions called leprosy in classical times are now regarded as curable psychosomatic illness. Jesus used a Direct Command technique of hypnosis, ”speaking with authority”, and was himself aware that he healed by suggestion and not through spirit possession; “your belief has healed you”.
Now as then and commonly throughout the religions of the world, the experience of nonordinary states of consciousness lies at the heart of the religious experience, used to trick people into believing strange things and most especially the words of those who claim to speak for the Infinite. There has always been someone in a gold robe who cons other people into doing the hard and dirty work, who weaponizes faith in service to power and authorizes hierarchies of the Elect as kings, enforcers, and slaves.
Jesus probably used hallucinogens, initiatory rituals of ecstatic trance and vision, performances of healing and exorcism, and communal feasts to induce these states, as the mystery cults in Malta, Anatolia, and throughout the ancient world did, though psychological manipulation alone can achieve the same results.
Fundamentalism uses similar methods of thought control today; with speaking in tongues, for example, classic behavioral conditioning techniques of modeling, cueing, and reinforcement train worshippers to self induce hysterical seizure.
Of course Jesus did perform one true miracle; he led an all-class revolution against the Roman Empire. For some of us, revolutionaries, that’s enough to find him an intriguing and useful model of action.
I believe nothing which offers others a means of control over me. But I believe in history.
Such is my Reckoning with Jesus, devil of my childhood, central figure of Christianity which has been a devil to humankind with its kings and crusades and Inquisitions.
So I wrote half a lifetime ago, from research conducted mainly in Jerusalem after a journey through the Arabian Peninsula and parts of the Frankincense Trail inspired by reading Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands.
My objective was to discover the lost historical Jesus beneath the layers of his myth as a fictional character in other people’s stories; to this end I read things written about him by both his friends and his enemies, and traced their sources as best I could.
During my recent time in Damascus, when not overthrowing the Assad regime or hunting his torturers and the Nazi founded bioweapons programme with its hideous medical experiments at the heart of the regime’s state terror through the hell of underground prisons, I reread possibly the best and most true account of the invention of Christianity by its founder Paul, Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas. Here follows my review on Goodreads.
The best books of 2020, the ones we’ll still be reading a thousand years from now, include:
A reimagination of the life of St Paul and the origins of his Absurdist Faith and invention of Christ and Christianity, a fiction destined to consume the Roman Empire and replace it with an empire of faith more terrible still, and born of sexual terror, resistance and revolution against state tyranny and imperialist colonialism, and the inchoate vileness of authority and a regime of torture and fear from which the only escape is madness and the only liberation is seizure of power, a power which is corruptive and poisonous and will turn like vipers on those who would use it to subjugate others.
Christos Tsiolkas has in Damascus given us a rare account in fiction of the true history of Christianity’s founding, an incantation of fearful imagery which recalls William Blake’s poetic reimagination of the Bible, a song of resistance against patriarchy and authorized identities of sex and gender, and an interrogation of the nature of power.
In part a sustained dialectics of sanity as obedience to authorized identities including those of sex and gender and madness as resistance and liberation which equates to ecstatic vision, and locates the whole of spiritual experience within the domain of self-ownership versus appropriation as revolutionary struggle and offers a unified theory of psychology and political action, the themes of Damascus hold the origins of our civilization in juxtaposition with our own time to discover Faith, Hope, and Love as informing and motivating sources of renewal and transformation.
A vivid and unforgettable vision of a world divided into masters and slaves, and the emergence of the idea of equality before the Infinite which revolutionized the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
It has recently been suggested by the party of treason and theocratic tyranny and terror in America that we should all read the Bible in public school; this I think an excellent idea, because you cannot understand European art, music, or literature without the Bible, and much of history.
My problem is with the state authorization of specific interpretations of the Bible; America was in part founded to free us from centuries of religious wars which had come before.
Who is Santa Claus, where did he come from, and how did he become a universal figure in our culture associated with Christmas?
A priest recently became infamous for telling children that Santa was a marketing character for Coca-Cola while performing the role of listening to wishes, a partial historical truth but one which misses the point; the poetic truth is that Santa embodies wishes as vision and as hope.
He is also far more ancient and subsumes a number of important functions, the origins of the figure of Santa Claus being in rituals of ecstatic trance and vision, underworld journey, and the dispersal of Sami tribal ritual and symbolism.
What this short film, focused on the use of amanita mushrooms, well documented as the pan-European witch’s flying potion, neglects to mention is that Finnish scout-snipers were employed by Gustave Adolph of Sweden, leader of the Protestants in the Thirty Years War, against the Catholic Holy Roman Empire; and roamed throughout Europe in the first half of the 1600’s, spreading their customs, including Santa, as heroes of the Reformation.
A wise elder in red and white as a figure of the magic mushroom, in a sled drawn by reindeer, bringing gifts of healing and welcomed with feasts, flying.
Santa and the Lord of Misrule who presided over the harvest and midwinter festival of Saturnalia which the Church had appropriated as Christmas are negative spaces of each other, Janus like figures which mirror and were conflated with one another; Santa the bringer of gifts, feasts, and reconnection with the mysteries of the spirit and dream world, and Saturn’s proxy ruler who represents transgression and suspension of laws and limits of the Forbidden and reversals of order and authority, but also an amok time of madness and the dangers of an authoritarian tyranny of whims.
The Underworld Journey and dream quest element of Santa’s myth, primarily an Orphic ritual of poetic vision and ecstatic trance, are universal in human cultures, and find a parallel in the Greco- Egyptian faith of Asclepius, found throughout the Roman Empire, in which patients entered guided healing states in dream incubation chambers. The historical leader of the Roman community in England after the fall of Imperial dominion, Ambrosius Aurelianus, on whom the literary figure of Merlin was based was a priest of Asclepius. This faith from the dawn of our civilization of the Serpent of Wisdom and Healing, rooted in oracles and dreams, has modern parallels in the dream navigation and interpretation arts of the Kagyu Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhists, the Naqshbandi Sufis, Jungian psychology, and Surrealism.
In the words of Jean Genet, who set me on my life’s path in swearing me to the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut 1982; “It takes a long time dreaming in darkness to live with grandeur.”
This suggests possibilities for reclaiming Christmas as a traditional festival of family and community healing, and a universal celebration of the revisioning of oneself and humankind.
In this time of reimagination and transformation, we dream new selves and new futures; we destroy and recreate our universes and realities, and free ourselves and each other to explore unknowns. Such times of change offer us new identities as liberation struggle, and emergence from the legacies of our histories.
Enacting the role of the Lord of Misrule, let us question, expose, mock, and challenge authority; let us transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden, defy our limits and those who would enslave us to their laws and ideas of virtue, and perform the violation of normalities and seizures of power. Let us run amok and be ungovernable.
Enacting the role of Santa Claus, let us be beneficent dispensers of mercy and compassion, healers of historic and systemic injustices, and champions of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. Let us dream new dreams, and find the courage to make them real.
Let us embrace our darkness and discover new possibilities of becoming human.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night; of wonders, raptures, and glorious transformative vision.
As we enter the Christmas season on this Midwinter Solstice, the day of most profound and deepest darkness, a time much of America will be consumed by orgiastic buying as displays of elite class membership and obligatory feasts often with people we don’t actually like or deeply know, adrift in a universe without imposed values living lives of random chaotic episodes of being which form no grand design, ephemeral and illusory, subjected to totalizing passions and caught in vast invisible systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization enslaved to authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege like Charlie Chaplin eaten by the gears of the machine he serves in The Factory, let us confront the meaninglessness of life and the terror of our nothingness not with abjection, despair, and helplessness but with the joy of total freedom.
When there are no rules, there are no impossibilities.
On the darkest day, the seasons change.
Merry Christmas, and don’t forget to run amok and be ungovernable.
As written by Wendy Syfret, author of The Sunny Nihilist: : How a Meaningless Life Can Make You Truly Happy, in Aeon; “Exhausted by the modern pressure to squeeze meaning out of every moment? Here’s a radical way to reset your priorities.
In theory, the pursuit of a meaningful life is noble. Foundational concepts of community, ethics, logic, morality, consciousness and equality were born from the investigation of meaning. From Aristotle and Plato to the entire oeuvre of John Hughes, the urge to wrestle with the point of it all has inspired great works of art, literature and film. But today something’s gone awry and the pursuit of meaning inspires more angst than awe. The search has moved from a private pursuit to a marketable product.
The rise of meaningless meaning
Let me demonstrate with a game, ‘spot the meaningless meaning’. Next time you’re at the supermarket, pharmacy or really any non-enlightened space of commerce, pay attention to what the products are attempting to offer. One might expect a barrage of quality and utility assurances: ‘these chickpeas are low sodium’, ‘this facemask is non-irritating’. But, increasingly, aspirations are higher. A chocolate bar isn’t skim (skimmed) milk powder and sugar, it’s a chance to create an intergenerational family moment. A lipstick isn’t a bullet of colour to light up a drawn face, but a weapon of radical self-expression.
Rather than informing a population of philosophically fulfilled, elevated beings, the ubiquity of all this bite-sized meaning has had an adverse effect, fuelling our familiar, modern malaise of dissatisfaction, disconnection and burnout.
The fixation with making all areas of existence generically meaningful has created exhausting realities where everything suddenly really, really matters. Daily newsletters flood our inboxes, prescribing never-ending tasks and goals to meditate over and mark as complete. In the shower, we listen to podcasts about making this day count, then towel off and cram in a few minutes of mindful journalling about what we managed to meaningfully achieve the day before.
But as meaning moves from a long-term exploration to a daily metric, it’s creating new problems. When we’re not immediately able to locate meaning in our actions, jobs, relationships and consumer products, we’re left feeling like anxious, empty failures. The once-noble pursuit that built culture and helped us carve out rewarding existences becomes just another task on the endless checklist of a ‘good life’ that we’re never quite able to tick off.
Nihilism as a solution
So what’s the alternative? Is the answer to embrace a state of pointless, nihilistic chaos? Yeah, pretty much. At least that’s what’s worked for me.
For the past few years, I’ve been consumed by nihilism. Reading that, it would be fair to assume things haven’t been peachy. But my descent into the controversial philosophy hasn’t been a grim road of despair and hopelessness. Quite the opposite. It’s become one of the most illuminating and fortifying parts of my life.
Rejecting the urge to seek and denote meaning to all things has changed the way I assign value and spend time. It has challenged what I focus on and, most importantly, what I disregard. I’ve found that a kind of optimistic or ‘sunny’ nihilism highlights the delicate beauty of existence, the absurdity of life, and the exciting chaos of the everyday. But I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand the power of sunny nihilism, it’s necessary to begin with the philosophy itself.
The broadest explanation of nihilism argues that life is meaningless and the systems to which we subscribe to give us a sense of purpose – such as religion, politics, traditional family structures or even the notion of absolute truth itself – are fantastical human constructs; inventions to make the randomness of existence feel a little more orderly. Or, as nihilism’s poster boy Friedrich Nietzsche put it: ‘Every belief, every considering something true, is necessarily false because there is simply no true world.’
Breaking it down further, the American philosopher Donald Crosby divides nihilism into four main forms: moral, epistemological, cosmic and, perhaps the best-known, existential. Moral nihilism rejects fundamental ideas of right and wrong; epistemological nihilism takes issue with absolute truth; cosmic nihilism considers nature to be inherently indifferent and hostile; and finally we reach existential nihilism, in many ways the culmination of all these considerations, which probably keeps most people up at night – the basic idea being that there is no meaning to life, everything is pointless.
Reading all that, it’s fair to argue that nihilism is kind of a bummer. These ideas do pose the risk of curdling into a kind of toxic nihilism that leaves the individual feeling despondent and overwhelmed. What’s the point of doing anything if nothing matters? If there is no inherent understanding of good and bad, why try to lead a moral life? If everything is pointless, why even get out of bed?
The cleansing power of sunny nihilism
While I’ll admit that the message that nothing matters – not your job, god, universe, certainly not what type of canned goods you buy – is an overwhelming thought, it doesn’t have to be. Set against this never-ending obsession with locating (or, too often, purchasing) meaning, it can be liberating.
When I contemplate life’s pointlessness, I begin by remembering that, in the scope of all human history, I really matter very little (a rather cosmic approach). My issues and concerns are mute. My successes and failures will all be forgotten. As will the achievements and stumbles of everyone around me (existential nihilism at its finest).
While I may feel dwarfed by the scope of endless and apathetic time, the smallest elements of my life begin to expand. If nothing matters long-term, my focus shifts to this moment. I understand that the present, however mundane, is as fleeting, temporal, fragile and forgettable as the greatest events in human history.
Nihilism makes me wonder about what I do and don’t pay attention to. Is what another person thinks of me imbued with greater meaning (or meaninglessness) as compared with a brush of jasmine tumbling over a neighbour’s fence? Not really. So why am I consumed by one while ignoring the other?
By his own description, Nietzsche ‘philosophise[d] with a hammer’, breaking open large ideas and challenging his readers to see what could be reformed with the pieces. In this way nihilism, like all philosophies, is a tool to explore parts of our lives. As with any tool, it can be picked up and put down, used to create or destroy; outcomes and executions are dependent on the user’s intent. It is up to you to decide if you will fall into the destructive grooves of toxic nihilism, or opt for something a little lighter. You may not have a purpose, but you do have agency. It’s this reading of nihilism that I think about when considering a life without meaning.
But how does one go about picking up such a tool and using it in a positive way? This Guide will help you embrace sunny nihilism and avoid its toxic alternative.
Think it through
Understand the difference between passive and active forms of nihilism
The challenges posed by nihilism weren’t lost on Nietzsche, who had an elegant way of explaining how the philosophy can serve as a destructive or constructive force. According to him, passive nihilists absorb the messages of meaninglessness and are threatened. They fear the void so scramble to fill it by indulging in any offering of it. As Nolen Gertz wrote in Aeon in 2020, this form of blind self-protection is a ‘dangerous form of self-destruction’.
He added: ‘To believe just for the sake of believing in something can lead to a superficial existence, to the complacent acceptance of believing anything believed by others, because believing in something (even if it turns out to be nothing worth believing in) will be seen by the passive nihilist as preferable to taking the risk of not believing in anything …’
Which is how we end up back in the trap of meaningless meaning. Or standing in the supermarket aisle, trying to convince ourselves that a can of chickpeas really does matter.
As a more constructive alternative, Nietzsche ushered individuals to evolve into active nihilists. That is, to stare into the abyss and see the absence of meaning not as a tragedy but as an opportunity. To consider it a space to fill with your own values, to define how you want to be in the world and what you believe to be true. An active nihilist isn’t intimidated by chaos, they recognise it as a chance to create something new and better.
In my own journey toward sunny nihilism, I landed somewhere in the middle. I wasn’t horrified by a lack of absolute truth, but I also didn’t rush to write my own. Rather, I chose to pause, stare into the void, and consider the freedom of nothingness.
Stay alert to meaningless meaning
Whereas nihilism can prompt reflection and widen your view on existence, the commercial hijacking of meaning plays into the vulnerabilities of the passive nihilist, contributing to our era’s epidemic of self-obsessed selfishness. It not only encourages you to centre every action around yourself, but it deceptively presents this as a noble act. When you embrace this kind of personal mythmaking, you give yourself permission to spend a lot of time thinking about your own life, actions and experiences.
Speaking to Politico magazine in 2020, Virginia Heffernan, the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art (2016), said: ‘the recent fantasy of “optimising” a life – for peak performance, productivity, efficiency – has created a cottage industry that tries to make the dreariest possible lives sound heroic.’
To help you avoid this decadent trap, it is worth being vigilant of, and guarding against, the ways the world is trying to convince you that you’re partaking in a sacred act – by positioning every brand, product or service as somehow meaningful.
Are those period undies really a symbol of rebellion, or just a convenient sanitary product? Does the bottle of hot sauce in my fridge truly mark me as an iconoclastic thrill-seeker, or just indicate a robust gut flora? Is my bank really helping me invest in family values and community, or do I just appreciate the low fees if I deposit a set amount each month?
While writing this article, I was conveniently served an advert for ‘Florence by Mills’, the new teen skincare range from the actress Millie Bobby Brown (I appreciate the algorithm recognising my youthful spirit). The entire range is clad in the familiar pastel colours and toothless message of ‘empowering young people through something something’ of so many personal care products. But the ‘Feed Your Soul Love U a Latte’ mask stood out in particular. Turns out it’s never too young to preach that enlightenment can be achieved in a 15-minute topical treatment.
I hope that the young people browsing these products are resilient enough to not fall into such narratives; that they’re able to pause to ask what these cheap exchanges are calling on them to invest emotionally or financially. Will this purchase make them happy, or is it an example of what Heffernan cautioned against when she said we were out to make ‘the dreariest possible lives sound heroic’?
Recognise the happy side of nihilism
When promoting nihilism as the antidote to the commercialisation of meaning, I tend to meet the same repeated questions: if there’s no point, then why do anything? Why get out of bed? Wash your hair? Treat another person with kindness? Not fall into a quivering heap?
I’m reminded of an episode of the Netflix sitcom The Good Place (2016-20). Chidi – a character who happens to be a moral philosopher – has the kind of existential crisis that inspires these queries. During his breakdown, he walks a classroom of philosophy students down the major paths where humanity has attempted to locate meaning and understand how to live an ‘ethical life’. After cycling through the arguments of virtue ethics, consequentialism and deontology, he finally declares that all these pathways to meaning lead nowhere (it’s worth watching the show to hear Chidi explain why) before concluding that nihilism is the only logical philosophical view – at which point he has a full meltdown.
While I love Chidi, I find the scene frustrating for how narrowly it presents this cause and effect. Such a response has always puzzled me. After all, did you get out of bed this morning to search for the meaning of life or for a cup of coffee? Again, are such grand questions really bringing such grand comforts?
In contrast to Chidi, another pop-culture figure shows how nihilism can inspire greater happiness. In the film The Beach Bum (2019), Matthew McConaughey plays Moondog, an epicurean, once-iconic, Florida-based writer. His is a woozy and colourful tale of excess and hedonism that involves a lot of drinking, drugs, avoided responsibility, and sex. All of which are indulged in with few consequences.
Watching The Beach Bum, you feel you’ve seen this movie before, you know to wait for the fall, when Moondog will collapse under the weight of his shirked responsibilities and the system will catch up to him. Except the fall never comes. After seeing it at South by Southwest film festival, the critic Hazem Fahmy wrote: ‘Rather than simply not address these issues, the film goes out of its way to remind us that nothing in this strange dimension truly matters.’
Moondog doesn’t care about anything, he lives for pleasure. Towards the end of the film, he outlines his life’s mantra to a reporter: ‘We’re here to have a good time.’ For all this destruction, and clear disregard for rules, values and consequences, Moondog isn’t punished. By the end of the film, he has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize and several million dollars. Although, true to form, he shows they’re meaningless too (I won’t spoil the finale).
Moondog’s embrace of nihilism demonstrates that, when you stop focusing on a greater point, you’re able to ask simpler but more rewarding questions: what does happiness look like right now? What would give me pleasure today? How can I achieve a sense of satisfaction in this moment? Most of the time, the answers aren’t complex. They’re small delights already at hand – time spent with loved ones, a delicious meal, a walk in nature, a cup of coffee. Or, in Moondog’s case, a lot of booze and parties.
Nihilism doesn’t have to spiral into selfishness
Moondog’s experience sounds great to me, but it leads to a second concern surrounding nihilism. It might not make you miserable, but what about everyone who has to hang out with you? If nothing matters, you’re not part of some larger plan and you’re not held accountable by any rulebook. Motivated only by what feels good in the moment, what’s stopping you acting only for your own interests?
Nietzsche was mindful of these pain points, writing in Beyond Good and Evil (1886): ‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’
Nihilism asks us to toss out meaning and gaze into the void that’s left in its place. But rather than being a simple, terrifying black hole, a void can prompt reflection. It’s a space to be filled with whatever you want. In that way, nihilism can serve as a funhouse mirror, reflecting and distorting your own beliefs. Approach it with pain and fear, and those feelings will be magnified. Go to it looking for a way to excuse gross behaviour, and you’ll find it.
Stare into the abyss
Give it a go yourself. Take a moment to truly submit to your own smallness in the Universe. To admit you are meaningless. That you don’t matter. That your name, ego, reputation, family, friends and loves will soon be gone.
This needn’t be a destructive experience. Once the discomfort passes, and your ego abates, stop to consider – how has your understanding of your own time and energy changed? Is your job really so important when coupled with the knowledge that even the greatest achievements in human history will eventually be lost to time? Are the issues, people or situations that cause you stress or pain actually worth the worry when you remember that no one will ever remember or really be impacted by them?
The only real impact these earthly concerns have is on what they take you away from: things that may not ‘matter’, but at least bring you joy.
Focusing on the scale of your own life, and how insignificant it is, also allows you to ask: OK, if I don’t matter, and neither do the issues that take up so much of my time, how does the world show itself differently? If I’m no longer the centre of my own universe, what takes that space?
You might start wondering what you want to last after you’ve gone, and what needs to be protected and treasured.
I considered these points recently while witnessing a widely affecting mass collision with nihilism – the delivery of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The shots showed an inconceivable array of distant galaxies that existed billions of years in the past. It was an overwhelming view that crashed into any understanding we have of time, scale and distance – not to mention the potential for life and realities beyond our own. Responding to it, it felt like the whole world had a mass awakening to individual inconsequentialism.
But the reaction wasn’t mass depression or hopelessness. It was awe. People wondered over the beauty and scale of worlds they could never truly comprehend. They saw how their own lives barely register on a cosmic level, that our own galaxy wasn’t even a blip. This sense of our own meaninglessness was humbling. It didn’t break people’s hearts but excited them, reminded them of the inconceivable beauty and majesty of existence. People felt thankful for being a dot in an endless sky, to be part of this cosmic tapestry, even if just for a meaningless moment.
It takes guts, but you too might find that the abyss reframes your attention to things you hope will last for a little longer than yourself. Art, community, the people you love, their right to feel safe, respected and well. If you’re looking for somewhere to redirect all this formerly self-involved energy, start there. In place of existential angst, psychological annihilation or selfish abandon, you can find relief in larger causes.
Try a light meditation on death
When I’m overwhelmed, remembering that one day I won’t exist makes whatever’s stressing me appear small. Accepting this finality transforms the bland environs I’m ignoring into an overwhelming buffet of smells, sights and experiences that suddenly feel impossibly rare.
This ‘mindfulness of death’ is central to the work of the artificial intelligence scientist and Buddhist teacher Nikki Mirghafori. To access this feeling, she counsels trying a form of ‘death meditation’ to help confront your fear of death, and experience the strange wonder that can come from that.
To try it, she instructs meditating with the mantra ‘this could be my last breath’. The theory is that by doing so, you work through the terror a little at a time, observing what comes to the surface during the practice and confronting each fear until you eventually reach a place of peace.
Mirghafori posits that, by accepting your own mortality and facing life’s impermanence, you can align the way you live with your truest values. It’s many people’s lack of interest in contemplating death – and as such, how precious and fleeting our lives are – that allows so many to waste their time.
I can report that this is a terrifying exercise. It’s like rehearsing your final moments, inviting your mind to flood with fear, regret, longing, loss, love and gratitude. When you imagine each breath to be your last, each breath becomes a gift on arrival. Even after you’re done, it’s impossible to not enter the rest of your day with a degree of elation at being alive.
Doing it, I’m reminded of what Epicurus once said: ‘Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.’ Epicurus didn’t believe in life after death, as either a punishment or a reward. He taught that life and all it could offer was happening to us right now.
Just as nihilism has become associated with narrow-minded destruction, Epicurus is often synonymous with hedonism and a ceaseless pursuit of selfish pleasures. But in reality, he was certain this kind of living would usher people away from materialism and greed. His ‘pleasure principle’ championed being and doing good, arguing that, with one precious life to enjoy, not a moment should be wasted in guilt or anxiety over pain caused to others. The only way to feel truly good was to treat people well.
Remember pointless pleasures
I’d like to end by lightening things up a little. One way to refocus on the pointless pleasure that actually forms the bedrock of our lives is to start a ‘nice things’ list. Across the day, make an effort to jot down moments, people and events that make you happy.
I’ve been doing this for years. Reviewing my own rambling lists, I’m always surprised by the simplicity of the entries: the smell of fresh basil, an excellent joke, two dogs meeting in the street. Alone they are innocuous (and usually overlooked), but together they flavour my days with endless sweetness. Learning to pay attention to them returns me to what actually provides solace in my day, training me to not overlook the now for the promise of the one day.
So often in the pursuit of greater meaning we erase not only the joy of these forgotten delights, but also their collective power. Yes, a flock of galahs on my nature strip, or crying to a Paul Kelly song, or the spasmodic energy of Junior Bake Off (my most recent entries) are not life-altering – but, taking time to notice and appreciate them, they form the sum of their parts. A handful of treasured beats becomes a good day, a good week, a good year, a good life. Meaningless, sure. Precious, absolutely.
Key points – How to be a happy nihilist
The rise of meaningless meaning. The search for meaning used to be a noble pursuit, but it’s become commercialised and now inspires more angst than awe.
Nihilism as a solution. This is the philosophy that says life is meaningless. Handled with care, it can be liberating.
The cleansing power of sunny nihilism. This is a kind of optimistic nihilism that highlights the delicate beauty of existence, the absurdity of life, and the exciting chaos of the everyday.
Understand the difference between passive and active forms of nihilism.
Passive nihilists scramble to fill the void with anything to hand; active nihilists are undaunted, and fill the space with their own values.
Stay alert to meaningless meaning. To avoid passive or toxic nihilism, it pays to be vigilant of, and guard against, the ways the world is trying to convince you that you’re partaking in a sacred act.
Recognise the happy side of nihilism. When you stop focusing on a greater point, you’ll find you can ask simpler but more rewarding questions, such as: what does happiness look like right now?
Nihilism doesn’t have to spiral into selfishness. When you stare into the abyss, it reframes your attention to things you hope will last for a little longer than yourself.
Try a light meditation on death. I can report that this is a terrifying exercise. But when you imagine each breath to be your last, each breath becomes a gift on arrival.
Remember pointless pleasures. From the smell of fresh basil to an excellent joke, start a ‘nice things’ list. Meaningless, sure. Precious, absolutely.
Why it matters
The young philosophers embracing nihilism
For uplifting and earnest examples of nihilism’s application, check out the way younger philosophers are exploring it. Two TEDx talks by teenagers stand out in particular. In 2018, Elias Skjoldborg, a student at Harwood Union High School in Vermont, used the platform to introduce his take on ‘optimistic nihilism’. In short, he argues that if life is meaningless – and we are not pinned to some greater existential task or goal – then we may as well focus on finding happiness during this brief, meaningless flash of consciousness we call existence.
When he says ‘if you died right now, it wouldn’t really make a difference in the big picture. Had you never been born, nobody would really care,’ he presents it as good news. He adds: ‘That life has no meaning is not a reason … to be sad.’ Rather, he explains, if our lives are needless, then the only directive we have is to figure out how to find happiness in our momentary blip of consciousness. Skjoldborg suggested that his audience get hobbies, help others, solve problems rather than creating them, and just try their best.
Skjoldborg is not alone in his observations. In his talk a year earlier, Siddharth Gupta, a student at Kodaikanal International School in India, also opened up about how nihilism has helped him. Giving his talk the title ‘Confessions of an Existential Nihilist’, he explained how his belief that life was worthless had given him the ‘opportunity to find meaning in all that I do’.
Meanwhile, over on YouTube, Khadija Mbowe, a Gambian Canadian vlogger on sociology and media, recently looked at nihilism and absurdism in a video asking if life still had value if it was a meaningless random occurrence within an uncaring universe. Clad in a bright orange graphic T-shirt with matching statement makeup, Mbowe looked like any other luminous member of Gen Z, asking: ‘What does our life, our existence, mean when we don’t believe we’re put here for a reason?’ as easily as if they were reacting to a viral mukbang video. Drawing on references from as broad a field as James Baldwin and RuPaul’s Drag Race, Mbowe asks big questions that don’t lead to dense, depressing answers. Instead, this vlogger’s takes are thoughtful, exploratory and ultimately hopeful.
Each generation has a tendency to make the case for why their set of circumstances is especially dire. But for young people coming of age during rolling crises of pandemics, climate catastrophes and quaking world economies, they might have a strong case for being particularly hard done by. Yet basking in the aforementioned reflections of these fresh-faced philosophers, one feels a little lightened, not only by their constructive interpretation of nihilism, but also by the resilience it appears to offer them.
Links & books
In my book The Sunny Nihilist: How a Meaningless Life Can Make You Truly Happy (2021), I explore not only the modern tendency to overinvest in meaning, but also the darker consequences of such a relationship. In particular, how it intersects with our notions of work, love, family, capitalism and politics. I also explore how people can detangle themselves, and how gratifying it is to do so.
The literary darlings Ottessa Moshfegh, Melissa Broder and Lisa Taddeo all frequently return to themes of millennial nihilism in their work. Meanwhile, the writers Jia Tolentino, Susan Sontag and Jenny Odell are looking more broadly at our interest in meaning, worth and community in a way that intersects with these ideas. Their deep folios of writing are edifying reading – I suggest starting with Tolentino’s Trick Mirror (2019) and Odell’s How to Do Nothing (2019), both books are as digestible as they are illuminating (and have personally been reliable elevated small-talk fodder for the past few years).
I already mentioned the TV show The Good Place (do check it out if you haven’t already), but nihilism is present in many of our other favourite entertainment offerings, such as BoJack Horseman (2014-20), a cartoon that follows a clutch of humans and anthropomorphic animals as they navigate Hollywood, fame, and their own cycles of ambition and destruction. One nihilistic moment involved Mr Peanutbutter, a lovable and dim-witted Labrador who is a successful TV actor, consoling his then-wife by tenderly reminding her: ‘The Universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn’t the search for meaning. It’s to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense and, eventually, you’ll be dead.’ I promise it’s funnier than it sounds.
Nihilism has found its way to other screens too. The films Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and Palm Springs (2020) both show how fun and bombastic these ideas can be. Although my personal favourite surprise nihilistic resource might just be SpongeBob SquarePants (1999-). If a chatty sponge can’t convince you of the chaotic charm of existence, I’m not sure what can.”
At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom.
Where do we begin, and where do we go from here? A reading list on Existentialism and Sartre:
Sartre: A Philosophical Biography, by Thomas R. Flynn provides an excellent guide to his life and work. Flynn’s Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction, is the best general work of its kind, and his massive interrogations of ideas of history in Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 1: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History, and Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History, are great followup studies.
For an insightful discussion of Existentialism which gives you a seat at the table during its founding, read Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others.
The Labyrinth: An Existential Odyssey with Jean-Paul Sartre, by Ben Argon is a graphic novel of rats caught in a maze and trying to discover a path to freedom, as are we all.
Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It,
by Ronald Aronson details the 1952 rupture and the fragmentation of the postwar Left.
Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, by Tilottama Rajan is an excellent history of relevant ideas.
The A to Z of Existentialism, by Stephen Michelman is a dictionary of 300 entries clarifying the ideas of its major figures including Sartre, De Beauvior, Camus, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and others.
The Pursuit of Existentialism: From Sartre and de Beauvoir to Zizek and Badiou, by Irwin Jones examines Existentialism as a historical force.
Movies with Meaning: Existentialism through Film, by Daniel Shaw is an essential guide to an intriguing field of study.
Primary Works and Studies by Author
Existentialism is a Humanism, Nausea, No Exit, The Wall, Being and Nothingness, To Freedom Condemned, We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939-1975, Literary Essays, Truth and Existence, Existential Psychoanalysis, Notebooks for an Ethics, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Mallarmé or the Poet of Nothingness, Baudelaire, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, The Family Idiot, Jean Paul Sartre
Sartre: A Philosophical Biography, by Thomas R. Flynn
The Second Sex, The Mandarins, Conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir
The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947, The Rebel, The Possessed, Albert Camus
A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, Robert Zaretsky
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, Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Rüdiger Safranski
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, C.G. Jung
On Nietzsche’s Side, The Step Not Beyond, Maurice Blanchot
Thomas the Obscure, The Last Man, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, The Infinite Conversation, The Space of Literature, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Community of Lovers, Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, Christophe Bident
The Thief’s Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, Treasures of the Night: collected poems, The Declared Enemy, Fragments of the Artwork, Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet
Genet: a biography, Edmund White
The Hélène Cixous Reader, Cixous, Sellers ed, foreword Jacques Derrida
Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine, Verena Andermatt Conley
The Magic Lantern, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews, Ingmar Bergman
The Odyssey, a modern sequel, Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, Report to Greco, The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis
The Essential Kierkegaard, Hong eds.
Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard,Clare Carlisle
I and Thou, Between Man and Man, Martin Buber
Martin Buber, Diamond
The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology, Steven Kepnes
Learning Through Dialogue: The Relevance of Martin Buber’s Classroom, Kenneth Paul Kramer
Waiting for Godot, The Unnameable, Samuel Beckett
A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, Hugh Kenner
Kangaroo Notebook, Beyond the Curve, The Face of Another, The Ruined Map, Secret Rendezvous, Woman of the Dunes, Kobo Abe
The Idiot, The Crocodile, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Diary of a Madman, Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
Strange Library, 1Q84, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
The Trial, The Castle, The Complete Stories, The Zürau Aphorisms, Franz Kafka
Conversations with Kafka, Gustav Janouch
Franz Kafka: a biography, Max Brod
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari
The Nightmare of Reason: Kafka, Pawel
Existentialist Psychotherapy
Sartre and Psychoanalysis: An Existentialist Challenge to Clinical Metatheory, Betty Canon
Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy, by Viktor E. Frankl
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, by Lacan
Philosophy of Existence, by Karl Jaspers.
Of general interest to literary scholars:
Écrits: A Selection, Jacques Lacan
Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Žižek
The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, Paul Rabinow
Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, Specters of Marx, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida
Desert Islands: And Other Texts, 1953-1974, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, Gilles Deleuze
Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Slavoj Žižek
The Theory of the Novel, Soul and Form editors John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis, The Historical Novel, Goethe And His Age, Essays on Thomas Mann, Solzhenitsyn, György Lukács
Žižek’s Jokes: Did You Hear the One about Hegel and Negation?, In Defense of Lost Causes, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, First as Tragedy Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek
The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, by Jean Baudrillard, Sylvère Lotringer (Editor)
What are they all arguing about? Origins of Existentialism in Husserl’s Phenomenology: an outline
Phenomenology: The Basics, Husserl’s Phenomenology, by Dan Zahavi
Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks, Maurice Alexander Natanson
Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs,
by Jacques Derrida
Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, by Leonard Lawlor
Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, by Theodor W. Adorno
On this day before winter solstice, darkest of all our days, and with the light possibly democracy itself begins to die from lack of faith as Tinkerbell warns us with the ritual command to clap our hands lest the faeries die, as the idea of our universal human rights dies in the ruins of Palestine, as Russia’s atrocities in the Third World War engulf Ukraine and the world, as China tests our will and threatens to unleash the conquest of the Pacific Rim, as the American state is captured once again by the Nazi fanatic and Russian spy Traitor Trump whose mission is the fall of democracy, and we face dystopian futures of global nuclear war and the fall of civilization, as the survival or extinction of our species hangs in the balance under threats of war, unknown pandemics to come, and ecological catastrophe, as the Pentagon on this day only three years ago issued rebukes without accountability as tacit authorization to the fascist infiltrated and subverted military units on the brink of mutiny and civil war in service to Trump and the Fourth Reich, it is good to remember who we are, who we have chosen to be, and who we wish to become.
Now is the time to rage against the dying of the light.
When those who would enslave us come for any one of us, let them find an America and a humankind not subjugated with learned helplessness or divided by exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united in solidarity and resistance.
And in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free.
Owning our stories as the songs of ourselves is a primary human act in which we become autonomous and self-created beings; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
The first question we must ask of our stories is this; whose story is this?
If we imagine the processes of our construction as a vast workshop like that of Santa’s elves, I believe that the parts of our assemblage are words and the rules for using them to create meaning as grammar.
As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake, a work which he began in 1922 with the German publication of the TLP and which occupied the rest of his life, as a response like that of Yeats in The Second Coming and of T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland to the collapse of civilization in three successive waves of mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
He envisioned a united humankind wherein war is no longer possible, a world without emperors and kings or the carceral states and colonialist empires they rule with their silly little flags and terrible divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game.
Plato and his successors in western mysticism and in Romantic Idealism had already established a historical tradition which took this idea in other directions, as a religion and philosophy of the Logos to the alchemical faith of the sapientia dei which found full expression in Jung and through neoPlatonism itself to the philosophy of Iris Murdoch, and was in the process of forming Surrealism, but Joyce was a master of languages and chose this as his instrument for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and for the rebirth of civilization.
And this love of languages as free creative play in which we ourselves are the artifact and product of our art is what caught my attention and created my teenage identification with Joyce. For I love languages and had grown up with three voices; English as my primary and home language, though shaped by immersion in the rhythms and phrases of the King James Bible and the Dutch language of the Reformed Church which surrounded me in the town where I was raised, Chinese as my second language from the age of nine, study which included Traditional Chinese inkbrush calligraphy and conversation with a teacher who spoke, in addition to superb English, the Wu dialect of Shanghai and the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, as well as Mandarin, Japanese, and other languages, having served in the Chinese military from 1924 through the Second World War, and as my third language I studied French in school rather than English from seventh grade through high school. Brazilian Portuguese was my fourth language, though limited to conversational proficiency, legacy of a formative trip in the summer of my fourteenth year just before starting high school.
It was during that summer, my first solo foreign travel, to train as a fencer with a friend from the tournament circuit for the Pan American Games planned to be held there the following year, that I witnessed a crime against humanity, the massacre of street children who had swarmed a food truck, a trauma and disruptive event followed by weeks in which I helped them evade the police bounty hunters who ruled the streets as apex predators.
From the moment I saw what the guards were shooting at beyond the walls of the palace in which I was a guest, I chose my side, and I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
We all seek paths of healing from trauma, and of hope and the redemptive power of love in transforming the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. I found such paths in literature as poetic vision, and in our languages and our stories as instruments with which we can operate directly on our psyche and take control of our adaptation and the evolution of human consciousness as an unfolding of intention. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and for this primary insight I owe the effects of reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions. I had begun my search for meaning and my Freshman year of high school by reading Anthony Burgess’ Napoleon Symphony, a novel which questioned my hero Napoleon and illuminated two of my other heroes Beethoven and Klimt, then turned to the study of language itself; S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, and Wittgenstein’s TLP, before discovering Joyce.
James Joyce’s linguistics scholarship was immense; he took Italian as his third academic language, taught himself Dano-Norwegian as a teenager to read his adored Ibsen in the original, and his modern languages degree cites Latin, Italian, French, German, and Norwegian. He loved languages and studied them as a game, as do I; his adult fluency included Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Russian, Finnish, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Modern Greek. All of this went into his masterpiece Finnegans Wake, written in a private language filled with games and experiments of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety according to the principle of Wittgenstein that because all rules are arbitrary they can be reimagined and changed at will and ourselves with them, a language densely layered with literary allusions and references, loaned and invented words, and of signs with multiple meanings like the paths of a labyrinth. You need a working knowledge of several languages to get the jokes; no wonder I loved him.
I’m not sure it’s intended to communicate anything, so coded and laden with puzzles is his new language; like the notation for the principles of a system by which to create and order the universe. He spent the rest of his life searching for the lost runes able to break and reforge the oaths and bindings of existence, to renew ourselves and our world; perhaps he found them.
Though I may claim no such realization of a guiding vision of our limitless possibilities of becoming human nor Quixotic quest to create and affirm that which is human in us as he, Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake demonstrated for me a great truth which has illuminated my understanding ever since; we are made of our ideas and of our stories, and forged with our words and our languages.
We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?
Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?
Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.
As I wrote in my post of September 25 2023, My Library of Possible Selves: A History Of My Identities Through My Languages; Among my treasures where live the voices of my cherished companions through life which rest bound in leather or cloth, gilded and illustrated and written in strange inks or simply printed on creamy paper and smelling of vanilla and old saddles, histories of our conversations across vast gulfs of time and space awaiting the moment I need them again, lies brooding a symbol of the unknowability of the Infinite and the Conservation of Ignorance, the Sefer ha-Zohar or Book of Splendor.
Heart of the Kabbalah written by Moses de Leon in Spain and first published about 1275, I discovered this single volume edition in our family library, wedged between Encyclopaedia Britannica and the University of Chicago’s Great Books of the Western World series as a teenager while reading through both in their entirety over several years, and claimed it as my own.
This was during an enthusiasm which began as a high school Freshman for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his disciple James Joyce’s attempt to reinvent humankind through a new universal language in Finnegans Wake, and I recognized immediately that Kabbalah was a project of like intent, within the context of Tikkun Olam or Repair of the World.
Written in a secret language? And filled with bizarre and utterly ambiguous symbols and metaphors? Of course I loved it.
That it was a forgery written for profit by a charlatan and reimagined by a madman just made it better in my eyes.
But like the visions of the Infinite and the alam al mythal it contains, the Book of Splendor remained beyond my grasp, dancing in and out of my awareness like a shifting fire of darkness and light. That which fascinated, intrigued, and compelled also warded questioning and ultimately escaped me; printed as it was written not in Hebrew for which I might have found a teacher but in a coded scholar’s cryptodialect of Aramaic and Andalusi Romance, a precursor of Spanish and Portuguese which uses Arabic script, languages which remained opaque to me. And even if translated one must be thoroughly familiar with the symbolic system it references in the Talmud and Midrash before Kabbalah becomes comprehensible. This was the only thing I ever gave up on, entangled with the Moebius Loop of language like Ahab lashed to the whale by the lines of his harpoon in his mad quest to break through the mask to the Infinite; though I read Gershom Scholem’s foundational study Kabbalah when it was published during my Freshman year in 1974.
Languages allow us to think the thoughts of others, to escape the limits of our histories, authorized identities, and the flags of our skin and to create new identities which become a library of possible selves; and mine form an atlas of my travels beyond the boundaries and interfaces of my maps of becoming human into unknown realms of human being, meaning, and value, also a history and archeology of my becoming human. I have often written that a full accounting of my languages becomes ambiguous and problematic; but herein I now so attempt.
Let me stipulate at the outset of this project that I now recount successive waves of languages in which I became conversant or literate as I explored our world over a lifetime, and in no way claim to have been able to think in them all at once, but only a few at any time during my studies and travels.
Languages are a hobby of mine; I grew up with three voices, English, Chinese, and French, each a mask of identity bearing the liminal force of the circumstances in which I learned them and conferring their own persona and uniqueness.
My English is influenced by the King James Bible and the local Dutch community of my childhood hometown, whose speech was full of thee’s and thou’s. This was the culture of elite hegemonies of race and patriarchy authorized by theocracy against which I rebelled in claiming Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-text to the Bible, a Reformed Church community aligned with the Apartheid regime of South Africa. Here as a child I witnessed a witch burning, a cross burned on the front lawn of newlyweds whose union the town referred to as a mixed marriage, he being Dutch and she a member of the minority Swiss Calvinists, and both white Protestants speaking Germannic languages; during high school my fellow students began picking up stones to throw at a teenage couple from out of town at a ball game because they were kissing without being married, a public stoning which I just barely stopped.
How did I give answer to this?
At the first assembly of the new school year the incoming class was asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle. Unconquered; the only title worth having, an idea which has continued to inform, motivate, and shape me since I first discovered it in a poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, as a high school Freshman.
Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; “I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I’m hoping we can be friends.
The poem I’ve chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. “
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
None who are human are beyond redemption. Sometimes all we need do to conjure the redemptive power of love is offer others entrance into our world, to reveal our pain and our fear, our loneliness and hope of love, the wounds and flaws of our humanity which open us to the pain of others.
Here I wish to make clear that my family were never part of any church whatsoever; we lived there because that was where my father got a job teaching English literature, Drama, and Forensics at the high school, where he also coached the Fencing and Debate clubs, and was my teacher in all of these. I describe my formative years growing up in Ripon California because it is helpful in understanding me to know that I grew up in a premodern world, the world the Enlightenment and its political form the American Revolution overthrew, though the Revolution remains incomplete in its realization and universalization both in America and throughout the world. This is what being an American means to me; to be a bearer of the Promethean Fire of liberation from systems of unequal power, where ever men hunger to be free.
Herein the question of home language as source identity becomes determinative; mine was English, though I inherit through my father the possessing ghosts of ancestors who were driven out of the Black Forest in 1586 at the start of decades of witch hunting hysteria. Drachensbrute, Brides of the Dragon, my ancestors were called by Martin Luther, whose fame for grand defiance of Church law eclipsed his infamy as a witch hunter and brutal torturer of women. By modern constructions of race this makes me Bavarian, though my ancestry in the patriarchal line is equally Shawnee, from the marriage of Henry Lale and Me Shekin Ta Withe or White Painted Dove during the American Revolution.
My paternal grandmother was Italian; of the Noce family whose stilt house in Bayou La Teche Louisiana was built from the ship they sailed from Genoa in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, its navigable approach guarded by ancient canon. My mother wrote a journal of a family visit with them in 1962; there was Quiller, a giant who could carry a railroad tie in each hand, all day long, the Silent Man who sat in his rocking chair for three days without saying anything, then whipped out a shotgun and fired into the swamp, and after several minutes of rocking declared; “Water moccasin,” a deadly poisonous snake. The women all wore pointy hats like cartoon witches, and I’ve never found any credible reference which might identify the ethnicity to which it belongs nor the origin of the pointed hat as a witch symbol.
Beyond this I am a direct patrilineal descendent of the ally of Scipio Africanus that Cicero wrote his treatise on friendship about, Laelius de Amicitia, in 44 B.C. We briefly ruled what is called the Gallic Empire in the mid second century A.D., what is now France, Spain, and the British Iles; my ancestors include a deified Roman general and shapechanger, origin of the Berserkers, for whom the Bear Dance is still performed in Romania.
I once described myself to the wife of a poetry professor as Roman with the words; “I am a citizen of the Roman Empire; that it has not existed for fifteen hundred years is irrelevant.” This was Anne Rice, whose poem about the revenge of the broken dolls will haunt my dreams forever, and who modeled the character of Mael in her novels on me as I was in the early 1980’s. Her idea of Those Who Must Be Kept came from a reference of mine to the classics of western civilization and the Dead White Men of our history; “We are all bearers of those who must be kept and those whom we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.”
In the line of matrilineal descent I am a direct successor to my great grandmother, whose story I told in my post of May 9 2023, A Legacy of Freedom Shared By Us All: Jewish American Heritage Month; Because the personal and the political are interdependent, and we are made of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, I offer here a story from my family history as told to me by my mother of how Jewish people saved our family, when no one else would, and without whom none of us would have ever lived.
Upon the docks of America arrived a nine year old girl, alone and without a penny to her name or a word of English. A stranger, with no one waiting to meet her, no family, no friends, nothing. My maternal great grandmother Apollonia this was, with flaming red hair like my mother’s, whose family had put her on a ship to escape from Austria as their home burned, the sole survivor of her whole town so far as we now know.
She wandered the port of Seattle asking for help, in her five languages and in descending likelihood of recognition; French, Austrian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, and finally, in despair and fear that the reaction would be far worse than being abandoned to starve and freeze to death lost and alone among strangers, Yiddish.
This like a magic spell summoned a crowd, by happy chance not one armed with torches and axes. So a stranger was taken in and raised by Jewish people, a family of whom I know nothing, and thus our family’s survival is owed to the entire Jewish community and people.
This happened in 1873, year of the glorious Vienna World’s Fair but also the stock market crash in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War which began a twenty year Depression in Europe and the Jewish persecutions as they were blamed for it; also conflicts between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in their borderlands.
She it was who owned her own rifles and horses by the age of sixteen when she began her career as a hunting guide, and died in the saddle at the age of 95, rifle in her hand, having shot the bear that attacked her horses and killed her. The Indians buried her like the Huns buried Attila, on her horse and with her rifle, like a warrior princess.
I was born within days of her death, and as with all ancestors I bear her onward, literally as DNA and the stories which possess us as the ghosts of other lives; incarnated truths written in our flesh.
Historical context and the fact that my ancestor in the maternal line knew Yiddish makes it possible that under Jewish law we are Jews, though my mother never claimed so and moreover was a radical atheist who raised us with no religious traditions at all. In so doing the family faith she liberated herself from was Catholicism, an artifact of her Austrian paternal line who were exiles of the 1919 fall of the Hapsburg Empire after 600 years.
My mother’s speech was permeated with Yiddish words and phrases, a legacy of my maternal great grandmother; my maternal grandfather was the source of the family German, actually Wienerisch or the Viennese dialect of Austro-Bavarian, combined with the French-influenced Schönbrunner Deutsch of the imperial court. This was the home language of my mother’s family, though grandpa knew Latin, taught himself English, and to various degrees knew other languages of the Austrian Empire including Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, the Romance language Venetian and its Triestino dialect, and could speak Russian and Polish well enough to do business in their communities here in America.
As a teenager immersed in Holocaust literature while working through the trauma of a near death experience in Brazil the summer before high school, my execution by a police death squad while rescuing abandoned street children they were bounty hunting having been prevented by the Matadors, and conversations with my mother as she wrote her study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet medical records and childhood therapy journal of Jerzy Kosinski which he fictionalized as The Painted Bird, I once asked her directly, Are we Jews?
To this she replied; “Everyone is a Jew. Everyone is someone’s Jew, someone’s scapegoat, someone’s Other. The great task of becoming human is to overcome our fear of otherness, while embracing our uniqueness.”
My Second Voice from the age of nine was Traditional Chinese; inkbrush calligraphy, the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, and the Wu Dialect of Shanghai. During my decade of formal study of Taoism and Zen Buddhism, Chinese and Japanese martial arts, and the game of Go I studied in both Chinese and Japanese.
This was through Sifu Dragon, who also spoke a very British English full of Anglo-Indian words and phrases which shaped my English through our conversations; my great teacher of martial and other arts he was, with whom my father arranged for me to study after I had retaliated against my fifth grade class for putting gum on my chair by poisoning everyone, only by chance without causing any harm to anyone beyond a brief nausea. Horrified that I might have become a nine year old mass murderer when my fellow students began throwing up, I told my father about it that night, to which he said; “You have discovered politics. Politics is the art of fear, and fear and power are the true basis and means of human exchange. Fear precedes power. Fear is a terrible master and an untrustworthy servant. So, whose instrument will it be? What you need is a way to use fear and power that restores balance instead of imposing dominion, and when confronted by enemies you must demonstrate you do not fear them in order to take their power.”
My Third Voice from the seventh grade is French, a legacy of having been sent to six years of French classes at the high school because I was beyond grade level in English, which I enthusiastically embraced along with Surrealist film and literature.
This Defining Moment bears interrogation; during seventh grade I took the AP English test given to high school seniors for university credit and tested out of English classes through senior year of high school. This was among tests arranged by my parents and teachers who conspired to force me into high school two years early, and had tried with math the previous year, which I absolutely refused but for one class, where I traded seventh grade English for Freshman French literature and language, a chance I fell upon with ravenous delight.
The French teacher was a blonde goddess, and here imagine the reporter Rita Skeeter played by Miranda Richardson who corners Harry Potter in the broom closet in The Goblet of Fire, who motivated her students by offering a trip to Paris, with her, after graduation from high school for the best senior French student each year; competition for this honor was fierce, and I was a very, very good student. Thanks for the soft landing in high school, Miss Starring.
Japanese I count as my fourth language as it developed over the years, becoming a greater passion at university when I was obsessed with Japanese poetry to the extent that I walked some of the Basho Road to see where he had written his masterpieces, and I claimed Zen as my religion on official forms through my twenties.
I learned some conversational Brazilian Portuguese from the summer before I began high school, Sao Paulo being the scene of my first Last Stand during the weeks of my campaign to rescue abandoned street children from the police bounty hunters and the trauma of my near-execution, in which I find echo and kinship with that of Maurice Blanchot by the Gestapo in 1944 as written in he Moment of My Death and Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czarist secret police in 1849 as described in The Idiot, from which I was saved by the Matadors, who welcomed me into their fearsome brotherhood with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
Though Arabic is my Sixth Voice, it has long become a natural language for me since first learning some Levantine Arabic in the summer of 1982, during the Siege of Beirut. This was when Jean Genet set me on my life’s path by swearing me to the Oath of the Resistance he had created in Paris 1940 from that of the Foreign Legion, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” And he gave me a principle of action by which I have now lived for over forty years; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
My Seventh Voice is Spanish, as fast upon my Baccalaureate graduation came the horrific Mayan Genocide and other atrocities of the monstrous Reagan regime, and the heroic Resistance of indigenous peoples to America’s imperial conquest of Central America which collapsed with the Iran-Contra Scandal. This theatre of revolutionary struggle includes that of the Zapatistas in the Yucatan; though later I formally studied Spanish from Argentine professors in one of my many graduate school programs, Spanish is a second or trade language for the people with whom I aligned myself, mostly speakers of Yucatec in Mexico or Quiche in the Guatemalan Peten among the Mayan group of over twenty languages, who were rebelling against the Ladino or Spanish speaking elites. So while I am literate in Spanish, I am conversant in two forms of Mayan.
Russian is my Eighth Voice, being the language of international solidarity at the time and of the Soviet advisors with whom I sometimes worked. I had some familiarity with it from my sister Erin, who began high school when I began teaching it, and used Russian as I had Chinese; as a second soul into which to grow as a self-created being, free from the legacies of our history. She studied for four years in high school with Lt Col Sviatislav Shasholin, USAF, who translated during the Nixon-Brezhnev talks and handled Soviet defectors, then went to UC Santa Cruz where she studied Russian language and Soviet Foreign Policy, graduating as Valedictorian of the Oaks International Studies School, then went to the Soviet Union as Pushkin Scholar at the University of Kallinin, a couple years before the Fall of the Soviet Union. Her first languages beyond English were Old Norse, Gothic, and Old Welsh, which she taught herself in seventh grade while researching Tolkien’s invented languages, so she could write poetry in them.
I currently write and publish in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Zulu, Hindi, Urdu, Persian and since the invasion in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and recently Italian and Dari, Afghanistan’s major language and like Urdu derived from Persian, all three of which are mutually intelligible. This list changes ceaselessly, as do human identities; ephemeral, impermanent, performative and a ground of struggle.
Including dead languages with no broad communities of native speakers but of scholars of ancient literatures, those of my Buddhist and Islamic scholarship include Classical Tibetan from my time as a monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana Order of Buddhism in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I waged a revolution against the monarchy, and from my studies as a member of the Naqshbandi Order of Sufis in Srinagar, Kashmir, where I fought for independence against the invasion by India; Classical Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and the exception to the dead languages of scholarship classification as a universal language of Islamic faith in which one must be literature to be considered fully Muslim, Classical Quranic Arabic.
So, my literacy includes twenty three languages if we count Latin, which I’ve taught in high school; basic Latin is crucial if you are a new student in America whose native language is not English, especially for university-bound students and solving unknown scientific and technical terms. If you know Latin root words and conjugations, you will master English twice as fast.
My languages of conversational proficiency serve also as an atlas of my history; as Sir Richard Francis Burton says; “Where ever you go, learn the language; it’s the key to everything else.” We now leave the regions of literacy and explore the Atlas of my journeys in terms of conversational level proficiency.
During the 1980’s I was involved in liberation struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, which ended with the great victory in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1988, in which I fought in my usual role of scout or reconnaissance. Here I learned some Zulu and Afrikaans, a fascinating Dutch hybrid language invented by the Cape Malay community using Jawi Arabic script, which incorporates elements of indigenous Khoisan and Bantu African languages and influenced by the Malay-Portuguese trade language Kristang.
From my time behind the Iron Curtain with the Romani my languages include Vlax Romani, the major Romani language and that of its heartland in Transylvania and Eastern Europe, and its origin or relative Vlachs or Aromanian, a Romance language created by the historical migrations and transformations of cultures in the borderlands between the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Venetian Empires, and influenced more by Greek than Slavic as a disambiguating characteristic from modern Romanian, a related language also originating in the Latin of the Roman Empire and its long centuries of disintegration and change.
Many Romani whom I knew spoke Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, and Hungarian interchangeably as code switching, and also spoke Hochdeutsch which is the second language of Hungary and of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland as Standard German. During this time I made mischief with a crew led by Bluey, an Irish gypsy from London who spoke English laden with Cockney rhyming slang, 16th century Thieves Cant, and the hybrid Irish Gaelic-Traveller cryptolanguage Shelta, a complex patois he and his crew, who were from everywhere, used as a secret language.
From my time in the Golden Triangle and Shan States I learned Thai, Shan, S’gaw Karen, the Singpho language of the Kachin Confederation of northern Burma and India, and the Sino-Tibetan language of the Konyak Naga. This charts the midcourse of my original Great Trek across Asia; one day I was driving to work in San Francisco and realized that I was going to live the same day I had more times than I could remember, that I was living in Nietzsche’s Hell of Eternal Recurrence, and I broke the pattern and took a wrong turn. I found myself at the airport and bought a ticket for an unknown destination; I just asked for a flight to the other side of the planet.
This I discovered upon landing was Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; on day three I realized everyone in its elegant business district was doing things I could have done at home in San Francisco if I had wanted to, so I decided to do what no one else was doing. I found a bus station with a map where all the roads ended in the Cameron Highlands, rode a bus nine hours into the empty spaces on the map, got out when the road became a dirt trail into the jungle, and began my journey. I crossed from Malaysia into Thailand, Burma, and India before coming to live alternately in Nepal and Kashmir for some while.
In Nepal my role as a monk of the Buddhist Kagyu Vajrayana order required literacy in Classical Tibetan, conversational Gorkali or Nepalese as it is the official language and spoken by half the population, Newari which is the language of Kathmandu Valley where I lived, Gurung which is a tribal language of the Annapurna region and a major language of my key allies the Gurkha military and the horse nomads with whom I operated across the border between Nepal and Kashmir, and some Hindi.
In Kashmir my scholarship of Sufism required literacy in Classical Quranic Arabic, which I had been studying for years already, Classical Persian, and Ottoman Turkish; the official language Urdu which is Hindi written with a Perso-Arabic script and influenced by Classical Persian, and conversational use of the Kashmiri language Koshur.
This period in the early 1990’s coincides roughly with the Siege of Sarajevo of which I am a witness, where I learned some Croatian written in Latin script, mutually comprehensible with Bosnian as they evolve from the same source.
From my voyages and treks in South Asia on a later journey, where I sailed out of Georgetown on the island of Penang as a home port, I Iearned Malay in which I am literate and so count among my Voices, this being the major language of the region, of sailors, and of my initial scholarship of Naqshbandi Sufism which is a pan-Islamic warrior brotherhood synonymous with the martial arts of silat, and Buginese which is the language of the Bugis people of the Sultanate of Sulawesi who are the primary shipbuilders and navigators of South Asia, where half of all shipped freight is still by sail, and of the pirates with whom I waged an antislavery campaign led by our Captain Starfollower.
Then came the Minangkabu of Sumatra where I studied the martial art of Raja Harimau, briefly I learned what I could of one of the many languages of the Mentawai Islands where I was castaway in a storm at sea and with an indigenous tribe built an outrigger or Oceanic Proa over a couple months to sail ten hours across open seas to the mainland of Sumatra, Iban which is a language of the indigenous Dayak peoples of Borneo, and Hokkien Chinese in its Penang and Singaporean variants which is understood throughout the Peranankan or Straits Chinese communities.
Of windows into the other ways of being human I count twenty four languages of conversation, including Hokkien Chinese, Iban, Mentawai, Minangkabu, Buginese, Croatian, Koshur, Gorkali, Newari, Gurung, Thai, Shan, S’gaw Karen, Singpho, Naga, Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, Hungarian, Shelta, Afrikaans, Yucatec, and Quiche. and twenty seven of literacy, a total of fifty one.
Thus far I have learned much about human diversity as well as the things which unite us, but nothing whatever of a great key which will unlock our infinite possibilities of becoming human.
Yet in the questioning of our languages as tools of creating our identities, of human being, meaning, and value, and of emergence from the legacies of our history and systems of oppression, we may transcend our limits and boundaries of otherness and belonging, and become exalted.
Will the next language offer the clues needed to decode the secrets of our liberation and self ownership, of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and how we choose to be human together? As my mother used to say to students who asked for some pronouncement or authorization, juggling possibilities with her hands; “Maybe, maybe not”.
This I wrote originally as a Postscript to my essay of September 8 2023, International Literacy Day: What is a Library For?
It became its own work when I realized I had never tried to fully count my languages nor assess the meaning of languages as having multiplicities of selves as masks to perform in reserve at any moment, nor as revolutionary acts which may change boundaries into interfaces.
May all the Voices of your languages build bridges and not walls. But how precisely can we do that?
Is there a universal language behind all our languages and personae, a code like DNA in our consciousness and a meta-grammar or innate rules as Chomsky argues by which we create and order human being, meaning, and value?
What truly lies beneath the surfaces of our illusory and impermanent selves, images like ephemeral jetsam which conceal a unified field of being, Infinite in extent? Can learning languages truly allow us to operate directly on our own consciousness and seize ownership and control of our own evolution, to inhabit the imaginal souls of others, abandon our divisions and pathologies of disconnectedness, and become exalted in our participation in the being of others and of all humankind?
What becomes of us, when we transcend ourselves through immersion in what Ibn Arabi called the alam al mythal, Coleridge the Primary Imagination, Jung the Collective Unconscious, and the ancients called Logos?
I am a man who has many souls, one for every language I am literate in, in which I can think and dream and compose, and like James Joyce I have discovered few answers, but many questions regarding our possibilities of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and humankind.
For this mad quest to become human, to breach the event horizons of our culture, the legacies of our history, and the limits of our authorized identities, obeys the principle of the Conservation of Ignorance, in which the Infinite remains vast and unknown regardless of what we know or how much we learn.
Only this I have learned; it is not the kinds of thoughts we are able to have which make us human, but how we use them in our actions toward others, to harm or heal.
Among all of these voices of possibilities of becoming human stands the Zohar in its silence, voice of the Infinite, and it says; “I bear secrets; open me.”
And I with Ahab reply; “To the end I will grapple with thee.”
A “Finnegans Wake” Lextionary: Let James Joyce Jazz Up Your Voca(l)bulary, Riverrun to Livvy: Lots of Fun Reading the First Page of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”, by Bill Cole Cliett
In this season of merriment and joy, filled with archaic and strange rituals and densely encoded with signs and messages, which for many Americans begins with the annual pilgrimage to see The Nutcracker ballet, most especially a delight for young girls and a performance filled with visions of beauty and wonder in a world which lies just beyond our own, I am once again seized and shaken by the Uncanny Valley of bifurcated vison and off kilter juxtaposition in the breathtaking beauty of the dancing and the ghastly horror of its subtext, because I am reasonably certain that when our heroine flies over the glittering confection of Candyland to rule it with her Nutcracker Prince, she is dead.
The Nutcracker ballet is the American Book of the Dead.
What is the mysterious wound with all its blood, and her witness which the adults silence with disbelief, but an act of sexual predation?
If the Nutcracker is a story of the destruction of a girl as a primal tragedy of patriarchy, with her death allegorized as a battle of mice versus nutcracker soldiers, it is also an initiation myth with Drosselmeyer as a Trickster figure and a terrifying guardian of the Otherworld who is transformed into a protector and guide as he becomes the Nutcracker Prince.
It is possible to construe and interpret the strange plot of Drosselmeyer as immortality magic, wherein he consumes Marie’s life force to transform himself into the boy prince who is also his doppelganger and presented as his nephew, for whom he prepares Marie as a bride and ghostly underworld companion, a reimagination of the myth of Persephone.
Both victim and tragic heroine, Marie escapes the prison of a family which has groomed her to disbelieve in her own experience through fantasy which is menacing and seductive, a world of her own. Hoffman was an icon of German Romanticism who clearly intended to affirm the vision of the individual and the liberating power of poetical truth, but there is also a parallel narrative of survival in which the toymaker Drosselmeier is not only a trickster god or magician who liberates Marie by setting challenges to overcome and creating scenes which reveal and transform inner conflict, but also a tyrannical and abusive figure of a patriarchal tyrant god. Hoffman harnesses the initiation of a pagan seeress to Romantic ends, and preserves the ambivalence of the Toymaker figure in the folklore; a god who is both an ally and a predator of humankind.
Clive Barker wrote what is undoubtedly the most nightmarish and fiendishly compelling version of the myth of the Toymaker in the Hellraiser series.
Herein a tale of both ecstatic vision and the transcendence of the spirit through immersion in an imaginal realm of dreams and death, a core text of Romantic Idealism as codified by Coleridge, shares liminal space with our nightmares as a manual of gaslighting, induced alienation, and patriarchal sexual terror.
I’d like to keep the ritual of ecstatic vision and beauty, and emerge from the legacies of our history as Freudian horror, but in this ballet which is a ground of struggle between authorized identities and the liberation of self-ownership we cannot, for they are bound together, the angelic and the monstrous, like all humankind and the histories and systems of oppression we must resist.
What can it teach us as a story of growing up as Resistance?
Shatter the mirror and break free of the image others would trap you in; reclaim yourself and your agency.
As written by Blaine Greteman in The Week, in an article entitled The Creep of The Nutcracker: What the hell is going on with Godfather Drosselmeyer and what is he teaching our children?; “Now that the holidays are upon us and the productions of The Nutcracker ballet are coming hard and fast, it’s time to ask that age old question: What the hell is going on with Godfather Drosselmeyer?
The Nutcracker has always been a story about a young girl’s journey into adulthood and sexual maturity, and as Drosselmeyer creeps around the stage this year, in the wake of Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore, he reminds us that the journey has always been fraught.
If you haven’t seen The Nutcracker in a while or have only absorbed bits of it through commercials playing Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” on infinite loop, the story goes like this: It’s Christmas Eve at the Stahlbaum home, and daughter Clara makes herself useful preparing for a party, while her younger brother Fritz, who nowadays would clearly have been diagnosed with ADHD, makes trouble. Soon the guests arrive. While the adults are adulting, the children make their own fun, until a mysterious man appears, cloaked in black and wearing an eyepatch. This is Godfather Drosselmeyer, a clock and toymaker who, depending on the production, either entertains the children or genuinely frightens them.
Either way, he soon takes over the night’s festivities. He produces uncanny, life-sized clockwork toys, which seem to come alive and dance for the guests. He hands out presents — dolls for the girls, swords for the boys. Clara, his special favorite, receives a wooden nutcracker, which everyone admires and which her jealous little brother quickly breaks. But Drosselmeyer bandages the toy and places it in a bed beneath the Christmas tree, where Clara will later fall asleep with it in her arms.
Things then get strange. At the stroke of midnight, Clara wakes to see Drosselmeyer on the grandfather clock, exercising what now appear to be magical powers. The room around her grows, or perhaps she shrinks. In the ballet’s source story, E.T.F. Hoffman’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, this moment is undeniably traumatic, and her account of it is the first of many that the adults around her will refuse to believe. The toys come to life and do battle with an evil mouse king and his troops. This is, after all, unbelievable, unless we remember that Drosselmeyer has already done something like it once before with his dancing automatons. In Hoffman’s story, Drosselmeyer tells the girl, “it will all be over soon.” But rather than being relieved she calls him “evil” (böser) and is paralyzed with fright.
Most versions of the ballet then jump to what happens in Hoffman’s tale on a subsequent night, when the nutcracker, who has been under a spell of the mouse queen, takes his natural shape as a handsome prince and escorts Clara to the Land of Sweets. Leaving aside the blatant colonialism of the caricatures that follow, isn’t it just a little creepy that Clara’s good-looking escort begins as a gift from Drosselmeyer? In fact this toy, in Hoffman’s story, bears a “strange resemblance to Drosselmeyer” himself.
But that’s not even half of it.
In the original, but not the ballet, the girl’s vision is accompanied by a sharp feeling of pain, which she will later realize was caused by falling into a glass cabinet and lacerating her arm. Discovered by her mother in a pool of blood, she relates Drosselmeyer’s role in her accident only to have her mother and the attending surgeon dismiss the “silly stuff” as the product of her “lively imagination.” Godfather Drosselmeyer, however, privately suggests that he believes her. As one 19th-century translation put it, “smiling queerly,” he “took the little girl on his lap, and spoke more softly than ever” as he confirmed that her dream contained some element of truth. It’s hard not to get a little Freudian about all this, but even if we don’t read it as some sort of sexual allegory, the dynamic is clear and unsettling.
Up to this point in the original, Drosselmeyer has wooed the girl with a special gift, awed her with his abilities as a technician and a magician, and degraded her by dismissing her as a “foolish child” (unverständig Kind) who could not appreciate his skill. Now he is teaching her to disbelieve her own experience unless it can be verified by a powerful man like himself. As the story continues, he will berate her for speaking “silly, stupid nonsense” (dummer einfältiger Schnack) when she tries to tell others. After being humiliated several times, she stops trying.
“A hundred times,” Hoffman writes, “she thought of telling what had happened, to her mother, or to Luise, or at least to Fritz; but she asked herself, ‘Will any of them believe me?'” Finally she withdraws into herself, which only warrants further criticism: “[I]nstead of playing as she used to do, she would sit still and silent, her thoughts far away, till everybody faulted her for being a little dreamer.”
It was a similar form of manipulation that caused the actress and director Asia Argento to describe her encounters with Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein as “a scary fairy tale” and “a nightmare” in the story that initially exposed decades of Weinstein’s abuse. Weinstein so thoroughly warped her perspectives of herself and their encounters, said Argento, that he began to “sound like he was my friend and he really appreciated me.” One of failed Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore’s accusers claimed he pushed her out of the car, saying: “You are a child. I am the district attorney of Etowah County. If you tell anyone about this, no one will believe you.” He was almost certainly right.
In these cases, as in so many others that have come to light in recent weeks, we find similar differentials of power, age, and authority, leading women to keep quiet about what happened to them or even to adopt their abuser’s account. As another of Weinstein’s victims noted, “I just put it in a part of my brain and closed the door.” Drosselmeyer may not be a sexual predator, but he exactly follows the sexual predator’s script.
This matters because souvenir nutcrackers and swords are not the only things our children take home at the end of the show. For Clara as for The Nutcracker’s young audiences, the journey to the Land of Sweets and back offers a magical glimpse of adulthood even as it raises suspicions about that vision. How much of it is Clara’s? How much does Drosselmeyer produce by manipulating his machines or shaping Clara’s imagination of herself?
Drosselmeyer should disturb us not because he is aberrant, but because he enacts in sugar-plum form the strategies that men have long used to manage and control female sexuality.
Rather than a reason to run for the exits, however, I’d suggest that this could be one of The Nutcracker’s redeeming qualities. Art has a remarkable power to make the familiar strange and allow us to see it anew — an effect Bertolt Brecht called verfremdung, or “alienation.” Hoffman’s nutcracker tale is strange, yet familiar, in exactly this way, especially as Clara internalizes the disbelief she encounters when she tries to tell her story.
A Nutcracker production that forced us to reckon with Drosselmeyer’s true power would also allow us to consider what it would mean for Clara, or many Claras, to take it back. While Drosselmeyer is a master of gears and springs, after all, his real hold over Clara comes from understanding that everyone, including herself, will trust his account of her experience more than her own.
That’s a hard nut, but it is ready to be cracked.”
As written by Joan Hennessy in StudyHall.Rocks, in an article entitled The Nutcracker’s Holiday Spell Broken; “From the overture to the dance of the sugar plum fairy, The Nutcracker is two hours of uninterrupted sweetness, and, importantly, a moneymaker for ballet companies across the nation. Or, at least, it was until now.
A recent critique in The Week magazine (“The Creep of The Nutcracker”) points to sexual overtones between a principal character, the mysterious Herr Drosselmeyer, and the ballet’s young protagonist, Clara.
The context: Set at a Christmas Eve party, Clara (also called Marie or Masha in various versions), fights with her brother, Fritz, over a nutcracker given to her by Drosselmeyer, an eye-patch wearing friend of the family. After the party, the girl falls asleep and dreams that the nutcracker is a prince.
While vapid, the ballet has remained insanely popular for decades. Anyone enrolled in a ballet school for any length of time has been in The Nutcracker. Small towns have at least one performance; cities have multiple productions. The ballet would have sellout crowds if it were staged at a landfill.
Next Christmas, Disney will release a star-studded film version, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, featuring a performance by Misty Copeland, principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre. Already, the trailer (below) has gone viral. That means next year’s holiday season promises wall-to-wall nutcrackers on stages and cinema screens everywhere — just as the story is getting a second, uncomfortable look.
The problem is Drosselmeyer, the story’s magical helper, who arrives for Christmas Eve celebrations carrying elaborate presents — in the ballet, life-sized dancing dolls. After the party, the revelers leave and Clara goes to bed. But later, she awakens and tiptoes into the parlor. Alone, she spots Drosselmeyer, who appears on top of a clock. He flaps his arms like an owl, writes George Balanchine and Francis Mason in the book, 101 Stories of the Great Ballets (Doubleday; 1975). The girl is thoroughly terrified.
At once beloved and creepy, Herr Drosselmeyer is ultimately confusing.
“For Clara as for The Nutcracker’s young audiences, the journey to the Land of Sweets and back offers a magical glimpse of adulthood even as it raises suspicions about that vision. How much of it is Clara’s?” asks Blaine Greteman, a professor at University of Iowa and a journalist, in The Week. “How much does Drosselmeyer produce by manipulating his machines or shaping Clara’s imagination of herself? Drosselmeyer should disturb us not because he is aberrant, but because he enacts in sugar-plum form the strategies that men have long used to manage and control female sexuality.”
This is the sort of thing that once you see, you cannot un-see. And if the criticism sticks, it could prompt dance companies and perhaps patrons to rethink their interest in the ballet. But in reality, it is also true that most productions miss the point of the original story, a coming-of-age fairy tale.
The ballet is based on The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). After Hoffmann’s death, Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) rewrote and softened the story. This version was used by Lev Ivanov while choreographing the ballet, which premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, 125 years ago this week, Dec. 17, 1892. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote the famous score.
In 101 Stories of the Great Ballets, Balanchine (1904-1983) recounts portraying various roles during his boyhood in Russia. Decades later, American ballet companies began producing the ballet. But Balanchine, who had come to the U.S. in 1933, proved central to The Nutcracker’s place as a Christmas tradition. As ballet master of the New York City Ballet, he staged his choreography of The Nutcracker in 1954. A decade later, the company moved to a larger stage, the scenery was redesigned, and an over-the-top tradition was born.
In his book, Balanchine wrote that he based his version on the Hoffmann story. But Hoffmann’s tale is darker.
Early on, Drosselmeyer shows the children an elaborate model he has built — a castle, with clear glass windows and golden turrets. When the children are unimpressed, his mean streak surfaces. “An ingenious work like this was not made for stupid children,” he snaps.
He also gives the family a nutcracker, and in the book, the girl notices similarities between the toy and Drosselmeyer. She becomes convinced that the nutcracker is Drosselmeyer’s spellbound nephew.
Her mother tells her she has been dreaming and “now drive it all out of your head.” In a fit of tough love, her father threatens to toss the nutcracker and all her dolls out the window.
This sequence is at the heart of the story, for Hoffmann worked to balance his obligations and his artistic bent. Educated in law, he made his living as a legal official in Berlin.
“The struggle within Hoffmann between the ideal world of his art and his daily life as a bureaucrat is evident in many of his stories, in which characters are possessed by their art,” explains an article on the Encyclopedia Britannica website.
It is no accident that Clara prefers the nutcracker’s fantastical world to her parents’ reality. As the story ends, Drosselmeyer’s nephew comes to visit, and he looks much like a nutcracker brought to life. It is the nephew — not Drosselmeyer — who marries the girl. She grows to womanhood, but unlike others, refuses to leave her dreams behind.
At this hour, Hoffmann concludes, the girl is “queen of a land where sparkling Christmas woods and transparent marzipan castles, in short, where the most beautiful, the most wonderful things, can be seen by those who will only have eyes for them.”
As I wrote in my post of March 30 2020, Embracing Fear as Liberation from Authority and Control: Anarchy as a Path of Psychological and Social Freedom; Even more terrible than blaming the victim is when no one believes the victim; it is an erasure and silencing which is the particular horror of women, as the dread that no one is coming to help is that of the LGBT and other marginalized communities.
The degree to which we are trusted and believed, our authority, and the reach of our voices in witness are excellent and reliable measures of our power and our position in social hierarchies. As a measure of societies themselves, this will tell you about the relative democracy or tyranny of a culture.
What Matthew Jacobs calls The Ubiquity of Disbelief in his insightful criticism in Huffpost of The Invisible Man starring Elizabeth Moss, entitled Why Does No One In Horror Movies Believe The Female Protagonist?, and examines disbelief and the horror of disconnectedness as a disease of mistrust and failure of solidarity, points directly to the cathartic function of art, its ability to hold up a mirror to our darkness.
For the mechanism and pathology of fear is what drives patriarchy, unequal power, and inauthentic relationships, abstracts us from ourselves and one another as simulacra and creates aberrations of violence and sexual terror.
From fear are monsters born; yet it is our fear we must embrace to free ourselves of the tyranny of others and the spectre of authoritarian force and control.
We must not let fear define us; it is the degree to which we can embrace, learn from, and free ourselves from our fear which measures our freedom and enacts our liberation from the control of others.
For when we cannot be driven into submission by authority through fear and learned helplessness the use of force becomes meaningless as does its scale; thus do we reclaim our power and agency to define ourselves, and ownership of the performances of our identities.
Here follows the wonderful guide to The Nutcracker on GradeSaver:
“These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.
Written by people who wish to remain anonymous
What is a nutcracker?
A nutcracker is said to represent power and strength, serving somewhat like a watchdog guarding your family against danger. A nutcracker bares its teeth to evil spirits and serves as a messenger of good luck and goodwill. Long ago, rare or unusual nutcrackers were part of the social dining tradition.
This is the story of a young girl’s difficult, painful enlightenment to some basic truth’s about life on earth. For instance, the reader could easily interpret this entire plot as an existential crisis. In that case, Drosselmeyer’s gift of a clockwork world would be a way of showing Marie that chaos is necessary in life, or else everything is repetitive and boring (like that toy quickly becomes). She much prefers the dark chaos of her imaginary world where the stakes are life and death, where people take tragedy with communal support, and where (most importantly) no one is alone. Marie is probably mourning the death of her parents, which is implied in that they live with Drosselmeyer who is their godfather.
This newfound awareness of tragedy and death makes Marie’s imaginary world into a tool that she uses to ask difficult questions about life than she can otherwise handle emotionally. Look for a moment at just how violent this seven year old’s imagination is—she imagines a world of bitter warfare between two antithetical forces. She imagines the pain of loss for the community each time someone dies. Interestingly, she also imagines funeral rites and spells of mourning when bad things happen, and when the toy community loses someone, they all rally together to support one another.
Based on this, the reader can guess safely that Marie is struggling with something specific. She wants Drosselmeyer to be in community with her, so that he can help her more directly with the pain of her life. She needs help and support from someone, and these stories are like cries for help through which she invites Drosselmeyer into her mind and emotions. Sadly, he misunderstands this, and he has a hard time relating to her, so she stays fairly lonely in her godfather’s estate.
The Nutcracker and the Mouse King Themes
These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.
Written by people who wish to remain anonymous
Imagination and the value of story
This story features the brilliant imagination of a young girl during Christmas time whose difficult life leaves her unable to sleep. At night, sometimes she wanders around her godfather’s estate, and she imagines an entire world. The novel depicts her imagination as if it is really happening, but the reader should distrust the narrator’s point of view about that, since her imagination seems real to her. That’s one of the most important design features of the novel, that her imagination seems real, because to her it is true. In a way, they’re more true in a greater sense than if they had been literally true. When she creates stories from her imagination, she learns from them authentically. With this domain of play, she can work through the various pains and fears of her blossoming mind.
Time, fate, and the loss of beauty
Marie’s young imagination becomes fixated early on with the passage of time and the inevitable loss of beauty. She is trying to reconcile the fact that as time passes, people age and their faces change, people get sick, and people even die (like her parents, perhaps; after all, she is at her godfather’s estate). In a word, she is concerned about the decay of the world toward some tragic end. Two major plot moments highlight this theme: The curse of Pirlipat where she goes from being beautiful to being hideous, and the death of the nutcrackers that started the war with the mice in the first place. Notice how the toys are human inventions (carved and painted), but the mice are agents of nature. That “man versus nature” conflict is also relevant to this theme.
Loneliness
The unspoken theme that gives this novel its melancholic feel is that no one believes Marie’s imagination. Not only is this tragic because Marie isn’t taken seriously, but it’s also a tragic indication that the person taking care of Marie is not comfortable or familiar with the way a kid’s mind works. Marie doesn’t need Drosselmeyer to believe her literally—she really just wants to talk about her emotions with someone, and telling him about her games is an attempt to be a little less lonely. When he thinks she’s just being silly, he rejects her further. These are all ways that Marie deals with loneliness, and perhaps she is even mourning. Her imaginary stories are dark and violent, and often the dreams involve a community rallying to support each other in the face of trauma and pain—which would be very desirous to Marie.
The imagined savior
One obvious symbol is the titular Nutcracker. In the context of the war against the mice, the Nutcracker is a savior character, because he will save the toy people from their impending doom. This is especially significant given that these characters belong to a religious community and they’re celebrating Christmas. In the context of Marie’s imaginary world, the savior character represents hope that the future can bring something good, in spite of Marie’s fear of time.
The clockwork world
When the children pester their godfather enough, they finally figure out what it is that he made for them—a little clockwork world with puppets that come out in time (like a cuckoo clock). They are fascinated by the world, but because the world is timed, it is predictable to them, and before very long, the kids are bored of the clock. They want something exciting and unpredictable, so Marie begins to invent an imaginary story about the toy world. The clock world represents the children’s unlikely preference for unpredictability. It is as if they understand that they are supposed to be entertaining themselves. By the end of the book, we know why—they are using their imaginations to deal with painful emotions.
The mice as a symbol for decay
Mice in the estate indicates the passage of time, because older houses tend to become infested with mice. Mice are also animals, which means they represent nature, because they are literally compelled by their nature. They are violent and they bring chaos and pain to the toy community. In other words, they make things worse over time, which makes them into a force of decay.
Pirlipat’s curse
In Marie’s imagination, she invents a beautiful princess. She imagines a beautiful girl, more beautiful than any other person in any universe. This makes Pirlipat archetypal because she is the “most” beautiful girl in the world, so she represents the fullness of Marie’s desire to be beautiful. So when Pirlipat is cursed with a hideous face, Pirlipat comes to represent Marie’s fear of being ugly.
The Christmas motif
This is a thoroughly “Christmas” story. It starts on Christmas eve, for starters. It concerns the basic theme of a young girl coming to terms with the horror and pain of life (by exploring imaginary stories in midnight trances). That might not seem very Christmas-like, but it absolutely is. In this story, the Christmas spirit is the opposite of time’s decay. Christmas represents hope and new life. It is important to consider that perhaps Marie is mourning the loss of her parents, which is something that would make Christmas very lonely and painful. It is not unusual for Christmas to represent such painful things for this specific reason.
Young and beautiful (Metaphor)
The battle was in full swing. The mice “continued to advance” and even overtook “some of the cannons.” There was so much “noise, smoke, and dust” that Marie could barely make out what was going on. However, one thing “she could tell for sure” was that “both sides were fighting as hard as they could.” Sometimes it seemed that the toys would win, and the other times it looked like the mice “would take the victory.” Madame Clarette and Madame Trudie “anxiously paced inside and wrung their hands.” “Am I to die in the flower of my youth?” Clarette asked. Indeed, she looked like the most beautiful creature alive and was too young to die.
Wonders (Simile)
The castle was beautiful, but “dull.” The children were clearly disappointed, for they were not allowed to play with it. However, their mother was mature enough to appreciate the beauty of Drosselmeier’s work. She “came over and asked to see the inside of the castle” and “the intricate clockwork that made dolls move.” So the judge “took everything apart and put it back together again,” which “cheered him right up.” He was so happy and pleased that he even gave the children “some beautiful brown men and women with gold faces” that smelled “as sweet and pleasant as gingerbread.”
An elegant look (Simile)
The tiny man wore “a beautiful hussar’s jacket of vivid violet with lots of trimming and buttons” and “matching trousers.” He also wore “the most beautiful” pair of boots that “a student, or even an officer, had ever worn.” They were so “tight on his legs” that they seemed “to be painted on.” It occurred to Marie that if Drosselmeier were to dress “as elegantly as the tiny man, he would not look nearly as handsome.” He was the most charming little man she had ever seen.
Sacks of wool (Simile)
“Inspired by the Nutcracker’s speech,” Fritz’s toy hussars made “the dangerous leap down from the second shelf to the floor.” They were not hurt, for they were dressed in “soft wool and silk” and were made of “cotton and sawdust.” So they plopped down like “little sacks of wool.” The Nutcracker, on the other hand, “would have almost certainly broken himself to pieces.” His body was “as brittle as linden wood.” He “would have likely broken his arms and legs” had not Madame Clarette sprang from the sofa to catch the Nutcracker “in her arms.”
Written by Julia Wolf
The most valuable
Marie had a reason to linger “near the Christmas table when the others had left” because “she had seen something nobody else seemed to have noticed.” After Fritz had “disengaged his hussars from parading about the tree, a splendid little man became visible.” His build left “much to be desired.” His “stocky” and “somewhat long upper body” didn’t fit his “small” and “spindly legs,” his head was “too large.” However, his fine clothing suggested that he was a man “of taste and education.” This imagery evokes a strong feeling of curiosity or – maybe even fascination. Marie can’t take her eyes off him.
The battle
“Strike the battle march, loyal vassal drummer!” Nutcracker shouted. The drummer beat the drum “so furiously that the glass in the cabinet shook and reverberated the sound.” Then “a rattle and clatter came from within the cabinet,” and Marie saw that “the lids of boxes where Fritz’s army was quartered” had popped open. The brave soldiers were “jumping out of their boxes” and “forming regiments on the bottom shelf.” As a true leader, Nutcracker was running “back and forth shouting words to inspire the troops.” This imagery is supposed to evoke a feeling of nervousness. Marie’s anxiety and Nutcracker’s determination make readers feel a variety of different emotions at once.
Charity
Lady Mouserinks had lived for years in the palace and “claimed to be related to the royal family” and “even queen of a realm called Mouseland.” She also claimed to have “a large court under the stove.” When she saw the queen in the kitchen, she asked her for some fat to feast. “Come out and you may have some of my fat,” said the queen, so Lady Mouserinks “jumped out, hopped up to the stove, and grabbed piece after piece of fat from the queen in her delicate little paws.” Then came her “cousins, aunts, uncles, and her seven sons.” This imagery is supposed to evoke a feeling of fear, since a kitchen full of mice is not a sight that the majority of us would enjoy.
Essay Questions
Written by people who wish to remain anonymous
1
Illustrate how the imagery of hearing manifests itself in the “Nutcracker and the Mouse King” by E.T.A. Hoffman.
The author uses the battle to appeal to the sense of hearing to the reader. The Nutcracker shouts, “Strike the battle march, loyal vassal drummer”. After the shouting, the drum is beaten loudly by the drummer. As a result of the drum beating, the cabinet shakes and reverberates the sound. Afterward, rattles and clatters come out of the cabinet. Marie sees the lids of boxes quartering and popping out. The courageous military jumps out of their boxes and forms regiments below the shelf. Due to his dedication and as person in charge, Nutcracker runs back and forth shouting every word that encourages his soldiers. The author uses this imagery of shouting to depict the sense of hearing to the reader so that he can understand the level of nervousness on the scene of war.
2
How does the author manage to use the ‘young and beautiful’ as a metaphor?
The author illustrates that the battle is in full swing and that the mice continue advancing and even overtakes some cannons. There are much noise dust and smoke, which confuses Marrie of what is happening. Despite the confusion, Marie can tell that there is a fierce fight between the two sides. It seems that the toys are going to win and at times mice seem to be stronger than the toys making unpredictable on who is going to emerge victorious. Both Clarette and Trudie are anxiously pacing inside and wringing their hands. Therefore, a metaphor helps the reader interpret that Clarette is the most gorgeous being who deserves to live long but not to die early.
3
Explain how the author brings out the theme of loneliness.
Marie finds herself between the rocks because there is no one around her who wants to believe what she is imagining. Even the person taking care of Marie does not believe in her or take her seriously. Her caretaker is not comfortable living with her because he is not familiar with how the child’s brain works. What Marie needs is someone to share with her imagination and emotions. However, most people around are doing their best to avoid her. Therefore, Marie finds herself on an island that she is alone with no one to give her emotional company. In this regard, the author has successfully developed the theme of loneliness.
Written by Julia Wolf
The King
Lady Mouserinks did as she promised; she avenged herself of the royal family by biting the beautiful little princess. Thus, angelic Pirpilat turned into a hideous creature. The queen “shut herself away in mourning,” and the wall of the king’s study had to be padded, for he “would often bang his head” against them, crying, “Oh, what an unhappy monarch I am!” He put all the blame on the court clockmaker and wizard and issued him an order: “restore the princess to her former self within four weeks, or suffer the disgraceful death of beheading.” The king wanted to have his beautiful daughter back, but he could not even imagine the outcome of his threats. “Take him away! Take that horrible nutcracker away!”
Pirpilat
The young Drosselmeier had broken the charm and the beautiful princess was saved. Her angelical beauty was restored and the court was so happy about it that everyone danced and cheered loudly. The poor queen even “fainted from happiness.” “The commotion did not at all ruffle young Drosselmeier, who was just taking his seventh and last step.” But then Lady Mouserinks popped out of a crack in the floor and the boy became “as hideous as Princess Pirlipat had been a few moments ago.” “Take him away! Take that horrible nutcracker way,” Pirpilat cried, forgetting about gratitude and compassion. “Oh, poor me, poor me – what am I to say?”
Marie
Marie had been so happy about the nutcracker’s victory that she hurried up to tell her family about it and the wonderful places she visited during the last night. What she didn’t expect was that nobody believed her. They laughed at her and at that “silly story” she invented. They only “laughed harder” when she tried to explain, so Marie went to her bedroom and retrieved seven crowns of the Mouse King. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough, for they called her “a little liar.” “Oh, poor me, poor me,” the little girl said and cried “violently.”
The story as written by Dio Sm
It is December 24, the house of Stahlbaum. Everyone is preparing for Christmas, and the children – Fritz and Marie – are wondering what will this time they get for a present from an inventor and godfather, senior adviser to the court Drosselmeyer, who often repairs clocks in the Stahlbaum’s house. Marie dreams about the garden and a lake with swans, and Fritz says that he likes their parents’ gifts more, because he can play with them (godfather’s toys are usually kept away from children so that they do not break them), and godfather cannot make the whole garden.
In the evening children admired the beauty-Christmas tree, near and on which were gifts: a new doll dress, hussars, etc. The godfather did a wonderful castle, but dancing dolls performed the same movement, and to get inside the castle was impossible, so the miracle of technology quickly became boring – only the mother got interested in a complex mechanism. When all the presents were sorted out, Marie saw the Nutcracker. Ugly doll seemed for the girl very pleasant. Fritz quickly broke the couple of Nutcracker’s teeth in an attempt to split the hard nuts, and thus Marie began to take care of it. At night children removed toys in the glass cabinet. Marie, placing her ward with all the conveniences, became a witness of the Battle of seven-headed Mouse King and the army led by the Nutcracker doll. Dolls surrendered under the onslaught of mice, and when the Mouse King has slumped to the Nutcracker, Marie threw her shoe at him.
When the girl woke up glass cabinet was broken. No one believed her story about the night incident. The godfather brought the repaired Nutcracker and told the tale of a solid walnut: the king and the queen had a beautiful princess Pirlipat, but the queen Mouserinks, taking revenge for her killed relatives by mousetraps of the court watchmaker Drosselmeyer (they ate bacon), turned the beauty into the ugly. Only the clicking of nuts could soothe her now. Drosselmeyer, under pain of death, with the help of a court astrologer, calculated the princess’s horoscope – her beauty could be restored by the walnut Krakatuk, chopped by a boy by a special method.
The king sent Drosselmeyer and astrologer in search of salvation; both a nut and a young man (the watchmaker’s nephew) were found in Drosselmeyer’s brother’s hometown. Many princes have broken their teeth trying to crack the Krakatuk, and when the king promised to give his daughter in marriage to a savior, a nephew came forward. He split the nut and the princess ate it and became a beautiful woman again, but the young man was unable to complete the entire rite, because Mouserinks fell under his feet. The mouse was killed, but the guy turned into the Nutcracker. The king drove Drosselmayera, his nephew and away. However, the astrologer predicted that the Nutcracker would become a prince and his ugliness would disappear if he won the Mouse King and a beautiful girl would fall in love with him.
Marie began to reproach Drosselmeyer that he did not help the Nutcracker. He said that only she could help, because she ruled over the light kingdom. The Mouse King got into the habit to extort her sweets in return for the safety of the Nutcracker. The parents were alarmed by the fact that the house was full of mice. When he asked for her books and clothes, she sobbed, she was ready to give everything, but when there would be nothing left, the Mouse King would want to tear herself. The nutcracker became alive and promised to take care of everything if he got the sword – Fritz helped with that. At night the Nutcracker came to Marie with a bloody sword, candle and 7 gold crowns. Having given her the trophies, he led her to his kingdom – the country of fairy tales, where they got into through the father’s fox fur coat. Helping Nutcracker’s sisters about the house Marie suddenly woke up in her bed.
None of the adults believed her story. As to the crown Drosselmayer said that this was his gift for her and refused to admit the Nutcracker to be his nephew (toy stood in its place in the closet). The father threatened to throw out all the dolls, and Marie did not dare to stammer about her story. But once on the threshold of their home appeared Drosselmayer’s nephew who privately confessed to Marie that ceased to be the Nutcracker, and made her an offer to share with him the crown and the throne of the Marzipan Castle. They say she is still the queen there.
The Nutcracker and the Mouse King Character List
Written by people who wish to remain anonymous
Marie
Marie is a playful child who lives in a large estate with her godfather and brother. In the winter, she witnesses her toys come to life. A mice army appears from holes in the walls, and the winter nutcrackers become animated to fight back. She watches the war play out at night, when no one is around, but when she tries to talk about it, no one believes her.
Fritz
Marie’s brother who plays with her often and often pesters their godfather about Christmas presents. Fritz often plays and imagines alongside his sister, Marie, but when she seems convinced about the mouse war against the nutcrackers, Fritz isn’t sure what to think.
Drosselmeyer
This court officer is godfather to Marie and Fritz. During the holidays, while the children are at his estate, he keeps them company and offers the promise of awesome Christmas gifts. He also appears in Marie’s midnight adventures, but in imaginary form.
Queen Mouserinks
This is the (perhaps imaginary) queen of the mice. The mice are in a war against the nutcrackers. Each night, they come out to do battle with the toys and nutcrackers, and one night, Queen Mouserinks is there to finish off the nutcrackers, but Marie throws a shoe at her.
Pirlipat
This is the princess of the toys whose beauty was unheard of. One day, the angry mice figured out a way to curse her with a piece of bacon, turning her ugly. Their other quest is to help restore Pirlipat’s beauty to her.
Krakatuk
This hero nutcracker has an advantage on the battlefield, because of a unique nut-cracking technique that lets him attack mice more easily. He is charged with the task of guiding the toys to victory while restoring Pirlipit’s beauty.”
Nina Kaptsova as the Sugar Plum Fairy, Bolshoi Ballet
Arabian Dance with Grigor Zakyan and Karina Davison
Moscow Ballet’s Arabian Variation featuring Sergey Chumakov and Elena Petrichenko
We celebrate today the human will to become, to explore, to discover new worlds and create new possibilities of becoming human, in the iconic figure of the migrant as the epitome and driving force of civilization.
Often the migrant also enacts the symbol, archetype, and allegory of the Stranger as well, with all of the ambiguities, dangers, and opportunities for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value implicit in the themes of this primary universal psychodrama.
Often has Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, quoted the book he kept on his nightstand for years in place of a Bible, Mein Kampf, to cheering crowds during an election rally in reference to migrants; “They’re poisoning our blood.”
No matter where you begin with ideas of otherness as a threat to identity, the origin of all fascism, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Let us give to fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!
The wave of fascism sweeping the world these past few years originates in a primal fear of otherness as loss of the self; this is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, becomes divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, racism, patriarchy, nationalism, and all of this coheres into authorized identities and a savage and cruel identity politics.
The Other is always our own mirror image, and we cannot escape each other. This is why fascism and tyranny are inherently unstable and always collapse in depravity and ruin; when we project what we dislike about ourselves onto others, as objects to abuse as if exorcising our demons, we dehumanize ourselves as well as them. And such denial fails as a strategy of transformation and adaptation to change, aggrandizing ossified institutions and systems until they become threats rather than solutions, and the whole edifice collapses from the mechanical failures of its contradictions as is happening now in America and throughout human civilization.
This is why the embrace of our own darkness and monstrosity is crucial to liberation struggle; how else can we bring change to systems of oppression if we cannot confront it in ourselves? Especially we must hold close and interrogate feelings like disgust, revulsion, rage, and other atavisms of instinct which we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail with the recognition that nothing we feel is either good or evil, but only how we use them in our actions toward others.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Against this Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force we must set a counterfire of solidarity and love, for only this can set us free. We must speak directly to that fear of otherness as loss of identity and of power if we are to turn the tide of history toward a free society of equals and not fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, toward democracy and a diverse and inclusive United Humankind and not carceral states of force and control, toward love and not hate.
We are stronger together than alone, as Benjamin Franklin demonstrated with his bundle of arrows in reference to Ecclesiastes 4:12 and the Iroquois Great Peacemaker called in some contexts Deganawidah. A diverse and inclusive society makes us more powerful if in different ways, wealthier, more resilient and adaptive, offers unknown joys and opens new vistas and possibilities of becoming human.
Change need not mean fear and loss; for it also offers limitless new wonders. We must be agents of change and bringers of Chaos, if we are to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.
The idea of human rights has been abandoned by its former guarantor nations, with whole peoples in Palestine and Ukraine being erased in wars of ethnic cleansing and genocide as exhibits of atrocities and crimes against humanity, and because of this and many other systems failures civilization is collapsing; ephemeral and illusory things like wealth and power are meaningless in the shadow of our degradation and the terror of our nothingness in the face of death.
A reader’s comment on my post of December 8, The Fall of America as a Guarantor of Democracy and Human Rights, contained the phrase “more hopeful of the good in most people”.
Here follows my reply; I too believed in things like human goodness once, but after forty years of wars, revolutions, resistance, and liberation struggle throughout the world I cannot. What I trust and hope for, if not believe in, is solidarity of action in struggle against systems of oppression and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. Such is my faith; the equality of human needs and the necessity of our unity in seizures of power to create a free society of equals.
As written by Jean Genet, who swore me to the oath of the Resistance and set me on my life’s path during the Siege of Beirut in 1982; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”
How shall we welcome the Stranger?
As written in the United Nations website; “Secretary-General António Guterres credited the more than 80 per cent of those who cross borders in a safe and orderly fashion as powerful drivers of “economic growth, dynamism, and understanding”.
“But unregulated migration along increasingly perilous routes – the cruel realm of traffickers – continues to extract a terrible cost”, he continued in his message marking the day.
Deaths and disappearances
Over the past eight years, at least 51,000 migrants have died, and thousands of others gone missing, said the top UN official.
“Behind each number is a human being – a sister, brother, daughter, son, mother, or father”, he said, reminding that “migrant rights are human rights”.
“They must be respected without discrimination – and irrespective of whether their movement is forced, voluntary, or formally authorized”.
‘Do everything possible’
Mr. Guterres urged the world to “do everything possible” to prevent their loss of life – as a humanitarian imperative and a moral and legal obligation.
And he pushed for search and rescue efforts, medical care, expanded and diversified rights-based pathways for migration, and greater international investments in countries of origin “to ensure migration is a choice, not a necessity”.
“There is no migration crisis; there is a crisis of solidarity”, the Secretary-General concluded. “Today and every day, let us safeguard our common humanity and secure the rights and dignity of all”.
Realize basic rights
For his part, the head of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Gilbert F. Houngbo, shone a light on protecting the rights of the world’s 169 million migrant workers.
“The international community must do better to ensure… [that they] are able to realize their basic human and labour rights”, he spelled out in his message for the day.
Leaving them unable to exercise basic rights renders migrant workers “invisible, vulnerable and undervalued for their contributions to society”, pointed out the most senior ILO official.
Vulnerabilities
And when intersecting with race, ethnicity, and gender, they become even more vulnerable to various forms of discrimination.
Mr. Houngbo flagged that migrants do not only go missing on high-risk and desperate journeys.
“Many migrant domestic, agricultural and other workers are isolated and out of reach of those who could protect them”, with the undocumented particularly at risk of abuse.
Fair labour migration
Meanwhile, ILO supports governments, employers and workers to make fair labour migration a reality.
Like all employees, migrant workers are entitled to labour standards and international human rights protections, including freedom of association and collective bargaining, non-discrimination, and safe and healthy working environments, upheld the ILO chief.
They should also be entitled to social protection, development and recognition.
To make these rights a reality, Mr. Houngbo stressed the key importance of fair recruitment, including eliminating recruitment fees charged to migrant workers, which can help eradicate human trafficking and forced labour.
Injustices suffered by migrant workers are injustices to us all – ILO chief
“Access to decent work is a key strategy to realize migrants’ development potential and contribution to society”, he said.
“We must recognize that injustices suffered by migrant workers are injustices to us all. We must do better”.
‘Cornerstone of development’
Meanwhile, in his message, the head of the International Migration Organization (IMO), António Vitorino, described migrants as “being a cornerstone of development and progress”.
“We can’t let the politicization of migration, hostility and divisive narratives divert us from the values that matter most”, he urged.
Regardless of what compels people to move, “their rights must be respected”, underscored the IMO chief.”
As I wrote in my post of January 23 2021, Inclusion and the Embrace of Otherness is the Test of Democratic Societies: On Immigration; Our new President Biden and his government seem committed to ideals of equity and fairness, in our system of immigration and in all things, which I celebrate and will help in any way I can; but in this area of policy I believe we need a few things more.
Inclusion and the embrace of Otherness is the test of democratic societies.
We need a version of the English Slave Act; anyone who sets foot on American soil is free, safe, and under our protection.
We need a borderless state with citizenship by declaration; if you accept the responsibilities of membership in our nation and agree to live in accord with our principles and agreements with one another, you are an American. If you’re crazy enough to want to be one of us, who are we to say no?
We need to reimagine and transform our security services and repurpose Homeland Security and the Border Patrol to provide safe passage to our shores and a humane landing which welcomes new Americans with food, medical attention, and education.
The horrific ethnic cleansing and systematic torture and abuse of the Trump regime did not emerge from nothing, but from an ancient injustice by which our nation created wealth and elite power and privilege for white supremacy; we have drawn a line in the sand to weaponize disparity and generate mass cheap exploitable labor which fuels agriculture, hospitality, childcare, and other markets and industries.
Illegal migrant labor is slave labor.
Let us emancipate our workforce so that everyone working here has the same legal protections as citizens, and no worker can be used against another.
As written by Maurizio Guerrero in In These Times; “One initiative stood out as especially (and cruelly) effective in President Donald Trump’s often inept White House: his administration’s monomaniacal attack on immigrants. Starting with an unconstitutional Muslim ban his first week in office, Trump signed more than 400 executive actions against migrants in a single term — curtailing legal immigration, casting out tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers, separating undocumented families and sowing terror in immigrant communities. Trump’s caging of migrant children at the border sparked nationwide protests in 2018 under the banner “Keep Families Together.”
But despite mass outrage among liberals, the enormous bipartisan machine built to surveil, catch and imprison migrants predates Trump. While separating children from their parents at the border was a cruel Trumpian twist, the U.S. immigration system has long torn apart families through deportation. The current iteration of that system, which criminalizes migrants for making mistakes once considered paperwork errors, took three decades to construct before Trump arrived — from the landmark immigration reform act under the Reagan administration in 1986, to the founding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President George W. Bush in 2003, to ICE’s massive raids under President Barack Obama.
President Joe Biden has promised to reverse some of Trump’s most egregious anti-immigrant policies, but few signs suggest he will address what paved their way: the ongoing criminalization of simply existing in the United States as an immigrant.
Biden has declared a moratorium on deportations during his first 100 days in office. He also promises to send an immigration reform bill to Congress. But neither of these measures, advocates say, would necessarily effect a meaningful change; the moratorium is a temporary measure, and a bill could be delayed in Congress and might expand immigration enforcement as a trade-off for pro-migrant measures.”
“On January 13, undocumented activist Jeanette Vizguerra (who has been living in sanctuary at the First Unitarian Society of Denver since 2015) accompanied a grassroots coalition at Biden’s transition headquarters in Wilmington, Del. The coalition demanded immediate action on immigration and an end to detentions and deportations.
“I am here today to personally ask Joe Biden … to act immediately when he takes office next week,” said Vizguerra, who risks arrest by ICE just for stepping out of the church. “[Biden must] protect families like mine that have been hunted and terrorized simply for daring to exist in this ‘land of the free.’ ”
We now have it within our power to end forever the threat of fascism in America, and with it the spectre of racist ethnic cleansing and white supremacist terror as state policy, the concentration camps, deportations, torture and murder which under Trump reached toward the scale of South Africa’s Bantustan system of slave labor and echoed the horrors of the Holocaust.
How shall we answer for the genocide perpetrated in our name?
The Biden Presidency held great promise for the Restoration of America and for a Reckoning with the legacies of our history; in this we have been betrayed not by a failure of vision, but by infiltration, subversion, and capture of the institutions of our government by a Fourth Reich we have yet to purge from among us, as well as by systemic forces of reaction.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2021, Overseer of the Carceral State Kamala Harris Proclaims Her Solution to the Humanitarian Refugee Crisis at Our Border; “Do Not Come”; Kamala Harris embodies my hopes and fears for the future of America; I hope she is a cross between Arundati Roy and the Jamaican warrior matriarchs who led the slave rebellion against the British Empire; but I fear she may be an overseer of the carceral state.
Today my darkest fears have been given new force by her speech to the “huddled masses yearning to be free”, as the poem by a Jewish girl on our Stature of Liberty proclaims. Former Prosecuting Attorney and instrument of law and order, force, fear, and the brutal tyranny of elite wealth and power and hierarchies of racial exclusivity, now wielding the authority of the Vice President of the United States, fails us all and betrays our trust in a stunning message to the world; “do not come”.
Not the poetic vision of an America which is a beacon of hope to the world, as written by Emma Lazarus;
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Kamala Harris could have simply quoted the magisterial poem which illuminates America’s historic mandate as a guarantor of universal human rights and the equality of all souls, could have spoken to the fear and pain of the wretched of the earth who have come to us for safety and for liberty, could have offered hope for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
And this is all the wisdom and empathy she has to offer us from her secret heart; “Do not come.”
Is Kamala an apologist of imperialism, abysmally ignorant, or just without moral vision?
For what purpose have we a border? We have drawn a line in the sand to exploit disparity and create illegal migrant labor; an invisible resource of those with no legal existence to whom we can do anything without reprisal, and whose cheap labor fuels vast industries of agriculture, hospitality, caretaking, and manufacture.
Migrant labor is slave labor.
This is the system of wealth, power, and privilege which our chosen champion has refused to challenge, and aligned herself instead with those who would enslave us.
Yet the betrayal of the people by Kamala Harris is neither the most central nor most sad issue driving the dynamics of elite hegemony and imperial dominion whose flaws can be read in the suffering of the masses at our border, for we ourselves have designed the failures which are their true cause.
As I wrote in my post of April 7 2021, How American Imperialism Created Our Humanitarian Crisis at the Border; Forty six years ago this April, America launched Operation Condor, a global campaign to destabilize and repress socialist governments and movements and defend capitalism as a hegemonic force and its elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege. This remains relevant to us today because it is the origin of many of the push forces driving waves of refugees to our border, and the horrific humanitarian crisis and test of our democracy created by American imperialism.
Migration is a word which conceals both the conditions which trigger it and our own complicity in creating them as consequences of our decades long policies of colonialism, anticommunist militarism, and economic warfare; ecological devastation with its drought and famine, poverty and social and political destabilization, an age of tyranny and state terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing, weaponized faith and its patriarchal sexual terror, and multigenerational wars.
In terms of refugees fleeing to America for safety and survival as well as liberty and equality we are mainly speaking of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, though the hell zone of Columbia and Venezuela now accounts for many, and with the collapse of central authority in Mexico and its degeneration into a region of warlords, oligarchs, and feudal crime syndicates we have refugees from Mexico itself as well as the traditional seasonal laborers.
Migrant labor is slave labor; this is the great truth America has never confronted and must now answer for in the suffering masses at our border. Entire sectors of our economy run on it; agriculture in which labor becomes a strategic resource as we starve without it, but also child and elder care, hospitality, and some manufacture. America’s wealth and power is created for us by others to whom we export the real costs of production, others who must remain invisible and exploitable as unregulated illegal labor to wring every ounce of value from them for our elites. Thus we weaponize economic disparity in service to power and privilege, and create and maintain hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and white supremacy.
Interests of elite hegemonies of wealth and power converge here with those of racial privilege and white supremacy in historic toxicity, in parallel with the rise of the carceral state as an instrument for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor and the repression of the Civil Rights Movement, and have done so from their origins. One such origin point is America’s appropriation, concealment, and instrumentalization of Nazi war criminals in the repression of dissent and the conquest of the world.
The Fourth Reich of which Trump was a figurehead did not emerge from nothing like Athena from the head of Zeus, but was an invention of American imperialism. As such its history and character as a global threat to democracy can be studied in the crisis of refugees and migration to which it has given birth, and in the legacies of our nation’s use of fascism as an instrument of dominion in the Americas, for as we were using it to conquer others, it was using us to seize the United States of America and the world.
As I wrote in my post of February 18 2020, Guatemala: Our Heart of Darkness; As we abduct and lockdown refugees in concentration camps and secret prisons, and drive others back into a Mexico whose government is supine before the power of its criminal organizations, we must reflect on the causes of this historic mass migration from Central America’s Dry Corridor of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; why is this happening, and what can be done to fix the problems which are driving it?
Drought and famine caused by global warming and climate change are clear immediate causes and triggering stressors of the current migration, but not exclusively; and as always the final dominoe in systems failures is a political choice.
These conditions have worsened longstanding issues of endemic poverty and pervasive violence and criminality, legacies of historical colonialism and American imperialist and capitalist policies and interventions, which I have described in my post of September 4 2019; “ There is an interesting connection between the chaos we created in Central America which is driving a mass exodus of immigration to our borders and the conspiracy theory of Islamic replacement of Europeans which inspires our greatest terrorist threat today; many of the white supremacists who ruled Algeria as a colony of France, mainly former Nazi soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion after the end of World War Two, were after its fall in 1962 hired by the government of the United States to rule El Salvador and Guatemala as puppet regimes to protect our corporate profits.
With them came the same ideology and dream of a homeland and asylum for escaped Nazis, and a secure base of operations and launchpoint for the Fourth Reich, as with those who fled the fall of the colony of Algeria as a white ethnostate to France and blamed Charles de Gaulle for its abandonment, and whose descendants now form the core of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.
Among the direct effects of the secret partnership between America and our former Nazi adversaries include:
The 1954 seizure of Guatemala by Eisenhower’s CI.A., which replaced a Marxist who had seized land owned by United Fruit and redistributed it to Indian peasants with a furniture salesman from Honduras, Castillo Armas. During the course of this coup America bombed Guatemala City, killed 9,000 communists, disbanded the unions, drove off the squatters, drew up a blacklist of some 70,000 leftists, built death squads and secret prisons, gave torture and brigandage free reign, created an enduring political front, the MLN, and started making a profit from our plantations.
The 1961 seizure of Guatemala by C.I.A. officer Willauer leading 200 men, a Harvard lawyer who had flown as Chennault’s first officer with the Flying Tigers in China. Guatemala was the staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Throughout the 1960-63 period of a civil war which continued until 1996, America crushed a pro-Castro rebellion using six C.I.A. bombers, exiled Cuban shock troops, and Green Berets who used the opportunity to test counterinsurgency theories later used in Vietnam.
The 1974 accession of an officer of Armas named Alarcon to the Presidency of Guatemala, who institutionalized the MLN, declaring “I am a fascist, and I have tried to model my party on the Spanish Falange.” He was, of course, a C.I.A. agent. Nixon once brought him along on his annual pilgrimage to consult with what he called his spiritual advisor, the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.
The 1982 seizure of power and Presidency of Rios Montt, an evangelical Sunday school teacher and personal friend of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who suspended the constitution, replaced the courts with secret tribunals, escalated the scorched earth warfare, torture, and disappearances of his predecessors, and one thing more. Here we see the designs of the Christian Identity Gideonite fundamentalists for America and the world given free reign.
During this the most terrible period of civil war throughout Central America, when Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were in fact a single nation ruled by remnants of the Nazis we had transplanted from French Algeria as American puppet regimes, and with the full authority of Ronald Reagan, Rios Montt weaponized Protestantism against encroaching Catholic Liberation theology.
During the 18 months of the Mayan Genocide, in which his death squads killed 3,000 people each month and annihilated 600 villages, he also instituted a system of forced labor in concentration camps modeled on the Apartheid system of South Africa and ruled by terror using former British police and Protestant Orange Militia units hired from Belfast, a mercenary force who had splendidly legal Hong Kong passports courtesy of the Thatcher government.
During over 35 years of civil war in Guatemala including Rios Montt’s genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native Indians, about half a million Indians were killed, over one million conscripted into military service and used against their own people, tens of thousands driven into Mexico as refugees, and most of the rest worked to death in the concentration camps. No American Army came to liberate them; they were not white, and no one cared so long as the profits flowed. Guatemala is America’s Belgian Congo; our heart of darkness.
I think of this every day as I eat my morning banana, for each one is the living form of a silent cry, the ghost of a tear, the memory of atrocity and horror, a thing like many others of fragile beauty and fleeting pleasure won by brutality and the theft of hope, pain and blood and death made manifest. For the dead and for wrongs past I can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged and the future that must be redeemed.
The 1981 founding of ARENA in El Salvador and the 1982-3 Presidency of Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, son of one of the original French Algerian OAS/Afrika Corps legionnaires and immigrants and leader of death squads since 1972, when he was trained at the US School of the Americas, often called a school for war criminals. During the peak of the civil war in 1983-84, about 8,000 people were killed every month in El Salvador.
The 1963-75 Honduran coup and military dictatorship of Arellano, for whose regime the term Banana Republic was coined, and of course the conduct of the Contra War beginning in 1980, which included the 1984 Honduran invasion of Nicaragua supported by 5,500 American troops.
Together Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were ruled for over a generation by America through our puppet tyrants and the ARENA and MLN parties we created. But there is more; much more, of which I will mention only four more brief examples here.
The 1964-85 rule of Brazil by the Arena Party and its legacy of torture and state terror which was ended by the total bankruptcy of the nation.
The 1976 military coup in Argentina and the civil war which followed, during which some 20,000 persons were disappeared. Of our earlier involvements; Peron had been a protégé of Franco and Mussolini, and Evita was assassinated not by us but by Vatican Intelligence with radiation poisoning due to Peron’s campaign against the Church. The Vatican also ran the Swiss escape route used by Otto Skorzeny and other SS officers at the fall of the Third Reich whom the government of America later hired. The most brazen flattery I have ever heard directed toward Oliver North was to compare him to Skorzeny.
The 1973 assassination of Allende in Chile and support of the Pinochet regime which killed as many as one in every hundred of its citizens.
Regarding Mexico, we long ago seized Texas and California, drew a line in the sand, and now call aliens everyone on the wrong side of it who comes here to pick the fruit, wash the dishes, and clean the toilets that our own nephews and nieces, children and grandchildren, would laugh in your face at the suggestion they get their hands dirty doing themselves.
Fascism is a sin of pride whose effects reverberate still, propagating outward in ever-widening circles as a force of contagion like the ripples of a stone cast into a pond. And we are all complicit in it, who call ourselves Americans.
We must make a better future than we have the past, and offer better solutions than to echo Marie Antionette’s dismissive and fatal reference “Let them eat cakes” in the imperious proclamation “Do not come”.
How is white supremacist terror conspiring in anti-immigrant violence now, and how does this issue figure in our elections as we choose who we will become?
As written by Martin Pengelly in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s ‘dehumanising and fascist rhetoric’ denounced by top progressive: Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal decries ‘horrific’ language after ex-president says immigrants ‘poisoning the blood of our country’; “A leading American progressive said Donald Trump was using “horrific … dehumanising and fascist rhetoric”, after the former president told supporters immigrants were invading the US and “poisoning the blood of our country”.
“This is horrific,” said Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, on Monday.
“Donald Trump’s description of immigrants who are coming to the southern border is dehumanising and fascist rhetoric. These are dangerous lies, designed to villainise immigrants and make horrific policy seem somehow acceptable.
“This is a good reminder of why we can never return to any policies of Donald Trump. He is trying to erase immigrants from America. None of his policies are about reforming the immigration system in a way that recognis[es] that America is better for having immigrants here.”
Dominating Republican presidential primary polling despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats, Trump made the remarks at election rallies in New Hampshire and Nevada.
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” the former president said in Durham, New Hampshire, on Saturday, returning to a line used before.
“That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America … but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
In Reno, Nevada, on Sunday, he said: “This is an invasion. This is like a military invasion. Drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.”
Academics, commentators and political opponents have been quick to link such rhetoric to that used by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and other authoritarian leaders.
On Saturday, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University professor and author of the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, said Trump’s aim was to “dehumanise immigrants now so the public will accept [his] repression of them when [he] return[s] to office”.
But on Sunday, Marc Short, chief of staff to Mike Pence when Pence was vice-president to Trump, came to Trump’s defence.
“I think it’s highly unlikely that Donald Trump has ever read Mein Kampf,” Short told Fox News, claiming Trump was instead using inflammatory language to distract critics while winning over voters.
Trump, however, has claimed to have owned Hitler’s memoir, which was published before his Nazi regime murdered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.
According to a 1990 profile in Vanity Fair, his first wife, Ivana Trump, told her lawyer her husband kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches by his bed.
Trump claimed the book was actually Mein Kampf and was given to him by a Jewish friend. The friend, Marty Davis, said he gave Trump the book of speeches, not Mein Kampf – and that he wasn’t Jewish. Trump told his profiler, Marie Brenner: “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
Brenner asked: “Is Ivana trying to convince her friends and lawyer that Trump is a crypto-Nazi? Trump is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitler’s speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitler’s genius at propaganda.”
Trump’s apparent interest in Hitler has surfaced since. In 2021, the then Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender said Trump told John Kelly, his second of four White House chiefs of staff: “Hitler did a lot of good things.”
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her journal Letters From An American; “It seems that former president Donald Trump is aligning his supporters with a global far-right movement to destroy democracy.
On Saturday, in Durham, New Hampshire, Trump echoed Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s attacks on immigrants, saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country”—although two of his three wives were immigrants—and quoted Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attacks on American democracy. Trump went on to praise North Korean autocratic leader Kim Jong Un and align himself with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, the darling of the American right wing, who has destroyed Hungary’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship.
Trump called Orbán “the man who can save the Western world.”
Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, explained in The Conversation what Trump is talking about. Autocrats like Orbán and Putin—and budding autocrats like Trump—are building a global movement by fighting back against the expansion of rights to women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people.
Russian leaders have been cracking down on LGBTQ+ rights for a decade with the help of the Russian Orthodox Church, claiming that they are protecting “traditional values.” This vision of heteronormativity rewrites the real history of human sexuality, but it is powerful in this moment. Orbán insists that immigrants ruin the purity of a country, and has undermined women’s rights.
Riccardi-Swartz explains that this rhetoric appeals to those in far-right movements around the world. In the United States, “family values” became tied to patriotism after World War II, when Chinese and Soviet communists appeared to be erasing traditional gender roles. Those people defined as anti-family—LGBTQ+ people and women who challenged patriarchy—seemed to be undermining society. Now, as dictators like Putin and Orbán promise to take away LGBTQ+ rights, hurt immigrants, and return power to white men, they seem to many to be protecting traditional society.
In the United States, that undercurrent has created a movement of people who are willing to overthrow democracy if it means reinforcing their traditional vision. Christian nationalists believe that the secular values of democracy are destroying Christianity and traditional values. They want to get rid of LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, immigration, and the public schools they believe teach such values. And if that means handing power to a dictator who promises to restore their vision of a traditional society, they’re in.
It is an astonishing rejection of everything the United States has always stood for.
The White House today responded to Trump’s speech. White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said: “Echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists and threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government are dangerous attacks on the dignity and rights of all Americans, on our democracy, and on public safety…. It’s the opposite of everything we stand for as Americans.”
Trump’s ‘dehumanising and fascist rhetoric’ denounced by top progressive
For the edification of the children in this time of reckoning and rewards, I have written a book of values and principles of action to guide us through life. Each sentence belongs on its own page, though you and your children will have to draw the illustrations.
Children, this is the time of year you will be asked, Are you naughty or nice?
Is it better to be naughty, or to be nice?
Better for who?
Don’t be nice, seize power.
Nice means obedient, like a good dog.
Never let anyone make you their dog.
Refuse to sit up and beg, roll over and show your belly, perform tricks or do anything that grants anyone power over you.
Refuse to be bribed or bullied into submission to authority.
Refuse to believe. Never take authority at their word, and test all claims of truth, for there is no just authority.
Refuse to submit.
Even if you are taken down a thousand times, locked away, denied things offered to others, given fearful lectures and not chosen for anyone’s team in games to play, you can still be victorious in defiance and resistance.
Find the other outcasts and build a team for games of liberation struggle, by rules of your own, because we are stronger together.
In the Red Fort, where humans once became things at the hands of the tyrant Assad’s torturers and enforcers, there is a hidden door, one among many throughout Damascus, to a vast underworld of prisons, dungeons, catacombs, armories and fortresses of last resort where once masters and slaves, the regime and its elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege with their enforcers and secret police and the imprisoned masses of silenced and erased others on whose exclusion on sectarian and ethnic lines the power and authority of the regime was based, lived in strange and twisted interdependence.
While others are liberating the prisoners, I am searching for the guards and torturers hiding among them.
One hundred thousand political and religious dissidents or those so judged by the regime disappeared into this underworld during the five decades of the Assad dynastic regime, with half a million killed in the thirteen year civil war.
Here the limits of the human are defined. There are doors which, once opened, cannot be closed again.
All those who hunt monsters must remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
The idea of Monstrosity is central to my interrogation of the origins of evil in the recursive Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as a system of oppression and dehumanization.
The use of social force in service to power and the illusions of security and authority obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and always creates its own Resistance. Both carceral police states of force and control, surveillance, propaganda, and repression of dissent, and the liberation movements which arise as their counterforce in Resistance and revolutionary struggle, are about seizures of power and the social use of force. But there is no moral equivalence, as the imposed conditions of struggle are determined by who holds power, and responsibility for its consequences belongs to tyrants and those who would enslave us. All Resistance is War to the Knife.
Where the state as embodied violence seeks to impose law and order through centralization of power to authority and to enforce virtue as security, we revolutionaries seek to delegitimize authority, through the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen, Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and through Defining Acts of Becoming Human; Transgression of the Forbidden, Violations of Normality, Performances of Unauthorized Identities, and Subversions of Other People’s Ideas of Virtue.
The great secret of power is that alone it is hollow and brittle, and crumbles to nothingness when confronted with disbelief and disobedience. And these are powers which cannot be taken from us, to disbelieve and disobey, inherent and defining qualities of our humanity, which once seized as the power over ourselves to choose, discover, and create our identity and destiny, confer autonomy and freedom as we become Unconquered and Living Autonomous Zones.
This is what I learned about Becoming Human as an art of revolution in Beirut 1982 when Jean Genet and I defied the Israeli siege in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of darkness and a Last Stand beyond hope of victory of survival in which we expected to be burned alive, and am now illuminated by again here is Damascus 2024, beyond our maps of becoming human and the topologies of civilization, in the empty places of unknowns marked Here Be Dragons.
Be not afraid of unknowns, for they hold both beauty and horror, and are spaces of free creative play wherein we may reimagine and transform ourselves and our ideas of human being, meaning, and value. Always go through the Forbidden Door, as have I in the forty two years I have lived among the Dragons of the Unknown, and do so now in the hells below Damascus.
Here I search for the perpetrators of crimes which have no names, and for the bioweapons network of laboratories, torture chambers, and factories designed originally by Nazis seeking to transform some of us into a posthuman species of elite supermen while annihilating the rest of us, a programme of human extinction moderated only by the need for slaves and thought control technology. The infamous Alois Brunner was not alone in creating the state of Syria under the Assad regime as an instrument of the Nazi vision of a master race, nor is Syria alone in this role as host and profiteer of Nazi terror among nations.
I, monster and hunter of monsters, wish to inscribe upon the memory of humankind and hurl in defiance into the chasms of our darkness this one true and possibly final witness; our humanity is not an imposed condition of being nor is our biology, genetics, hormones, and the morphology of our form destiny, but processes of becoming human shaped by our prochronism or the history of our choices and adaptations across vast epochs of time as a continuum of being, not national identity, nor race, nor gender, nor class, nor of any fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, not of hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness of any kind, but our embrace of love over hate, hope over fear, faith in each other as solidarity over division, and of mercy, empathy, and compassion over cruelty and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
As written by Alex MacDonald in Middle East Eye, in an article entitled Alois Brunner: The Nazi who helped the Assads torture Syrians: While his presence was long denied by Damascus, the influence of Adolf Eichmann’s righthand man has cast a long shadow over Syria; “The overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has emptied the country’s jails.
Many of those who have emerged after years or decades of confinement are pale and starving. Frequently they bear the marks of Assad’s torturers.
Few places are worse than the sprawling Sednaya Prison, around 30km north of Damascus, where thousands are believed to have been executed in what was known as the “Human Slaughterhouse”.
The methods employed by Bashar are a continuation of those of his father Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria between 1970 and 2000.
Such practices were in part learned from Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, who lived in Syria for more than half his life and who served as an adviser to the state on repressing dissent and establishing a regime of torture.
Alois Brunner and the Holocaust
Brunner was born in April 1912 in Vas, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the end of the 1920s he was a member of the Nazi Party, before joining the SS in 1938 following Germany’s annexation of Austria.
He was the righthand man of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust and responsible for implementing the mass murder of Jews throughout Europe. Brunner’s postings included as commandant at the Drancy internment and transit camp in northwestern Paris; and at the Breendonk internment camp along the Antwerp-Brussels highway in Belgium.
According to Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Brunner “was responsible for the deportation to the death camps of 128,500 Jews”. These included 47,000 from Austria, 44,000 from Greece, 23,500 from France, and 14,000 from Slovakia. “He was a fanatic antisemite, a sadist and a person who was totally dedicated to the mass murder of European Jewry.”
Several interviews published during the 1980s appeared to show Brunner unrepentant about his role during the Holocaust. “All of [the Jews] deserved to die because they were the Devil’s agents and human garbage,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1987. “I have no regrets and would do it again.”
Earlier, in an interview with a German magazine in 1985, Brunner is reported as having said: “My only regret is I didn’t murder more Jews.”
Brunner arrives in the Middle East
After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, Brunner fled using a fake Red Cross passport, heading first to Egypt and then to Syria in 1954, where he would remain for the rest of his life.
Syria at the time was fertile ground for Brunner. After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Nakbah (“Catastrophe”) that saw more than 700,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes and land, Jewish residents of neighbouring states faced intense scrutiny and persecution.
Syrian Jews, whose population once numbered around 25,000, faced some of the harshest treatment in the region. They were forbidden to work for the government, nationally owned enterprises, and banks. When the head of a Jewish family died his property would be forfeited to the state while members of the family could only stay by paying rent to the state. Some confiscated Jewish property was handed to Palestinian refugees.
With a few notable exceptions, Syrian Jews were not allowed to leave the country, amid fears they would bolster Israel. They were the only minority to have their religion mentioned on their passports and identification papers.
In addition, post-war Syria was a highly unstable entity that regularly underwent coups, including four violent changes of power between 1949 and 1954, the first of them orchestrated by the CIA.
Brunner initially stayed at George Haddad Street in Damascus as a sublease of Kurt Witzke, a German officer and adviser to the Syrian government. But the new arrival was later to denounce his landlord, leading to the arrest and torture of Witzke and leaving Brunner as the property’s only resident.
During the 1950s, Brunner worked with fellow Nazi fugitives in Damascus, smuggling weapons, including between the Soviet Union and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria’s fight against French colonialism.
Eventually Brunner’s work was noticed by Syrian intelligence, who arrested him for interrogation. “I was Eichmann’s assistant,” he reportedly told his interrogators, “and I’m hunted because I’m an enemy of the Jews.” He was promptly hired.
Brunner’s fortunes fluctuated during the late 1950s and early 1960s. His position was eventually secured with the rise of the Arab Ba’ath Party, which seized power in March 1963, and the subsequent Assad dynasty which would govern Syria until December 2024.
Brunner and the Assad dynasty
Brunner was reportedly “spoiled” by the Baathist leaders who carried out the coup, according to Danny Orbach, an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Brunner’s benefits included a generous salary, a driver and regular contact with senior regime officials.
The new leadership also included eventual defence minister Hafez al-Assad, who was introduced to Brunner by Colonel Abd al Hamid Al-Sarraj.
It was while living in Syria under the pseudonym “Dr Georg Fischer” that Brunner taught Hafez Assad “how to torture”, according to Zuroff. “He was involved in the harsh treatment of the Jewish community of Syria and was an expert in terror and torture.”
The extent and exact details of Brunner’s status and influence on Assad remain hard to verify due to the secrecy surrounding it (new information may come to light with the overthrow of the Assad dynasty).
But one torture method attributed to Brunner is the technique known as the “German Chair”, whereby a detainee has their hands and feet tied underneath a flexible metal chair which can then be bent to apply pressure to the neck and spine, resulting in paralysis or death.
Defence lawyer Andreas Schulz outlined the method at the trial of alleged Syrian war criminals in Koblenz, Germany, in December 2021. He said that Brunner was likely to have been responsible for the technique, although the Communist government of East Germany had also had links with Syria.
In a report of proceedings by the Syrian Center for Legal Studies and Research (SCLSR), Schulz said that Brunner “established a suppression apparatus to ensure the future of the Baath Party and the Alawites”. He managed this, according to Schulz, through mention of his relationship with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, thereby securing the post of presidential adviser to Assad, training intelligence officials and testing torture techniques.
Brunner’s first work was at an intelligence base specialising in torture in Syria’s southwest Wadi Barada valley region, the SCLSR reported Schulz as saying. But the relationship eventually soured and he fell out with Assad.
In 2017, the French magazine Revue XXI reported three Syrian security sources as stating that Brunner “trained all the leaders” of the Assad regime at Wadi Barada.
“With the help of Alois Brunner, the new Syrian president sets up a repressive apparatus of rare efficiency,” wrote Hedi Aouidj and Mathieu Palain. “Complex, divided into numerous branches which all monitor and spy on each other, operating on the basis of absolute compartmentalisation, this apparatus is built on a principle: to hold the country by the use of limitless terror.”
The hunt for Brunner
But Syria was not the only Middle Eastern government with an interest in Brunner: he had also attracted attention from Israel, which in May 1960 had drugged and kidnapped his former boss Eichmann, ahead of a trial and eventual execution in Israel in June 1962.
Brunner survived at least two Israeli intelligence assassination attempts while in Syria in 1961 and 1980 that reportedly cost him three fingers and an eye. During the 1985 interview, he was reported to have pulled a poison pill from his pocket, swearing that he would never allow the Israelis to take him alive like they did Eichmann.
Since the end of World War Two, Nazi war criminals had always been on the radar of those who wanted to bring them to justice: during the 1950s, Brunner himself had been found guilty in France in his absence and sentenced to death.
But towards the end of the 20th century, concerted international efforts were made to track down elderly Nazi war criminals before they died and escaped justice.
Brunner was one of those still on the list: at the launch of the UN Nazi War Crimes Commission in New York in November 1987, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s ambassador to the UN, held up a file about Brunner’s activities.
In March 2001, a French court again found him guilty in his absence, this time for the arrest and deportation of 345 orphans from the Paris region.
By July 2007, Austria was prepared to pay €50,000 for information that led to his arrest and extradition. Six years later, the Annual Simon Wiesenthal Center Report on The Status of Nazi War Criminals stated that Brunner was the “most important unpunished Nazi war criminal who may still be alive” while conceding that the “chances of his being alive are relatively slim”.
But Syria had always rebuffed attempts by France and other nations to investigate Brunner or even admit he was in the country.
The mystery of Brunner’s death
By the 1990s, Brunner’s high-profile interviews had made him a liability for his hosts in Damascus.
Revue XXI magazine suggested that Brunner died in 2001 in Damascus, aged 89, living in a squalid basement under a police station where he was quietly stowed by the authorities in 1996. The report quoted one of Brunner’s guards as saying that he “suffered and cried a lot in his final years, [and] everyone heard him”.
A second guard testified that the door to his cell was closed “and never opened again”, similar to the fate dealt to numerous prisoners in Sednaya. “We are satisfied to learn that he lived badly rather than well,” Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld told the AFP news agency at the time. Another report by a German intelligence official suggested to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 2010 that he was dead.
The opaque nature of the Syrian state, combined with the chaos of the recent civil war, means that the true extent of the influence of Brunner and other Nazi war criminals on the Assad dynasty is still unknown.
In the years following the downfall of Nazi Germany, war crimes trials followed to ensure that those responsible faced justice. In a statement on Monday, the International Federation for Human Rights called for similar accountability for the violence inflicted on the Syrian people since 2011.
“The brutal repression unleashed on the Syrian population since March 2011 has led to nearly 500,000 deaths, displaced over 6 million refugees, and caused more than 150,000 disappearances,” it said. “These atrocities cannot go unpunished, and those responsible must be held accountable.”
The case of Alois Brunner proves that the legacy of repression in Syria originated before 2011, and in many respects can be traced back to World War Two and earlier.”
As the conversation goes in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus;
“Faust: How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
Mephistopheles: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.”
Alois Brunner: The Nazi who helped the Assads torture Syrians
While his presence was long denied by Damascus, the influence of Adolf Eichmann’s righthand man has cast a long shadow over Syria
Torch of Liberty 