Beneath the gaze of a dead God, leprous and cold, which seizes and shakes us with its horror and judgement, the full Moon of the Long Nights devours us with its baleful and malevolent eye, window into endless chasms of darkness, like a rotting thing washed up on the shores of time, carcass of a lost beauty upon whose waning echoes of power our civilization has been built by those who would enslave us as they mine its authority for their own.
Herein I write of the cartography of our monstrosity and the limits of the human, of the tyranny and terror of faith weaponized in service to power, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, from the ruins of a glorious antiquity undermined by a series of hells constructed by the fallen Assad regime and a people sacrificed to the power of a tyrant; a letter to any possible future humanity, from Damascus, with love.
For this is the end result of all such power and the state as embodied violence, and we must look upon it and bear witness, not in despair and learned helplessness as such tyrants intend, but in solidarity, refusal to submit, and certain knowledge that all systems of oppression and carceral states of force and control will in the end fall and become nothing.
Let us say with Ahab; “To the end, I will grapple with thee.”
As written by Shelley in his poem Ozymandias:
“I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Patrick Stewart as Ahab in Moby Dick, trailer for BBC series
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) Original Trailer
As I wrote in celebration of Herman Melville, on his birthday August 1;
To each of us his own White Whale, to lift us beyond our limits in pursuit of the Impossible; this gift has Herman Melville given us in his magnificent novel Moby Dick, written as an answer to the Book of Job.
And yet more; fables which intertwine with our histories to magnify and deepen us through the dreams in which we live, the courage to embrace our passions and our shadows as their master and wield the darkness as a forge of destiny rather than be consumed by it, to live Unconquered and free, and finally the glorious mad quest to strike through the mask of illusion which is the material world and its Wilderness of Mirrors, lies, and falsifications, and with rapture and terror, or fascinans et tremendum as Rudolf Otto phrased it, seize the creative power and vision of the Infinite which lies beyond; Herman Melville charted themes of Romantic Idealism with the subversive intent of Victor Hugo’s social realism and the interrogation of traditional religious values through its symbols of his direct model Nathaniel Hawthorne.
There are other layers to the ideas of Herman Melville, who describes and questions the arbitrary nature of rule bound systems and of reality, and moreover is revolutionary and transgressive.
In his great book Moby Dick, we have a Marxist- environmentalist diatribe against capitalism valorizing workingmen’s labor in the form of a critique of the Romantic project of projecting ourselves into nature for the purpose of dominating and exploiting its resources, harnessed to a narrative which is primarily an exploration of men’s relationships with other men and starring the beautiful and very human marriage of his narrator Ishmael and the tattooed Islander Queequeg. Though mad Ahab is the tragic Romantic hero of the story and referential to Victor Frankenstein, the whale is its main character; it is the epic of a nonhuman personification of unconquerable nature. Moby Dick is also a figure of the ferocious patriarchal god of the Old Testament; the novel is laden with religious symbolism and images, and its humanism prefigures Freud and Nietzsche.
He wrote of gender inequality in The Tartarus of Maids, memorialized the cause of abolition in his civil war poetry which begins with John Brown’s Ferry and ends with the assassination of Lincoln, and his novel of a slave revolt at sea, Benito Cereno, references Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave.
Bartleby the Scrivener, a Story of Wall Street, a short story universally taught in American high schools, was influenced by The Communist Manifesto and by his own experience of the European revolutions of 1848-49. Herein Sartrean
authenticity, Marxist commodification, and Kafkaesque absurdism play together in a sandbox of ideas a hundred years in advance of its time.
Herman Melville still fulfills his mission as a revolutionary writing in the role of the Jester of King Lear to incite, provoke, and disturb; Camille Paglia devoted a whole chapter to him in her course on western civilization published as Sexual Personae, as has Harold Bloom in The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. C.L.R. James wrote a study of capitalism and its consequences for the rise of totalitarian fascism while imprisoned with other communists awaiting deportation from Ellis Island in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.
For each of us can find reflection in the magnificent Ahab and his tragic but glorious quest to reach beyond our limits, to dream an impossible thing and make it real.
We have today remembered one of America’s most horrific and revealing anniversaries, eleven years after the Sandy Hook massacre forever changed our nation’s ideas about guns from talismans of security and power to signs of our helplessness before the rapacity and amoral terror of our subjugation and commodification by elites, for whom the occasional murdered child is an acceptable cost of doing business, and our worthlessness in the eyes of our political leadership which require a vast and unregulated market for guns as a strategic resource in imperial conquest and dominion and the readiness to fight global wars.
Who bears arms bears death, has chosen to reduce all human interactions to a kill/no kill decision, and by our failure to prevent them from doing so have been authorized to bear death among us with powers of extrajudicial summary execution as a subversion of democracy.
We have granted such permission now for over two centuries under the immunity of a misinterpreted Second Amendment which we must abolish along with police who are allowed to carry guns.
Before all else in this question of the power of death and who the state authorizes to bear it, we must recognize the underlying causes and purposes of the right to bear arms in white supremacist terror and the repression of dissent, subversions of our principles of liberty, equality, and justice.
True democracy and a free society of equals is not possible when some of us have to power and right to kill the rest of us without cause.
As written by Robin Levinson-King for the BBC, in an article entitled Sandy Hook 10 years on: How many have died in school shootings?: “It has been a decade since a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, killing 20 children and six school staff.
In a written statement declaring Wednesday, the anniversary, a day of remembrance, US President Joe Biden said the tragedy forced everyone to re-examine their “core values and whether this can be a country that protects the most innocent.”
In the wake of the massacre, many demanded tighter gun restrictions.
Yet the death toll from school shootings keeps climbing as debates over gun control continue ten years on.
According to research compiled by the independent K-12 School Shooting Database research group, there have been 189 shootings at schools around the US since Sandy Hook that have resulted in at least one fatality.
The shootings counted include everything from suicides and domestic violence.
Seventeen were “active shooter situations” – defined as “when the shooter killed and/or wounded victims, either targeted or random, within the school campus during a continuous episode of violence”.
While those events count for a small portion of total shooting incidents, they account for more than a third of all casualties.
In total, 279 have died from being shot on a school property during, before or after school hours, including weekends.
In November, a memorial for the victims of Sandy Hook was opened to the public, not far from the school grounds.
Victims’ names were carved into a wall that circled a sycamore tree.
Nelba Marquez-Greene’s six-year old daughter, Ana Grace Marquez-Greene, was among the victims.
“Ten years. A lifetime and a blink,” she wrote on Twitter. “Ana Grace, we used to wait for you to come home. Now you wait for us. Hold on, little one. Hold on.”
“We’re not in a place to have polite discourse in this country on that issue,” she said.
In the aftermath of what was at the time the worst school shooting in US history, then-President Barack Obama vowed to push forward sweeping legislation to reduce gun violence by addressing everything from gun magazine sizes to mental health.
But he left office without being able to pass his hoped-for laws.
Ten years on, Mr Biden has renewed a promise to pass a ban on semi-automatic rifles.
In June, he signed a landmark gun bill into law, but if fell short of reinstating the so-called assault-weapons ban that had been in effect before 2004.
However, a debate over this and other gun control measures that have been proposed continues, with evidence being put forward on both sides over their effectiveness at stopping school shootings.
Gun control advocates argue that tighter restrictions to access is key, while others argue that failures of the mental health system and better security on school campuses are more pressing concerns.
Nicole Hockley, the co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise Foundation, a charity, lost her son Dylan in the massacre.
“All shootings reopen wounds,” she told the BBC earlier this year.
Her other son, who survived, graduated from high school this year and will be able to vote. It is his generation, she said, who will enact change.”
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her journal, Letters from an American; “Today, survivors of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado, testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Club Q is an LGBTQ club in the city of about 500,000 people. The shooter opened fire there on the night of November 19-20, during a dance party. He used an AR-15 style rifle, murdering five people and wounding 19 more. Six others were hurt in the chaos.
Pointing to Republican anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that calls LGBTQ individuals “groomers” and abusers,” survivors of the mass shooting said that Republican rhetoric was “the direct cause” of the massacre. Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) drew a wider lens: “The attack on Club Q and the LGBTQI community is not an isolated incident, but part of a broader trend of violence and intimidation across our country.”
James Comer (R-KY), who will likely chair the committee in the upcoming Republican-controlled House, disagreed. Blaming Democratic policies that he claims are soft on crime, he said that “Republicans condemn violence in all forms,” and that the survivors have his “thoughts and prayers.”
But Comer’s insistence that Republicans do not celebrate guns is not entirely honest. Just last year, four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Michigan that killed four students and wounded seven other people, Comer’s colleague Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted on Twitter a Christmas photo of him, his wife, and five children holding assault weapons in front of a Christmas tree. The caption read: “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) immediately posted her own family photo with her four sons all posing with firearms.
In 2020, according to the New York Times Editorial Board, “Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.”
Democrats do not do this. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) shot a hole in a climate bill in 2010 but, according to the New York Times Editorial Board, that was the last time a Democrat used a gun in an ad.
The national free-for-all in which we have 120 guns for every 100 people—the next closest country is Yemen, with about 52 per one hundred people—is deeply tied to the political ideology of today’s Republican Party. It comes from the rise of Movement Conservatism under Ronald Reagan.
Movement Conservatism was a political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the social and economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors.
In the 1960s, leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government. They emphasized individualism, the idea that a man should take care of his own family, defending it with weapons, if need be, and fighting off a dangerous government and those who wanted to use the government for “socialism” or “Marxism.”
In 1972, the Republicans still embraced the idea that the government had a role to play in making the country safer for everyone, and their platform called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns.” But in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun safety. In 1980 the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms.
In 1980 the National Rifle Association endorsed Reagan. This was the first time it had endorsed a presidential candidate, and showed an abrupt change in what had, until 1977, been a sporting organization that emphasized gun safety and rejected the idea of working with manufacturers of guns and ammunition.
In the past, NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. Until the mid-1970s, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks.
But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”
Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA began to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.
After a gunman trying to kill Reagan in 1981 paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases.
The NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike the law down, and in 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional.
Now a player in national politics, the NRA PAC was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers, 99% of it going to Republican candidates. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election, and in that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.
The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shootings as one in which four people are shot, not including the shooter: in 2021 alone, we had 692 of them.
While gun ownership has actually declined since the 1970s, there are far more guns in fewer hands: a study in 2017 showed that about half of US guns are owned by about 3% of the population, and that was before Americans launched a new gun-buying spree after 2020.
Ten years ago today, a 20-year-old in Newtown, Connecticut, shot and killed 20 children between the ages of six and seven, and six adult staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. In the wake of those horrific murders, Congress tried to pass a bipartisan bill requiring background checks for gun purchases, but even though 90% of Americans—including nearly 74% of NRA members—supported background checks, and even though 55 senators voted for the measure, it died with a filibuster.
Dave Cullen, who writes about school shootings, argued yesterday in a New York Times op-ed that there is reason to hope we will finally address our gun problem. The Sandy Hook Massacre galvanized Americans into pushing back to reclaim our safety, as Shannon Watts and congressional representative Gabrielle Giffords—herself a survivor of gun violence–—organized the gun safety movement. That movement, in turn, got a dramatic boost from the activism of the survivors of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which a 19-year-old gunman murdered 17 people and injured 17 others.
This June, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had to acknowledge that support for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was “off the charts, overwhelming,” and 15 Republican senators bucked the NRA to vote for basic gun safety legislation.
But, also in June, the Supreme Court handed down the sweeping New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision requiring those trying to place restrictions on gun ownership to prove similar restrictions were in place when the Framers wrote the Constitution. Already, a Texas judge has struck down a rule preventing domestic abusers from possessing firearms on the grounds that domestic violence was permissible in the 1700s.
The decision is being appealed.”
As written by Sebastian Murdock in Huffpost, in an article entitled Obama Reflects On ‘Darkest Day Of My Presidency’: Nearly 10 Years After Sandy Hook
Former President Barack Obama spoke at an event marking the anniversary of the 2012 school shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead.; “Former President Barack Obama said he still considers the deadly school shooting that took the lives of 20 children and six adults in 2012 the “darkest day of my presidency” as the 10th anniversary of the shooting approaches.
“I consider Dec. 14, 2012, the single darkest day of my presidency,” Obama said Tuesday night at the Sandy Hook Promise “10-Year Remembrance” benefit in New York City. “Like so many other people, I felt not just sorrow, but I felt angry, fury in a world that could allow such a thing.”
Sandy Hook Promise, started by several families who lost loved ones in the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting, is a nonprofit that aims to protect children from gun violence while teaching empathy in classrooms.
During his speech at the benefit, Obama praised Sandy Hook Promise for preventing possible acts of gun violence.
“You’ve made meaning where there was none,” Obama said. “Back when we were together in 2012, I said that Newtown would be remembered for the way that you looked out for each other, the way that you cared for one another and the way that you loved one another.”
While gun violence continues to run rampant in the U.S., there have been glimmers of positive change in the last 10 years. Sandy Hook families won $73 million in a lawsuit settlement this year against Remington Arms, which made the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle used by the gunman during the massacre. It was the first time a gun manufacturer had been held liable for a shooting.
And the National Rifle Association (NRA), which saw its membership surge at the start of 2013 following the Sandy Hook shooting, has seen its leadership and political power crumble under the weight of mismanagement and greed over the last few years.
Then there’s Alex Jones, the conspiracy host of “Infowars,” who used his platform to mock the parents of dead children for years, falsely claiming they were actors and that their loved ones never died. This year he was finally held accountable for the torrent of abuse he leveled on the Sandy Hook families when he was ordered to pay more than $1 billion for his dangerous lies.
Earlier this year, 19 students and two teachers were killed in Uvalde, Texas, in a shooting sickeningly similar to that of Newtown. The following month, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan gun safety bill into law that enhances background checks, addresses mental health care, and places curbs on buying guns.
Obama attempted a similar push for gun violence prevention in 2016 with a bill that would have enhanced background checks. He spoke through tears the day he implored Congress to act.
“Somehow, we become numb to it, and we start thinking, ‘This is normal,’” Obama said.
Instead, the former president was roundly mocked by conservatives for his emotional plea. The bill ultimately failed, thanks in part to pressure from the NRA and a handful of Democrats who voted against the bill to cater to gun-loving voters in their states.
In his speech Tuesday, Obama said the work to curb gun violence isn’t done.
“In 2022, there has not been a single week — not one — without a mass shooting somewhere in America,” he said. “We pretend that the best we can do for the families of Sandy Hook, Parkland and Virginia Tech and so many other communities is to tinker around the edges and then offer rote recitations of our thoughts and our prayers when violence explodes once again.”
Obama admits he still gets angry when he hears about the latest senseless shooting.
“Whether it is in a church or a synagogue, in a grocery store or on a college campus or in a home or on a city street … I still feel anger,” he said. “And I hope you do too.”
As I wrote in my post of February 16 2022, Victory For the People Over Profiteers of Gun Violence and White Supremacist Terror; “ We celebrate a victory for the people over profiteers of gun violence and white supremacist terror in the case of the Sandy Hook families against Remington, manufacturer of the gun that was used to murder twenty children and six adults in a few minutes. Guns are weapons of terror and mass destruction, and should be legislated as such.
As written by Sarah Jorgensen, Jason Hanna and Erica Hill at CNN; “Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son Noah was killed in the shooting, said in the news release that their loss is “irreversible, and in that sense, this outcome is neither redemptive nor restorative.”
“One moment we had this dazzling, energetic 6-year-old little boy, and the next all we had left were echoes of the past, photographs of a lost boy who will never grow older, calendars marking a horrifying new anniversary, a lonely grave, and pieces of Noah’s life stored in a backpack and boxes.”
“What is lost remains lost. However, the resolution does provide a measure of accountability in an industry that has thus far operated with impunity. For this, we are grateful.”
As written by Sebastian Murdock in Huffpost; “Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son was killed in the shooting, said she hopes the settlement will push gun companies to operate differently.
“My beautiful butterfly, Dylan, is gone because Remington prioritized its profit over my son’s safety,” Hockley said in a statement. “Marketing weapons of war directly to young people known to have a strong fascination with firearms is reckless and, as too many families know, deadly conduct. Using marketing to convey that a person is more powerful or more masculine by using a particular type or brand of firearm is deeply irresponsible. My hope is that by facing and finally being penalized for the impact of their work, gun companies, along with the insurance and banking industries that enable them, will be forced to make their business practices safer than they have ever been.”
Hope is a fine and noble thing, final gift or curse of Pandora to humankind, a tenuous and frangible thing, ambiguous in meaning and its power to bring change, like love and faith, and like its confreres among our passions which are also Ideals perhaps not very bankable without action to make it real. The praxis of hope is struggle.
Here I must digress, for I believe the future evolution of humankind and the history of the next millennium will be defined by the struggle between two forces; the renunciation of the use of social force and violence as democracy and peace and the universalization of force and violence as tyranny and terror, and what we do with our hope in the face of hopeless imposed conditions of struggle and unanswerable force will decide our fate.
Camus interrogated this best and directly in The Myth of Sisyphus and constructed his Absurdism on his interpretation of the uses of hope in resistance to fascist tyranny, and nothing has superseded his insight.
Why is this relevant to the issue of gun violence? Because we face enormous systemic and structural forces in opposition to freeing ourselves from constant threat of death, and our choices here will shape our response.
When teaching Camus’ essay and his novel The Stranger, I always directed students to his remarks in the lecture he gave to the Jesuits, “the difference between us is, you have hope.”
Albert Camus used hope in a special context, for in that lecture on hope and faith Camus seizes the problem directly; hope is ambiguous, relative, a Rashomon Gate of contingency and multiplicities of meaning, and like its myth in Pandora’s Box both a gift and a curse.
How is this of use to the audience Camus wrote for, the freedom fighter who resists and yields not, beyond hope of victory or survival? How do we find the will to claw our way out of the ruins of civilization and make yet another Last Stand? How answer overwhelming force and the unwinnable fight?
As Jean Genet said to me in Beirut of 1982, moments before we expected to be burned alive by Israeli soldiers who had set fire to our house after we refused to come out and surrender, “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” It is a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty-nine years now.
Herein lies a gate which opens not to Dante’s Inferno, but to freedom and self-ownership as authenticity, and to seizure of power from authorized identities, the boundaries of the Forbidden and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, marked by a sign bearing the famous warning; “Abandon hope, all you who enter here.”
Always go through the Forbidden Door.
As Lenin asked; “What is to be done?”
Let us repeal the Second Amendment, disarm and demilitarize the police, end immunity from prosecution of gun manufacturers for the crimes which they enable and promote, disband the National Rifle Association as an organization of terror, break the link between arms manufacture as a business of empire and the carceral state which floods the market with cheap guns to shape some of us into monsters with which to terrorize the rest as a pretext for the imposition of a police state, and abandon the valorization and fetishization of violence as toxic masculinity, misogyny, and patriarchal terror.
This may be the work of centuries, but in a world wherein the national and imperial ambitions and whims of its nuclear powers, currently America, China, Russia, Britain, France, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, and NATO nuclear weapons sharing partners Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, can exterminate our species and annihilate much of our planet, can we afford not to act now to begin disarmament?
Today we have taken a first step as a nation toward freeing ourselves from the existential threat of gun violence and from patriarchal and white supremacist terror. This we justly celebrate, but let us also unite in solidarity of action to liberate ourselves and humankind from the use of social force.
As I wrote in my post of June 12 2019, Equal Access to Justice for Victims of Gun Violence Act; Those who manufacture, sell, or trade guns must be held responsible for the harm that they do, and we must support this important legislation which ends their immunity from being sued by the victims in whose suffering they are complicit. This industry of death must be pursued to its utter destruction.
As Gabrielle Giffords said, “The gun lobby convinced politicians that an entire industry deserved to operate without fear of ever being held responsible in a courtroom. Today, we stand up and fight again to restore the fundamentally American principle that no industry, including the gun industry, is above the law.”
Surely a least-restrictive policy of gun ownership would say, demonstrate that we can trust you with our lives, that you have earned the right to bear arms through a history of honorable conduct and self-discipline, that you are able to make kill/no kill decisions rationally and with a judgement free of racism, rage, jealousy, vengeance, the need to dominate and control and the desire to subjugate and inflict pain and terror, or other mental illness or impairment, and unclouded by drugs or alcohol, and you are free to openly carry a weapon except in areas otherwise restricted.
Who could pass such a test? Who can be trusted to bear death among us, with de facto powers of summary execution?
Our laws must recognize that anyone with a gun is a bearer of death, and has chosen this role and brings death into all situations which they encounter and all relationships in which they participate. Possession of a gun proves intent to kill. Bringing a gun into a situation means you have upped the ante to life or death in all that you do.
Herein I offer my idea of a useful past; world literature as contexts and sources for constructing a transnational identity as a global family member.
Yes, I once attempted to synthesize all knowledge and historical memory of our global human civilization under this banner as a resource for my high school students, including arts and sciences. I didn’t get as far as did Diderot with his Encyclopédie, all 23 volumes of it. I may have been influenced in this mad Quixotic quest by reading through our family Encyclopædia Britannica several times in my teens and twenties; ah, the folly of youth. I wasn’t trying to learn everything; I was trying to remember everything, the universe whole and entire, as the emergence of ideal forms and potentialities hidden within us.
I wanted to be able to think the thoughts of the Infinite, as much as may be within my understanding. I failed of course, but I’ve had a lot of fun trying.
The great mystery of Being in Time is not that universals connect us, but that our memory and history allow us to conserve our identity while in constant processes of adaptation and change.
We need both conserving forces which buffer us from the shock of the new and as a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation across vast epochs of time without damage to our morphology of human being, meaning, and value, but also we need revolutionary or innovational forces which allow us to meet new threats and capitalize on chaos.
How do we use reading lists as teachers, parents, readers exploring unknowns, ourselves, and the boundaries of our maps of becoming and of human being, meaning, and value?
One ongoing project which I ran for many years using these lists in high school, mainly teaching AP English for university-bound seniors, Forensics or speech and debate, and Socratic Seminars on various subjects through the Gifted and Talented Program, may also be useful for private reading or home study, groups, partners, and getting to know one’s neighbors; I asked students to choose the list of a group with which they identify and then choose partners from a different group, then select two books, one from each other’s list, to read together and give a presentation as partners about each book to the class.
This project, which I called Becoming Human Through Literature, has three goals; to develop a broad personal culture, to discover maps of how to become human, and to operate transcontextually as a global family member.
As an activity for partners in any stage of a relationship, reading books together and discussing them as you progress makes a wonderful way to explore each others values and ideas. You may surprise and delight one another; you may also surprise and reimagine yourself.
For all of these lists I began with immortal classics and added whatever I thought merited inclusion on the basis of quality alone; this is how I found myself teaching a broad and inclusive curriculum. Yes, this means I’ve read all of the books listed, many in their original languages, and with some the major critical works and essays about them; and often taught, discussed, scored student critical essays and written about them for many years. It also means that if your favorite book is not on a list, I may simply not have read it yet.
I am a product of a Great Books of the Western World education, a set of works published by Encyclopædia Britannica based on the great Mortimer J. Adler’s course at the University of Chicago, which I read entirely through during my high school years, a second time while I was at university as an undergraduate, and a third during my graduate studies in literature, Jungian psychology and comparative mythology, history, and philosophy. It is a practice which I recommend to everyone as both a starting point and a lifelong journey. This and Harold Bloom’s list in The Western Canon formed my starting point; as a teenager I began keeping lists of books I liked with notes, and the current version, in constant revision during the last forty years, I call Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2024 Edition.
On these lists are the finest books I’ve discovered over a lifetime of reading, and I hope they will bring joy to your life as they have mine.
The Great Books of the Western World programme; do read them as I did beginning in eighth grade at age fourteen starting with Plato and Nietzsche, using Adler’s Ten Year Plan which took me three or four years during the three times I read it in my teens, twenties, and thirties, using his ten volume synopticon of the Great Books, the Great Ideas Program Series.
I spent around one sixth of my life in this study, in the quiet time for reflection between my many other pursuits, and wouldn’t trade a moment of it. I hope you too may find joy in this.
Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler (Editor)
As written in Wikipedia; “Originally published in 54 volumes, The Great Books of the Western World covers categories including fiction, history, poetry, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, drama, politics, religion, economics, and ethics. Hutchins wrote the first volume, titled The Great Conversation, as an introduction and discourse on liberal education. Adler sponsored the next two volumes, “The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon”, as a way of emphasizing the unity of the set and, by extension, of Western thought in general. A team of indexers spent months compiling references to such topics as “Man’s freedom in relation to the will of God” and “The denial of void or vacuum in favor of a plenum”. They grouped the topics into 102 chapters, for which Adler wrote the 102 introductions. Four colors identify each volume by subject area—Imaginative Literature, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, History and Social Science, and Philosophy and Theology.”
How to Think about the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization
“Comprised of the edited transcripts of the 1950s television series The Great Ideas produced by the Institute for Philosophical Research in San Fransisco, this book introduces laypeople to 52 great ideas of philosophy through dialogue between an interviewer and the philosopher Mortimer Adler.”
The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought, Mortimer J. Adler
“Mortimer Adler sat down at a manual typewriter with a list of authors and a pyramid of books. Beginning with “Angel” and ending with “World,” he set out to write 102 essays featuring the ideas that have collectively defined Western thought for more than twenty-five hundred years. The essays, originally published in the “Syntopicon,” were, and remain, the centerpiece of Encyclolpaedia Britannica’s “Great Books of the Western World.”
Harold Bloom’s magisterial study and reading list The Western Canon has for me some glaring limitations, both as a best books list and as representations of authorized identities and imaginal spaces to grow into and beyond.
First, it excludes everything not central to the Western European Canon as historically construed. This limits its usefulness as a map of becoming human.
Second, it dismisses nearly all works by women and nonwhite authors as “inferior in quality and a waste of time to study”, as he actually had the outrageous bigotry to write, something which by the mid 20th century should have been transparent in intent and long abandoned.
Third, it misunderstands modern American literature from World War One onward, ignores masterpieces of literature and includes irrelevant and ridiculous choices no one reads or needs to know.
Harold Bloom wrote the finest critical work on Shakespeare ever, and is reasonably trustworthy on works including the Greek and Roman classics, British Romantics, and American Transcendentalists; but here his world ends, as do his maps of becoming human.
This is where we must begin, all of us, in the reimagination and transformation of the Canon and of our limitless possibilities of Becoming Human.
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Harold Bloom
It is illuminating regarding the purposes, motives, visions of the future and ideas of national identity of America’s two dyadic political parties, that while the Republicans are afraid the state is coming for their guns, we Democrats must now fear that a Second Trump Regime is coming for our books.
Before they come for our books, our children, our future, our memories, histories, and identities, we must archive and rescue what we can of our civilization before it falls and is lost.
And we must write, speak, teach, and organize democracy as the praxis of its values of Liberty, Equality, Truth, and Justice, bear witness and remember, and perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
We must smash the Wilderness of Mirrors in which we wander, lies and illusions, propaganda and alternate realities of falsification and theft of the soul, and reclaim our stories, both those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh and those we ourselves create.
As I wrote in my post of September 1 2024, Becoming Human Through Literature: Jay’s Revised Modern Canon of Literature, a Resource For Back To School; As the new school year begins in America, and teachers, parents, students, and all those who love to read are gathering ideas for new worlds to explore, I offer here my reading lists curated over forty years, many as an English teacher at Sonoma Valley High School in California.
Of paramount importance is that school begins this year in a context of open hostility to education, a word from the Greek educatus which means to draw forth potential human being, meaning, and value rather than to stuff in facts, and which models and teaches not falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the factory model of education as industrial production and obedience to authority, but its opposite; citizenship in a democracy as the art of asking questions and testing answers. There are historical reasons why our democracy was born in the Enlightenment and the scientific model of reason, and why tyranny is often a product of theocratic subjugation to authority.
If we are to be a free society of equals, wherein citizens are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights, universal education in which nothing is Forbidden as an area of experiment, inquiry, and debate is crucial; democracy requires freedom of information and communication including those of free speech and a free press.
In a time of darkness, book bans and burning, politization of school boards as subversion of democracy and repression of dissent, the forbidding of inquiry in areas which may threaten elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, we must write, speak, teach, and organize democracy as Resistance to fascist tyranny and as revolutionary struggle.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks made for us by others and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
And our job as teachers and parents is to help, model, and guide our children in their ongoing self creation and choices about how to be human together and become citizens, not slaves.
We do not need to post and recite the Ten Commandments, pledge allegiance to gods or masters, or trade value with money which proclaims In God We Trust; because none of this is about our relationship with the Infinite, and everything to do with a state which wants to claim our obedience as the interpreter of divine will, recasting the Divine Right of Kings America was founded to overthrow. Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
We do need to learn as a nation and as a species to cherish our uniqueness and that of others, in solidarity and not division. And if we are to be a democracy, we need an education system founded on the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in literature and history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
To this end I offer here updated versions of the reading lists I used throughout my years of teaching AP and other English classes in high school, as supplementary choice reading lists for all four years and in Forensics which mixed all grade levels together, to stand alongside and apart from the limits of state and school board approval and control, both of curriculum and of our human possibilities.
Literature as a palace of memories wherein we may think the thoughts of others is also a key to empowerment and self actualization, happiness, and stellar achievement not only in our academic careers at university but also to our professional and personal lives; a free space of play in which to discover and create ourselves. If we offer only this to our students, children, and future generations of citizens, a free space of play in the creation of themselves bearing many possible authorized identities without hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, we have done our job as caretakers of the future. Each of us has one problem in common which we must solve in order to grow up and become ourselves; we must reinvent how to become human.
Find your bliss, as Joseph Campbell exhorts us to do; but first something must catch spark and engage our interest, provoke us to question and explore.
This is the role of relevance and inspiration in literature and much else, and why the canon is central to the project of civilization.
The canon represents nothing less than an authorized set of possible identities; this is why it must adapt and change with time.
I organized Modern American Literature as core lists by fiction, poetry, drama, science and other fictions, and also literatures of the American South, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American, Jewish American, and Hawaiian categories.
As Gertrude Stein invented the modern world after our civilization destroyed itself in World War One, my list begins with her. Where possible, superlative critical works accompany the primary sources from authors of world-historical significance.
World Literature is represented by three lists of universal tools for understanding what it means to be human and the literature we have produced, Feminism and Women’s Literature, Fairytales, and Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology, and lists of National Literatures including Australia, New Zealand, & Canada, Austria, Germany, & Switzerland, Africa, Britain & Ireland, the Caribbean, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe, France, Greece, India, Iran, Islamic Peoples, Italy, Japan, Jewish People, Latin America, Netherlands, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, Scandinavia, and Spain.
Here I wish to signpost that nothing on my reading lists is chosen by any criterion other than quality as I so judge; in contrast to official reading lists chosen for reading level and state objectives by grade and also appropriate age level content, because values are always negotiated truths and a ground of struggle, and in America the Texas Board of Education controls through purchasing power and ideological influence the publication of all textbooks nationally and is highly political and moreover falsified by the network of fundamentalist churches it represents. Ever wonder why our history text books make no mention of slavery as a cause of the Civil War?
How do we use reading lists as teachers, parents, readers exploring unknowns, ourselves, and the boundaries of our maps of becoming and of human being, meaning, and value?
One ongoing project which I ran for many years using these lists in high school may also be useful for private reading or home study, groups, partners, and getting to know one’s neighbors; I asked students to choose the list of a group with which they identify and then choose partners from a different group, then select two books, one from each other’s list, to read together and give a presentation as partners about each book to the class.
This project, which I called Becoming Human Through Literature, has three goals; to develop a broad personal culture, to discover maps of how to become human, and to operate transcontextually as a global family member.
As an activity for partners in any stage of a relationship, reading books together and discussing them as you progress makes a wonderful way to explore each others values and ideas. You may surprise and delight one another; you may also surprise and reimagine yourself.
For all of these lists I began with immortal classics and added whatever I thought merited inclusion on the basis of quality alone; this is how I found myself teaching a broad and inclusive curriculum. Yes, this means I’ve read all of the books listed, many in their original languages, and with some the major critical works and essays about them; and often taught, discussed, scored student critical essays and written about them for many years; works thoroughly lived with. It also means that if your favorite book is not on a list, I may simply not have read it yet.
Regarding my own critical biases as consequences of my personal history; I am a product of a Great Books of the Western World education, a set of works published by Encyclopædia Britannica based on the great Mortimer J. Adler’s course at the University of Chicago, which I read entirely through during my high school years, a second time while I was at university as an undergraduate majoring in English and Creative Writing but also in a Nexus program of arts and sciences, and a third during my graduate studies in literature, Jungian psychology and comparative mythology, history, and philosophy. It is a practice which I recommend to everyone as both a starting point and a lifelong journey. This and Harold Bloom’s list in The Western Canon formed my starting point; as a teenager I began keeping lists of books I liked with notes, and the current version, in constant revision during the last forty years, I call Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2024 Edition.
On these lists are the finest books I’ve discovered over a lifetime of reading, and I hope they will bring joy to your life as they have mine.
Why is a diverse and limitless field of reading and study necessary to creating ourselves and our identities as we grow up? How does our education shape our political and social decisions about who we are and how to be human together?
As I wrote in my post of October 4 2021, What is the True Purpose of Public Education in a Democracy?; In The Addams Family Goes to School, wherein the truant officer is dispatched to bring Pugsley and Wednesday, aged 6 and 8 who have never been to school, our introduction to this family of glorious misfits, monsters, and forgotten gods, we are presented with a morality play of revolutionary struggle and a recurring theme of the series in which individuals and society are locked in a titanic battle for ownership of identity, with the stakes being autonomy or theft of the soul.
What is the true purpose of public education?
School is the forge of normality, authorized identities of sex and gender, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, the institutionalization of nationalist values and narratives of exclusivity, valorization of competition, violence, militarism, and the apologetics of capitalist elitism as meritocracy, and of hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness and divisions of race. Here we sort future masters from those who will serve them.
Public education is also our one chance to reimagine and transform our civilization through its members, to produce citizens of a free society of equals who can fulfill the four primary duties of a citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Tyranny cannot withstand exposure, truthtelling, and the witness of history.
Can democracy function as diversity and inclusion, or does throwing all the children in a pen together to sort themselves out always result in assimilation or exclusion, hierarchies of exclusionary division or making everyone the same?
The politization of public education has become national news recently with violent and disruptive confrontations during school board meetings, but this is nothing new. Education is a ground of struggle; who is chosen to succeed and take their place among our elite and who will clean their houses, serve their food, produce the goods and material basis of their survival.
At stake here is nothing less than the definition of our humanity, of freedom and equality, of who will manage systems, process symbols, ideas, and information, create and have the power to change civilization, and who will service them.
Every aspect of education as a social system, textbooks and the canon of literature, how history is taught, tests and success filters for access to power and wealth, class stratification or mobility, patriarchy, racial divisions, language, all of it is volatile and of crucial importance to the project of democracy.
As written by Sherman Dorn in The Washington Post; “Chaos and violence seem to be the themes of the first month of school. To many observers, these may appear to be exceptional, unprecedented times. But there’s a long history of public schools serving as ideological and physical battlegrounds, particularly when it comes to conflicts over citizenship and civil rights.
The violent response this fall by some Americans to public health measures and teaching our history of racism is an echo of violent responses in the past to efforts to broaden the reach and mission of schools. And this history also shows that how government reacts is not foreordained, and that the choice of responses will play a major role in determining the long-term consequences of this violence.
In the 1830s and 1840s, industrialization in Massachusetts triggered civil disorder, including the Boston riots between Protestants and immigrant Catholics. State Secretary of Education Horace Mann thought he had a solution to this strife, arguing for educating all children together in what he called common schools designed to foster a background that all children would share.
But this concept proved fractious from the start.
No sooner did common schools emerge than violence engulfed them. In 1844, Catholic families in Philadelphia sought representation in the schools. Yet many White Protestants saw Catholic immigrants as a threat to a burgeoning national identity, and nowhere was that assault clearer than in their supposed attempts to take over the public schools. So nativists spread false rumors that Catholic immigrants were pushing local public schools to remove Bibles.
These rumors, fear and anger spread and neighbors took to the streets. Multi-day riots in May and July resulted in the burning of multiple Catholic churches and the deaths of more than two dozen people.
Violence at and around schools became even more widespread after the Civil War. As newly elected Black politicians joined with community members to create a system of public schooling in the South, they fused schooling and citizenship. All the Reconstruction-era state constitutions that Congress approved had education embedded as a right. The appearance of public schools for Black children and the promise of access to all aspects of society enraged some White Southerners who feared the erosion of a social order that gave them privilege and power. Those fears translated to direct attacks.
Because of the central role of public education in the new definition of American citizenship, Southern racists targeted schools as part of an explicit counterrevolution to undermine Reconstruction and civil rights. The Ku Klux Klan regularly attacked schools, and being a teacher in a Black community was one of the most vulnerable occupations throughout the late 19th century.
For a brief period in the early 20th century, school violence dissipated, but for the worst of reasons. Across the South, White elites imposed systems of disfranchisement and segregation; systematically and structurally disadvantaged, Black schools became less of a visible threat to White supremacy and reigning power arrangements.
But schooling became the center of widespread community conflict and violence again in the early 1940s. When two Jehovah’s Witness children, Lillian and William Gobitas, refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in their Minersville, Pa., public school classroom, they were expelled. Their case wound through the federal courts, finally reaching the Supreme Court, which decided in favor of the school district.
In the wake of that decision, Jehovah’s Witnesses were assaulted in communities across the country, often with members of the American Legion as leading local vigilantes. Coming to the schools with a mob mentality, Legionnaires and others identified the pledge in public schools as fundamental to American identity and those who refused to say it as national threats. In wartime, the mobs — and many other Americans — viewed dissent as suspicious and unpatriotic.
From Litchfield, Ill., to Kennebunk, Maine, entire towns were wracked by anti-Witness mobs. Children who refused to say the pledge for any number of reasons faced expulsion and threats of incarceration, as did their parents for encouraging juvenile delinquency.
In part shamed by the violence following their earlier decision, the majority of the court reversed itself three years later. As Justice Robert Jackson explained in his majority decision, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
Despite this shift and the protection of students’ right to dissent, public schools remained figurative and literal battlegrounds in the fight over American identity and rights.
In the fall of 1957, White mobs in Little Rock, Ark., turned out in protest of the nine Black students desegregating Central High School. As Melba Pattillo Beals described in her memoir, on the first day of school her classmate Elizabeth Eckford was sandwiched between Arkansas National Guard members refusing to let her enter the school and “a huge crowd of white people screeching at her back … [having] closed in like diving vultures … [who] shouted, stomped, and whistled as though her awful predicament were a triumph for them.” The mobs dispersed only after President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to enforce federal court orders to desegregate.
In Nashville the same month, a violent opponent of desegregation bombed Hattie Cotton Elementary School. No one was hurt in the late-night bombing, but as historian Sonya Ramsey explained, the single Black student in the school stopped attending.
In the 1970s, White mobs attacked buses carrying Black students as they arrived at South Boston High School.
Across American history, schools have been vulnerable to periodic violence that surrounds debates about citizenship and equal rights in education, including the role of schools in fostering shared childhood experiences, in building citizenship and equal education regardless of race, and in allowing principled dissent from rituals.
The strife this year fits into that broader pattern. To the parents and politicians angry or confused about critical race theory, like the parents and politicians angry or confused about mask mandates and health policies, the public schools are a key front in a battle for their rights and standing as citizens.
Debate over the role and purposes of public schools is a healthy sign of a functioning democracy. But violence around schooling is fundamentally at odds with the give-and-take of democratic decision-making. And it demands a strong response from authorities.
In 1943, the Supreme Court reversed the decision that had triggered mob violence against Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1957, Eisenhower responded to the resistance to desegregation in Arkansas by dispatching federal troops.
Yet when the government has failed to confront violence, the consequences have been severe. In 1833, abolitionist Prudence Crandall opened her Canterbury, Conn., boarding school to Sarah Harris and other Black girls and women. Public officials responded by making it illegal for her to admit students from out of state without town permission, prosecuted her and stood by while a mob destroyed much of her school in 1834. Crandall moved to Illinois the next year, costing Connecticut a dedicated educational leader and beginning two centuries of a long troubled history of school segregation in New England.
The history of education teaches us that violence surrounding democratic schooling is part of a recurring pattern and that we have a choice to passively accept or assertively confront violent impulses.”
As I wrote in my post of March 22 2020, The Subversion of our Education System and Democracy; The suspension of our national standardized testing has revealed a failure of our education system; the commodification and privatization of learning and the modeling of our schools on factory production has produced a generation of Americans who can follow orders, perform routine tasks, and parrot facts, but whose abilities to create, invent, reason, and analyze and interpret facts have been crippled. This is intentional.
Educatus, the Greek word origin of education, means to bring out rather than to stuff facts in. It is an idea bound together with that of citizens as co-owners of their own government in a democracy, and equally responsible for one another and for the stewardship of its four pillars of freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
Our civilization is founded and premised on its ability to question itself; this capacity for adaptation and transformation sets democracy apart from the tyrannies of priest-kings which had come before. From our origin in the Forum of Athens, the dialectics of Socratic method has been the forge of our identity as an anti-hierarchical culture, a free society of equals in which the greatest duty of a citizen is to question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, to incite, provoke, and disturb, and we must return this process to its central role in education if liberty is to survive and flourish in this age of state terror and control.
We have permitted the subversion of our education system and democracy by those who would enslave us. And we must take it back.
As I wrote in my post of July 8 2021, Truth, Lies, and History as a Ground of Struggle; the Case of Critical Race Theory Repression; We are confronted today with the realization of a nightmare and prophetic vision written by George Orwell in 1984, the classic novel of unequal power and the authoritarian nature of government which rendered in the chiaroscuro of a newsreel depicting the liberation of concentration camps a fictional interrogation of totalitarianism as a companion volume to Hannah Arendt’s nonfictional The Origins of Totalitarianism.
The remnants of the Fourth Reich and the organizations of white supremacist treason and terror within our government who remain loyal to Trump’s vision of a white ethnostate want the government to control what is taught as history in our schools, which would be the death knell of freedom and equality in America, and are enacting a furious assault on our values and on public education as a guarantor of an informed electorate in order to render meaningless the idea of citizenship, the co-ownership of the state by its members, in parallel with vote suppression legislation.
As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Kurdistan; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.
Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming its most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.
As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This?; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As I wrote in my post of June 19 2020, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?
Whose story is this? This question must be the beginning of a new pedagogy of education in history, and remain central to the project of its study. True education in the discipline of history asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, and the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.”
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr., Mary Doria Russell (Introduction)
From his life as a seed of change, may thousands Arise and seize power from those who would enslave, commodify, and dehumanize us as the raw material of their power.
All Resistance is War to the Knife; those who respect no limits and no laws may hide behind none.
Luigi Mangione has assassinated an apex predator of an unjust system of oppression, and opened the floodgates of a vast and primal rage among the underclasses of our society which may one day bring a reimagination and transformation to our bizarre and loathsome private healthcare system which is designed to enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. For this act of exposure and challenge of authority, of Resistance, seizure of power, and bringing a Reckoning, I here sing his praise.
Let his valor and glorious refusal to submit and die quietly in the enormity of his grief and pain be celebrated and remembered, but let us also give reply with our solidarity of action, for free universal healthcare is a precondition of the Right to Life and guaranteed by our Bill of Rights. What does it mean to be human, if not to be each other’s keepers?
Go Not Quietly.
The Allopathic Complex and Its Consequences
Luigi Mangione’s last words
LM
Dec 09, 2024
The second amendment means I am my own chief executive and commander in chief of my own military. I authorize my own act of self-defense in response to a hostile entity making war on me and my family.
Nelson Mandela says no form of viooence can be excused. Camus says it’s all the same, whether you live or die or have a cup of coffee. MLK says violence never brings permanent peace. Gandhi says that non-violence is the mightiest power available to mankind.
That’s who they tell you are heroes. That’s who our revolutionaries are.
Yet is that not capitalistic? Non-violence keeps the system working at full speed ahead.
What did it get us. Look in the mirror.
They want us to be non-violent, so that they can grow fat off the blood they take from us.
The only way out is through. Not all of us will make it. Each of us is our own chief executive. You have to decide what you will tolerate.
In Gladiator 1 Maximus cuts into the military tattoo that identifies him as part of the roman legion. His friend asks “Is that the sign of your god?” As Maximus carves deeper into his own flesh, as his own blood drips down his skin, Maximus smiles and nods yes. The tattoo represents the emperor, who is god. The god emperor has made himself part of Maximus’s own flesh. The only way to destroy the emperor is to destroy himself. Maximus smiles through the pain because he knows it is worth it.
These might be my last words. I don’t know when they will come for me. I will resist them at any cost. That’s why I smile through the pain.
They diagnosed my mother with severe neuropathy when she was forty-one years old. She said it started ten years before that with burning sensations in her feet and occasional sharp stabbing pains. At first the pain would last a few moments, then fade to tingling, then numbness, then fade to nothing a few days later.
The first time the pain came she ignored it. Then it came a couple times a year and she ignored it. Then every couple months. Then a couple times a month. Then a couple times a week. At that point by the time the tingling faded to numbness, the pain would start, and the discomfort was constant. At that point even going from the couch to the kitchen to make her own lunch became a major endeavor
She started with ibuprofen, until the stomach aches and acid reflux made her switch to acetaminophen. Then the headaches and barely sleeping made her switch back to ibuprofen.
The first doctor said it was psychosomatic. Nothing was wrong. She needed to relax, destress, sleep more.
The second doctor said it was a compressed nerve in her spine. She needed back surgery. It would cost $180,000. Recovery would be six months minimum before walking again. Twelve months for full potential recovery, and she would never lift more than ten pounds of weight again.
The third doctor performed a Nerve Conduction Study, Electromyography, MRI, and blood tests. Each test cost $800 to $1200. She hit the $6000 deductible of her UnitedHealthcare plan in October. Then the doctor went on vacation, and my mother wasn’t able to resume tests until January when her deductible reset.
The tests showed severe neuropathy. The $180,000 surgery would have had no effect.
They prescribed opioids for the pain. At first the pain relief was worth the price of constant mental fog and constipation. She didn’t tell me about that until later. All I remember is we took a trip for the first time in years, when she drove me to Monterey to go to the aquarium. I saw an otter in real life, swimming on its back. We left at 7am and listened to Green Day on the four-hour car ride. Over time, the opioids stopped working. They made her MORE sensitive to pain, and she felt withdrawal symptoms after just two or three hours.
Then gabapentin. By now the pain was so bad she couldn’t exercise, which compounded the weight gain from the slowed metabolic rate and hormonal shifts. And it barely helped the pain, and made her so fatigued she would go an entire day without getting out of bed.
Then Corticosteroids. Which didn’t even work.
The pain was so bad I would hear my mother wake up in the night screaming in pain. I would run into her room, asking if she’s OK. Eventually I stopped getting up. She’d yell out anguished shrieks of wordless pain or the word “fuck” stretched and distended to its limits. I’d turn over and go back to sleep.
All of this while they bled us dry with follow-up appointment after follow-up appointment, specialist consultations, and more imagine scans. Each appointment was promised to be fully covered, until the insurance claims were delayed and denied. Allopathic medicine did nothing to help my mother’s suffering. Yet it is the foundation of our entire society.
My mother told me that on a good day the nerve pain was like her legs were immersed in ice water. On a bad day it felt like her legs were clamped in a machine shop vice, screwed down to where the cranks stopped turning, then crushed further until her ankle bones sprintered and cracked to accommodate the tightening clamp. She had more bad days than good.
My mother crawled to the bathroom on her hands and knees. I slept in the living room to create more distance from her cries in the night. I still woke up, and still went back to sleep.
Back then I thought there was nothing I could do.
The high copays made consistent treatment impossible. New treatments were denied as “not medically necessary.” Old treatments didn’t work, and still put us out for thousands of dollars.
UnitedHealthcare limited specialist consultations to twice a year.
Then they refused to cover advanced imaging, which the specialists required for an appointment.
Prior authorizations took weeks, then months.
UnitedHealthcare constantly changed their claim filing procedure. They said my mother’s doctor needed to fax his notes. Then UnitedHealthcare said they did not save faxed patient correspondence, and required a hardcopy of the doctor’s typed notes to be mailed. Then they said they never received the notes. They were unable to approve the claim until they had received and filed the notes.
They promised coverage, and broke their word to my mother.
With every delay, my anger surged. With every denial, I wanted to throw the doctor through the glass wall of their hospital waiting room.
But it wasn’t them. It wasn’t the doctors, the receptionists, administrators, pharmacists, imaging technicians, or anyone we ever met. It was UnitedHealthcare.
People are dying. Evil has become institutionalized. Corporations make billions of dollars off the pain, suffering, death, and anguished cries in the night of millions of Americans.
We entered into an agreement for healthcare with a legally binding contract that promised care commensurate with our insurance payments and medical needs. Then UnitedHealthcare changes the rules to suit their own profits. They think they make the rules, and think that because it’s legal that no one can punish them.
They think there’s no one out there who will stop them.
Now my own chronic back pain wakes me in the night, screaming in pain. I sought out another type of healing that showed me the real antidote to what ails us.
I bide my time, saving the last of my strength to strike my final blows. All extractors must be forced to swallow the bitter pain they deal out to millions.
As our own chief executives, it’s our obligation to make our own lives better. First and foremost, we must seek to improve our own circumstances and defend ourselves. As we do so, our actions have ripple effects that can improve the lives of others.
Rules exist between two individuals, in a network that covers the entire earth. Some of these rules are written down. Some of these rules emerge from natural respect between two individuals. Some of these rules are defined in physical laws, like the properties of gravity, magnetism or the potential energy stored in the chemical bonds of potassium nitrate.
No single document better encapsulates the belief that all people are equal in fundamental worth and moral status and the frameworks for fostering collective well-being than the US constitution.
Writing a rule down makes it into a law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. Law means nothing. What does matter is following the guidance of our own logic and what we learn from those before us to maximize our own well-being, which will then maximize the well-being of our loved ones and community.
That’s where UnitedHealthcare went wrong. They violated their contract with my mother, with me, and tens of millions of other Americans. This threat to my own health, my family’s health, and the health of our country’s people requires me to respond with an act of war.
END
Brian Thompson’s killing inspired rage – against the healthcare industry
Thousands of Americans go bankrupt, lose their homes or die every year due to medical insurer practices
Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze. Hers is the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves.
As with the figure of the Wolfman and other monsters which embody the hostile and threatening aspects of the forces of nature, the figure of Medusa tells us how we relate to our natural selves and to nature, and to the essential wildness and chaos of both.
We may also regard them as dyadic idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty, animus and anima archetypes in Jungian terms, though all mythic figures can be assigned positional and qualitative values in this way, and if you are a primary or native Romance language speaker you will construct meaning so that the whole material universe and everything in it is either masculine or feminine, though these things are truly ambiguous, conflicted, relative, and shifting as protean transformations of meaning, value, and identity which change with our history.
Identity and its dimensions as identities of sex and gender are prochronisms, a history in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation over time and through our interdependence with others, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
What is most useful to me in the figure of Medusa is what we can learn from her myth about the purpose of Patriarchy as control of nature, a theme which Camille Paglia has fully explored in her foundational work Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, the role of Medusa as tragic heroine and avenger of a violated natural wildness typifies the conflicts inherent within our society as systemic patriarchy, misogyny, and control.
It can also tell us why we burn down rainforests to plant palm oil crops, poison ourselves with fossil fuels, and other travesties of capitalist plunder and colonial exploitation, why our oceans are dying, and why the extinction of humankind may be inevitable.
We are addicted to power, and cannot bear that which is beyond our absolute control. Here is the origin of our dominion and subjugation of nature and of one another; fear. Fear of wildness, chaos, disorder, unpredictability, and loss of control; fear of standing naked before the endless chasms of night and the emptiness of the infinite cosmos without our armor of lies and illusions conferred by submission to authority, fear of embracing our darkness and our inchoate passions which threaten to sublime and enrapture, to defile and exalt us beyond our limits and reveal to us our true selves and truths written in our flesh.
This is why seizures of power and revolutionary struggle for ownership of identity and autonomy as a process of becoming human and free self-created beings as emergence from authorized identities, including those of sex and gender, is primary in terms of developmental stages of growth and history for both persons and whole societies.
It is also why the struggles for liberty and equality and against patriarchy and racism and for ecological sustainability and against capitalism and extinction are parallel and interdependent; for their origins are in the same disparity and disconnectedness of humankind from nature, and in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force.
As I wrote in my post of December 10 2019 Human Rights Day
Today we mark Human Rights Day with the beginning of a series of actions throughout the world in hope of making real for all peoples this most precious and tenuous gift of our civilization.
As described on the United Nations website; ”Human Rights Day is observed every year on 10 December — the day the United Nations General Assembly adopted, in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR): a milestone document proclaiming the inalienable rights which everyone is inherently entitled to as a human being regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
Our world is filled with injustices and a plethora of windmills that might be giants at which one may tilt; a host of genocides and state terrors, pervasive slavery, identity driven divisions of race, faith, language, and nationality, and those attendant upon the economics and class ravages of plutocracy and environmental plunder and extinction.
Upon reflection I return to the one dehumanization and power asymmetry which has been with us since the dawn of agriculture and city-states ruled by priest-kings and the enforcers who drive the slaves in the fields; patriarchy and its key factor, the silencing of women. Remove this one keystone and the whole poisonous structure which shapes us into monsters and slaves begins to fall.
The dynamic which divides half of humanity against the other half is brilliantly described in a short video by the eminent classical scholar Mary Beard; I was captivated by her use of the myth of Medusa as a controlling metaphor of maladaptive male-female relationships and the legacy of disfigured masculinity.
Medusa herself is a compelling archetype; goddess and monster, like the beautiful and terrible jellyfish which is among her images and forms, and whose power appropriates the toxicity of the male gaze, her myth describes the history of the emergence of the Patriarchy and its seizure of power over our civilization, and the consequences of its primary values inversion which assigns the yin or death force to the female half of the human dyad.
Of all the many inequalities we must redress to liberate ourselves, among those most crucial to our identity and our freedom are the silencing of women, and the denial of the feminine unconscious in men, and their transmutation into figures not of birth and life but of death, with all its attendant witch hunts in their many forms.
Let us revoice and revision our ideals and relationships of masculinity and femininity as a fulcrum of identity, and change the balance of power in the world.
As written by Cody Delistraty in an article entitled What If We’ve Been Misunderstanding Monsters? Fictional evil creatures might be more nuanced—and have more to teach us—than has long seemed; “Medusa is pure wickedness: an angry misandrist with venomous snakes for hair and the ability to turn a man to stone with only a look. That is, at least, how she is depicted in Thomas Bulfinch’s influential nineteenth-century text, Mythology. So too in Edith Hamilton’s updated Mythology, from 1942, and, as such, in much of contemporary popular culture.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, published around 8 CE, however, Medusa had a backstory that’s often elided in modern retellings. She was attractive and innocent when Poseidon (Neptune) lured her into Athena’s (Minerva’s) temple and raped her. When Athena found out, she turned Medusa’s hair into snakes, erasing her beauty.
Though Freud posited that Medusa’s hair represented sexual repression, a symbol of castrated genitalia and the madness to which that might lead a person, the poet Ann Stanford, in her “Women of Perseus,” unpacks the more nuanced psychological effects of Medusa’s rape and the complications it adds to understanding her. Commenting on Stanford’s work, the poet and scholar Alicia Ostriker notes in her article “The Thieves of Language” that “the trauma ‘imprisons’ Medusa in a self-dividing anger and a will to revenge that she can never escape, though she yearns to.”
Consumed by this vengeful desire, Medusa might be not so much a monster as a tragic figure. Given the way her story as a “monster” has been told over the last few centuries, however, you’d be hard-pressed to know it.
The Light Side of the Force or the Dark Side. Mount Olympus or Hades. The idea is that though we must choose a direction, it’s a straight and clear path.
When depicted as wholly and unchangeably evil, the classic monsters of literature and myth help make sense of a complex world, often with Biblical clarity and simplicity. The existence of pure evil implies the existence of pure good. Heaven or Hell. The Light Side of the Force or the Dark Side. Mount Olympus or Hades. The idea is that though we must choose a direction, it’s a straight and clear path.
Until the Enlightenment, this one-sided view of monsters was rampant. The word “monster” is likely derived from the Latin “monere,” which means “to warn,” writes the scholar Stephen Fox in Rutgers University’s The Scarlet Review—as in a warning from God that to deviate a little from norms is to deviate entirely into the realm of evil. The notion of total evil is an inherently Old Testament one: you either adhere wholly to the commandments of God and make the correct sacrifices and go to Heaven; or you do not, and you go to Hell.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—an overtly Biblical epic that seemingly takes place in the Middle Ages—made little room for nuance between good and evil. Orcs and Trolls and Sauron—these are absolute monsters with no redeeming values. “Tolkien was very clear about his monsters being intended as embodiments of pure malice and corruption, with no effort made to show any humanizing or empathetic aspects to them,” writes Fox.
The trap is to think of all literary and mythical monsters in these Biblical terms. Though God and Tolkien may have had certain ideas about evil… well, #NotAllMonsters. To look at even the most classic of fictional monsters is to see complications to this reductive version of evil. Grendel, for instance, the villain of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, might seem a clear-cut brute. He’s depicted as a giant and is said to be a descendent of Cain, from the Book of Genesis, adding to his essential evilness.
But upon a closer read one sees that the ostensible hero and Grendel have much in common. Both are characterized throughout the poem as having the “strength of 30 men in their arms,” as noted by the Old English literary scholar Andy Orchard in his book Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript.
When Beowulf fights, he’s depicted as doing so in a “distinctly inhuman way,” Fox writes, matching the style of Grendel. Even Grendel’s home, which seems to be in a bog or swamp of some kind, forces Beowulf to come down to the monster’s level to battle with him. A fair inference is that Beowulf is not so different from Grendel; they are literally on the same level. Apparent good and apparent evil often mix and meld, complicating their boundaries.
Post-Enlightenment, literary monsters began largely to reflect social deviance. Intrinsic evil as a driving idea began to fall away. On the face of it, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is about the atrocity of Victor Frankenstein’s creation—no man has any business doing God’s work of creation. But to go deeper is to see that the central conflict of Frankenstein is not so much the relationship between creator and monster as it is the relationship between family and society. When Frankenstein’s mother is on her deathbed, she tells him that his fiancée, Elizabeth, “must supply my place,” mixing the role of mother and lover in Frankenstein’s mind. (To mix even further: his mother dies of the scarlet fever that Elizabeth had passed to her.) But Frankenstein puts off marrying Elizabeth, even at his father’s insistence. Instead of marrying and having a baby with her, as society would deem appropriate, Frankenstein “collected the instruments of life around [him] that [he] might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at [his] feet,” writes Shelley.
By choosing to forego his social responsibilities to marry and procreate, he inflicts “a wound upon the social body,” as Shelley writes. It’s his social choices that are deemed monstrous. Frankenstein’s actual monster becomes a symbol for the creator’s deviance. Only upon realizing that he has departed too far from social norms does Frankenstein decide that his creature must die. His last words: “[seek] happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition.” On his own deathbed, Frankenstein has finally learned his lesson: don’t mess with social norms.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula ends with the vampire’s execution, the monster’s death similarly restoring health to the community, as it represents the achievement of social cohesion following the threat of an outsider. Depicted as sexually suspect, Dracula, like Frankenstein and his monster, is a loner who foregoes his social duties. “Horror novels are often structured around conflict between the safety of a middle-class family home and queer-coded loners who seek its disruption,” writes the literary scholar Evan Hayles Gledhill in “Deviant Subjectivities: Monstrosity and Kinship in the Gothic Imagination.” “The ability to live as one chooses outside the constraints of the traditional pater familias is consistently presented as either a corruption… or a moral failing.”
Because norms have shifted significantly through recent history, many of the monsters of the past now seem like jokes. Bela Lugosi’s 1931 film performance as Dracula, for example, is no longer frightening to contemporary audiences because his overt queerness has been coopted as camp; his operatic black cape has become a kind of cultural gag. His social threat has been mostly neutered—and with it his capacity to frighten.
Today’s most ubiquitous monsters match contemporary moral panics. With Slender Man, a monster that originated as an online meme, his scariness is based on his supposed realness. Reified by the Internet’s echo chamber, young, very-online people post realistic-but-Photoshopped images of him and share supposed stories of encounters. When two teenagers stabbed a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin in 2014, later telling authorities they were told to do so by Slender Man, the fictional became, for a moment, too real—adding to Slender Man’s perceived reality and thus his ability to scare.
Similarly, last year’s The Invisible Man movie remake with Elisabeth Moss turned the late-nineteenth century literary monster into a domestically abusive tech billionaire, playing in part on the idea that near-unlimited money might turn a man evil. As a critique of billionaire culture and a particular flavor of masculinity, this kind of monster legitimately scares because a version of it exists.
How might we view these contemporary monsters in a hundred years?
To play (literal) devil’s advocate, perhaps in an increasingly virtual world, Slender Man will seem tame, even funny, like Dracula does now. Perhaps the current version of the Invisible Man will be viewed as a victim of capitalism, ambition culture, and toxic masculinity. One might still wonder whether Medusa is an incorrigibly wicked monster. But if deep down she’s also an abused and traumatized person desperately trying to take matters into her own hands, is she even really a monster at all?”
As written by Lorna Marie Kirkby in her thesis The Rape of Medusa: Feminist Revision of Medusa in Stanford and DuPlessis; “Medusa, the snake-haired, stony-gazed Gorgon first appeared in her monstrous guise in Greek mythology. In the Greek myth Medusa was transformed into the petrifying monster that we know today by the goddess Athena as a punishment for ‘coupling’ with Poseidon in her temple. She has since been used in the modern world as a means for silencing women through the stigmatisation of female sexuality in art, psychology (particularly Freudian) and as a means for controlling and creating negative images of women that are to be avoided under the conditions of the modern patriarchal society. In reaction to misogynistic appropriations of the myth, many feminists have turned to Medusa in acts of revisionist mythmaking to transform Medusa into a source of power as an icon of the female gaze, sexuality, and power. The two poems that I have chosen for this essay, both entitled Medusa, constitute particularly unique revisions of the Medusa myth by focusing not on aspects of the Greek myth, but on Ovid’s retelling of the Medusa story in his Metamorphoses where Medusa is not punished for having sexual relations with the God Poseidon, but for being the victim of a rape by the sea God. Whereas most appropriations, misogynist and feminist, focus primarily on the result of Medusa’s transformation – the petrifying gaze and the serpent-hair – Medusa by Ann Stanford, published in 1970, and Medusa by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, published in 1980, address the rape that triggered the transformation, bringing the Medusa myth into modern feminist discourses on rape and the representation of rape in literature. In this essay I am going to assess Stanford and DuPlessis’ revisions of the Medusa myth in terms of how the two poems fit into the tradition of feminist revisionist mythmaking. In order to do so I will first consider the relationship between mythology, the oppression of women and how revising Ovid’s Medusa
myth has made it possible for Stanford and DuPlessis to subvert existing, patriarchal representations of both rape and women. I will then move on to explore in more detail the issues involved with representing rape in literature and the role of trauma in the two poems; and finally I will analyse in more detail the questions of voice that are necessarily brought tothe surface in feminist revisionist literature, and how these questions are expressed through the tropes of silence, the female gaze and female creativity in Stanford and DuPlessis’ poems.
The question of violence against women became a key part of feminist agendas first in the late1960s with multiple campaigns to change the way in which society perceives rape and its victims. The anti-rape movement of second wave feminism came about in the late 1960s and early 70s and addressed both legal and political aspects of rape, including laws and the difficulties in prosecuting rapists, and attitudes such as victim- -hatred as a response to rape.
modern understandings of rape and sexual violence, is against the tradition of viewing rape from a patriarchal perspective which either normalises rape, or punishes the victim. This perspective is particularly clear in mythology, where sexual assault is often glossed over, seen as fate at the hands of the Gods
or seen as the crime of the victim: Ovid’ s Medusa myth is no exception. The inscription of rape as part of the classic mythological narrative acts to minimize the element of human suffering in the victim of sexual assault and it is this gap in the mythological narrative that has allowed feminist revisionist mythmakers to readdress and change popular perceptions of rape by rewriting the original myths from a feminine perspective. Moniza Alvi explains her motivation for choosing the Europa myth in her work as an approach to writing about rape:
“I hoped that using the myth would be a helpful universalising strategy, representing rape emblematically. The poem could then be dream-like and surreal, with a focus on feelings, rather than morality, and a ‘whose fault was it?’ scenario, which often leads to the woman being blamed.” (Alvi in Gunne and Thompson,2010: xii) Thus using mythology provides feminist revisionists not only the opportunity to challenge the overriding male viewpoint from which myths are written, but also to convey messages that take on a universal effect from the mythological status of the original. Alicia Ostriker explains the effect that feminist writers can gain from revisionist mythmaking as originating from the ‘double power’ of literature that bears a mythic status:
“It exists or appears to exist objectively, in the public sphere, and consequently confers on the writer the sort of authority unavailable to someone who writes ‘merely’ of the private sel. Myth belongs to ‘high’ culture and is handed ‘down’ through the ages by religious, literary, and educational authority. At the same time, myth is quintessentially intimate material, the stuff of dream life, forbidden desire, inexplicable motivation everything in the psyche that to rational consciousness is unreal, crazed, or abominable” (Ostriker, 1982: 72)
From this, therefore, we can see why feminists have chosen to use myths to re-evaluate traditional perceptions of women. Feminine voices are few and far between in the classical narratives that have formed the foundations of our literary traditions, so by using myths women writers have been able to give the feminine voice an element of authority that is equated, as Alvi used The Rape of Europa, where Europa is raped by Zeus in the guise of a Bull in her poem
Europa and the Bull that forms the centrepiece of her collection
Europa. (Alvi, 2008: 24-38) Ostriker has explained, with so-called ‘high culture’, putting them on an even playing field with the male voices that have oppressed and silenced them for so long. Once on an even playing field, these women writers are in prime position to be able to question, destabilise and ultimately change the traditional narratives that have been so instrumental in defining and silencing women. Ann Stanford and Rachel Blau DuPlessis fit into this tradition of women revisionist writers and have used the mythological figure of Medusa as a vehicle for the previously oppressed feminine voice. Ovid’s description of Medusa’s rape at the hands of Poseidon is extremely brief, and played out over the course of just two lines of his Metamorphoses:
“They say that Neptune, Lord of the sea, Violated her in a temple of Minerva.” (Ovid,2011: 76)
In a narrative where the action is dominated by the acts of Gods (Poseidon’s rape and Athena’s punishment), the assault upon Medusa and her subsequent punishment despite being a victim is effectively accepted as the result of external, divine forces; her fate as a mortal woman. The brevity of Ovid’s description of the rape eliminates Medusa’s own perspective of the event and
any thoughts, feelings, or trauma that may arise as a result of the assault. The question of Medusa’s punishment at the hands of Athena is also key to feminist readings of Ovid’s work, for how can a punishment asigned by a woman represent the male oppression of the rape victim? Joplin explains:
“[Athene] is no real female but sprang, motherless, from her father’s head, as enfleshed fantasy. (…) Athene is like the murderous angel in Virginia Woolf’s house, a male fantasy of what a woman ought to be, who strangles the real woman writer’s voice.” (Joplin in Higgins and Silver, 2013: 51) So Athena and the punishment she confers upon Medusa is ultimately an extension of the power of the patriarchy.
The unanswered question of Medusa’s perspective is then further discouraged through her transformation into a monstrous creature to be feared. This has meant that Medusa’s own suffering has been largely ignored until the recent surge of feminist revisionism since the late 1960s.
In their poems both Stanford and DuPlessis give first person accounts of Medusa’s suffering and the lasting trauma left by sexual violence, thus providing the perspective that had been missing from the Medusa myth, rewriting it to include and indeed promote the female voice. At the same time they have reduced the role of the Gods by attributing the transformation of their Medusas not to fate or to divine forces, but to the trauma of the rape, so that the petrification and the sprouting of snakes for hair is something intimate and personal that comes from Medusa herself. The transformation of Stanford’s Medusa seems more like a metaphor for the psychological change that takes place after experiencing rape: “My hair coiled in fury; my mind held hate
alone./ I thought of revenge, began to live on it./ My hair turned to serpents, my eyes saw the world in stone.” (Stanford, 2001: 114). Removing the mythical powers of the Gods from Medusa’s transformation thus emphasises the personal, human suffering that is missing from Ovid’s telling of the myth and
reduces Poseidon’s assault to a human act of violence which brings the rape into the realms of the political and the social. Stanford’s description of Poseidon also belittles the God, making him seem repulsive “the old man” (Ibid.), “the stinking breath, the sweaty weight” (Ibid.: 115) – the effect of which is that Stanford is able to criticise rape as a form of oppression over women, as in real life, rather than allowing the sexual assault to remain as the tragic fate of a mythological figure. DuPlessis takes a slightly different approach, yet her poem
Medusa, like Stanford’s also leaves the realm of the mythic to constitute a wider criticism of the normalised violence and oppression against women. She achieves this through an amalgamation first of the three Graeae into one mother figure, and secondly of her rapist and her killer into one masculine, oppressive force. The mother figure, though unnamed, is identified as the three Graeae in the fifth section “Stole/ they/ eye of my mother,/ stole they teeth,/ mother.” (DuPlessis, 1980: 39) Referencing multiple victims of
male oppression in the poem allows DuPlessis’ critique to transcend the individual suffering of Medusa and to work as a demonstration of women’s
suffering at the hands of men. This is also highlighted later in the fifth section where the reader is reminded of another mythological rape victim, Philomela
: “she weave a woven/ to webble The Graeae were three powerful, mystical hags, (Deino, Enyo and Pemphredo) who shared one eye and one tooth between them. In his quest for the head of Medusa Perseus steals their single eye (and in some versions the tooth too), holding it to ransom for information on where to find the magical objects that will help him.
Philomela was raped by King Tereus of Thrace, who cut out her tongue and imprisoned her to prevent her from telling anybody about the assault. Philomela then wove her story into a tapestry to send to her sister Procne Tereus’ wife
who then killed her son by Tereus and served him as a meal to Tereus. Fleeing from the angered Tereus, Procne and Philomela prayed to the Gods to be turned to birds. Their wishes were granted with Procne transformed into a Swallow, and Philomela into a Nightingale, the female of which is naturally mute. For further critical analysis of the myth, see Geoffrey Hartman’s The Voice of the Shuttle (Hartman, 1969) and Joplin’s feminist response to Hartman, The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours (Joplin in Higgins and Silver, 2013). “the wobble words.”, “the shuttle eye”, “her loopy threads” (Ibid.). The male perpetrators of violence or oppression are never mentioned by name or specifically as Gods or heroes, in fact aside from ‘he’ or ‘they’, the only other word used to refer to the male oppressor is ‘Man’: “Everywhere/ I see/ inside me/ Man poised” (DuPlessis, 1980: 36). Her use of capitalisation being scant, the fact that DuPlessis has chosen to use a capital letter for ‘Man’ seems to institutionalise the male sex and makes it clear that the Medusa of the poem is not talking about just one man, nor even Poseidon and Perseus together, but rather the ever-present patriarchy as a whole. The ominous presence of the ‘poised’ patriarchy, ready to exert oppression over women appears again in the following stanza “on my eye/ a knife/ ceaselessly/ on a whetstone.” (Ibid.)
Here, whilst symbolically recalling Medusa’s rape, DuPlessis also refers to
the continued and constant oppression of women through violence. Using the Medusa myth has therefore made it possible for Stanford and DuPlessis to simultaneously present an intimate view of the psychological repercussions of rape and auniversal indictment of violence and oppression of women as a historical notion. There is however the continued question of representing rape in poetry.
I reference again Avi’s explanation of the concerns she faced when writing
Europa and the Bull:“I envisaged the narrative in a series of
short sections, each presenting a bright image, each one hitting home, while the beauty of setting and the magical elements, would, I hoped, ensure that the tale was not too start. In the rape scene, I was able to employ the ambiguous image of the plunging bull in which much could be left to the readers’ imagination. I considered this approach preferable to a graphic animal/ human rape depiction which would sensationalize the tale and might turn off reader as well as writer.” (Alvi in Gunne and Thompson, 2010: xii) The problem of portraying rape with vivid and violent images in a form known for aesthetics is a problem faced by all who choose to use sexual violence in their work. In our comparison between Stanford and DuPlessis’ poems we can see two different approaches to the representation of rape. DuPlessis uses a similar technique to that of Alvi, by shrouding the violence in a kind of secrecy and metaphor where the word ‘rape’ is never used, nor the name of the perpetrator, nor is there a graphic depiction of the sexual assault or the murder. Instead the physical acts are concealed behind a complex system of language filled with symbolism
and fragmented by the protagonist’s trauma that prevents a direct retelling of the assault as such.
The fragmentary nature and emphasis on sounds in DuPlessis’ language suggests a psychological regression to a purer language such as that of a child, yet the infantile perspective simultaneously allows DuPlessis to incorporate numerous metaphors and symbols for violence.
DuPessis’ use of metaphor for violence – “a knife/ ceaselessly/ on a whetstone” (DuPlessis,1980: 36), “forcing the branch/ ripping the tree” (Ibid.: 37), “Broke the moon box”, (Ibid.: 39) – has the same effect as Alvi’s plunging bull, by avoiding the disturbing direct description of rape and violence, yet allowing images to build up in the reader’s mind through aesthetic and poetic language. Myth and metaphor allows DuPlessis to address what has largely remained a taboo or stigmatised subject matter using existing, accepted forms of rape narrative, yet doing so through a first person narrative something that Alvi avoided in her poetry in order to prevent her poetry from straying into the ‘survivor discourse’ that is prevalent in rape narratives. DuPlessis’ avoidance of direct engagement with violent acts could be an expression of the trauma undergone by the victim who is not yet prepared for the cathartic act of ‘telling’ the rape, yet by the end of the poem, DuPlessis expresses an empowerment through creativity as the head of Medusa changes from its identification as a victim to become an icon for female creativity.
Stanford’s engagement with the telling of trauma is much more direct. Unlike DuPlessis and Alvi, Stanford’s first person account of Medusa’s rape is direct, plain-spoken and faces the violence encountered by the protagonist head-on. Not only does Stanford use the word rape, as is often avoided in the aesthetic form of poetry, but she avoids the use of euphemism to ‘soften’ the theme of rape, openly subverting the status of rape as taboo. Instead the language employed by Stanford is straightforward and basic, painting an exact picture of the assault suffered by Medusa. The first mention of the sexual assault seems to mimic Ovid’s matter -of-fact and essentialist description in Metamorphoses,
“He seized and raped me before Athena’s altar.” (Stanford, 2001: 114) yet later in the poem, when expressing the lasting effects of trauma and the rage that ensues, Stanford gives a much fuller and more vivid image of the rape
“but there recur/ thoughts of the god and his misdeed always – / the iron arm, the marble floor/the stinking breath, the sweaty weight, the pain/ the quickening thrust.” (Ibid.: 115). This straightforward telling of the event shocks the reader, forcing them to face the taboo of sexual violence. The logical cause-and-
effect style of Stanford’s first person narrative leads the reader
to question the status that rape has had in literature historically, where the rape of mythical women has been accepted as part of historical narrative without a consideration of the feelings of individual women who undergo the same process in reality.
The structure and tone of the poem in its simplicity and focus on the cause and effects of Medusa’s rage following her sexual assault brings to mind the survivor discourse as is common in autobiographical trauma narratives:
“To return fully to the self as socially defined, to establish a relationship again with the world, the survivor must tell what happened. This is the function of narrative. The task then is to render the memories tellable, which means to order and arrange them in the form of a story, linking emotion with event, event with event, and so on.” (Culbertson,1995: 179) Through a variation on survivor discourse, Stanford has brought the Medusa myth into the modern concern of psychological trauma in rape victims where Medusa’s transformation into
the serpent-haired monster with a petrifying gaze is equated with a victim’s dev
elopment of rage as a response to trauma, directed not only at the perpetrator of the sexual crime but at all men. This anger against the world, however, leaves her isolated: “My furious glance destroyed all live things there./ I was alone. I am alone. My ways/ divide me from the world, imprison me in a stare” (Stanford, 2001: 115) The rage that separates her from the world thus enacts a kind of petrification on the protagonist herself too, making her impenetrable to the world and alienated, unable to make human connections. Trauma
in Duplessis’ Medusa on the other hand is played out through the protagonist’s
inability to express herself, as is reflected in the fragmented and infantile language used throughout the poem. Whereas Stanford’s Medusa work
s finds a kind of therapy through the act of ‘telling’, DuPlessis’ poem is a battle for the self-expression that has long been denied to women. The silencing of women is emphasised by the large blank spaces, and the way that DuPlessis has used short phrases rather than complete sentences that together hint at something left untold. In the first section of Duplessis’ poem there are multiple explicit references toman’s voice and ability to define women,“he held the meanings up” (DuPlessis, 1980: 35),fixing them as objects in patriarchal discourses “showing which/ is object, which subject,/ the discourse/ faceting her.” (Ibid.), whilst the women, the victims of discursive as well as sexual
violence remain “crosst tongue” (Ibid.) and oppressed into their definitions
“Her he can and as he can/ he ken and names the/ knowing;/ breaks her/ in/ to being ridden,/ over the half spoken,/over the forgotten.” (Ibid.) In this li
ne in particular we can account for the fragmented and broken language of the poem, the ‘half spoken’ which can be seen to refer to Medusa’s perspective of her story which has been ‘forgotten’ by mythology.
DuPlessis also uses language and references consistent with mutilation, such as the theft of the three Graeae’s eye, the reference to Philomela who has her tongue removed by Tereus. Mutilation is a theme that has been used by many women to explain the oppression of their voices, Joplin states: “Our muteness is our mutilation, not a natural loss, but a cultural one” (Joplin in Higgins and Silver, 2013: 39).
Joplin likens women’s mutilation of voice, into silence, to the manx cat (a species without a tail) observed by Virginia Woolf:
“The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle changed, by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence, the emotional light for me. Certainly, as I watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe, something seemed lacking, something seemed different.” (Woolf, 2000: 13)
The absence of the tail of Woolf’s Manx cat is like the absence of the tale of women. The tail/tale is conspicuous in its absence and leads the reader to question the universe that has been created to omit the female voice. DuPlessis’ poem essentially plays out Medusa’s battle to regain her ability to speak and to recover her mutilated ‘tale’ as she battles for her creative power. Stanford, on the other hand, rather than engaging with the historical aspect of the silencing of women, focusses on the image of Medusa as a mythical monster that has since been maintained and supported by other largely misogynist readings of the Medusa myth in order to maintain the silence of women. Freud, for example, created a theory based on the Medusa myth that relies on his earlier theories of castration. In his theory, Medusa’s head represents at once the castrated female genitals and the dangers of female sexuality: “The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone. Observe that we have here once again the same origin from the castration complex and the same transformation of affect! For becoming stiff means an erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact. (…) Since the Greeks were in the main strongly homosexual, it was inevitable that we should find among them a representation of woman as a being who frightens and repels because she is castrated” (Freud, 1963: 202-203)
For Freud, then, Medusa is a monster, representing man’s fear of the castrated genitals of the mother and of becoming castrated himself. Stigmatising Medusa as a monster of castrated genitals or of snake-hair and petrifying gaze – devalues her voice. In subverting this view,
Stanford gives Medusa’s voice worth. She does this by deflecting the monstrosity that was traditionally hers onto the god that raped her and his offspring that are growing inside of her: “his monster seed beneath my heart” (Stanford, 2001: 115). Stanford’s reversal of the monster identification is completed by language consistent with human emotion and human reactions to describe Medusa’s perspective, such as “anger”, “hate”, “alone”, “thoughts”, “pain”, “blood” and “heart”.
In rendering the monster human, Stanford is giving her the voice that was ignored or feared in the monster, allowing the victim her opportunity to give her testimony to the crime committed and express her trauma through language. The ability to express oneself through language and the triumph of the female creative voice is key also to understanding DuPlessis’ Medusa.
In the final two sections of her poem, DuPlessis demonstrates the triumph of the female creative voice, as the Medusa head comes to signify something other than the monster of mythology and Freudian psychology: female creativity. In order to unite the Medusa myth with creative power, DuPlessis resurrects the romantic symbols of rocks, stones and nature as representative of poetry and creativity: “O voice seed./ Listen root./ Spring sprout./ Head web.// From the eye jet/ from the tooth debt/ rock and reck/ rock and reckon” DuPlessis, 1980: 41). In these two stanzas we can see the reappearance of the female voice and of the gaze. Whereas before it was the male gaze fixing the female into her objectification, now it is the female eye that ‘jets’ and the female voice that ‘seeds’.
Many feminist scholars have claimed that it was the female gaze that posed the greatest threat of the Medusa myth and that the underlying meaning of the theories of castration complex that have evolved around the myth, were in fact the dangers of the female gaze (to the patriarchy). Hazel Barnes stated that,
similarly to Sartre’s theory in Being and Nothingness,“It was not the
horror of the object looked at which destroyed the victim but the fact that his eyes met those of Medusa looking at him” (Barnes, 1974: 13). Thus, the female gaze holds a power, but not amystical one. Simply put, the female gaze is the greatest threat to the dominating male gaze.
The female gaze in DuPlessis’ poem triumphs over the male gaze,
and the female voice is free to express itself “in sight, my netted reach/ in voice, my knotted speech” (DuPlessis, 1980: 42)
As opposed to DuPlessis ’ empowerment and revitalisation of the female gaze, the gaze of Stanford’s Medusa loses its vitality and freshness as her erotic power is crushed by the sexual assault. “Whatever I looked at became wasteland” (Stanford, 2001: 114), “my furious glance
Sartre theorised that when we are looked at we are frozen into the role of an object, objectified by our function as defined by the subject of the gaze. As though being turned to stone by that gaze. (apud.Sartre, 1956) destroyed all live things there” (Ibid.: 115). With a semantic field consistent with death, Stanford portrays a woman who has been emotionally mutilated as well as physically attacked.
Stanford emphasises Medusa’s victimisation and lack of control over her own destiny “twisted by fury that I did not choose” (Ibid.). The language of the poem is oppressive, as is her own gaze: “The prisoner of myself” (Ibid.). This language, relatively plain, using logical sentences, structured like the language of man, is restrictive and does not allow her the freedom that DuPlessis’ Medusa finds in her reappropriation of the power of creativity. Stanford’s Medusa remains the victim of male oppression, as is revealed in the final stanza where the cycle of violence against women continues with her pregnancy “And now the start,/ the rude circling blood-tide not my own/ that squirms and writhes, steals from me bone by bone”(Ibid.). In the final lines of the poem it becomes clear that Stanford’s protagonist has not escaped the objectification of the male gaze, but that she remains oppressed “prisoned withinmy prison, left alone,/ despised, uncalled for, turning my blood to stone.” (Ibid.)
This imprisonment inside the androcentric narrative, objectified by the male gaze, is the complete opposite of Hélène Cixous’ Medusa who uses language and creativity to escape the constraints of literary tradition that silence women.
“You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. She’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.” (Cixous, 1976:885) Used by Cixous to theorise the creation of a unique écriture féminine, the stigmatised and oppressed Medusa woman is neither a threat to humanity, nor an ugly monster, nor silent. She is beautiful and she is laughing. She has transcended the status conferred upon her by patriarchal mythic tradition and expresses herself in a unique language: La rire de la Méduse.
This is what emerges in DuPlessis’ unique and subversive language. The female gaze and feminine voice that is oppressed and imprisoned in Stanford’s poem is freed and embraced in DuPlessis’. Through an exploration of Medusa’s victimisation, Stanford and DuPlessis have broken Medusa free from her status as a snake-haired monstrosity. Uncovering a long tradition patriarchal oppression, they have turned the popular myth on its head, transforming Medusa into an exemplification of the violence with which male literary tradition has objectified woman and silenced her voice. Prompting readers to take a second look at the way women have been portrayed in male-dominated narratives, DuPlessis and Stanford have unsilenced the voice that the rape (sexual and textual) had suppressed. Stanford unveils a world of oppression and of male forces victimising women, and DuPlessis has empowered the female voice, bringing back the female gaze, and ending optimistically with a celebration of female creativity. The rape of Medusa, that which has been used by myth and patriarchy to imprison Medusa, has been subverted and used by women revisionist writers to free Medusa.
I first read Kropotkin and other revolutionaries in the slums of Brazil, over fifty years ago now at the age of fourteen during the weeks of fighting between the police bounty hunters and death squads and the Matadors, criminals and revolutionaries founded by the magnificent and terrible avenger Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who had rescued me from execution and welcomed me into their fearsome brotherhood.
We were all that stood between state terror, brutal repression, and death and the abandoned children, beggars, garbage pickers, misfits and outcasts whom the elite had hired the police to hunt and kill, we ragged few; but stood we did, and took the fight to the enemy.
Songs of liberation such as his were important to us, who had chosen to place our lives in the balance with the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon named The Wretched of the Earth.
Today I write to you from Damascus, where we have driven a monster from his lair and liberated a nation from tyranny, and while there is mass joy and dancing in the streets there is also the horrors of the Red Fort and those wretched prisoners which bear into the light truths of ourselves we must grapple with, as well as the possessing ghosts of those who are lost, consumed as the raw material of a brutal tyrant’s power.
Our world contains hundreds, thousands of worlds, with beauty, and horror, you cannot imagine from the relative safety of home. We must go forth into the world, with all of its brokenness and all the flaws of our humanity, and embrace our monstrosity if we are to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.
We must find reasons to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival; because if we cannot, human beings who rely on us will die.
When you’re all that stands between liberty and tyranny, freedom and slavery, life and death, between a people and genocide, when you’re human, there is no mustering out.
In Brazil in the summer of my becoming a man I learned many things, from both books and lived history; the value of solidarity against unanswerable force, the inviolability of ones word as a contract, as a witness of history, and in the pursuit of truth, the primacy of loyalty as a counterforce to dehumanization.
And above all, this; Resistance is always war to the knife. Those who respect no limits and no laws may hide behind none.
And all such revolutionary struggle, seizures of power, and the sacred calling to bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us is a ground of struggle primarily within the human heart, whose echoes and reflections become the action of our values and become a fulcrum through which we bring change to the balance of power in the world.
If you have never been hungry when there is nothing to eat you can afford, in pain when doctors and medicines are beyond purchase, condemned to a life of brute labor because of the circumstances of your birth or the exclusionary otherness of race, gender, or caste, nor been confronted with the misery of others in the midst of wealth which they create but do not share, such authors as Kropotkin may not speak to you in ways you can understand and use.
Among the most difficult things in life is to see unjust and unequal systems when one is a beneficiary of them.
We wander in a wilderness of mirrors, distorted images as if in a funhouse which falsify and abstract us from ourselves in infinite reflections, of misdirects, lies, and illusions, alternate realities and cults of submission to authority.
We become colonized by these falsehoods and shaped to the uses of their elite hegemons of wealth, power, and privilege and their enforcers and carceral states of centralized power and brutal repression. Those who would enslave us through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, hierarchies and divisions of belonging and otherness, and the weaponization of fear in service to power claim to speak in our name and make us complicit in their crimes against humanity as a strategy of our subjugation. Thus do we become puppets of the thieves of souls.
But once you have escaped the Golden Cage, you cannot look away, cannot forget, cannot refuse to help where you can, and remain human. We are all prisoners of such legacies of history; I broke out of my cage, and if I can escape to freedom so can you.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Here is the FaceBook post on Kropotkin to which I am replying herein:
We celebrate Liberation of Syria Day as the tyrant Assad flees to Russia; the living dead emerge from the underworld labyrinth of prisons and torture laboratories to which they were condemned, the monuments and propaganda of the regime are given to the flames, and the diverse peoples and communities of Syria begin to reclaim the nation that was always theirs from those who would dehumanize and enslave us, and with their independence won awaken to a world of limitless possibilities of becoming human, with no one other than ourselves the arbiter of our identity and future.
There are many blueprints and historical legacies for how such a becoming may be achieved, but no imposed orders of human being, meaning, or value, nor any better or worse ways of being human together beyond what best preserves our freedoms and universal human rights, that we each of us may discover or create our own best selves without infringing on those of others.
This is the true meaning of democracy; a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s humanity.
Syria is now free to struggle toward such a humankind; many forces and influences with different visions of an ideal society and future will be negotiating the boundaries of their otherness, and not always amicably, but without tyranny and the imperial dominion of foreign powers as imposed conditions of struggle that journey has now become far more hopeful.
With the Liberation of Syria, keystone of Iran’s Axis versus democracy and of the Russian Empire, we have shattered the spell of invincibility, terror, despair, and learned helplessness by which the nation, the region, and much of the world has been ensorcelled and held spellbound by Russia’s Third World War on its many fronts, and this has civilizational and world-historical consequences which will unfold across time in ways which cannot be predicted, and this is their great power as a Rashomon Gate Event of reimagination and transformation. The enemies of democracy, of our liberty and humanity, can be defeated.
We have brought the Chaos, and with luck a tidal change; in the words of the magnificent commander of Hayat Tahrir al Sham, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, in his victory speech; “The future is ours”.
I wonder if he was quoting me; when I said it in Damascus as we welcomed him into the city I was quoting Jerzy Kosinski in his brilliant study of Soviet society The Future is Ours, Comrade; he was quoting Lenin, who was paraphrasing Shakespeare in The Tempest, Act 2 Scene 1; “Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come, in yours and my discharge.” That this is a line of the treacherous murderer Antonio seems to have been forgotten or lost in translation by all and sundry, except of course for Lenin who knew exactly what he had unleashed, and Kosinski who suffered for it.
I say again, among the ruins of the first Russian fortress state to fall, the future is ours. Today we rejoice in Damascus; one day we may do the same in Moscow.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Syrians celebrate fall of Bashar al-Assad after five decades of dynastic rule
Today, December seven, is a day that “will live in infamy”; but what lessons have we learned?
As Elizabeth D. Samet, author of the new book Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness, writes in her article in Time entitled America Learned the Wrong Lessons From Pearl Harbor—And the World Is Still Living With the Consequences; “On Tuesday, December 7, 2021, we will remember Pearl Harbor, the 1941 Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base on Oahu, Hawaii, for the eightieth time. It is a ritual remembrance that has much to reveal about Americans’ present-day understanding of themselves and their country’s role in the world, especially at a moment when we are also trying to understand the exit from Afghanistan. What happens on such anniversaries reveals the double edge of a nation’s memory, which offers a sense of strength and unity even as it tends to foreclose a certain kind of future.
We will remember Pearl Harbor in unsurprising ways: there will be the customary memorial parade in Hawaii (the theme of which is to be Valor, Sacrifice, and Peace); television networks will run World War II programming; newscasters will introduce segments of documentary footage and interviews with some of the dwindling number of World War II veterans. These remembrances will be both solemn and sentimental: they will awaken the nostalgia of a confused country for a period of supposed clarity, when good and evil could be readily discerned and disentangled, when the U.S. wielded its military might in the service of liberating the world from its oppressors, and when the exercise of violent force brought about a definitive resolution.
Americans were being taught how to remember the events of December 7, 1941, almost as soon as they happened. Hours after learning of the attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dictated the first draft of his War Message to Congress. He would revise the initial language, “a date which will live in world history,” into what would ultimately become the speech’s most well-known phrase, “a date which will live in infamy.” Merriam-Webster notes that Roosevelt’s language is frequently misremembered as “day of infamy.” But it also reports a yearly spike in lookups of the word infamy. In other words, the core message of treachery summoning a righteous vengeance has not been lost even if our recollection is imperfect and even if Americans have to be reminded annually of what the word actually means.
Infamy—perfidy and surprise—and the compulsion to exact revenge for it shaped the narrative from the beginning. In Cultures of War, the historian John W. Dower called the word infamy a “code” that would teach Americans how to understand not only Pearl Harbor but also, ultimately, 9/11, after which the word again appeared in newspaper headlines and speeches, thus indelibly linking the two attacks.
In 1941, organizing chaotic violence and suffering into a story with meaning, propaganda posters soon gave graphic representation to these concepts. Sometimes featuring a fist raised in defiance or a tattered flag, they enjoined the American public to “Avenge Pearl Harbor” by making bullets or ships, buying war bonds, or joining the navy or coast guard “NOW.” Americans were exhorted to do all of these things so that those who perished at Pearl Harbor would not have “died in vain.”
Relentless calls to “remember” served as a goad to revenge, and the propagandists’ message gave us a vocabulary still in use today for framing American violence. In a representative example, a postcard features a sailor remarking to two shipmates as they watch a Japanese ship they’ve just shelled sink: “Just a little something ‘to remember Pearl Harbor.’” A poster, which proclaims “Make him pay for that day,” depicts a knife plunged into a calendar open to December 7, while another, portraying a blind serviceman, demands, “He CAN’T forget Pearl Harbor—Can you?”
Just a week after the attack, Don Reid and Sammy Kaye produced the song “Remember Pearl Harbor,” which proclaimed to its listeners that all those who died on December 7 died “for liberty.” When the journalist Eric Sevareid, recently returned from Europe, heard it, he mocked the song for its “saccharine melody” and referred to it as “Remember-r-r Pearl Harbor-r-r.” He was also disgusted by the atmosphere of the New York night clubs in which people danced to it.
The spectacle seemed to Sevareid typical of America’s cynical response to a war they had only just joined. He saw not patriotic fervor but a kind of visceral excitement: there was “money to burn,” fashion had seized on the “military motif,” black marketeers thrived, jingoistic newspaper “headlines blared the good news every time that three Jap planes went down,” and billboards told consumers that Wrigley’s gum and Lucky Strikes “had gone to war.” Americans were persuaded that the country “could produce its way to victory,” but they ignored the political and social realities of a world in flames. “Little men sneered at the Four Freedoms,” Sevareid recalled, “and the great vision of the century of the common man was sneered at as ‘globaloney.’”
That’s not the way we remember it now. We imagine that everything changed overnight. But, as the historian Richard W. Steele carefully documented, by early 1942, only two months after the attack, members of the Roosevelt Administration were already worrying that the public had lost interest. On February 16, Time ran a story with the headline, “THE PEOPLE: Smug, Slothful, Asleep?” It catalogued a list of warnings expressed by everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt to James Landis, the executive head of Civil Defense, to Edward R. Murrow that, as Murrow put it, Americans “do not fully appreciate the need for speed … do not quite understand that if we delay too long in winning the victory we will inherit nothing but a cold, starving embittered world… Already there are signs that we’re coming to accept slavery and suppression as part of the pattern of living in this year of disgrace.” General Johnson was more succinct: “The general public . . . simply does not seem to give a tinker’s dam.”
The further irony is that it is far less convenient to remember the Pacific Theater than it is the European. The brutality of the war against Japan, often racially motivated on both sides, as Dower chronicled in War Without Mercy, and its ready association with the internment camps at home, does not easily fit into the narrative of the Good War we prefer to remember today. While Pearl Harbor was the catalyst for our entrance into the conflict, we have ever since tended to overlook the Pacific in favor of the war against the Nazis.
The real and immediate consequences of the war we have chosen to remember—chiefly the liberation of Europe from fascist tyranny—offered then and still offers us the most attractive version of ourselves. Yet that liberation, together with the establishment of a new world order, gave us a false impression that the violent force we inflict on others would inevitably yield virtuous results. Our memory also omits certain compromising details: our reluctance to enter the war on behalf of liberating anyone, our callousness toward the fate of Europe’s Jews, our short-lived interest in denazification, our exportation of segregation to postwar Europe.
In recent years, we have become increasingly enthralled with the idea that when Americans die, they die for liberty, and thus we are repeatedly committed to sending more righteous liberators to die—in Iraq, in Afghanistan—so that others will not have died “in vain.” We seem also to have grown to love the idea of being hated for our freedom, for “our way of life,” and this leads quite naturally to an obsession with American greatness and goodness. We can find aggrieved, reductive versions of this exceptionalist belief on t-shirts or in the lyrics of a pop song like Darryl Worley’s “Have You Forgotten?”
But we can also discern an influence on national policy. The assumption that when Americans fight they fight for liberty has a long history, but that assumption, together with a confidence in the exceptional nature of American violence as a mode of deliverance, has been used since World War II to frame and to justify a series of dubious military actions. This is especially true of our most recent conflicts. It clearly undergirded President George W. Bush’s victory declaration in the War on Terror on the decks of the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003: “In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty and for the peace of the world,” he told the assembled sailors, “And wherever you go, you carry a message of hope, a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘To the captives, come out; and to those in darkness, be free.’” Such faith—or a cynical appeal to it—likewise inspires us to cling amid the ruins to our unintentional, impermanent liberation of women in Afghanistan.
Commemoration is a natural, normal, even necessary part of any culture. Remembrance can forge a sense of collectiveness otherwise elusive, especially in a fractured democracy like our own. But when memory is so tightly yoked to righteous indignation—as is the case with Pearl Harbor or 9/11—it risks becoming pathological by obstructing the growth essential to a nation’s progress.
World War II was an aberration in so many ways: the existential threat posed by fascism, the unequivocal necessity of our participation, and the decisiveness of Allied victory are only the most obvious. When we remember Pearl Harbor, we find ourselves in the position of Orpheus, suddenly mistrusting Hades’ bargain, compelled to look back, only to discover that Eurydice has vanished. Betrayed by the last twenty years, we grasp in vain to retrieve an elusive glory. Our tragic postwar mistake was in thinking that the consequences of World War II could be endlessly duplicated. Over the years we have somehow developed a capacity to be surprised when American military might doesn’t establish, as it once helped to do, a new world but instead, after twenty wasteful years of occupation, fitful nation-building, and unfounded confidence, are left right back where we started. There is a cruel and particular irony in the paradox that a country the imagination of which has always been knit so tightly to the future—to the seductive dream of beginning anew—now finds itself in the position of hoping that history will miraculously repeat itself.”
Here follows the text of F.D.R.’s immortal Day of Infamy speech, in which the greatest leader America has ever known other than Lincoln set us forever on a course of total resistance to fascist tyranny which would usher in the Imperial American epoch of global history.
I direct your attention to this moment because we stand in its echo today, but with our positions reversed as sponsors of Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza and throughout Palestine, and in the wake of the Fourth Reich’s recapture of the state under Traitor Trump as the Resistance and our partners in the Democratic Party begin the long process of salvaging democracy and rebuilding our institutions and the public trust and faith in the idea of America as a free society of equals, founded on the values of freedom, equality, truth, and justice for all, a guarantor of liberty and universal human rights, a beacon of hope to the world, and a refuge for the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” as the Statue of Liberty proclaims, we must fully inhabit the terror of our victims.
There can be no reclaiming our heart or transformation to a global United Humankind of universal freedom and equality without owning our complicity in evil and the restoration of balance through acts of redemption, reckoning, and restitution. America’s creation of the state of Israel as a colony and proxy of imperial dominion and control of oil as a strategic resource was very useful in establishing the third phase of American Empire in the wake of World War Two, and like the Conquest by which we seized a continent and slavery by which we created our seed capital of empire, for such original sins we must give answer to the court of history.
Our nightmare history as a colonial and imperial power is a legacy from which we must emerge, and still today shapes, motivates, informs, and determines our actions and ideas of belonging and otherness as identity politics, legitimation of power, and manufacture of consent.
In the Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and the far more general ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, one people divided by history and faith as weaponized by those who would enslave us, we have a vivid and immediate example of the psychopathy of power and the state as embodied violence, atrocities in which we Americans are complicit as our taxes paid for the bombs and tanks which now consume, silence, and erase whole cities, families, and peoples in a storm of fire and steel.
This too we must resist, if democracy and our universal human rights are to be meaningful in future, and if we human beings are to be guarantors of each other’s humanity. Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
The tragic events of October 7 have often been compared to those of December 7 as events of disruption and fracture of the world order; so may we compare our own violations of human rights through our client state of Israel with those we suffered at the hands of the enemies of democracy in the Second World War.
In the dark mirror of Gaza we must confront our own darkness, in witness and solidarity of action.
As Elie Weisel teaches us; “Silence is complicity.”
“Yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.
Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.
It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.
The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.
Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island.
And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island.
Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.
As Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.
No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.
I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.
Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.
With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt – Declaration of War Address – “A Day Which Will Live in Infamy”
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America Learned the Wrong Lessons From Pearl Harbor—And the World Is Still Living With the Consequences/ Time
להלן הטקסט של נאום יום השמצה האלמותי של F.D.R., שבו המנהיג הגדול ביותר שידעה אמריקה אי פעם מלבד לינקולן העמיד אותנו לנצח במסלול של התנגדות מוחלטת לעריצות הפשיסטית שתוביל את העידן הקיסרי האמריקאי של ההיסטוריה העולמית.
אני מפנה את תשומת לבכם לרגע הזה כי אנחנו עומדים בהד שלו היום, אבל כשהעמדות שלנו הפוכות כנותני חסות לטיהור אתני בעזה, וכאשר ביידן והמפלגה הדמוקרטית מתחילים בתהליך הארוך של הצלת הדמוקרטיה ובנייה מחדש של המוסדות שלנו ואמון הציבור. ואמונה ברעיון של אמריקה כחברה חופשית של שווים, המושתתת על ערכי חופש, שוויון, אמת וצדק לכולם, ערבה לחירות ולזכויות אדם אוניברסליות, מגדלור של תקווה לעולם ומקלט. עבור “ההמונים המכופפים המשתוקקים לנשום לחופשי” כפי שמצהיר פסל החירות, עלינו לאכלס במלואם את הטרור של קורבנותינו.
אי אפשר להחזיר את הלב שלנו או להפוך למין אנושי גלובלי של חירות ושוויון אוניברסליים בלי להיות הבעלים של שותפותנו ברוע והשבת האיזון באמצעות פעולות של גאולה, חשבון נפש והשבת.
היסטוריית הסיוט שלנו כמעצמה קולוניאלית ואימפריאלית היא מורשת שממנה עלינו לצאת, ועדיין היום מעצבת, מניעה, מודיעה וקובעת את פעולותינו ורעיונות השייכות והאחרות שלנו כפוליטיקת זהויות, לגיטימציה לכוח וייצור הסכמה.
בפשעי המלחמה הישראליים ובפשעים נגד האנושות בעזה, ובטיהור האתני הרבה יותר כללי של הפלסטינים, עם אחד המחולק על ידי ההיסטוריה והאמונה בנשק על ידי אלה שישעבדו אותנו, יש לנו דוגמה חיה ומיידית לפסיכופתיה של הכוח והמדינה כאלימות מגולמת, זוועות שבהן אנו האמריקאים שותפים כמסים שלנו עבור הפצצות והטנקים שצורכים כעת, משתיקים ומוחקים ערים ומשפחות שלמות בסערה של אש ופלדה.
גם לזה עלינו להתנגד, אם הדמוקרטיה וזכויות האדם האוניברסאליות שלנו יהיו משמעותיות בעתיד, ואם אנו בני האדם נהיה ערבים לאנושיותו של זה. מדוע עלינו להיות כלואים זה של זה, ולא המשחררים זה של זה?
האירועים הטרגיים של ה-7 באוקטובר הושוו פעמים רבות לאלו של ה-7 בדצמבר בפרל הארבור כאירועים של שיבוש ושבר של הסדר העולמי; אז אולי נשווה את ההפרות שלנו של זכויות האדם באמצעות מדינת ישראל של הלקוח שלנו עם אלה שסבלנו מהם בידי אויבי הדמוקרטיה במלחמת העולם השנייה.
במראה האפלה של עזה עלינו להתמודד עם החושך שלנו, בעדות ובסולידריות של פעולה.
כפי שמלמד אותנו אלי וייזל; “שתיקה היא שותפות.”
Arabic
يما يلي نص خطاب يوم العار الخالد الذي ألقاه روزفلت، والذي فيه أعظم زعيم عرفته أمريكا على الإطلاق غير لينكولن، وضعنا إلى الأبد على مسار المقاومة الكاملة للاستبداد الفاشي الذي من شأنه أن يبشر بعصر الإمبراطورية الأمريكية في التاريخ العالمي.
أوجه انتباهكم إلى هذه اللحظة لأننا نقف في صدىها اليوم، ولكن مع انقلاب مواقفنا باعتبارنا رعاة للتطهير العرقي في غزة، وبينما يبدأ بايدن والحزب الديمقراطي العملية الطويلة لإنقاذ الديمقراطية وإعادة بناء مؤسساتنا وثقة الجمهور والإيمان بفكرة أمريكا كمجتمع حر متساوٍ، مؤسس على قيم الحرية والمساواة والحقيقة والعدالة للجميع، وضامن للحرية وحقوق الإنسان العالمية، ومنارة أمل للعالم، وملجأ. بالنسبة إلى “الجماهير المحتشدة التي تتوق إلى التنفس بحرية” كما يعلن تمثال الحرية، يجب علينا أن نسكن بشكل كامل رعب ضحايانا.
لا يمكن أن يكون هناك استعادة لقلوبنا أو التحول إلى جنس بشري عالمي يتمتع بالحرية والمساواة العالمية دون الاعتراف بتواطئنا في الشر واستعادة التوازن من خلال أعمال الفداء والحساب والتعويض.
إن تاريخنا الكابوس كقوة استعمارية وإمبريالية هو إرث يجب أن نخرج منه، وما زال حتى اليوم يشكل ويحفز ويعلم ويحدد أفعالنا وأفكارنا حول الانتماء والاختلاف كسياسات الهوية، وإضفاء الشرعية على السلطة، وتصنيع الموافقة.
في جرائم الحرب والجرائم ضد الإنسانية التي ترتكبها إسرائيل في غزة، والتطهير العرقي الأكثر عمومية للفلسطينيين، شعب واحد منقسم بسبب التاريخ والإيمان، وقد استخدمه أولئك الذين يريدون استعبادنا كسلاح، لدينا مثال حي وفوري على الاعتلال النفسي الذي يعاني منه الشعب الفلسطيني. القوة والدولة يجسدان العنف، والفظائع التي نحن الأميركيين متواطئون فيها حيث ندفع ضرائبنا مقابل القنابل والدبابات التي تستهلك الآن وتسكت وتمحو مدن وعائلات بأكملها في عاصفة من النار والفولاذ.
ويجب أن نقاوم هذا أيضًا، إذا أردنا للديمقراطية وحقوقنا الإنسانية العالمية أن تكون ذات معنى في المستقبل، وإذا أردنا نحن البشر أن نكون ضامنين لإنسانية بعضنا البعض. لماذا يجب أن نكون سجانين لبعضنا البعض، وليس محررين لبعضنا البعض؟
غالبًا ما تتم مقارنة الأحداث المأساوية التي وقعت في 7 أكتوبر بتلك التي وقعت في 7 ديسمبر في بيرل هاربور باعتبارها أحداث اضطراب وكسر في النظام العالمي؛ فهل يجوز لنا أن نقارن انتهاكاتنا لحقوق الإنسان من خلال دولة إسرائيل العميلة مع تلك التي عانينا منها على أيدي أعداء الديمقراطية في الحرب العالمية الثانية.
وفي مرآة غزة المظلمة، يجب علينا أن نواجه ظلامنا، بالشهادة والتضامن في العمل.
With Iran and her Hezbollah forces diverted or engaged by Israel as she makes a fiction of Biden’s Pax Americana with over one hundred violations of the peace in its first days, Syrian Democratic Forces of Kurdish fighters mixed with American Special Operations Forces on the northeast and former al Qaeda faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham on the northwest are coordinating actions to make a wishbone of Syria and overthrow the loathsome Assad regime.
While the SDF and America liberate Kurdistan and her oilfields, HTS has seized Aleppo and Hama City in a blitzkrieg campaign which may well capture Damascus.
This was triggered by the performative Israeli-Hezbollah peace agreement, but also designed to buy time for Ukraine after a disastrous month and facing a second invasion force from North Korea, and very much a hail mary play by an America whose government will soon be captive of a Trump regime which will commit us not to the liberation of democracies such as Ukraine or a possible free Syria, but fully to the imperial conquest and dominion of Russia and Trump’s puppetmaster and agent handler Putin, beginning with Syria and Ukraine and ending with Russian and Iranian control of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean.
Russia currently plans to invade Poland and the Danube through the Romanian port of Constantia on the Black Sea this spring, and capture or destroy NATO bases and ability to resist conquest through the Northern Route of invasion, the Baltic and Arctic, and Britain, Canada, and others are now bolstering paper thin defenses in the region because they know what is coming. All of this is made possible because Putin’s star agent Traitor Trump will hold that door open for him. Motivation for solidarity is high, especially among the nations of a resurgent NATO under threat by Russia and a America captive to Trump and the Fourth Reich acting together, and can be leveraged to the benefit of liberty in all of the theatres of World War Three ongoing now; Ukraine and Syria obviously, but also long smouldering conflicts throughout Africa, Palestine and Lebanon, Yemen, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Libya and the contest with Turkey and France for the Mediterranean, within Russia herself, and most crucially in America where propaganda warfare and long term infiltration and subversion programmes have resulted in the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024.
We have only a few points at which the dawn of a new Russian Empire allied with the Iranian Dominion can be placed in check, and Syria is one of them. This does not mean regime change in Syria is a foregone conclusion, nor that the confused and ambiguous nature of political loyalties which is normal here will change.
Everyone fights Islamists which includes HTS and their constituent elements al Qaeda and IS both of whom HTS has long fought as well, though not as ferociously as al Qaeda and IS fight each other. Except when we are all fighting Russian and Iranian forces as we are now in Syria; this is especially curious when Saudi Arabian and Gulf states forces who are experienced in fighting Russia’s Africa Corps at the same time as they fight African IS affiliates now fight side by side with IS, al Qaeda, and Taliban fighters in the same units both in the HTS and SDF, Sunni warriors united only by a shared fury at Iranian Shia proxies such as Hezbollah.
Turkey backs the HTS because HTS represents something new, built by integrating its opponents and local ethnic communities which have historically proven resistant to playing well with others, and has fought both IS and al Qaeda as well as Assad’s forces though many of its fighters are former members of both. But although Turkey historically fights against and not for the mainly Kurdish SDF which otherwise is an independence movement from both Turkey and Syria, at this moment Turkey is allied with and aiding SDF, again something new and very strange.
SDF is an American ally and the de facto national army of Kurdistan; also not Islamist but pro western democracy ideologically, and easy to tell from HTS because its full of foreign fighters from everywhere, plus female Kurdish warriors. SDF has units which may be official forces from France and Israel as well as America and Turkey, with the usual mercenaries, professional adventurers, and madmen like myself.
Its all very nostalgic as we find ourselves returned to the start of this conflict in 2012 with the Syrian Civil War, with clear goals of regime change and the liberation of Syria from Russian and Iranian dominion. We are also close to the conditions of Friday January 20 2017, when Trump abandoned America’s forces in Syria and sabotaged the democracy movement, with Russian bombs raining death on our soldiers while he took the Oath of Office to protect and defend our nation from all enemies foreign and domestic.
With our window of opportunity for the Liberation of Syria closing on Inauguration Day January 20 2025, and the chance that Traitor Trump may once again betray our armed forces and the cause of liberty in handing Syria to Russia, we must be swift, but also tricky. I hope to offer our enemies surprises and forms of mischief they cannot imagine or predict.
Confusion to the enemy.
Onward to Damascus!
As written by Jason Burke in The Guardian, in an article entitled Why did Syrian militants HTS seize Aleppo – and how did they do it so quickly?; “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist militant group that has surged to global attention by launching a surprise and successful offensive in Syria over the past week, has long been the country’s most powerful rebel faction. Now its tens of thousands of fighters have seized a major city, cut a strategic highway and forced the military of Bashar al-Assad into a hasty retreat across a swath of the country, opening a new phase in a 13-year civil war that many presumed was over.
What is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham?
This sudden turn of events is shocking but not entirely surprising, veteran observers say.
“Everyone watching Syria knows it has been a tinderbox under very great pressure both domestically and from regional powers for years. The war has been continuing in the background … The scale of the gains made by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is surprising but not the offensive if you look at what the group has been saying and signalling,” said Charlie Winter, a Syria expert and director of ExTrac, a UK-based risk intelligence platform.
For about five years, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which means Movement for the Liberation of Greater Syria, has controlled the north-western Syrian province of Idlib, where it has set up what it calls the Syrian Salvation government to run schools, clinics and courts for an estimated 4 million people. Idlib thus provides a secure territorial base but also a steady stream of funding from taxes among other resources.
The group’s forces are reportedly well-trained but lightly equipped, though heavier weapons have been seized from Syrian government troops during the advances of recent days. HTS leads a rough coalition of ideologically aligned smaller factions, including groups made up of Uzbek, Tajik and Turkmen militants who have been based in Syria for many years. There may be a “smattering” of veteran western European Islamists among them, analysts said.
Where did HTS come from and who is its leader?
Formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, HTS was originally founded by al-Qaida to exploit opportunities offered by the collapse of Syria into civil war. It was swiftly successful, building a fearsome reputation for insurgent attacks and suicide bombings against regime forces and other enemies. Though broadly committed to the same project of establishing a new Islamic caliphate based in Syria and Iraq, the group became a bitter enemy of the Islamic State, and eventually split from al-Qaida too.
The leader throughout its 13-year existence has been Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a, better known as Abu Muhammed al-Jawlani, who is 42 and is thought to have been born in Syria from a family that had fled the Golan Heights after the 1967 war during which Israel occupied the mountainous area.
Little is known about Jawlani’s early years but he has described fighting with insurgents against US-led coalition forces after the invasion in 2003 before being detained with thousands of other militants in 2006. He was then imprisoned for five years in a series of US-run and Iraqi prisons before being released in 2011 and returning to Syria with six others to lead al-Qaida’s push there.
Experts say Jawlani not only distanced itself from al-Qaida but, having been targeted by Islamic State from early in the civil war, fought hard against its brutal rivals. Over the following years, Jawlani’s fighters sought, with limited success, to win the acquiescence of local communities by providing basic administration and security, rather than simply through fear. In 2021, Jawlani’s efforts to rebrand HTS culminated in an interview with US public broadcasters – though the $10m (£7.9m) reward for information leading to his arrest by US authorities remains.
This strategy led to a fierce debate among analysts. Though the US and Russia, Turkey and other states designate HTS as a terrorist group, some analysts have considered it as breaking with the extreme violence and fanaticism of many previous groups.
They point out that its aims are explicitly local, stripped of any broader vision of a much wider war against the west or Middle Eastern rulers that characterised Islamic State, and that the group has enforced Islamic codes of behaviour less strictly than many expected, recently withdrawing “morality police” from the streets after public protests.
Other experts are convinced that the group’s core thinking remains faithful to the main principles of extremist Islamist ideologies, even if its day-to-day behaviour and tactics are different. They point to thousands of arbitrary detentions in areas under its control and say any idea that HTS is a new and pragmatic form of Islamic militancy is entirely misguided.
Why launch an offensive now?
It is unclear why the HTS chose this moment to launch an offensive and recapture Aleppo, once a bastion of resistance to the Assad regime. One factor may be the military weakness of Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based militia that provided crucial support for Damascus but has been hard hit in its war with Israel. Another may be the distraction of Iran and Russia, both key supporters of Assad. HTS claims the “aggression” of the regime against the people of Idlib had become unbearable.
Whatever the truth, the offensive has already had a huge strategic impact. “It took 100 days for Aleppo to fall in 2016, and only 48 hours for it to be recaptured,” said Winter. “This takes us back to the middle of the last decade in terms of how the war could end.”
As I wrote in my post of February 9 2023, Lines of Fracture: Earthquake Exposes Systemic Flaws in Syria; Disaster seizes a region already destabilized and made precarious by multiple lines of fracture, wishbone of Russia and Turkey in World War Three’s catastrophic contest for imperial dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
Beneath the hammer of fate and an earthquake which is among the most terrible disasters within living memory, the systemic flaws of our civilization are exposed as historical political decisions about how to be human together circle round in recursive process to seize and shake us all, like an ouroboros swallowing its tail.
One can learn much in the study of systems under stress, but what is most important here are the lives of the people caught in the gears of the great machine we serve, like Charlie Chaplin in The Factory, and the opportunity for change such destabilization offers us.
Chaos opens a gate for the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, of our possibilities for becoming human, and of new dreams of human being, meaning, and value.
In Syria and throughout the world, let us act in solidarity to establish beyond question the principle of universal human rights and the institutions of democracy and its values of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and forever abandon as a species all inequalities of power, divisions of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and the tyranny and terror of carceral states of force and control.
As I wrote in my post of March 14 2022, Russia’s Wars of Imperial Conquest and Dominion Since 2020: the Case of Syria in the Russian-Turkish Conflict for Dominion of the Middle East; Future scholars of the genesis and development of the Third World War which has now begun may trace its faultlines in two parallel and interdependent conflicts being waged beyond the borders of Ukraine, where we are witness to the unfolding of secondary and tertiary consequences which have engulfed Ukraine like the expanding ripples in a pool into which a stone has been cast.
These conflicts are first the reconquest of former Soviet client states as a new Russian Empire, and second the imperial conflict between Russia and Turkey for dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
Multiple theatres of war are ongoing in both conflicts; Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the democracy movement in Russia itself are in the first category, while Syria, Libya, and Nagorno-Karabakh are examples of the second.
This is the first in a series of essays in which I will address each of these theatres of war, and as the Stalingrad-like devastation of Ukraine is being compared with that of Syria and Russia’s lawless brutality and cruelty in its policies and strategies of waging war in support of Assad’s monstrous regime, I thought I’d begin with Syria.
As I wrote in my post of March 26 2021, A Mad Hatter’s Tea Party: Syria; Syria is a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party of multisided issues and shifting alliances, and like Afghanistan a place where empires go to die. One is confronted here with a Great Game in which two Great Powers Conflicts are in play, one of Turkey versus Russia, and another of the Arab-American Alliance most especially including Israel versus Iran, but also one in which everyone fights Isis and Trump infamously assassinated America’s two greatest allies in that cause, Iran’s Qassem Suleimani and Iraq’s Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the national heroes of their nations.
It is also a game of conflicting and ambiguous loyalties, interests, and goals which tend to neutralize and cancel each other out; Turkey, our principal ally versus Assad and Russia, also fights two other allies versus Isis, the Kurds and Turkey’s Communists, and her use of Syrian refugees as provocations to win concessions from the European Union are among the causes of Nazi revivalism in Europe. Here also chaos reigns, and the whole region is destabilized and filled with warlords, mercenaries, tribal vendettas, oligarchic and sectarian divisions.
Chaos is a measure of the adaptive potential of a system, and where many see only its negative aspects I see also its possibilities for growth and transformation.
As I wrote in my post of January 4 2020, Cry Havoc: Consequences of the American Assassination of the Iranian and Iraqi Shiite Military Leaders; As the consequences of this event ripple outward through the medium of time, multiplying possibilities. alternate futures, transforms of ourselves and our shapings of one another, the true magnitude of the American assassination of the Iranian and Iraqi Shiite military leaders will unfold.
It is a seed of destruction, but of who?
An age of Chaos dawns, and we are abandoned to its whims and to its wantonness as it seizes and swallows the mighty, disrupts and changes power relations and structures of social form, bringer of death as an aspect of Time but also of transformation and rebirth.
Chaos which I celebrate as a principle, but which must be wielded as a dangerous and multidimensional force with great forethought and caution as we play the Great and Secret Game, for action and reaction always strike in both directions.
The magnificent Guillermo del Toro, in his gorgeous work Carnival Row which explores themes of racism and inequality among war refugees in the nation which failed to defend them from their conquerors and in harboring them finds itself confronted with an alien people as neighbors amid squalor, poverty, and social destabilization, much like many nations in our world today, depicts the formation of an alliance between two leaders of rival factions:
“Who is chaos good for?”
“Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of those in the shadows.”
To summarize the war in Syria during the past year, I recount here my posts, beginning with that of February 7 2020, Syrian Peace Accord Collapses as Turkey Invades, “Turkey has invaded Syria today with an enormous column of over 400 vehicles, to control a highway in support of their allied rebel forces in Idlib which have been under sustained attack by Syrian and Russian forces since December, displacing 600,000 new refugees in a war which has driven 12 million from their homes.
This is the third time Turkey has invaded Syria during this war; the previous two were directed against the Islamic State which still controls Idlib, and the second against US allied Kurdish forces who fought the IS but also want an independent state, anathema to Turkey.
Just to confuse things further, the IS and their rivals al Qaeda had been nearly destroyed by the US before Trump ordered the abandonment of our allies as a favor to Putin, besides noninterference in the Russian conquest of Ukraine supremacy in the Middle East being the reason Russia interfered with our elections in the first place. The CIA’s Tenth Division was abandoned in place under Russian aerial bombardment when Trump was delivering his Oath of Office speech, as loyal American servicemen died. Yes, they understand that they are deniable forces and are trained to exfiltrate on their own; I mention this because this was the moment I realized Trump was a traitor and a foreign agent. With the bombs raining death on our soldiers.
February 27 2020, Syria: Victory for the Rebellion Against Assad and Russia; Syrian rebel forces backed by Turkey seize Saraqeb in a victory which isolates Assad and his Russian allies, cutting the road between Damascus and Aleppo and the main highway which acts as a supplies lifeline to the sea.
If neither side can claim victory and a new peace cannot be negotiated, Russia, Iran, and Turkey will continue to fight for dominion of the Middle East in a destructive forever war until the world abandons fossil fuels and oil becomes worthless.
If Assad’s regime of terror is utterly destroyed, which requires the decisive defeat of Russia, unlikely without American intervention, the endgame of this horrific war will devolve into myriads of sectarian and oligarchic conflicts, resulting not in liberation and a secular democracy but in fragmentation and thereafter the probable emergence of an Iranian Shia proxy state uneasily neighboring a rival Sunni fundamentalist state itself divided into al Qaeda and IS factions, splitting Syria along sectarian allegiances in a parallel of Yemen. Until the next round of proxy wars and great powers imperialism begins again.
Poor Syria seems doomed to calamity in this simplistic formulation of an intensely complex set of issues, but there are multiple paths to countless outcomes which are possible here; consider if the people of Syria destroyed the oilfields. What then would imperial powers fight to gain?
March 5 2020, Pawns in a Turkish Great Game: the Syrian Refugee Crisis; Erdoğan is driving a million refugees from his invasion of Syria into Europe in order to win concessions from the EU, using some of the world’s most vulnerable people in a game of brinksmanship where the price of its failure may be a Third World War.
Turkey challenges Russia in both Syria and Libya, engulfing both the Middle East and the Mediterranean in the threat of war; today saw Greek and Turkish special forces deployed against each other along the border, and reports of skirmishes as thousands of refugees make suicidal runs to a Europe which offers no safety and does not want them.
Refugee crises, inclusive of the one on America’s border with Mexico as well as those of Venezuela and Syria, are failures of human values as well as policy; manmade crises which reveal the depth of a government’s commitment to the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Born of complex and intractable situations, refugee crises may seem like Gordian Knots of multilayered and interdependent issues, but the last decision, the one that actually sacrifices a people, is often a political choice made for a limited gain.
Our world is filled with such conundrums, in which we are offered choices between conflicting and unclear goals and values; how do we choose our side? I have been asked this literally, at times by people who are armed and with flames and gunfire in the background; whose side are you on?
To this I could answer that I am on the side of freedom versus authority, of democracy and of equality, truth, and justice. It’s the version which explains why I have chosen one thing and not another without going into easily misunderstood complexities; for example in Syria I am on the side of Turkey and America against Russia because of the brutality of Assad’s tyranny and its many abuses of our universal human rights, and I think we should take the fight to liberate Syria to the streets of Moscow. Equally do I oppose Erdogan’s tyranny in Turkey, and his policies against our allies the Kurds.
There is but one principle higher than that of Liberty, and that is the Rights of Man which derive from our condition and not our government, being universal to humankind and superseding the laws of any nation.
I have but one answer to any question of loyalty or allegiance; I am on the side of the dispossessed, the powerless, and the vulnerable.
The BBC has a great explanatory article on the history of the Syrian War; “It is now more than a battle between those who are for or against Mr Assad.
Many groups and countries – each with their own agendas – are involved, making the situation far more complex and prolonging the fighting.
They have been accused of fostering hatred between Syria’s religious groups, pitching the Sunni Muslim majority against the president’s Shia Alawite sect.
Such divisions have led both sides to commit atrocities, torn communities apart and dimmed hopes of peace.
They have also allowed the jihadist groups Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda to flourish.
Syria’s Kurds, who want the right of self-government but have not fought Mr Assad’s forces, have added another dimension to the conflict.
Who’s involved?
The government’s key supporters have been Russia and Iran, while Turkey, Western powers and several Gulf Arab states have backed the opposition.
Russia – which already had military bases in Syria – launched an air campaign in support of Mr Assad in 2015 that has been crucial in turning the tide of the war in the government’s favour.
The Russian military says its strikes only target “terrorists” but activists say they regularly kill mainstream rebels and civilians.
Iran is believed to have deployed hundreds of troops and spent billions of dollars to help Mr Assad.
Thousands of Shia Muslim militiamen armed, trained and financed by Iran – mostly from Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, but also Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen – have also fought alongside the Syrian army.
The US, UK and France initially provided support for what they considered “moderate” rebel groups. But they have prioritised non-lethal assistance since jihadists became the dominant force in the armed opposition.
A US-led global coalition has also carried out air strikes on IS militants in Syria since 2014 and helped an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias called the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) capture territory once held by the jihadists in the east.
Turkey has long supported the rebels, but it has focused on using them to contain the Kurdish militia that dominates the SDF, accusing it of being an extension of a banned Kurdish rebel group in Turkey. Turkish-backed rebels have controlled territory along the border in north-western Syria since 2016.
Saudi Arabia, which is keen to counter Iranian influence, has armed and financed the rebels, as has the kingdom’s Gulf rival, Qatar.
Israel, meanwhile, has been so concerned by what it calls Iran’s “military entrenchment” in Syria and shipments of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah that it has conducted hundreds of air strikes in an attempt to thwart them.
How has the country been affected?
As well as causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, the war has left 1.5 million people with permanent disabilities, including 86,000 who have lost limbs.
At least 6.2 million Syrians are internally displaced, while another 5.7 million have fled abroad.
Neighbouring Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, which are hosting 93% of them, have struggled to cope with one of the largest refugee exoduses in recent history.
How is the country divided?
The government has regained control of Syria’s biggest cities. but large parts of the country are still held by opposition armed groups and the Kurdish-led SDF.
The last remaining opposition stronghold is in the north-western province of Idlib and adjoining parts of northern Hama and western Aleppo provinces. It is home to an estimated 2.9 million people, including a million children, many of them displaced and living in dire conditions in camps.
In September 2018, Russia and Turkey brokered a truce to avert an offensive by pro-government forces that the UN had warned would cause a “bloodbath”.
Rebels were required to pull their heavy weapons out of a demilitarised zone running along the frontline, and jihadists were told to withdraw from it altogether.
In January 2019, the truce deal was put in jeopardy when a jihadist group linked to al-Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, expelled some rebel factions from Idlib and forced others to surrender and recognise a “civil administration” it backed.
The SDF currently controls almost all territory east of the River Euphrates.
The alliance had appeared to be in a strong position until December 2018, when President Donald Trump unexpectedly ordered US troops to start withdrawing from Syria with the territorial defeat of IS imminent.
The decision suddenly left the SDF exposed to the threat of an assault by Turkey, which has said it wants to create a “security zone” on the Syrian side of the border to prevent attacks by Kurdish fighters.
Kurdish leaders have urged the Syrian government and Russia to send forces to shield the border and begun talks about the future of their autonomous region.”
As written by Jason Burke in The Guardian, in an article entitled Can Syrian rebels maintain momentum and take Damascus?; “So far the rebel advance in Syria appears unstoppable. On Friday, the columns of pickup trucks and motorbikes of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its allies were reported to have reached the outskirts of the city of Homs, only 100 miles (160km) from Damascus, the capital.
The extraordinarily rapid advance made by the coalition of rebel groups has stunned not only observers and regional powers but also, it appears, the regime of Bashar al-Assad. HTS swept first from its north-western stronghold into Aleppo, the country’s second biggest city, and then Hama, another major city 80 miles further south down the strategic M5 highway.
Assad’s military forces have offered negligible resistance. Poorly trained police officers have been pressed into service, with predictable results. Shortly before the rebels arrived outside Hama, Syria’s defence ministry called its defensive lines “impregnable”. The Syrian army then said it had withdrawn “to preserve the lives of civilians”.
Few are fooled by such claims, particularly from a regime responsible for such vast numbers of civilian casualties over 13 years of civil conflict. Analysts describe Assad’s military as “hollowed out” by poor morale, defections and corruption. Its retreat has left rows of armoured personnel carriers, tanks, even sophisticated Russian-supplied missile launchers and warplanes in rebel hands.
“The question is whether they can continue the momentum and go to Damascus. It looks like a huge groundswell of support for what’s happening and that reveals the brittle nature of the regime,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at London’s Chatham House.
HTS, a former branch of al-Qaida, has made efforts to soften its sectarian image and, possibly, ideology. H A Hellyer, a senior associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute, said careful management of relations with diverse communities was one reason for the successes of the last week, pointing to the negotiated entry of the rebels into Ismaili Shia villages as an example. “If they could pull off that kind of approach with Alawite communities then it is all over,” Hellyer said, referring to the heterodox Shia minority of which Assad is a member and from which he draws much of his most loyal support.
There is evidence too of close coordination between rebel forces – the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army sent a convoy to support HTS when it needed reinforcements – which may allay concerns about the unity of the rebels.
This weekend may see the most significant gains yet. Homs province is Syria’s largest in size and borders Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan. Homs city, parts of which were controlled by insurgents until a bloody siege in 2014, is a gateway to Damascus, as well as Syria’s coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus, both bastions of regime loyalists.
But anyone hoping for a decisive outcome in the coming days or even weeks may be disappointed. The rebels may not even have thought they could seize Aleppo so swiftly when they launched their offensive last week, and have come a long way very quickly. It is not clear that they will be able to use the heavy weapons or other equipment they have seized, and success could expose the deep divisions between their various factions.
At the same time, the regime’s forces may rally as the initial shock subsides. Assad is already withdrawing forces from Syria’s east to reinforce those around Damascus, ceding key cities such as Deir ez-Zor to Kurdish opposition factions.
“There is a clear level of desperation and they are concentrating defence around strongholds. The big question now is what Iran and Russia do,” said Broderick McDonald, an associate fellow at King’s College London.
Moscow, a key backer that provided much of the firepower that turned the tide of the civil war in Assad’s favour, is distracted by Ukraine but is unlikely to abandon its investment in Syria outright. Tehran too, though weakened by the conflict with Israel, will do what it can after decades of support for the Assad family. Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, fought for the regime in the civil war, and may still be able to offer some assistance despite recent losses in its war with Israel. Hundreds of fighters from Iran-backed militia in Iraq are poised to cross into Syria to fight the rebels.
Then there are Gulf powers who are more likely to back the devil they know than the one they do not, particularly when the main contender is a proscribed jihadi extremist.
This weekend two annual conferences in Bahrain and Qatar will bring together many of the foreign ministers of the region, allowing unofficial discussions and possibly the formulation of a plan to roll back the rebel advance.
“This brings the whole Syrian uprising full circle,” Vakil said. “Assad survived through external support, but this is giving people another shot at the Arab spring … We are in the fog of it but for ordinary civilians this is a real moment, dangerous and uncertain but an opportunity, definitely.”
Guillermo del Toro’s Carnival Row
Liberation of Syria Campaign Thus Far
Can Syrian rebels maintain momentum and take Damascus?
Islamist militants take control of Aleppo – in pictures: Syrian militants led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham launched an offensive on 27 November, taking control of large parts of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city
Torch of Liberty 