In the witness of Jimmy Lai before the court of the Chinese Communist Party but also that of history, a state of tyranny and terror which Occupies Hong Kong as imperial conquest and dominion is delegitimized and exposed, and a figure emerges of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth and of freedom as refusal to submit to authority, its brutal force in repression of dissent and its terrorist though control and theft of our universal human rights including that of a free press.
We must recognize the independence and sovereignty of Hong Kong and stand with her in Solidarity against tyranny and terror, we all us who love liberty, by any means necessary.
China has established an archipelago of artificial islands as fortresses for control of the South China Sea and its strategic shipping lanes as a launchpad for the conquest of the Pacific Rim, and we may see her plans for us all in the Occupation of Hong Kong, the genocide of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, the seizure of Tibet, and the repression of the democracy movement in China itself in Tiananmen and the Umbrella Revolution. And we may look to her proxy forces and client states, the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar and the North Korean soldiers invading Ukraine.
If we do not confront China’s imperial conquest and dominion now, we will be fighting in the streets of San Francisco and every city with a Chinese community when the CCP has the power to enforce their Overseas Chinese Policy which claims all persons of Chinese ancestry as their own citizens regardless of where they were born or what nations they are loyal citizens of currently. The CCP already has secret police stations to silence dissidents globally, and they will send forces of Occupation to capture cities where Chinese people now reside as a pretext for invasion. The existence of the Chinese Communist Party, its capture of China, and its plans for the Pacific Rim nations are among the existential threats we must face, and we will do so either on our terms or theirs.
The French Revolution began with the attempted jailbreak of de Sade now celebrated as Bastille Day; can we not do the same for Jimmy Lai and Hong Kong?
As written by William McGurn in MSN, in an article entitled The Absurd Trial of Jimmy Lai; “Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai’s trial resumed last week in Hong Kong. Among the questions asked by the defense was about someone the prosecution characterized as a “U.S. anti-China propagandist.” That would be me. Jimmy answered that we are the “closest” of friends, and that when he became a Catholic, I became his godfather.
All innocuous stuff. But a Chinese friend of Jimmy’s told me the word “godfather” may carry more sinister connotations for the Hong Kong government. Cue the theme song from Francis Ford Coppola’s film epic about the Corleone family.
It’s absurd. But no more absurd than Jimmy’s whole trial, which paints him as Hong Kong’s Osama bin Laden—“mastermind” of a national security threat to China. To drive this home, the Hong Kong government has pulled out props that rival Hollywood’s: the chains they put on a then-72-year-old Jimmy when he was arrested, the massive police presence at his trial as though he might bust out, not to mention the solitary confinement imposed for most of Jimmy’s four years in prison.
With all this, the trial is only showing what everyone in Hong Kong already knows: Jimmy was an incredibly engaged publisher whose journalism proved highly popular.
On Friday Jimmy was asked about an Oct. 27, 2019, interview with him headlined, “What the Americans are telling Us.” The piece called for “continuous lobbying” to gain foreign support for Hong Kong. Asked to explain, Jimmy said “lobbying” meant emphasizing the peaceful and nonviolent nature of the protests.
“All I said in this article was the true reflection of the facts I perceived,” Jimmy said according to Reuters. “And the true thoughts of my heart, without any sense of hostility or intention to be seditious. And this goes for all my other articles.”
He added: “For truth prevails in God’s kingdom, and that’s good enough for me.”
Official transcripts aren’t publicly available. But each day a website called the Witness—founded by a group of former court reporters—publishes an unofficial account. The public can also follow the reporting of media outlets in the courtroom.
The moderating nature of Jimmy’s voice shines through the testimony. Apple Daily staffers were forbidden to advocate for Hong Kong independence. Jimmy also opposed the violence by some of the younger protesters, recognizing immediately that it “scared away” the peaceful Hong Kong citizenry.
Likewise he denied that calls for “resistance” were really calls for violence. The core of the government’s case is that Jimmy is anti-China and anti-Hong Kong. As he’s made clear from the first day of his testimony, all his activities were pro-freedom and pro-Hong Kong.
Specifically, he was trying to hold China to its promises to honor the values and freedoms that transformed Hong Kong from a barren rock into a global center for trade and finance. On the stand, he listed these Hong Kong values: “rule of law, freedom, pursuit of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly.” Apple Daily, he said, “aligned” itself with them.
As for the U.S., the Hong Kong government can’t seem to make up its mind whether Jimmy was carrying out an American plot or directing America to carry out his. Probably the most substantive allegation is that at meetings with senior officials including Vice President Mike Pence, Jimmy lobbied them for sanctions.
In the courtroom he denied it. “I would not dare to ask the vice president to do anything,” he said. “I would just relay to him what happened in Hong Kong when he asked me.” And encourage Mr. Pence to lend his voice to Hong Kong’s cause.
Mr. Pence confirms Jimmy’s account. In a text Sunday, he called Jimmy a “hero.” “During our meeting at the White House in July of 2019,” he said, “Jimmy Lai and I discussed his stand for democracy and his hope that we would continue to speak out on behalf of the rights and autonomy promised to the people of Hong Kong.”
On sanctions Mr. Pence was unequivocal: “Jimmy Lai did not ask for US sanctions or any action against Hong Kong or China.”
John Bolton, then national security adviser, says the same. “I’ve known Jimmy for many years,” he said in an email, “and I was glad to visit with him about what was actually going on in Hong Kong.”
Those who know Jimmy say it’s dangerous for the government to have him on the stand. They say that after all that time in solitary, he’s back to his old, charismatic self. And that watching him testify can seem like watching an Apple Daily editorial meeting, with Jimmy holding forth on truth and freedom.
Mark Clifford is a former Hong Kong newspaperman and board member of Jimmy’s media group. He is also author of Jimmy’s biography, “The Troublemaker,” which will be published Dec. 3. He sums up the trial this way:
“Jimmy Lai’s testimony shows that he was guilty only of practicing good journalism. The idea that he was somehow driving U.S. policy on Hong Kong is laughable.”
As I wrote in my post of December 6 2021, America Boycotts China’s Olympics; Though historical forces and the different visions of its leaders divided the Revolution, for a brief shining moment the possibility of a new China as a successor of both the democracy and universal human rights of the American and French Revolutions and the socialism of the Second International and the Russian Revolution illuminated the future. Among the limitless possibilities of becoming human, it remains a hope which still lives as a vision of humankind united as a global free society of equals.
It is a vision of liberty and equality stolen from the Chinese people in the Loyalty Purge and Massacre of the Jiangxi Soviet of 1930-31, the true origin of the Chinese Communist Party which now exists in which Mao killed three out of four of the communists, some one hundred thousand people, and seized absolute control. In this mass murder and crime against humanity Mao established the First Rule of Tyranny; When the state’s absolute monopoly on power is in doubt, kill everyone not personally loyal to you. This aphorism, not included in the public version of the Red Book, became the founding principle of the Chinese Communist Party as an instrument of terror and tyranny, as autocratic and totalitarian as the regime of any king or emperor.
Democracy in China is a dream stolen by a dead tyrant, but one which may be restored.
The Black Flag still flies from the barricades in Hong Kong where we raised it on New Year’s Day in 2020, and its primary meaning has not changed since its use by the First International and the veterans of the Paris Commune; freedom versus tyranny, the abolition of state terror, surveillance, force and control, and resistance to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
With this bold signal the people declare: We have no masters; we shall be ruled by none.
As I wrote in my post of August 19 2020, China’s Holocaust: the Genocide of the Uighurs of Xinjiang and the Colonization of Hong Kong; It begins with the Great Wall of Silence and the control of truth, the repression of dissent and silencing of heroes like Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai, and Cai Xia, but it always ends in concentration camps like those in Xinjiang; the path of tyranny and fascism leads ever downward into degradation and dehumanization.
What do you call it when a government enacts the erasure and genocide of an ethnic and religious minority, and profits by their slave labor in concentration camps?
I call it a Holocaust.
What do you call a government which uses forced sterilizations, mass abductions, torture, murder, sending children to orphanages to be taught only in the official language, the outlawing of religious practice, and all this and more horrors and crimes against humanity targeted against those who do not fit the authorities paradigm of blood, faith, and soil?
I call it fascism.
And I say that whatever lies such governments tell about their crimes, what they call themselves or the particulars of their inhumanity, means nothing. All that matters is this; the powerful are inflicting harm on the powerless and the dispossessed.
Shall we let the vulnerable and wretched of the earth stand alone? Are all humans our brothers and sisters?
In the conquest and genocide of the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang the Chinese Communist Party has revealed their true nature as a xenophobic authoritarian state of force and control and a criminal organization of state terror and tyranny. They are a government without legitimacy.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
As I wrote in my post of February 12 2022, Genocide Games: the Case of Hong Kong; I do not like thee, Xi Jinping; and unlike Dr Fell in the beloved poem of 1680 by Tom Brown, I both know and can tell why as a truthteller and witness of history; state terror and tyranny, carceral states of force and thought control, disappearance and torture by police, universal surveillance, and the falsification of propaganda and alternate histories, imperial conquest and colonial exploitation, slave labor and genocidal ethnic cleansing, and fascisms of blood, ideology as a faith, and soil; of all this I accuse Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.
These things I am able to say because of the freedom of access to information which I enjoy as an American citizen, because the transparency of the state in America and the legal protection and heroic stature in our society of whistleblowers and truthtellers is a firewall against secret power, and because the sacred calling to pursue the truth as both a right of citizens and a universal human right are among those parallel and interdependent sets of rights of which the common defense is the primary purpose of the state.
So are legitimacy, trust, and representation conferred to any state which is a guarantor of the rights of its citizens; the corollary of this is that any state whose primary purpose is not to guarantee the rights of individuals has no such legitimacy.
We must be a democracy and a free society of equals, or the slaves of tyrants.
And this we must resist.
Why we fight: the stakes of the Hong Kong liberation struggle can be seen in the corpses of political prisoners which toured the world as the Human Bodies Exhibition and the CCP’s threat of terror and atrocities to silence global dissent.
They are coming for us and for all democracy protestors with teams of assassins throughout the world, and we must come for them first and bring regime change to the Chinese Communist Party.
As I wrote in my post of February 15 2022, Monsters, Freaks, Transgression of the Forbidden, the Sacred Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves: On Chaos as Love and Desire; Watching the sunrise overlooking Hong Kong from Lion Rock, seized many times in recent years by democracy protesters and revolutionaries in the struggle for liberation and independence from China, in the wake of the last celebrations of Chinese New Year and several nearly sleepless nights of making mischief for tyrants under cover of the festival, my thoughts turn to the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature, of ourselves as wild and glorious things, of love and desire as anarchic forces of liberation, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden and the violation of norms as seizures of power from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and the refusal to submit to authority.
Freedom, and all that comes with it; above all freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, as defiance of authorized identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of love and desire as liberating forces of Chaos, and all of this as sacred acts of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
And of our myriad possible futures, sorting themselves out in our daily lives like a hurricane governed by the flight of a hummingbird; tyranny or liberty, extinction or survival.
Order and its forms as authority, power, capital, and hegemonic elites of patriarchy and racism, class and caste, which arise from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, which appropriates and subjugates us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization and weaponizes hierarchies of otherness and belonging and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and creates states as embodied violence, tyrannies of force and control, carceral states of police and military terror, and dominions of imperial conquest and colonial assimilation and exploitation; all of these systems and structures are born in fear, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and submission to authority, have a key weakness without which they cannot arise and perpetuate unequal power, for this requires the renunciation of love.
Chaos has as its champion the totalizing and uncontrollable divine madness of love, which leaps across all boundaries to unite us in solidarity of action against those who would enslave us.
Love exalts us beyond the limits of ourselves and the flags of our skin, disrupts authorized identities and narratives as imposed conditions of struggle, seizes power as ownership of ourselves, and reveals the embodied truth of others.
Once we have a definition of democracy as a free society of equals and a praxis of love, there are some principles which can be derived as an art of revolution and seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
Order is unequal power and systemic violence; Chaos is liberty, equality, interdependence, and harmony.
Order subjugates through division and hierarchy; Chaos liberates through equality and solidarity.
Authority falsifies; speaking truth to power or parrhesia as Foucault called truth telling and performing the witness of history confers authenticity to us in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, and delegitimize tyrants.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s just an old humbug.
The four primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
There is no just Authority.
Law serves power and authority; transgression and refusal to submit confer freedom and self-ownership as primary acts of becoming human and Unconquered.
Always go through the Forbidden Door. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Such is my art of revolution and democracy as love; there remains poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our limitless possibilities of becoming human, and love and desire as unconquerable informing, motivating, and shaping forces and innate human realms of being and powers which cannot be taken from us as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, anarchic and ungovernable as the tides, and it is love and desire as forms of wildness and embodied truth which offer us a definition of freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2024, This Chinese New Year, Let Us Bring the Chaos; Happy Chinese New Year to all humankind; may we find the joy of total freedom to balance the terror of our nothingness, embrace the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves in liberation struggle from authorized identities and the masks others make for us, discover the truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh with which to free ourselves from the lies and illusions of our falsification, build solidarity to triumph over the subjugation of our divisions, rekindle the absurd hope we need to claw our way out of the ruins of our fallen civilization and make yet another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival, and love to transcend the limits of our form, redeem the flaws of our humanity, and heal the brokenness of the world.
Such is the spell I cast this night with my wishes, ephemeral and possibly going nowhere at all as my words drift like candles set free upon the winds and the tides, yet this is their beauty.
We lost and broken things, who refuse to submit and abandon not our fellows.
Here in this place of darkness ruled by fear and force we light up the night with fireworks and hurl defiance to those who would enslave us; this earth, this sad and glorious humankind.
In Hong Kong tonight I unleash the fire of poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation of ourselves and of human being, meaning, and value, as revolutionary struggle and making mischief for tyrants, one among many with my brothers, sisters, and others throughout the world.
In my pocket I have a jar which contains the death scream of a hero of the revolution and of the sovereignty and independence of Hong Kong, whom the Occupation forces of the Chinese Communist Party regime tried to silence but could not, not while others bear his voice and his witness onward. This is a kind of power like nothing else, and one day it will seize and shake the world, the Chinese Communist Pary and the nation of China it has captured and poisoned along with the rest.
We are coordinating actions among networks of democracy and liberation organizations and movements throughout South Asia and the world, systems of alliances referred to in Asia as the Milk Tea Movement, in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities in China, Thailand, Myanmar and its sister state Sri Lanka, which during the past years have morphed with protean strangeness to include Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, West Papua, the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, India, Kashmir, possibly a whole emerging South Asian Spring, and now newly energized with the outbreak of World War Three and the invasion of Ukraine has solidarity with democracy movements as well as direct agents of change within Russia and its imperial dominion of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya, and Africa and within the dominion of Iran including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, and since October 2023 in Gaza and regionally as a theatrical performance in three dimensions; anticolonial struggle of Palestine versus America and her colony of Israel, second the broader conflict between the Arab-American Alliance and the Dominion of Iran which is driven by the ancient sectarian Sunni-Shia division, and World War Three as Iran’s ally Russia attempts to re-found her Empire, and all of this as civilizational collapse and rebirth in the titanic struggle between forces of liberation and a theatre of cruelty and imperial state terror.
There is a saying attributed as a Chinese curse but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong, “May you live in interesting times.”
We are now living in interesting times; whether we make of our time a curse or a fulcrum with which to change the balance of power in the world from tyranny to democracy and free societies of equals rests with each of us.
Join us.
Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, has a scene in which two young successors to leadership of traditionally rival factions find themselves in love and in need of allies in a subplot which reimages Romeo and Juliet; the rebellious hellion Jonah Breakspear asks his Machiavellian lover Sophie Longerbane, “Who is chaos good for?” To which she replies, “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
Let us bring the Chaos.
The Hunger Games: Salute of the Resistance
The three finger salute from The Hunger Games adopted by the Thai democracy revolution in 2014 was embraced in Hong Kong, now having spread to allied liberation struggles and democracy movements globally as the Salute of the Resistance.
“If we burn, you burn with us”.
To all masters, lords, and rulers in all lands and throughout time:
We are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
There’s a stain of cruelty on our armour, my fellow Americans, to paraphrase the line from Hamlet and Star Trek in season one, episode 13, The Conscience of the King; and the twistings and turnings of time and fate which have brought us to this place are many and strange indeed.
An aphorism from my youth promises us that hurricanes are born with the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings; soon we may have opportunity to test that proposition.
We have answered terror and death with terror and death, and this is both tragic and shameful. Force cannot answer force, nor heal the flaws of our humanity.
On this day and all too often, the Promethean Fire of the Torch of Liberty which illuminates the gates of our nation in New York Harbor did not reach across the wild seas to foreign shores. This is a great tragedy, and it is a tragedy which is ours and for which we must answer.
In Palestine and Lebanon our taxes buy the deaths of children.
Let us return to First Principles with a simple question; Who is suffering and in need of mercy? It is a similar question to the one I ask to determine when and how to use force and violence, Who holds power?, but with a very different direction as to the unfolding of our future.
Here in a Holy Land divided by the sectarian particulars of how to be human together in accord with the will of the Infinite as universal brotherhood and love, crimes which define the limits of the human are perpetrated against our most innocent, utterly powerless, and incapable of threatening anyone; children. Children whom the enemy of our humanity, the state of Israel and its sponsors including America, either brutalize and kill with glee in the hysteria of power or refuse to see and recognize in complicity. And our history surfaces one figure to represent all of the children sacrificed to power and hate, and doomed by the complicity of silence.
I ask you now, all of humankind, to abandon the path of our dehumanization and renounce genocide, ethnic cleansing, wars of conquest and dominion, and crimes against humanity.
I ask, I beg, I demand; I ask you in the name of Anne Frank.
As I wrote in my post of May 21 2024, Abjection Despair Horror: Surviving the Terror of Our Nothingness in the Mirror Of Gaza; In the mirror of Gaza the Abyss looks back at us, and we are captives of the distorted funhouse images of Israel and America, vestiges of dreams as refuge of the outcasts and guarantor of our universal human rights, and the monsters we have now become.
I can recognize nothing in the figures which confront us, and though I hurl defiance at the endless chasms of darkness my words find no limit and return no echoes, as if devoured by the Nothing.
Yet I am neither defeated by the overwhelming force and terror of Authority nor subjugated by despair and learned helplessness, for this is the space where I live, this horror, this joy, this freedom.
As Jean Genet said to me in 1982 during the Siege of Beirut, in a lost cause, in a burning house, in a time of great darkness; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
I hope that this remains true, for all of us as we struggle to emerge from the legacies of our history and seize our power from systems of oppression, for this is the great task of becoming human, in general and in this Rashomon Gate Event now unfolding in Rafah and elsewhere; to dream impossible things and make them real.
There are some things which should be true even if they never were, even if Keats was wrong and finding a thing beautiful does not make it so, even if Thomas Mann was right and love cannot redeem anything, even if as Tolkien feared we have arrived at the Black Gate with no bonds of brotherhood to unify us, even if as did Camus we must claw our way out of the ruins to make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
There are no Israelis, no Palestinians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, plunder, and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
What is Israel, if not a refuge for the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, among them the most demonized and persecuted people of human history, the Jews?
Let us reply with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
Join us.
As I wrote in my post of March 20 2020, Fear and Despair: How Dancing With Our Darkness May Help Us to Learn, Grow, and Transform Ourselves and Our World; In this time of suffering and of fear and despair, of injustice and loss, violence and greed, isolation and loneliness, life disruptive events and cataclysms, of vast power asymmetries of patriarchy and plutocracy, and of the atavistic barbarisms of fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, we are confronted with the truth of the human condition in the darkness of its most negative aspects, but also liberated by these same empty spaces.
When illusion is robbed of its power over us, and the echo chamber of lies is revealed for the hollow misdirection of rapacious predators that it is, a space of freedom opens into which we may grow beyond our limits.
We are now all Edvard Munch’s figure in The Scream, overwhelmed with the horror of a world gone mad, our fear and despair made manifest in our cry for humanity and our lament for the brokenness of the world.
And in this moment of Awakening we seize our power and reclaim ourselves, for the realization of our flawed nature and the wounds of our humanity opens us to the pain of others, confers transformative power and heralds the redemption of the world. Humans are beautiful not in spite of our flaws, but because of them.
When all the evils have escaped the Pandora’s Box of authoritarian force and control, hope remains; for when all our gods and masters have been revealed as humbugs like Oz behind the curtain of their smoke and bluster, the realization that no one has any hold over us is swiftly followed by the terrible and wonderful awareness of our total freedom.
We are the negative spaces of our fears and other demons, figures cast like shadow puppets by the darkness which defines our limits and which we are able to embrace.
Cherish your darkness, for the darkness will set you free.
As I wrote in my post of July 22 2022, Now Is the Time of Monsters; Hope and Despair On the Cusp of Change; The government of Italy has collapsed, an act of sabotage by fascist revivalists who have abandoned the political coalition which has thus far prevented it from tumbling off the edge of a precipice into the Abyss, an existential threat to the survival of her peoples and the basic services of any state which include healthcare.
So does the looming threat of Traitor Trump’s return to power in America’s 2024 elections represent an existential crisis of democracy and of our whole global civilization and world order.
But if the Abyss holds terrors of a precariat held hostage by death and the material needs of survival, the Abyss is also where hope lies, for here the balance of power may be changed in revolutionary struggle.
In this liminal time of the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human, of seizures of power and the performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen, Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, let us look to our glorious past in the Resistance which was victorious in the Liberation of Italy on April 25 and the hanging of Mussolini on April 28 1945.
May Trump and all who would enslave us, all tyrants, theocrats, fascists, monsters, may all of these join Mussolini in death and ruin.
As Slavoj Zizek’s favorite saying goes, a French mistranslation or paraphrase of Antonio Gramsci’s line in his Prison Notebooks “La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati”, literally “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”, as “Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”, which introduces the idea of monstrosity, referential to the historical development of the idea in Michel de Montaigne, Michel Foucault, and Georges Canguilhem’s work The Normal and the Pathological, a dialectical process of mimesis which results in the form of the principle as; “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
Meanings shift, adapt, and change as they transgress boundaries, inhabit public and private spaces, and unfold over vast gulfs of time, and so must we.
As I wrote in my post of December 20 2022, This Christmas, Confront the Meaninglessness of Life Not With Abjection, Despair, and Helplessness But With the Joy of Total Freedom; As we enter the Christmas season, a time much of America will be consumed by orgiastic buying as displays of elite class membership and obligatory feasts often with people we don’t actually like or deeply know, adrift in a universe without imposed values living lives of random chaotic episodes of being which form no grand design, ephemeral and illusory, subjected to totalizing passions and caught in vast invisible systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization enslaved to authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege like Charlie Chaplin eaten by the gears of the machine he serves in The Factory, let us confront the meaninglessness of life and the terror of our nothingness not with abjection, despair, and helplessness but with the joy of total freedom.
When there are no rules, there are no impossibilities.
Merry Christmas, and don’t forget to run amok and be ungovernable.
As I wrote in my post of October 13 2023, Our World Is Destroyed and Recreated in This Ritual of the Black Sun Wherein Our Humanity Is Eclipsed By the Legacies of Our History; As the season of Halloween is signaled tomorrow by the new moon, it opens with a solar eclipse and the Ritual of the Black Sun as symbolized despair, abjection, grief, and fear, illuminated with great beauty and horror in Stanton Marlin’s study of the alchemical works of Jung in The Black Sun: the alchemy and art of darkness, William Blake’s Book of Urizen, and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, my three primary references on this subject.
And this ritual of transformative rebirth occurs in the wake of the war crimes and atrocities of the Hamas terror attack on Israel, which now conclusively from plans and orders found on its slain perpetrators includes the planned mass murders and abduction of school children.
There are two possible replies to an event of this kind, which disrupts and fractures systems of order on the positive side and violates our humanity as degradation and dehumanization on the negative like a Janus coin of mirror reversals; with fear and its mad children rage and violence, or with love and its praxis as compassion and mercy.
To bring harm or healing, enforcement of virtue and the tyranny and terror of wars of imperial dominion and conquest and the centralization of power to authority and carceral states of force and control, or solidarity as guarantors of each others universal human rights and democracy as co owners of the state in a free society of equals.
If we choose war in this moment, and America sends military aid to Israel as a sponsor and collaborator in the genocide of the Palestinians in retribution for this vast war crime and atrocity perpetrated by Hamas to fasten their political control of the people of Gaza, the Age of Tyrants has begun.
If we choose peace and send humanitarian aid both to the people of Israel and of Gaza in the war of annihilation which is coming as Netanyahu gathers his forces to invade, we may yet have a chance for a future democracy to emerge in the region and globally as a United Humankind.
Our best chance to heal the legacies of our history and reunite the peoples of Israel and Palestine is if they turn their backs on those who claim to act in their name, both Netanyahu’s regime and that of Hamas, and refuse to kill each other in service to the power of those who would enslave us.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Yet hope remains for transformative change, the fall of theocratic regimes and the emergence of secular democracy free from the legacies of our history, a history which in the bifurcated and fragmented states and national identities of the region divides one people into Israelis and Palestinians through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in service to the power of tyrants and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, systems of oppression which are our true enemies.
A massive people’s protest movement has erupted both locally and globally, and this gives me hope that we may yet escape the Age of Tyrants, which I predict will unfold as six to eight centuries of totalitarian empires and wars of dominion ending with the extinction of humankind; with 92 to 98 percent probability.
But the chance to salvage something of our humanity and our civilization of democracy and universal human rights does exist, however fragile and unlikely, if we can unite and act in solidarity as each other’s liberators and guarantors of a free society of equals.
As written by Alex Lantier in the World Socialist Web Site of the Fourth International, in an article entitled Mass protests erupt internationally against Israeli war on Gaza; “A week after Palestinians initiated an armed uprising against Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, protests are erupting internationally against Israel’s war on Gaza.
The fascistic regime of Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered 1.1 million Palestinians to flee Gaza City and go south, along roads bombed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Israel—which has now cut off Gaza’s water, fuel and electricity, and whose leaders call the Palestinians “human animals”—is targeting the Palestinians for genocide.
As the scale of the crimes committed by the Israeli regime and its NATO allies has become clear, protests have erupted around the world in bold disobedience of media denunciations of Palestinians, police intimidation and protest bans.
The most significant demonstration Friday took place in New York City, where thousands rallied to oppose the onslaught against Palestine, in open defiance of the unrelenting pro-Israel propaganda of the entire American political establishment and corporate media. In the center of world imperialism, home to the largest Jewish population of any American city, masses of people—including over 1,000 Jews—expressed their revulsion with the unfolding crimes in Gaza.
Other protests on Friday involving hundreds of people were held in Pittsburgh, Portland and Washington D.C., with larger demonstrations planned across the US this weekend. Despite the efforts of the media and politicians to demonize all protests against Israel’s policies as “antisemitic” and to isolate those feeling sympathy for the Palestinians, opposition is building among workers and youth of all backgrounds. A 2021 poll found that one-quarter of American Jews consider Israel to be an “apartheid state” hostile to the Palestinians, a figure that will only continue to grow.
Thousands also took to the streets in London once again on Friday, defying similar propaganda and threats from the British media and political establishment.
A series of larger demonstrations also swept across the Middle East, involving hundreds of thousands of people. In Jordan, mass protests in Amman demanded the opening of Jordan’s border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Protesting crowds marched on the border with Israel, only to be turned back by Jordanian police.
Large protests took place in Sanaa and Tehran. In Cairo, tens of thousands rallied outside the Al Azhar Mosque, chanting “Free Palestine.” Thousands defied a state ban to march in support of Gaza in Tunis. In Iraq, a country that has lost over one million lives after decades of US-led sanctions, war and occupation since the 1991 Gulf War, hundreds of thousands marched in Baghdad.
Protesters in the Middle East are effectively opposing not only the Israeli regime, but also their own governments, which have betrayed the Palestinians for decades. The Arab bourgeoisie’s role is exemplified by the treachery of the Egyptian military dictatorship. Having signed a treaty with Israel in 1978, Egypt has now closed its borders to Palestinians trying to flee Gaza.
In Israel itself, despite the ultra-reactionary political atmosphere fostered by Netanyahu’s government, which has now been joined by the official opposition, there is explosive discontent. Millions joined protests earlier this year against Netanyahu’s attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary. The attack on the judiciary, as a letter titled “Elephant in the Room” from 3,000 predominantly Jewish intellectuals made clear, is intimately tied up with the conditions that led to the Hamas uprising.
The letter states:
(There is a) direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity. …
There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.
All the major imperialist powers stand exposed by their support for Netanyahu and his war on the Palestinians. On Sunday, October 8, the heads of state of France, Italy, Germany, Britain and the United States pledged “steadfast and united support to the State of Israel,” and an “unequivocal condemnation of Hamas.” At a press conference in Qatar on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken doubled down in condoning Israeli crimes.
Asked by a reporter if Israel is “retaliating in a fury” and whether the US supports this, Blinken replied with total hypocrisy and double-talk: “What Israel is doing is not retaliation. What Israel is doing is defending the lives of its people. … I think any country faced with what Israel has suffered would likely do the same thing.”
What message are the NATO powers sending? They aim to create on a global scale a new era of imperialist colonial rule. They brook no resistance to the Israeli state’s illegal, 16-year blockade of Gaza, its denial of food and medicine to the impoverished enclave, and its targeted assassinations of Gaza residents. If this united front of imperialist gangsters were to sum up its policy toward the Palestinian people in one phrase, it would be: “Slaves you were, and slaves you remain.”
In a video released Friday, which has gone almost entirely unreported in the Western media, Hamas official Basim Naim summarized the background of Israeli oppression, which led to the October 7 rebellion.
He said:
We are speaking about a 75-year-old occupation that neglected and ignored all political and legal means to settle the conflict, where the Israeli enemy continued their policy of denial of the Palestinian people’s existence and their national rights. We have repeatedly warned during the past few months and years that the situation on the ground was not sustainable and that the explosion was only a matter of time.
We have warned repeatedly about the Israeli continued violations in Al-Aqsa Mosque and their attempt to change its status quo in an apparent plan to divide the holy mosque spatially and temporally. We have also warned about the state terrorism implemented by the fascist settlers across the occupied West Bank. We have warned about the forceful expulsion of our people from Jerusalem. We have also warned about the systematic crimes against our prisoners, including women and children, in Israeli jails.
And lastly, we have warned about the Israeli siege on Gaza for more than 17 years, which is a war crime that turned Gaza into the biggest open-air prison on earth, where a whole generation has lost all kind of hopes. But unfortunately, no one listened to these warnings, and the international community, especially the Western countries, continue to give Israel the cover at all levels to continue committing its crimes.
In prosecuting their war against Gaza, the Israeli government and Western imperialist powers aim to obliterate this historical background and numb the population with wall-to-wall atrocity propaganda.
While the deaths of Israeli civilians are undoubtedly tragic, the violence that took place occurred in the context of a massively oppressed people rebelling against a heavily armed oppressor. Even if one were to accept all the accounts of Palestinian violence, it only raises the question—what could lead to such violence?
History judges differently the violence of a population rising up against oppression and the calculated resort to mass murder by capitalist state machines armed with vast military and financial resources. The imperialists have always claimed that the resistance of the oppressed to colonialism justifies their savage retribution. In exacting this retribution, they have always portrayed the oppressed as savages and murderers.
In 1899, the Boxers revolted against the division of China into imperialist spheres of influence. Citing the Boxers’ killings of Christian missionaries and their seizure of foreign property, eight imperialist powers sent armies to sack Beijing and massacre the Boxers. Mounting conflicts between these powers over the division of the spoils in China led ultimately to the bloody Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s, which cost nearly 20 million lives, provoking the 1949 revolution that ended colonial rule over China.
In 1904, the Herero people in Namibia rose up against German colonial rule, killing more than 100 German settlers. The German army responded by carrying out the first genocide of the 20th century against the Herero, forcing them into deserts where they died of thirst, or imprisoning them in death camps prefiguring the extermination camps of the Nazi regime. In 2015, German officials formally acknowledged the genocide and offered a state apology.
Netanyahu’s regime and its imperialist allies are resorting to similar methods against Gaza. However, the great anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century that broke out after the Russian revolutions of 1905 and October 1917 did not take place in vain. Among masses of workers and youth internationally, Netanyahu’s barbaric methods provoke outrage. This opposition will grow as the monumental scale of the crimes being planned and committed against Gaza become evident to ever broader layers of workers and youth throughout the world.
The NATO powers’ other justification for backing Netanyahu’s crimes—that they are defending Jews and opposing antisemitism—is collapsing. In reality, they are supporting Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in a close alliance with political descendants of the forces that carried out the Holocaust.
As the capitalist ruling elites plunge into barbarism, a mass movement is emerging in the international working class. Protests against imperialism and Zionism are erupting amid mounting global struggles of the working class. Strikes against exploitation, austerity, inflation and police violence shook all the major imperialist powers this year and will intensify in the weeks and months ahead.
The liberation of Palestine is only possible in the context of the growth of a powerful socialist movement of the international working class, including within Israel itself. This will create the conditions for the overthrow of Zionist chauvinism and the unity of Palestinian and Israeli workers. The struggle against the war in Gaza must acquire a clear, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist character, mobilizing the working class in a struggle for socialism across Palestine and the Middle East and internationally.”
In juxtaposition with this internationalist and revolutionary lens of vision are forces of reaction born of fear and trauma weaponized in service to power, the siren call of armed might and retribution as a form of security, but security is an illusion, and only love can reconcile these conflicted identities of Israeli and Palestinian and heal the systems of division and unequal power which are at the heart of this war which threatens to swallow us all.
As written by Yuval Noah Harari in The Guardian, in an article entitled Israelis and Palestinians are facing their moment of greatest danger since 1948: There is still a slim chance of peace if wiser counsels prevail and other major powers intervene in a coalition of the willing; “Israel has just experienced the worst day in its history. More Israeli civilians have been slaughtered in a single day than all the civilians and soldiers Israel lost in the 1956 Sinai war, the 1967 six-day war and the 2006 second Lebanon war combined. The stories and images coming out of the area occupied by Hamas are horrific. Many of my own friends and family members have suffered unspeakable atrocities. This means the Palestinians, too, are now facing immense danger. The most powerful country in the Middle East is livid with pain, fear and anger. I do not have either the knowledge or moral authority to speak about how things look from the Palestinian perspective. But in the moment of Israel’s greatest pain, I would like to issue a warning about how things look from the Israeli side of the fence.
Politics often works like a scientific experiment, conducted on millions of people with few ethical limitations. You try something – whether increasing the welfare budget, electing a populist president or making a peace offer – witness the results, and decide whether to proceed further down that particular path; or you reverse course and try something else. This is how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has unfolded for decades: by trial and error.
During the 1990s Oslo peace process, Israel gave peace a chance. I know that from the viewpoint of Palestinians and some outside observers, Israeli peace offers were insufficient and arrogant, but it was still the most generous offer Israel has ever made. During that peace process, Israel handed partial control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority. The outcome for Israelis was the worst terror campaign they had experienced until then. Israelis are still haunted by memories of daily life in the early 2000s, with buses and restaurants bombed every day. That terror campaign killed not only hundreds of Israeli civilians, but also the peace process and the Israeli left. Maybe Israel’s peace offer wasn’t generous enough. But was terrorism the only possible response?
After the failure of the peace process, Israel’s next experiment in Gaza was disengagement. In the mid-2000s, Israel unilaterally retreated from the entire Gaza Strip, dismantled all settlements there and returned to the internationally recognised pre-1967 border. True, it continued to impose a partial blockade on the Gaza Strip and to occupy the West Bank. But the withdrawal from Gaza was still a very significant Israeli step, and Israelis waited anxiously to see what the result of that experiment would be. The remnants of the Israeli left hoped that the Palestinians would make an honest attempt to turn Gaza into a prosperous and peaceful city state, a Middle Eastern Singapore, showing to the world and to the Israeli right what the Palestinians could do when given the opportunity to govern themselves.
Sure, it is difficult to build a Singapore under a partial blockade. But an honest attempt could still have been made, in which case there would have been greater pressure on the Israeli government from both foreign powers and the Israeli public to remove the blockade from Gaza and to reach an honourable deal about the West Bank as well. Instead, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and turned it into a terrorist base from which repeated attacks were launched on Israeli civilians. Another experiment ended in failure.
This completely discredited the remnants of the Israeli left, and brought to power Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish governments. Netanyahu pioneered another experiment. Since peaceful coexistence had failed, he adopted a policy of violent coexistence. Israel and Hamas traded blows on a weekly basis and almost every year there was a major military operation, but for a decade and a half, Israeli civilians could go on living within a few hundred metres from Hamas bases on the other side of the fence. Even Israel’s messianic zealots showed little zeal to reconquer the Gaza Strip, and even rightwingers hoped that the responsibilities involved in ruling more than 2 million people would gradually moderate Hamas.
Indeed, many on the Israeli right saw Hamas as a better partner than the Palestinian Authority. This was because Israeli hawks wanted to go on controlling the West Bank, and feared a peace deal. Hamas seemed to offer the Israeli right the best of all worlds: relieving Israel of the need to govern the Gaza Strip, without making any peace offers that might dislocate Israeli control of the West Bank. The day of horror Israel has just experienced signals the end of the Netanyahu experiment in violent coexistence.
So what comes next? No one knows for sure, but some voices in Israel are veering towards reconquering the Gaza Strip or bombing it to rubble. The result of such policy could be the worst humanitarian crisis the region has experienced since 1948. Especially if Hezbollah and Palestinian forces in the West Bank join the fray, the death toll could reach many thousands, with millions more driven from their homes. On both sides of the fence, there are religious fanatics fixated on divine promises and the 1948 war. Palestinians dream of reversing the outcome of that war. Jewish zealots like the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich have warned even Arab citizens of Israel that “you are here by mistake because Ben-Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister] didn’t finish the job in ’48 and didn’t kick you out”; 2023 could enable fanatics on both sides to pursue their religious fantasies, and re-stage the 1948 war with a vengeance.
Even if things don’t go to such extremes, the current conflict is likely to put the last nail in the coffin of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The kibbutzim along the Gaza border have been socialist communes and some of the most tenacious bastions of the Israeli left. I know people from those kibbutzim who, after years of almost daily rocket attacks from Gaza, still clung to the hope of peace, as if to a religious cult. These kibbutzim have just been obliterated, and some of the last peaceniks are either murdered, burying their loved ones, or held hostage in Gaza. For example, Vivian Silver, a peace activist from Kibbutz Be’eri who for years has been transporting ailing Gazans to Israeli hospitals, is missing and likely held hostage in Gaza.
What has already happened cannot be undone. The dead cannot be brought back to life, and the personal traumas will never completely heal. But we must prevent further escalation. Many of the forces in the region are currently led by irresponsible religious fanatics. External forces must therefore intervene to deescalate the conflict. Anyone who wishes for peace must unequivocally condemn the Hamas atrocities, put pressure on Hamas to immediately and unconditionally release all the hostages, and help deter Hezbollah and Iran from intervening. This would give Israelis a bit of breathing space and a tiny ray of hope.
Second, a coalition of the willing – ranging from the US and the EU to Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority – should take responsibility for the Gaza Strip away from Hamas, rebuild Gaza and simultaneously completely disarm Hamas and demilitarise the Gaza Strip.
There are only slim chances that these steps will be realised. But after the recent horrors, most Israelis don’t think they can live with anything less.”
As I wrote in my post of October 17 2023, Chaos Is the Great Hope of the Powerless: Case of the Hamas-Israel War; A wise friend has questioned my valorization of Chaos as a principle of change in the context of Black Saturday, a term which describes the Hamas attack on Israel and the immense forces of terror, death, destruction, fracture, grief, rage, and revenge it unleashed, becoming a single tide of darkness.
Thank you once again for your kindness and your wisdom.
In this moment of tragedy I am thinking of Chaos as a disruptive force of fracture and change which has stripped us bare of our ideologies to reveal the fragile humanity beneath, and may be leveraged for liberty or tyranny by how we respond as a species and global civilization. As Guillermo del Toro writes in Carnival Row, Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.
What do I hope for now, for the peoples of Israel and Palestine? That both may unite to free each other, but first we will need universal humanitarian aid to any one on either side of these lines of division, and a Reckoning for the war crimes of both Hamas and Israel. For Israel took the bait, and gave Hamas the victory; they are now equal as war criminals without legitimacy.
Israel took the bait, and the world is calling them out for war crimes; this may be the end of the Netanyahu alt right regime and the dawn of a new Middle East. I was absolutely expecting Biden and allies to enable Israels Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem; in this I rejoice to be wrong about human nature. Maybe the idea of human rights is not dead. As my mother used to sing to students who asked her to make authorizing statements about anything, artifact of a Shakespeare in Thirty Minutes theatrical show that toured nationally with some of her students in it, bouncing her open hands left and right; Maybe, maybe not, Maybe, maybe not.
No one seems to have noticed publicly that this means Israeli intelligence has been infiltrated. It is also possible that unknown puppetmasters have infiltrated and seized control of both Hamas and Israel, for purposes which are unclear and antithetical to the interests and well being of either. We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, friends.
What Reckoning, for crimes against humanity by an organization of terror which has long been a vanguard of anticolonial revolutionary struggle under the imposed conditions of Occupation, slavery, and a genocidal Blockade?
Not the totalization of the general population of Palestinians in a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing as Netanyahu wishes and Hamas intends as a strategy of delegitimation of the Israel state in the moral equivalence of terror, for if Israel, her patron America, and the international community accept the terms of struggle offered by Hamas they too become organizations of terror, and Hamas wins.
This is a decolonial revolution, and victory goes to the side who can establish the legitimacy and moral supremacy of their story. As my father taught me, Never play someone else’s game.
Hamas also wishes in this provocation to weld the peoples of Gaza to them; this is a primary strategy of fascism and tyranny, to make the people in whose name you claim to act complicit in unforgiveable crimes. Always beware those who claim to speak and act in your name as a strategy of your subjugation.
A third layer of meaning here is the ambiguity of the geopolitical and world-historical forces beyond the Holy Land; Russia, her ally Iran and the Iranian Dominion of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, especially the Assad regime of Syria which has sent forces into Israel as a client state of Russia and Iran, and Hezbollah, which offers many of the social services of a government and may be in the process of emergence as an independent state, or a true empire in the transnational sense like the Holy Roman Empire. The great question here is; has Russia opened a new front of her plan of global conquest and made this a theatre of World War Three?
How does one answer all of this? How bring a Reckoning for the terror of Hamas without authorizing and becoming complicit in the greater terror of Israel’s kleptocratic Occupation and looming genocide of the Palestinians?
The forms that might take give me pause, for they will determine our future, and though I know what I myself must do, I do not like it, and am calling out here in my journals, where I work through the consequences of my decisions before acting on them, for unknown possibilities I myself cannot envision.
Yes, my friend, Chaos has profoundly destructive forms; death among them, ruin and civilizational collapse, the negation of all we have claimed as our identity, but all are also measures of the adaptive range of systems, and can give birth to new forms from this liberated energy. And as you point out, all forces operate in opposite directions at once, creating their own opposition in accord with Newton’s Third Law of Motion. These are not moral forces in balance, but ambivalent forces which contain each other in recursion and processes of change.
So, while our nations try to shatter each other’s truths with overwhelming force and mass terror, I must find a path of least force to salvage what I can of our humanity, and I hope I will not fail as I did at Mariupol and Panjshir.
This may be all we have as humans lost in chasms of darkness and a Wilderness of Mirrors, this refusal to abandon each other to dehumanization, but like our refusal to submit to authority it is a power which cannot be taken from us, even in imposed conditions of struggle designed to produce abjection and learned helplessness, or rage and tribalization as identity politics and the manufacture of consent to be fed into engines of death for the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and tyrannies.
Such ephemeral and insubstantial things, like whispered prayers to abyssal unknowns, figments of love, hope, faith, which belong to the shadows, the delusions of grandeur of beasts harnessed to systems of oppression by others who yet dream that we might become more.
Dream with me.
Embrace our absurdity as flawed things wrestling with immense forces of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization in a mad quest to become human, under imposed conditions of struggle typified by atrocities designed to produce abjection, learned helplessness, and despair, as we are consumed by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege whose primary weapon is division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as identity politics and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Against all of this we have only our solidarity with each other, the redemptive power of love, our refusal to submit or to believe and trust authority which frees us as Unconquered and self created beings and Living Autonomous Zones, and our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves. Powers which cannot be taken from us, and which can seize the power of those who would enslave us.
This is why I practice the art of believing impossible things, but only those I myself have chosen or created. Among these are Liberty, Equality, Solidarity, Truth, Justice, our universal human rights and a United Humankind as a free society of equals in which we are guarantors of each other’s humanity. And crucially, act to make them real. In cases of tyranny and terror, wars of ethnic supremacy, enforcement of virtue as crusades and inquisitions and faith weaponized in service to power,, and other conflicts of national identity, of conquest and imperial dominion, carceral states of force and control, of our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and of all forms of unequal power and systems of oppression, we must bring a Reckoning, especially to the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity regardless of who they may be or in the name of what cause they act, and silence the drums of war.
Dream with me, but act in solidarity to make it real.
As the Mad Hatter says to Alice; “That is an excellent practice, but right now you might want to focus on the Jabberwock.”
Just so.
As I wrote in my post of March 10 2023, On Hope and Despair: Surviving Life Disruptive Events; To a friend with suicidal ideation and facing multiple trauma, life disruptive events, and institutional catch 22s which include class and patriarchal oppression enforced by rentier capitalism and the political theft of our right to life through failure to provide the free universal healthcare which is its precondition, I have written this brief message:
Now is the time to reach out, make connections, and build community. Isolation is dangerous in the extreme for you in this moment. A sea of fellow humans surrounds us, all of whom must wrestle with the flaws of our humanity as imposed conditions of struggle. I hear you in this message, and am afraid. Choose life, my friend, as precarious and filled with pain and fear as it may be; our stories can always change, regardless of the limits of our scope of action and agency.
It may now become possible to reclaim the life which has been stolen from you, and begin to heal and reinvent yourself. May you find peace and joy in this terrible world, my friend.
All I have to offer in this are words, ephemeral and impermanent as leaves taking flight in the wind; a poor substitute for the golden coins which should be laid upon our eyes to bear us to unknown shores where we may be free from the limits of our form and the material basis of our lives under unequal power as imposed conditions of struggle.
We must struggle against such authoritarian forces of coercion as a universal process of becoming human, and against tyranny and terror our best defense is solidarity, loyalty, mutual aid and interdependence, faith in each other, and our duty of care for each other. If these should fail, those who would enslave us win.
A maker of mischief, I; and a bringer of Chaos, bearing songs of liberation. I cannot free us from the systems of unequal power which entrap us, but I can illuminate their limits, flaws, and internal contradictions which will inevitably bring about their collapse, and if we all of us act together we may seize our power to reimagine and transform our possibilities of becoming human and the choices we make about how to be human together.
And maybe one thing more; a spell, if you will, or a wish; I reach once more into Pandora’s Box to problematize and interrogate hope as a balance for despair.
As I wrote in my post of September 27 2020, What Do We Need Now to Forge A Future For Humankind?; We live in interesting times, a phrase attributed in popular culture as Chinese but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong; beset by complex and interdependent problems; existential threats to democracy and to our survival as a species, and confronted by a political crisis of identity driven by pervasive and overwhelming fears and the modern pathology of disconnectedness. This is a moment of decision, with extinction and civilizational annihilation hanging in the balance, of the wonder and terror of total freedom, and our choices will gloriously expand the possibilities of becoming human or cast us into oblivion.
History begins with us, or ends with us.
What do we need now if we are to forge a future for humankind?
So I asked the question three years ago, which I revisit now to recontexualize the praxis of hope as historical and political as well as personal and psychological, one which shapes us both as individuals and as nations.
Here follows a Book of Hope, to balance against despair in surviving life disruptive events, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
What is hope, and how is it useful?
Hope is power, an inherent and defining quality of human being, and a primary force of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization.
Hope dances with faith and love as parts of us which cannot be taken from us, a final space of free creative play which escapes the darkness and those who would enslave us, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and resistant to our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their carceral states of force and control.
Hope is also a fulcrum of change not only for ourselves in becoming human, but also of seizures of power in revolutionary and liberation struggle, a form of poetic vision which allows us to see beyond the limits of our material and social conditions to diagnose systemic flaws and contradictions and find new ways of being human together.
These aspects of hope as recursive processes of change, adaptation, and growth in living systems, social, political, and psychological as well as biological ecologies which construct us, make of hope a kind of freedom inborn in us, and interconnected with ideas of agency, autonomy, and liberty.
How can we find the will and power to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival? This has been the great question of my life posed by existential threats in the first three Last Stands which created and defined me; when the police opened fire on the student protestors my mother and I were among at Bloody Thursday in People’s Park Berkeley 1969, when I was nearly executed by police bounty hunters in Brazil in 1974 for refusal to stand aside from the street children they were authorized to kill for being who the system made them, and in Beirut 1982 when I was given the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet as we refused to surrender to the soldiers who had just set fire to our café and expected to be burned alive.
In my very long journey to becoming who I am now, I began from the position of Camus regarding hope that it is an instrument of our subjugation to authority through faith weaponized in service to power and the falsification of lies, illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use Angleton’s iconic metaphor. Hope for me then must be abandoned if we are to become free; with time I began to see instead hope as a form of freedom, one crucial to our defiance of authority and seizures of power.
First, here is the place from which I began, as I wrote in my post of August 20 2019, On Becoming Human; This morning I was rereading my favorite stories by H.P. Lovecraft on his birthday and writing some thoughts about his work in my literary blog, sister site to this one, when I realized that his surreal mythology illuminates the existential crisis of meaning and values which confronts us in America today and in the world at large in what is rapidly becoming a post-democracy global tyranny under the Fourth Reich, and that we have faced similar peril after both World Wars as western civilization destroyed and recreated itself; how can we go on when the values of the Enlightenment, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, have failed us? It is as if we looked to the heavens for signs and portents of guidance, only to find writ large the words, “I do not exist.”
One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre and Marx or a Lovecraftian one of Absurdist faith, referential to classical sources, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign, tyrannical, and hostile to humanity, ideal figures of Trump and his lunatic presidency of Absurdist-Nihilist Theatre of Cruelty, rests with our solution to the riddle of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils?
Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope in its negative form directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen as we so often do with liberators who become tyrants, or like T.S. Elliot of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bear the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation.
True freedom requires disbelief. Freedom means self-ownership and the smashing of the idols.
Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop lightningbolt awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”
It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.
Now imagine humanity after civilization destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars facing that same awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country, exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one but herself.
Our responses to this awakening to possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.
Everyone possesses and uses both forces just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity, or ruptures to our prochronism, the history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.
For both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their connections. And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and history.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of January 20 2021, The Turning of the Tide: With Inauguration Day Comes the Return of Hope; I have a complex relationship with the idea of hope, with the ambiguity, relativity, and context-determined multiple truths and simultaneity of meaning which defines hope, that thing of redemption and transformative power which remains in Pandora’s Box after all the evils have escaped, as either the most terrible of our nightmares or the gift of the miraculous depending on how we use it.
As the Wizard of Oz said of himself it’s a humbug, but it is also a power which cannot be taken from us by force and control, and like faith of which it is a cipher holds open the door of our liberation and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
As we believe, so we may become.
Human being, meaning, and value originate in this uniquely human capacity to transcend and grow beyond our limits as an act of transformation, rebirth, and self-creation, and as a seizure of power over our identities. Among other things it allows us to escape the flag of our skin and inhabit that of others; to forge bonds through empathy and compassion and enact altruism and mercy.
This is what is most human in us, a quality which defines the limits of what is human, and which we must cherish and conserve as our most priceless gift.
Hope is the thing which can restore us to ourselves and each other, unite a divided nation and begin to heal our legacies of historical inequalities and injustices, and it can be wielded as an instrument which counters fear. Hope is the balance of fear, and fear is a negative space of hope; and because fear births hate, racism, fascism, hierarchies of elite privilege and belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, hope is a power of liberation and of revolutionary struggle.
As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession; One day I crossed beyond our topologies of meaning and value and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden into the unknown, the blank places on the maps of our becoming marked Here Be Dragons, and never returned. I live now where the dragons dwell, and I wouldn’t trade a moment of the life I have lived for any treasure on earth, for I am free.
It happened like this; one day I was driving from my fun job teaching high school to my real work counseling at my very elegant office in San Francisco, and I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this. So I took a wrong turn to the airport and bought a ticket to the other side of the earth. I had no idea where I was flying to, and when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia I found a bus station with a map that showed all the routes ending in the mountains, which were an enormous empty space along the spine of the country. So I took a bus there and got off at the end of the road, where a dirt track led into the forest of the Cameron Highlands, and began walking.
Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.
Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.
What if we told students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all, and the best you can do is survive another day and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the darkness since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance before his capture and imprisonment by Israel, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.
Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have long forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?
Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another last stand, there is hope.
And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.
Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.
Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah (Live In London)
This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate
Confronting the Jabberwock
This post partum psychosis parallels how many of us feel about America now, trapped in a monstrous form we never chose by a monstrous future which we have birthed. Post election psychosis, but also our national Awakening to complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. Now is the Time of Monsters, truly.
Our friend, the Abyss, and my Kit For Hope; a reading list
At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom.
Come and dance with us in a space of free creative play unbound by the limits of fascist, white supremacist, and theocratic-patriarchal terror and propaganda, and let your social media fund joy, hope, and liberty instead.
Join us in Resistance to falsification and the Wilderness of Mirrors that is X; lies and illusions, conspiracy theories and alternate realities, treasonous and dishonorable fascist and Russian propaganda and the subversion of democracy, a poisonous sea of thought control and repression of dissent now become an instrument of state propaganda as Traitor Trump returns to power riding the crest of its wave, and all the while the entirety of our activity on X creates the wealth and power of those who would enslave us.
Follow me here on Bluesky; I’ll follow you back unless your content is sexual exploitation or otherwise that which I cannot endorse or be associated with.
As I wrote in my post of July 25 2024, Elon Musk Bankrolls Trump and the Subversion of Democracy In Order to Subjugate Us All To Artificial Intelligences Under His Command and to Change Humankind Itself; As we are challenged by the fascist-Apartheid ideologist and amoral plutocrat Elon Musk in his bid to simply buy the American state having pledged incalculable wealth to the election campaign of Traitor Trump, we must ask why; what is the value to him of a second Trump Presidency, and what are his goals and plans?
Yes, Trump and Musk are alike as celebrities and kingpins of power and inherited wealth, though Musk is a true plutocrat where Trump’s wealth is largely fictitious and fraudulent, and Trump is merely a former reality television star and pussy grabber where Musk owns a social media platform which gives him terrifying global power as control of the public narrative and the opinion of youth as well as history and the ideology of future generations, much like his forerunners Rupert Murdoch or William Randolph Hearst.
Musk and Trump are also fellow conspirators in the subversion of democracy as major figures of international fascism and white supremacist terror, Musk shaped by the ideology of South African Apartheid and Trump by multigenerational Klu Klux Klan membership and his personal idolatry of Hitler on whose speeches he modeled his own, and according to his ex wife having slept with a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand for years in place of a Bible.
But Elon Musk wants something far more than a Fourth Reich tyranny under Trump from which to launch the re-Nazification of the world; he wants to subjugate us all under artificial intelligences which he controls, and ultimately to change humankind itself.
As I wrote in my post of December 16 2022, Hate Speech is Not Free Speech: the Case of Elon Musk’s Twitter; Mesmerized as by the blinkless predator stare of a cobra or its echo in the Kubrick gaze of Jenna Ortega’s character of Wednesday, we have witnessed the spectacle of violation and degradation of a beloved social media platform by an amoral plutocrat who purchased it to leverage Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, into the White House once more, for the purpose of the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America to a regime of tyranny, and has relentlessly and with feral viciousness promoted white supremacist and antisemitic terrorists and fascist propagandists and marginalized and silenced dissent, impartial investigative journalism, and voices from the center of traditional democracy and its values of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Hate speech is not free speech, and merits no quarter. To fascism we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
In all of the absurd madness of conspiracy theories, alternate realities, rewritten histories, lies and illusions, propaganda and thought control, and the commodification of humankind by big data and pervasive surveillance, and with the examples of monsters of depravity and paranoid fantasy such as Traitor Trump, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, and Elon Musk, of fascist propaganda mills like Fox News and now sadly Twitter weaponized in service to power and the repression of dissent, let us study closely a great truth which now stands revealed on the stage of history; the Fifth Estate has now replaced the institutions of politics as the shaping force whereby we choose how to be human together.
Its been a long process, the fall of democracy; I’m tempted to say it began with Hearst and his 1898 false story of the bombing of an American ship in Cuba as the pretext for the Spanish-American War and our conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as we built our empire on the carcass of Imperial Spain’s; but the historical forces involved are ambiguous and complex. And the mighty have always sought to keep the slaves at their work creating the wealth they enjoy through lies as well as force; lies are cheaper than armies.
As the marvelous and prophetic film Wag the Dog tells us, he who tells the story shapes the response. And we must be very careful who we allow to write our history, and who makes the rules by which it is written, for journalism is a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and electoral democracy requires truths free from the influence of power.
As Lenin asked in the essay that began the Russian Revolution; “What is to be done?”
If we do not seize and nationalize Twitter and any media platform of hate crime or fascist propaganda as a public good owned by us all, we must enact fair rules of play which ensure no one’s speech harms another, either as individuals or as a class of persons.
To create an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
As I wrote in my post of December 12 2023, Elon Musk, Alex Jones, and the Apologetics of Fascist Power; In the notorious fascist soapbox once known as Twitter, a primary instrument of Traitor Trump’s subversion of democracy in the Stolen Election of 2016, we have hate speech masquerading as free speech, as well as a Fourth Reich propaganda factory spinning endless lies, misdirects, and falsification designed to capture the idea of the truth as a pillar of democracy.
In this it is sadly far from alone, though we must recognize it as an enemy instrument of war and act accordingly in purging it from our nation and from all those who love liberty.
When its owner Elon Musk, in his mad quest to transform America into an image of the Apartheid State of South Africa, admitted the Russian agent, former crime lord of a sex trafficking syndicate operating under the guise of a modeling and beauty pageant network and known Epstein associate, and figurehead of the Fourth Reich Donald Trump, I and many other loyal Americans and antifascists quit Twitter.
Recent actions by Musk, in collaboration with Tucker Carlsen, to reinstate the grotesque purveyor of cruelties Alex Jones, who tormented the families of victims of gun violence with unspeakable savagery, calls for more than this in reply.
But first, what has happened?
As written by Miles Klee in Rolling Stone, in an article entitled The Curious Alliance of Alex Jones and Elon Musk: The latest right-wing ideologue to have a ban lifted by X (formerly Twitter) spent months alternately flattering and needling its mercurial owner; “WHEN INFAMOUS CONSPIRACY theorist Alex Jones recorded a video last week saying he hoped Elon Musk would watch an interview he gave to Tucker Carlson, it was clear what he wanted most of all: a comeback.
“Elon Musk says he’s a free-speech absolutist, but still hasn’t let me back on Twitter with my own channel,” Jones said, putting the owner of the site now branded as X in something a bind. Either reinstate the account of a man whose name is practically synonymous with extremist misinformation, or accept the wrath of Jones’ many far-right allies, who bombarded Musk with demands that Jones be allowed on the platform again. It certainly didn’t help that Musk had, a year previously, vowed to maintain Jones’ 2018 permanent ban, saying the InfoWars host’s false claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting being a hoax (which resulted in $1.5 billion in legal judgments against him for the victims’ families) were beyond the pale. (Jones was actually suspended for harassing CNN journalist Oliver Darcy on Capitol Hill in a live Periscope video.)
Musk took the path of least resistance and responsibility, outsourcing the matter to his followers — or, more accurately, to an increasingly far-right X user base almost certain to approve of Jones’ return. Nearly 2 million accounts voted, with more than 70 percent in favor of reinstatement. Musk dutifully complied, just as he had following a similar poll about reinstating Donald Trump last year. (Trump has only tweeted once since, in August, to share the mug shot from his booking at an Atlanta jail on felony charges related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election, instead opting to post on his own platform, Truth Social.)
But the lifting of Trump’s ban more than a year ago amid an early wave of “amnesty” for right-wing misinformation peddlers and extremists — including outright Nazis — came under very different circumstances than the move to unmuzzle Jones. In November 2022, Musk had only just begun his supposed free-speech crusade and wanted to persuade conservatives, who had long blasted Twitter as biased against them, that the site would become politically neutral. Giving Trump a pass, despite the former president’s violations of platform guidelines and attacks on Musk himself, seemed like an effort to simultaneously pander to MAGA world and reap the massive engagement that a singular figure like Trump had historically brought to his once-favorite app.
Meanwhile, the promise to keep Jones in exile made it look as if Musk were carefully considering each executive pardon. But the hard-right element he had started courting was never going to stop with Trump — who never resumed his unhinged tweeting anyway. In articles at the time, Jones’ InfoWars even seized on the reversal of Trump’s suspension to argue that it was hypocritical to deny the radio host’s reinstatement given the Trump decision; Jones himself grumbled a good deal about how Musk could “bring freedom back to the web” and kick off a “human renaissance” — though, of course, not if he continued to stubbornly refuse entreaties to reactivate Jones’ account.
This became the blueprint for a distant relationship between the two, all the way up through the message Jones delivered to Musk ahead of the Carlson interview: Jones continued to flatter Musk as a potential savior of free expression while insinuating that the billionaire was nothing more than a puppet of the globalist cabal if he didn’t hand Jones a powerful megaphone.
That Musk, in Jones’ view, might prove a kind of establishment coward did not appear to be a novel attitude. In a 2018 interview for the YouTube series Valuetainment, as Jones faced the removal of his content from several major tech platforms, he did a round of word association in which the host listed public figures, asking him to relay the first impression that popped into his head. Jones responded “patriot” to a mention of Sen. Ted Cruz, and used an ableist slur to describe LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick. When he heard the name “Elon Musk,” paused a second before answering, “scared man.”
Some of Jones’ ideas clearly clash with Musk’s — he has ranted, for example, that electric vehicles are “the biggest energy guzzlers.” Prior to Musk’s Twitter takeover, an InfoWars contributor went so far as to publish a 2021 video called “Elon Musk Exposed,” calling him a “fraud” and a “fake genius.” While subsequent coverage showed an appreciation for Musk’s increasing hostility toward liberals and leftists in his conservative conspiracism, the outlet nonetheless made room for columns that struck a more skeptical tone (like the May 2022 column “Elon Musk Is Not the Free Speech Superhero We’d Like Him To Be“) and tied him to moral panics. In November 2022, InfoWars questioned the possibly Satanic significance of Musk’s Halloween costume (he seemed to be dressed as a samurai, of sorts), also noting his role at the forefront of “transhumanist technology,” something Jones has condemned as a precursor to “humanity’s destruction.”
That same month, Jones himself took aim at Musk as mass layoffs led to speculation about Twitter’s demise. “He hit the panic button and basically came out and attacked me so that he can get the left off of his back,” Jones complained. “It’s fine to me that he did that, except he went too far and compared himself to Jesus” by using a Bible quote, he said. “If Elon loves to quote Christ so much, in between dressing up like Satan, he should quote Christ’s most famous quote: ‘Let he without sin cast the first stone.’”
The stage was set for the long game: Musk drew praise from Jones and InfoWars whenever he triggered the libs, but also the occasional reminder that he had not proven himself a committed ally to their movement. Over the course of 2023, as Musk’s erratic behavior, dabbling in harmful misinformation, and squabbles with anti-extremism watchdogs led to an advertiser exodus from Twitter, he began to sound more radicalized and in closer alignment with Jones’ brand of blustery defiance, telling departed brands at a conference event in November, “Go fuck yourself.”
In that context, Musk had less to lose by submitting to this latest pressure campaign to bring Jones back. Ad revenue had already cratered, so what’s the downside of platforming a dangerous radical known to call for violence? Following Jones’ return, in an X Spaces chat on Sunday (featuring reactionaries Andrew Tate, Vivek Ramaswamy, Jack Posobiec, Laura Loomer, Rep. Matt Gaetz, and Michael Flynn), Jones and Musk acted as if any past friction between them had all been a misunderstanding. Musk at one point asked Jones to clarify what had happened during “the Sandy Hook thing” (Musk said that “denying the murders of children” is “not cool”), with Jones referring to him in groveling tones as “sir” and falsely claiming that he had just covered the conspiracy theories about the shooting that other people had put forward. Musk evidently took the explanation at face value.
After digging himself into a hole with his constant proclamations of X as a no-holds-barred public square, he may not have had much of a choice. Musk actually admitted that Jones would be “bad for X financially” but stuck to the same rhetoric, piously tweeting that “principles matter more than money.” He can therefore bask in (momentary) adulation from the far right for abandoning his earlier-stated principles. Jones, a man given to railing against “elites,” is subverting his own to heap gratitude upon the richest man alive — this despite the fact that his online footprint remains much smaller than it was before the flurry of bans he received across all his channels in 2018.
Caught in this weird embrace, the duo may have yet stranger days ahead as both strain for influence over online discourse ahead of an election year. And while Musk could theoretically rein Jones in for bad behavior, any discipline would spark enormous backlash from his political cohort — and besides, he has proven susceptible to exactly the kind of outlandish propaganda Jones dishes out. Musk may believe he runs this circus, but when it comes to the command of spectacle, Jones often has the upper hand.”
Who is Elon Musk? Why is he trying to reproduce in America the Apartheid regime of South Africa where his fortune originates?
As I wrote in my post of December 16 2022, Hate Speech is Not Free Speech: the Case of Elon Musk’s Twitter; Mesmerized as by the blinkless predator stare of a cobra or its echo in the Kubrick gaze of Jenna Ortega’s character of Wednesday, we have witnessed the spectacle of violation and degradation of a beloved social media platform by an amoral plutocrat who purchased it to leverage Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, into the White House once more, for the purpose of the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America to a regime of tyranny, and has relentlessly and with feral viciousness promoted white supremacist and antisemitic terrorists and fascist propagandists and marginalized and silenced dissent, impartial investigative journalism, and voices from the center of traditional democracy and its values of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Hate speech is not free speech, and merits no quarter. To fascism we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
In all of the absurd madness of conspiracy theories, alternate realities, rewritten histories, lies and illusions, propaganda and thought control, and the commodification of humankind by big data and pervasive surveillance, and with the examples of monsters of depravity and paranoid fantasy such as Traitor Trump, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, and Elon Musk, of fascist propaganda mills like Fox News and now sadly Twitter weaponized in service to power and the repression of dissent, let us study closely a great truth which now stands revealed on the stage of history; the Fifth Estate has now replaced the institutions of politics as the shaping force whereby we choose how to be human together.
Its been a long process, the fall of democracy; I’m tempted to say it began with Hearst and his 1898 false story of the bombing of an American ship in Cuba as the pretext for the Spanish-American War and our conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as we built our empire on the carcass of Imperial Spain’s; but the historical forces involved are ambiguous and complex. And the mighty have always sought to keep the slaves at their work creating the wealth they enjoy through lies as well as force; lies are cheaper than armies.
As the marvelous and prophetic film Wag the Dog tells us, he who tells the story shapes the response. And we must be very careful who we allow to write our history, and who makes the rules by which it is written, for journalism is a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and electoral democracy requires truths free from the influence of power.
As Lenin asked in the essay that began the Russian Revolution; “What is to be done?”
If we do not seize and nationalize Twitter and any media platform of hate crime or fascist propaganda as a public good owned by us all, and purge our media and our society utterly of the speech, we must enact and enforce fair rules of play which ensure no one’s speech harms another, either as individuals or as a class of persons.
To create an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
As I wrote in my post of August 8 2019, Free Speech Versus Safety From Fascist Terror: Hate, Violence, and the Dark Side of Social Media;” As written in the Essential California newsletter of Tuesday morning: “In his much-cited 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow — an internet pioneer and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — wrote that “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
But the utopian ideals of the early internet are increasingly at odds with the view of it as a place for free speech at all costs, as the darker corners of the web have proved a fertile breeding ground for violent extremism.”
Barlow’s Declaration is a gloriously anarchic and libertarian manifesto; pretty words, indeed, which I endorse without reservation but for this; the right of free speech ends where others are harmed, dehumanized, identified as targets for violence, or restricted in their own freedoms.
The very first and most important example of what is meant by our founding principle of America as “only that government which is necessary to obtain those rights which we cannot obtain for ourselves” is our right to freedom from hate speech which authorizes murder, as no one’s rights may infringe upon another’s. Further, the right to life takes precedence over the right to freedom of information and communication, as we may have one without the other, but not the reverse. Before all else, we must be alive to possess other rights.
Whenever I consider our freedoms of speech and of the press, I imagine myself in the great film V for Vendetta, and secondarily in the classic film Brazil, whose dictum “We’re all in this together” has been the guiding principle of so many of my adventures. Harry Tuttle, played by Robert de Niro, V, played by Hugo Weaving, and the hero of Inglourious Basterds, the magnificent Lt. Aldo Raine played by Brad Pitt, are together my heroes and role models of political action. I have asked myself in many contexts over a lifetime of complex choices, what would our heroes do in this situation?
What would Aldo Raine do if confronted by a global Fourth Reich which has seized control of the American Presidency and has built concentration camps on our border?
What would Harry Tuttle do when a totalitarian regime has enacted pervasive state terror and surveillance, secret prisons, and attacks on truth and justice, equality and freedom?
What would V do when tyranny and plutocracy have stolen our humanity from us, and lost our values in a sea of illusions and lies?
What is Bluesky and why are so many people suddenly leaving X for the platform? Users turn to the heavily moderated network after warnings about misinformation on Elon Musk’s X
July 25 2024 Elon Musk Bankrolls Trump and the Subversion of Democracy In Order to Subjugate Us All To Artificial Intelligences Under His Command and to Change Humankind Itself
We celebrate the ICC issue of the arrest warrant for Netanyahu as a war criminal, for this is a historic victory which changes the narrative of the conflict, delegitimizes Israel through loss of the white hat of immunity conferred by historical victimization, and empowers the Palestinian liberation and independence movement.
The collapse of Netanyahu’s kleptocratic settler regime and of the Israeli state as a theocratic terrorist institution may now be inevitable, and this is the moment for America to free herself of historical complicity in crimes against humanity as a patron of imperial conquest and dominion of Palestine as a nation and of the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
We must now bring regime change to Israel and Netanyahu to justice, but we must also bring a Reckoning to his entire apparatus of state terror and tyranny including the settler militias our own nation has funded.
Our best chance and hope to restore balance in the region and defuse the metastasizing conflict between the Israel and Iran and between America and Russia is still BDS of Israel, but we must also disempower and bring change and a Reckoning to the regime.
This tidal change begins but does not end with Netanyahu on the witness stand where once stood another monster whose space he now occupies, Slobodan Milošević. And it cannot end in Israel alone, but must also bring transformative change and a Reckoning to America and all those complicit in such crimes throughout the world.
Peace be upon us all.
As I wrote in my post of September 19 2024, Israeli Terror Attack Kills Americans With Impunity: No BDS, No Arrest of Netanyahu and Other War Criminals, No Policy of Regime Change in Israel, No Legitimacy of the American State As A Guarantor of Our Universal Human Rights; Our leaders have betrayed us to the Nothing; the cruel and merciless racist genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terror of a theocratic and amoral regime designed for fiendish dual purposes; the imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors and the Final Solution of the Palestinians.
This and this alone does Israel now represent, for the capture of the state by a settler regime to whom only their own fellow Jews are truly human and the subversion of democracy, our universal human rights, and the dream of Israel as a refuge from fascism and hate crime is now total and nearly final. The dream of a new Sepharad dies, and in its place rises a carceral state of force and control based on Jewish Identity politics, the weaponization of faith in service to power, the centralization of power to tyranny, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
With the Gaza War and its myriads of atrocities and crimes against humanity, directly modeled on Putin’s destruction of Mariupol and which both follow the doctrine of Total War as crafted by Hitler and Franco and tested at Guernica, Israel has become a mirror of the death camps her people once survived, a nation of walls and internal borders, quasi-slave labor enforced by a system of barricaded slums modeled on the Bantustans of Apartheid South Africa, and have a permanent war economy which exports globally instruments of the repression of dissent and universal surveillance.
Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis. Here only fear, power, and force are real and have meaning, and we are all threatened by dehumanization and subjugation to a wicked and malign authority which has abandoned human being, meaning, and value for power enforced by terror, abjection, despair, and learned helplessness.
No matter where you begin with hierarchies and taxonomies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
What must be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such different results; the ideology of nonviolent Resistance which Gandhi and Martin Luther King used in victorious seizures of power, and the Russian and all subsequent Revolutions of class struggle and socialist liberation?
In this horrific event of mass terror a great truth is revealed; the liberty and human rights of one people is identical to that of all people, especially those of an Occupied or colonized people and of the imperialist-colonialist people who claim ownership of them, for the imperials are also enslaved by their own empire.
Beware of those who claim to speak and act in your name, for this is a primary strategy of subjugation and the manufacture of consent; especially when coupled with unforgiveable acts committed in your name.
Israel has committed many such unforgiveable acts of dehumanization against the people of Palestine, because they worship the Infinite differently and are less white in the flags of their skins. Yet Israel was founded as a democracy, and the apologists of state terror both in Israel and in America are glad to behave as if this were still true and rally vast wealth and power to the Israeli state and war machine in the name of the Jewish people whom they no longer defend, but use the language of defense, security, and just cause to authorize and legitimate brutal repression and crimes against humanity.
This has all unfolded over seventy years, but this week something new has happened which changes everything; they have killed Americans, volunteer medics and famine relief workers, among their victims of mass random civilian terror.
We American are uniquely positioned to influence Israel and end this war of genocide and ethnic cleansing, for we are the primary sponsors of Israeli tyranny and terror. They are our colony and proxy state in America’s monopolization of oil as a strategic asset which confers us our global hegemony and dominion, and this is instrumental to the business of empire.
As of this week our taxes not only buy the deaths of children in Palestine, but also the deaths of our fellow Americans.
Netanyahu believes he can commit any crime against humanity without losing American money, arms, and political cover, because we are caught on the horns of a dilemma in our elections; we must unite in solidarity to deny Trump the capture of the state lest we lose our democracy utterly and forever, but the Democratic Party thus far refuses to reign in our wayward vassal for fear of losing votes and money. Netanyahu and Trump almost certainly conspired together in the tragedy of Black Saturday to do exactly this, hand Trump the election together with manufacturing a casus belli for Netanyahu’s conquest and genocide of Palestine and the globalization of the conflict in which a Zionist Empire may arise.
There is but one rule in American politics; nobody messes with the grift.
What measures have we taken to bring peace and justice to the twin nations of Israel and Palestine? Genocide Joe refused to vote to charge Netanyahu with genocide, then armed him with the weapons to commit it; in all fairness, this is nothing new, and continues seventy years of American policy. We missed our best chance at defusing this war when we refused to enact Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction against Israel; again nothing new, as this was what we were protesting for when Governor Reagan ordered the police to fire on the students on Bloody Thursday 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley, I a nine year old child holding my mothers hand when she offered a bouquet of flowers to a policeman who replied by cocking and aiming a shotgun at her. We were saved by a police grenade thrown into the crowd, as all devolved into death and chaos; fifty five years later our universities are still using police terror to repress dissent regarding our investment and arming of Israel versus Palestine.
America has no policy of regime change in Israel, has not brought Netanyahu and his regime to trial, has not used BDS to silence the bombs, and now allows the murder of American citizens with impunity.
Kamala laughs; but this time she is laughing at us. We need her to break the power of the fascists who plan to overthrow democracy, and she knows this and that at this point we cannot disavow her or fail to vote for her; but we can keep both democracy and our universal human rights if she and the Democratic Party change their policy of arming and funding Israel without accountability for how those weapons are used. We must bring this to the front of the election as its defining issue; Kamala must lead the change, for the principle of human rights is of equal importance with the preservation of democracy.
Biden failed this test, and abandoned the idea of human rights by refusing to change policy, use BDS, arrest Netanyahu, or stop sending weapons of mass destruction for purposes of ethnic cleansing and genocide, and we purged him from the election because of it, on the pretext of being an imbecile rather than a conspirator in genocide as he was. Yet the Democratic Party wants to ignore the elephant in the room, and makes no mention of the most crucial issue on the ballot other than democracy and abortion, our complicity in crimes against humanity; this is a mistake.
Trump of course is far worse, for he is an active partner and ally of Netanyahu, possibly a co-conspirator as well, who hopes to divide and conquer America by making us complicit in the unforgivable crimes of Israel. This we must resist and meet with solidarity and a United Humankind, but we must also recognize and acknowledge the complicity of the Democratic as well the Republican Parties in the crimes against humanity of the state of Israel.
Our lives count as nothing against the power offered by Zionist paymasters; we have not even declared AIPAC a terrorist organization.
Now is the moment to free ourselves from capture of the state by forces inimical to our humanity and our liberty. If we cannot do so now, rallying to the bloodied shirt of our fellow Americans, we never will.
Among the legacies of the past which we drag around behind us like an invisible reptilian tail, there are those which must be kept and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
As I wrote in my post of July 24 2024, Tyrant of Völkisch-Nationalen Hebräertum, Hebrew National Socialism, Netanyahu Addresses Congress When He Should Be On Trial For Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity; Völkisch-Nationalen Hebräertum; an interesting phrase created by the founders of the Zionist project to describe themselves, which frames the design of the state of Israel within the ideology of the Nazi Party as its model and counterpart, speaks to us today from the august lectern of the United States Congress.
The First Lie of Tyrants is that they speak for the people in whose name they wield power, and further centralize power to authority through fear and divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, birthing fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Everything the enemy says is a lie.
No matter where you begin with boundaries and hierarchies of membership and otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Look to Gaza for proof, and as an oracle of our future should we align ourselves with the path of tyranny and not of Liberty.
In this time of darkness, under the shadows of fascist tyranny both here in America embodied by the Party of Treason which has invited a war criminal to dictate to us all the terms of our nation’s engagement with his regime, and in Israel where fascist tyranny and terror has captured the state, these two abominations seek to legitimize each other as political campaign performances as mass protests in our nations and throughout the world challenge and defy their seizure of power over us and its consequences for the Palestinian Genocide and the imperial conquest and dominion of Gaza and the whole of the Middle East.
At stake here are first the idea of universal human rights, second the subversion of democracy and a free society of equals globally, and third the danger that broadening the Gaza War into a war between the Arab-American Alliance which includes Israel as our colony and proxy state and the Iranian Dominion which includes Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen will draw into its maelstrom all of NATO versus Russia, a Third World War now ongoing in several theatres but not yet a nuclear one or direct superpower conflict, and a war in which much of humankind will die, an Age of Tyrants will begin, and civilization will fall.
And if fascist tyrannies can replace democracies and the Third World War becomes a universal conflict of imperial powers and Orwellian totalitarian nightmares, either we will emerge a millennia from now as scattered bands of savages brutalized and dehumanized by centuries of war and tyranny, or our species will become extinct before then. In ninety eight or more possible futures out of every one hundred, humankind is already doomed.
But there is that slim Forlorn Hope that one day something like ourselves discovers the ruins of our civilization, and begins once again to wonder and to question.
Today as Netanyahu sings his siren songs of fear, power, and force to America and the world, let us give to fascism and to tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of May 29 2021, Palestine and Israel: State of the Peace; A fragile peace holds for now in the volatile, chaotic, and rapidly changing relationships between Palestine and Israel, and between these partners in the imaginations of America and the international community. It is an uneasy dance of identity, memory, and history performed to the lyrical songs of narratives of victimization, songs which seduce and shape us to the service of power and authority.
Before the stage of the world and the witness of history, we can see here in real time the processes and consequences of divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as primary informing, motivating, and shaping forces of human being, meaning, and value.
For those of us who participated on May 10 2021 not in the defense of al Aqsa, a thing of grandeur fit for the deaths of heroes, but in defense of the families at prayer which Israel attacked and the unarmed women and children hunted through the maze of a derelict antiquity, disembodied screams in a land of fear and darkness, the Third Intifada was born on that night as a hope beyond the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity for reimagination, transformation, the redemptive power of love to heal the divisions of exclusionary otherness and the pathology of our disconnectedness, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
What is the state of the peace? How we answer this question hinges on implicit value judgements and becomes a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, and a measure of our character. In this as in many things, I recall Monet’s description of the meaning of his art as a form of metaphysics and investigation into the soul of humankind; “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks outward, but the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.”
So our question becomes, what does this look like from the perspectives of its partners, Palestine, Israel, and America?
America vacillates with Joe Biden on the cusp of a vast and horrific realization; that we have for over seventy years been the sponsors of tyranny and state terror, and responsibility for the endless litany of woes which have shaped the peoples of Palestine are shared by all of us and by our proxy state of Israel. It parallels our national reckoning with the legacies of slavery and our systemic racial inequalities and injustices which awaken with the Black Lives Matter protests, like our reckoning with Patriarchy and sexual terror in the #metoo movement, and with the consequence of capitalism for our extinction in the Green New Deal and the global ecological movement ignited by the Pythian visionary Greta Thunberg.
An awakening and tidal change whose full consequences and potential for the reimagination and transformation of humankind are incalculable, our political, ecological-material, sexual, and racial social justice movements represent a total civilizational shift and a revolution in universal human rights which will one day utterly change and renew our ideas of human being, meaning, and value.
Francis Fukuyama was wrong when he predicted that we live at the end of history; we live at the beginning of a new history. But he was exactly right when he diagnosed its principles of operation in The End of History and the Last Man; “It was the slave’s continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master.”
I hope we are at the beginnings of becoming human. I fear that our historical legacies may become traps, falsifications, assimilative and colonizing narratives wherein tyrannies of authorized identities may steal our souls. This is the problem of the Hobgoblin’s broken mirror in Anderson’s The Snow Queen; we are lost in a world of distorted images, captured echoes, and illusions. This, too, we must resist.
Israel is caught in the jaws of its history, held captive by Netanyahu’s regime of kleptocratic fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but also a victim which has become a dark mirror of her abuser. Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis; fear, power, and force are not the only things which have meaning, nor do we live in a world wherein love is without redemptive power.
In his massive campaign of ethnic cleansing and repression of dissent, and in his diplomacy of terror and negotiations by missile fire, Netanyahu plays to his own alt-right constituents as their figurehead. But he may have miscalculated international reactions; he has been provoked into exposing the true nature of the Occupation, and the White Hat conferred by narratives of historical victimization is slipping.
The Third Intifada has accomplished its goals of changing the narrative, fracturing American support for Israeli militarism and advancing support for Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction, moving a decades old issue to center stage, and timed to the vote on the massive arms deal now in Congress. At least, those were my goals in the wake of our defense of the people of Palestine at al Aqsa.
Others among the defenders of Palestine have their own plans and objectives; certainly Hamas emerged as the clear victor of the struggle, having seized authority from the Fatah government of Palestine through active defense of its people, and rendering the elections Abbas refuses to call irrelevant. Hamas has delegitimized the Palestinian Authority, and stained its partnership with the Israeli government as collaboration, while the Third Intifada, waged by Hamas but also dozens of other factions, special forces from a number of allied governments, and madmen like myself, has called into question the idea of the Two State Solution.
Of Hamas and of all revolutionaries I say this; Any who stand between the tyranny and state terror of conquest, enslavement, and death, and the lives of innocents are heroes and champions of our humanity. The particulars are irrelevant.
Are we not our brother’s keepers?
There is a path forward beyond the dichotomous paradigm of a dual identity; abandon the Two State Solution and reimagine and transform Israel and Palestine as a united nation under secular law and designed to safeguard equality and universal human rights.
America’s enormous financial and military sponsorship of the state of Israel provides a very big lever with which to change the balance of power. I advocate BDS when it means peace and demilitarization; we must fund and shape ourselves to constructive and not destructive ends, to love rather than hate and to hope rather than fear.
Build democracy in Israel and we also build justice and equality for its minorities, exactly as in America. I believe we must liberate the peoples of Israel from a fascist regime of blood, faith, and soil, for the beneficiaries of state terror and tyranny are also subjugated by it. This is the great internal contradiction of authoritarian power as fascism; it is a system which dehumanizes and instrumentalizes even those in whose name it perpetrates its crimes against humanity as a strategy of authorization and the manufacture of consent, and why it must inevitably consume itself.
As Israel prepares its Final Solution to the problem of Palestine, America does nothing. Nothing to stop crimes against humanity, and everything to provide the criminals with arms and other support. We bear responsibility for these crimes with our proxies in Israel.
The people who lived near the Nazi death camps claimed they knew nothing of the Holocaust, nothing about the vast rain of human ash which blanketed their towns and stained them with its silent crimes. But we know. How shall we answer, when we knew and did nothing?
As I wrote in my post of January 5 2023, Netanyahu’s Israel Announces Its Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem; Inscribed upon the iron gates of Netanyahu’s Israel are the words; “Work is Freedom”, and as at Dachau and Auschwitz, it is always a lie.
How has the dream of Israel, a homeland and safe haven for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, a people historically among the world’s most persecuted, marginalized, and vilified minorities, become a proxy of American dominion through control of the strategic resource of oil behind the fig leaf of narratives of victimization which confer legitimacy and moral authority, a militarized theocratic society whose vast military power defends Jewish peoples everywhere, but also perpetrates the conquest, enslavement, and genocide of the Palestinians in the world’s oldest Occupation?
Why create a Brave New World of walls and borders, surveillance and brutal repression?
Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis.
No matter where you begin with hegemonies of the elect, in this unique case whose deed of title to the lands of Israel is signed in the Bible by the Infinite, and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a wanted man – and he has only himself to blame
אנו חוגגים את סוגיית ה-ICC של צו המעצר לנתניהו כפושע מלחמה, שכן זהו ניצחון היסטורי שמשנה את הנרטיב של הסכסוך, עושה דה-לגיטימציה לישראל באמצעות אובדן הכובע הלבן של החסינות שמעניקה קורבנות היסטורית, ומעצים את השחרור הפלסטיני. ותנועת עצמאות.
קריסת משטר המתנחלים הקלפטוקרטי של נתניהו ושל מדינת ישראל כמוסד טרור תיאוקרטי עשויה להיות כעת בלתי נמנעת, וזה הרגע של אמריקה להשתחרר משותפות היסטורית לפשעים נגד האנושות כפטרונית של כיבוש קיסרי ושליטתה של פלסטין. אומה ושל רצח עם וטיהור אתני של העם הפלסטיני.
כעת עלינו להביא את שינוי המשטר לישראל ולנתניהו לדין, אך עלינו גם להביא חשבון לכל מנגנון הטרור והעריצות המדינתיים שלו, כולל מיליציות המתנחלים שמימנה אומתנו.
הסיכוי והתקווה הטובים ביותר שלנו להחזיר את האיזון באזור ולנטרל את הסכסוך הגרורות בין ישראל לאיראן ובין אמריקה לרוסיה היא עדיין ה-BDS של ישראל, אבל עלינו גם לבטל את הכוח ולהביא שינוי וחשבון למשטר.
השינוי הגאות הזה מתחיל אבל לא מסתיים עם נתניהו על דוכן העדים שבו עמדה פעם מפלצת נוספת שאת שטחה הוא תופס כעת, סלובודן מילושביץ’. וזה לא יכול להסתיים בישראל לבדה, אלא חייב גם להביא שינוי מהפך והתחשבנות לאמריקה ולכל השותפים לפשעים כאלה ברחבי העולם.
שלום לכולנו.
Arabic
لنصر!
نحتفل بإصدار المحكمة الجنائية الدولية مذكرة اعتقال بحق نتنياهو باعتباره مجرم حرب، لأن هذا انتصار تاريخي يغير رواية الصراع، وينزع الشرعية عن إسرائيل من خلال فقدان القبعة البيضاء للحصانة الممنوحة من خلال الضحية التاريخية، ويعزز حركة التحرير والاستقلال الفلسطينية.
إن انهيار نظام نتنياهو الاستيطاني اللصوصي والدولة الإسرائيلية كمؤسسة إرهابية ثيوقراطية قد يكون الآن أمرًا لا مفر منه، وهذه هي اللحظة المناسبة لأمريكا لتحرير نفسها من التواطؤ التاريخي في الجرائم ضد الإنسانية كراعٍ للغزو الإمبراطوري والسيطرة على فلسطين كأمة والإبادة الجماعية والتطهير العرقي للشعب الفلسطيني.
يجب علينا الآن جلب تغيير النظام في إسرائيل ونتنياهو إلى العدالة، ولكن يجب علينا أيضًا محاسبة جهازه بالكامل من الإرهاب والاستبداد بما في ذلك ميليشيات المستوطنين التي مولتها أمتنا.
إن أفضل فرصة وأمل لدينا لاستعادة التوازن في المنطقة ونزع فتيل الصراع المتفاقم بين إسرائيل وإيران وبين أمريكا وروسيا لا يزال يتمثل في مقاطعة إسرائيل وسحب الاستثمارات منها وفرض العقوبات عليها، ولكن يتعين علينا أيضًا نزع القوة وإحداث التغيير ومحاسبة النظام.
إن هذا التغيير الهائل يبدأ ولا ينتهي بنتنياهو على منصة الشهود حيث وقف ذات يوم وحش آخر يشغل مكانه الآن، سلوبودان ميلوسيفيتش. ولا يمكن أن ينتهي الأمر في إسرائيل وحدها، بل يجب أيضًا أن يحدث تغييرًا تحويليًا ومحاسبة لأمريكا وكل المتواطئين في مثل هذه الجرائم في جميع أنحاء العالم.
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 to be interrogated in open debate in a public forum; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Among his many lies and crimes in the subversion of our democracy, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, proclaimed a 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. We must disavow and ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets of this anniversary and instead make the public debate and 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 combine viciously in our triumphalist narratives of the Puritans as founders of America. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21 1620, its celebrations have been historically promoted through our schools as a year round ongoing campaign and glorification of the Conquest and the idea that American identity is founded in the Puritans as an iconography of racial and religious superiority. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
The Idea of Thanksgiving and American Identity, a reading list
Legacies of America’s Founding Fascist State: Slavery
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, by Nikole Hannah-Jones
History, memory, identity, the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others including those who would enslave us, who are and can become and who decides; all of this is a ground of struggle against systems of oppression, falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and often a shifting ground, constructed of relative truths as a Rashomon Gate of human being, meaning, and value.
Brazil’s embrace of a national holiday on the date of the great slave revolt leader Zumbi’s death in glorious battle at the hands of colonialist forces is a case study of what I term the Narrative Theory of Identity, in which self construal is a form of revolution and the primary defining act of becoming human.
Celebrate with us the great warrior, King, and figure of liberation Zumbi and his defiance unto death of those who would enslave us, and the free republic of Palmares he led in anticolonialst revolution and a century long war of independence against vast forces of imperial conquest and dominion and systems of white supremacist oppression and terror, whoever he may have been and whatever rebel kingdom he championed, for all that truly matters is that he holds an imaginal space we each of us may step into and become, no matter the wretchedness of our initial conditions.
That a man lived and was real who refused to submit is enough for us to remember and dream into being, for each of us may become that man who we dream.
As written by Tiago Rogero in The Guardian, in an article entitled Brazil celebrates Black Consciousness Day as national holiday for first time: Legacy of African Brazilians honored on 329th anniversary of resistance leader Zumbi’s death by Portuguese forces; “During the more than 350 years during which slavery was legal in Brazil, harsh conditions prompted a string of uprisings, often resulting in the establishment of quilombos – independent communities formed by escaped Africans who were formerly enslaved, and their descendants.
None were more prominent than the one known as Palmares, where, in the 17th century, as many as 11,000 people lived in a string of communities across parts of the north-eastern states of Alagoas and Pernambuco.
But the roughly 100-year history of what historians regard as the most significant resistance movement against slavery in Brazil began to unravel on 20 November 1695, when its most famous leader, Zumbi, was captured by Portuguese colonial forces and killed.
Three hundred and twenty-nine years later, the date will for the first time be marked as a national public holiday: Black Consciousness Day, which has been a longstanding demand of Black movements that still face attacks from the far right.
A series of events – including at least 38 in São Paulo alone – will mark the date nationwide, celebrating Zumbi, Palmares and the ongoing fight for racial equality.
“Palmares was the largest quilombo in the Americas, both in terms of its longevity and population,” said Danilo Luiz Marques, a historian and professor at the Federal University of Alagoas.
Some researchers have described Palmares – whose first records date back to 1590 – as the earliest form of a republic to emerge on Brazilian soil. Marques, however, argues that it was a Bantu kingdom, reflecting the central-African language family to which most Africans brought to Brazil belonged.
Black movements in Brazil have celebrated the names of Zumbi and Palmares since the early 20th century at the earliest, but it was only in 1971 that 20 November became a key date.
Activists had sought a date to contrast with another historically associated with Black people: 13 May, the day slavery was abolished in 1888.
Rather than celebrating Black individuals, however, 13 May had traditionally been used to exalt the white princess who signed the abolition decree: Isabel, then the regent of the Brazilian empire.
“The princess was glorified as if she had granted a favour to the enslaved people; as if she were a heroine,” said Deivison Campos, a historian and professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul.
“The Palmares group sought to counter this narrative, proposing 20 November as a way to honour the collective struggle for the inclusion of Black people in Brazilian society,” he said.
Today, 13 May is still celebrated, with Black activists arguing it cannot be ignored since abolition was primarily the result of Black resistance. However, 20 November has become so popular that November is now informally known as Brazil’s Black Consciousness Month.
The law to make Black Consciousness Day Brazil’s 10th national holiday – signed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in December 2023 – was passed amid significant resistance from conservatives.
During the presidency of far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, Sérgio Camargo, the then head of the Palmares Foundation – a federal body established in 1988 to promote African-Brazilian culture – harshly criticised the 20 November holiday, labelling it the Day of Black Victimisation, the Day of the Black Mind Enslaved by the Left or the Day of Resentment for the Past.
Some within the far-right even doubt the existence of Palmares or its most famous leader despite extensive historical evidence. “Falsehoods have always been used to attack Black history,” said Marques.
Brazil’s largest television network, Rede Globo, will mark the date with a 50-minute primetime special focusing on the wrongful imprisonment of Black individuals based on photographic identification – a widespread issue in the country.
“In Brazil, Black people continue to be imprisoned, deprived of freedom, a healthy life and the chance to realise their dreams simply because they are Black,” said the special’s creator and presenter, Clayton Nascimento.
“It’s important that 20 November is, for the first time, a public holiday because it allows us to pause and reflect on Brazil’s Black history. We were the ones who built this nation,” he added.”
As written in 2019 by Laurence Blair in The Guardian, in an article entitled History of free African strongholds fires Brazilian resistance to Bolsonaro: Quilombo dos Palmares – founded by Africans who escaped slavery – maintained its independence for 100 years and has become a touchstone for a new generation; “Apalm-fringed ridge rises above the plains of Alagoas in north-east Brazil. Just a few replica thatched huts and a wall of wooden stakes now stand at its summit, but this was once the capital of the Quilombo dos Palmares – a sprawling, powerful nation of Africans who escaped slavery, and their descendants who held out here in the forest for 100 years.
Its population was at least 11,000 – at the time, more than that of Rio de Janeiro – across dozens of villages with elected leaders and a hybrid language and culture.
Palmares allied with indigenous peoples, traded for gunpowder, launched guerrilla raids on coastal sugar plantations to free other captives, and withstood more than 20 assaults before falling to Portuguese cannons in 1695.
“Hundreds threw themselves to their deaths rather than surrender,” said local guide Thais “Dandara” Thaty at the historical site in Serra da Barriga. In her telling, those killed included Dandara – her adoptive namesake – captain of a band of warrior women, whose husband Zumbi is similarly shrouded in myth as a fearless Palmarian commander.
About 5 million enslaved Africans were brought across the Atlantic to Brazil between 1501 and 1888. Many escaped, forming quilombos, or free communities.
Three centuries later, the remarkable saga of Palmares is being seized on once more as a symbol of resistance against Brazil’s rightwing president and the country’s pervasive racism towards its black and mixed-race majority.
A pair of new television and Netflix documentaries, screened in late 2018 and this June, have examined the legacy of Palmares. In March, the victorious carnival parade of Mangueira samba school highlighted Dandara among a lineup of overlooked black and indigenous heroes. Later that month, Brazil’s senate voted to inscribe Dandara in the Book of Heroes in the Pantheon of the Fatherland, a soaring, modernist cenotaph in Brasília.
Angola Janga, a graphic novel charting the rise and fall of Palmares, has won a string of awards. “Many people want an alternative view, to try to escape the one-sided, one-dimensional vision of our history imposed by the Portuguese and Brazilian elite,” said author Marcelo D’Salete, whose painstakingly researched book, including maps and timelines alongside striking monochrome illustrations, has been widely used in classrooms.
“Quilombos in general are very big right now,” said Ana Carolina Lourenço, a sociologist and adviser to one recent documentary on Palmares. Young Afro-Brazilians have even coined a verb, she added – to quilombar – meaning to meet up to debate politics or simply celebrate black music, culture and identity.
This renewed prominence coincides with a sharp rightward turn in Brazilian politics. Jair Bolsonaro has denied that Portuguese slavers set foot in Africa, and vilified the roughly 3,000 quilombos dotted across Brazil today – poor and marginalised Afro-Brazilian communities, often descended from fugitive slaves – branding their residents “not even fit for procreation”.
The president has sought to erode the landholding rights of quilombo communities in favour, critics argue, of the powerful agribusiness sector. Police killings, mainly of Afro-Brazilians, in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have also risen sharply in 2019 with Bolsonaro’s encouragement.
Earlier this month, footage of supermarket security guards whipping a bound and gagged black teenager for allegedly shoplifting, prompted reflections on the lasting legacy of slavery.
For centuries, writers portrayed Palmarians merely “as runaway blacks and outlaws who rebelled against the crown”, said the Alagoas historian Geraldo de Majella.
It was only in the mid-20th century that historians began to reconstruct its story via Portuguese archives, often in Marxist terms. Meanwhile, “black militant movements took up the flag of Palmares as a movement of national liberation,” De Majella explained. The largest guerrilla group during the 1964-85 military dictatorship – the Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard – counted former president Dilma Rousseff among its members.
Lula, the former president, simultaneously bolstered recognition of Palmares and the legal rights of present-day quilombos. 20 November – the date the Palmarian leader was killed – was officially adopted as the National Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness in 2003.
In the same year, public schools were legally required to teach Afro-Brazilian history.
But limited archaeological evidence and the absence of Palmarian sources has encouraged freewheeling interpretations. Today, perhaps drawing on the historical presence of advanced metalworking at the site, some compare Palmares with Wakanda, the hi-tech, Afrofuturist utopia of Marvel’s Black Panther.
But the inclusion of Dandara – whose first written mention occurs in a 1962 novel – in the Pantheon divided opinion. “I absolutely defend creative freedom in the way people look at our history,” said D’Salete. “But we need to take care to differentiate between fact and fiction.”
Fernando Holiday, an Afro-Brazilian YouTuber and conservative activist, has noted that Palmarian society had monarchical elements and also kept captives. “I’m sorry to disappoint leftist and black leaders, but today we’re commemorating a farce,” Holiday said in a video. “Zumbi wasn’t a hero of abolition.”
But Palmares and other examples of revolt and resistance, D’Salete argued, “are important as other ways of understanding our history … so people can imagine and build another kind of society that is very different to one just based on violence and oppression”.
That legacy of violence is apparent in Tiningu, a remote quilombo in Pará state. The community has battled to receive legal recognition, threatened by the ranchers and landowners who have cut down much of the surrounding rainforest. One resident was murdered by a rival soybean farmer on the eve of Bolsonaro’s election. Here, Palmares is not merely history but a source of hope.
“Zumbi was the beginning of everything,” said local teacher Joanice Mata de Oliveira, whose school is daubed with the names of African nations. “He was the one who began our fight.”
As I wrote in my post of January 12 2023, A History of the Revolution in Brazil and Fascist Counter-Revolution: Liberty Versus Tyranny, Lula Versus Bolsonaro; In the wake of the collapse of Bolsonaro’s fascist counter-revolution and coup attempt in Brazil, Lula’s swift reaction in the mass arrests of the treasonous brownshirts who stormed the offices of the government in imitation of Trump’s failed January 6 Insurrection, itself modeled on his idol Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, and the stunning nationwide repudiation of Bolsonaro and his failed capture of the state by the victorious peoples of Brazil, has now begun a new phase of struggle with the manhunt for those who fund and organize fascist tyranny, much like that ongoing now in America for two years.
An insidious and far reaching conspiracy against democracy linking the Trump and Bolsonaro crime families and the forces of reaction in America and Brazil begins to emerge, mixing familiar malefactors and Fourth Reich apologists like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson with unknown freaks of nature like Luiz Philippe de Orléans e Braganza, who seeks a return to the throne of Brazil through Trump and Bolsonaro as proxies and is now scuttling from beneath his rock like the ravenous and vile crawling thing all aristocrats are beneath their gold paint, conspiracies which widen to engulf whole networks of white supremacist terror, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, plutocratic and oligarchic theft of public wealth as terminal stage capitalism seeks to free itself from its host political system, and the xenophobic and self-righteous carceral states of force and control which they spawn as instruments of elite wealth, power, and privilege.
Our great enemy is the global Fourth Reich, which transforms itself ceaselessly and adapts to the conditions of whatever nation it targets for subversion and capture, and the interconnections between regimes of fascist tyranny are manifold and subtle. Fascism wears many masks, and like an ambush predator in nature moves among us behind mirages of lies and illusions, rewritten histories and stolen voices, images which capture and distort. Here is a ground of struggle in which we all of us must fight, if we are to seize control of our own identity under falsification and division as imposed conditions of struggle.
As written in the Netflix series Wednesday, episode three Friend Or Woe:
“Principal Weems, bracing Wednesday in her office for sabotaging the celebration of the Pilgrim leader who burned the original Outcasts alive and built the town on their stolen land and graves, a story repeated endlessly in our all too real history; “You’re a trouble magnet.”
Wednesday: “If trouble means standing up to lies, decades of discrimination, centuries of treating outcasts like second-class citizens or worse…”
Principal: “What are you talking about?”
Wednesday: “Jericho. Why does this town even have an Outreach Day?
Don’t you know its real history with outcasts? The actual story of Joseph Crackstone?”
Principal: “I do. To an extent.”
Wednesday: “Then why be complicit in its cover up? Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
Principal: “That’s where you and I differ. Where you see doom, I see opportunity. Maybe this is a chance to rewrite the wrongs, to start a new chapter in the normie-outcast relations.”
Wednesday: “Nothing has changed since Crackstone. They still hate us. Only now they sugarcoat it with platitudes and smiles. If you’re unwilling to fight for truth…”
Principal: “You don’t think I want the truth? Of course I do. But the world isn’t always black and white. There are shades of gray.”
Wednesday: “Maybe for you. But it’s either they write our story or we do. You can’t have it both ways.”
Here is a History of the Revolution in Brazil as I have lived it;
As I wrote in my post of October 30 2022, Victory in Brazil: “We are going to live new times of peace, love and hope” vows Brazil’s New President Lula as He Begins the Restoration of Democracy; We celebrate a Forlorn Hope vindicated and become glorious in the victory of the peoples of Brazil and their champion Lula, with dancing in the streets and running Amok beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden.
A monster and tyrant has been driven from his castle, and this is always cause for celebration. We will always have this moment of triumph, and the hope it holds for our future, regardless of the trials to follow. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse is up to each of us to live and make real; but things are now possible which yesterday were not, and this I call victory.
With the words of Glinda to Oz I congratulate Lula and the peoples of Brazil; ‘We’ve waited a long time for you, Wizard.” And we really need you to be the Wizard we hope you are.
A great work now begins, as like Biden in America, Lula in Brazil leads the Restoration of Democracy in a nation whose systems, structures, institutions, values, and ideals have been damaged by fascist subversion, disruption, and fracture, but whose people emerge from the crucible of their forging unconquered and renewed.
One day we will be a United Humankind and a free society of equals, and Lula like Biden will be remembered for as long as there are human beings as among the founders of a new humanity and civilization, whose vision will shape our being, meaning, and value, inform our choices about how to be human together for millennia, and motivate our discover of the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us each do what we can to make the dream of democracy real.
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2021, Brazilians Seize the Streets to Demand the Resignation of Bolsonaro; The horrific death toll of Bolsonaro’s inept and corrupt handling of the Pandemic, the campaign of ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, the plunder of public wealth and natural resources by a plutocratic elite, the vast precariat of a nation poised on the edge of collapse; all these and one thing more have brought the people of Brazil into the streets this week to demand the resignation of the tyrant Bolsonaro; the brutal repression of a kleptocratic fascist regime of force and violence.
The use of force and violence fails at the point of resistance and refusal to submit, and power is a fragile and hollow illusion which may be dispelled by exposure and challenge of authority, for who cannot be controlled is free. Regardless of the death squads and sexual terror, of the enormous military might of the government of Brazil as a host structure of racist elite hegemony, a people who do not recognize the authority of the state and who meet repression with disobedience cannot be subjugated.
Every Brazilian in the streets today who challenge and defy state terror has won their freedom, for they cannot be enslaved by those who would be our masters. So begins the end of tyranny in Brazil; we can help the people of Brazil liberate themselves and establish a true democracy as a free society of equals by shaping our policy to such ends.
The people of Brazil have spoken; how shall we answer them?
As I wrote in my post of March 11 2021, Brazil Reclaims Its Heart: the Return of Lula da Silva, Champion of the People; Lula da Silva, Champion of the People, has had the false corruption charges against him overturned and is now free to challenge Bolsonaro for the Presidency of Brazil once again.
This is a historic example of class war, which pits labor leader da Silva directly against capitalist kingpin Bolsonaro, whose regime creates wealth for elites by the de facto enslavement of Blacks and the precariat and the plunder of resources from indigenous peoples, and whose government is controlled from within by a network of some six thousand military officers who enforce his kleptocracy with brutal repression.
Racism, patriarchy, oligarchic and plutocratic wealth, de facto military rule; Brazil today meets all the criteria of fascist tyranny. I look now to Lula to change the balance of power and restore democracy in Brazil.
Of my connection with Brazil and her peoples, stamped into my soul by the trauma of my near-execution by police while rescuing abandoned street children whom they were bounty hunting for the wealthy aristocratic elite, I have written in my post of July 15 2022, Let Hope Overcome Fear: Lula 2022; Among my personal role models in antifascism and revolution is the fictional character of Harry Tuttle played by Robert de Niro in the film Brazil, whose line “we’re all in this together,” echoes through forty some years of my life and adventures.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen, in the summer of 1974, to train with some fellow fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there, though later the venue was moved to Mexico. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy my age I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial and equestrian sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this. This was how the elites of Brazil had chosen to solve the problem of abandoned street children, fully ten per cent of the national population. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we do not challenge and defy tyranny and unjust systems.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a traumatic near death experience, similar to the mock executions of Maurice Blanchot by the Nazis in 1944 as written in The Instant of My Death and Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czar’s secret police in 1849 as written in The Idiot; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was reflexive and a decision of instinct beneath the level of conscious thought or volition, where the truths our ourselves written in our flesh are forged and revealed. Asked to let someone die to save myself, I simply said no. When thought returned me from this moment of panic or transcendence of myself, I asked how much to let us walk away, whereupon he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, infamous for avenging his mother’s savage murder by killing his father and eating his heart, who had been arrested the previous year after a spectacular series of one hundred or more revenge killings of the most fiendish and monstrous of criminals, powerful men beyond the reach of the law who had perpetrated atrocities on women and children. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, with the words; “You are one of us,” and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
“We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge”; so they described themselves to me, and this definition of solidarity as praxis or the action of values remains with me and shadows my use of the battle cry Never Again! As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene I; “If you wrong us, shall we not avenge?”
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased; all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth.
Join us, for a United Humankind cannot be enslaved, conquered, dehumanized, falsified, or commodified, nor can tyranny stand against liberty when the people refuse to submit.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Brazil celebrates Black Consciousness Day as national holiday for first time
Legacy of African Brazilians honored on 329th anniversary of resistance leader Zumbi’s death by Portuguese forces
History of free African strongholds fires Brazilian resistance to Bolsonaro:
Quilombo dos Palmares – founded by Africans who escaped slavery – maintained its independence for 100 years and has become a touchstone for a new generation
20 de novembro de 2024 O Brasil celebra sua herança de resistência negra, revoltas de escravos, repúblicas negras livres e luta de libertação
História, memória, identidade, as histórias que contamos sobre nós mesmos e aquelas contadas sobre nós por outros, incluindo aqueles que nos escravizariam, que são e podem se tornar e que decidem; tudo isso é um terreno de luta contra sistemas de opressão, falsificação, mercantilização e desumanização, e muitas vezes um terreno mutável, construído de verdades relativas como um Portão Rashomon do ser humano, significado e valor.
A adoção pelo Brasil de um feriado nacional na data da morte do grande líder da revolta de escravos Zumbi em uma batalha gloriosa nas mãos das forças colonialistas é um estudo de caso do que chamo de Teoria Narrativa da Identidade, na qual a autoconstrução é uma forma de revolução e o principal ato definidor de se tornar humano.
Celebre conosco o grande guerreiro, rei e figura da libertação Zumbi e seu desafio até a morte daqueles que nos escravizariam, e a república livre de Palmares que ele liderou na revolução anticolonial e uma guerra de independência de um século contra vastas forças de conquista e domínio imperial e sistemas de opressão e terror da supremacia branca, quem quer que ele tenha sido e qualquer reino rebelde que ele defendeu, pois tudo o que realmente importa é que ele detém um espaço imaginário em que cada um de nós pode entrar e se tornar, não importa a miséria de nossas condições iniciais.
Que um homem viveu e foi real que se recusou a se submeter é o suficiente para nos lembrarmos e sonharmos em ser, pois cada um de nós pode se tornar aquele homem que sonhamos
12 de janeiro de 2023 Uma História da Revolução no Brasil e da Contra-Revolução Fascista: Liberdade Versus Tirania, Lula Versus Bolsonaro
Na esteira do colapso da contra-revolução fascista de Bolsonaro e da tentativa de golpe no Brasil, a rápida reação de Lula nas prisões em massa dos camisas marrons traidoras que invadiram os escritórios do governo em imitação da fracassada Insurreição de 6 de janeiro de Trump, ela mesma modelada em seu ídolo O Golpe da Cervejaria de Hitler e o repúdio nacional impressionante a Bolsonaro e sua captura fracassada do estado pelos povos vitoriosos do Brasil, agora começou uma nova fase de luta com a caçada para aqueles que financiam e organizam a tirania fascista, muito parecido com o que está em andamento agora na América por dois anos.
Uma conspiração insidiosa e de longo alcance contra a democracia, ligando as famílias criminosas de Trump e Bolsonaro e as forças da reação na América e no Brasil, começa a emergir, misturando malfeitores familiares e apologistas do Quarto Reich como Steve Bannon e Tucker Carlson com aberrações desconhecidas da natureza como Luiz Philippe de Orléans e Braganza, que busca um retorno ao trono do Brasil através de Trump e Bolsonaro como procuradores e agora está fugindo de debaixo de sua rocha como a coisa rastejante voraz e vil que todos os aristocratas são sob sua tinta dourada, conspirações que se ampliam para engolir redes inteiras de terror supremacista branco, terror sexual patriarcal teocrático, roubo plutocrático e oligárquico da riqueza pública e os estados carcerários xenófobos e hipócritas de força e controle que eles geram como instrumentos de riqueza, poder e privilégio da elite.
Nosso grande inimigo é o Quarto Reich global, que se transforma incessantemente e se adapta às condições de qualquer nação que vise para subversão e captura, e as interconexões entre regimes de tirania fascista são múltiplas e sutis. O fascismo usa muitas máscaras e, como um predador de emboscada na natureza, move-se entre nós por trás de miragens de mentiras e ilusões, histórias reescritas e vozes roubadas, imagens que capturam e distorcem. Aqui está um terreno de luta no qual todos nós devemos lutar, se quisermos assumir o controle de nossa própria identidade sob falsificação e divisão como condições de luta impostas.
Conforme escrito na série da Netflix quarta-feira, episódio três Friend Or Woe:
A Diretora Weems, preparando-se na quarta-feira em seu escritório por sabotar a celebração do líder peregrino que queimou vivos os Párias originais e construiu a cidade em suas terras e túmulos roubados, uma história repetida infinitamente em nossa história real; “Você é um imã de problemas.”
Quarta-feira: “Se problemas significam enfrentar mentiras, décadas de discriminação, séculos tratando párias como cidadãos de segunda classe ou pior…”
Diretora: “Do que você está falando?”
Quarta-feira: “Jericó. Por que esta cidade ainda tem um Dia de Divulgação?
Você não conhece sua história real com párias? A verdadeira história de Joseph Crackstone?
Diretora: “Sim. Até certo ponto.”
Quarta-feira: “Então por que ser cúmplice em seu encobrimento? Aqueles que esquecem a história estão fadados a repeti-la.”
Principal: “É aí que você e eu diferimos. Onde você vê desgraça, eu vejo oportunidade.
Talvez esta seja uma chance de reescrever os erros, de começar um novo capítulo nas relações normie-párias.
Quarta-feira: “Nada mudou desde Crackstone. Eles ainda nos odeiam. Só que agora eles adoçam com platitudes e sorrisos. Se você não está disposto a lutar pela verdade…”
Diretor: “Você não acha que eu quero a verdade? Claro que eu faço. Mas o mundo nem sempre é preto e branco. Existem tons de cinza.”
Quarta-feira: “Talvez para você. Mas ou eles escrevem nossa história ou nós. Você não pode ter as duas coisas.
30 de outubro de 2022 Vitória no Brasil: “Vamos viver novos tempos de paz, amor e esperança” promete o novo presidente Lula ao iniciar a restauração da democracia
Celebramos uma Esperança Desamparada vindicada e nos tornamos gloriosos na vitória dos povos do Brasil e de seu campeão Lula, dançando nas ruas e correndo descontroladamente além dos limites do Proibido.
Um monstro e tirano foi expulso de seu castelo, e isso é sempre motivo de comemoração. Sempre teremos esse momento de triunfo e a esperança que ele reserva para o nosso futuro, independentemente das provações que virão. Se tal esperança é uma dádiva ou uma maldição, cabe a cada um de nós viver e tornar real; mas agora são possíveis coisas que ontem não eram, e isso eu chamo de vitória.
Com as palavras de Glinda a Oz felicito Lula e os povos do Brasil; ‘Esperamos muito tempo por você, feiticeiro. E nós realmente precisamos que você seja o Mago que esperamos que você seja.
Um grande trabalho começa agora, como Biden na América, Lula no Brasil lidera a Restauração da Democracia em uma nação cujos sistemas, estruturas, instituições, valores e ideais foram danificados pela subversão, ruptura e fratura fascistas, mas cujo povo emerge do cadinho de seu forjamento invicto e renovado.
Um dia seremos uma Humanidade Unida e uma sociedade livre de iguais, e Lula como Biden será lembrado enquanto houver seres humanos entre os fundadores de uma nova humanidade e civilização, cuja visão moldará nosso ser, ou seja, e valor, informar nossas escolhas sobre como sermos humanos juntos por milênios e motivar nossa descoberta das possibilidades ilimitadas de nos tornarmos humanos.
Vamos cada um fazer o que pudermos para tornar o sonho da democracia real.
7 de setembro de 2022 Brasil comemora seu bicentenário de independência, e Bolsonaro o usa para armar o patriotismo a serviço de seu regime em um comício Trump-Nuremberg
Nesta gloriosa e jubilosa celebração de dois séculos de Independência do Brasil, que significam a libertação do colonialismo imperial e da aristocracia feudal, as sombras de nossa história ameaçam ressurgir e nos tomar mais uma vez em uma tirania de poder desigual sistêmico e hegemonias elitistas de riqueza e privilégio.
E a isso devemos resistir. Demos à tirania fascista a única resposta que ela merece; Nunca mais.
Bolsonaro citou Richard Nixon em seu comício Trump-Nuremberg; “Eu não sou bandido.”
Como em todas as grandes mentiras, um criminoso é exatamente o que é.
Da minha ligação com o Brasil e seus povos, estampada em minha alma pelo trauma de minha quase execução pela polícia ao resgatar meninos de rua abandonados que estavam caçando recompensas para a rica elite aristocrática, escrevi em meu post de 15 de julho de 2022, Deixe a esperança vencer o medo: Lula 2022; Entre meus modelos pessoais no antifascismo e na revolução está o personagem fictício de Harry Tuttle interpretado por Robert de Niro no filme Brasil, cuja frase “estamos todos juntos nisso”, ecoa por quarenta e poucos anos de minha vida e aventuras.
Deixe-me colocar isso no contexto; O Brasil foi minha primeira viagem solo ao exterior, voando para São Paulo quando eu tinha quatorze anos, no verão de 1974, para treinar com alguns colegas esgrimistas para os Jogos Pan-Americanos que estavam planejados para lá, embora mais tarde o local tenha sido transferido para México. Eu tinha um pouco de português de conversação recém-aprendido, um convite para ficar na casa de um menino da minha idade que eu conhecia do circuito de torneios de esgrima com quem eu poderia descobrir as travessuras locais e visões de festas na praia.
Foi assim que entrei em um mundo de maneiras corteses e criados de luvas brancas, anfitriões graciosos e brilhantes que eram luminares locais e deram um magnífico baile formal para me apresentar, e um amigo com quem eu compartilhava uma paixão louca por esportes marciais e equestres , mas também um mundo de muros altos e guardas armados.
Minha primeira visão além dessa ilusão veio com os sons de tiros de fuzil dos guardas; quando olhei da minha sacada para ver quem estava atacando o portão da frente, descobri que os guardas estavam atirando em uma multidão de mendigos, a maioria crianças, que assaltaram um caminhão que transportava os mantimentos semanais. Naquele dia fiz minha primeira excursão secreta além das muralhas.
Que verdades estão escondidas pelas paredes de nossos palácios, além das quais é proibido olhar? É fácil acreditar nas mentiras da autoridade quando alguém é membro da elite em cujo interesse eles alegam exercer poder e deixar de questionar seus próprios motivos e posição de privilégio. Mentiras terrivelmente fáceis de acreditar quando somos beneficiários de hierarquias de alteridade excludente, de riqueza e disparidade de poder e desigualdades sistematicamente fabricadas e armadas a serviço do poder, e de genocídio, escravidão, conquista e imperialismo.
Sempre preste atenção no homem atrás da cortina. Pois não existe autoridade justa, e como Dorothy diz no Mágico de Oz, ele é “apenas um velho farsante”, e suas mentiras e ilusões, força e controle, não servem a nenhum interesse além dos seus.
Sendo um menino americano ingênuo, senti que era meu dever relatar o incidente; mas na delegacia tive dificuldade em me fazer entender. Eles achavam que eu estava ali para apostar na minha guarda em um concurso mensal em andamento para o qual policial pegasse o maior número de crianças de rua; havia um quadro-negro na parede da estação para isso. Foi assim que as elites do Brasil escolheram resolver o problema das crianças de rua abandonadas, dez por cento da população nacional. Outro jogo de apostas chamado “o Grande”, foi aquele em que o policial chutou a barriga das mais grávidas e ficou entre as dez maiores causas de morte no Brasil para adolescentes, invariavelmente vivendo em zonas de favelas que abrigam as mais pobres e negras do mundo. cidadãos; isso em uma cidade fundada por escravos africanos fugidos como uma república livre.
Aprendi muito nas semanas que se seguiram; sobretudo aprendi quem é o responsável por essas desigualdades; somos, se não desafiarmos e desafiarmos a tirania e os sistemas injustos.
Durante as noites de minhas aventuras além dos muros e ações para ajudar os bandos de mendigos infantis e obstruir as caças de recompensas da polícia, tive uma experiência traumática de quase morte, semelhante às execuções simuladas de Maurice Blanchot pelos nazistas em 1944, conforme escrito em The Instant de Minha Morte e Fiódor Dostoiévski pela polícia secreta do Czar em 1849, conforme escrito em O Idiota; fugindo da perseguição por um labirinto de túneis com uma criança ferida entre outros e presos a céu aberto por dois fuzileiros da polícia que tomaram posições de flanco e apontaram para nós enquanto o líder pedia rendição além da curva de um túnel. Fiquei na frente de um menino com uma perna torcida que não podia correr enquanto os outros espalhavam uma e escapou ou encontrou esconderijos, e se recusou a ficar de lado quando ordenado a fazê-lo. Isso foi reflexivo e uma decisão do instinto abaixo do nível do pensamento consciente ou volição, onde as verdades que nós mesmos escrevemos em nossa carne são forjadas e reveladas. Pediram para deixar alguém morrer para me salvar, eu simplesmente disse não. Quando o pensamento me fez sair desse momento de pânico ou transcendência de mim mesmo, perguntei quanto nos deixaria ir embora, e então ele ordenou que seus homens atirassem. Mas houve apenas um tiro em vez de uma demonstração de fogo cruzado, e isso foi um grande erro; ele teve tempo de perguntar “O quê?” antes de cair no chão.
E então nossos socorristas se revelaram, tendo se aproximado da polícia por trás; os Matadors, que podem ser descritos como vigilantes, uma gangue criminosa, um grupo revolucionário, ou todos os três, fundados pelo notório vigilante e criminoso brasileiro Pedro Rodrigues Filho, famoso por vingar o assassinato selvagem de sua mãe matando seu pai e comendo seu coração, que havia sido preso no ano anterior após uma série espetacular de cem ou mais assassinatos por vingança dos criminosos mais diabólicos e monstruosos, homens poderosos fora do alcance da lei que haviam perpetrado atrocidades contra mulheres e crianças. Nessa temível irmandade fui acolhido, com as palavras; “Você é um de nós”, e nas ruas de São Paulo naquele verão nunca mais fiquei sozinho.
“Não podemos salvar a todos, mas podemos vingar”; assim eles se descreveram para mim, e essa definição de solidariedade como práxis ou ação de valores permanece comigo e obscurece meu uso do grito de guerra Nunca Mais! Como Shakespeare escreveu em O Mercador de Veneza, Ato III, cena I; “Se você nos ofender, não devemos nos vingar?”
A partir do momento em que vi os guardas da família aristocrática com quem eu era hóspede atirando contra a multidão de crianças sem-teto e mendigos que fervilhavam o caminhão de alimentos no portão da mansão, nus e esqueléticos de fome, cheios de cicatrizes, aleijados e deformados com doenças desconhecidas a qualquer povo para quem os cuidados de saúde e a alimentação básica sejam gratuitos e pré-condições garantidas do direito universal à vida, desesperados por um punhado de alimentos que possam significar mais um dia de sobrevivência; naquele momento eu escolhi o meu lado, e meu povo são os impotentes e os despossuídos, os silenciados e os apagados; todos aqueles a quem Frantz Fanon chamava de miseráveis da terra.
Junte-se a nós, pois a Humanidade Unida não pode ser escravizada, conquistada, desumanizada, falsificada ou mercantilizada, nem a tirania pode se opor à liberdade quando o povo se recusa a se submeter.
Pois somos muitos, estamos observando e somos o futuro.
Brazil, a reading list
History
Brazil: A Biography, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Heloisa Murgel Starling
With Putin’s vassal soon to be in the White House and finishing his subversion and dismantling of the American state and its institutions of democracy in favor of a theocratic patriarchal white supremacist and fascist tyranny, and North Korean armies of Occupation and imperial conquest about to invade, Biden has, after two years of dithering in stupefaction at being confronted with a direct challenge to NATO by our historic enemy, finally and as his probable last act as President authorized Ukraine to use our missiles in her defense.
Will the power to strike Russian warfighting capability, manufacture and supply, airfields, artillery bases, roads and avenues of movement, centres of troop mass, communications and other logistical, tactical, and strategic instruments of death and dominion, be decisive? I would say it may greatly help, but Ukraine will need far more than missiles to achieve victory. We must also bring regime change in Russia, for the liberation of Ukraine is contingent upon this, and on the solidarity of NATO and America.
One thousand days of war, and we as a nation have neither brought a direct and personal Reckoning to Putin, his regime, the oligarchs he represents, not to his American agents and spies including Traitor Trump and his treasonous and dishonorable allies and co-conspirators who have infiltrated our government and now captured the state once again to give Putin a free hand in Ukraine and in the many theatres of World War Three into which he has cast us all, nor have we counter-invaded Russia to liberate her from a tyrant who may destroy our civilization and humankind.
I did both of these, after placing my life in the balance with the people of Ukraine at Mariupol and then with those who escaped with me in the breakout on April 18 reorganized at Warsaw with liberation fighters from all over Europe and beyond, and linked up with Russian peace and democracy movements in both the Russian Army and civil society to bring a Reckoning and regime change in the liberation of Russia as well as striking behind Russian lines to slow and confuse the enemy, and fighting to liberate the Black Sea.
If America and NATO had done all of this, rather than one old poet, those few who clawed their way out of the ruins of Mariupol with me, and those with nothing left to lose or who understood that in the invasion of Ukraine Russia was testing the resolve of NATO and without Resistance would next invade Poland and all of Eastern Europe, if nations had done this and not a few volunteers, we would not have failed the peoples of Ukraine and Russia.
The question now is, have we awakened to our peril, and begun to unite in Solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights to free ourselves from the schoolyard bully which is Putin’s Russia?
As written by Warren Murray in The Guardian, in an article entitled Ukraine war briefing: Ukraine marks 1,000 days since full-scale Russian invasion; “Ukraine marks 1,000 days on Tuesday since Russia’s full-scale invasion, with troops battling on numerous fronts, Kyiv besieged by frequent drone and missile strikes, and officials preparing for Donald Trump to reclaim the White House in January. Thousands of Ukrainian citizens have died, more than six million live as refugees abroad and the population has fallen by a quarter since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion that began Europe’s biggest conflict since the second world war.
A Russian missile attack killed 10 people and wounded 44 in Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa on Monday, local governor Oleh Kiper and national police said. Four children were among the wounded while three people were in serious condition. National police said seven officers, a medic and two residents were killed, and 14 police officers were among the wounded. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said a Russian ballistic missile hit a residential neighbourhood, and an apartment building, a university building and an administrative building were damaged. “These are not random strikes – these are show strikes. After calls and meetings with Putin, after all the false gossip in the media about supposedly ‘refraining’ from strikes. Russia is showing what it is really interested in: only war,” he said.
The German tabloid Bild has reported on what it calls a “top secret” delivery to Ukraine of 4,000 strike drones, developed by the German artificial intelligence firm Helsing. The company reportedly received the contract from the Ukraine defence ministry in September and the order has been paid for out of a German government fund.
Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian’s defence and security editor, writes that Britain is expected to clear Storm Shadow missiles for use by Ukraine on targets inside Russia now that the US president, Joe Biden, has agreed to do the same for the American long-range Atacms weapon. Storm Shadow cruise missiles, fired from warplanes, have a range of about 250km (155 miles), similar to the US Atacms, which is ground-launched.
The Storm Shadow has in the past been given to Ukraine by the UK and France, which calls it Scalp, to strike targets inside Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders. The US has been able to veto their use because it supplies a guidance system. Ukraine wants to be able to strike barracks, fuel and logistics hubs, and airbases deeper inside Russia to blunt Moscow’s relentless attacks on their country. Russia, by contrast, is able to strike targets anywhere in Ukraine.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, hailed the “totally good” US decision on Atacms. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andriy Sybiga, said “it could be a gamechanger. The longer Ukraine can strike, the shorter the war will be … [Ukraine has the] full right to strike military targets on the territory of Russia. It could have a very positive impact on the situation on the battlefield.”
The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, described Biden’s decision as “important” and “essential”. A German government spokesperson said, however, that Germany was sticking with its decision not to supply Ukraine with long-range Taurus missiles. The decision by the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to withhold its most powerful missile has been a significant point of contention in Germany.
The international chemical weapons watchdog said on Monday that banned CS riot gas had been found in shell and soil samples from the zone where Russian forces are operating. The OPCW convention bans the use of CS gas and other toxic weapons in war zones. Ukraine accuses Russia of using it on the field of battle. Britain and the US have accused Russia of using the toxic agent chloropicrin as well as riot control agents in the invasion.
The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, met on Monday with Russia’s natural resources minister in Pyongyang, state media reported. A delegation from a Russian military academy also arrived in the North Korean capital, KCNA said. The US, South Korea, Ukraine and allies have accused North Korea of sending more than 10,000 soldiers to help Russia fight Ukraine. In exchange for North Korea sending troops, the west think Russia is offering technological support that could advance Kim’s nuclear weapons programme.
The Kremlin rejected a reported peace proposal from the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to be put forward at the G20 summit in Brazil, to freeze hostilities at the current positions of both parties. Erdoğan’s plan reportedly consists of: freezing the frontline as it is, Ukraine agreeing not to join Nato for at least ten years, supplying Ukraine with weapons to provide for its defence and placing international peacekeepers in a demilitarised buffer zone in the Donbas. Earlier, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov dismissed reports that Erdoğan was suggesting a freeze of the current tactical situation as a condition that would be “unacceptable” to the Russian Federation.”
What will happen in our near future in this theatre of World War Three?
As written by Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian, in an article entitled Letting Ukraine fire missiles into Russia unlikely to have decisive effect: Military and political consequences of allowing Kyiv to use Atacms missiles remain uncertain; “It has taken an election defeat in the US and the arrival of 10,000 North Koreans in Ukraine for Joe Biden to finally relent. After two years of asking, Ukraine’s army has been given permission to use US long-range Atacms missiles to strike against targets inside Russia. The military and political consequences remain uncertain.
Russia has been able to bomb targets across all of Ukraine throughout the war. On Sunday it attacked key sites across the country’s power network, forcing Kyiv to implement national electricity rationing as a result of the damage caused. Some missiles were aimed as far west as Lviv and at sites near the border with Moldova, and an energy crisis is closer as a result.
Kyiv did not have a significant long-range missile programme before the full-scale Russian invasion and has been hamstrung by its western backers ever since. The US, UK and France may have donated long-range missiles but they have only allowed them to be used against targets inside Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders – meaning that key airfields, fuel depots, logistics sites and barracks in Russia had remained beyond the reach of Ukraine, except through drone attacks.
White House leaks to US media on Sunday night indicate that Biden, with two months of his presidency left to run, has given permission for Atacms missiles, which have a range of 190 miles (300km), to be used inside Russia. However, there is an apparent qualification: they must be used in relation to the battle in Kursk oblast. There, Russia, with the help of North Korea, has massed about 50,000 troops and is aiming to snuff out Ukraine’s three-month incursion.
“Reading the tea leaves, unfortunately this looks like more incrementalism,” said George Barros, a Ukraine expert at the US Institute for the Study of War. “It looks like the US wants the Atacms missiles to be used precisely against the North Koreans in Kursk, yet there is a large volume of meaningful Russian support infrastructure in locations such as Rostov, Belgorod and Vorenezh.”
Though there have been no Atacms missile attacks inside Russia recorded yet, some effects are expected to be immediate. Russian military planners are likely to move anything they believe is at risk out of range if they can do so fast enough.
That may be good value for the US also given that Atacms stockpiles are not plentiful and the missiles, at a cost of somewhere between $1m and $2m, are not cheap.
There may also be a value in directly threatening North Korea, whose entry into the war is hugely significant, Barros said. “So far the western response has been lacklustre, and there are reports that North Korea may be willing to send as many as 100,000 to fight against Ukraine.” With Russia and Ukraine’s combat forces considered very roughly matched at somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000, dissuading North Korea from sending more troops could be significant.
With a Donald Trump presidency looming, Ukraine also badly needs an opportunity to show what it can do, with western help, on the battlefield. “The Ukrainians need to convince the incoming US administration that they are still worth backing – in Trump’s transactional view, a ‘good investment’,” argued Matthew Savill, of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank.
In response, the west has to contend with Russian threats of escalation, though the reality of the Ukraine war is that, as Savill points out, Moscow “has already escalated”. Russia is already engaged in a heightened sabotage campaign across Europe, with assassination plots targeting western arms makers and arson plots, including sending incendiary devices via the DHL network to the UK.
Meanwhile in Ukraine, the attacks on power plants and substations primarily affect civilians, particularly when electricity is lost. “Russia’s strategy of escalating attacks, especially around holidays or weekends, is intended to break the spirit of Ukrainians and remind them of the hardships of war,” said Vladyslav Faraponov, the head of the board of Ukraine’s Institute of American Studies.
However, few experts believe that even allowing Ukraine to use Atacms more broadly inside Russia will have a decisive military effect. The US permission may well be followed by the UK, France and Italy agreeing to donate more of their Storm Shadow/Scalp missiles, which have a similar range, and allowing them to be used inside Russia. But again, stocks are limited, even if permission is given by the Europeans and the US, which provides a guidance system on which the missile relies.
Ukraine remains under serious pressure in the east, with Russian forces threatening to form a pocket that would encircle Kurakhove in the south. Though Russian casualties are running at record levels of about 1,500 a day, as the Kremlin tries to persuade Trump and his team that its victory is inevitable with constant frontline attacks, Ukraine is also short on personnel numbers and has never obtained decisive western support at any point during the war.
“Over time, Ukrainians have learned to live with initial refusals on the delivery or use of critical weapons, followed by hesitant ‘maybes’, and only after countless lives are lost, a reluctant ‘yes’. Unfortunately, this reactive approach is not what Ukraine needs to preserve its independence or endure potential negotiations,” Faraponov said.
A late decision to loosen restrictions on one missile type is not obviously the kind of decisive support that Ukraine hopes for either.”
As written by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled Joe Biden’s last-gasp missile decision is momentous for Ukraine – but Putin will retaliate: Zelenskyy must now show that missiles will change this war, and his European allies must unify ahead of the Trump presidency; “US president Joe Biden’s last-gasp decision to permit Ukraine to fire western-made, long-range missiles at military targets deep inside Russian territory runs the risk of triggering a sharp increase in retaliatory sabotage, such as cyber and arson attacks on Britain and its European Nato partners.
Vladimir Putin, who ordered the full-scale, illegal invasion of Ukraine 1,000 days ago tomorrow, has long warned that Kyiv’s expanded use of US-, British- and French-made missiles would be viewed by Moscow as an act of war by Nato, and could trigger catastrophic consequences. Now Putin’s bluff, if it is a bluff, is being called.
Much the same may be said of Keir Starmer and the EU. A joint statement by G7 leaders, coinciding with the 1,000-day landmark, pledged “unwavering support for Ukraine for as long as it takes”. Starmer reiterated that commitment en route to this week’s G20 summit in Brazil. Exactly what it means in practice may soon be harshly tested.
Biden’s decision is welcome, if overdue. Amid grinding Russian ground advances, EU feuding and Donald Trump’s unpropitious re-election, the war has reached a critical juncture, militarily and diplomatically. The outcome is in the balance as the scales momentarily tip towards more death and destruction, then back towards some form of Trump-imposed land-for-peace sell-out.
Russia has the advantage at present. But Kyiv will not and must not give up.
Biden was slow to give the missile go-ahead, despite months of pressure from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has argued, with good reason, that Ukraine is fighting with one hand tied behind its back. Russian airfields, military bases and command centres that are used to mount almost daily, lethal missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s cities and energy infrastructure are out of range.
Biden’s tardiness was the product of an excessive caution that has seen the US drag its feet on supplying new weapons from the start. If Ukraine had been armed in 2022 with all the tanks, air-defence systems, missiles and fighter aircraft it has subsequently, belatedly been given, it might not be struggling as it is now.
But his hesitation was reportedly reinforced by a recent classified US intelligence assessment. It warned that Putin could respond to the use of the US long-range army tactical missile system (Atacms), and the similarly capable Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles, AKA Scalp-EG, on Russian soil, with attacks on the US and its allies.
Direct, overt Russian armed retaliation against European military bases or territory seems unlikely, although tensions with Poland and other “frontline” Nato countries are running high. Dark threats by Putin cronies such as former president Dmitry Medvedev about using nuclear weapons are dismissed as rhetorical fearmongering.
Instead, the intelligence finding suggested, Russia may step up covert, deniable sabotage: cyber, infowar and arson attacks of the type it has undertaken in recent years. This would allow the Kremlin to impose a cost, especially on wavering Nato members such as Olaf Scholz’s Germany, while avoiding all-out east-west war.
The GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, and other state organs are said to have been tasked by Putin with preparing asymmetrical responses for exactly the circumstances that are now unfolding. The overall aim: to alarm and disrupt western societies and publics.
The GRU is notorious in Britain for carrying out the non-Ukraine-related Salisbury poisonings in 2018. In March this year, it was linked to arson at a warehouse in east London supposedly used to supply Ukraine. Attacks on a factory in Poland and non-military targets in Latvia and Lithuania are also attributed to the GRU. In May, Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, said 12 people had been arrested for beatings, arson and “acts of sabotage on commission from Russian intelligence services”.
These may have been mere practice runs. Kaja Kallas, former prime minister of Estonia and newly nominated EU foreign policy chief, says Moscow is waging a “shadow war” on Europe. Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, warns that Russia may target energy producers and arms factories. Europe needed a coordinated approach, Kallas said. “How far do we let them go on our soil?”
Nor is the threat confined to land. Last week, in the latest in a series of incidents, a Russian spy ship – officially classed as an “oceanographic research vessel” – was militarily escorted out of the Irish Sea. Its unexplained presence there and around UK coasts has renewed concerns about the security of critical undersea infrastructure, including pipelines and internet cables linking the UK, Ireland, Europe and the US.
Described as the latest attempt to probe western defences and vulnerabilities, the incident followed an investigation in Nordic countries last year into suspected Russian state-led espionage ops. Spy ships disguised as fishing vessels were being used to plan future attacks on windfarms and communications cables in the North Sea, it said.
However Russia responds – and the initial Kremlin reaction on Monday was wait-and-see – Biden’s decision challenges Ukraine and the European Nato allies, too. Having pressed so hard for so long, Zelenskyy must prove that the missiles make a difference. US officials are sceptical they can change the course of the war. EU officials in Brussels hope they will.
What Biden appears to hope is that long-range strikes on North Korean troops newly deployed in Russia’s contested Kursk region will deter Pyongyang from further involvement. That seems improbable, too. Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s ostracised dictator, is Putin’s new best bro. He’s not noted for a caring attitude to human life.
With Trump’s advisers threatening a de facto betrayal of Ukraine, Europe’s leaders, including Starmer, must put their money, lots of it, and their weapons where their mouths are – and help Zelenskyy maintain the fight, even without US hardware and financial backing, if need be.
The problem is that unity of purpose, and resources, are lacking. Scholz broke with most of the EU last week when he phoned Putin for a chat. The chancellor (who continues to refuse to supply Germany’s Taurus long-range missiles to Kyiv) said he was pursuing peace. But it looked like weakness with snap elections brewing, and it angered other leaders. “No one will stop Putin with phone calls,” Tusk snarled. “Telephone diplomacy cannot replace real support from the whole west for Ukraine.”
The “whole west” means France, too. But President Emmanuel Macron, having spoken frequently and passionately about the vital importance for Europe of defeating Russia, now appears to be temporising about actually letting Kyiv fire French missiles. Will Starmer give a green light, or will he also get cold feet?
With Ukraine burning, Europe divided, and Biden two months away from oblivion, it’s little wonder that Putin, with a host of dirty tricks up his sleeve, thinks he’s winning the Ukraine missile crisis.”
This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate
Ukraine war briefing: Ukraine marks 1,000 days since full-scale Russian invasion
Оскільки васал Путіна незабаром опиниться в Білому домі та завершить свою підривну роботу та демонтаж американської держави та її інститутів демократії на користь теократичного патріархального білого расиста та фашистської тиранії, а окупаційні та імперські завойовники Північної Кореї збираються вторгнутися, Байден, після двох років тремтіння в приголомшенні, зіткнувшись з прямим викликом НАТО з боку нашої історичної ворога, нарешті і як його, ймовірно, останній акт на посаді Президента, дозволив Україні використовувати наші ракети для свого захисту.
Чи матиме вирішальне значення можливість завдати удару по російських військових можливостях, виробництві та постачанні, аеродромах, артилерійських базах, дорогах і шляхах пересування, центрах зосередження військ, комунікаціях та інших матеріально-технічних, тактичних і стратегічних інструментах смерті та панування? Я б сказав, що це може дуже допомогти, але для перемоги Україні знадобиться набагато більше, ніж ракети. Ми також повинні змінити режим у Росії, бо звільнення України залежить від цього, а також від солідарності НАТО та Америки.
Тисяча днів війни, а ми як нація не принесли прямої та особистої розрахунку ні Путіну, ні його режиму, ні олігархам, яких він представляє, ні його американським агентам і шпигунам, включаючи зрадника Трампа та його зрадницьких і безчесних союзників і співзмовників які проникли в наш уряд і тепер знову захопили державу, щоб дати Путіну розв’язану руку в Україні та на багатьох театрах Третьої світової війни, на які він кинув ми всі, і ми не вторглися в Росію, щоб звільнити її від тирана, який може знищити нашу цивілізацію та людство.
Я зробив і те, і інше, після того, як поставив своє життя на терези з народом України в Маріуполі, а потім з тими, хто втік разом зі мною під час прориву 18 квітня, реорганізувався у Варшаві з бійцями-визволителями з усієї Європи та за її межами, і об’єднався з російськими рухами за мир і демократію як у російській армії, так і в громадянському суспільстві, щоб принести розрахунок і змінити режим у звільненні Росії, а також завдати удару в тилу Росії, щоб уповільнити і заплутати ворога і з боями звільнити Чорне море.
Якби все це зробили Америка та НАТО, а не один старий поет, ті кілька, хто разом зі мною вибирався з руїн Маріуполя, і ті, кому більше нічого втрачати або хто розумів, що вторгненням в Україну Росія випробовує рішучість НАТО і без Опору наступним чином вторгнеться в Польщу та всю Східну Європу, якби це зробили нації та не кілька добровольців, ми б не підвели народи України та Росії.
Питання зараз полягає в тому, чи ми усвідомили свою небезпеку і почали об’єднуватися в «Солідарність» як гаранти універсальних прав людини один одного, щоб звільнитися від хулігана на шкільному дворі, яким є путінська Росія?
Russian
19 ноября 2024 г. Тысяча дней войны на Украине
С вассалом Путина, который скоро окажется в Белом доме и завершит свою подрывную деятельность и демонтаж американского государства и его институтов демократии в пользу теократической патриархальной белой супремасистской и фашистской тирании, а северокорейские оккупационные и имперские завоевательные армии вот-вот вторгнутся, Байден, после двух лет ошеломления от столкновения с прямым вызовом НАТО со стороны нашего исторического врага, наконец, и в качестве своего вероятного последнего акта на посту президента разрешил Украине использовать наши ракеты для ее защиты.
Будет ли решающим сила, способная нанести удар по российскому военному потенциалу, производству и снабжению, аэродромам, артиллерийским базам, дорогам и путям передвижения, центрам сосредоточения войск, коммуникациям и другим логистическим, тактическим и стратегическим инструментам смерти и господства? Я бы сказал, что это может очень помочь, но Украине понадобится гораздо больше, чем ракеты, чтобы добиться победы. Мы также должны добиться смены режима в России, поскольку освобождение Украины зависит от этого, а также от солидарности НАТО и Америки.
Тысяча дней войны, и мы как нация не принесли прямого и личного отчета Путину, его режиму, олигархам, которых он представляет, ни его американским агентам и шпионам, включая предателя Трампа и его предательских и бесчестных союзников и сообщников, которые проникли в наше правительство и теперь снова захватили государство, чтобы предоставить Путину свободу действий на Украине и на многочисленных театрах Третьей мировой войны, в которые он бросил нас всех, и не контратаковали Россию, чтобы освободить ее от тирана, который может уничтожить нашу цивилизацию и человечество. Я сделал и то, и другое, поставив свою жизнь на кон с народом Украины в Мариуполе, а затем с теми, кто бежал со мной во время прорыва 18 апреля, реорганизованного в Варшаве с борцами за освобождение со всей Европы и за ее пределами, и связавшегося с российскими движениями за мир и демократию как в российской армии, так и в гражданском обществе, чтобы принести Расплату и смену режима в освобождении России, а также нанести удар по российским линиям, чтобы замедлить и сбить с толку врага, и бороться за освобождение Черного моря.
Если бы все это сделали Америка и НАТО, а не один старый поэт, те немногие, кто прорвался из руин Мариуполя вместе со мной, и те, кому нечего было терять или кто понимал, что вторжением в Украину Россия испытывает решимость НАТО и без Сопротивления вторгнется в Польшу и всю Восточную Европу, если бы это сделали страны, а не несколько добровольцев, мы бы не подвели народы Украины и России.
Теперь вопрос в том, осознали ли мы свою опасность и начали ли объединяться в Солидарности как гаранты всеобщих прав человека друг друга, чтобы освободиться от школьного хулигана, которым является путинская Россия?
My writing on Ukraine of 2024
August 24 2024 The Unconquerable Human Will to Freedom: Ukraine’s Independence Day in the Shadow of War
May 8 2024 On this Victory Over Fascism Day, As World War Three Rages in Ukraine and Palestine, Let Us Liberate All of Humankind From Fascisms of Blood, Faith, and Soil and the Imperial Conquest and Dominion of Mad Tyrants
April 20 2024 Anniversary of My Speech to the Volunteers At Warsaw, and of the Reorganization of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of Ukraine For Liberation Struggle in Russia in the Wake of Our Escape From Mariupol
February 24 2024 Anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine; Symptom, Consequence, and Trigger Event of the Fall of Human Civilization In Recursion
February 23 2024 How It All Began; World War Three, the Capture of America and the Subversion of Democracy by Traitor Trump, the Invasion of Ukraine, and the Fall of Civilization
Primal fairytales and narratives of revolutionary intent; Margaret Atwood is a goddess of Liberty who comes bearing ax and torch to free us from our cages.
While teaching her books I always referred to her as the greatest writer of the 20th century because her novels recapitulate and transform the whole history of civilization, though in this she is not unique.
Working from the deepest stratum of our collective psyche, Margaret Atwood’s reimaginations of Grimm’s fairytales and other sources offer a Socratic criticism of the forces operating from those texts, an art of protest and of empowerment.
If you need a wrecking crew to smash the patriarchy, Margaret Atwood’s novels should be in your toolkit. Let’s unpack her sources and references a bit; for greater detail see Sharon Rose Wilson’s The Fairytale Sexual Politics of Margaret Atwood.
Cat’s Eye presents a narrator, Elaine Risley, who is a trapped Rapunzel in a world of ghosts, witches, cruel stepsisters, vanishing princes, and a merciful fairy godmother. The story draws ideas mainly from Anderson’s Snow Queen and Grimm’s Rapunzel, secondarily from Anderson’s Ice Maiden and Grimm’s Girl Without Hands.
Fearful door images echo Grimm’s Fitcher’s Bird; Risley’s dreams and visions are filled with images from medieval art, paintings of the Annunciation, Ascension, and the Virgin. The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of Atwood’s vision; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort.
Of her characters, Cordelia from Shakespeare’s King Lear is among her finest; Mrs. Sneath is a cannibal goddess who resembles Baba Yaga and is linked to the figure of cat-headed Maat in this story. Maat is a dual aspected Egyptian goddess of motherhood but also a lioness and fierce hunter in her form as Sekmet.
Thematically Cat’s Eye is an investigation of the Rapunzel Syndrome; the wicked witch who imprisons her, the tower she is trapped in, a rescuer. Margaret Atwood’s driving conflicts are female-female, though her plots foreground sexual power and its political reflections.
Life Before Man offers The Wizard of Oz, The Nutcracker ballet, Anderson’s Snow Queen, a host of tales from Grimm including The Girl Without Hands, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Cap, Fitcher’s Bird, and The Robber Bridegroom. Secondary intertexts include Wilde’s Salome, Dante’s Inferno, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Coleridge’s Kublai Khan, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, and Mother Goose rhymes, mainly Little Miss Muffet. It’s a sort of Grand Tour of our civilization and the history of our private inner space and the disastrous and grotesque ways we collide with each other. Also, wonderful and illuminating reading.
Interlunar reimagines Cocteau’s Orphee, the ballet Giselle, both the Grimm and Anne Sexton version of The White Snake, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Motifs include death, pestilence, filth, eating, power, the journey, healing, hands, blindness and vision. Themes of guilt and shame, love, destruction, sacredness, creation, fertility, and metamorphosis are to be found in this richly imagined novel. I have used it as a sacred text and source of ritual immersion in dreams and poetic vision for our modern Orphic festival on Mad Hatter Day, not entirely as satire.
The Edible Woman is a linked text with The Handmaid’s Tale; do read both together. Herein the main embedded stories are Hansel & Gretel, The Gingerbread Boy, Goldilocks, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, and her protagonist Marion plays all of these roles as well as those of Little Red Cap, the Robber Bride, and Fitcher’s bride.
The Handmaid’s Tale gives a voice to Bilhah, the Biblical Handmaid, revisions Little Red Riding Hood as an extension of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, and tells the story of the Christian disempowerment of the Goddess and thew civilizational shift to Patriarchy as a theocratic system of oppression at the dawn of mass slave agriculture, priest-kings, and city-states following the Maria Gimbutas theory as presented in the great film The Red Shoes.
Margaret Atwood’s parodies of Grimm operate on three levels; thematic, images and motifs, and narrative structure. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we have themes of family and especially female-female conflict, gender and sexual power asymmetries, and the initiation and heroic journey. Motifs and images include dismemberment, cannibalism, fertility, labyrinths and paths, and all manner of disturbing sexual violence. Plot devices include a variety of character foils, doppelgangers, disguises and trickery of stolen and falsified identity.
Among Margaret Atwood’s Great Books, The Handmaid’s Tale is a universally known reference both because it has been taught for over a generation in every high school in America as a standard text and because of the extraordinary television series, arguably the most important telenovela ever filmed. We teach it for the same reasons the show is popular; a visceral and gripping drama with unforgettable characters, a mesmerizing plot of liberation struggle, and an immediate and accessible story which empowers and illuminates.
It depicts the brooding evil and vicious misogyny of Christianity and Fascism as two sides of the dynamic malaise of authority as patriarchy and tyranny, sexual and racial terror institutionalized as religion and state, as drawn directly from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, but also from contemporary culture as it contains satires of identifiable public figures, organizations, and events. Serena is based on Phyllis Schlafly, and Gideon is the nation of Pat Robertson and the fundamentalists who seized control of the Republican Party in 1980 around the time of the novel’s writing; Margaret Atwood’s motive in part was to sound an alarm at the dawn of the Fourth Reich and the coming Age of Tyrants as threats to global democracy.
It remains to be seen whether the forces of tyranny or of liberty will prevail in the end. Each of our lives is a contest between these forces, our private struggles reflected in the society and human civilization we share.
And this is the great lesson and insight of Margaret Atwood; each of us is both a Handmaid and a Serena, trapped within the skin of the other. She locates the primary conflict within ourselves, and transposes the Jungian conflict with the Shadow in terms of sex, gender, and power.
Margaret Atwood carries forward the pioneering work of Angela Carter in the feminist revisioning of fairytales and restoring history’s silenced female voice which founded one of the most exciting and diverse subgenres of literature, as the standard bearer of a generation of authors.
Her subversion and provocation of Authority in her chosen role as the Jester of King Lear, Promethean guardian of humanity and thief of the sacred fire is magnificent and epic; through her politicized literary performances and rebellions she became a figure of the goddess of Liberty who by the seizure of power restores the balance of the world.
These are fine and meritorious victories to have won; future generations of girls who expect to be the heroes of their own stories and become women who bear the torch of freedom in their turn may count Margaret Atwood among the ancestors and protectresses who first discovered a way through the Labyrinth to a self-owned and self-creating identity. But to me her greatest achievement is neither literary nor political, but in her third sphere of action; that of psychology.
In works which parallel those of the classicist James Hillman, she reimagines Jungian archetypal psychology in ways which treat persons as stories, a complex and shifting dynamism of motivating and informing sources, as texts which shape our histories and ourselves and become the key relation between memory and identity. And she does this while questioning the second-order relations, sociopolitical forces and structures.
So, a radical new psychology of liberation which operates by poetic and mythic rules, stewardship of a new literature which describes those rules and provides stories as case studies, and a praxis or action of her values which formulates the political consequences of her ideology as a holistic system of Humanist philosophy which extend that of Simone De Beauvoir. Her triadic configuration of psychology, politics, and literature, each reinforcing and interdependent with the others, is a unique, brilliant, and powerfully transformational theory of identity, art, and the meaning and value of being human.
The Handmaid’s Tale series trailer
Moments in History That Inspired The Handmaid’s Tale
Like the spiral chambers of a seashell, we each of us are made of stories which extend ourselves into the material world as processes of growth and adaptive change; systems of history, mimesis, and identity which I call Defining Moments.
How shall I count mine?
By Last Stands, in which I defied unanswerable and overwhelming force beyond hope of victory or survival.
First among them is the grand adventure and disruptive trauma of my first solo foreign travel, the summer before my freshman year at high school, to Brazil to train for the Pan American Games with fellow fencers.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first grand adventure, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen to train with a group of fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there; I was the San Francisco Bay Area champion in saber and foil in my age division, as I was through high school. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial arts and sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the morning food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls, and I have been living beyond the walls ever since.
Remembering this Defining Moment now, the day I looked beyond my limits and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden to discover and question the basis of my own privilege and reach across divisions of authorized identities of class and race in solidarity with those who do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us and create our wealth, and to whom we have exported the true costs of production and excluded from its benefits as our de facto slaves, what fixes my imagination is that I lived an allegory of Awakening which recapitulates the story of the Buddha and has become a world myth as the Prince in the Golden Cage. I had no charioteer to answer my questions and create order and meaning from my trauma of witness; I had a whole tribe of them, the Matadors. We’ll get to that part shortly.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, and a jar of tagged ears. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; that fully ten percent of Brazilians were abandoned and orphaned street children on whom bounties had been placed as a solution, that a quarter of the population lived in shantytowns, that life expectancy for 80% of the people was 35 years, that 350,000 children died before the age of five each year and only 13% finished primary school, that nearly half the people were illiterate.
And yet it was a rich nation; the Brazilian gold boom of the 1700’s created Europe’s industrial revolution, and at this same time of pervasive and systemic poverty and racism Brazil was the worlds number one coffee, sugar, orange, and gasohol producer, #2 cocoa, and #3 timber and beef producer. But over half of the wealth was owned by less than two percent of its people, like the family who were my gracious hosts.
Above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we buy the products of an unjust system, remain silent as witnesses of history to injustices, or abandon our duty of care toward others when evil unfolds before us and by a mission of action we may safeguard others from harm. This is the true purpose and design of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege; to disrupt our interdependence and the solidarity of our universal brotherhood as a precondition of unequal power.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a second near death experience, this time similar to though not as formal as those of Maurice Blanchot’s mock execution by the Nazis in 1944 and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s by the Czar’s secret police in 1849; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender from beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was my Ring of Fire and the first of more Last Stands than I can now clearly remember, and I find hope for us all in the instinctive duty of care of the young boy I once was to whom it never occurred to run, to surrender, or to abandon a stranger to harm, and like Wagner’s great hero Siegfried chose instead the fire.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did in Mariupol from March 22 to April 18 2022 and at Panjshir in Afghanistan from the last week of August til September 7 2021, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling.
When the disembodied voice of my executioner reached out from the darkness of the purgatorial labyrinth in which we were trapped to order my surrender, with the life of a stranger in the balance, I asked how much to let us walk away, and he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who had been arrested the previous year. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
As one of my rescuers phrased it; “Come with us. You are one of us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
May we all be granted the gift of vision of our interdependence and the universality of our humanity, and wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Eight years later, and after spending much of my high school years working through the trauma of these events and choosing the origins of evil as my field of study, came my second Last Stand, which fixed me on my life’s path in Antifascist action and revolutionary struggle as a member and inheritor of the Resistance.
During the summer of 1982 before my senior year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Feral bands of soldiers were roaming the streets, committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, and more joined us. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.
A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”
To which I replied, “Moments stolen from death belong to us, and set us free. Possibly this is all we truly own. It’s a poor man who loves nothing worth dying for.”
He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before his capture, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path of struggle for liberty against tyranny and autocracies of state force and control, for equality against racist violence and injustice, and against the fascism which combines both state tyranny and racist terror.
He introduced himself as a former Legionnaire by the name of Jean, was mischievous, wise, immensely learned in classical scholarship and possibly had once been educated as a priest, and filled with wild stories about the luminaries of modern European culture. I was stunned when I discovered days later that my strange new friend was one of the greatest literary figures of the century. I had quoted The Thief’s Journal in refutation of something he said, which he found hilarious, while we were discussing Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as compared to that of Jung, a conversation which remained unfinished as he couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually he sputtered, “I myself am Jean Genet.” To me he remains a Trickster figure and part of my historical identity and personal mythology.
With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers running amok in a sack of murder, arson, and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, who had set fire to our cafe and other buildings and were calling for surrender and blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with an apologetic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”
We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all. I have lived by it for thirty-nine years now.
Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’
To which I replied, “No.”
“Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
Five years after the Siege of Beirut, I fought in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the largest battle ever fought in Africa, even more vast than El Alamein.
In a massive campaign which broke the grip of Apartheid on South Africa and liberated Angola and Namibia, involving over 300,000 Cuban volunteer soldiers between December 1987 and March 1988, in coordination with Angolan and other indigenous forces, international volunteers like myself, and with Soviet aid and advisors, defeated the far larger and technologically superior South Africa and their UNITA and American allies and mercenaries in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, an Angolan military base which South Africa had failed to capture with five waves of assaults. The results included the independence of Namibia, the withdrawal of South African troops from Angola, the replacement of the racist Prime Minister Botha by de Klerk in South Africa and his negotiations with the African National Congress, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, and the end of apartheid.
While the spectacle of this grand final battle in a decades long liberation struggle was unfolding, I was making mischief behind enemy lines in the bush. Here I discovered a lost unit, mainly Zulu, which was encircled by Apartheid forces. After reporting what I knew of the area to the command group and a brief conference in several languages, an old fellow who had heretofore been silent stood up from the shadows of the tent, whose shirtless form displayed a fearsome and magnificent scar from a lion’s claws, and said; “We are surrounded and outnumbered with no ammunition and worse, no water, and no one is coming to help us. We must attack.”
The sergeant smiled at this as if he had been given a marvelous gift, strode outside, and gave the order which if you are lucky you will never hear; “Fix bayonets!”
And the men about to die erupted in song. “Usuthu! Umkhonto wami womile!” “My spear is thirsty”, that last.
Like the generations of struggle which liberated South Africa from Apartheid and colonial slavery, this nameless fight in the enormous Battle of Cuito Cuanavale was won against impossible odds because of things common to any liberation struggle; solidarity of action, the embrace of death as seizure of power, and the definition of victory as refusal to submit.
For the great secret of force and control is that it is hollow, brittle, and shatters when confronted with disobedience, and the great secret of authority and legitimacy is that it is an illusion of smoke and mirrors which vanishes utterly when disbelieved.
Believe nothing which is untested, for there is no just authority.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Strategies of division along lines of faith, race, and national identity are a primary weapon of fascism and tyranny in the subjugation of a population in whose name authority claims to act and speak, in the centralization of power, and in the manufacture of consent through abjection, despair, and learned helplessness, as well as in the creation of hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and these processes and systems of oppression are universal to humankind.
Yet war and ruin are not inevitable, for the chaos which seized South Africa as revolutionary struggle is also universal; the use of social force obeys the Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce. As both an existential threat to ossified and failing systems, structures, and institutions, here a three-part harmony of failed political, economic, and social systems, and also as a window of opportunity for revolutionary struggle and transformative change.
Chaos is not simply disorder; chaos destructures order and creates new possibilities of adaptation. Chaos is a force of revolution and liberation, and a measure of the potential for change of a system.
Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, has a scene in which two young successors to leadership of traditionally rival factions find themselves in love and in need of allies in a subplot which reimages Romeo and Juliet; the rebellious hellion Jonah Breakspear asks his Machiavellian lover Sophie Longerbane, “Who is chaos good for?” To which she replies, “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
Leveraging Chaos for change defines revolutionary and liberation struggle, but why is it necessary to bring the Chaos to restore balance to systems of unequal power as a fulcrum of change?
Those who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none. When carceral states of force and control, tyranny and terror, reach the stage of totalization of power to authority and become engines of dehumanization, they enter my world, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, and it is on this ground we must resist them.
All Resistance is war to the knife. Because the choice is between freedom as refusal to submit or abandon others, and the surrender of our universal human rights and of the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
We resist tyranny and terror and all systems of oppression not to enforce virtue, but as each other’s guarantors of our human rights that we may each be free to find our uniqueness; and to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
In my very long life of such struggles defined by many Last Stands, I think of two among them which represent the limits of the human in their horror and atrocities; Sarajevo and Mariupol.
The Russian genocide and erasure of Mariupol was characterized by its organized mass murders, rapes, and tortures of civilians, the mobile factories of cannibalism which turned people into army rations, the use of a new hyperbaric terror weapon as crematoriums to hide their crimes, and the abduction and enslavement of children. All of this the world and I have seen before and doubtless will again; nor was I truly disturbed by being buried in a tunnel collapse under bombardment and crawling out for several hours, through the remains of the dead and among the lost voices of the dying whom I could not help. But I spent a few days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when I discovered what the Russian Army and their partners, a crime syndicate called the Butterfly Collectors, were doing with some of the stolen children and young girls brought into special facilities on military bases far way in Russia; torture brothels whose spectacles were broadcast to the world on the dark web in shows which I hope you cannot imagine.
Of Sarajevo I shall speak here not of the monstrous acts of those who would be conquerors, nor of the courageous resistance of their intended victims who held true to their faith and to each other in the face of death and torture, nor even of the valor and compassion of the volunteers of the International Brigade who placed themselves between hammer and anvil, but of a small horror which has come to symbolize for me the unimaginable horrors of war; the Jar of Eyes.
On the desk of a commander of death squads sat a jar full of eyes, and beside it an ice cream scoop which he would toy with, stroking its stainless smoothness with an absentminded and sensual languor while interrogating prisoners.
He said he got the idea from the Byzantine Emperor Basil the Second the Bulgar Slayer, who Christianized Bulgaria by blinding the army he defeated and leaving one man in ten with eyes to guide the others home, as a warning to crush resistance by terror.
How do I know this, and what were we to each other, this monster and I? Herein I recall and speak as a witness of history a Defining Moment in which we played a game of chess with the life of a prisoner of his as the prize.
As a jailbreak this was to my knowledge unique; I had asked the guards at the gate to see the commander, bearing gifts I knew he wanted greatly in trade for a prisoner whose value he did not know; making a game of it was his idea, which became several days of conversations. I think he was lonely.
Within the jar the eyes would float randomly, hypnotic, reflective, capturing ones will to resist with a Medusa-like gaze of objectification and dehumanization appropriated from their tormentors, a talisman of transference of power. A jar of silent screams, erased lives, and the lost witness of history; how can we accuse our destroyers when we have no mouths?
Here among the dragons, where the rule of law cannot reach and our maps of meaning and value have given way to tantalizing empty spaces which beckon with the siren call of the Forbidden, where the only currency is fear and the only relationships those of power and dominion, we challenge and define by their absence and contrary the limits of what is human.
For we are all trapped in the Jar of Eyes, and if we are to reawaken and assume our true forms we must find a means of escape.
Walk Through the Fire, song from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode Once More With Feeling
And here is my theme song for Last Stands, which I posted as I crossed into Afghanistan after the Fall of Kabul to defend Panjshir and before joining the fight at the Azovstal Steelworks in Mariupol.
Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
Among my Defining Moments are those I categorize as By Encounters with Possible Selves As Shaping Forces of Becoming Human, figures and images reflected in the eyes of others with whom we share imaginal spaces.
We choose as our companions through life those who represent qualities and figures of human being, meaning, and value we wish to integrate in our becoming; those who perform roles we wish to step into.
Herein I number the conversations and personal relationships with those who shaped me and left upon me their mark of strangeness; first among them an influence of my childhood, Edward Albee, as I watched my father direct his plays and listened to their conversations.
With a title taken from the song Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? in the 1933 Disney short film Three Little Pigs, where two of the pigs are convinced they’re safe from the wolf in their straw and twig houses, you know that threatening truths will undo the house of illusions George and Martha, emblematic founders of America, have built around themselves.
As written by Ben Brantley in The New York Times; “Mr. Albee has unsparingly considered subjects outside the average theatergoer’s comfort zone: the capacity for sadism and violence within American society; the fluidness of human identity; the dangerous irrationality of sexual attraction and, always, the irrefutable presence of death.”
In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee has given us the Great American Play, a mirror in which we see ourselves as we are rather than the illusions we have spun around and through ourselves as a defensive mask. It is about the historical and political consequences of a lie we told at our founding about freedom and equality in a government designed to leave structural power asymmetries of wealth, race, and gender untouched; about the human cost of dysfunctional relationships, and about the implications for meaning and being when the personal and political realms of action collide and change each other. This play is a masterpiece, and I think we should all watch the film in school before we go to vote for the first time.
In this context I think of America as represented in Edward Albee’s iconic play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. My father directed some of his plays, and I listened intently to their conversations during rehearsals from a center front seat in the theatre, which interrogated Albee’s direct influences and references among his fellow Absurdists Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter.
The line of transmission of Absurdist elements in literature originates with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll, Nikolai Gogol, and Franz Kafka, diverges from the limits of Humanism with Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Witold Gombrowicz, Albert Camus, Albee and his ilk as previously cited, diverged from the main tradition as Nihilism in Samuel Beckett, Thomas Ligotti, and Kobo Abe, and continues today in the works of Haruki Murakami, Kurt Vonnegut, and Elif Shafak.
Of my adventures as a theatre brat I shall recount here only one; during my father’s direction of The Sandbox my mother asked Edward Albee if she could have a picture taken with him, whereupon he pointed to the gallery along the theatre entrance and said, “Let’s take it in front of the Jackson Pollock; it looks like Martha’s mind.” For Edward Albee, whose works were among those I could recite verbatim at the age of four, literally as I used to sit in at rehearsals and give the actors their lines if someone forgot, the failure of order in both political and psychological terms was a symptom of Sartrean bad faith.
Here also Albee leads us through a labyrinth of mirrors, a funhouse of distorted images, both comical and grotesque, images which capture and reflect, assimilating or robbing us of our uniqueness in infinite regress to steal our souls, which through his magic of seeing our true selves becomes a Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror as in in Anderson’s The Snow Queen, fragmented images which multiply our possibilities of becoming human.
I particularly like the following lines from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, laden with satire of our falsification through invented histories and authorized identities, and influential to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra;
“Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don’t know the difference.
George: No, but we must carry on as though we did.
Martha: Amen.”
Do see the iconic 1966 film adaptation starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; I used to show it to high school students on day one of American History.
And I would say in preface to the class; Here we see images of the history from which must emerge to become human as self-created and self-owned beings; histories which we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails, with legacies of unequal power and multigenerational epigenetic trauma.
I want you to seize these images and reclaim them for your own. Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We are gathered here to study history and our place in it, and to interrogate our informing, motivating, and shaping sources as stories, to perform the four primary duties of a citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and to be what Foucault called truth tellers.
So, I have a film for you which models how to perform these roles, and this is where we will begin our study of American History, with the Original Lie which founded our nation. This is who we are, and it falls to each of us to make a better future than we have the past; to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.
Such was my annual speech in preface to the study of American history.
Also informative and insightful, Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee, includes his ideas about Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Sam Shepherd, as well as autobiographical writings about his own life, work, and worldview.
Finally, written four decades after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, there is his last and greatest work, displaying the final form of his political psychology and an evolution of all the themes that have come before in his long career as a playwright, like a summa theologica of our time; The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?
The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? is a Greek tragedy in structure which employs the methods of comedy to subversive ends, about the uncontrollable, totalizing nature of love and passion as a bringer of chaos and renewer of the world, sweeping all before it like a tidal wave.
Nowhere in his cannon of work is Edward Albee’s intention more clear; to empower and liberate us both personally and politically. As an examination of Keats’ ideal of Love it is insightful and superb; as an extension and interrogation of the themes of Thomas Mann in Death in Venice and his reinterpreter Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita it is a brilliant satire and political fable. Herein he restates his primary insight; that life is a struggle for control and ownership of identity, the persona or mask that is worn in Greek theatre, between ourselves and our society.
As written by the Edward Albee Society, On The Goat of Who Is Sylvia?; “The play is about love, and loss, the limits of our tolerance and who, indeed, we really are.” Indeed, while bestiality is one of the many topics addressed in Albee’s play, the playwright’s main objective is more aligned with imagining ourselves “subject to circumstances outside our own comfort zones.”
In an interview with Charlie Rose focused on The Goat’s 2002 New York premiere, Albee stated, “Imagine what you can’t imagine. Imagine that, all of a sudden, you found yourself in love with a Martian, in love with something you can’t conceive of. I want everybody to be able to think about what they can’t imagine and what they have buried deep as being intolerable and insufferable. I want them to just think freshly and newly about it.”
Even the play’s title echoes this sense of multiplicity in terms of its meaning. Albee said in his interview with Charlie Rose, “A goat is two things. A goat is the animal, and, also, I believe a person can be a goat, the butt of a situation.” Florescu offers a more symbolic definition of the word goat: “Sylvia is everybody’s goat, ready to unleash our wildest desires, potentially dissolving, or, at least, diminishing the ravaging effects of our gregarious, unhealthy regimented selves.” Zinman suggests that the use of the term “goat” could also refer to “scapegoat”: “The goat is wholly innocent, victimized by Martin’s obsessive love and Stevie’s murderous revenge.” Yet, in an advertisement created by The Philadelphia Theatre Company for their production, a picture of a goat “with a snapshot of the play’s characters hanging out of its mouth, suggesting that a goat, who will, notoriously, eat anything, has devoured this family alive,” suggests the personification of the goat and, thus, Sylvia’s own responsibility for the events that take place. In addition, the name Sylvia, Zinman argues, references Shakespeare’s pastoral vision in Two Gentlemen of Verona.
As stated by Esbjornson, The Goat is ultimately meant to be a tragedy. Even the set he and John Arnone collaborated on had columns to provide a “classical quality to it, a Greek-tragedy quality.” Zinman states, “In ancient Greek tragedy, the hero, at the height of his happiness, often complacent in his smooth fortunate life, undergoes a sudden reversal of fortunes.” Indeed, once Martin confesses his affair to Ross, his fate is no longer his own. According to Aristotle, he must then “‘fall from a great height,’” which Martin does; he is reduced from an award-winning architect to a mere sexual deviant. Whereas Martin acts more as a tragic hero, Ross, on the other hand, takes the place of the chorus “representing the vox populi and of setting the wheels of tragedy in motion.”
Albee thinks a play can be called political only if “…it makes people think differently enough about things so that their life alters including their politics.” In order to make a difference in a contemporary society so accustomed to debunking generally accepted restrictions, Albee had to “…go even further afield than Nabokov to find a taboo still standing.” In Zinman’s opinion, Albee’s view is that sexuality is “…more complex, far wider, deeper, and less governable than we generally think.” Albee’s use of bestiality is meant to parallel society’s view of homosexuality which “appear[s] normal by comparison.” Gainor furthers her argument by stating that it is through bestiality that Martin “literalizes his extremity of alienation and longing.” By experiencing prejudice for his own sexual proclivities, Martin must “accept his son’s desires with equanimity, applying his newly gained insights on dominant and marginal practices.”
In this way, Martin and Billy can seek to rebuild their relationship. Robinson writes of The Goat: “Albee’s play insists that it is about something beyond a domestic crisis that can be cordoned off and concealed from the world – though it is about that too. We see that the personal is political, yes, but also something more: that what is private about our lives only comes to have meaning as we enter the public sphere and this public sphere enters us.” Ultimately, as Robinson states, The Goat is meant to affect both the micro and macro levels of society in a way that encourages progressive thinking even in uncertain times. “
And on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, also from the EAS website; “George and Martha revel in the dissection of the truth and illusion that have kept them bound in their fiery marriage. The illusionary component of George and Martha’s relationship is best symbolized by their imaginary son. George, jarred by Martha’s breaking of their rule, decides to kill off or “exorcise” their son, thus explaining the significance of Act III’s title. Adler writes, “…George exorcises the child not only to kill the illusion and live in reality, but to destroy one reality—that in which he has failed to exercise the strength necessary to make the marriage creative even without children–and create a new reality to take its place. George, through mapping out for Nick and Honey the way to redirect their lives, achieves for Martha and himself a radical redirection of their own.” Unlike Martha and George who are universally acknowledged by critics as having married for love, Nick and Honey’s marriage was only initiated because of Honey’s pregnancy coupled by her father’s wealth. George tries to steer Nick and Honey away from the fate that he and Martha are currently battling: the use of illusion as a weapon against each other. Martha, too, as Hoorvash and Porgiv comment, “…senses that something is lacking, not merely in her marriage or her life, but also in the lives of everyone else.” Paolucci further asserts: “The younger couple mirror our own embarrassment and own public selves; Martha and George, our private anguish.” In an interview with Rakesh H. Solomon, Albee comments on George and Martha’s imaginary son as a metaphor for this profound discontentment: “There is a distinction between the death of a metaphor and the death of a real child. And the play for me is more touching and more chilling if it is the death of the metaphor.” George’s shattering of the illusion of his and Martha’s son is his answer to Martha’s desire for him to “…assert his strength” against her “…many masculine qualities…[which] feeds off of George’s emasculation.” The duality of George’s personality allows for a breadth of interpretations for actors. Albee comments: “‘Once you’ve played George in my play no other role with the possible exception of Hamlet will challenge you quite as much as far as magnitude of text, complexity of language and the challenge of working on many planes at the same time.’”
George and Martha’s inability to conceive also plays into the extended metaphor of Albee’s play, suggesting that “…sterility and fertility are simply metaphors for social stagnation and progress, respectively. George’s solution, rather, is closer to a religious one, which has always been part of the American ideology” Albee’s inspiration for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was the tumultuous state of American society during the 1960s. Dircks writes of Albee: “Albee saw an American society as sustaining itself on national illusions of prosperity and equality; here too, the situation demanded an honest confrontation of problems and a heightened state of communication.” Zinman, too, states, “Albee’s political and cultural agenda is woven into the characters’ preoccupations, and thus into the dialogue.” Thus, there can be no mistaking Albee’s allusion to George and Martha Washington, the first couple of the United States. Still, other critics attribute Albee’s inspiration to not just American politics but also to Virginia Woolf, herself, and her short story: “Lappin and Lapinova.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? remains an impactful script that speaks to universal conflicts each generation must face: Who are we? What do we represent? and What will our futures hold?”
Among the many funhouse mirror images which I have claimed as my own, my second and most sustained influence must be my great teacher, of martial arts, Chinese and later Japanese languages, calligraphy, and poetry, the strategy game of wei-chi or go, Chan or Zen Buddhism and Taoism, with whom I studied daily for ten years from the age of nine, and who was my window to a larger world. As a result I grew up with three voices and thinking in three languages, as I also studied French from seventh grade.
That last reference bears interrogation; during seventh grade I tested out of English classes through senior year of high school on AP and SAT exams given to me specially and IQ tests arranged by my parents and teachers who conspired to force me into high school early, which I absolutely refused but for one class, where I traded seventh grade English for Freshman French literature and language, a chance I fell upon with ravenous delight. The French teacher was a blonde goddess who motivated her students by offering a trip to Paris, with her, after graduation from high school for the best senior French student each year; competition for this honor was fierce, and I was a very, very good student. Thanks for the soft landing in high school, Miss Starling.
How I met Sifu Lung, my teacher of Chinese and martial arts, happened like this; I spent recess at school during fifth grade either playing chess with the Principal or experimenting with the chemistry set in the classroom, which doubtless seemed odd, unfriendly, and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals marked with skull and crossbones on the bottles down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing would get a dose. That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. I told my father about it that night.
To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear and power as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.
Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and you can use it as a lever to win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?
Fear, power, and the use of social force are balanced with the need to belong. Sometimes its best to do what others do to fit in, but it isn’t always best, and it can be very wrong. Best is to discover what’s best for you, no matter how different that is, and find belonging on your own terms and no one else’s. Even if you have to create that community yourself.
What you need is a way to confront people directly when you’re upset with them that doesn’t cause more problems than it solves.”
This was 1969 and he arranged for me to study with a Taoist priest, scholar of Zen Buddhism, and scholar of traditional arts who had just escaped arrest during the Cultural Revolution in China, around the time the mob nearly dragged Chou En Lai, officially the leader of the Cultural Revolution and a friend and ally of my teacher since 1920 at the Whampoa Military Academy, into the street for execution.
I called him Sifu Lung, Teacher Dragon, because of a story he told on the day we met, a version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave; I had been startled by the sudden fluid movement of his enormous shadow, like a flight of silent birds, in the still room of his study through moon gate doors which like a gaping mouth opened into the chasms of darkness of a gorgeous pillared temple illuminated only by the many incense sticks which glowed like eyes of fire. And I asked, “Why is your shadow so huge? And it moves.”
“Once we were dragons,” he began, “we were vast, without end or beginning, and we filled the universe. But when humans came there was no place for them, and they could not see us all at once; so we became small, lost our greatness, and found ways to share our world. We abandoned eternity and the rapture of the heavens for the stewardship of humankind, who refuse to venture out of their cages and discover what lies beyond their boundaries.
But you can see me because your cage has not yet been built, and because we are alike in our powers of vision and illusion. This suggests possibilities. So I will teach you how to fight as you wish, but also how to grow beyond your limits and find your greatness.”
Next would be the family storyteller and unofficial uncle of my boyhood, William S. Burroughs, with his bizarre tales of magical battles, adventures in strange realms, and of monstrous and wonderful beings, a friend of my father who was an underground theatre director in San Francisco and a collector of unusual people.
Of Burroughs I have written in celebration; a pivotal figure of my youth, one of my father’s Beatnik friends who among the writers, artists, musicians, and film and theatre people he collected was all of those as well as a magician and scholar of the occult, and a wise and kindly mentor.
An encyclopedic and phantasmagorical body of work, full of dark satire, science fiction tropes, chaos, magic, songs of anarchy and freedom, and a beautiful unbounded transgression, William S. Burroughs wove revolutionary socio-political insights together with the glorious madness of Dionysian ecstatic vision.
Combining in his person Existentialism and Surrealism, his work is driven by two great themes; rebellion against Authority and the dreamquest of a magician to become a god.
The first of these themes being Sartrean Authenticity and a Promethean rebellion versus Control, a personification of all forms of thought control and normalcy, referential to Camus, Genet, Nietzsche, the English Romantics, de Sade, and most of all Georges Bataille, whose post-Freudian analysis of sociocultural forces and institutions, developed within the theoretical framework of Levi-Strauss and structural anthropology, indict Authority as a means of dehumanizing and shaping us into the tools of our own governmental, religious, and economic enslavement. The influence of Bataille on William S. Burroughs cannot be overstated.
His second major theme is ecstatic vision and transcendence as a path of liberation from the material world, a sublimity achieved through the derangement of the senses; sex, drugs, violence, and the pursuit of the extreme and the bizarre. As in the early novels of his direct model Jean Genet, a major theme in this is the seizure of power and authenticity through transgression of the Forbidden.
This includes the many magical subterfuges and arcane disciplines he practiced, first among them being the cut-up method of randomization to reveal hidden truths invented with Brion Gysin and intended as a ritual of prophecy derived from the I Ching, the inspiration for which Burroughs once told me was Leibniz’s famous claim to have invented binary mathematics when reading the I Ching in his hunting lodge in Bavaria when he had the primary insight that the whole universe can be constructed of combinations of one and zero.
The works of William S. Burroughs may first be read as an interrogation of the four principles of Leibniz, Non-Contradiction, the Identity of Indiscernibles, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and the Principle of Bivalence, as illuminated in the conversations of Aristotle, al Farabi, Avicenna, Aquinas, Kant, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carroll, and Korzybski, and playing the other side of the board Heraclitus, Nagarjuna, al Ghazali, and Hui Shi.
Second is the technique of juxtaposition developed from Tristan Tzara’s Dada and Monet’s principle; “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks outward, and the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world that we see.”
Here in juxtaposition is a praxis of his values in the second dimension of Burrough’s thought, his context within the lineage of Romantic Idealism; Prometheus and Milton’s rebel angel, Shakespeare in The Tempest, Byron and his sources Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich von Schiller, then Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Keats, Blake, and Coleridge, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Third we must recognize that William S. Burroughs is primarily a mystic and Surrealist, obsessed with experiments with telepathy, precognition, shapeshifting, out of body travel to other dimensions and times, curses and psychic conflicts with malign and alien forces which reflect those of H.P. Lovecraft, and a unique and personal spiritism akin to that of voodoo which I would call Jungian shadow work. In this aspect he resembles Philip K Dick, prophet of the transhuman, Carl Gustave Jung and Vladimir Nabokov in Ada, and all of his fellow Surrealists.
Of direct influences among Surrealists we must count Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue, Ionesco’s Rhinoceroses, Jarry’s Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, Reverdy’s The Thief of Talant, Michel Leiris‘ Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
As to his language and style we must trace his origins in the Surrealist poets and their influences and references; Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and de Lautréamont, Stéphane Mallarmé and Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Éluard, René Char, and Phillip Lamantia.
All of William S. Burroughs’ works may be read as conceptual art representing surrealist films in the tradition of Cocteau, Artaud, Dali, David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Tim Burton, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Guillermo del Toro.
He began along this path as a child when he became the avatar of a chthonic being conjured by his Welsh nanny in the rite of Calling the Toad; and thereafter sought transformation and transcendence in forms ever more strange. This he claimed was the toad that Nietzsche feared he must swallow, which was transferred to him as a spirit guardian and oracle of wisdom, a succession of bearership as a mystery initiation into which he inducted me through storytelling as ritual. Upon each completion we would recite together Prospero’s line in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”.
This canon of stories, possibly invented on the spot and told over some time intermixed with fabulous and strange versions of Grimm’s Fairytales, now seems to me similar in intent to Ted Hughes’ reimaginations of mythology attempting to construct and reawaken a lost faith. He never wrote them down, unfortunate as unlike his books they were suitable for young adults if not children and coherent in a way his novels, constructed of episodes he called turns as in vaudeville acts, are not. One day I may do so for him.
I wrote my first story, Dream of the Toad, when I was twelve and immersed in Frazier’s Golden Bough and other myths, folklore, and fairytales, inspired by the wonderful stories he told of growing up stepping back and forth between our world and a parallel, magical one, filled with living figures from fairytales and myths in delightfully bent and off-center versions of their stories, as he and my father played chess of an evening and the coals of the fire burned low, enveloping us in the gathering darkness.
To me, William S. Burroughs will always be a kindly and urbane but tormented gentleman, a Trickster figure and Guide of the Soul, bearer of hidden signs and wounds, a charming rascal and unofficial uncle steeped in classical literature he could recite from memory, full of mischief and secrets and whom you could trust with your own.
Years after his time as a figure in our home, I first read his books as a teenager immersed in the grimoires of medieval magic, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as guides to universal principles of creating ourselves through language, when I discovered the stunning vistas of his transgression and disruption of gender, as he had never said or signaled anything inappropriate within my sight or hearing as a child. So also with his anarchism and reimagination of Marx in fiction as the Algebra of Need.
He always liked my Dream Labyrinth wall, a floor to ceiling collage of Hieronymus Bosch and other strange images opposite my bed which I changed and elaborated constantly throughout my teenage years. Bizarre drawings like cinematic storyboards would be found added after his mysterious arrivals and departures. He loved illusions, grand entrances and ghostly exits, and above all humor, by which to keep the world off balance and step nimbly by its obstacles.
His books are also a Dream Labyrinth, which together form maps of the unknown and of possibilities of human meaning and being, as well as topologies of transformation as a Hall of Mirrors.
William S. Burroughs remains an important vehicle of transmission of the whole western mystery tradition, indebted as he is to Philippe Soupault for his interpretation of William Blake and to Georges Bataille for his interpretation of Nietzsche and Freud.
One can also speak of Burroughs the magician of poetic vision and ecstatic trance in terms of Dionysius and Orpheus, and the literature of ceremonial magic as was Jung, immersed in Gnosticism, Theosophy, Rosicrucian occultism, Egyptian mythology, shamanism, tarot as he gave me my first deck of cards which I have to this day and taught me their use, I Ching, Kabbalah, alchemy, and all of this through Aleister Crowley whom he claimed as a source of discipleship and interpreted through his direct model, H.P. Lovecraft, of whom he once said; ”I wish Lovecraft wrote fiction. Some truths are too terrible to invoke by their names.”
Burroughs’ conspiracy of Venusian insects to conquer humankind through drug addiction as a metaphor of capitalism, summarized in his formulation of Marxism as The Algebra of Need, is an appropriation of Lovecraft. The master and his disciple were also both serious scholars of the occult obsessed with dark magic, who saw in mysticism a tradition of counterculture and dissent, as with the martyrdom of the Templars and the heroic Jacques DeMolay.
Naked Lunch is a masterpiece and classic of literature; Junky and Queer are among his other autobiographical novels modeled on those of Jean Genet. Like those of Genet, his stories are parodies and subversions of sacred rituals intended to liberate us from authority and free the creative imagination to forge an authentic humankind.
The Nova Trilogy: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express, further explores addiction as a metaphor of social control and the destructive nature of capitalism. His idea of the Ugly American as a malign intrusive alien entity and force which must be exorcised parallels and is referenced by Malcolm X’s personification of heroin addiction as a White Man who must be cast out.
One of the most accessible of his works is his book on the gangster Dutch Schultz, a dialectical journal in the classical form of a Jesuit report recording the actual last words of the gangster in one column and Burroughs’s commentary in the other- complete with cinematography notes.
America, a trilogy including Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands, a triumph of Surrealism in epic form and a masterpiece, has a clarity of prose and the imprint of a master artist at the summit of his powers. As a prank I once switched them for the actual American History textbooks in a high school class; strangely no one objected and I had to go right on teaching through the semester with it as myths of national identity. I think we had more fun with this subject than is usual.
The Revised Boy Scout Manual is a brilliant parody and a manual of anarchist revolt and the overthrowing of governments. Along with T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom it is among the finest classics of direct action and guerrilla warfare one might consult.
The Cat Inside is a delightful and precious allegory of freedom and rebellion, a meditation on values which extends Nietzsche’s analysis of master- slave psychology to a philosophy of anarchist liberation, which references Nietzsche’s interpreters Karl Jaspers, Maurice Blanchot, C.G. Jung, and Gilles Deleuze.
The Wild Boys envisions feral youths in rebellion against the Authority that created them, a dystopian future in which man’s animal nature has been betrayed by civilization but which also has the power to redeem him, the final part of his Anarchist trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil. As he wrote it during the period of his visits, I have often wondered how much of it was drawn from my father’s ideas and the claim of our family history that we are not human but werewolves, and had been driven out of Europe for that reason; Martin Luther referred to my ancestors as Drachenbraute, Brides of the Dragon, and we were driven out of Bavaria in 1586 at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions. He was writing it during the Stonewall Riots, which may be a more direct context as a fictionalization of the witness of history. It is also filled with episodes from the glory days of his youth and set in Mexico and Morocco as imaginal realms.
When I asked him, at the age or nine or ten, if I was in his book and what he was writing about, he said; “Freedom, nature as truth and civilization as addiction to wealth and power and theft of the soul, and how our pasts get mixed up with our futures.”
The Wild Boys reimagines The Egyptian Book of the Dead, of which fellow Surrealist and poet Philip Lamantia was a scholar, also the subject of his final novel The Western Lands as is H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, references Octave Mirbeau, Bataille, Genet, and extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as restraint of our nature. David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau here mingle and intertwine.
The Black Rider: the casting of the magic bullets, a theatrical collaboration with director Robert Wilson & the magnificent Tom Waits, is a can’t miss.
Exterminators collects thirty short stories, the Collected Interviews 1960-1997 edited by Lotringer are fascinating, as is The Adding Machine: essays.
Interzone is a travel journal, but only on the surface to the Marrakesh of Beatnik glory, as it also recounts the Lovecraftian plot to enslave humanity through heroin by fascist insects from Venus.
All the works of William S. Burroughs are masterpieces of Anarchist liberation and transgression, Surrealism and occult mysticism, even if difficult because they are told in collages of random and nonlinear episodes, with an iconography that is bizarre and obscene. In spite and possibly because of this, they remain among the great classics of world literature, revealing endless chasms of darkness and infinite possibilities of rapture and illumination.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Go ahead; swallow the toad.
Thereafter follows a chance encounter of my university years which became decisive in the direction of my life, Susan Sontag who was a kind of muse and provocateur.
One unforgettable afternoon, as a young university student lingering in museum, I found myself standing before an incomprehensible painting lost in thought when I became aware of someone very close behind me, out of sight, also silent.
Several minutes must have passed before the presence spoke, asking “What do you see?” I forget how I answered, but as I moved to turn away and find something easier to behold (it may have been I need something easier) hands delicately lighted on my shoulders, almost not there, but fixing me in place, pinioned before my subject.
And she said, “Look again”.
This was Susan Sontag, who remained the afternoon to discuss art and other subjects, shifting topics without warning to unrelated fields, epigrammatic statements, bizarre quotations, and somehow bringing it all together in devastating insights, a dazzling and bewildering conversation, with eyes that could see right through a thing to its heart, intimate and not a little terrifying.
She spoke as if she were a hyperdimensional being, unbounded by time and space and assembling collages of meaning from disparate realms. I’m not surprised people had difficulty following her narratives, but it was always worth the effort to understand.
For she will always be with us, a presence just out of sight, saying “Look again”.
This, the moment of our first encounter, occurred sometime after her 1980 publication of Under the Sign of Saturn, by some measure a final and apex achievement of her revisioning of humankind, and before my September 1982 conversations over strawberry crepes at breakfast with Jean Genet, in Beirut after my summer of gourmet travel became a summer of resistance to the Israeli invasion and siege.
In Susan Sontag I discovered a fellow in the adoration of Wagner and the opera in general but also of David Bowie, and in the uncommon vice of being both a classicist and a radical postmodernist influenced by French theory in apprehension and inclination regarding literature and the arts, academic tribes often siloed and unable to comprehend or discuss works beyond their own specializations. Susan transgressed boundaries, curious about everything as was I, and there never was a better companion with whom to solve unknowns or parse meaning from the shock of the new, whether in art, music, or literature, than Susan Sontag, for unlike Nietzsche she said yes to life, and refused nothing.
She it was who signaled for me a reframing of dialectical struggle in humanistic terms; the self is literally a persona or theatrical mask, and the first revolution in which we all must fight is the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
Susan Sontag referred to the differences between a thing and its image as the creative potential between bounded realms, a theme which runs through all her works and accounts for her interest in pop art and photography. I describe this as Chaos or the adaptive range of the system of self and society.
Could I but wield the power of wishes I would grant us all her transparency of insight and the ability to transform ourselves and our world through imaginative vision, to make of life a work of art. Each of us must find this for ourselves.
Her collections of essays, which source Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot for her aesthetics and ideology of Art, especially in the reinterpretation of Nietzsche, include Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, Under the Sign of Saturn, Where The Stress Falls, and the monumental On Photography, and her novels The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, are together a superb introduction to American arts & letters, as I think they shall remain for some time.
The Benefactor is a masterpiece which explores homosexuality as both identity and desire and describes coming out as an escape from a Dream of Mirrors. A deconstruction of Freud by way of Gaston Bachelard and others, it provides a tour of critical theory and applies the methods of Derrida and Foucault, the philosophy of Sartre and de Beauvoir, and the aesthetics and mystical dream quest of Surrealism to issues of gender, sex, and power.
Death Kit is a metafictional novel of polyphonous layered images, cleaving tightly to the model of Camus, and references Maurice Blanchot as he faced mock execution by the Nazis in 1944 as an existential crisis.
The Volcano Lover presents literary history as an unfolding of intention through the lives of its characters. Time, memory, history, and the struggle for meaning and self ownership are among the interdependent constellation of themes which echo those of Vladimir Nabokov, and like his explorations of them Susan Sontag’s works can be read as teleological questioning of the nature of being, of the cosmic fate and order of the universe and its meaning, and of our place in it.
In America explores possible reinventions of ourselves and our nation. Read it together with its companion work, Philip K. Dick’s alternate universe puzzle The Man in the High Tower; they are metaphysical and ideological topologies which Janus-like present very different faces of the same Surrealist quest.
An icon of the magisterial arbiter of culture as well as the literary rebel and a type of the New York Intellectual, arguably the last of her kind in the latter case as she seems to have overthrown herself and the authority of her own class, Susan Sontag is a universal reference known to all as the woman who monkeywrenched hierarchies of aesthetic value and leveled high art with pop culture, legitimizing Warhol’s Factory among other revolutionary acts.
And she argues that the historical memory from which identity grows is undergoing a massive transformational change from a literary-linguistic to a photographic-visual basis, from words to images, and represents a shift in human consciousness comparable to the invention of language. She wrote at the dawn of a new humanity as its Pythian seer, and like the original mythic figure was not always understood or believed.
As to the painting, an abstraction of a classical Japanese koi pond, my answer at second look was “Movement- these forms are in a series of states of transition, with the symbols alongside, not ideograms but where one might expect a poem, acting as time marks like in a musical score. This is an allegory of change.”
To which she said, “Yes it is! Who are you? Oh, I’m Susan.”
I reached out to shake hands during introductions; she took my hand, and did not let it go.
Finally there was Jean Genet who swore me to the Oath of the Resistance during the Siege of Beirut in the first of many Last Stands.
As I wrote in my celebration of his birthday; Among the great iconoclasts and poets of liberation, Jean Genet became himself a figure of the Rebel so anointed by Sartre; but also he is a Saint and mystic whose fictionalized autobiographies are filled with Catholic, Gnostic, and Classical symbolism and themes, Jungian archetypes, and references to Romantic Idealism and Surrealism.
As did Keats, he chronicles a voyage of discovery in search of Love and Beauty as Platonic Ideals which are both transcendent and immanent in nature; passions which transport us beyond our limits as ecstatic vision and their values and hidden principles which are truths written in our flesh.
His was the red flag of revolution; Jean Genet directly worked with the Black Panthers, the anticolonialist rebels of Algeria, Communist and other Antifascist groups in America and Europe, and for the freedom of the Palestinians. In many ways both his career as a revolutionary and his literary works parallel those of Albert Camus.
But interdependent with his political work as an agent of change is that of a visionary whose mission is to regenerate the world. In the Surrealist works of Jean Genet do the forces of conservatism and revolution intertwine like the twin serpents of Asclepius, god of healing dreams.
The Thief’s Journal is a classic of world literature and a universal reference, the usual entrance to his world of ideas. Jean Genet describes herein his youthful wanderings throughout Europe, his burglaries constructed as parodies and inversions of Catholic religious rituals and of authorized Ideals. Both his homosexual relationships and his crimes against class and property are transgressive acts of revolutionary liberation in a grand subversive campaign of freedom.
Yet concealed within this contextual glove is a heroic quest for meaning and a rebellion in the Romantic tradition; to smash through the mask of illusions and seize the true and naked Infinite in its splendor. As did Ahab, Victor Frankenstein, Milton’s rebel angel, and Prometheus, Jean Genet sought to cast down false idols and rekindle the sacred fire.
All of these figures, images, myths, and sources of iconography appear throughout the early Great Books of Jean Genet, along with themes and ideas from Blake, Coleridge, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando; a symbology and thematic system which reveals a deeply learned scholarship.
In this quest Jean Genet enacts and references Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and an immersion in the ecstatic Dionysian principle from The Birth of Tragedy, his interpretation of which is informed by Carl Gustave Jung’s lectures published as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra from the 86 seminars he chaired over 11 university terms on the great poem, and on the nuanced and erudite revisioning of Nietzsche by Maurice Blanchot.
Of his numerous influences and references, his works await the great scholar who will annotate them and restore their place among the canon of literature and their relevance to our lives; so also with the geniuses who were influenced by him, including among them William S. Burroughs with whom he is intertwined like a secret twin or the faces of Janus.
Our Lady of the Flowers, a prison journal which is also a descent into a Dantesque underworld narrated by his alter-ego, a female identified character named Divine, for whom the muse of John Waters is named, who is both Beatrice as guide of the soul and the pilgrim figure as holy spirit and Bride of God. It is a Gnostic-Jungian text full of medieval symbolism and classical references, which describes parallel narratives of Persephone’s myth and the alchemical regeneration of the fallen world through the sapientia dei. In short, it is an unheralded masterpiece which draws ideas from the Divine Comedy and reimagines the whole western tradition of occult religious mysticism as a unified system of thought, and a map of the rebirth of civilization and the human spirit.
Of his plays, The Balcony is a stunning satire of power structures as ritualized role playing in a brothel’s hall of mirrors, and The Blacks explores race and identity as a game of masks in a furious condemnation of white privilege.
Treasures of the Night: collected poems is both beautiful and wonderfully subversive and dangerous, a call of beckoning sirens. Who among us has not heard that call, and ventured forth into the ravishing darkness?
The Declared Enemy collects his political essays, while Fragments of the Artwork does the same for his writings on art.
Prisoner of Love is a memoir of the two years he spent in Palestinian refugee camps, a final meditation on being an Outsider and the meaning of rebellion.
Though he doesn’t mention me in the book, I will never forget our conversations at breakfast during the Fall of Beirut to the Israeli siege in the last days before his capture, for this is where he swore me to the oath of the Resistance and set me on my life’s path of struggle for liberty against tyranny and autocracies of state force and control, for equality against racist injustice, and against the fascism which combines both tyranny and white supremacist terror.
I have been engaged in revolutionary struggle, in the resistance to fascism and tyranny, and in the quest for our liberty and democracy, since the summer of 1982 when my culinary explorations were so rudely interrupted by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Siege of Beirut, and I will resist injustice til the end. To all masters and tyrants in all worlds now and yet undreamed, I say with Ahab; “To the end I will grapple with thee.”
With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers running amok in a sack of murder, arson, and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with an apologetic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”
We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all.
Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’
To which I replied, “No.”
“Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
So for the informing, motivating, and shaping forces which forged me as I grew up and became who I chose to be, like all humans a self created being who has assimilated qualities through direct transmission and successorship from those who offered aspirational selves and identities.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and others?
Edward Albee, a reading list
Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee, Edward Albee
Torch of Liberty 