In our current moment of book burnings and bans, rewritten histories and authorized identities, silencing and erasure of the witness of history and the repression of dissent, thought control and the electoral infiltration, subversion, and capture of public institutions crucial to the mission of democracy and the manufacture of an informed electorate able to question authority as co-owners of the state, our interdependent public schools and libraries have become a frontline in the struggle between tyranny and liberty.
What is a library for?
Libraries share with public schools the purpose of creating citizens, of education in its original Greek meaning to bring out the truth of ourselves, together with two other primary and crucial functions in a democracy; to provide free access to learning as both rights of information and a free press, which also parallel equality as annihilation of class and access to opportunity as a seizure of power, and to provide inclusive and diverse representations of self as revolutionary struggle against authorized identities, divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of race, gender, faith, and nationality.
At the heart of this process of identity construction lies the curation of reading lists and a personal library which represents and defines us in ways we have chosen for ourselves.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
Memory, history, identity; the selves we choose among the limitless possibilities of becoming human. Here is a central problem of both libraries and the construction of ourselves as assemblages of stories; how shall we taxonomize, structure, and assign relative value to the texts we gather, in our personae and in our libraries as memory palaces? And in a realm of ideas and their consequences which is chaotic, shifting, ephemeral, impermanent, and full of dyadic opposites, relative truths, mutual interdependence and change?
Before all else, who decides? Public libraries and schools confront us with all of the issues about how to be human together which create, inform, motivate, and shape human societies, and democracies most especially as negotiated meaning and value.
This is why the curation of personal libraries and unauthorized reading lists are revolutionary acts, and a praxis of the values of democracy.
In aid of this process of decolonization and becoming autonomous I share with you now some ideas from writing in Aeon on How to Nurture and Grow a Personal Library, and a link to the wonderful community of librarians at LibraryThing.
As I wrote in preface to my reading lists, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others. Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?
As I wrote in my post of May 28 2022, On Libraries and Identity as a Ground of Struggle; “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” So Heinrich Heine has taught us, in his lyric drama of 1823, Almansor: A Tragedy. As described by Professor Shlomo Avineri in a lecture at CEU; “Almansor” is a tragic love story between an Arab man and Donna Clara, a Moroccan woman who’s forced to convert from Islam to Christianity. Taking place in Granada in 1492, the tragedy depicts the burning of the Qu’ran, the act that prompts the sentence now engraved in the ground of Berlin’s Opernplatz commemorating the horrifying book burning of 1933.
Heine’s lyrical poetry was well-loved in Germany, his most famous poem “Lorelei” even appeared in a collection of German folk songs, although the poet’s name was given as Anonymous. His books, together with the works of Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kastner, Karl Marx, Heinrich Mann and many other “un-German” authors, were also burned on May 10, 1933.”
Why was this early work of German Romanticism silenced and erased from the canon of literature for over a century? As a wiki article describes; “The performance turned into a fiasco and had to be canceled after tumultuous scenes in the auditorium. Since there are no immediate newspaper reports of the event, the trigger is not entirely clear and leaves room for speculation ranging from personal intrigue to anti-Semitism. According to Manfred Windfuhr, editor of the Düsseldorf Heine edition, the most likely explanation is the anecdote that the actor of Almansor Eduard Schütz later reported. According to this, a viewer asked about the author of the play during the last transformation towards the end of the performance and was whispered “Der Jude Heine” in response. In the erroneous assumption that an Israelite money changer of the same name from Braunschweig wrote the tragedy, he then exclaimed: “What? shall we listen to the silly Jew’s nonsense? We don’t want to tolerate that any longer! Let’s knock out the piece! ”And thus triggered the protests. simple confusion of names.”
Heine’s personal friends and influences included Goethe, Schlegel, Dumas, Hegel, and Marx, and his direct models were the world’s first historical novel Las Guerras de Granada by Ginés Pérez de Hita, which awaits translation into English, The Magic Ring by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, and the beautiful Arabic and Persian romance Layla and Majnoun which has been reimagined in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by the Afghan author Khaled Hosseini.
In Almansor, Heine writes in reference to the book burning of 1499 by the future Grand Inquisitor in the wake of the fall of Al-Andalus and the betrayal by the Catholic monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragón of the treaty which guaranteed freedom of religion for all, during which thousands of books were destroyed, including the Qu’ran and other works of Islamic, Jewish, and classical Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, history, and science, excepting only medical works from the flames. It seems they weren’t quite as crazy as our own science deniers and anti-vaccine Luddites, but nearly so, and the parallels do not end there.
And so, we come to this; the Republican Party, in public declaration of their origins and traditions in the Inquisition and the Nazis, have chosen to launch a national campaign of book burnings and bans and are waging a combined electoral and media campaign to monopolize public school and library boards to authorize identities and repress dissent. And only our public solidarity and will to resist subjugation stands between us and the year 2022 being remembered in history with those of 1499 and 1933.
As I wrote in my post of December 14 2021, Subversion of Democracy: Case of the Texas Book Ban;
Remaining on the Texas Public School Required Reading List:
Lynchings and Other Family Gatherings: the Joy of Community
Keep Your Pimp Hand Strong: Negotiating Gender Roles
Only Our Kind Are Truly Human: Why Values and Morals Only Apply To Us
Texas bans books from public schools and libraries in subversion of democracy and our values of freedom and equality of all humankind in an attempt to enforce imperiled hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege historically and systemically constructed along divisions of race and gender and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
The multifront assault on freedom of information and expression is about patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror under the fig leaves of Gideonite fundamentalist Christian Identity sectarianism and jingoistic nationalism, as it has always been.
The last time the state had the right to control its slave populations through access to learning civilization collapsed and was lost for a thousand years while the Church burned books which threated elite power, and we must be vigilant lest we give those who would enslave us the right and power to do so yet again, and cast the world into a Dark Age from which we may never recover.
As written by Ryan Cooper in The Week, in an article entitled The forgotten history of Republican book banning; “A conservative stock character is making a comeback: the book banner. For the past few years, Republicans have pretended they’re defending free speech and free inquiry in schools against censorious liberals with their safe spaces and trigger warnings. In reality, conservatives have a mile-long history of trying to suppress the teaching of books they find uncomfortable.
That record has resurfaced in the Virginia gubernatorial race, where Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin recently ran an ad in which a woman named Laura Murphy complained about not being able to dictate what was taught at her local high school. Murphy describes the issue as explicit material being shown to children without parental sign-off, but there’s much more to the story than the ad let on: Back in 2013, Murphy told The Washington Post that her son Blake (now an associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee) had night terrors after being required to read Toni Morrison’s book Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Beloved.
Murphy isn’t the only Republican with this censorious impulse. The American Library Association maintains an incomplete list of attempted book-banning events in recent history, and in the large majority of cases for which a motivation is explained, it is conservative: Right-wing parents in Columbus, Ohio, tried to ban Catcher in the Rye in schools in 1963 because it was “anti-white.” Other parents challenged The Grapes of Wrath in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1991 because it invoked God and Jesus in a “vain and profane manner.” Slaughterhouse-Five was suppressed in Oakland County, Michigan, in 1972, in a case in which a circuit judge called the book “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” Those are just three of dozens of examples.
Now, liberals have done the same thing on occasion, typically targeting books which contain racial slurs, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But the bulk of book banning incidents — parents complaining about sexual content, violence, skepticism of Christianity, cursing, or the history of racism and slavery — are straight out of the Moral Majority politics of the 1980s and 1990s. That habit seemed to vanish for awhile when Republicans nominated a thrice-divorced, credibly accused rapist for president. Now it’s coming back.
In recent months, Republican legislatures have passed de facto prohibitions of teaching the history of racism across the country. As a result, a Tennessee teacher was fired for assigning Ta-Nehisi Coates, while a Texas school board recently apologized for instructing teachers to present “opposing” views on the Holocaust while trying to obey a Republican law on curriculum content. Don’t let the brief reprieve fool you: They were always like this.”
As written by Amy Brady in Lithub, The History (and Present) of Banning Books in America: On the Ongoing Fight Against the Censorship of Ideas; “Like small pox and vinyl records, book banning is something many Americans like to think of as history. But according to the American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE), the practice persists. ABFE, which from its headquarters in White Plains fights book banning across the country, keeps a list of books challenged each year by American public libraries and schools. In 2016, that list includes Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Emily M. Danworth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Most of the titles are by LGBTQ authors and authors of color who write about life beyond white, straight, middle-class America.
One way ABFE fights book banning is to partner with other organizations in the publishing industry (including their parent organization, the American Booksellers Association) to host Banned Books Week, a seven-day celebration that takes place in bookstores and libraries all over the United States. This year, the event runs from September 25th to October 1st with a focus on “diversity,” a factor behind many book challenges. “There were over 300 book challenges in 2015,” said Chris Finan, Director of ABFE, in an interview. “And themes of race, ethnicity, and sexual preference have been a large part of why those books got challenged.”
On its website, ABFE acknowledges that diversity is difficult to define. One definition that has informed their thinking comes from the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom: Diversity includes “non-white main and/or secondary characters; LGBT main and/or secondary characters; disabled main and/or secondary characters; issues about race or racism; LGBT issues; issues about religion, which encompass in this situation the Holocaust and terrorism; issues about disability and/or mental illness; non-Western settings, in which the West is North America and Europe.”
Historically, other reasons for banning books include: sexual imagery, violence, and any content considered obscene. Indeed, arguments over obscenity—how its defined and how that definition relates to the First Amendment—have been at the heart of banned-book controversies throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Many historians point to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the first book in the United States to experience a ban on a national scale. The Confederacy barred the book from stores not only for its pro-abolitionist agenda, but because it aroused heated debates about slavery (some historians argue that the book catalyzed the Civil War).
A decade after the war, a carping moralist government official named Anthony Comstock convinced the United States Congress to pass a law prohibiting the mailing of “pornographic” materials. His definition of the term was murky at best. Anatomy textbooks, doctors’ pamphlets about reproduction, anything by Oscar Wilde, and even The Canterbury Tales were deemed too sexy to send through the mail.
These bans, or “comstockery,” as the practice became known, continued into the new century. But by the 1920s, shifts in politics and social mores led booksellers to see themselves as advocates for people’s right to read whatever they wanted. Then, in 1933, an influential court case—The United States v. One Book Called Ulysses—helped usher in a new era of legal interpretation of the First Amendment.
In that court case, Judge John M. Woolsey overturned a federal ban of James Joyce’s Ulysses—the ban had been in effect since 1922, and court transcripts reveal that the judge who banned the book also remarked that it was “the work of a disordered mind.” Woolsey, who admitted to not liking the novel, found legal cause to challenge the previous judge’s definition of pornography—and by extension, his definition of art. He ultimately ruled that the depiction of sex, even if unpleasant, should be allowed in serious literature. His final edict is at once hilarious and evident of a mind capable of separating legal philosophy from personal preference: “[W]hilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”
The case set an important precedent. However, Comstock Law remained on the books until 1957, when the Supreme Court tried Roth vs. The United States. The plaintiff was Samuel Roth, a writer and bookseller convicted for mailing pornographic magazines to subscribers. His trial forced the American legal system to once again reconsider its definition of obscenity. The Court’s final decision was bad for Roth: his conviction was upheld, and he remained in prison until 1961. But it was great for lovers of books: the definition was narrowed to apply to only that which is “utterly without redeeming social importance.” That narrowing made room for books depicting sex and violence. Even Judge Woolsey had found Ulysses to have social importance.
In the decades that followed, public officials would continue to challenge the Court’s 1957 definition of obscenity, including Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, whose personal definition famously began and ended with the declaration “I know it when I see it.” But in general, the 1960s and 70s witnessed a simultaneous drop in instances of book bans and rise in more explicit art. Artists and authors felt freer than ever to experiment. Consumers were more willing than ever to un-clutch their pearls and engage with racy material. Sex was mainstream in the novels of John Updike and Erica Jong. Then America elected Ronald Reagan.
“Reagan didn’t run on a campaign of anti-pornography,” Finan clarifies. “But he nevertheless ran an election that depowered those who fought for First Amendment freedoms. [His] election encouraged challenges by people who were unhappy with books in schools and libraries that were increasingly realistic in their depiction of life.” The number of challenges to books made by school boards and libraries rose dramatically: “Suddenly we were facing 700-800 challenges a year,” says Finan. In 1982, the ALA responded to this renewed culture of censorship with Banned Books Week. “The point of the event was to get people to understand that these books weren’t pornographic or excessively violent, but simply depicting the real world…and that many were classics of American literature,” Finan says. “Banned Books Week was the first real [American] celebration of the freedom to read.”
In those early days, Banned Books Week consisted almost entirely of libraries and bookstores hanging posters and displaying banned books. “Those displays were enormously effective communication tools,” says Finan, “because people would wander over and find out that the books they love had been challenged. Suddenly they understood that censorship isn’t just about fringe literature.” Today, those displays remain a centerpiece of Banned Books Week, but partnering sponsors are also seeking to involve readers in other ways. The Washington, DC Public Library, for example, hosts a city-wide scavenger hunt of banned books that began on September 1st and will continue until the end of the month. The books, which have been wrapped in black paper printed with words like “SMUT” or “FILTHY,” have been hidden on shelves in libraries and bookstores all over DC.
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), another sponsor of Banned Books Week, has published a handbook that lists which comic books have been censored and outlines what readers can do to fight censorship. “Since 2011, at least one graphic novel has been included on ALA’s annual list of the ten most frequently challenged books,” said Betsy Gomez, Editorial Director of CBLDF, in an interview. “In 2015, CBLDF fought more than 24 attempts to ban books, including the comics Drama, This One Summer, The Sandman, Fun Home, Persepolis, Palomar. So far, in 2016, CBLDF has defended a dozen books.” The handbook includes programming ideas for educators and libraries to engage their communities in discussions about banned books throughout the year.
Organizations with no official connection to Banned Books Week are also getting involved. Wordier Than Thou, an open mic storytelling group in Pinellas Park, Florida, began presenting last year an annual burlesque show inspired by selected banned books. “[The show] definitely gets people talking about literature,” wrote Tiffany Razzano, founder of Wordier Than Thou, in an email. “[Last year], throughout the night people would come up to me and tell me about their favorite banned book.” The show, which features area burlesque favorite Mayven Missbehavin’, makes thematic sense: “It’s supposedly offensive material [interpreted by] scantily clad women performing classic burlesque stripteases,” she writes. For the sake of surprise, Razzano wouldn’t disclose which books would be featured this year. But last year’s performance included Gone with the Wind, 1984, and The Scarlet Letter.
It’s rare today for a book banning case to make it to the federal courts, but many challenges to books are still taking place on the state and local levels. At the time of this writing, ABFE has joined a protest against the Chesterfield County Public Schools in Virginia, which seeks to remove Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park and other titles from students’ voluntary summer reading lists. The proposed removal is “particularly outrageous,” says Finan, because the books aren’t a part of the school’s required curriculum.
If school administrators are attempting to limit even elective reading, what does the future hold for students who want access to all books, classic and contemporary—books that might broaden their understanding of the world? “The problem of book banning hasn’t gone away, and it probably won’t,” Finan laments. “There are always going to be struggles over the proper limits to free speech.”
As I wrote in my post of September 8 2021, With the Lions of Panjshir: a Notebook of Resistance; I greet you from a place of great darkness and beauty, beyond all limits of the human and boundaries of the Forbidden, among the unknowns marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value. Here ancient truths are tested, and new truths are forged with the limitless possibilities of becoming human. Of these truths I speak to you as a witness of history; of wonderful things, terrible things.
It is a place wherein the flaws of our humanity are reflected in the brokenness of the world, but one in which true heroism is possible and the sacred wounds we bear can open us to the pain of others, where the redemptive power of love reveals the truth of ourselves and our interdependence as our brothers keepers. Is this not the beauty of humankind?
The best and most accurate summation of the Battle for Panjshir thus far is written by Santosh Chaubey for Reuters, Resistance is Futile: Why Panjshir Falling to the Taliban is Inevitable; “Panjshir valley of northern Afghanistan, the last province to resist the Taliban’s complete control of Afghanistan, has fallen as per the claims made by the Islamist force. But if we see the genesis of the Taliban’s emergence this time, we find that the Panjshir valley resistance is already a lost battle with no international support coming to the rescue and sustain it against the combined strength of the fundamentalist outfit and Pakistan.
Ahmad Massoud, the Panjshir leader and head of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRFA), and Amrullah Saleh, the caretaker President of the previous Afghan government, are both appealing to get some international support for the challengers. But with major powers like the US, Russia, China, Germany and Britain and the United Nations willing to give the Taliban a chance if they mend their ways, the NRFA, it seems, is going to be just a minor resistance group localised to a limited area if it continues with its efforts.
The United Nations Security Council recently adopted a resolution on Afghanistan. While Russia and China abstained in the vote on the resolution sponsored by the US, UK and France, the message was very clear that the international community had no problem with a Taliban-led government if the Islamist outfit ensured that Afghanistan would not become a terror hub again, like it was under the 1990s Taliban government regime: naturally with additional norms like upholding human rights concerns of women, children and minorities.
(Here I append my own commentary: Norms which like the eradication of Islamist terror are likely unenforceable; fig leaves of legitimacy.)
Clearly, the international community is looking towards a peaceful political settlement this time in the country that has seen civil wars for over 40 years and is willing to give the Taliban a chance with their rapid takeover after the withdrawal of the US and other international troops that showed the powerlessness of the previous Afghan government and inoperability of the security mechanism developed by America across the country since 2001.
Afghanistan has been a graveyard for many countries. The USSR invaded it in December 1979 but faced a humiliating loss after a decade of war much in the same way as the US and other international forces have seen in the last 20 years. While the Soviet Union’s withdrawal led to a bitter tribal war between different Mujahideen commanders with no alternative arrangement set in place and saw the emergence of the Taliban, this time the international community is much more concerned with terror becoming the biggest global threat and its deep correlation with Afghanistan in the past.
To sum it up, the international community is not going to encourage another movement in Afghanistan this time like it did for the anti-Taliban resistance Northern Alliance in the 1990s – until the Taliban fail and go back to the ways of the 1990s to become a radical, fundamentalist insurgent group again that harbours terrorists and threatens global security.
Though the Taliban have denied this, emboldened by Pakistan’s direct support, they now claim to have completely captured the landlocked valley. As confirmed by Ahmad Massoud, Pakistan bombed the valley to give the Taliban an upper hand over the NRFA fighters who were bravely taking on the Taliban forces for the last three weeks.
With direct air support through drone bombing, Pakistan also air-dropped its special forces to fight alongside the Taliban. And though the Taliban have assured the international community that they will not allow Afghanistan to become a terror hub again and will not allow terrorists to use the nation’s soil to plan and perpetrate terror attacks in other countries, the Taliban force at Panjshir valley also includes al-Qaeda fighters.
The correlation between ISI chief Hamid Faiz’s landing in Kabul on September 4 and the Taliban’s claim of complete capture of Panjshir province on September 6 can’t be ignored.
Though the NRFA says the Taliban claim is false, releasing a tweet this morning that says the “Taliban’s claim of occupying Panjshir is false and NRFA forces are present in all strategic positions across the valley to continue the fight, assuring the people of Afghanistan that the struggle against the Taliban and their partners will continue until justice and freedom prevails”, the fact is the NRFA lost its main voice and spokesperson Fahim Dashti in the battle on Sunday while Amrullah Saleh is missing and is reportedly in Tajikistan and Ahmad Massoud has fled.
Panjshir valley resisted the Soviet invasion in the 1980s and the Taliban takeover between 1996 and 2001. But the difference between then and now is the sweeping capture of Afghanistan by the Taliban all across the country, in 33 of the 34 provinces. Just Panjshir was left, but with claims made by the Taliban releasing video clips showing their fighters raising the Taliban flag on Bazarak, Panjshir’s capital city, and capturing Ahmad Massoud’s house and patrolling the valley’s streets, this province too has largely fallen.
The Taliban were not able to capture the northern areas of the country so effectively the last time, in the 1990s, as the Northern Alliance and many ethnic minorities inhabiting these areas fought well with international support. But by co-opting ethnic minorities like the Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmens and even Hazaras of this area this time by including commanders of these tribes, the Taliban have swept the entire northern Afghanistan area, including the border posts.
The local leadership of Panjshir previously had access to the supply routes to get essential items and arms and ammunition even during the war phase. But this time, these supply routes are under Taliban control, and while controlling the narrow entrance to the valley, they have blocked the roads and have ensured that food, medical and other emergency services supplied to the valley are entirely cut off.”
There are some claims in this article clearly written by someone who is here in Panjshir which I would amend; most importantly, the Taliban have occupied government offices and other parts of the capital of both symbolic and tactical value, but this is not the same as control when the NRF remains armed and can strike at will throughout the province.
Both the government of Afghanistan in exile and Massoud himself remain secure and defiant, having escaped to Tajikistan while we fought diversionary and rearguard actions as well as the main battle on Sunday in which Fahim Dashti was killed, and the fighters of the NRF themselves are like lions with an arena full of prey to hunt; nothing frightens them, not even aerial bombardment, and though they can be killed they cannot be defeated.
As the Taliban have come to their home, the defenders of Panjshir will return the courtesy and come to theirs in Kabul. No program of pacification can entirely crush resistance in this mazelike series of over twenty valleys and goatpaths over towering cliffs in which perhaps a quarter million people live; and it is an hour’s drive from Kabul, where the NRF and other allied sleeper cells, rollover suicide teams, local reaction forces, and infiltration agents within the Taliban and other groups, await their moment of retribution. No conflict in these conditions can be final.
Nor can any victory here be described as total; Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires for many reasons, among them the shifting and multiple loyalties of its people, not merely a checkerboard of traditional ethnic divisions and independent warlords but also an operational environment wherein an entire military culture of armed and trained fighters follow whoever best serves their interests and from antiquity pursue war as a profession, change the ideologies and goals of their factions or join others opportunistically, and many competing organizations share members or have infiltrated each other so thoroughly it has become impossible to tell the wolves from the sheep.
The Taliban has seized Afghanistan; but the Taliban, cohesive through its origins in the fifty students of Mullah Mohammad Omar who founded it in 1994 in Kandahar to restore sharia law, is today united by only four things; first and foremost resistance to American imperialism and colonial dominion and the Deobandi ideology which recasts Islamic faith as anticolonial liberation struggle as it was developed in Delhi in resistance to the British Empire and instrumentalized by Pakistan through its mosques and madrasas; secondly the historical narratives of victimization and blood debt of a decades long anticolonial war of independence which have forged a national identity represented by the Taliban, third the personal charisma, authority, and lines of patronage of its leaders and the direct loyalties of their forces, who are often also clan and tribal leaders with the authority of kings, and fourth unifying institutions and authority such as the Quetta Shura command in Pakistan and the Haqqani Network de facto intelligence service. Having a secure base of operations across an open border with its patron Pakistan has been crucial to its success, but the Taliban is both a proxy of Pakistan, who has recreated Afghanistan as a Sunni buffer state and key ally between herself and Iran, and a genuine independence movement.
These are its strengths; the weaknesses of the Taliban are its ethnic balkanization and chaotic factional multiplicity which make exercising direct control of its own forces problematic. The Taliban remains a theocracy and unifying institution, but with a feudal army, where a nobleman commands his own sworn fighters and obeys his own direct lord but that lord cannot command his soldiers personally, not a modern one with a unifying chain of command. When the situation begins with three major competing organizations of Sunni fundamentalism, Taliban, Islamic State, and al Qaeda, locked in a titanic and ferocious life or death struggle for dominion whose fighters are often members of more than one group, and becomes complex with dozens or possibly hundreds of factions, to claim that anyone is in control or can rule here in Afghanistan is absurd. And here lies the great opportunity which Chaos offers us; to seize our power from any authority who would subjugate us.
The call of Chaos is simply one which I cannot resist, though I am here in Panjshir specifically because of a debt of honor I owe to the father of its current warlord Ahmad Massoud, the legendary warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud. So as the Pineapple Express run off the books by special operations forces to smuggle their former partners out of the country during the debacle of the Kabul airlift neared completion, I was organizing an expedition across the Khyber Pass from Peshawar, the heart of the Taliban’s government in exile and bastion of its Pakistani Intelligence handlers and advisors as well as the gateway to the world’s largest arms black market and its tribal borderlands.
Panjshir is lost, and with it the immediate hope of independence from Taliban theocratic tyranny in Afghanistan as well as the American colonial imperialism the Tasliban has freed the nation from. This is a predictable phase of anticolonial liberation struggle and a form of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes, as we are sadly familiar with in the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mugabe, and so many other revolutions which become tyrannies, though there are special and unique conditions here in Afghanistan and limits to the comparison of theocracy to any form of liberation struggle arising from secular Humanism as embodied in the American and French Revolutions on the one hand and the Russian and other communist revolutions on the other.
What must be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such very different results? For now we must work to bring change and restore democracy and our universal human rights to a sovereign and independent Afghanistan, and move from throwing stones to throwing words. Before all else is this; the people must be co-owners of the state who have chosen to be human together in ways which it embodies, and not its slaves.
I will fight on, for the liberty and humanity of the peoples of Afghanistan and the world, wherever men hunger to be free.
On September 5 2021 I wrote; Confusion during fighting in Panjshir; the Taliban have been lured into a trap in the valley and cannot escape while the resistance control the passes. Taliban mountaineers have been captured attempting to climb the cliffs and seize gun positions. But the road north leads not to resupply or transshipment, but to Taliban held areas, and communications are sporadic. Panjshir is isolated from support, no help is coming from the international community, and the fight now rests with mobile teams behind Taliban lines; significant forces await a route to bring aid. Meanwhile the Taliban in the valley, including elite units and the Red Faction shock troops, are fighting ferociously for survival, as are the people of Panjshir. This is a battle of mutual annihilation, glorious and terrible; it remains to be seen whether it is also futile.
In a post of September 6 2021, I wrote; Taliban has captured the capital of Panjshir using Pakistani drone bombing and airdropped elite Pakistani units, and Massoud and the government in exile have fled to Tajikistan. Now the game has become one of Occupation and Resistance.
To a friend’s post bidding good riddance to Massoud on the basis of his father’s personal moral failings as a CIA allied warlord implicated in sex trafficking, slave labor, and the heroin trade, I replied; No one anticipated Pakistani drone bombardment and direct support with airlifted special forces units, nor do I wish to fight Pakistan as they helped us win the independence of Kashmir from the 1990-1993 invasion and brigandage by India, an independence which lasted until 2019, and allied with me personally in circumstances of horror and desperation; I have met among the enemy a number of those I originally met as allies in Kashmir thirty years ago and other places since, including Pakistan Intelligence Services operatives now advising Taliban commanders they have cultivated and worked with as key assets since the mujahideen period of the Soviet invasion, and their descendants. I spent an evening at a campfire dining with some of them and am not mistaken; they certainly knew me.
Of course you are right that local constructions of values including ideas of gender equality and freedom do not align or share much common ground with ours, and opium is the currency here; America’s soldiers were de facto enforcers of our client warlords control of the heroin market and guards of the opium fields. I do not mean to suggest that there are good and bad sides to heckle or cheer on; we are all bad guys here.
Why am I here? Maybe I just like lost causes, to quote a despicable villain and monstrous perpetrator of sexual and racist terror from Gone With The Wind, a character who nonetheless had some great lines. This world we humans have built for ourselves shapes us to the service of power and its authoritarian systems and structures of inequality and elite hegemonies of weaIth, power, and privilege, offers few innocents to champion, and as George Bernard Shaw suggests in Pygmalion with the magnificent character of Eliza’s father; the requirement of virtue to merit help, whether it be charity or solidarity of action, is a false dichotomy which serves to perpetuate unequal power and maintain hegemonic elites.
I have found but one general principle as a guide to disambiguate when we must resist by any means necessary and when we must forebear the social use of force, and it is not in defense of the innocent as this places a moral burden of judgement on victims of unjust authority, and often there are no innocent.
No, my test for the use of force is simply this; who holds the power?
When is it good to be bad?
In Nietzsche’s formulation, how do we hunt monsters without becoming monsters ourselves?
To these questions I give a hunter’s reply; I am not a good man, who forebears to challenge unjust authority, nor do other people’s ideas of virtue interest me if they take away our power to resist evil. I am far more useful to you than that, if you are among those who engage in struggle against unequal power, theocracy and imperial dominion, tyranny, state terror, carceral states of force and control, fascism of all kinds, violations of our universal human rights and of our ideals as a free society of equals which include a secular state, liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
I am a bad man who is on your side.
For myself, the only thing you need to merit help is to need help, and the test of the use of force and violence is a simple question; who holds power? I am a revolutionary for whom the seizure of power is about autonomy and the restoration of balance. I am on the side of those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth where ever they may be, and I place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
I celebrate the victory of the people of Afghanistan over the American Empire even if that takes the form of the Taliban for now, and have argued for our recognition of them as a legitimate independence movement and the government of Afghanistan. But I cannot support the genocidal conquest and assimilation of one ethnic group by another, nor the violation of the sovereignty and independence of any state claimed by another. There is but one legitimacy which any state may claim; the will of its people.
No one may with justice or natural right speak or act in another’s name without their consent; thus Rousseau teaches us, and it is this principle of Natural Law which founded America in the Declaration of Independence.
How shall we answer those who would enslave us?
This we must ever resist, beyond hope of victory or even survival. And in resistance and refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free, for nothing can take from us our refusal of consent to be governed, mastered, and enslaved.
Let us run amok and be ungovernable; let us bring the Chaos, and be free.
Panjshir: Resistance fighters vow to defend Afghanistan’s final anti-Taliban holdout | AFP
August 16 2024 Anniversary of the Fall of Kabul and Afghanistan
A Journey Along Pakistan’s Historic Khyber Pass (2000)
Peshawar Smugglers’ Market
Counting the Costs: A Reading List for Understanding Afghanistan and America’s Longest War
Afghan Voices: History and Literature By Afghan Authors:
The Essential Rumi, Rumi: the Big Red Book, Coleman Barks translator
Games Without Rules: history of the Afghans, Destiny Disrupted: a history of the world through Islamic eyes, Tamim Ansary
The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini
A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, The Patience Stone, Earth and Ashes, A Curse on Dostoevsky, Atiq Rahim
A Woman Among Warlords, Malalai Joya
The Storyteller’s Daughter: One Woman’s Return to Her Lost Homeland, Saira Shah
Kara Kush, The Sufis, The Way of the Sufi, Tales of the Dervishes: Teaching Stories of the Sufi Masters Over the Past Thousand Years, Caravan of Dreams, The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin, The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin, Idries Shah
General Histories of the American- Afghanistan Wars:
The American War in Afghanistan: A History, Carter Malkasian
Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Michael Griffin
In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan, Seth G. Jones
The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014, Carlotta Gall
Swimming With Warlords: A Dozen-Year Journey Across the Afghan War, Kevin Sites
A History of America’s War in Afghanistan by People Who Fought It:
Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan, Doug Stanton
Not A Good Day To Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda, Sean Naylor
Outlaw Platoon: Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan, Sean Parnell & John R. Bruning
Lions of Kandahar: The Story of a Fight Against All Odds, Rusty Bradley & Kevin Maurer
The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, Jake Tapper
Roberts Ridge: A Story of Courage and Sacrifice on Takur Ghar Mountain, Afghanistan, Malcolm MacPherson
The Chosen Few: A Company of Paratroopers and Its Heroic Struggle to Survive in the Mountains of Afghanistan, Gregg Zoroy
The Hooligans of Kandahar: Not All War Stories are Heroic, Joseph J. Kassabian
American Spartan: The Promise, the Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant, Ann Scott Tyson
And in fiction, there is nothing like William T. Vollman’s Surreal novel of his fight as a volunteer with the mujahideen against the Soviet invasion, You Bright and Risen Angels, referential to the triumvirate of Great Books written about the Second World War, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and John Hawkes’ The Cannibal.
همانطور که در پست خود از سپتامبر 8 2021 نوشتم, با شیرها از Panjshir: نوت بوک مقاومت; من شما را از یک محل تاریکی بزرگ و زیبایی استقبال, فراتر از تمام محدودیت های انسان و مرزهای ممنوع, در میان ناشناخته مشخص شده در اینجا اژدها بر روی نقشه های ما از انسان, معنی, و ارزش.
در اینجا حقایق باستانی آزمایش می شوند، و حقایق جدید با امکانات بی حد و حصر تبدیل شدن به انسان است. از این حقایق من به شما به عنوان شاهد تاریخ صحبت می کنند; از چیزهای شگفت انگیز، چیزهای وحشتناک.
جایی است که در آن عیب های بشریت ما در شکسته شدن جهان منعکس شده است، اما جایی که در آن قهرمان واقعی امکان پذیر است و زخم های مقدسی که ما تحمل می کنیم می تواند ما را به درد دیگران باز کند، جایی که قدرت رستگاری عشق حقیقت خود و استقلال ما را به عنوان برادران حافظ ما آشکار می کند. آیا این زیبایی نوع بشر نیست؟
طالبان دفاتر دولتی و دیگر بخش های پایتخت را هم با ارزش نمادین و هم با ارزش تاکتیکی اشغال کرده اند، اما این همان کنترول زمانی نیست که ان آر اف مسلح باقی بماند و بتواند به خواست خود در سراسر این ولایت حمله کند.
هم دولت افغانستان در تبعید و هم خود مسود همچنان امن و سرپیچی می کنند و جنگجویان خود ان آر اف مانند شیرهایی هستند که عرصه ای پر از شکار دارند؛ هیچ چیز آنها را نمی ترسد، حتی بمباران هوایی، و هر چند آنها را می توان کشته آنها را نمی توان شکست داد.
با آمدن طالبان به خانه شان، مدافعان پانجشیر حسن نیت را پس خواهند داد و به خانه های شان در کابل خواهند آمد. هیچ برنامه ای از اقیانوس آرام به طور کامل می تواند مقاومت در این سری پیچ و خم بیش از بیست دره و بز کوهی بیش از صخره های قوی که در آن شاید یک چهارم میلیون نفر زندگی می کنند خرد;
و این یک ساعت رانندگی از کابل است، جایی که سلول های خواب NRF و تیم های انتحاری رولور، و ماموران نفوذ در درون طالبان و دیگر گروه ها، در انتظار لحظه قصاص خود هستند. هیچ درگیری در این شرایط نمی تواند نهایی باشد.
و نه می توان هر پیروزی در اینجا به عنوان کل توصیف; افغانستان به دلایل زیادی قبرستان امپراتوری ها نامیده می شود که در میان آنها تغییر مکان و وفاداری های متعدد مردمش، نه صرفا یک شطرنجی از تفرقه های قومی سنتی و جنگ سالاران مستقل
اما همچنین یک محیط عملیاتی که در آن کل فرهنگ نظامی از مبارزان مسلح و آموزش دیده به دنبال هر کس که به بهترین وجه در خدمت منافع خود و به دنبال جنگ به عنوان یک حرفه، تغییر نام جناح های خود و یا پیوستن به دیگران فرصت طلبانه، و بسیاری از سازمان های رقیب به اشتراک گذاری اعضای و یا به یکدیگر نفوذ کرده اند تا به طور کامل آن را تبدیل به غیر ممکن است به گرگ ها از گوسفند بگویید.
طالبان افغانستان را تصرف کرده اند؛ اما طالبان، هر چند در ریشه های آن پنجاه دانش آموز ملا محمد عمر که آن را در سال 1994 در قندهار تاسیس شده برای بازگرداندن شریعت، امروز تنها با چهار چیز متحد است؛
اول و مهمتر از همه ایدئولوژی دیوبندی که ایمان اسلامی را به عنوان مبارزه آزادی بخش ضداستعدایی باز می کند، همان طور که در دهلی در مقاومت در برابر امپراتوری بریتانیا توسعه یافته و توسط پاکستان از طریق مسجدها و دانشکده های آن ابزاری شده است؛
دوم روایت های تاریخی قربانی شدن و بدهی خون یک جنگ طولانی ضد استعماری استقلال که هویت ملی را به وجود آورد، سوم کاریزما شخصی، اقتدار، و خطوط حمایت از رهبران آن و وفاداری مستقیم نیروهای خود،
و چهارمین نهاد متحد کننده و اقتدار فرماندهی کویتی در پاکستان و شبکه حقانی در واقع سرویس اطلاعاتی. داشتن یک پایگاه امن عملیات در آن سوی مرز باز با پاکستان حامی اش برای موفقیت آن بسیار مهم بوده است، اما طالبان هم یک طرفدار پاکستان و هم یک جنبش استقلال واقعی است.
این نقاط قوت آن است; ضعف های طالبان بالکانیزاسیون قومی و چندگانگی جناحی آشفته آن است که اعمال کنترل مستقیم نیروهای خود را مشکل ساز می کند. وقتی وضعیت با سه سازمان بزرگ رقیب بنیاد گرایی سنی، طالبان، دولت اسلامی و القاعده آغاز می شود
، در یک زندگی تایتانیک و وحشی و یا مبارزه مرگ برای سلطه که مبارزان اغلب اعضای بیش از یک گروه قفل شده است ، و پیچیده می شود با ده ها یا احتمالا صدها جناح ، ادعا می کنند که هر کسی در کنترل است و یا می تواند در اینجا در افغانستان حکومت پوچ است. و در اینجا نهفته است فرصت بزرگ که هرج و مرج به ما ارائه می دهد; تا قدرت ما را از هر قدرتی که ما را تسلیم کند، به دست آورد.
من پاسخ دادم که به پست یکی از دوستانش که بر اساس شکست های اخلاقی شخصی پدرش به عنوان یک جنگ سالار همدست سیا که در قاچاق جنسی، کار برده و تجارت هروئین دست داشته است، رهایی خوبی به ماساژور داده است
هیچ کس پیش بینی بمباران هواپیماهای بدون سرنشین پاکستانی و حمایت مستقیم با واحدهای نیروهای ویژه هوایی؛ من در میان دشمن با تعدادی از کسانی که در اصل سی سال پیش به عنوان متحد در کشمیر ملاقات کردم و جاهای دیگر از آن زمان ملاقات کرده ام، از جمله عوامل سرویس های اطلاعاتی پاکستان اکنون به فرماندهان طالبان توصیه می کنند که آنها به عنوان دارایی های کلیدی از زمان حمله به شوروی، و نوادگان آنها کشت کرده اند.
من یک شب را در یک آتش سوزی صرف غذاخوری با برخی از آنها و اشتباه نیست; آنها قطعا من را می شناختند.
البته شما درست است که ساخت و ساز محلی از ارزش ها از جمله ایده های عدالت جنسیتی و آزادی را هم تراز نیست و یا به اشتراک گذاری زمینه های مشترک زیادی با ما، و مواد مخدر ارز در اینجا است؛ من به این معنی نیست که نشان می دهد که طرف خوب و بد به heckle یا تشویق در وجود دارد. ما همه آدم بدها اينجا هستيم
چرا من اينجا هستم؟ شاید من فقط می خواهم علل از دست رفته، به نقل از یک شرور نفرت انگیز و عامل هیولا از ترور جنسی و نژادپرستانه از رفته با باد، یک شخصیت که با این وجود به حال برخی از خطوط بزرگ است.
این دنیایی که ما انسان ها برای خودمان ساخته ایم، ما را به خدمت قدرت و سیستم ها و ساختارهای استبدادی نابرابری و هژمونی های نخبه ای از وزن، قدرت و امتیاز شکل می دهد، بی گناهان کمی را به قهرمان شدن ارائه می دهد،
و همانطور که جورج برنارد شاو در پیگمالیون با شخصیت باشکوه پدر الیزا پیشنهاد می کند، نیاز به فضیلت برای کمک شایستگی، چه خیریه باشد و چه همبستگی عمل، یک دوگانگی کاذب است که در خدمت دائمی کردن قدرت نابرابر و حفظ نخبگان هژمونی است.
من یک اصل کلی را به عنوان راهنمای ابهامات در زمانی که ما باید به هر وسیله ای که لازم است مقاومت کنیم و زمانی که ما باید استفاده اجتماعی از زور را تحمل کنیم، پیدا کرده اند و آن را در دفاع از بی گناهان نیست چرا که این مکان بار اخلاقی قضاوت بر قربانیان اقتدار ناعادلانه است، و اغلب بی گناه وجود ندارد.
نه, آزمون من برای استفاده از زور است که به سادگی این; چه کسی قدرت را در دست دارد؟
کي خوب است که بد باشي؟
در فرمول نیچه، چگونه می توانیم هیولاها را شکار کنیم بدون اینکه خودمان هیولا باشیم؟
به این سوالات من پاسخ شکارچی را; من مرد خوبی نیستم، که برای به چالش کشیدن اقتدار ناعادلانه پیشی می گیرم، و نه ایده های مردم دیگر که فضیلت دارند، اگر قدرت ما را برای مقاومت در برابر شر از بین ببرند، به من علاقه مند است. من برای شما بسیار مفید تر از آن هستم،
، اگر شما در میان کسانی که در مبارزه با قدرت نابرابر درگیر هستند، نقض حقوق بشر جهانی ما و آرمان های ما به عنوان یک جامعه آزاد برابر که شامل یک دولت سکولار، آزادی، برابری، حقیقت، و عدالت، مذهبی و سلطه امپراطوری، زورگویی، ترور دولتی، دولت های کارسرال زور و کنترل، و فاشیستی از همه نوع است.
من مرد بدی هستم که طرف تو هستم
برای خودم، تنها چیزی که شما نیاز به کمک شایستگی این است که نیاز به کمک، و آزمون استفاده از زور و خشونت یک سوال ساده است؛ چه کسی قدرت را در دست دارد؟
من انقلابی هستم که به دست گرفتن قدرت برای او درباره خودمختاری و بازگرداندن تعادل است. من در کنار کسانی هستم که فرانتز فانون آنها را هر جا که باشد، بدچاره زمین می نامید، و من زندگی ام را در تعادل با کسانی که از ناتوانان و ناتوانان، خاموشان و پاک شدگان هستند، قرار می دهدم.
من پیروزی مردم افغانستان را بر امپراطوری امریکا جشن می گیرم حتی اگر این امر در حال حاضر شکل طالبان را بگیرد، و برای به رسمیت شناختن آنها به عنوان یک جنبش استقلال طلبانه مشروع و دولت افغانستان استدلال کرده ام.
اما من نمی توانم از فتح نسل کشی و تحریک یک گروه قومی توسط گروه دیگر حمایت کنم و نه نقض حاکمیت و استقلال هیچ دولتی که مورد ادعای دیگری باشد. اما یک مشروعیت است که هر دولت ممکن است ادعا وجود دارد; از مردم آن خواهد شد.
هیچ کس ممکن است با عدالت و یا حق طبیعی صحبت می کنند و یا عمل به نام دیگری بدون رضایت آنها; بنابراین روسو به ما می آموزد، و این اصل قانون طبیعی است که آمریکا را در اعلامیه استقلال تاسیس کرد.
چگونه باید به کسانی که ما را به برنده می کنند پاسخ داد؟
این ما همیشه باید مقاومت کنیم، فراتر از امید به پیروزی یا حتی بقا. و در مقاومت و امتناع از تسلیم شدن به اقتدار ما فتح نشده و آزاد می شوند، برای هیچ چیز نمی تواند از ما امتناع ما را از رضایت به حکومت، استاد، و به بر بردگی.
اجازه دهید ما را اجرا amok و غیر قابل اداره می شود; اجازه دهید ما را هرج و مرج، و آزاد باشد.
Our memories and histories inhabit us like ghosts, ephemeral but casting long shadows in which we live, and a ground of struggle as identity and mimesis. For our memories are never identical with their original, even in the most transparent and authentic witness of history, but structures of reproduction shaped by myriads of others, and how we have interpreted them over time as beings of change and impermanence.
Baudrillard’s simulacra, Sartre’s nausea of inauthentic being, Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, phantasms, falsifications. How do we enter the imaginal worlds of our own self and past, when all becomes a Rashomon Gate Event of transformation, relative truths, shifting and ambiguous meanings? How shall we practice the arts of remembering and the pursuit of truth when all that we are is subject to the Observer Effect and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and what does this mean for our ars poetica?
Schrödinger’s Cat is laughing at me.
So also for my thoughts now during this the week of the Fall of Panjshir, last battle of the recapture of Afghanistan by the Taliban, though we who answered the call of the great warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud’s son for help from the international community in defense of Liberty and the sovereignty and independence of all human souls are fighting still, in the bastion of the Taliban’s power in Kabul as well as in Panjshir and elsewhere.
For three years later the meaning of these events has changed for me, and its lessons for the future of liberation struggle in Afghanistan against the theocracy of the Taliban which instrumentalized and co-opted the liberation struggle of the Afghan peoples from American imperial dominion and colonial exploitation, have become more clear.
As my stated purpose herein is to memorialize a glorious and tragic failure to redeem our future from the shadows of our past, and a chain of events begun with mistakes in America’s 1979-1989 proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the 1989-1992 Afghan Civil War which directly led to the resurgence of religious wars waged by al Qaeda and ISIS against democracy including 9-11 and the capture of Afghanistan by a theocracy as well as horrific wars in Syria and Yemen, I offer here my writing from the time as I traveled through the Khyber Pass to Panjshir during the Kabul Airlift.
Of our future I say this; Afghanistan under the Taliban is a mirror in which we may see our common fate, if we cannot unite in solidarity to seize democracy from the jaws of theocratic tyranny.
To this pathology of disconnectedness and the terror of our nothingness, to division, abjection, learned helplessness, and despair in the face of overwhelming force, I make reply with Buffy the Vampire Slayer quoting the instructions to priests in the Book of Common Prayer in episode eleven of season seven, Showtime, after luring an enemy into an arena to defeat as a demonstration to her recruits; “I don’t know what’s coming next. But I do know it’s gonna be just like this – hard, painful. But in the end, it’s gonna be us. If we all do our parts, believe it, we’ll be the one’s left standing. Here endeth the lesson.”
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2021, Why Am I showing the film Inglorious Basterds in a Cave in Afghanistan?; Chaos beckons me with its siren call, like unto like, and as with Ulysses I cannot resist the call of the Unknown to discover what lies beyond our boundaries of the Forbidden. Here I am conjured into desolate and broken canyonlands and endless stars, shattered ruins of an ancient geological cataclysm and the ghosts of empires; a land of tragic beauty.
Trade is flowing across the Khyber Pass and the open border of Afghanistan and Pakistan regardless of the refugee crisis in Kabul, and I go with it, one insignificant bit of flotsam lost in a tide of opportunity for those who capitalize on chaos or like myself use it as a lever of change in a space of adaptive potential. Like a hunting spider I have left my lair in Peshawar, near the heart of the Taliban high command and the mosque from which its directives are propagated, as the great powers of the world meet in the G7 conference to decide the fate of Afghanistan and Taliban forces prepare to invade the defiant and unconquerable Panjshir province where the son of the legendary warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud has been joined in resistance by a government in exile led by Acting President of Afghanistan Amrullah Saleh.
I am on horseback touring remote villages as a traveling theatre with a projector, generator, screen, and a number of films, an industry still thriving here as in many places with little outside contact, a way of life brilliantly depicted in The Cinema Travellers by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya, celebrated in the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. I tell people I am a wandering seller of dreams; rather than try to go unnoticed where strangers rarely travel, I set up a show and gather an audience, and no one questions who I am or why I am here.
When you cannot blend in, stand out; it’s a trick I learned from my partner Dolly’s Uncle Bob through our fathers who grew up together in the shadow of the McKay Carnivals he founded during the Depression to carry out the work of Socialism and the Industrial Workers of the World begun by her grandfather John F. McKay and his comrade Eugene V. Debbs, and from Bluey and his circus in Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall. How do you hide a large number of highly unusual people with special skills and their support, always on the move? As a show. Let the strangers be truly strange, and sell tickets.
Why am I showing the film Inglorious Basterds in a cave in Afghanistan?
Inglorious Basterds is a great film of the stunning cruelty of force and power and the triumph of the unconquered human spirit, a dance of terror and beauty like the lives of ordinary people here in a place beyond all human law and throughout so much of our world wherein privation and the needs of survival are paramount, and overwhelming and generalized fear is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us. Also it is a film whose episodic and interlayered narrative structure is confusing to those unfamiliar with its intertexts and references; The Secret of Santa Vittoria, The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare, The Guns of Navarone, Zulu Dawn, The Seven Samurai; but the glorious nature of lost causes and forlorn hopes, of defiance and resistance in the face of certain death, is all too familiar to the audience of my traveling theatre.
Resistance is always victorious, for in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free.
Such is my definition of freedom and of victory in liberation struggle, and like Dorothy’s Magic Ruby Slippers it is a power and liberty which cannot be taken from us, and bears the power to take us home to our true selves.
Its an idea that translates well into Deobandi theological rhetoric, a parallel of Catholic Liberation Theology which originated the Indian revolution against the British Raj and the Taliban’s liberation struggle against American colonialism.
Homer wrote in episodes too, as do I here in my daily journals and publication Torch of Liberty; Inglorious Basterds is a heroic quest to change the balance of power in the world, of revolutionary struggle by those whom Frantz Fanon called the “Wretched of the Earth”, in this case the historically marginalized and othered Jews, and those who place their lives in the balance with them; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
Antifascist action is revolutionary struggle and class war; it engages unequal power in the forms of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and often of Patriarchy as well, which is interdependent with fascism as theocracy, and far more ancient, but central to its project of subjugation to hegemonic elites. The origins of evil are in systemic and structural inequalities, the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and as Wagner teaches us the price of power is renouncement of love. From this pathology of disconnectedness, nihilism, abjection, and dehumanization arises authority and the tyranny of the carceral state; police, prisons, borders, and the force and control of a society organized to dehumanize and falsify us in service to power through hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and authorized identities.
This we must resist, and in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free. The magnificent Lt Aldo Raine is an antifascist hero whose story models liberation struggle and teaches us how to engage those who would enslave us. It is a story of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but only as cases of a universal condition.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for self- ownership, autonomy, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Inglorious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
This is my theme song for Last Stands, by the magnificent David Bowie, which I only post when I am about to do something from which no return is possible, so far as I can foresee. It is a farewell to those I have loved and a wish for a better future than we have made of our past, we humans. It is also a declaration of no quarter and war to the knife to my enemies, to set the terms of our struggle; enter my arena, and anything goes, for those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none, and there are no rules in my games of resistance to fascism and tyranny.
My victory conditions do not include personal survival, only acts of resistance, which makes my goal in imposed conditions of struggle against overwhelming force to take the enemy down with me. And to such refusal to submit as absolute commitment tyranny can make no reply; there is no profit in it.
I have done this now more times than I can number or easily remember; yet here I remain to bear witness to the hollowness and fragile nature of power and authority, Unconquered. Here is proof of the unknowability of our limits, of the redemptive power of love as solidarity in liberation struggle, of our inherently autonomous nature and the unconquerable human will to become, and of my Principles of Revolution that force finds its limit in disobedience and that freedom is won by refusal to submit to force as described by Thoreau and by disbelief in authority as described by Voltaire. Here is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us.
As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
Here Endeth the Lesson: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season seven, episode eleven
References
The Cinema Travelers by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya, film trailer
Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW
by Peter Cole (Editor), David Struthers (Editor), Kenyon Zimmer (Editor)
خاطرات و تاریخ ما ما را مانند ارواح ساکن, زودگذر اما ریخته گری سایه های طولانی که در آن زندگی می کنیم, و زمینه مبارزه به عنوان هویت و تقلید. برای خاطرات ما هرگز با اصلی خود یکسان نیست، حتی در شفاف ترین و معتبرترین شاهد تاریخ، بلکه ساختارهای تولید مثل که توسط تعداد بی شمار دیگران شکل گرفته است، و اینکه چگونه ما آنها را در طول زمان به عنوان وجود تغییر و ناهمانی تفسیر کرده ایم.
سیمولاکرای بودریلارد، تهوع سارتر از وجود غیرممکن، بیابان آینه های اترتون؛ دروغ، توهم، هذیان، دروغ، دروغ. چگونه وارد جهان های خیالی خود و گذشته خودمان می شود، وقتی همه به یک رویداد تحول دروازه راشمون، حقایق نسبی، تغییر و معناهای مبهم تبدیل می شوند؟
چگونه می توانیم هنرهای به یاد آوردن و پیگیری حقیقت را تمرین کنیم وقتی که همه آنچه هستیم تابع اثر ناظر و اصل عدم اطمینان هایسنبرگ است و این برای شاعر آرس ما چه معنایی دارد؟
گربه شرودینگر به من می خندد.
بنابراین برای افکار من در حال حاضر در طول این هفته از سقوط پانجشیر، آخرین نبرد از بازپس گیری افغانستان توسط طالبان، هر چند ما که پاسخ به فراخوان پسر جنگجو بزرگ احمد شاه مسود برای کمک از جامعه بین المللی در دفاع از آزادی و حاکمیت و استقلال تمام روح انسان هنوز هم مبارزه، در بند قدرت طالبان در کابل و همچنان در پنجشیر و جاهای دیگر.
دو سال بعد معنای این رویدادها برای من تغییر کرده است و درس های آن برای آینده مبارزه آزادی بخش در افغانستان علیه حکومت سالاری طالبان که مبارزه آزادی بخش مردم افغانستان را از سلطه امپراطوری آمریکا و استثمار استعماری ابزاری و مشترک می کردند، روشن تر شده است.
همانطور که هدف اعلام شده من در اینجا این است که یادبود شکست با شکوه و غم انگیز به آینده ما را از سایه های گذشته ما، و زنجیره ای از وقایع با اشتباهات در جنگ پراکسی آمریکا در سال های 1979-1989 علیه اتحاد جماهیر شوروی در افغانستان و 1989-1992 افغان آغاز شده است جنگ داخلی که به طور مستقیم منجر به تجدید حیات جنگ های مذهبی توسط القاعده و داعش علیه دموکراسی از جمله 9-11 و تصرف افغانستان توسط یک حکومت مذهبی شد و همچنین جنگ های وحشتناک در سوریه و یمن،
من اينجا نوشته خود را از زمان سفر از طريق پاس خيبر به پنجشیر در جريان پرواز کابل پيشنهاد ميکنم.
از آینده ما من می گویم این; افغانستان در زمان طالبان آینه ای است که در آن ممکن است سرنوشت مشترک خود را ببینیم، اگر نتوانیم در همبستگی متحد شود تا دموکراسی را از فک های طوطی تئوکراتیک به دست آورد.
به این آسیب شناسی قطع ارتباط و وحشت از پوچی ما، به تقسیم، انتزاع، درماندهی آموخته، و ناامیدی در مقابل نیروی قریب به اتفاق قربانیان، من پاسخ با بافی قتل خون آشام به نقل از دستورالعمل به کشیش ها در کتاب نماز مشترک در قسمت یازدهم فصل هفت، Showtime، پس از luring دشمن را به عرصه شکست به عنوان یک تظاهرات به استخدام خود را؛
“من نمی دانم چه آینده است. اما من نمی دانم که این درست مثل این خواهد بود – سخت، دردناک. اما در آخر، ما خواهیم بود. اگر همه ما قطعات خود را انجام دهیم، باور کنید، ما کسی خواهیم بود که ایستاده باقی مانده است. در اینجا پایان درس است.”
همانطور که در پست خود در 24 آگست 2021 نوشتم، چرا من فیلم باستردز اینگلوریوس را در غاری در افغانستان نشان می دهم؟؛ هرج و مرج به من اشاره می کند با تماس آژیر آن، مانند آن، و به عنوان با اوریس من می توانم تماس ناشناخته ها برای کشف آنچه
نهفته است فراتر از مرزهای ما از ممنوع مقاومت در برابر. در اینجا من را به دره های ویرانه و شکسته و ستاره های بی پایان، ویرانه های شکسته از فاجعه زمین شناسی باستانی و ارواح امپراتوری conjured؛ سرزمین زیبایی غم انگیز.
تجارت در سراسر مسیر خبر و مرز باز افغانستان و پاکستان بدون در نظر گرفتن بحران پناهندگان در کابل جریان دارد، و من با آن می رویم، یک بیت ناچیز از فلوتسام در یک جریان فرصت برای کسانی که در هرج و مرج سرمایه گذاری می کنند یا مانند خودم از آن به عنوان اهرم تغییر در فضای پتانسیل سازگار استفاده می کنند، از دست رفته است.
مانند عنکبوت شکاری من در پشاور، نزدیک قلب فرماندهی عالی طالبان و مسجدی که دستورالعمل های آن از آن منتشر می شود، به جا گذاشته ام، زیرا قدرت های بزرگ جهان در کنفرانس گروه 7 برای تصمیم گیری در مورد سرنوشت افغانستان با هم دیدار می کنند
و نیروهای طالبان آماده می شوند تا به ولایت نافرمانی و تسخیر ناپذیری که در آن پسر جنگجوی افسانه ای احمد شاه اسد توسط یک دولت در تبعید به رهبری امرالله صالح سرپرست ریاست جمهوری افغانستان به مقاومت پیوسته است، حمله کنند.
مقاومت همیشه پیروز است، برای امتناع از ارائه ما تبدیل به فتح نشده و آزاد است.
چنین است تعریف من از آزادی و پیروزی در مبارزه آزادی بخش، و مانند دمپایی روبی سحر و جادو دوروتی آن را یک قدرت و آزادی است که می تواند از ما گرفته نمی شود، و خرس قدرت ما را به خانه به خود واقعی ما است.
این ایده که ترجمه خوبی به شعارهای الهیاتی Deobandi، موازی از الهیات آزادی کاتولیک که انقلاب هند در برابر راج بریتانیا و مبارزه آزادی بخش طالبان علیه استعمار آمریکا نشات گرفته است.
اقدام ضد فاشیستی مبارزه انقلابی و جنگ طبقاتی است؛ این درگیر قدرت نابرابر در اشکال فاشیست های خون، ایمان، و روح، و اغلب از مردسالاری نیز، که به هم نزدیک با فاشیستی به عنوان خداپرستی، و به مراتب بیشتر باستانی، اما مرکزی برای پروژه خود را از انحنا به نخبگان هژمونی.
ریشه های شر در نابرابری های سیستمی و ساختاری، حلقه ترس، قدرت و زور واگنر است و همانطور که واگنر به ما می آموزد قیمت قدرت دست از عشق است.
. از این آسیب شناسی قطع ارتباط، پوچ گرایی، آبجک شدن و غیرانسانی شدن، اقتدار و استبداد دولت کارسرال را به وجود می آورد؛ پلیس، زندان ها، مرزها و نیرو و کنترل جامعه ای که برای غیر انسانی کردن و ساختگی کردن ما در خدمت به قدرت از طریق سلسله مراتبی از دیگر بودن انحصاری و هویت های مجاز سازماندهی شده است
این ما باید مقاومت در برابر, و در امتناع از ارائه ما تبدیل به فتح نشده و آزاد.
همیشه مبارزه بین ماسک که دیگران را برای ما و کسانی که ما برای خودمان را باقی می ماند وجود دارد; این اولین انقلابی است که همه ما باید در آن بجنگیم، مبارزه برای مالکیت خود، خودمختاری، و امکانات بی حد و حصر انسان شدن.
I remember when I first realized that Trump is actually a treasonous and dishonorable foreign agent whose mission is the subversion and fall of democracy in America and not merely an apex predator of systems of oppression which include patriarchal-theocratic sexual terror and white supremacist terror; watching him take the sacred and ancient Oath of Office while Russian bombs fell on the American servicemen he had abandoned to their deaths in Syria.
The Stolen Election of 2016 and the whole illegitimate and criminal Trump Presidency which ought to be nullified and erased in its acts and appointments was nothing but a sidelining operation to clear America from the board of play for the invasion of Ukraine by his puppetmaster and handler from the end of the Soviet era, when KGB Colonel Putin ran the black market in East Berlin and used Trump to hide the wealth of crime syndicates and oligarchs, and later to move Russian agents globally through Trump’s sex trafficking ring within the Miss Universe beauty pageant and modeling organizations he owned between 1995 and 2015.
There was never anything more grand to Traitor Trump and his despicable regime than this, the filthy and perverse sexual terror and nihilistic amoral greed of a crime boss in the service of the KGB and Russian syndicates, and he betrayed America every single day of his life as a foreign spy since his first visit to Moscow in 1987.
Can Trumps despisal and mockery of our veterans, inability to comprehend the value of a life of service to one’s nation, and disrespect for the military come as a surprise from a man without loyalty, and whose word means nothing?
How can I know with reasonable probability though not beyond doubt that Trump was a KGB asset before the Soviet Union became an oligarchy and crime syndicate in 1991, and Putin’s star agent in America thereafter?
In the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, my friends and I made mischief throughout Europe, across and behind the Iron Curtain as a specialty. These were the Crows, led by the famous Irish gypsy Bluey, clown and Ringmaster of a circus which provided cover for his true enterprises. He made an art of finding what one wants or needs and offering it as a gift or favor to be redeemed later; a laughing trickster, who built an outlaw empire from winning trust, trading favors and secrets, and making things happen for powerful people, and a Great Game of outwitting these same authorities, destabilizing tyrannies, championing the powerless, and subverting systems and regimes of force and control.
I learned much from him.
Bluey once described the Great Game to me like this: “To be Romani is determined by three truths not of our making; First, no one stands with us, so we must stand with each other in everything and trust no outsiders. Second, we will be killed or driven out if discovered, so we must live within identities of disguise. Third, we are powerless and few, so we must live in the margins and in the shadows; its why they call us crows, scavengers. This is how we have survived more than a thousand years, by these three rules.”
This was my entrée into the world of the Romani, which I might have married into had events unfolded differently, ourselves being trapped on opposite sides of the Wall during a firefight, and the reason my languages include Vlax Romani, the major Romani language and that of its heartland in Transylvania and Eastern Europe, and its origin or relative Vlachs or Aromanian, a Romance language created by the historical migrations and transformations of cultures in the borderlands between the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Venetian Empires, and influenced more by Greek than Slavic as a disambiguating characteristic from modern Romanian, a related language also originating in the Latin of the Roman Empire and its long centuries of disintegration and change. Many Romani whom I knew spoke Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, and Hungarian interchangeably as code switching, and also spoke Hochdeutsch which is the second language of Hungary and the official language of Germany and Austria as Standard German. Of course we could all speak some Russian as well, and I was reasonably fluent having worked with Soviet Special Forces and KGB advisors against Apartheid forces in South Africa and Angola among other places, and among the hundreds of Crows were languages from all over Europe and beyond.
As he grew up in Ireland and when ten years old went alone to live in the streets of London, Bluey spoke English laden with Cockney rhyming slang, 16th century Thieves Cant, and the hybrid Irish Gaelic-Traveller cryptolanguage Shelta, a complex patois he and his crew, who were from everywhere, used as a secret language.
So while I cannot claim to have known Trump personally or to possess incriminating proof of his relationship with Putin during the Soviet era, I know the operational environment, the methods of the KGB, and how Putin did business as its kingpin very well indeed.
Enough to call him Traitor Trump, and apply to him the dictum that everything the enemy says is a lie.
The very first time I heard of Trump during the 2016 election campaign was in the context of remarks he had made about veterans. At the time I said to my partner Theresa; “Disrespects veterans? That’s it; that’s all I need to know about a man. I’m voting for Hillary.”
My hope now is that all of us, and most especially every serving or former member of the US Armed Forces and their families, will say the same and vote for Harris and Walz.
As written by Kevin Carroll in The Guardian, in an article entitled The Trump campaign’s conduct at Arlington is shocking but not surprising; “The tranquil majesty of Arlington national cemetery tends to bring forth civic virtues in Americans and eloquence in their leaders. Speaking there in 1985 above the graves of the fallen, Ronald Reagan observed that while we may imagine the deceased as old men, most “were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives – the one they were living and the one they would have lived … they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers … They gave up everything for our country, for us. And all we can do is remember.”
Nowhere in that vast cemetery is Reagan’s point driven home as poignantly as in section 60, which embraces those men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice at painfully young ages since 9/11. Here the dates on the simple headstones are within memory, the grief of loved ones is raw and visitors may witness acts of tenderness in response.
Good manners, Jane Austen observed, hold a society together. George Washington copied longhand in boyhood and preserved into adulthood a list of 110 “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior”. Another general turned president, Dwight Eisenhower, cautioned in his Guildhall address after VE Day that “humility must always be the portion” of any man who receives acclaim earned by others’ sacrifices.
Donald Trump and his staff knew – and were reminded of – federal regulations specifically prohibiting the misconduct their campaign engaged in at Arlington’s section 60 this week. But the law aside, only a gross lack of manners, decency and humility could incline a person to film a fundraising appeal over the resting places of dead men and women who cannot decline to participate in the coarse spectacle. The photo of a grinning Trump giving a jaunty thumbs-up over these patriots’ graves is an indelible image of narcissism risen to the point of sociopathy.
Worse is the allegation that two Trump staff members assaulted a small, middle-aged female Department of the Army employee who attempted to enforce the regulation and preserve the cemetery’s dignity. The victim reportedly refrained from filing charges due to a reasonable fear of violence or harassment from Trump’s supporters. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign defamed this woman as mentally ill. His running mate, JD Vance, said Kamala Harris could “go to hell” for her campaign’s suggestion that the unauthorized footage was intended for use as political footage – just before Trump used it for exactly that.
This ugly incident would have derailed the candidacy of any presidential nominee before Trump’s crude emergence on the American political scene in 2016. In 2024 it is already, probably intentionally on Trump’s part, being replaced in the news by reaction to his social media posts making lewd innuendos about Harris, and QAnon threats to imprison Democratic party leaders. But it is part of a pattern of disrespect for and misuse of the United States military that bears upon Trump’s fitness to serve again as president.
Trump infamously described America’s dead from the first world war as “suckers” and “losers”. Trump also asked my former boss, White House chief of staff John Kelly – on Memorial Day and over the section 60 grave of his Marine son killed in Afghanistan – “What was in it for them?” I walked up to a visibly shocked Kelly moments after that exchange, the details of which he later confirmed.
Trump demanded military equipment parades in Washington of the kind Soviet leaders held on May Day in Moscow’s Red Square, but disdained appearing with wounded service members. He called America’s service chiefs “dopes and babies” and needled them about their public sector pay – God only knows what he thinks of enlisted troops who make a fraction of a general’s salary.
Trump began his run for the presidency in 2016 by mocking the late senator John McCain for being a prisoner of war; he followed this by feuding with the bereaved parents of Muslim American and African American soldiers; recently, he belittled Medal of Honor recipients shot during the brave actions that led to their awards.
More serious than Trump’s words are his actions and plans regarding the armed forces. In 2018 Trump discussed having troops shoot civilian migrants, including women and children, as they tried to cross America’s south-west border – a patently illegal order. In 2020 he unlawfully used national guardsmen to clear protesters from Lafayette Park for yet another campaign photo opportunity. In 2021 Trump and his advisors planned to invoke the Insurrection Act to misuse the military to put down protests anticipated if Mike Pence and Congress refused to certify Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. Trump’s Project 2025 envisions using the national guard for internal immigration investigations, a vast and ill-advised expansion of the American military’s limited role in domestic law enforcement.
Trump sees the armed services as yet another entity to be misused for his personal benefit, damaged and then discarded just as he has with his bankrupt businesses, the evangelical Christian churches and the Republican party. Beyond that, his boorish statements and bad behavior regarding the military almost certainly come from a place of self-loathing. Trump dodged the Vietnam war draft by claiming – probably falsely – to suffer from bone spurs. A gnawingly insecure man, Trump is self-conscious of his lack of the virtues towards which the military strives: as the US army puts it, loyalty to the constitution, dutiful fulfillment of responsibilities, respect for others, selfless service to both the country and subordinates, honor, integrity and personal courage.
His poor form at Arlington this week therefore shocks but does not surprise, as the idea of serving others, much less giving one’s life for others, is anathema to Trump. This attitude would be a sad commentary about any man, but ought to disqualify someone seeking to serve as commander-in-chief.”
Like everything else Trump does in this election, it seems to have backfired on him. And it is absolutely emblematic of his narcissism and inability to understand why anyone would lay down their life for their countrymen. In Trump’s world, it’s every man for himself, and devil take the hindmost. I propose for your consideration that this is not an admirable summum bonum in a national leader or a man of any kind, for it is not only a mask of cowardice bearing the image of amoral greed, but a disloyalty and treason which breaks the bonds of brotherhood from which any nation is made.
As written by Robert Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled Democrats seize on Trump cemetery photo op ‘disgrace’ as election issue: Politicians and veterans say episode was on par with ex-president’s history of disrespecting service in armed forces; “Democrats are trying to turn Donald Trump’s clash with staff at Arlington National Cemetery, the hallowed final resting place of America’s war dead, into a broader election issue by highlighting it as an example of his history of disrespecting military veterans.
Congressional Democrats with military records and liberal-leaning veterans groups say the episode is consistent with past instances of the Republican presidential nominee flagrantly denigrating service in the armed forces.
They also see it as an opportunity to turn the tables on Republican efforts to undermine the record of Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, who has come under fire for a series of supposedly misleading statements about aspects of his 24 years of military service in the national guard.
The US army rebuked Trump’s campaign this week after members of the former president’s entourage “abruptly pushed aside” a female cemetery staff member who was trying to prevent them taking pictures of Trump at a wreath-laying ceremony at the grave of a soldier who was killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
The cemetery worker was acting in line with the facility’s rules, which prohibits pictures or film being shot in section 60, the burial area for personnel killed serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.
Pictures later appeared of Trump posing alongside members of the soldier’s family smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign – a gesture denounced by some as inappropriate and crass.
Trump’s campaign also posted video footage on TikTok with the former president claiming – falsely – that “we didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then [the Biden administration] took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.” In fact, 11 US soldiers were killed in Trump’s last year in Afghanistan.
Trump was invited to Arlington by several of the families of those killed to mark the third anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal – the botched handling of which stands as one of the most damaging episodes of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Now Democrats are accusing him of exploiting a revered site for narrow campaign purposes, in breach of the cemetery’s regulations. The former president did not attend the previous two anniversaries marking the withdrawal.
“Arlington National Cemetery isn’t a place for campaign photo-ops. It’s a sacred resting place for American patriots,” Mikie Sherrill, a Democratic House member from New Jersey and former navy helicopter pilot, posted on X. “But for Donald Trump, disrespecting military veterans is just par for the course. It’s an absolute disgrace.”
Gerry Connolly, a congressman from Virginia, demanded the release of footage and paperwork from the incident. He said it was “sad but all too expected that Donald Trump would desecrate this hallowed ground and put campaign politics ahead of honouring our heroes”.
Jared Golden, a Democratic Congress member from Maine and an ex-marine, called Arlington “sacred ground and all visitors should take the time to learn the rules of decorum that ensure the proper respect is given to the fallen and their families”.
Although surveys have shown that roughly six in 10 retired service members voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election, some left-leaning veterans groups have added their voice to the criticism.
Jon Stoltz, a former army officer and co-founder of VoteVets, a veterans group that is supporting Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, accused Trump of using the cemetery “for a political ceremony” and predicted that it could turn previously sympathetic ex-servicemen against him.
“They don’t have a right to do that with other veterans who are there,” Stoltz told the Associated Press. “I know there’s veterans who support Trump. He’s just motivated people against him.”
In a statement, Allison Jaslow, chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, added to the condemnation, saying: “There are plenty of places appropriate for politics – Arlington is not one of them. Any aspiring elected official, especially one who hopes to be Commander in Chief, should not be confused about that fact.”
The cemetery’s rules state: “Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honoured dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.”
Trump’s attitude to military service has come under scrutiny because of a track record of dismissive statements, both public and private. This month, he appeared to disparage the Congressional Medal of Honor – saying it was inferior to the medal of freedom, which he bestowed as president – because most of its recipients had “been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead”.
According to his former White House chief of staff John Kelly, he refused to visit a first world war cemetery during a 2018 visit to France, calling the American servicemen buried there “suckers” and “losers” for getting killed.
He also ridiculed the late Republican senator John McCain, saying he was only considered a war hero because he had been captured. According to separate reports, Trump voiced objections to having disabled veterans at a military ceremony which ultimately never occurred, saying “it doesn’t look good for me”.
As I wrote in my post of September 5 2020 All the Kings Horses and All the Kings Men: Trump’s Base Begins to Shatter As His Contempt For Our Military Is Revealed
It seems Trump may have finally violated a taboo our society still cares about; his base begins to shatter as his contempt for our military is revealed.
As reported by Time; ‘Trump’s Support Among Military Voters Is Tanking.
At this point four years ago, then-candidate Donald Trump held a massive lead of 20 points over Hillary Clinton among military voters. This time around, he’s struggling to keep up. A new Military Times poll revealed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads Trump by about four percentage points among active-duty troops.
And that was before today’s bombshell report published in the Atlantic. The article outlines a number of instances when President Donald Trump derided U.S. service members, even describing the country’s war dead as “losers” and “suckers.”
Trump and several top aides have rushed to deny the allegations. Trump told reporters late Thursday that he “would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes. There is nobody that respects them more.”
That hasn’t dampened a backlash on social media among military veterans. Retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, a frequent Trump critic, urged Twitter followers to vote against the president, posting a widely shared video in which he relayed a story about how his father was shot down over Vietnam. “I am stunned that anybody in the United States military would consider you anything but a loser or a sucker,” Eaton said. “You’re no patriot.”
Other veterans posted similar statements in response to the article, which described how Trump cancelled a scheduled visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 because he didn’t see a reason why he should honor people who managed to get themselves killed, nor did he want to get rained upon in front of TV cameras. “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” the report quoted Trump as saying.
Biden, whose late son, Beau Biden, served in Iraq, issued a statement after the Atlantic article was published Thursday that said the comments were yet another sign Trump is unfit for the presidency. If the quotes are true, he said, it’s “another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the president of the United States.”
The anonymous allegations in the Atlantic article would hardly be the first time the president, who received five military deferments for bone spurs in his heels that kept him out of the Vietnam War, has disparaged the records of military members. As a candidate in 2015, the president said he was no supporter of Sen John McCain, who was held captive in Vietnam for nearly six years after his airplane was shot down over Hanoi. “He was a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people who weren’t captured.”
Trump’s interactions with military families have also come under scrutiny, particularly the question of how he has expressed sympathy for those who have lost loved ones in the line of duty. Individual parents and partners have come forward to say whether or not the President contacted them directly.
Eleven Gold Star families, those who lost loved ones serving the country’s military, wrote a joint letter in 2016 to the then-Republican presidential nominee, accusing him of “cheapening the sacrifice” of their deceased relatives in the way he responded to the parents of Captain Humayun S.M. Khan, who died in Iraq in 2004. Trump criticized his father and mother after they spoke out against him at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
In total, there are 1.4 million active duty service members, or less than one half of one percent of the U.S. population. But as a barometer of Trump’s base, and an indicator of his ability to drive turnout to counter mobilized Democrats across the country, Trump’s tanking numbers with the military are a bad sign for his campaign.”
As written by Jeffrey Goldburg in The Atlantic, in an article entitled Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’. The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic; “When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.
Trump’s understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and sacrifice has interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president. “I like people who weren’t captured.”
There was no precedent in American politics for the expression of this sort of contempt, but the performatively patriotic Trump did no damage to his candidacy by attacking McCain in this manner. Nor did he set his campaign back by attacking the parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain who was killed in Iraq in 2004.
Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination. When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides. Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral. (These sources, and others quoted in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. The White House did not return earlier calls for comment, but Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, emailed me this statement shortly after this story was posted: “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard. He’s demonstrated his commitment to them at every turn: delivering on his promise to give our troops a much needed pay raise, increasing military spending, signing critical veterans reforms, and supporting military spouses. This has no basis in fact.”)
Trump’s understanding of heroism has not evolved since he became president. According to sources with knowledge of the president’s views, he seems to genuinely not understand why Americans treat former prisoners of war with respect. Nor does he understand why pilots who are shot down in combat are honored by the military. On at least two occasions since becoming president, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his views, Trump referred to former President George H. W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II. (Bush escaped capture, but eight other men shot down during the same mission were caught, tortured, and executed by Japanese soldiers.)
When lashing out at critics, Trump often reaches for illogical and corrosive insults, and members of the Bush family have publicly opposed him. But his cynicism about service and heroism extends even to the World War I dead buried outside Paris—people who were killed more than a quarter century before he was born. Trump finds the notion of military service difficult to understand, and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible. (The president did not serve in the military; he received a medical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War because of the alleged presence of bone spurs in his feet. In the 1990s, Trump said his efforts to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases constituted his “personal Vietnam.”)
On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, and who would, a short time later, be named the White House chief of staff. The two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.
“He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told me. “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.” Kelly’s friend went on to say, “Trump can’t imagine anyone else’s pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a fallen marine on Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.”
I’ve asked numerous general officers over the past year for their analysis of Trump’s seeming contempt for military service. They offer a number of explanations. Some of his cynicism is rooted in frustration, they say. Trump, unlike previous presidents, tends to believe that the military, like other departments of the federal government, is beholden only to him, and not the Constitution. Many senior officers have expressed worry about Trump’s understanding of the rules governing the use of the armed forces. This issue came to a head in early June, during demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in response to police killings of Black people. James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former secretary of defense, lambasted Trump at the time for ordering law-enforcement officers to forcibly clear protesters from Lafayette Square, and for using soldiers as props: “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” Mattis wrote. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”
Another explanation is more quotidian, and aligns with a broader understanding of Trump’s material-focused worldview. The president believes that nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.” (According to eyewitnesses, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, Trump turned to aides and said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?”)
Yet another, related, explanation concerns what appears to be Trump’s pathological fear of appearing to look like a “sucker” himself. His capacious definition of sucker includes those who lose their lives in service to their country, as well as those who are taken prisoner, or are wounded in battle. “He has a lot of fear,” one officer with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s views said. “He doesn’t see the heroism in fighting.” Several observers told me that Trump is deeply anxious about dying or being disfigured, and this worry manifests itself as disgust for those who have suffered. Trump recently claimed that he has received the bodies of slain service members “many, many” times, but in fact he has traveled to Dover Air Force Base, the transfer point for the remains of fallen service members, only four times since becoming president. In another incident, Trump falsely claimed that he had called “virtually all” of the families of service members who had died during his term, then began rush-shipping condolence letters when families said the president was not telling the truth.
Trump has been, for the duration of his presidency, fixated on staging military parades, but only of a certain sort. In a 2018 White House planning meeting for such an event, Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.”
Zero respect’: Trump’s Arlington visit puts his attitude about the military back in the spotlight/ MSN
Donald Trump can’t comprehend what it means to sacrifice. He’s un-American.
Serving the nation is the epitome of American honor.
Film by The Lincoln Project
‘What the hell is wrong with these people?’: Velshi slams Trump’s Arlington video scandal/ MSN
Two important anniversaries in the history of Chile and socialism occur in September; the September fourth advent of the golden age of Allende and the tragedy of the September eleventh coup which deposed him. These two events will continue to define Chile for all of human history, for it will always remain a nation shaped by the legacy of Salvador Allende as interpreted by his cousin Isabel.
No nation has a finer historian of its secret heart and inner life than Isabel Allende, who rendered it in terms of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy in her classic works of world literature The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna, in which she joins the triumvirate of Magical Realism with Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Do read her luminous interrogation of immigrant experience and the negotiations of ideas of homeland and new frontier as conflicted and juxtapositional constructions and source identities, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile.
Isabel Allende’s reimagination of the role of culture in becoming human as an autonomous free being and the special function of language in that process, so like that of Amy Tan, recalls to me Haruki Murakami’s origin story as a writer, the discovery of his voice and authentic self through deliberately composing in English, a second language with which he was not wholly conversant. It is important to understanding their glorious and beautiful novels, but also illuminating as a universal human process of individuation wherein language is our primary identity as reflected in the special issues of migrants as transnational explorers of unknowns.
We are all Strangers who claim membership in multiple cultures and societies, who live on both sides of the boundaries we transgress like the images of the Hobgoblin’s broken mirror, who must create ourselves anew and become free. This strangeness is at once the greatest gift of our time and the greatest threat, for how a nation deals with otherness is as central to its identity and mission as it is to our performance of self.
We are our thoughts, and language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have. I have practiced the arts of writing and of languages as disciplines of self-creation since my freshman year of high school when I discovered Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, who tried to reimagine and transform humankind through creating a new universal language in Finnegan’s Wake, because through rewriting ourselves and thinking in different ways we can seize direct control of our own evolution and consciousness.
Languages are a hobby of mine; I grew up with three voices, English, Chinese, and French, each with its own identity, by which I mean our personae or the masks we wear in the performances of ourselves as derived from the classical Greek theatrical mask, and the legacies of our history or prochronism, self construal as a history expressed in our form of how we humans have made adaptive choices to changing conditions over vast epochs of time.
From the age of nine I learned the spoken Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong and the Wu dialect of Shanghai with written Traditional Chinese and inkbrush calligraphy, with some Japanese as I studied Chan or Zen Buddhism for ten years interdependent with my studies of languages and martial arts. From seventh grade through high school I attended French rather than English classes; interdependent with my immersion in Surrealist film and literature.
I learned some conversational Portuguese in eighth grade for my summer trip before high school to Brazil, a language branded into my soul regardless of little formal study by the trauma of my near execution by a police bounty hunting team whose campaign to kill the abandoned street children I had disrupted. There in the streets of Sao Paulo I first realized the praxis of learning languages not only as a means of connection with others, but also a lever of change, seizure of power, and revolutionary struggle. As the Matadors, founded by the great and terrible Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who rescued and welcomed me into their ferocious brotherhood said; “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
During high school I was an enthusiast of Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, under which influence I attempted the only project of language learning I have ever abandoned; to read the Kabbalah, which is written not in Hebrew but in a coded scholar’s Aramaic and Andalusi Romance, languages of which I could find no living speakers.
During summer breaks at university I continued to travel; I loved the poetry of Basho so much that one such summer I once walked part of his route across Japan to see where he had written them. And then there was the fateful trip between my junior and senior years, on a culinary tour of the Mediterranean as cooking had by then become a hobby of mine, which involved first contacts with Italian, Spanish, and Greek as well as a masterclass in French, wherein I was stranded in Beirut under siege and a chance encounter with the great Jean Genet set me on my life’s path when he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance. This also marks the beginning of my studies of Arabic, both classical Quranic Arabic and conversational Levantine Arabic.
A full accounting of my languages now would be near impossible; those I need shift and change with where I am, and I have lived among many peoples. For example, there was a time over thirty years ago when my attentions were divided between a war of independence in Kashmir and revolutionary struggle against the monarchy in Nepal, with expeditions into Sarajevo under the Siege and other places; and for these theatres of action I needed three kinds of languages; that of the people, Koshur in Srinagar and Newari in Katmandu, of officialdom and bureaucracy which is Gorkhali in Nepal and Urdu in Pakistan as well as Kashmir and near identical with Hindi but written with a Perso-Arabic script and influenced by Classical Persian, and the languages of literary scholarship in which I was engaged, Classical Tibetan as a member of the Kagyu Vajrayana order of Buddhism in Katmandu and in Srinagar Classical Quranic Arabic which I had been learning since Beirut along with spoken Levantine Arabic which has become a fourth natural language for me with English, Chinese, and French, and also Classical Persian and Ottoman Turkish as a scholar of the Naqsbandi Sufi order of Islam. In the Balkans I learned some Croatian written in Latin script, mutually comprehensible with Bosnian as they evolve from the same source.
Since the Invasion of Ukraine I have found myself speaking and writing in Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish more than I wish were necessary; I do love the languages and the peoples, though as so often the conditions in which we meet are those of tragedy as museums of private holocausts, as well as the hope of our glorious and beautiful Resistance.
With every new language I choose a new name in that speech like every other student, but I also create new identities as roles to play. By now I’ve lived many lives within the scope of my own, and keep multiple possible selves in reserve as a spectrum of adaptive choices. We are all pluralities, but the student of languages enacts selfhood as a theatrical game.
Thinking in other languages shapes thoughts differently, frees us and opens the doors of possibility to new ways of being human, relating to our experience, and organizing ideas about the world. This is why the study of languages is necessary to balanced development for young people; learning languages provides many of the cognitive and emotional growth benefits of living in other cultures, though I regard travel and living elsewhere as critical formative rites of passage to a future self which is created and chosen with intent as opposed to one merely issued as a default identity by our circumstances.
Languages forge connections and immerse us in the worlds of others, interrogating our boundaries as parallel universes of human possibilities and allowing us to change otherness from a threat to a growth opportunity, reinforcing diversity as an adaptive value and also insulating us from modern man’s pathology of disconnectedness.
Writing is a way to structure and improve ones thinking and oneself, because how we write is how we think and we can operate on ourselves, edit and restructure our thought processes, and seize ownership and control of our own evolution and adaptation to change through writing. When we think and write in languages other than our primary home language, we liberate ourselves from the normality in which we are embedded. Haruki Murakami’s use of writing in English, a language he was not truly conversant in when he chose it as an instrument with which to escape the limits of his normalities, is an excellent example of the use of this tactic to shift perspectives and liberate ones experience from the prisons and legacies of our history, and as Picasso declared “to see in a new way”.
In this respect language is primary to all other forms of identity, because it organizes all other systems of relating to self and other. As Rene Descartes wrote in his Discourse on the Method; ”je pense, donc je suis.”
I believe in learning languages and ways of being human other than those of one’s home as a path of autonomy or freedom from the ideas of others as an imposed condition of struggle, of empathy and our duty of care for others in a diverse and inclusive society, and of seizures of power from authorized identities, especially those of nationality which instrumentalize division in service to tyranny.
So also with the selves we inhabit in our imaginal homelands and the brave new worlds we find ourselves in with the unfolding, pluralization, and transformation of ourselves through history.
A History of Chile in Three Acts
CIA, Chile & Allende
Neoliberalism and Privatization as American Imperialism, and State Terror and Tyranny in the CIA’s Pinochet Regime,
What are the roots of Chile’s economic inequality?
Chile, a study of national identity in three parts
On this terrible day we mourn the extrajudicial and political assassination by police, ultimately under the command of the Fourth Reich Triumvirate of the President of the United States Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad, four years ago of a committed fellow antifascist and brother in the great struggle against white supremacist terror and the carceral state of the Fourth Reich, Michael Reinoehl, who has in a live broadcast interview publicly claimed responsibility for killing in self defense a member of a violent racist terror organization on August 29 2020 in Portland.
To whom does responsibility in such a tragedy belong? First responders are immune from prosecution for trying to save lives because of the doctrine of our duty of care for others; does this not also apply as a general humanitarian principle to intervention to prevent our own death and that of others? Who perpetrates the threat or use of deadly force, displays or fires guns at others to intimidate or kill them, is responsible for the harm their actions cause; so also with organizations of terror which arm, train, fund, and provide communications and logistics support for them, regardless of whether they are a deniable asset of state terror such as the Patriot Prayer group which fielded the perpetrator, police who hide behind the immunity and authority of their badges to enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and authorize others in the commission of acts of terror, or those who provide ideology and authorization, logistics and communication, and other organizational infrastructure for them as a conspiracy of white supremacist terror, even if it originates from the White House.
I now wish to clarify publicly and irrevocably that I neither endorse violence nor the avoidance of responsibility for our actions; anyone who reads my writing will realize that I believe violence is a result of unequal power and of fear, and this informs and motivates everything else. We have a right to defend ourselves and others from harm, but not to compel virtue by force. My abhorrence of the social use of force is the basis for my opposition to law and order, prisons, police, surveillance, tyranny, state force and control, normality and the ideas of other people, state authorization of identities, and violations of our rights of conscience and of bodily autonomy. I envision a society free of the use of social force and without violence.
As to public confrontations as theatre; I understand the value of public image and presence and of protest in raising awareness of a cause, and especially in the four primary duties of a citizen in the face of unjust authority to question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, and the inviolable principle of solidarity which means that if they come for the marginalized and the oppressed we come for them, and in my world you stand with those who stand with you, but this does not imply an endorsement of ridiculous macho posturing, the fetishization of guns and other male jewelry, or the valorization of warlike displays of toxic masculinity which may become preconditions and incitements to violence. This is especially true where guns are involved; their power is seductive and malign. The fetishization of instruments of violence normalizes and precedes violence.
Who bears arms bears death, has chosen to bear death among us and has degraded every human relationship and interaction to a kill or no kill decision.
Choose life.
But never let this stay your hand in defense of the lives and liberty of yourself or of others; for who respects no laws and no limits can hide behind none. To fascism I give the only reply it merits; Never Again! And to tyranny I say; Sic Semper Tyrannis.
I am a monster and a hunter of monsters, and mine is a hunter’s morality; I have no use for anything which limits our ability to confront and destroy threats such as fascist terror and tyranny, which must be met on its own ground, beyond all laws and all limits.
War to the knife; and we must be very cautious that our actions serve the cause of liberty and not tyranny, and bring hope.
What is the great lesson of Michael Reinoehl, murdered by police assassins for the murder of a fascist terrorist?
Let us remember always that the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce, and remember the warning of Nietzsche; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”
Here endeth the lesson; or maybe not. For I have used a word throughout my witness of history and eulogy for a comrade which is itself a ground of struggle; antifascist. A word that cuts slices, polarizes, incites, damns or grants permission, identifies friend or foe, confers nobility of purpose, and engulfs the world in the fires of transformation and rebirth symbolized in the stolen fire of the gods of our Torch of Liberty.
As I wrote in my post of July 31 2020, A Useful Past: What is Antifa?; What do we mean when we say we are Antifascists? What do our enemies mean when they use the term? These mirror reverse meanings face us Janus-like in dialectical contradiction as negative spaces of each other like Escher’s Drawing Hands, and while factions struggle to control the narrative in the media I don’t see much direction provided by anyone speaking as an Antifa-identified voice. I’m changing that, for I speak to you today as the founder of Lilac City Antifa.
In calling Antifa a terrorist group, Trump has inverted its values and libeled every American serviceman, from those who fought in World War II to our entire military services today, for they have been the primary force against fascism and tyranny throughout the world. I am an American patriot and an Antifascist; and if our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us.
The Second World War has been much studied, filmed, and written about; but of course what we mean when we speak of Antifa today proceeds from the history of those whose public service of vigilance in exposing and confronting fascism developed from the partisans of that conflict and from the Allied military and intelligence services sent to assist them in the liberation of Europe, from the Resistance and from those who hunted escaped Nazis after the war.
To begin with, both the OSS which became the CIA and the Jedburgh teams which became the Green Berets or US Special Forces originate as antifascist forces, and this is true generally of the European intelligence and special operations forces and community born and forged in the war against fascism.
One may discover strange and unlikely allies in the Antifascist community because of this history; and we may say the same of enemies. Both our allies and our enemies are partners in a dance, wherein we choose our futures and how to be human together.
A very specific historical context and tradition informs and motivates those who, like myself, use the term Antifascist as a descriptor of identity; I have appended some articles on this useful past, but Antifa is a personal choice to work against fascism and may sometimes be a component of an ideology or belief system but is not an organization. No one calling themselves Antifa speaks for or answers to anyone else; it is a nonhierarchical and mutualistic network of alliances. This is intentional, as it makes our network of alliances impossible to infiltrate, and though we contain members of many nations security and military services, no one can give orders to anyone else. There is no special tie nor fraternal handshake; membership is by declaration.
To claim you are Antifa is to be Antifa. This means whatever we intend when we say it.
For myself, to be an antifascist is to belong to a tradition of resistance which originates in the Second World War, a war that has never ended but went underground. I look also to the American Revolution against imperial tyranny and colonial inequality and to the Second American Revolution and the great crusade of Abolition against slavery that was the Civil War, to the Paris Commune and the Garde Militaire which survives it, and to our direct origins in the Italian Arditi del Popolo, the Antifaschistische Aktion direct action forces of the German Democratic Socialists from whom we inherit our name, the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, and the Resistance, for antecedents and inspiration. For the principles which I feel are consistent with Anti-fascism, see my repost below of the original proclamation with which I founded Lilac City Antifa.
Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa: Resistance Against Fascism and Tyranny
We, the People of Lilac City and of America, being of all imaginable varieties of historical origin, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual personae, faith and the lack thereof, class and status, and all other informing and motivating sources of becoming human and frames of identity as yet undiscovered, declare our independence from fear and from authorized identities, boundaries of the Forbidden, images and narratives of ourselves made for us by others as instruments of subjugation, the tyranny of false divisions and categories of belonging and exclusionary otherness among us.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
We stand united as human beings whose universal rights depend on no government but on the inherent nature of our humanity, and as American citizens and co-owners of our government in a free society of equals, inclusive of all who so claim and declare as heirs of the legacy and idea of Liberty and of America as an historical expression and manifest form of its ideals and values, among these being freedom and the autonomy of individuals, equality as an absolute structural principle in law and ideal in social relations, truth and its objectivity and testable nature and our right to seek and verify and to communicate it which includes freedom of the press and the right of access to information and from surveillance and all forms of thought control, justice and its impartiality, and a secular state in which freedom of conscience is absolute and there can be no compulsion in matters of faith.
We are a web of human lives which connect us with one another and anchor us to our Liberty, to our history and to our future, and we are resolved to our common defense as human beings and as Americans, and to the mutual safety and freedom of ourselves and of others from fascist violence and intimidation, coercion and the social use of force, in the performance of our identities and in our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We are American patriots and heirs to the glorious tradition of resistance by those who stood for Liberty at the balance points of history, at Saratoga and Yorktown, Gettysburg, Normandy, and many others, against the three primary threats of tyranny, inequalities of race and gender and slavery in all its forms, and fascism which combines and expands them, as we must always do against the atavistic forces of barbarism and the nightmares of totalitarian force and control which threaten our nation and our civilization, against what madness and evil may together do.
We must unite together as free citizens who will not be broken by fear, but instead embrace our differences as a strength and a heritage purchased for us all by the blood of our sacred dead in countless wars throughout our history.
To all those who have offered their lives in our service, members and veterans of the military and other security services: join us. If our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us. For America is a Band of Brothers, sworn to one another and to the defense of our union, with liberty and justice for all.
To all enemies of America and a free society of equals: We are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Join us in resistance, who answer fascism and tyranny with equality and liberty.
I am an American patriot and an Antifascist. Pledge thus with me:
I swear zero tolerance for racism or the supremacy of any persons by categories of identity, racist violence and white supremacist terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, hate and its symbols and speech, for all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for all inequalities and divisions of exclusionary otherness and victimization of the dispossessed and the powerless.
I will make no compromise with evil.
As you have sworn to challenge and confront fascism, therefore I offer you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut in 1982 by Jean Genet; here is the story of how it happened, and of my true origin.
During the summer before my undergraduate 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, “We have nothing but moments stolen from death; these alone belong to us, and set us free. It’s a poor man who has no pleasures 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 Georges Bataille, 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.
There came a day when the barricades were overrun and our neighborhood along with it, one of our last days together. With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers running amok in a sack of murder, arson, and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, our house set on fire and about to be burned alive as the soldiers called for us to come out and surrender, 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 a very Gallic 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 the great 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, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.
We escaped capture that day because we were led through the checkpoints of the encirclement by an unlikely ally, a figure who materialized out of the background at the far end of the alley and walked over to us grinning. This was the sniper whom my friends and I had been playing our games with for two weeks, who had been utterly invisible and had outwitted every attempt to track, trap, ambush, or identify him, and who had in fact besieged the city from within. He held out his hand to me and I shook it as he said, “Well played, sir. I’ve tried to kill you every day for fourteen days now, but the Israelis have occupied the city, and this changes everything. We have a common enemy, and they don’t know that, so I’m in a position to help you. But I can’t fight them alone. Want a partner?”
So began a great adventure and friendship, which I share with you now in the context of the nature of antifascist resistance because it illustrates something which can never be forgotten by anyone who does this kind of work; human beings are not monsters, are deserving of human doubt, and are never beyond redemption.
The struggle between good and evil in the human heart often pivots and balances on the differences between the purpose of the use of force; to punish transgression when inflicted by authority as an act of subjugation and repression against the powerless, or to seize power and to protect the powerless as a duty of care. Be very sure you know which cause your actions serve.
The end goal of Antifascism, and of revolutionary struggle and liberation, is to achieve a democratic society of true equality, diversity, and inclusion in which we can abandon the social use of force.
Such a day will not be easily won, nor quickly, even with seizures of power, for the systems of oppression in which we are embedded also inhabit our flesh as living stories, and we must escape the legacies of our history if we are to create ourselves anew in a free society of equals. Of our histories, memories, identities let us remember always this; there are those we must escape and those we must keep and remember, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Today we celebrate Labor Day and all the victories of solidarity and resistance to brutal repression of the labor union movement that followed in the wake of the great Pullman Strike which founded it.
In this moment of heroic resistance to commodification in the resurgence of labor unions with the Restoration of America and the Harris-Walz campaign to free us from subjugation to the Fourth Reich and the Party of Treason under Traitor Trump and other forms of solidarity, mass action, and seizures of power by workers in an increasingly exploitative society as capitalism and with it our civilization begins to fragment and collapse from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, we may ask; why unions?
Why are labor unions crucial to any defense of our humanity and our universal rights, and to democracy? Here I look to the origins of Labor Day, and its place in the glorious history of liberation struggle.
On Labor Day in 1921 the Battle of Blair Mountain ended the largest armed revolt since the Civil War, and branded the meaning of Labor Day and unions forever into the soul of America.
A union, like a democracy, is nothing more or less than a band of brothers who refuse to submit to enslavement and labor exploitation, or to abandon their fellows. Here is the essence and instrument of a free society of equals; liberty, equality, fraternity.
Our labor unions are a national treasure and a firewall of democracy which must be defended and celebrated.
Today we remember, and rejoice.
As written by Samuel Fleischman in The Nation; “Heading east from here, County Road 17 snakes up and down craggy hills for several miles before crossing an unremarkable intersection. A deserted church sits on one corner. On the other, a small bronze plaque recounts the Battle of Blair Mountain, a labor dispute that saw almost 10,000 miners face off against a union-busting sheriff, several thousand deputized locals, and the US military. It was the largest armed uprising in the country since the Civil War. This year marks the 100th anniversary, yet hardly a soul today remembers it.
The origins of the battle can be traced to the Matewan Massacre, when gun thugs working for Baldwin-Felts—an infamous strike-breaking “detective” agency—got into a shootout with a group of miners and Sheriff Sid Hatfield. After Baldwin-Felts agents murdered Hatfield in revenge the following year—on the steps of the county courthouse—his death became a martyrdom that roused miners to battle.
Coal life was already hard enough. Dangerous conditions (the Monongah Disaster alone killed upwards of 400 people, not to mention the long-term effects of breathing in coal dust), low wages (mine owners had been convicted of war profiteering during World War I), and exploitative credit systems were par for the course.
The situation only escalated in the summer of 1921 after hundreds of striking workers were arrested and held indefinitely. Hatfield’s death was the final straw. By August, thousands of miners were marching toward Matewan, intent on freeing their comrades and bringing their guerilla version of class warfare into action.
When the bombs started falling on the slopes of Blair Mountain—on Labor Day, 1921–many realized the gravity of their situation. For almost a week, miners numbering in the thousands had been battling machine-gun nests commanded by Don Chafin, sheriff of Logan County. They had already refused the pleas of President Harding, who feared their struggle might inspire the nearly 2 million unemployed Americans across the country to launch a full-scale class revolution. Thousands of leaflets bearing Harding’s message calling on the miners to disperse, were dropped by plane—and summarily ignored.
By nightfall, after the rumble of machine-gun fire and whir of biplane engines had dissipated, the miners must have looked around from where they were perched in trees or stretched out in hastily dug trenches and seen the numbers missing from their ranks. Still, they fought on.
Their fight was the culmination of a decades-long struggle. After coal companies rejected every effort by the UMWA to win representation, armed struggle took hold. By the end of the week somewhere between 50 and 100 miners, among them Appalachians, Italian immigrants, and African Americans, were dead.”
To all those whose struggles have won for us the freedoms we now enjoy, and whose continuing resistance to unjust authority, dehumanization, and exploitation by those who would enslave us holds our hope for the future of humankind in which the bold claim of our Declaration of Independence, wherein Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776, “all men are created equal,” may at long last be made real, I salute you.
The origins of Labor Day are recounted by Tim Goulet in Jacobin; “On September 5, 1882, socialists, the Knights of Labor, and various left organizations associated with the Central Labor Union (CLU) organized a march calling for shorter hours, higher pay, safer working conditions — and a labor holiday.”
“Ten thousand workers took an unpaid day off and marched from City Hall through Union Square to Forty-Second Street.
This event would soon become annual, spreading to other cities, states, and municipalities as the movement for a labor day grew. In 1885 and 1886, various American cities declared the first Monday in September to be a workers’ holiday, and on February 21, 1887, Oregon became the first state to recognize Labor Day. Massachusetts, Colorado, New York, and New Jersey followed later that year.”
“But it wasn’t until 1894 that Grover Cleveland, a conservative Democrat, declared Labor Day a federal holiday. Not coincidentally, his announcement came at the close of a mass strike.
In June of that year, workers who built Pullman railroad cars had joined Eugene Debs’s American Railway Union (ARU). They were angry that their steep pay cuts were not matched by rent reductions in their company town. As a result, 125,000 railroad workers refused to move any trains that had a Pullman car attached to it.
Cleveland called out the National Guard to police the railways but could not convince the strikers to resume work. Claiming that it was interfering with the postal service, Richard Olney, former attorney general, forced the courts to issue the first federal injunction against a strike.
When Debs refused to call the work stoppage off, he was jailed for six months. At least thirty workers were killed during the government’s violent suppression of the strike. This violence was openly condemned by New York’s Central Labor Union, who stood in full solidarity with the ARU.
Six days after it ended, Cleveland made Labor Day a national holiday, hoping it would defuse class anger and deflect attention away from the more militant May Day. But the president had other concerns too. It was a midterm election year, and Cleveland — serving his second nonconsecutive term — did not want to appear an enemy of organized labor. Yet he miscalculated: legalizing Labor Day could not make up for smashing the Pullman Strike and jailing Debs. He lost his reelection campaign, and the labor movement didn’t stay quiet for long.
Cleveland did not simply invent Labor Day, as we are often led to believe. The holiday represents a partial victory that reflects the labor movement’s strength, which pressed its weight on the scales of politics and forced a federal reform.
Like most reforms, it had a dual character: on the one hand, it absorbed and nullified some worker militancy; on the other, it ceded ground to the unions and put them in a better position to win future demands. Seeing it merely as a weapon instituted from the top down obscures the class struggle that led directly to its adoption.”
Heather Cox Richarson recounts the history of Labor Day this way ” Almost one hundred and forty-two years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.
Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored.
Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity. But for all that the war had seemed to be about defending men against the rise of an oligarchy that intended to reduce all men to a life of either enslavement or wage labor, the war and its aftermath had pushed workers’ rights backward.
The drain of men to the battlefields and the western mines during the war resulted in a shortage of workers that kept unemployment low and wages high. Even when they weren’t, the intense nationalism of the war years tended to silence the voices of labor organizers. “It having been resolved to enlist with Uncle Sam for the war,” one organization declared when the war broke out, “this union stands adjourned until either the Union is safe, or we are whipped.”
Another factor working against the establishment of labor unions during the war was the tendency of employers to claim that striking workers were deliberately undercutting the war effort. They turned to the government to protect production, and in industries like Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal fields, government leaders sent soldiers to break budding unions and defend war production.
During the war, government contracting favored those companies that could produce big orders of the mule shoes, rifles, rain slickers, coffee, and all the other products that kept the troops supplied. The owners of the growing factories grew wealthy on government contracts, even as conditions in the busy factories deteriorated. While wages were high during the war, they were often paid in greenbacks, which were backed only by the government’s promise to pay.
While farmers and some entrepreneurs thrived during the war, urban workers and miners had reason to believe that employers had taken advantage of the war to make money off them. After the war, they began to strike for better wages and safer conditions. In August 1866, 60,000 people met as the National Labor Union in Baltimore, Maryland, where they called for an eight-hour workday. Most of those workers calling for organization simply wanted a chance to rise to comfort, but the resolutions developed by the group’s leaders after the convention declared that workers must join unions to reform the abuses of the industrial system.
To many of those who thought the war would create a country where hard work would mean success, the resolutions seemed to fly in the face of that harmony, echoing the southern enslavers by dividing the world into people of wealth and workers, and asking for government intervention, this time on the side of workers. Republicans began to redefine their older, broad concept of workers to mean urban unskilled or semi-skilled wage laborers specifically.
Then in 1867, a misstep by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio made the party step back from workers. Wade had been a cattle drover and worked on the Erie Canal before studying law and entering politics, and he was a leader among those who saw class activism as the next step in the party’s commitment to free labor. His fiery oratory lifted him to prominence, and in March 1867 the Senate chose him its president pro tempore, in effect making him the nation’s acting vice president in those days before there was a process for replacing a vice president who had stepped into the presidency.
Wade joined a number of senators on a trip to the West, and in Lawrence, Kansas, newspapers reported—possibly incorrectly—that Wade predicted a fight in America between labor and capital. “Property is not equally divided,” the reporter claimed Wade said, “and a more equal distribution of capital must be worked out.” Congress, which Wade now led, had done much for ex-slaves and must now address “the terrible distinction between the man that labors and him that does not.”
Republican newspapers were apoplectic. The New York Times claimed that Wade was a demagogue. Every hard worker could succeed in America, it wrote. “Laborers here can make themselves sharers in the property of the country,—can become capitalists themselves,—just as nine in ten of all the capitalists in the country have done so before them,—by industry, frugality, and intelligent enterprise.” Trying to get rich by force of law would undermine society.
Congress established an eight-hour day for federal employees in June 1868, but in that year’s election, voters turned Wade, and others like him, out of office. In 1869, Republican president Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation saying that the eight-hour workday of “laborers, workmen, and mechanics” would not mean cuts in wages.
Then, in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. The transatlantic cable had gone into operation in 1866, and American newspapers had featured stories of the European war. Now, hungry for dramatic stories, they plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by crazed women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows.
The Communards were a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who planned to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to associations of workmen, American newspapers wrote. In their telling, the Paris Commune brought to life the chaotic world the elite enslavers foresaw when they said it was imperative to keep workers from politics.
Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.” Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace looked at the rising numbers of industrial workers and the conditions of city life, and warned Americans, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”
At the same time, it was also clear that wealthy industrialists were gaining more and more control over both state and local governments. In 1872 the Credit Mobilier scandal broke. This was a complicated affair, and what had actually happened was almost certainly misrepresented, but it seemed to show congressmen taking bribes from railroad barons, and Americans were ready to believe that they were doing so. Then, in July 1877, after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages 20 percent and strikers shut down most of the nation’s railroads, President Rutherford B. Hayes sent U.S. soldiers to the cities immobilized by the strikes. It seemed industrialists had the Army at their beck and call.
By 1882, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government so far toward men of capital that it seemed there was more room for workingmen to demand their rights. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.”
The workers marching in New York City in the first Labor Day celebration in 1882 carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.”
Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….”
Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”
As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).
They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday. Each year, the first Monday in September would honor the country’s workers.
In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.”
Happy Labor Day. “
Here is the Labor Day speech of Eugene V. Debbs, published on September 5, 1903 in the Social Democratic Herald and republished for the first time in Jacobin magazine; “The first Monday in September has by statutory enactment and general consent been set apart as Labor Day in the United States; and its celebration this year will be more general than ever before.
It is a day not only for rest and recreation, but for counsel and meditation. It affords an excellent opportunity to take a backward look, examine the present situation, take an inventory of resources and prepare for the greater work yet to be done before Labor Day can be celebrated by the hosts of freedom.
Labor Day must be regarded not as a privilege to be thankful for, but as a right to be enjoyed.
We never hear of Capital Day, not because Capital has no day, but because every day is Capital Day.
The struggle in which we are now engaged will end only when every day is Labor Day.
Upon every hand we see the signs of preparation.
The working class are mustering their mighty forces for political and economic conquest.
While the capitalists are capitalizing, the industrial conditions are revolutionizing, the working class are organizing, the Socialist sentiment is crystallizing and in due time the cooperative commonwealth will be materializing.
The liberation of the toilers of earth from the bonds of wage slavery is a mission worthy of the great international movement historically commissioned to render that inestimable service to humanity.
Courage is needed and intelligence, and both will be furnished in abundance by the working class itself.
Organization, based upon the mutual economic interests of the working class, is the demand of the day.
All workers, men, women and children, of all races and countries are included in the call to action.
The only line that is drawn is between the working class and their exploiters and that must be drawn straight and reach around the globe.
Workingmen, this is the day for you to realize that your interests are the same, that divided you are helpless, that united you can and will conquer the earth!
United political action will place the working class in control of government, and the abolition of capitalism will inevitably follow.
To work for wages, no matter how high, or how short the work-day, is to acknowledge a master and be at his mercy.
The full-grown workingman of the future will be free with his fellow workers to employ themselves, be their own masters and enjoy all the fruit of their labors.
Let every intelligent workingman resolve this day to do his share to abolish the wage system and emancipate the sons and daughters of toil.
The Socialist Party is the party of the working class, the party that stands for economic equality and industrial freedom, the party of progress and civilization.
This is the day to hold aloft its banner and proclaim its principles.
The struggle is as righteous as ever prompted men to do and dare on field of battle.
A few men are great now because the great mass are small.
Socialism means the exaltation of the whole and not the aggrandizement of individuals.
It is the greatest movement in all history.
It is the challenge of the twentieth century to the tyranny and oppression of the ages.
The ultimate triumph is inevitable.
The future is for socialism and humanity.”
“The Wobblies” (1979) IWW Labor Union Documentary Revolutionary Anticapitalist Industrial Unionism
When Labor Day Meant Something, by Chad Broughton/ The Atlantic
“Labor Day began not as a national holiday but in the streets, when, on September 5, 1882, thousands of bricklayers, printers, blacksmiths, railroad men, cigar makers, and others took a day off and marched in New York City.”
As the new school year begins in America, and teachers, parents, students, and all those who love to read are gathering ideas for new worlds to explore, I offer here my reading lists curated over forty years, many as a high school English teacher.
Of paramount importance is that school begins this year in a context of open hostility to education, a word from the Greek educatus which means to draw forth potential human being, meaning, and value rather than to stuff in facts, and which models and teaches not falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the factory model of education as industrial production, but its opposite; citizenship in a democracy as the art of asking questions and testing answers. There are historical reasons why our democracy was born in the Enlightenment and the scientific model of reason, and why tyranny is often a product of theocratic subjugation to authority.
If we are to be a free society of equals, wherein citizens are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights, universal education in which nothing is Forbidden as an area of experiment, inquiry, and debate is crucial; democracy requires freedom of information and communication including those of free speech and a free press.
In a time of darkness, book bans and burning, politization of school boards as subversion of democracy and repression of dissent, the forbidding of inquiry in areas which may threaten elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, we must write, speak, teach, and organize democracy as Resistance to fascist tyranny and as revolutionary struggle.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks made for us by others and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
And our job as teachers and parents is to help, model, and guide our children in their ongoing self creation and choices about how to be human together and become citizens, not slaves.
We do not need to post and recite the Ten Commandments, pledge allegiance to gods or masters, or trade value with money which proclaims In God We Trust; because none of this is about our relationship with the Infinite, and everything to do with a state which wants to claim our obedience as its interpreter. Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
We do need to learn as a nation and as a species to cherish our uniqueness and that of others, in solidarity and not division. And if we are to be a democracy, we need an education system founded on the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in literature and history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
To this end I offer here updated versions of the reading lists I used throughout my years of teaching AP and other English classes in high school, as supplementary choice reading lists for American Literature and World Literature as our education system has structured classes, to stand alongside and apart from the limits of government and school board approval and control, both of curriculum and of our human possibilities.
This was the key to empowerment and self actualization, happiness, and stellar academic achievement among my students and to success later in life; a free space of play in which to discover and create themselves. If we offer only this to our students, children, and future generations of citizens, a free space of play in the creation of themselves bearing many possible authorized identities without hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, we have done our job as caretakers of the future. Each of us has one problem in common which we must solve in order to grow up and become ourselves; we must reinvent how to become human.
Find your bliss, as Joseph Campbell exhorts us to do; but first something must catch spark and engage our interest, provoke us to question and explore.
This is the role of literature, and why the canon is central to the project of civilization.
The canon represents nothing less than an authorized set of possible identities; this is why it must adapt and change with time.
I organized Modern American Literature as core lists by fiction, poetry, drama, science and other fictions, and also literature of the American South, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American, and Jewish American, and Hawaiian categories, as well as a nonfiction list I entitled A Useful Past: Contexts and Sources for Constructing an American Identity, part of which is the American Presidents Histories and Biographies list included here.
As Gertrude Stein invented the modern world after our civilization destroyed itself in World War One, my list begins with her. Where possible, superlative critical works accompany the primary sources from authors of world-historical significance.
World Literature is represented by 28 lists for Feminism and Women’s Literature, Fairytales, Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology, Existentialism, and lists of National Literatures including Australia, New Zealand, & Canada, Austria, Germany, & Switzerland, Africa, Britain & Ireland, the Caribbean, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe, France, Greece, India, Iran, Islamic Peoples, Italy, Japan, Jewish People, Latin America, Netherlands, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, Scandinavia, and Spain.
Here I wish to signpost that nothing on my reading lists is chosen by any criterion other than quality as I so judge; in contrast to official reading lists chosen for reading level and objectives by grade and also appropriate age level content, because values are always negotiated truths and a ground of struggle, and in America the Texas Board of Education controls through purchasing power and ideological influence the publication of all textbooks nationally and is highly political and moreover falsified by the network of fundamentalist churches it represents. Ever wonder why our history text books make no mention of slavery as a cause of the Civil War?
How do we use reading lists as teachers, parents, readers exploring unknowns, ourselves, and the boundaries of our maps of becoming and of human being, meaning, and value?
One ongoing project which I ran for many years using these lists in high school may also be useful for private reading or home study, groups, partners, and getting to know one’s neighbors; I asked students to choose the list of a group with which they identify and then choose partners from a different group, then select two books, one from each other’s list, to read together and give a presentation as partners about each book to the class.
This project, which I called Becoming Human Through Literature, has three goals; to develop a broad personal culture, to discover maps of how to become human, and to operate transcontextually as a global family member.
As an activity for partners in any stage of a relationship, reading books together and discussing them as you progress makes a wonderful way to explore each others values and ideas. You may surprise and delight one another; you may also surprise and reimagine yourself.
For all of these lists I began with immortal classics and added whatever I thought merited inclusion on the basis of quality alone; this is how I found myself teaching a broad and inclusive curriculum. Yes, this means I’ve read all of the books listed, many in their original languages, and with some the major critical works and essays about them; and often taught, discussed, scored student critical essays and written about them for many years. It also means that if your favorite book is not on a list, I may simply not have read it yet.
I am a product of a Great Books of the Western World education, a set of works published by Encyclopædia Britannica based on the great Mortimer J. Adler’s course at the University of Chicago, which I read entirely through during my high school years, a second time while I was at university as an undergraduate, and a third during my graduate studies in literature, Jungian psychology, history, and philosophy. It is a practice which I recommend to everyone as both a starting point and a lifelong journey. This and Harold Bloom’s list in The Western Canon formed my starting point; as a teenager I began keeping lists of books I liked with notes, and the current version, in constant revision during the last forty years, I call Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2024 Edition.
On these lists are the finest books I’ve discovered over a lifetime of reading, and I hope they will bring joy to your life as they have mine.
Why is a diverse and limitless field of reading and study necessary to creating ourselves and our identities as we grow up? How does our education shape our political and social decisions about who we are and how to be human together?
As I wrote in preface to my Becoming Human project, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature for 2022; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As I wrote in my post in celebration of Juneteenth, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, of submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, beauty, and constructions of identity, and from the force and control of the state, especially in this context as falsification, rewritten histories, lies, and illusions which serve the power of those who would enslave us.
What is this freedom? What does it mean for us as we grow up and create ourselves?
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves as interdependent partners who exalt one another as guarantors of each others rights and humanity.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?”
As I wrote in my post of September 21 2020 History, Memory, Identity: Whose Story Is This?; 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 asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries and testing our ideas in experiment and debate; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America; this and all else we must always question. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
A Useful Past: Contexts and Sources for Constructing an American Identity
Yes, I once attempted to synthesize all knowledge and historical memory of our civilization specific to America under this banner as a resource for my high school students, including arts and sciences. I didn’t get as far as did Diderot with his Encyclopédie, all 23 volumes of it. I may have been influenced in this mad Quixotic quest by reading through our family Encyclopædia Britannica several times in my teens and twenties; ah, the folly of youth. I wasn’t trying to learn everything; I was trying to remember everything, the universe whole and entire, as the emergence of ideal forms and potentialities hidden within us.
The great mystery of Being in Time is not that universals connect us, but that our memory and history allow us to conserve our identity while in constant processes of adaptation and change.
We need both conserving forces which buffer us from the shock of the new and as a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation across vast epochs of time with damage to our morphology of human being, meaning, and value, but also we need revolutionary or innovational forces which allow us to meet new threats and capitalize on chaos.
This is the only list of context readings I have been able to complete; my studies of art and music being arbitrary and those of sciences changing too fast since the 1980’s for a definitive sum of knowledge;
But with literature I am on my own ground of struggle, publish in over a dozen languages and can speak with authority on both Modern American and World literatures.
Harold Bloom’s magisterial list which follows below has for me some glaring limitations, both as a best books list and as representations of authorized identities and imaginal spaces to grow into and beyond.
First it excludes everything not central to the Western European Canon as historically construed.
Second it dismisses nearly all works by women and nonwhite authors as inferior in quality and a waste of time to study, something which by the mid 20th century should have been transparently biased and long abandoned.
Third it misunderstands modern American literature from World War One onward, ignores masterpieces of literature and includes irrelevant and ridiculous choices no one reads or needs to now.
Harold Bloom wrote the finest critical work on Shakespeare ever, and is reasonably trustworthy on works including the classics, British Romantics, and American Transcendentalists; but here his world ends, as do his maps of becoming human.
This is where we must begin, all of us, in the reimagination and transformation of the Canon and of our limitless possibilities of Becoming Human.
Harold Bloom’s List in The Western Canon, from the appendices:
“The Theocratic Age
Here, as in the following lists, I suggest translations wherever I have derived
particular pleasure and insight from those now readily available. There are
many valuable works of ancient Greek and Latin literature that are not
here, but the common reader is unlikely to have time to read them. As
history lengthens, the older canon necessarily narrows. Since the literary
canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical,
and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. I would
think that, of all the books in this first list, once the reader is conversant
with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial
work is the Koran. Whether for its aesthetic and spiritual power or the
influence it will have upon all of our futures, ignorance of the Koran is
foolish and increasingly dangerous.
I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary
texts, because of their influence on the Western Canon. The immense wealth
of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary
tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available
to us.
THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
Gilgamesh, translated by David
Ferry
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
The Holy Bible, Authorized King
James Version
The Apocrypha
Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke
Aboth), translated by R.
Travers Herford
ANCIENT INDIA (SANSKRIT)
The Mahabharata
There is an abridged
translation by William Buck,
and a dramatic version by
Jean·Claude Carriere,
translated by Peter Brook
The Bhagavad-Gita
The crucial religious section
of Mahabharata, Book 6,
translated by Barbara Stoler
Miller
The Ramayana
There is an abridged prose
version by William Buck, and
a retelling by R. K. Narayan
THE ANCIENT GREEKS
Homer
The Iliad, translated by
Richmond Lattimore
The Odyssey, translated by
Robert Fitzgerald
Hesiod
The Works and Days;
Theogony, translated by
Richmond Lattimore
Archilochos , Sappho, Aikman
translated by Guy Davenport
Pindar
The Odes, translated by
Richmond Lattimore
Aeschylus
The Oresteia, translated by
Robert Fagles
Seven against Thebes, translated
by Anthony Hecht and Helen
H. Bacon
Prometheus Bound
The Persians
The Suppliant Women
Sophocles
Oedipus the King, translated by
Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay
Oedipus at Co/onus, translated
by Robert Fitzgerald
Antigone, translated by Robert
Fagles
Electra
Ajax
Women of Trachis
Philoctetes
Euripides
(translated by William
Arrowsmith)
Cyclops
Heracles
Alcestis
Hecuba
The Bacchae
Orestes
Andromache
Medea, translated by Rex
Warner
Ion, translated by H. D. (Hilda
Doolittle)
Hippolytus, translated by Robert
Bagg
Helen, translated by Richmond
Lattimore
Iphigeneia at Aulis, translated by
W. S. Merwin and George
Dimock
Aristophanes
The Birds, translated by William
Arrowsmith
The Clouds, translated by
William Arrowsmith
The Frogs
Lysistrata
The Knights
The Wasps
The Assemblywomen (also called
The Parliament of Women)
Herodotus
The Histories
Thucydides
The Peloponnesian War
The Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus,
Empedodes)
Plato
Dialogues
Aristotle
Poetics
Ethics
HELLENISTIC GREEKS
Menander
The Girl from Samos, translated
by Eric G. Turner
“Longinus”
On the Sublime
Callimachus
Hymns and Epigrams
Theocritus
Idylls, translated by Daryl Hine
Plutarch
Lives, translated by John Dryden
Moralia
“Aesop”
Fables
Lucian
Satires
THE ROMANS
Plautus
Pseudo/us
The Braggart Soldier
The Rope
Amphitryon
Terence
The Girl from Andros
The Eunuch
The Mother-in-Law
Lucretius
The Way Things Are, translated
by Rolfe Humphries
Cicero
On the Gods
Horace
Odes, translated by James
Michie
Epistles
Satires
Persius
Satires, translated by W. S.
Merwin
Catullus
Attis, translated by Horace
Gregory
Other poems translated by
Richard Crashaw, Abraham
Cowley, Walter Savage Landor,
and a host of English poets
Virgil
The Aeneid, translated by
Robert Fitzgerald
Eclogues and Georgics,
translated by john Dryden
Lucan
Pharsalia
Ovid
Metamorphoses, translated by
George Sandys
The Art of Love
Epistulae heroidum or Heroides,
translated by Daryl Hine
Juvenal
Satires
Martial
Epigrams, translated by James
Michie
Seneca
Tragedies, particularly Medea;
and Hercules furens, as
translated by Thomas
Heywood
Petroni us
Satyricon, translated by William
Arrowsmith
Apuleius
The Golden Ass, translated by
Robert Graves
THE MIDDLE AGES: LATIN, ARABIC, AND THE VERNACULAR BEFORE DANTE
Saint Augustine
The City of God
The Confessions
The Koran
Al-Qur’ an: A Contemporary
Translation by Ahmad Ali
The Book of the Thousand Nights
and One Night
The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee
Hollander
Snorri Sturluson
The Prose Edda
The Nibelungen Lied
Wolfram von Eschenbach
Parzival
Chretien de Troyes
Yvain: The Knight of the Lion,
translated by Burton Raffel
Beowult translated by Charles W.
Kennedy
The Poem of the Cid, translated ·by
W. S. Merwin
Christine de Pisan
The Book of the City of Ladies,
translated by Earl Richards
Diego de San Pedro
Prison of Love
B.
The Aristocratic Age
It is a span of five hundred years from Dante’s Divine Comedy through
Goethe’s Faust, Part Two, an era that gives us a huge body of reading in
five major literatures: Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. In this
and in the remaining lists, I sometimes do not mention individual works by
a canonical master, and in other instances I attempt to call attention to
authors and books that I consider canonical but rather neglected. From this
list onward, many good writers who are not quite central are omitted. We
begin also to encounter the phenomenon of “period pieces,” a sorrow that
expands in the Democratic Age and threatens to choke us in our own
century. Writers much esteemed in their own time and country sometimes
survive in other times and nations, yet often shrink into once-fashionable
fetishes. I behold at least several scores of these in our contemporary literary
scene, but it is sufficient to name them by omission, and I will address this
matter more fully in the introductory note to my final list.
ITALY
Dante
The Divine Comedy, translated
by Laurence Binyon in terza
rima, and by John D. Sinclair
1n prose
The New Life, translated by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Petrarch
Lyric Poems, translated by
Robert M. Durling
Selections, translated by Mark
Mus a
Giovanni Boccaccio
The Decameron
Matteo Maria Boiardo
Orlando innamorato
Ludovico Ariosto
Orlando furioso
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Sonnets and Madrigals,
translated by Wordsworth,
Longfellow, Emerson,
Santayana, and others
Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince
The Mandrake, a Comedy
Leonardo da Vinci
Notebooks
Baldassare Castiglione
The Book of the Courtier
Gaspara Stampa
Sonnets and Madrigals
Giorgio Vasari
Lives of the Painters
Benvenuto Cellini
Autobiography
Torquato Tasso
Jerusalem Delivered
Giordano Bruno
The Expulsion of the
Triumphant Beast
Tommaso Campanella
Poems
The City of the Sun
Giambattista Vico
Principles of a New Science
Carlo Goldoni
The Servant of Two Masters
Vittorio Alfieri
Saul
PORTUGAL
Luis de Camoens
The Lusiads translated by
Leonard Bacon
Antonio Ferreira
Poetry, in The Muse Reborn,
translated by T. F. Earle
SPAIN
Jorge Manrique
CoplasJ translated by Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow
Fernando de Rojas
La CelestinaJ translated by
James Mabbe, adapted by Eric
Bentley
Lazarillo de TormesJ translated by
W. S. Merwin
Francisco de Quevedo
Visions, translated by Roger
L’Estrange
Satirical Letter of Censure, in
J. M. Cohen’s Penguin Book
of Spanish Verse
Fray Luis de Leon
Poems, translated by Willis
Barns tone
St. John of the Cross
Poems, translated by John
Frederick Nims
Luis de Gongora
Sonnets
Soledades
Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote, translated by
Samuel Putnam
Exemplary Stories
Lope de Vega
La Dorotea, translated by Alan
S. Trueblood and Edwin
Honig
Fuente ovejuna, translated by
Roy Campbell
Lost in a Mirror, translated by
Adrian Mitchell
The Knight of Olmedo,
translated by Willard F. King
Tirso de Molina
The Trickster of Seville,
translated by Roy Campbell
Pedro Calderon de Ia Barca
Life Is a Dream, translated by
Roy Campbell
The Mayor of Zalamea
The Mighty Magician
The Doctor of His Own Honor
Sor Juana Ines de Ia Cruz
Poems
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales
Troilus and Criseyde
Sir Thomas Malory
Le Marte D’Arthur
William Dunbar
Poems
John Skelton
Poems
Sir Thomas More
Utopia
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Poems
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Poems
Sir Philip Sidney
The Countess of Pembroke’s
Arcadia
Astrophel and Stella
An Apology for Poetry
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke
Poems
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
The Minor Poems
Sir Walter Ralegh
Poems
Christopher Marlowe
Poems and Plays
Michael Drayton
Poems
Samuel Daniel
Poems
A Defence of Ryme
Thomas Nashe
The Unfortunate Traveller
Thomas Kyd
The Spanish Tragedy
William Shakespeare
Plays and Poems
Thomas Campion
Songs
John Donne
Poems
Sermons
Ben Jonson
Poems, Plays, and Masques
Francis Bacon
Essays
Robert Burton
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Sir Thomas Browne
Religio Medici
Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall
The Garden of Cyrus
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
Robert Herrick
Poems
Thomas Carew
Poems
Richard Lovelace
Poems
Andrew Marvell
Poems
George Herbert
The Temple
Thomas Traheme
Centuries, Poems, and
Thanksgivings
Henry Vaughan
Poetry
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Poems
Richard Crashaw
Poems
Francis Beaumont and
John Fletcher
Plays
George Chapman
Comedies, Tragedies, Poems
John Ford
‘Tis Pity She’s a W hare
John Marston
The Malcontent
John Webster
The White Devil
The Duchess of Malfi
Thomas Middleton and
William Rowley
The Changeling
Cyril Toumeur
The Revenger’s Tragedy
Philip Massinger
A New Way to Pay Old Debts
John Bunyan
The Pilgrim’s Progress
haak Walton
The Compleat Angler
john Milton
Paradise Lost
Paradise Regained
Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor
Poems
Samson Agonistes
Areopagitica
john Aubrey
Brief Lives
Jeremy Taylor
Holy Dying
Samuel Butler
Hudibras
john Dryden
Poetry and Plays
Critical Essays
Thomas Otway
Venice Preserv· d
William Congreve
The Way of the World
Love for Love
jonathan Swift
A Tale of a Tub
Gulliver’s Travels
Shorter Prose W arks
Poems
Sir George Etherege
The Man of Mode
Alexander Pope
Poems
john Gay
The Beggar’s Opera
James Boswell
Life of Johnson
Journals
Samuel Johnson
Works
Edward Gibbon
The History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire
Edmund Burke
A Philosophical Enquiry into
. . . the Sublime and Beautiful
Reflections on the Revolution
in France
Maurice Morgann
An Essay on the Dramatic
Character of Sir John Falstaff
William Collins
Poems
Thomas Gray
Poems
George Farquhar
The Beaux’ Stratagem
The Recruiting Officer
William Wycherley
The Country Wife
The Plain Dealer
Christopher Smart
Jubilate Agno
A Song to David
Oliver Goldsmith
The Vicar of Wakefield
She Stoops to Conquer
The Traveller
The Deserted Village
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The School for Scandal
The Rivals
William Cowper
Poetical W arks
George Crabbe
Poetical W arks
Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders
Robinson Crusoe
A Journal of the Plague Year
Samuel Richardson
Clarissa
Pamela
Sir Charles Grandison
Henry Fielding
Joseph Andrews
The History of Tom Jones, a
Foundling
Tobias Smollett
The Expedition of Humphry
Clinker
The Adventures of Roderick
Random
Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
A Sentimental Journey through
France and Italy
Fanny Burney
Evelina
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
The Spectator
FRANCE
Jean Froissart
Chronicles
The Song of Roland
Francois Villon
Poems, translated by Galway
Kinnell
Michel de Montaigne
Essays� translated by Donald
Frame
Fran�ois Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel,
translated by Donald Frame
Marguerite de Navarre
The Heptameron
Joachim Du Bellay
The Regrets, translated by
C. H. Sisson
Maurice Sceve
De lie
Pierre de Ronsard
Odes, Elegies, Sonnets
Philippe de Commynes
Memoirs
Agrippa d’ Aubigne
Les Tragiques
Robert Gamier
Mark Antony, translated by
Mary (Sidney) Herbert,
Countess of Pembroke
The J ewesses
Pierre Comeille
The Cid
Polyeucte
Nicomede
Horace
Cinna
Rodogune
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Maxims
Jean de La Fontaine
Fables
Moliere
(translated by Richard Wilbur)
The Misanthrope
Tartuffe
The School for Wives
The Learned Ladies
(translated by Donald Frame)
Don Juan
School for Husbands
Ridiculous Precieuses
The Would-Be Gentleman
The Miser
The Imaginary Invalid
Blaise Pascal
Pensees
Jacques-Benigne Bossuet
Funerary Orations
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
The Art of Poetry
Lutrin
Jean Racine
(translated by Richard Wilbur)
Phaedra
Andromache
(translated by C. H. Sisson)
Britannicus
Athaliah
Pierre Cadet de Marivaux
Seven Comedies
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Confessions
Emile
La Nouvelle Heloise
Voltaire
Zadig
Candide
Letters on England
The Lisbon Earthquake
Abbe Prevost
Manon Lescaut� translated by
Donald Frame
Madame de La Fayette
The Princess of Cleves
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de
Chamfort
Products of the Perfected
Civilization, translated by
W. S. Merwin
Denis Diderot
Rameau’s Nephew
Choderlos de Lados
Dangerous Liaisons
GERMANY
Erasmus, a Dutchman living in
Switzerland and Germany,
while writing in Latin, is
placed here arbitrarily, but
also as an influence on the
Lutheran Reformation.
Erasmus
In Praise of Folly
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust� Parts One and Two,
translated by Stuart Atkins
Dichtung und Wahrheit
Egmont, translated by Willard
Trask
Elective Affinities
The Sorrows of Young Werther,
translated by Louise Bogan,
Elizabeth Mayer, and W. H.
Auden
Poems, translated by Michael
Hamburger, Christopher
Middleton, and others
Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Meister’s Years of
Wandering
Italian Journey
Verse Plays and Hermann and
Dorothea, translated by
Michael Hamburger and
others
Roman Elegies, Venetian
Epigrams, West-Eastern
Divan, translated by Michael
Hamburger
Friedrich Schiller
The Robbers
Mary Stuart
Wallenstein
Don Carlos
On the Naive and Sentimental
in Literature
Gotthold Lessing
Laocoon
Nathan the Wise
Friedrich Holderlin
Hymns and Fragments,
translated by Richard Sieburth
Selected Poems, translated by
Michael Hamburger
Heinrich von Kleist
Five Plays, translated by Martin
Greenberg
Stories
C.
The Democratic Age
I have located Vico’s Democratic Age in the post-Goethean nineteenth century, when the literature of Italy and Spain ebbs, yielding eminence to
England with its renaissance of the Renaissance in Romanticism, and to a
lesser degree to France and Germany. This is also the era where the strength
of both Russian and American literature begins. I have resisted the backward
reach of the current canonical crusades, which attempt to elevate a number
of sadly inadequate women writers of the nineteenth century, as well as
some rudimentary narratives and verses of African-Americans. Expanding
the Canon, as I have said more than once in this book, tends to drive opt
the better writers, sometimes even the best, because pragmatically none of
us (whoever we are) ever had time to read absolutely everything, no matter
how great our lust for reading. And for most of us, the harried young in
particular, inadequate authors will consume the energies that would be
better invested in stronger writers. Nearly everything that has been revived
or discovered by Feminist and African-American literary scholars falls all
too precisely into the category of “period pieces,” as imaginatively dated
now as they were already enfeebled when they first came into existence.
ITALY
Ugo Foscolo
On Sepulchres, translated by
Thomas G. Bergin
Last Letters of ]acopo Ortis
Odes and The Graces
Alessandro Manzoni
The Betrothed
On the Historical Novel
Giacomo Leopardi
Essays and Dialogues, translated
by Giovanni Cecchetti
Poems
The Moral Essays, translated by
Howard Norse
Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli
Roman Sonnets, translated by
Harold Norse
Giosue Carducci
Hymn to Satan
Barbarian Odes
Rhymes and Rhythms
Giovanni Verga
Little Novels of Sicily, translated
by D. H. Lawrence
Mastro-Don Gesualdo,
translated by D. H. Lawrence
The House by the Medlar Tree,
translated by Raymond
Rosenthal
The She-Wolf and Other Stories,
translated by Giovanni
Cecchetti
SPAIN and PORTUGAL
Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
Poems
Benito Perez Gald6s
Fortunata and Jacinta
Leopoldo Alas (Clarin)
La Regenta
Jose Maria de E�a de Queir6s
The Maias
FRANCE
Benjamin Constant
Adolphe
The Red Notebook
Francois-Auguste-Rene de
Chateaubriand
Atala and Rene, translated by
Irving Putter
The Genius of Christianity
Alphonse de Lamartine
Meditations
Alfred de Vigny
Chatterton
Poems
Victor Hugo
The Distance, The Shadows:
Selected Poems, translated by
Harry Guest
Les Miserables
Notre-Dame of Paris
William Shakespeare
The Toilers of the Sea
The End of Satan
God
Alfred de Musset
Poems
Lorenzaccio
Gerard de N erval
The Chimeras, translated by
Peter Jay
Sylvie
Aurelia
Theophile Gautier
Mademoiselle de Maupin
Enamels and Cameos
Honore de Balzac
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Louis Lambert
The Wild Ass’s Skin
Old Goriot
Cousin Bette
A Harlot High and Low
Eugenie Grandet
Ursule Mirouet
Stendhal
On Love
The Red and the Black
The Charterhouse of Parma
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary, translated by
Francis Steegmuller
Sentimental Education
Salammbo
A Simple Soul
George Sand
The Haunted Pool
Charles Baudelaire
Flowers of Evil, translated by
Richard Howard
Paris Spleen
Stephane Mallarme
Selected Poetry and Prose
Paul Verlaine
Selected Poems
Arthur Rimbaud
Complete Works, translated by
Paul Schmidt
Tristan Corbiere
Les Amours jaunes
Jules Laforgue
Selected Writings, translated by
William Jay Smith
Guy de Maupassant
Selected Short Stories
Emile Zola
Germinal
L ‘Assommoir
Nana
SCANDINAVIA
Henrik Ibsen
Brand, translated by Geoffrey
Hill
Peer Gynt, translated by Rolf
Fjelde
Emperor and Galilean
Hedda Gabler
The Master Builder
The Lady from the Sea
When We Dead Awaken
August Strindberg
To Damascus
Miss julie
The Father
The Dance of Death
The Ghost Sonata
A Dream Play
GREAT BRITAIN
Robert Burns
Poems
William Blake
Complete Poetry and Prose
William Wordsworth
Poems
The Prelude
Sir Walter Scott
Waverley
The Heart of Midlothian
Redgauntlet
Old Mortality
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
Emma
Mansfield Park
Persuasion
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poems and Prose
Dorothy Wordsworth
The Grasmere Journal
William Hazlitt
Essays and Criticism
Lord Byron
Don juan
Poems
Walter Savage Landor
Poems
Imaginary Conversations
Thomas De Quincey
Confessions of an English
Opium Eater
Selected Prose
Charles Lamb
Essays
Maria Edgeworth
Castle Rackrent
John Galt
The Entail
Elizabeth Gaskell
Cranford
Mary Barton
North and South
James Hogg
The Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a justified
Sinner
Charles Maturin
Me/moth the Wanderer
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poems
A Defence of Poetry
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Frankenstein
John Clare
Poems
John Keats
Poems and Letters
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Death’s ]est-Book
Poems
George Darley
Nepenthe
Poems
Thomas Hood
Poems
Thomas Wade
Poems
Robert Browning
Poems
The Ring and the Book
Charles Dickens
The Posthumous Papers of the
Pickwick Club
David Copperfield
The Adventures of Oliver Twist
A Tale of Two Cities
Bleak House
Hard Times
Nicholas Nickleby
Dombey and Son
Great Expectations
Martin Chuzzlewit
Christmas Stories
Little Dorrit
Our Mutual Friend
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Poems
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Poems and Translations
Matthew Arnold
Poems
Essays
Arthur Hugh Clough
Poems
Christina Rossetti
Poems
Thomas Love Peacock
Nightmare Abbey
Gryll Grange
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Poems and Prose
Thomas Carlyle
Selected Prose
Sartor Resartus
john Ruskin
Modern Painters
The Stones of Venice
Unto This Last
The Queen of the Air
Walter Pater
Studies in the History of the
Renaissance
Appreciations
Imaginary Portraits
Marius the Epicurean
Edward FitzGerald
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
Autobiography
John Henry Newman
Apologia pro Vita Sua
A Grammar of Assent
The Idea of a University
Anthony Trollope
The Barsetshire Novels
The Palliser Novels
Orley Farm
The Way We Live Now
Lewis Carroll
Complete W arks
Edward Lear
Complete Nonsense
George Gissing
New Grub Street
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Poems and Letters
Charlotte Bronte
jane Eyre
Villette
Emily Bronte
Poems
W uthering Heights
William Makepeace Thackeray
Vanity Fair
The History of Henry Esmond
George Meredith
Poems
The Egoist
Francis Thompson
Poems
Lionel Johnson
Poems
Robert Bridges
Poems
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Collected Poems
The Man Who Was Thursday
Samuel Butler
Erewhon
The Way of All Flesh
W. S. Gilbert
Complete Plays of Gilbert and
Sullivan
Bah Ballads
Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone
The Woman in White
No Name
Coventry Patmore
Odes
James Thomson (Bysshe Vanolis)
The City of Dreadful Night
Oscar Wilde
Plays
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Artist as Critic
Letters
John Davidson
Ballads and Songs
Ernest Dowson
Complete Poems
George Eliot
Adam Bede
Silas Marner
The Mill on the Floss
Middlemarch
Daniel Deronda
Robert Louis Stevenson
Essays
Kidnapped
Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Treasure Island
The New Arabian Nights
The Master of Ballantrae
Weir of Hermiston
William Morris
Early Romances
Poems
The Earthly Paradise
The Well at the World’s End
News from Nowhere
Bram Stoker
Dracula
George Macdonald
Lilith
At the Back of the North Wind
GERMANY
Navalis (Friedrich von
Harden burg)
Hymns to the Night
Aphorisms
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Fairy Tales
Eduard Morike
Selected Poems, translated by
Christopher Middleton
Mozart on His Way to Prague
Theodor Storm
Immensee
Poems
Gottfried Keller
Green Henry
Tales
E. T. A. Hoffmann
The Devil’s Elixir
Tales
Jeremias Gotthelf
The Black Spider
Adalbert Stifter
Indian Summer
Tales
Friedrich Schlegel
Criticism and Aphorisms
Georg B iichner
Danton’s Death
Woyzeck
Heinrich Heine
Complete Poems
Richard Wagner
The Ring of the Nibelung
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Birth of Tragedy
Beyond Good and Evil
On the Genealogy of Morals
The Will to Power
Theodor Fontane
Effi Briest
Stefan George
Selected Poems
RUSSIA
Aleksandr Pushkin
Complete Prose Tales
Collected Poetry, translated by
Walter Arndt
Eugene Onegin, translated by
Charles 1 ohnston
Narrative Poems, translated by
Charles 1 ohnston
Boris Godunov
Nikolay Gogo)
The Complete Tales
Dead Souls
The Government Inspector,
translated by Adrian Mitchell
Mikhail Lermontov
Narrative Poems, translated by
Charles 1 ohnston
A Hero of Our Time
Sergey Aksakov
A Family Chronicle
Aleksandr Herzen
My Past and Thoughts
From the Other Shore
Ivan Goncharov
The Frigate Pallada
Oblomov
Ivan Turgenev
A Sportsman’s Notebook,
translated by Charles and
Natasha Hepburn
A Month in the Country
Fathers and Sons
On the Eve
First Love
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from the Underground
Crime and Punishment
The Idiot
The Possessed (The Devils)
The Brothers Karamazov
Short Novels
Leo Tolstoy
The Cossacks
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
A Confession
The Power of Darkness
Short Novels
Nikolay Leskov
Tales
Aleksandr Ostrovsky
The Storm
Nikolay Chernyshevsky
What Is to Be Done?
Aleksandr Blok
The Twelve and Other Poems,
translated by Anselm Hollo
Anton Chekhov
The Tales
The Major Plays
THE UNITED STATES
Washington Irving
The Sketch Book
William Cullen Bryant
Collected Poems
James Fenimore Cooper
The Deerslayer
John Greenleaf Whittier
Collected Poems
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature
Essays, first and second series
Representative Men
The Conduct of Life
Journals
Poems
Emily Dickinson
Complete Poems
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass, first edition
Leaves of Grass, third edition
The Complete Poems
Specimen Days
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
Tales and Sketches
The Marble Faun
Notebooks
Herman Melville
Moby-Dick
The Piazza Tales
Billy Budd
Collected Poems
Clare/
Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry and Tales
Essays and Reviews
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym
Eureka
jones Very
Essays and Poems
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
The Cricket and Other Poems
Henry David Thoreau
Walden
Poems
Essays
Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Two Years before the Mast
Frederick Douglass
Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, an
American Slave
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Selected Poems
Sidney Lanier
Poems
Francis Parkman
France and England in North
America
The California and Oregon Trail
Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres
Ambrose Bierce
Collected Writings
Louisa May Alcott
Little Women
Charles W. Chesnutt
The Short Fiction
Kate Chopin
The Awakening
William Dean Howells
The Rise of Silas Lapham
A Modern Instance
Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage
Stories and Poems
Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady
The Bostonians
The Princess Casamassima
The Awkward Age
Short Novels and Tales
The Ambassadors
The Wings of the Dove
The Golden Bowl
Harold Frederic
The Damnation of Theron Ware
Mark Twain
Complete Short Stories
The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn
The Devil’s Racetrack
Number Forty-Four: The
Mysterious Stranger
Pudd’nhead Wilson
A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court
William James
The Varieties of Religious
Experience
Pragmatism
Frank Norris
The Octopus
Sarah Orne Jewett
The Country of the Pointed Firs
and Other Stories
Trumbull Stickney
Poems
And here is the list of the volumes of The Great Books of the Western World do read them as I did beginning in eighth grade at the age of fourteen, using Adler’s Ten Year Plan which took me three to four years during the three times I read it in my teens, twenties, and thirties, using his ten volume synopticon of the Great Books, the Great Ideas Program Series.
I spent around one sixth of my life in this study, and wouldn’t trade a moment of it. I hope you too may find joy in this.
How to Think about the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization
“Comprised of the edited transcripts of the 1950s television series The Great Ideas produced by the Institute for Philosophical Research in San Fransisco, this book introduces laypeople to 52 great ideas of philosophy through dialogue between an interviewer and the philosopher Mortimer Adler.”
The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought, Mortimer J. Adler
“Mortimer Adler sat down at a manual typewriter with a list of authors and a pyramid of books. Beginning with “Angel” and ending with “World,” he set out to write 102 essays featuring the ideas that have collectively defined Western thought for more than twenty-five hundred years. The essays, originally published in the “Syntopicon,” were, and remain, the centerpiece of Encyclolpaedia Britannica’s “Great Books of the Western World.”
As written in Wikipedia; “Originally published in 54 volumes, The Great Books of the Western World covers categories including fiction, history, poetry, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, drama, politics, religion, economics, and ethics. Hutchins wrote the first volume, titled The Great Conversation, as an introduction and discourse on liberal education. Adler sponsored the next two volumes, “The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon”, as a way of emphasizing the unity of the set and, by extension, of Western thought in general. A team of indexers spent months compiling references to such topics as “Man’s freedom in relation to the will of God” and “The denial of void or vacuum in favor of a plenum”. They grouped the topics into 102 chapters, for which Adler wrote the 102 introductions. Four colors identify each volume by subject area—Imaginative Literature, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, History and Social Science, and Philosophy and Theology. The volumes contained the following works:
Volume 1
The Great Conversation
Volume 2
Syntopicon I: Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, and Love
Volume 3
Syntopicon II: Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World
Volume 4
Homer (rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler)
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Volume 5
Aeschylus (translated into English verse by G.M. Cookson)
The Suppliant Maidens
The Persians
Seven Against Thebes
Prometheus Bound
The Oresteia
Agamemnon
Choephoroe
The Eumenides
Sophocles (translated into English prose by Sir Richard C. Jebb)
The Oedipus Cycle
Oedipus the King
Oedipus at Colonus
Antigone
Ajax
Electra
The Trachiniae
Philoctetes
Euripides (translated into English prose by Edward P. Coleridge)
Rhesus
Medea
Hippolytus
Alcestis
Heracleidae
The Suppliants
The Trojan Women
Ion
Helen
Andromache
Electra
Bacchantes
Hecuba
Heracles Mad
The Phoenician Women
Orestes
Iphigenia in Tauris
Iphigenia in Aulis
Cyclops
Aristophanes (translated into English verse by Benjamin Bickley Rogers)
The Acharnians
The Knights
The Clouds
The Wasps
Peace
The Birds
The Frogs
Lysistrata
Thesmophoriazusae
Ecclesiazousae
Plutus
Volume 6
Herodotus
The History (translated by George Rawlinson)
Thucydides
History of the Peloponnesian War (translated by Richard Crawley and revised by R. Feetham)
Volume 7
Plato
The Dialogues (translated by Benjamin Jowett)
Charmides
Lysis
Laches
Protagoras
Euthydemus
Cratylus
Phaedrus
Ion
Symposium
Meno
Euthyphro
Apology
Crito
Phaedo
Gorgias
The Republic
Timaeus
Critias
Parmenides
Theaetetus
Sophist
Statesman
Philebus
Laws
The Seventh Letter (translated by J. Harward)
Volume 8
Aristotle
Categories
On Interpretation
Prior Analytics
Posterior Analytics
Topics
Sophistical Refutations
Physics
On the Heavens
On Generation and Corruption
Meteorology
Metaphysics
On the Soul
Minor biological works
On Sense and the Sensible
On Memory and Reminisence
On Sleep and Sleeplessness
On Dreams
On Prophesying by Dreams
On Longevity and Shortness of Life
On Youth and Old Age, On Life and Death, On Breathing
Volume 9
Aristotle
History of Animals
Parts of Animals
On the Motion of Animals
On the Gait of Animals
On the Generation of Animals
Nicomachean Ethics
Politics
The Athenian Constitution
Rhetoric
Poetics
Volume 10
Hippocrates
Works
The Hippocratic Oath
On Ancient Medicine
On Airs, Water, and Places
The Book of Prognostics
On Regimen in Acute Diseases
Of the Epidemics
On Injuries of the Head
On the Surgery
On Fractures
On the Articulations
Instruments of Reduction
Aphorisms
The Law
The Ulcer
On Fistulae
On Hemorrhoids
On the Sacred Disease
Galen
On the Natural Faculties
Volume 11
Euclid
The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements
Archimedes
On the Sphere and Cylinder
Measurement of a Circle
On Conoids and Spheroids
On Spirals
On the Equilibrium of Planes
The Sand Reckoner
The Quadrature of the Parabola
On Floating Bodies
Book of Lemmas
The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems
Apollonius of Perga
On Conic Sections
Nicomachus of Gerasa
Introduction to Arithmetic
Volume 12
Lucretius
On the Nature of Things (translated by H.A.J. Munro)
Epictetus
The Discourses (translated by George Long)
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations (translated by George Long)
Volume 13
Virgil (translated into English verse by James Rhoades)
Eclogues
Georgics
Aeneid
Volume 14
Plutarch
The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (translated by John Dryden)
Volume 15
P. Cornelius Tacitus (translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb)
The Annals
The Histories
Volume 16
Ptolemy
Almagest, (translated by R. Catesby Taliaferro)
Nicolaus Copernicus
On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
Johannes Kepler (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Books IV–V)
The Harmonies of the World (Book V)
Volume 17
Plotinus
The Six Enneads (translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page)
Volume 18
Augustine of Hippo
The Confessions
The City of God
On Christian Doctrine
Volume 19
Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologica (First part complete, selections from second part, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)
Volume 20
Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologica (Selections from second and third parts and supplement, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)
Volume 21
Dante Alighieri
Divine Comedy (Translated by Charles Eliot Norton)
Volume 22
Geoffrey Chaucer
Troilus and Criseyde
The Canterbury Tales
Volume 23
Niccolò Machiavelli
The Prince
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
Volume 24
François Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel, but only up to book 4.
Volume 25
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Essays
Volume 26
William Shakespeare
The First Part of King Henry the Sixth
The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth
The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth
The Tragedy of Richard the Third
The Comedy of Errors
Titus Andronicus
The Taming of the Shrew
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo and Juliet
The Tragedy of King Richard the Second
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Life and Death of King John
The Merchant of Venice
The First Part of King Henry the Fourth
The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth
Much Ado About Nothing
The Life of King Henry the Fifth
Julius Caesar
As You Like It
Volume 27
William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night; or, What You Will
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Troilus and Cressida
All’s Well That Ends Well
Measure for Measure
Othello, the Moor of Venice
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Timon of Athens
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Cymbeline
The Winter’s Tale
The Tempest
The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth
Sonnets
Volume 28
William Gilbert
On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
Galileo Galilei
Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences
William Harvey
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
On the Circulation of Blood
On the Generation of Animals
Volume 29
Miguel de Cervantes
The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha (translated by John Ormsby)
Volume 30
Sir Francis Bacon
The Advancement of Learning
Novum Organum
New Atlantis
Volume 31
René Descartes
Rules for the Direction of the Mind
Discourse on the Method
Meditations on First Philosophy
Objections Against the Meditations and Replies
The Geometry
Benedict de Spinoza
Ethics
Volume 32
John Milton
English Minor Poems
On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity
A Paraphrase on Psalm 114
Psalm 136
The Passion
On Time
Upon the Circumcision
At a Solemn Musick
An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester
Song on May Morning
On Shakespeare
On the University Carrier
Another on the same
L’Allegro
Il Penseroso
Arcades
Lycida
Comus
On the Death of a Fair Infant
At a Vacation Exercise
The Fifth Ode of Horace
Sonnets (I, and VII—XIX)
On the New Forcers of Conscience
On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester
To the Lord General Cromwell
To Sir Henry Vane the Younger
To Mister Cyriack the Skinner upon his Blindness
Psalms (I—VIII & LXXX—LXXXVIII)
Paradise Lost
Samson Agonistes
Areopagitica
Volume 33
Blaise Pascal
The Provincial Letters
Pensées
Scientific and mathematical essays
Volume 34
Sir Isaac Newton
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
Optics
Christiaan Huygens
Treatise on Light
Volume 35
John Locke
A Letter Concerning Toleration
Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
George Berkeley
The Principles of Human Knowledge
David Hume
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Volume 36
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels
Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Volume 37
Henry Fielding
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Volume 38
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
The Spirit of the Laws
Jean Jacques Rousseau
A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
A Discourse on Political Economy
The Social Contract
Volume 39
Adam Smith
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Volume 40
Edward Gibbon
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Part 1)
Volume 41
Edward Gibbon
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Part 2)
Volume 42
Immanuel Kant
Critique of Pure Reason
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
Critique of Practical Reason
Excerpts from The Metaphysics of Morals
Preface and Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics with a note on Conscience
General Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals
The Science of Right
The Critique of Judgement
Volume 43
American State Papers
Declaration of Independence
Articles of Confederation
The Constitution of the United States of America
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
The Federalist
John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
Considerations on Representative Government
Utilitarianism
Volume 44
James Boswell
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
Volume 45
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
Elements of Chemistry
Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier
Analytical Theory of Heat
Michael Faraday
Experimental Researches in Electricity
Volume 46
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Philosophy of Right
The Philosophy of History
Volume 47
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust
Volume 48
Herman Melville
Moby Dick; or, The Whale
Volume 49
Charles Darwin
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
Volume 50
Karl Marx
Capital
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Manifesto of the Communist Party
Volume 51
Count Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
Volume 52
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
Volume 53
William James
The Principles of Psychology
Volume 54
Sigmund Freud
The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis
Selected Papers on Hysteria
The Sexual Enlightenment of Children
The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy
Observations on “Wild” Psycho-Analysis
The Interpretation of Dreams
On Narcissism
Instincts and Their Vicissitudes
Repression
The Unconscious
A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
The Ego and the Id
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety
Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
Civilization and Its Discontents
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Second edition
The second edition of Great Books of the Western World, 1990, saw an increase from 54 to 60 volumes, with updated translations. The six new volumes concerned the 20th century, an era of which the first edition’s sole representative was Freud. Some of the other volumes were re-arranged, with even more pre-20th century material added but with four texts deleted: Apollonius’ On Conic Sections, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Joseph Fourier’s Analytical Theory of Heat. Adler later expressed regret about dropping On Conic Sections and Tom Jones. Adler also voiced disagreement with the addition of Voltaire’s Candide, and said that the Syntopicon should have included references to the Koran. He addressed criticisms that the set was too heavily Western European and did not adequately represent women and minority authors.[11] Four women authors were included, where previously there were none.[12]
The added pre-20th century texts appear in these volumes (some of the accompanying content of these volumes differs from the first edition volume of that number):
Volume 20
John Calvin
Institutes of the Christian Religion (Selections)
Volume 23
Erasmus
The Praise of Folly
Volume 31
Molière
The School for Wives
The Critique of the School for Wives
Tartuffe
Don Juan
The Miser
The Would-Be Gentleman
The Imaginary Invalid
Jean Racine
Bérénice
Phèdre
Volume 34
Voltaire
Candide
Denis Diderot
Rameau’s Nephew
Volume 43
Søren Kierkegaard
Fear and Trembling
Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
Volume 44
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America
Volume 45
Honoré de Balzac
Cousin Bette
Volume 46
Jane Austen
Emma
George Eliot
Middlemarch
Volume 47
Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit
Volume 48
Mark Twain
Huckleberry Finn
Volume 52
Henrik Ibsen
A Doll’s House
The Wild Duck
Hedda Gabler
The Master Builder
The contents of the six volumes of added 20th-century material:
Volume 55
William James
Pragmatism
Henri Bergson
“An Introduction to Metaphysics”
John Dewey
Experience and Education
Alfred North Whitehead
Science and the Modern World
Bertrand Russell
The Problems of Philosophy
Martin Heidegger
What Is Metaphysics?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations
Karl Barth
The Word of God and the Word of Man
Volume 56
Henri Poincaré
Science and Hypothesis
Max Planck
Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
Alfred North Whitehead
An Introduction to Mathematics
Albert Einstein
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
Arthur Eddington
The Expanding Universe
Niels Bohr
Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (selections)
Discussion with Einstein on Epistemology
G. H. Hardy
A Mathematician’s Apology
Werner Heisenberg
Physics and Philosophy
Erwin Schrödinger
What Is Life?
Theodosius Dobzhansky
Genetics and the Origin of Species
C. H. Waddington
The Nature of Life
Volume 57
Thorstein Veblen
The Theory of the Leisure Class
R. H. Tawney
The Acquisitive Society
John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
We celebrate Poland’s twin anniversaries of resistance and revolution this week; the 1943 Warsaw Uprising of the Jewish Ghetto against the Nazis over one hundred years ago and the 1980 Solidarity labor movement and revolution, which in the Gdansk Agreement of August 31 made the Soviet Empire blink and begin its long process of fragmentation and collapse. These pivotal events of modern Polish history are connected both by many of the people who led them and by their motives and dreams for a better future for their nation and for all humankind.
Poland is also a case study of how socialism can collapse into fascism after once having triumphed over the seduction of tyranny and authorized identities of blood, faith, and soil. In this it has close parallels with the glorious and tragic history of Hungary, in which my parents participated in the 1956 Revolution which was the first serious challenge to the Soviet dominion of Eastern Europe.
Sadly, it is far easier to rebel against an intrusive outside force of imperial conquest, tyranny, and terror than it is to rebel against our own.
If you would look beneath the veil of lies and illusions and discover the true history of Poland and of the origins of evil in unequal power and authorized identities and in the tyranny and terror of state force and control, I refer you to Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, written from his therapy journal when he was psychosomatically mute for five years after his liberation by Russia at the age of nine.
A lightning strike can ignite fires which will travel underground along the roots of trees to engulf whole regions in renewal and transformation. In this epochal moment of reckoning and renewal across America and the world, we must look to our own rootlines; to the historic origins of injustice and inequality and to the successes and failures of resistance and revolution for clues to solutions and the possibilities of our future.
We are engaged today in revolutionary struggle, democracy movements, human rights protests, antifascist action, and the founding of Autonomous Zones throughout the world. We fight for our freedom and for our universal human rights, we fight to remain unconquered and to give tyranny and fascism the only reply they merit; Never Again! Tomorrow we awaken to a brave new world of unknown possibilities of becoming human.
Let us bring the lightning.
As I wrote in my post of April 19 2022, Never Again: Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Days; Each year we commemorate the eight Days of Remembrance of the Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust, in Israel with moments of silence as whole cities pause while air raid sirens warn of impending attack, lest we forget and think the danger is long past and we ourselves safe, and throughout the world those engaged in revolutionary struggle against brutal tyrannies and in resistance to the force and control of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil reflect on the example of our sacred dead and their glorious last stand in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which affirms our common human being, meaning, and value.
All over the world, those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, will remember and rise again to claw their way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand.
Who resists and refuses to submit to force cannot be conquered or subjugated. This is the great lesson of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and why we remember it; because we must if we are to remain human, owners of ourselves if nothing more, and free.
To disambiguate between our two days of remembrance, the United Nation’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27 marks the day in 1945 when the Soviet Red Army liberated the Auschwitz–Birkenau concentration camp; an achievement of liberation struggle and international solidarity, a good and noble cause to celebrate. But Israel and the United States have chosen the Yom HaShoah date of Nisan 27 on the Hebrew calendar for the 8-day DRVH commemoration something else entirely; the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Not the rescue of the Holocaust’s victims, but the resistance unto death and solidarity with each other of a people who refused to submit to unjust authority, tyranny, and state terror.
In Resistance we become Unconquered and free.
As described by the only surviving commander of the Uprising, Dr. Marek Edelman, author of Resisting the Holocaust: Fighting Back in the Warsaw Ghetto, who fought on as the city was burned around them, they fought against impossible odds not to escape, for there was nowhere to escape to in occupied Poland, nor to buy time, for no help was coming, but only “to pick the time and place of our deaths”.
This I dispute, for the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising did far more than to claim their own freedom in seizing ownership of their lives in challenge to authority and refusal to obey force and control; they showed the rest of us how to live, and how to become free.
In the words of Max Stirner; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
As I wrote in my post of January 27 2021, Holocaust Remembrance Day, as the Senate Deliberates the Impeachment of Trump and the Repudiation of Fascist Tyranny and White Supremacist Terror; On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, as the Senate deliberates the impeachment of Trump and the repudiation of Fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror, it is with special urgency that we reflect on the liberation of Auschwitz seventy-six years ago today; on the meaning, origins, and consequences of human evil, and a nation’s failure to resist its seduction and subjugation, and how each of us will meet its challenges both as individuals and as a nation.
So many of the issues we face link back to racist and sectarian divisions of exclusionary otherness, hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege and authorized hierarchies of belonging; the injustices of state terror and racist police violence, the disparities of healthcare access and economic insecurity which have driven the emergence of a vast precariat during the pandemic, and the existential threat of the collapse of democracy and the capture of our government by the Fourth Reich of which Trump’s January 6 Insurrection is but the tip of an iceberg.
As I wrote in my post of December 8 2020, If you begin with white supremacist ideology, regardless of what minorities the purges begin with, you will always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Our purpose in the second impeachment of Trump is the discovery and exposure of the network of conspiracy which has enabled his crimes, and a public reckoning for all of his collaborators in treason, tyranny, and terror. Under oath and on the record for all of history, let us pursue fascism to its destruction.
Dismantling the network of treason and white supremacist terror which has seized us in its jaws and bringing its conspirators to justice will not be enough to free us from its threat, which hangs above our heads like a Sword of Damocles; we must also abolish the institutions of state terror and tyranny, of force and control, surveillance and disinformation, birthed in overwhelming and pervasive fear on 911 and given free reign by the Patriot Act. For the power and secrecy of our security service and a militarized police are not a strength but a weakness; they give authority the means to drive us into submission and transform democracy into tyranny. No state should possess such powers.
What is to be done? Lenin’s great question resonates for us today as it did against monarchies and colonial empires, and as our civilization destroyed itself in the World Wars. The fall of democracy and of global human civilization is once again possible because many of our governments have been attacked from within by the subversion of intrusive forces, but also because of the mechanical failures of our systems and structures from their internal contradictions. These flaws in the ways we have chosen to be human together we must reimagine and transform.
To choose one example of an area of reform among the apparatus of state terror and tyranny, a clear and present evil to represent the rest, consider the social use of force in the case of our concentration camps for nonwhite migrants at our border with Mexico, and the horrors of our racist ethnic cleansing and campaign of genocide in the example of the psychological warfare and torture of migrant children, the legacy of abandonment from our policy of orphaning and the cruel mystery of the lost children.
We must throw open the gates of these prisons and welcome those who have come to us for safety and for freedom as our brothers and sisters in liberty and a free society of equals.
We must disband the instruments of ethnic cleansing and tyranny including Homeland Security and its ICE and Border Patrol forces, and their deniable assets including fifth columns within our military and security services, secret armies, and organizations of terror including those which stormed our capitol, and hold accountable all those responsible for enacting and carrying out policies of racist ethnic cleansing, genocide, and crimes against humanity just as we did at Nuremberg.
Above all we must rescue the children from abuse and crimes against humanity by our government. Each of us has the opportunity to test ourselves and the quality of our humanity in righteous action, by uniting in challenge to authority and to evil in defense of the innocent.
For never again is no longer a historical reference to an incomprehensible evil, and has become a choice each of us must make. How we answer this test will condemn or redeem us, decide the fate of countless others and signal the fall or rebirth of our civilization.
Our choice is simple; when they come for the children, shall we surrender them to torture and disappearance by the state and its police, or shall we defend and protect them to the last?
How would we have met this test in that other time of darkness generations ago, whose history surfaces one particular face to represent all the unknown faces of the lost children?
And so I ask you, I beg, I demand; abandon not the innocent, but be a refuge and sanctuary from hate.
I ask you in the name of Anne Frank.
Hebrew
31 באוגוסט 2024 יום השנה למרד ורשה של פולין 1943 ומהפכת הסולידריות של 1980
בכל שנה אנו מציינים את שמונת ימי הזיכרון לחללי הקדושים וגיבורי השואה, בישראל ברגעי דומייה כאשר ערים שלמות עוצרות בזמן שסירנות תקיפות אוויר מזהירות מפני תקיפה צפויה, שמא נשכח ונחשוב שהסכנה עברה מזמן ואנחנו בעצמנו. בטוחים, וברחבי העולם העוסקים במאבק מהפכני נגד עריצות אכזרית ובהתנגדות לכוח ולשליטה של פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה משקפים את הדוגמה של המתים הקדושים שלנו ועמידתם האחרונה המפוארת במרד גטו ורשה. מאשר את האדם המשותף, המשמעות והערך שלנו.
בכל העולם, אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי כדור הארץ, חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והמחוקים, יזכרו ויקומו שוב כדי לצאת מהחורבות ולעשות עוד דוכן אחרון.
מי שמתנגד ומסרב להיכנע לכוח אי אפשר לכבוש או להכניע. זהו הלקח הגדול של מרד גטו ורשה, ומדוע אנו זוכרים אותו; כי אנחנו חייבים אם אנחנו רוצים להישאר בני אדם, הבעלים של עצמנו אם לא יותר, וחופשיים.
כדי לבלבל בין שני ימי הזיכרון שלנו, יום הזיכרון הבינלאומי לשואה של האו”ם, 27 בינואר, מציין את היום בשנת 1945 שבו שחרר הצבא האדום הסובייטי את מחנה הריכוז אושוויץ-בירקנאו; הישג של מאבק שחרור וסולידריות בינלאומית, מטרה טובה ואצילית לחגוג. אבל ישראל וארה”ב בחרו בתאריך יום השואה כ”ז בניסן בלוח העברי להנצחת 8 הימים של DRVH משהו אחר לגמרי; יום השנה למרד גטו ורשה ב-1943. לא הצלת קורבנות השואה, אלא התנגדות למוות וסולידריות זה עם זה של עם שסירב להיכנע לסמכות לא צודקת, לעריצות ולטרור המדינה.
בהתנגדות אנו הופכים ללא כבש וחופשי.
כפי שתיאר המפקד היחיד שנותר בחיים של המרד, ד”ר מרק אדלמן, מחבר הספר “התנגדות לשואה: נלחם בחזרה בגטו ורשה”, שנלחם בזמן שהעיר נשרפה סביבם, הם נלחמו כנגד סיכויים בלתי אפשריים לא לברוח, שכן לא היה לאן לברוח בפולין הכבושה, וגם לא לקנות זמן, כי שום עזרה לא הגיעה, אלא רק “לבחור את הזמן והמקום של מותנו”.
על זה אני חולק, שכן גיבורי מרד ורשה עשו הרבה יותר מאשר לתבוע את חירותם בעצמם בכיבוש הבעלות על חייהם באתגר לסמכות וסירוב לציית לכוח ולשליטה; הם הראו לכולנו איך לחיות, ואיך להיות חופשיים.
במילותיו של מקס סטירנר; “לא ניתן להעניק חופש; יש לתפוס אותו.”
כפי שכתבתי בפוסט שלי מ-27 בינואר 2021, יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה, כאשר הסנאט דן בהדחתו של טראמפ ובדחיית הרודנות הפשיסטית והטרור העליונות הלבן; ביום השואה הזה, בזמן שהסנאט דן בהדחת טראמפ ובהתכחשות לעריצות הפשיסטית ולטרור העליונות הלבן, בדחיפות מיוחדת אנו חושבים על שחרור אושוויץ לפני שבעים ושש שנים היום; על המשמעות, המקורות וההשלכות של הרוע האנושי, וכישלונה של אומה להתנגד לפיתויה ולהכנעתה, וכיצד כל אחד מאיתנו יעמוד באתגרים שלו הן כפרטים והן כעם.
כל כך הרבה מהסוגיות העומדות בפנינו נקשרות חזרה לחלוקות גזעניות ועדתיות של אחרות מדריגה, הגמוניות של עושר עילית, כוח ופריבילגיות והיררכיות מוסמכות של שייכות; העוולות של טרור המדינה ואלימות משטרתית גזענית, פערי הגישה לשירותי בריאות וחוסר ביטחון כלכלי שהניעו את הופעתה של פרקריאט עצום במהלך המגיפה, והאיום הקיומי של קריסת הדמוקרטיה ותפיסת ממשלתנו על ידי הרייך הרביעי. מתוכם המרד של טראמפ ב-6 בינואר הוא רק קצה קרחון.
כפי שכתבתי בפוסט שלי מ-8 בדצמבר 2020, אם תתחיל באידיאולוגיה של עליונות לבנה, בלי קשר לאילו מיעוטים מתחילים הטיהורים, תמיד תסיים בשערי אושוויץ.
המטרה שלנו בהדחה השנייה של טראמפ היא גילוי וחשיפת רשת הקונספירציה שאפשרה את פשעיו, וחשבון פומבי לכל משתפי הפעולה שלו בבגידה, עריצות וטרור. תחת שבועה וברישום של כל ההיסטוריה, הבה נרדוף אחר הפשיזם עד להשמדתו.
פירוק רשת הבגידה והטרור העליונות הלבנה שתפסה אותנו במלתעותיה והבאת קושרים לדין לא יספיקו כדי לשחרר אותנו מאיום שלה, התלוי מעל ראשינו כחרב דמוקלס; עלינו גם לבטל את מוסדות הטרור והעריצות של המדינה, של כוח ושליטה, מעקב ודיסאינפורמציה, שנולדו בפחד מוחץ ומתפשט ב-911 וקיבלו שלטון חופשי על ידי חוק הפטריוט. שכן הכוח והסודיות של שירות הביטחון שלנו ומשטרה צבאית הם לא חוזק אלא חולשה; הם נותנים לסמכות את האמצעים להניע אותנו לכניעה ולהפוך את הדמוקרטיה לעריצות. אף מדינה לא צריכה להחזיק בסמכויות כאלה.
מה יש לעשות? השאלה הגדולה של לנין מהדהדת עבורנו כיום כפי שהתרחשה נגד מונרכיות ואימפריות קולוניאליות, וכאשר הציוויליזציה שלנו הרסה את עצמה במלחמות העולם. נפילת הדמוקרטיה ושל הציוויליזציה האנושית הגלובלית אפשרית שוב מכיוון שרבות מהממשלות שלנו הותקפו מבפנים על ידי חתרנות של כוחות פולשניים, אך גם בגלל הכשלים המכניים של המערכות והמבנים שלנו מהסתירות הפנימיות שלהם. את הפגמים הללו בדרכים שבחרנו להיות אנושיות יחד עלינו לדמיין מחדש ולשנות.
כדי לבחור דוגמה אחת לאזור של רפורמה במנגנון הטרור והעריצות של המדינה, רוע ברור ונוכח לייצג את השאר, שקול את השימוש החברתי בכוח במקרה של מחנות הריכוז שלנו למהגרים לא לבנים בגבולנו עם מקסיקו, ואת הזוועות של הטיהור האתני הגזעני שלנו ומסע רצח העם בדוגמה של עינויים פסיכולוגיים של ילדים מהגרים, מורשת הנטישה ממדיניות היתמות שלנו והתעלומה האכזרית של הילדים האבודים.
עלינו לפתוח את שערי בתי הכלא הללו ולקבל בברכה את אלו שהגיעו אלינו למען הביטחון ולמען החופש כאחים ואחיותינו לחירות וחברה חופשית של שווים.
עלינו לפרק את מכשירי הטיהור האתני והעריצות, לרבות ביטחון המולדת וכוחות ה-ICE ומשמר הגבול שלו, ואת הנכסים הניתנים להכחשה, לרבות עמודים חמישיים בשירותי הצבא והביטחון שלנו, צבאות חשאיים וארגוני טרור, כולל אלה שהסתערו על הבירה שלנו, ו לתת דין וחשבון על כל האחראים לחקיקת וביצוע מדיניות של טיהור אתני גזעני, רצח עם ופשעים נגד האנושות בדיוק כפי שעשינו בנירנברג.
מעל הכל עלינו להציל את הילדים מהתעללות ופשעים נגד האנושות על ידי הממשלה שלנו. לכל אחד מאיתנו יש הזדמנות לבחון את עצמנו ואת איכות אנושיותנו בפעולה צדקנית, על ידי התאחדות באתגר לסמכות ולרוע בהגנה על החפים מפשע.
שכן לעולם לא עוד אין עוד התייחסות היסטורית לרוע בלתי מובן, והפכה לבחירה שכל אחד מאיתנו חייב לעשות. האופן שבו נענה על המבחן הזה יגנה אותנו או יגאל אותנו, יכריע את גורלם של אינספור אחרים ותאותת על נפילה או לידה מחדש של הציוויליזציה שלנו.
הבחירה שלנו פשוטה; כשהם באים להביא את הילדים, האם נמסור אותם לעינויים והיעלמות על ידי המדינה ומשטרתה, או שנגן עליהם ונגן עליהם עד הסוף?
איך היינו עומדים במבחן הזה באותה תקופה אחרת של חושך לפני דורות, שההיסטוריה שלו מעלה פרצוף אחד מסוים כדי לייצג את כל הפנים הלא ידועות של הילדים האבודים?
ועל כן אני שואל אותך, אני מתחנן, אני דורש; לא לנטוש את החפים מפשע, אלא להיות מקלט ומקלט משנאה.
אני שואל אותך בשם אנה פרנק.
Polish
31 sierpnia 2024 Rocznica wybuchu Powstania Warszawskiego 1943 i Rewolucji Solidarnej 1980
Każdego roku obchodzimy osiem Dni Pamięci Męczenników i Bohaterów Holokaustu w Izraelu chwilami ciszy, gdy całe miasta zatrzymują się, a syreny przeciwlotnicze ostrzegają przed zbliżającym się atakiem, abyśmy nie zapomnieli i nie pomyśleli, że niebezpieczeństwo minęło, a my sami bezpieczni i na całym świecie ci, którzy zaangażowani w rewolucyjną walkę przeciwko brutalnym tyraniom oraz w oporze wobec siły i kontroli faszyzmów krwi, wiary i ziemi, zastanawiają się nad przykładem naszych świętych zmarłych i ich chwalebnego ostatniego bastionu w powstaniu w getcie warszawskim, które potwierdza naszą wspólną istotę ludzką, znaczenie i wartość.
Na całym świecie ci, których Frantz Fanon nazwał Nieszczęśnikami Ziemi, bezsilnymi i wywłaszczonymi, uciszonymi i wymazanymi, będą pamiętać i powstać, aby wygrzebać się z ruin i zrobić kolejny Ostatni bastion.
Kto stawia opór i odmawia poddania się sile, nie może być pokonany ani ujarzmiony. To jest wielka lekcja powstania w getcie warszawskim i dlaczego o tym pamiętamy; ponieważ musimy, jeśli mamy pozostać ludźmi, właścicielami samych siebie, jeśli nic więcej, i wolnymi.
Aby odróżnić nasze dwa dni pamięci, Międzynarodowy Dzień Pamięci o Holokauście zorganizowany przez ONZ, 27 stycznia wyznacza dzień 1945 r., kiedy sowiecka Armia Czerwona wyzwoliła obóz koncentracyjny Auschwitz-Birkenau; osiągnięcie walki wyzwoleńczej i międzynarodowej solidarności, dobry i szlachetny powód do świętowania. Ale Izrael i Stany Zjednoczone wybrały datę Jom HaShoah 27 Nisan w kalendarzu hebrajskim na 8-dniowe upamiętnienie DRVH, coś zupełnie innego; rocznica powstania w getcie warszawskim w 1943 r. Nie ratowanie ofiar Holokaustu, ale opór przed śmiercią i solidarność ze sobą ludzi, którzy odmówili poddania się niesprawiedliwej władzy, tyranii i państwowemu terrorowi.
W Resistance stajemy się Niezwyciężeni i wolni.
Jak opisuje jedyny ocalały dowódca Powstania, dr Marek Edelman, autor książki Resisting the Holocaust: Fighting Back in the Warsaw Ghetto, który walczył dalej, gdy miasto wokół nich płonęło, walczyli z niemożliwymi do uniknięcia w okupowanej Polsce nie było dokąd uciec, ani kupić czasu, bo pomoc nie nadchodziła, a jedynie „wybrać czas i miejsce naszej śmierci”.
Spieram się z tym, bo bohaterowie Powstania Warszawskiego zrobili o wiele więcej niż tylko domagali się własnej wolności w przejęciu na własność swojego życia w kwestionowaniu władzy i odmowy podporządkowania się sile i kontroli; pokazali reszcie z nas, jak żyć i jak stać się wolnym.
W słowach Maxa Stirnera; „Wolność nie może być przyznana; musi zostać zajęty”.
Jak napisałem w moim poście z 27 stycznia 2021 r., Dzień Pamięci o Holokauście, gdy Senat rozważa oskarżenie Trumpa i odrzucenie faszystowskiej tyranii i terroru białej supremacji; W tym Dniu Pamięci o Holokauście, kiedy Senat obraduje nad oskarżeniem Trumpa i odrzuceniem faszystowskiej tyranii i terroru białej supremacji, ze szczególną pilnością zastanawiamy się dzisiaj nad wyzwoleniem Auschwitz siedemdziesiąt sześć lat temu; o znaczeniu, pochodzeniu i skutkach ludzkiego zła oraz o tym, że naród nie oparł się jego uwiedzeniu i ujarzmieniu oraz o tym, jak każdy z nas sprosta wyzwaniom, zarówno jako jednostki, jak i jako naród.
Tak wiele problemów, z którymi mamy do czynienia, wiąże się z rasistowskimi i sekciarskimi podziałami wykluczającej inności, hegemonii elitarnego bogactwa, władzy i przywilejów oraz autoryzowanych hierarchii przynależności; niesprawiedliwości terroru państwowego i rasistowskiej przemocy policji, dysproporcje w dostępie do opieki zdrowotnej i niepewność ekonomiczna, które doprowadziły do powstania ogromnego prekariatu podczas pandemii, oraz egzystencjalne zagrożenie upadkiem demokracji i przejęciem naszego rządu przez Czwartą Rzeszę z czego powstanie Trumpa z 6 stycznia jest tylko wierzchołkiem góry lodowej.
Jak pisałem w swoim poście z 8 grudnia 2020 r., Jeśli zaczniesz od ideologii białej supremacji, niezależnie od tego, od jakich mniejszości zaczną się czystki, zawsze wylądujesz u bram Auschwitz.
Naszym celem w drugim oskarżeniu Trumpa jest odkrycie i ujawnienie sieci konspiracji, która umożliwiła jego zbrodnie, oraz publiczne rozliczenie za zdradę, tyranię i terror za wszystkich jego współpracowników. Pod przysięgą i z zapisem dla całej historii, dążmy do zniszczenia faszyzmu.
Rozbicie siatki zdrady i terroru białej supremacji, która chwyciła nas w szczęki i postawiła spiskowców przed obliczem sprawiedliwości, nie wystarczy, aby uwolnić nas od groźby, która wisi nad naszymi głowami jak Miecz Damoklesa; musimy także znieść instytucje terroru państwowego i tyranii, siły i kontroli, nadzoru i dezinformacji, zrodzone z przytłaczającego i wszechobecnego strachu w 911 i którym ustawa Patriot dała wolną rękę. Siła i tajemnica naszej służby bezpieczeństwa i zmilitaryzowanej policji to nie siła, ale słabość; dają autorytetowi środki do kierowania nas do uległości i przekształcenia demokracji w tyranię. Żadne państwo nie powinno posiadać takich uprawnień.
Co należy zrobić? Wielkie pytanie Lenina rozbrzmiewa dla nas dzisiaj, podobnie jak w przypadku monarchii i imperiów kolonialnych oraz gdy nasza cywilizacja zniszczyła samą siebie w wojnach światowych. Upadek demokracji i globalnej cywilizacji ludzkiej jest ponownie możliwy, ponieważ wiele naszych rządów zostało zaatakowanych od wewnątrz przez wywrotowe siły natrętne, ale także z powodu mechanicznych awarii naszych systemów i struktur spowodowanych ich wewnętrznymi sprzecznościami. Te wady w sposobach, które wybraliśmy, aby być razem ludźmi, musimy ponownie wyobrazić sobie i przekształcić.
Aby wybrać jeden przykład obszaru reform wśród aparatu terroru państwowego i tyranii, jawnego i obecnego zła dla reszty, rozważmy społeczne użycie siły w przypadku naszych obozów koncentracyjnych dla niebiałych migrantów na naszej granicy z Meksykiem, oraz okropności naszych rasistowskich czystek etnicznych i kampanii ludobójstwa na przykładzie psychologicznych tortur dzieci migrantów, spuścizny porzucenia naszej polityki sieroctwa i okrutnej tajemnicy zaginionych dzieci.
Musimy otworzyć bramy tych więzień i powitać tych, którzy przybyli do nas po bezpieczeństwo i wolność, jako naszych braci i siostry w wolności i wolnym społeczeństwie równych.
Musimy rozwiązać instrumenty czystek etnicznych i tyranii, w tym Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego i jego siły ICE i patrolu granicznego, a także ich aktywa, które można podważyć, w tym piąte kolumny w naszych służbach wojskowych i bezpieczeństwa, tajne armie i organizacje terrorystyczne, w tym te, które szturmowały naszą stolicę, oraz pociągać do odpowiedzialności wszystkich odpowiedzialnych za uchwalanie i prowadzenie polityki rasistowskich czystek etnicznych, ludobójstwa i zbrodni przeciwko ludzkości, tak jak to zrobiliśmy w Norymberdze.
Przede wszystkim musimy ratować dzieci przed nadużyciami i zbrodniami przeciwko ludzkości ze strony naszego rządu. Każdy z nas ma możliwość sprawdzenia siebie i jakości naszego człowieczeństwa w sprawiedliwym działaniu, jednocząc się w walce z władzą i złem w obronie niewinnych.
Bo nigdy więcej nie jest już historycznym odniesieniem do niezrozumiałego zła, a stał się wyborem, którego musi dokonać każdy z nas. To, jak odpowiemy na ten test, potępi nas lub odkupi, zadecyduje o losie niezliczonych innych i zasygnalizuje upadek lub odrodzenie naszej cywilizacji.
Nasz wybór jest prosty; kiedy przyjdą po dzieci, czy poddamy je torturom i zniknięciu przez państwo i jego policję, czy też będziemy ich bronić i chronić do końca?
Jak moglibyśmy sprostać temu testowi w tamtym innym czasie ciemności pokolenia temu, którego historia wyłania jedną konkretną twarz, reprezentującą wszystkie nieznane twarze zaginionych dzieci?
A więc proszę, błagam, żądam; nie porzucaj niewinnych, ale bądź schronieniem i sanktuarium przed nienawiścią.
“Beware; I am Fearless and therefore Powerful”- Mary Shelly
Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein?
Yet as Prospero said of Caliban, we must also say of Frankenstein’s monster; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Like Milton in Paradise Lost and the magnificent novel of transgression written by Emily Bronte in direct reply to Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Mary Shelly’s references and sources include the myth of Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Plato’s Protagoras, poetic versions of his myth by Goethe and Byron, the play by her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the myth of the fallen angels and their monstrous children the Nephilim from the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
As I have written of Vander Meer’s retelling of Frankenstein in the novel Borne: Mary Shelly’s glorious novel was also about the abandonment of a child who is no longer perfect, among a number of other themes, including the origins of violence.
I believe a major theme of the novel Frankenstein is the monstrosity of God, who like Victor creates and then abandons his child when it is imperfect and no longer a reflection of his, when we become our own free and independent beings. Yes, Victor wants to become a god, which is why the story resonates with everyone, and is an allegory of the failure of reason and science to realize Idealist and Utopian visions of humanity, the novel being both a codification and critique of Romantic Idealism.
I like Victor, and have used variants of this name as aliases because he is a figure of Milton’s rebel angel, but also the monster, a figure of the Shadow based on Caliban in The Tempest. The story is about their relationship as parent and abandoned and damaged child. As a reference to both Mary Shelly’s and Emily Bronte’s model in Goethe’s Faust, the roles of Victor and Catherine reprise that of Faust, while the monster and Heathcliff are versions of The Devil.
Frankenstein addresses themes of science and civilization versus nature which echo Rousseau, reason versus passion which prefigure Freud, and both of these within a Promethean rebellion against God, authority, and universal Law as a form of Idealism; this from the perspective of the monster’s creator.
From the monster’s view, the novel portrays the disfigurement of the soul through abandonment by a parent who also functions as a figure of a creator-god and of Authority, known as the problem of the Deus Absconditus which refers to the god who bound humankind to his laws and then ran away before he was caught, and who drives the child to achievement and supremacy- what the Greeks called Arete or Virtue but also denoting superiority as with Achilles in the Iliad, one of Mary Shelly’s sources- in a chosen arena but who like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring cannot love, rendering all victory meaningless and hollow, dehumanizing the child and shaping a vessel of rage and vengeance, with the iron self discipline and will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others. It is about birthing monsters, how systems of oppression shape some of us into monsters with which to terrorize the rest of us into consent to be governed and submission to authority, and the chaotic plasticity of identity and relationships.
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
A story which is at once Greek tragedy and Freudian study of the process and relations between the id, ego, and superego, with a third parallel storyline relating a Romantic reimagination of Biblical Genesis like that of Blake, it is both the apotheosis of Romantic Idealism and its first criticism, exegesis and classical myth, dialectic on responsibility and discourse on Aristotle’s categories of being, critique of Rousseau’s natural man and of Nietzsche’s Superman which it also inspired in a recursive loop of influence across the seas of time. Its author was a Pythian visionary whose insight reached centuries into the future, and whose immense scholarship reimagined some of the greatest works of our historical civilization.
Mary Shelly’s influence echoes through time, multiplies, and reshapes the contexts of its polymorphous meanings. One cannot think of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa without thinking of his original, the dual-aspected monster-child created to bind our nature with reason, nor read her sources and references in the prophecies of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost without reevaluating them in terms of Mary Shelly’s novel; her work resonates through past and future, and what touches, it changes.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein?
A nested set of puzzle box themes and contexts, multiple narrative threads which create paradoxes of meaning, role reversals and inversions of identities, and the questioning of the mission of civilization and the morality of progress; Mary Shelly created the modern world with her great book Frankenstein.
The Corpus Frankenstein: essential films and books
Gothic
Frankenstein 1931 film Its Alive scene
Van Helsing creation of the monster
Penny Dreadful Caliban’s Speech; Why would you allow me to feel?
Mary Shelly
Young Frankenstein Puttin on the Ritz
The Frankenstein Chronicles
The Rocky Horror Picture Show – The time warp
(I was in the Berkeley live cast at the UC Theatre, Indecent Exposure)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:
The New Annotated Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Leslie S. Klinger (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Guillermo del Toro (Introduction), Anne K. Mellor (Afterword)
Torch of Liberty 