A victory for justice and the exposure of tyranny’s lies and falsifications was won a year ago this day with the United Nations declaration of the Chinese Communist Party’s policies in Xinjiang as genocide, slavery, and crimes against humanity.
It remains for the international community to bring a Reckoning to Xi Jinping’s regime of cruelty and dehumanization, and join together with the peoples of China in liberation struggle.
China’s horrific crimes in Xinjiang is a boundary which defines the limits of the human and the legitimacy of the state, and it is a line we must defend or surrender to states everywhere the principles of our universal human rights and democracy as a free society of equals wherein the state is co-owned by its citizens as a guarantor of their rights.
There is one and only one condition in which any state can be legitimate, and that is when it acts as a guarantor of the parallel and interdependent sets of rights of citizens and of human beings, and balances those rights so that none may infringe upon those of another.
For once we surrender our humanity to the state, and become things and not human beings, instruments of the power and profit of others through systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, subjugated by carceral states of force and control through abjection and learned helplessness, division and authorized identities of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of blood, soil, and faith, we allow those who would enslave us to feed us into the machine of the state as psychopathy and embodied violence as the raw material of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Let us give to systems of oppression, to fascism, and to tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As written by Jamey Keaten and Edith M. Lederer in Huffpost: “The office of U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet published its long-awaited report on alleged rights violations in China’s western Xinjiang region Wednesday, brushing aside Beijing’s demands to keep a lid on a report that fanned a tug-of-war for diplomatic influence with the West over the rights of the region’s native Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups.
The report, which Western diplomats and U.N. officials said had been all but ready for months, was published with just minutes to go in Bachelet’s four-year term. The report was unexpected to break significant new ground beyond sweeping findings from independent advocacy groups and journalists who have documented concerns about human rights in Xinjiang for years.
But Bachelet’s report comes with the imprimatur of the United Nations, and the member states that make it up. The run-up to its release fueled a debate over China’s influence at the world body and epitomized the on-and-off diplomatic chill between Beijing and the West over human rights, among other sore spots.
In the past five years, the Chinese government’s mass detention campaign in Xinjiang swept an estimated million Uyghurs and other ethnic groups into a network of prisons and camps, which Beijing called “training centers” but former detainees described as brutal detention centers.
Beijing has since closed many of the camps, but hundreds of thousands continue to languish in prison on vague, secret charges.”
As I wrote in my post of August 19 2020, China’s Holocaust: the Genocide of the Uighurs of Xinjiang and the Colonization of Hong Kong; It begins with the Great Wall of Silence and the control of truth, the repression of dissent and silencing of heroes like Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai, and Cai Xia, but it always ends in concentration camps like those in Xinjiang; the path of tyranny and fascism leads ever downward into degradation and dehumanization.
What do you call it when a government enacts the erasure and genocide of an ethnic and religious minority, and profits by their slave labor in concentration camps?
I call it a Holocaust.
What do you call a government which uses forced sterilizations, mass abductions, torture, murder, sending children to orphanages to be taught only in the official language, the outlawing of religious practice, and all this and more horrors and crimes against humanity targeted against those who do not fit the authorities paradigm of blood, faith, and soil?
I call it fascism.
And I say that whatever lies such governments tell about their crimes, what they call themselves or the particulars of their inhumanity, means nothing. All that matters is this; the powerful are inflicting harm on the powerless and the dispossessed.
Shall we let the vulnerable and those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth stand alone? Are all humans our brothers and sisters?
In the conquest and genocide of the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang the Chinese Communist Party has revealed their true nature as a xenophobic authoritarian state of force and control and a criminal organization of state terror and tyranny. They are a government without legitimacy.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
As I wrote in my post of July I 2020, An Empire of Terror and Racist Genocide: The Fall of Hong Kong and the Sterilization of the Uighur Ethnic Minority of Xinjiang; As the first wave of mass arrests and crimes against humanity by the Chinese Communist Party and its regime of state terror roll over Hong Kong on this anniversary of its handover by the British to their successor empire in the citadel of darkness which is Beijing, as the women of the Uighur ethnic and religious minority in Xinjiang are forcibly sterilized in a program of ethnic cleansing and genocide which parallels the campaign of erasure in the re- education prisons wherein their language, faith, history, and identity as a people are stolen, the world watches as yet another spectacle of inhumanity unfolds before us with stupefaction and the helpless surrender of civilization to atavistic barbarism.
And once again we do nothing when a predator arrives to cut the powerless and the dispossessed from the herd of humankind, for without a united front against tyrannies of force and control the most ruthless and amoral among us wins.
Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller spoke his famous condemnation of the complicity of silence in the face of evil in the context of the Holocaust, but it applies as a universal principle; “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
As I wrote in my post of October 6 2019, Vendetta Lives: Hong Kong Defies Tyranny and State Terror; I am one man, of limited understanding, though I have worn many masks in many places, and not all of my causes have been lost; through all my forlorn hopes and a lifetime of last stands I yet remain to defy and defend.
Of our many possible futures I can only say this; all is not yet lost, nor is anything past redemption when the will to resist and to become better can be found.
So I leave you with the words of Alan Moore from V for Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2022, Genocide Games: the Case of Xinjiang; A year ago I wrote in my post of February 19 2021, China Genocide Slavery Sexual Terror; The Chinese Communist Party is responsible for vast horrors, including xenophobic ethnic cleaning and slavery. But we are also responsible, if we buy the products of injustice.
And like a monster in a horror film which attacks from the darkness when we are distracted, new revelations expose the government of China’s campaign of rape and sexual terror against the Islamic minorities of Xinjiang.
If anyone questions the centrality of a nonsectarian government and the principle of separation of church and state to democracy and our universal human rights, consider the examples of Yemen and Xinjiang.
Little has changed for the peoples of China or of her imperial conquests Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong in the year since I wrote these words in support of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction China movement, words like the screams of terror of the victims of China’s tyranny and terror, swallowed in the howling chasms of darkness of their Occupations and nearly lost to human memory and the witness of history like the countless lives of the silenced and the erased.
But I remember, and bear witness.
In the example of Xinjiang we can see the links between racist and sectarian terror as systemic violence, imperial conquest, and colonial dominion and exploitation.
Here also is the most horrific example of a carceral state of force and thought control as institutionalized dehumanization and enslavement in the world today; as Xinjiang is China’s laboratory for a Brave New World, whose technologies of dehumanization, commodification, and falsification they are exporting to fellow tyrannies globally.
And if we do nothing to change this monstrous crime against humanity or to disrupt Xi Jinping’s plans for the Conquest of the Pacific Rim, in Xinjiang we can see the future which awaits all of us.
Let us unite with the peoples of China, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong in solidarity against imperial conquest and occupation by a regime of tyranny and terror, while we still can.
As written by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post and cited in my journal entry of November 17 2019; ”We have known for some time now that China is carrying out something deeply unsettling in Xinjiang. The restive, far west region of the country is home to a number of Turkic Muslim minorities, including the Uighurs, who in the last half-decade have been swept up in large numbers by the dragnet of the central state. We know that roughly a million or more people have been subjected to a vast system of detention or “reeducation” camps, where they are cajoled to “Sinicize” and abandon their native Islamic traditions. There’s already been a great deal of international criticism: In Washington, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have condemned China’s project of de facto cultural genocide. A report by a United Nations panel of experts warned this month that China’s methods could “deeply erode the foundations” of Chinese society.
But Chinese officials still hide behind the Potemkin villages of their own making. They insist that the camps are actually job-training centers where amenable Xinjiang residents are working to better assimilate into mainstream society through vocational schooling and language instruction. They point to the necessity of such measures to counter the reach of radical Islamist groups in the region. We know now, though, that Chinese authorities don’t actually believe their own party line.
That’s because of the new details surfaced by an astonishing set of leaked documents obtained by the New York Times. The cache includes 403 pages of Communist Party directives, reports, notes from internal investigations and internal speeches given by party officials, including President Xi Jinping. The Times’s story by Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, published this weekend, offers a rarely seen window into the deliberations of one of the world’s most opaque governments. And what we see is chilling.
It relays how a flurry of ethnic violence and terrorist attacks in the early part of the decade persuaded Xi to unleash the “organs of dictatorship” — his own words, in a private speech. This apparently involved mass roundups, the construction of a 21st-century Orwellian apparatus of control and surveillance and a systematic assault on the ability of the region’s residents to observe their Islamic faith. As a justification for the draconian clampdown, a top Chinese official in Xinjiang warned of the risks of placing “human rights above security” in a 10-page directive from 2017. The tranche of documents also points to internal disagreement about the repression in the region and was delivered to the Times by a figure from “the Chinese political establishment” who “expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.”
Perhaps the most striking document is a classified directive issued to local officials in an eastern Xinjiang city on how to talk to Uighur students who return from other parts of China and discover their relatives and friends have been disappeared into detention camps.
They were instructed to tell the students that their relatives had been “infected by unhealthy thoughts,” framing the state’s distrust of Muslim minorities in terrifyingly clinical terms. “Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health,” read the directive.
The Times also reported on evidence of what appears to be a “scoring system” used by officials to determine who gets released from a camp. It incorporates not only the behavior of the detainees, but also the cooperation of relatives outside. “Family members, including you, must abide by the state’s laws and rules, and not believe or spread rumors,” officials were told to say. “Only then can you add points for your family member, and after a period of assessment they can leave the school if they meet course completion standards.”
The new revelations fit into a wider, horrifying story of repression. China makes independent reporting in Xinjiang virtually impossible — and every foreign reporter invested in covering the story has to weigh the risk of endangering local fixers and sources, many of whom may have already been swept into detention. Meanwhile, analysis of satellite imagery led one researcher to conclude that the authorities have demolished 10,000 to 15,000 religious sites in Xinjiang in recent years. The Washington Post’s editorial page director Fred Hiatt declared: “In China, every day is Kristallnacht.”
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2022, Why I Write: A Manifesto of Art and Revolution At the Dawn of the South Asian Spring; We are coordinating actions among networks of democracy and liberation organizations throughout South Asia, systems of alliances referred to as the Milk Tea Movement, in Hong Kong, Beijing and other cities in China, Thailand, and Burma, which during the past year have morphed with protean strangeness to include Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, West Papua, the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, Sri Lanka, India, Kashmir, possibly a whole emerging South Asian Spring, and now has solidarity with democracy movements as well as direct agents of change within Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Libya in one dominion and within Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen in another.
There is a saying attributed as a Chinese curse but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong, “May you live in interesting times.”
We are now living in interesting times; whether we make of our time a curse or a fulcrum with which to change the balance of power in the world from tyranny to democracy and free societies of equals rests with each of us.
How shall we write our witness of history and sacred calling to pursue the truth as what Foucault called truthtellers? In this crucial moment wherein the fate of humankind hangs between tyranny and liberty, how are we to perform an ars poetica of revolution?
One way to describe our experience of our time is to focus on externalities, much as Flaubert did in his attempt to remove his own authorial voice from his stories in service to Reason. Such an exercise yields narratives much like the daily current events briefing I gave to my Forensics classes during Extemp Prep, a team current events speaking competition. Perhaps the best example today is the newsletter of Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who writes the most impartial and trustworthy daily news brief as current history. Its a unique approach to events unfolding around us in real time, and her references and contexts are authoritative and reliable.
To contrast and compare her art to mine as rhetoric, I write here in my daily political journal what may be described as strategy, intelligence, and policy guidance for the antifascist community and allied revolutionary, liberation, and democracy movements throughout the world and its Autonomous Zones. That the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty is “to incite, provoke, and disturb” should give warning that I make no pretense to impartial and nonpartisan writing.
My biases are defined first by my values, including liberty, equality, truth and justice, nonviolence and our universal human rights, and their praxis as causes, and secondly by the windmills against which I tilt; unequal power, authority and authorized identities, normality and the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue, tyrannies of force and control and carceral states of police terror and institutionalized violence, militarism and imperial conquest, dominion, and colonialism, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and their systemic and historical instruments patriarchy and racism, divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of membership and belonging, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which drives all of this.
In this revolutionary struggle I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. And if you are among them or their allies who refuse to submit to tyranny and terror, this I say to you; I am not a good man, but I may be someone who can help.
I hope to be more useful than a good man, whose scope of action is limited by the false morality of those who would enslave us among the imposed conditions of struggle and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, as Shaw teaches us through the figure of Eliza’s father in Pygmalion and the gorgeous film My Fair Lady.
We must resist division in service to power into the deserving and the undeserving by a moral burden of merit as a hierarchy of otherness and membership in hegemonic elites. Let us answer merit and caste with equality and universal human rights, and division, especially fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, with solidarity.
Neither of us need to be good in order to help or receive help, merely in need or able to help where needed as a duty of care for others which honors our common humanity and recognizes our interdependence.
So I say again, I am not a good man, for I accept no limits and trust no authority, and I practice as sacred acts seizures of power, disruptions of order and bringing the Chaos, the transgression of the Forbidden, violation of normalities, subversions of authorized identities, the pursuit of truth, believing impossible things but only those I myself have created or chosen, and poetic vision as the reimagination and transformation of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
And if you are among the outcast, the broken and the lost, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, I am a bad man who is on your side.
As written by Julian Borger in The Guardian; “The outgoing UN human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, has said that China had committed “serious human rights violations” against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province which may amount to crimes against humanity.
Bachelet’s damning report was published with only 11 minutes to go before her term came to an end at midnight Geneva time. Publication was delayed by the eleventh-hour delivery of an official Chinese response that contained names and pictures of individuals that had to be blacked out by the UN commissioner’s office for privacy and safety reasons.
The Chinese government, which attempted until the last moment to stop the publication of the report, rejected it as an anti-China smear, while Uyghur human rights groups hailed it as a turning point in the international response to the programme of mass incarceration.
The 45-page report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) concluded: “The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups, pursuant to law and policy, in context of restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
The Chinese government, which attempted until the last moment to stop the publication of the report, said in an official response that it was “based on the disinformation and lies fabricated by anti-China forces” and that it “wantonly smears and slanders” China and interfered in the country’s internal affairs.
The Chinese response was accompanied by a 121-page counter-report, emphasising the threat of terrorism and the stability that the state programme of “de-radicalisation” and “vocational education and training centres” has brought to Xinjiang.
Human rights organisations welcomed the report. Omer Kanat, the executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project pressure group said it was “a game-changer for the international response to the Uyghur crisis”.
“Despite the Chinese government’s strenuous denials, the UN has now officially recognized that horrific crimes are occurring,” Kanat said.
Over the past five years, China swept an estimated million Uyghurs and other minority groups into internment camps which it termed training centres. Some of the centres have since been closed but there are still thought to be hundreds of thousands still incarcerated. In several hundred cases families had no idea about the fate of relatives who had been detained.
Out of 26 former inmates interviewed by UN investigators, two-thirds “reported having been subjected to treatment that would amount to torture and/or other forms of ill-treatment”.
The abuses described included beatings with electric batons while being strapped in a “tiger chair” (to which inmates are strapped by their hands and feet), extended solitary confinement, as well as what appeared to be a form of waterboarding, “being subjected to interrogation with water being poured in their faces”.
The US and some other countries have said the mass incarceration of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang, the destruction of mosques and communities and forced abortion and sterilisation, amount to genocide. The UN report does not mention genocide but says allegations of torture, including force medical procedures, as well as sexual violence were all “credible”.
It said that the authorities had deemed violations of the three-child official limit on family size to be an indicator of “extremism”, leading to internment.
“Several women interviewed by OHCHR raised allegations of forced birth control, in particular forced IUD [intrauterine device] placements and possible forced sterilisations with respect to Uyghur and ethnic Kazakh women. Some women spoke of the risk of harsh punishments including “internment” or “imprisonment” for violations of the family planning policy,” the report said.
“Among these, OHCHR interviewed some women who said they were forced to have abortions or forced to have IUDs inserted, after having reached the permitted number of children under the family planning policy. These first-hand accounts, although limited in number, are considered credible.”
In the report, Bachelet, a former Chilean president, noted that the average rate of sterilisation per 100,000 inhabitants in China as a whole was just over 32. In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region it was 243.
“Serious human rights violations have been committed in [the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region] in the context of the government’s application of counter-terrorism and counter-‘extremism’ strategies,” the report said. “These patterns of restrictions are characterized by a discriminatory component, as the underlying acts often directly or indirectly affect Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim communities.”
The report calls on the Chinese government to “take prompt steps to release all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty” in Xinjiang and “urgently clarify the whereabouts of individuals whose families have been seeking information about their loved ones”.
Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The United Nations Human Rights Council should use the report to initiate a comprehensive investigation into the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity targeting the Uyghurs and others – and hold those responsible to account.”
The Hunger Games Salute of the Revolution
UN report on China’s Crimes Against Humanity in Xinjiang
Sixty one years ago, Dr Martin Luther King led the historic March on Washington; three years ago tens of thousands carried forward the banner of freedom and equality in the Get Your Knee Off Our Necks March. Today we celebrate our legacy of Resistance to fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror as a glorious heritage of all humankind, and a sacred duty to stand in solidarity against those who would enslave us.
Of this I say; who remains unconquered in resistance is free.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
As I wrote in my post of June 28 2021 on Stonewall; I believe resistance confers freedom, that to be free of force and control means to remain unconquered within ourselves as autonomous individuals, that to defy tyranny and fascism is an act of liberation and affirmation of our humanity which cannot be stolen, and a victorious moment of self creation which exalts us beyond the limits of threat of force. And that each of us who remains unconquered becomes a seed of liberty and transformation, able to free others.
This is how we realize the ideals of democracy, of freedom and equality, and redeem the promise of America as a free society of equals whose citizens are co-owners of our government, an America which is a guarantor of our universal human rights and a refuge for the wretched of the earth, and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us stand united in solidarity against those who would enslave us.
Here I wish to amplify the mission statement for the Black National Convention which says, “We are in defense of ALL Black lives. When we say “Black lives,” that means everybody. We want all Black people to thrive. Black people of every gender expression, sexual orientation, ability, ethnic background, class origin, country of birth, region, or religion are included. Everyone in, nobody out.”
This bold and necessary declaration of principles of inclusion and diversity by a marginalized, dispossessed, and vulnerable community I would amend by expansion to general conditions of which white supremacist terror and racism in America are examples of universal systems of oppression; Let us defend all lives. When we say all lives, that means everybody. We want all human beings to thrive. Peoples of every race and nation, language, gender expression, sexual orientation, ability, ethnic background, class origin, country of birth, region, or religion included.
I dream of a United Humankind and a global free society of equals, wherein our universal human rights are paramount and we are guarantors of each other’s rights, and in which we have abandoned the social use of force. Everyone in, nobody out.
As written by Rachel Jones in 2020 in National Geographic, in retrospect of the historic March on Washington, in an article entitled A fractured and traumatized nation’ marches on, 57 years later: ”Like many other African-American parents, Tasha Johnson made the ten-hour drive to Washington, D.C., from Brunswick, Georgia, on Friday to represent her two sons, 27-year-old Rafeal and 26-year-old Akeem. But she was also attending the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on behalf of one of her sons’ best friends, who couldn’t be there.
Tragically, Ahmaud Arbery’s name was mentioned multiple times from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during Friday’s Commitment March on Washington, a peaceful demonstration attended by thousands of people for a very powerful reason. A continuous cycle of police-related shootings and killings have stoked a national outcry. The organizers of Friday’s march, titled “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” to highlight the need for police and criminal justice reform, say the protest provided sorely needed evidence that Americans are ready to confront racial injustice. Not even the risk of COVID-19 could keep them away.
The last full Friday of August felt like the culmination of a long, restless summer bookended by George Floyd’s May 25 brutal demise in Minneapolis to the August 23 shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, seven times as he walked away from a police officer during an arrest. America’s seeming unwillingness to acknowledge the toll these events have taken was put on full blast during the protest, and few could sum up the relevance of the day better than Johnson.
“It was devastating to hear my son sobbing from the pain that he was in on the day Ahmaud was murdered,” Johnson says of her son, Akeem. Arbery, 25, was jogging through a Brunswick, Georgia, neighborhood on February 23 when he was pursued and fatally shot by two white men who claimed they thought he was a burglar.
“He is still going through it,” Johnson said Friday. “He speaks of having visions of Ahmaud coming to him in dreams and talking to him. Where we are in this nation, we’re doing incredible damage to the minds and the lives of our Black youth, and it has to stop. I came because I want the world to know I am willing to be part of the solution.”
While some observers expected the threat of COVID-19 to restrict the numbers of participants, tens of thousands patiently queued in a line that wrapped around the perimeter of the National Mall, awaiting their turn to have their temperature taken as a precautionary measure. Then they were given a neon green wristband and a ticket to enter the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool area near the World War II Memorial.
March participants from across the United States descended on Washington to advocate for police reform, voting rights, and for more just, equitable lives for their children as the United States heads to a contentious presidential election clouded by claims of blatant voter suppression and interference during the 2016 campaign.
Like Tasha Johnson, many invoked the country’s long history of racial violence and economic injustice as their motivating factors.
Renee Jones of Riverside, California, says she was marching in honor of a cousin who was killed by a Las Vegas police officer. She wants better for her son, her nieces and nephews.
“I’m out here to give them a fighting chance and pay it forward, just like the generation before me did for us,” Jones says.
Another marcher, Keir Witherspoon, says she carries the spirit of two of her grandparents who had attended the 1963 march. (See rare color images from the first March on Washington.)
“They would feel proud of me for exercising my right to protest…and disheartened that I am fighting for the same thing they were,” says Witherspoon.
Lathan Strong attended the march set an example for youth.
“As an educator, it is important that we show our young people the importance of being out here and what it means to vote,” Strong says.
Friday’s march, which featured presentations by high-profile pastors, activists, labor leaders, and politicians, had glimpses of the original gathering 57 years ago. The 1963 event was a masterstroke of careful, deliberate staging and preparation. The official program reads like a social justice roll call of the ages. Envision a stage big enough for A. Phillip Randolph, the celebrated union leader who founded of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Myrlie Evers, recently widowed after her husband, Mississippi NAACP secretary Medgar Evers, was assassinated in his driveway. The Archbishop of Washington Patrick O’Boyle spoke, as did NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins. Congressman John Lewis was a significant presence at the 1963 March. His death last month left a gaping hole in the fabric of American civil rights activism. (Lewis spent his life bridging America’s racial and political divides.)
And, of course, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was anointed as the “Moses of his people” at the original march—and at several points during Friday’s rally. Back in 1963, speeches were punctuated by performances from opera legend Marian Anderson and the Queen of Gospel Music, Mahalia Jackson.
Organizing the 1963 march required an enormous amount of strategizing and planning by some of the nation’s leading civil rights activists, says Kenneth Janken, professor of African-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“It was the result of years and perhaps even decades of work to establish a solid working-class movement,” Janken says. “Not only was there a focus on the event itself, but it was in some ways a culmination of efforts that had been underway for a long time to increase the unionization of black workers, to raise pay and to demand legal and policy protections that white Americans took for granted.”
Randolph and Wilkins conceived the idea for the 1963 march to amplify the systemic barriers to employment and economic progress for Black Americans, who still faced enormous threats and limitations decades after slavery. The system of state and local laws enacted after the end of the Civil War, known as Jim Crow, effectively choked off all attempts by Black families to gain meaningful employment, economic stability, and the freedom to live peacefully. March on Washington architects seized an opportunity to highlight their demands in full view of the nation’s policy command center. Dr. King’s eloquent, passionate “I Have a Dream” speech is often listed among the best orations of the 20th century.
“That large rally was a manifestation of everyday work that happened in small towns, in rural communities, and in large cities,” Janken says. “It happened through the regular day-to-day, work of groups like SNCC, going into a community and finding out what their local grievances were, and equipping them with the skills to carry out campaigns of their own.”
Contrast this broad-based, longer-term event plan with Friday’s march. The “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” march was conceived after George Floyd died as a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes. The Reverend Al Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, says the idea for the Commitment March came to him on the day of Floyd’s memorial service, which gave organizers just about two months to plan.
The urgency of the moment was palpable.
The list of featured speakers read in part like a registry of mourners. The event, co-organized by Sharpton’s National Action Network, Martin Luther King III, and a long list of partner organizations, featured relatives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician fatally shot on March 13 by Louisville police officers executing a drug warrant on the wrong apartment, New Yorker Eric Garner, and other Black and brown Americans whose deaths came at the hands of police officers.
Speakers also included U. S. Representative Ayanna Pressley, the first Black woman elected to Congress from the state of Massachusetts, former Secretary of Labor and head of the Democratic National Committee Tom Perez, and top representatives of labor unions, religious leaders, and community activists. Martin Luther King III gave up part of his speaking time to someone he called “the future of our nation,” the only granddaughter of Dr. King and Coretta Scott King, his daughter Yolanda Renee King.
In a piping, exhilarating tone, Ms. King charmed the crowd with a passionate assessment of her generation’s power. “Some of you may remember that two years ago at the March for our Lives, I said, ‘Spread the word, have YOU heard, all across the nation, we are going to be a great generation! That was in 2018. I didn’t know what would hit us in 2020, and shut our schools and put our young lives on hold. But great challenges produce great leaders!”
She added, “We have mastered the selfie and TikTok, and now we must master ourselves.”
For some people, the march was an opportunity for reflection, a teachable moment, or motivation to take a stand. Many who couldn’t attend the march found ways to contribute to the groundswell of energy to challenge racial injustice in the United States.
Shortly after George Floyd’s death, J.C. Sager, from Flourtown, Pennsylvania, co-organized the “Shade for Change” Go Fund Me campaign, which provided 2,000 black umbrellas that were distributed at Friday’s march to help shield participants from the August sun. Sager, a father of three boys under the age of five, says watching the video of George Floyd’s murder was a defining moment.
“I was raised a privileged white boy in suburban Philadelphia, and even though I have a good friend from childhood who’s Black, I wasn’t prepared for how hard that video hit me,” he says. “I was horrified. I saw my three sons under that officer’s knee, and that did something to me, to my heart, and it will never sit right. I don’t understand why more white people can’t consider their own son that way, or their daughter, like in Breonna Taylor’s case.”
During George Floyd’s memorial in June, Sager says he idea to raise funds for umbrellas came to him.
“I remembered reading about how umbrellas were used as social-distancing tools in protests in other countries,” Sager says. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to see these black umbrellas during a rally where “Black Lives Matter” was being emphasized?’
Sager reached out to his cousin Allison McGill-Higgins to help plan the fundraiser. McGill Higgins, who is African American and immunocompromised, couldn’t attend the march due to the risk of COVID-19. Sager says he’s proud to say he’s from a bi-racial family, and says “Black Lives Matter” reminds him of the need to get to know people from different backgrounds.
“It’s extremely important, to grow as a person, to know people who don’t look like you … opens up so many horizons and helps you to look at life through a different lens.”
His work on the “Shade for Change” project also guides Sager’s efforts to raise his boys. “I can’t look them in the eye and know that I did nothing to try and send some positivity out there in the world and to support Black voices and to use my privilege for good. “
When more than 250,000 people converged on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., 57 years ago, there was no social media footprint, no cell phone cameras, no viral organizing or rideshare apps to facilitate the gathering.
Veteran Associated Press reporter Linda Deutsch covered the 1963 March as a 19-year-old journalism intern at Monmouth College. She had talked her way into the assignment at a local newspaper, the Perth Amboy Evening News, and onto a bus reserved for the journey by the local chapter of the NAACP. The trip resulted in her first front-page story and led to a stellar career as a courts reporter, covering trials that included some of the most racially volatile in America’s history: Angela Davis, O.J. Simpson, and Michael Jackson, to name a few.
Deutsch, who retired in 2014, spent part of the last week in August talking with friends in Kenosha, Wisconsin, about Jacob Blake, the Kenosha man who was shot seven times in the back by a police officer during an arrest. She thinks the hope and enthusiasm that guided marchers 57 years ago seems in short supply today.
“I wish I could be more optimistic, but it’s such a difficult time,” she says. “I haven’t felt this way since after the Rodney King verdict. I knew that this not guilty verdict in this white, suburban bedroom community would lead to unrest, and one of my colleagues turned to me after it was read and said, Well, I guess we have to go cover the riots now.”
But many speakers and participants at the “Get Your Knee off Our Necks” gathering said they’re counting on the same results for their effort that attendees of the 1963 march experienced. That activism yielded an epic shift in the American Civil Rights movement, culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In 2020, march speakers highlighted the stalled George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a reform measure passed by the House of Representatives but awaiting a vote in the Senate. They also called for a vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act 2020, which seeks to restore some of the voter protections that were stripped from the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 2013.
Yet, in a fractured and traumatized nation, many people believe there’s still a chance to move toward Dr. King’s vision of a just and equitable America—despite the challenges. They are willing to work for it. (Hear from those who marched for racial justice after the death of George Floyd.)
“I don’t want my grandson to have to march for the same thing my grandfather marched for,” says Frank “Nitty” Sensabaugh, who led a group of marchers who walked 750 miles from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Washington, D.C.
The 24-day journey was not without trial. Supporters cooked food and provided monetary donations to offset hotel costs. But after a few days of peaceful walking, the group was met with resistance in Ohio and Indiana. Indiana State Police arrested Sensabaugh and co-organizer Tory Lowe because, according to police, they were blocking traffic. The group also faced racial slurs and even gunfire as they progressed toward Washington, D.C. The mixed reaction to the journey was exactly what organizers of the walk had hoped to illuminate, Sensabaugh says, a tale of two Americas, needing to unite as one.
For many, the 2020 Commitment March was an affirmation of Black lives.
“One of the main things we want to gain is the full representation of how many people are here,” said Ma’isah Malsuf, who traveled to D.C. from Chicago. “If you can have so many people come in one space during a time that’s so uncertain and risky, it solidifies that people are concerned about the direction of the country.”
As written by Joan E Greve Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian, in an article entitled Tens of thousands join Get Your Knee Off Our Necks march in Washington DC; “Tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington DC on Friday, demanding criminal justice reform and voting rights following a summer of protests against systemic racism and against police treatment of Black people.
The Get Your Knee Off Our Necks march, announced in early June following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, also marks the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr gave his “I have a dream” speech urging racial equality.
Thousands gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, many wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts, as speakers demanded racial equality and an end to police brutality in the US.
“We get less healthcare, like we don’t matter,” said the civil rights leader the Rev Al Sharpton, whose National Action Network organization was one of the event organizers.
“We go to jail longer for the same crime like we don’t matter. We get poverty, unemployment, double the others, like we don’t matter.
“We’re treated with disrespect by policemen that we pay their salaries like we don’t matter. So we figured we’d let you know, whether we tall or short, fat or skinny, light skinned or dark skinned, black lives matter.
“And we won’t stop until it matters to everybody.”
King’s son, Martin Luther King III, was among those to speak, telling the crowd they must “defend the freedoms that earlier generations worked so hard to win”.
Friday’s event comes ahead of a November election expected to see a record number of mail-in ballots, and with a Republican party seemingly opposed to making it easier to vote.
Donald Trump has admitted he is blocking money sought by Democrats for the postal service so he could stop people voting by mail.
“Our voting rights are under attack,” King said.
“We must vigorously defend our right to vote because those rights were paid for with the blood of those lynched for seeking to exercise their constitutional rights.”
The Democrat-controlled house of representatives has passed legislation making voting more accessible in 2019, and recently renamed the bill the John R Lewis voting rights act. The Republican controlled Senate has refused to act on the legislation.
Organized by the civil rights campaigner Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and groups including the NAACP and the National Urban League, the speakers at Friday’s rally also highlighted police brutality and the need for reform.
The Washington march comes days after Jacob Blake became the latest in a series of Black people to suffer brutal treatment at the hands of police.
Blake was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday, and remains in hospital. His family said on Tuesday that Blake had been paralyzed from the waist down.
Speaking on Friday, Blake’s father, Jacob Blake Sr, said: “There are two systems of justice in the United States. There is a Black system and a white system and the Black system isn’t doing so well. I’m tired of looking at cameras and seeing these young black and brown people suffer.”
Blake’s sister, Letetra Widman, said Black people were done “catering to your delusions”.
“America, your reality is not real,” Widman said. “We will not pretend. We will not be your docile slave. We will not be a footstool to oppression.”
Widman also called on protesters to continue to march peacefully. “You must fight, but not with violence and chaos – with self-love,” Widman said. She called out loudly: “Black men, stand up. Stand up, Black men, and educate yourselves.”
Among those expected to participate in Washington are the families of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, all Black people killed by police or by individuals on the extremist fringes who regarded themselves as vigilantes.
The march was organized amid protests over the killing of Floyd.
The 46-year-old died after a police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, including the final two minutes when Floyd was unconscious.
“The reason why George Floyd laying there with that knee on his neck resonated with so many African-Americans is because we have all had a knee on our neck,” Sharpton told USA Today.
The march was set to be the largest political gathering in Washington since the coronavirus outbreak began to escalate in March.
The thousands of participants streaming in for the march on Friday morning stood in lines that stretched for several blocks, the Associated Press reported, as organizers insisted on taking temperatures as part of coronavirus protocols.
Organizers reminded attendees to practice social distancing and wear masks throughout the program.
The march will be matched by demonstrations in states which have a high Covid risk, NAN said, including in Montgomery, Alabama and Las Vegas, Nevada.
The NAACP is hosting a “virtual march” throughout the day.
Speakers will include the New Jersey senator Cory Booker, congresswoman Brenda Lawrence, from Michigan, and Stacey Abrams.
A group of protesters are due at the march who have walked all the way from Milwaukee to the nation’s capital for the event.”
As written by Charles Kaiser in The Guardian, in an article entitled March on Washington: the day MLK – and Dylan and Baez – made hope and history rhyme; “One hundred years after the civil war, the treatment of African Americans persisted as a gaping wound in the purported land of the free. Then, suddenly in the 1960s, the bleeding from lynchings, bombings, beatings and shootings finally had a seismic effect. It galvanized the noble group who made the 60s so electric: the nimble, passionate and utterly fearless Black and white citizens who banded together to rescue America’s soul.
By 1963, the Rev Martin Luther King Jr had become the leader of the first generation since the abolitionists who truly believed they had the power to heal the nation. Since founding his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, King had worked tirelessly to fulfill its mission: “To save the soul of America.”
King turned 28 the week after he founded the SCLC. More successfully than anyone since Abraham Lincoln, this Baptist preacher united millions of Black and white Americans in a cause of moral righteousness. They were drawn to his brain, to his soul, to his deep baritone and to his bearing. The novelist Jose Yglesias noted that “King laughed with his whole body, like a man who trusts his feelings”.
His Gandhi-inspired choice of weapons put him on an unassailable moral plane. In a nation drenched in violence, he ordered his foot soldiers to fight with nothing but courage, intelligence and decency. In spring 1963, the world recoiled at the cost of that bravery, when the commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, used clubs, high-pressure hoses and snarling German shepherds to halt a march of more than 1,000 non-violent protesters.
When the white establishment of Birmingham gave in and agreed to remove “whites only” signs on restrooms and drinking fountains and to desegregate lunch counters, white terrorists bombed the hotel room where King and his aides had been staying and the house of his brother, Alfred. Miraculously, none were injured.
A few weeks later, civil rights leaders were meeting John Kennedy at the White House when he said, “Bull has probably done more for civil rights than anyone else.” At first they were shocked. Then they thought it was joke. Then they realized it was true. Nearly universal revulsion to Connor’s tactics was a big factor in finally pushing Kennedy go on television, in June, to propose a civil rights act, and to deliver probably the greatest speech of his life.
Echoing King, Kennedy declared: “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free … Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.”
King was exhilarated. He told the president he had given “one of the most eloquent profound and unequivocal pleas for justice and the freedom of all men ever made by any president”. And yet even after that speech, Kennedy was so nervous that Congress would respond the wrong way to a massive demonstration in the capital, it took another five weeks before he publicly endorsed the March on Washington, whose 60th anniversary we celebrate today.
Courtland Cox, an early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a key organizer of the March, recalled a day now remembered almost exclusively for the soaring words of King’s “I have a dream” speech but also a peak moment for the collaborative power of music and politics.
A month before, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, to perform at a voter registration rally.
“It wasn’t just a concert,” said Cox. “It was a community event.”
Dylan performed Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers just a few weeks earlier. That was also one of the songs Dylan sang before 250,000 people in Washington. When Lena Horne was introduced, she uttered a single word: “Freedom.”
Seeger had performed the most important musical pollination of all, when in 1957 King visited the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training camp for civil rights workers. When Seeger sang We Shall Overcome, it was the first time King heard it. He fell in love with it. In Washington, it was sung by the Freedom Singers, accompanied by Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Theodore Bikel – and nearly everyone in the audience.
Cox had spent years registering voters in places where “if we got caught we would be shot. Alabama was the most dangerous. In Mississippi I always thought I could get away from a bullet, compared to Alabama where they used bombs and dynamite. I thought your chances were better with a bullet than dynamite.
“I’m not sure how you can really express it. During the most stressful things the music would be the wind beneath your wings. It’s one thing singing We Shall Overcome when the police were out there with tear gas. It’s sung in a way that maintains your determination. The music had advocacy.”
Peter Goldman wrote all the most important Newsweek stories about civil rights. So he traveled to Washington for the march.
He said: “During the mid day break between the mostly entertainment morning sessions and the afternoon speechifying session, some of the musicians were hanging out in the rotunda of the Lincoln Memorial. I’m standing there and Joan Baez walks up behind Bob Dylan and pats him on the butt. ‘Let’s sing, Bobby,’ she said. So the two of them start on a Dylan song. They were joined by Peter and Mary – Paul was elsewhere. They went on for about an hour. Folk songs, freedom songs. Dylan songs.”
How big was the audience?
“Me. It was one of my luckier days.”
In his superb memoir, Chasing History, the great reporter Carl Bernstein writes that the Washington Star deployed more than 60 reporters, installed 10 special telephones up and down the mall, and even commandeered a helicopter to fly film to the newsroom. And yet, somehow, the lead stories in both the Star and the Washington Post failed to mention the main event: King’s extraordinary speech.
James Reston, the celebrated New York Times Washington bureau chief, did not make the same mistake. In a front-page analysis, he wrote that King “touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else.
“He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Gandhi, and the cadences of the Bible. He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile.”
Bernstein felt the same way.
“For me, listening to Dr King’s speech, with its emotive power, and witnessing the sheer numbers of Black and white people marching together, I was certain I had experienced the most powerful moment of my lifetime – the ‘someday’ from We Shall Overcome was drawing nearer.”
I have a dream – Martin Luther King and the 1963 March on Washington
The March On Washington: The Spirit Of The Day/ Time
How Martin Luther King Went Off Script in ‘I Have a Dream’, by Clarence B. Jones, MLK’s speechwriter and advisor/ Wall Street Journal
Al Sharpton on 60 years since the civil rights march on Washington
Presented by Jonathan Freedland, with Al Sharpton, produced by Danielle Stephens, and the executive producer is Maz Ebtehaj
This week, Jonathan Freedland sits down with Sharpton to discuss why he believes Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech has been abused by some on the right, why he is still fighting for police reform, and how James Brown was so influential on his life
Here is a Mirror of Dorian Grey wherein America may behold the monster of our soul which lives beneath the mask of normality, in the mug shot of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. Here the nadir of our atrocities, perversions, amoral nihilism, degenerate brutality and atavisms of animal instinct glare back at us with the malign and savage rage of a baboon, and like Nietzsche’s Abyss we must beware lest our shadow capture us in the mirror of its gaze.
Half our nation remains under its spell, while those still free mock and poke the beast with a stick. Trump has on this day in 2023 surrendered to justice with no mass protests by loyal followers despite his threats and plots of coup, terror, and civil war, and we rejoice in his pathetic diminishment and humiliation, yet the danger has not passed.
Both the Fourth Reich which has infiltrated the state and Trump as its figurehead are still fundraising off of hate speech, possess a largely intact and unimpeded propaganda network, and control not only the Republican Party but also much of the state through their agents in the legislative and judicial branches of government as well as its security services.
In this moment, under the glare of the police photographer’s lights, the orders of a judge, and the scrutiny of history, Trumps thinks of himself as a doomed king at bay, like King Kong, a film which is an allegory of fascism as a flawed response to the fall of civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, an American version of the Wagnerian end in fire with which Hitler was obsessed and ended in his suicide in an underworld labyrinth.
What remains to be determined is whether America sees Trump as its tragic savior, cast in the part of Cyrus the Great in a myth of Exile as our new faith of QAnon has him, and chooses to fall with him and bring two thousand years of democracy as a dream of liberty and equality crashing down into fascist tyranny.
While most of us are hoping that being sent to prison for treason and espionage will remove the threat of a second Trump Presidency, many among the Party of Treason, Patriarchal Theocracy, and White Supremacist Terror will and are using the indictments and lawsuits to escalate commitment among those already decided, and abandoning overtures to swing voters and independents in recognition of a totally polarized political and cultural moment wherein few persuadable voters remain. After all, prison did not prevent Trump’s role model Adolf Hitler from becoming the Fuhrer; why should it derail rather than help Trump’s capture of the state and subversion of democracy?
Above all reigns the Image, dubbed now the Kubrick State, and its Rashomon Gate of signs and meanings in the iconography of fascist tyranny.
Why is it cute and adorable when Jenna Ortega does the Kubrick Stare as Wednesday Addams, but fearsome and repulsive when Trump does it? Wednesday doesn’t drop her chin to present dominance and glowering menace, a pose Trump carefully copies from Jack Nicholson in The Shining because he intends it as a threat and a demonstration of power; Jenna’s Wednesday faces us directly as total openness and honesty, a Nietzschean yes to life, to its horror and depravity as well as its exaltation and beauty, a Gaze which denies nothing and like that of Medusa appropriates the dehumanization of the Male Gaze as a seizure of power and a n act of liberation which sees the truths and uniqueness of others and sets us free; an Otherness which accepts and affirms all otherness as equal. She challenges us to risk saying yes to ourselves and those truths written in our flesh; while Trump in his Theatre of Cruelty desires only our subjugation. Herein is the true difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties.
What does Trump’s mugshot and the polarized reactions to it tell us about America and the moment we now live in? As written by Chris McGreal in The Guardian, in an article entitled Belligerence and hostility: Trump’s mugshot defines modern US politics; “Mugshots define eras.
Bugsy Siegel peering malevolently from beneath his fedora in a 1928 booking photo summed up the perverse romance of gangsters in the prohibition age.
Nearly half a century later, mugshots of David Bowie, elegantly dressed but dead-eyed after his arrest for drug possession, and a dishevelled Janis Joplin, detained for “vulgar and indecent language”, spoke to the shock waves created by 1960s counterculture.
Now comes what Donald Trump Jr described as “the most iconic photo in the history of US politics” before the booking picture of his father glaring into the camera was even taken. But whether deeply divided Americans view the first ever mugshot of a former president as that of a gangster or a rock star is very much in the politics of the beholder.
Trump’s hostility shines through as he turns his eyes up toward the camera above him and in his taut, downturned mouth as he is booked into the Fulton county jail on charges of trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. Dressed in a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, he makes no attempt to put on a smile like some of his co-defendants in their mugshots.
The picture does not flatter but it does convey the message many of Trump’s supporters want to hear – belligerence.
The six-pointed star of the Fulton county sheriff’s office badge and the name of the sheriff, Patrick Labat, sits in the top left hand corner of the picture. But some will be disappointed that Trump is not seen in the classic pose holding a board in front of his chest with his name and date of arrest.
Still, the mugshot will now enter the pantheon of famous-name booking photos, alongside Frank Sinatra looking unperturbed after his arrest in 1938 for “carrying on with a married woman”, and Hugh Grant after he was found with a sex worker on Sunset Boulevard. Trump has some way to go to catch up with the American actor Lindsay Lohan’s eight-year run of mugshots for theft, drugs and driving offences.
The former president’s supporters are already embracing the booking photo as a badge of honour and defiance. It will be held up as evidence that their man will not give up the fight against a system his followers see as ever more determined to bring him down and prevent him returning to the White House.
Far-right congresswoman Lauren Boebert led the way with a tweet proclaiming: “Not all heroes wear capes.”
The president’s detractors, on the other hand, will see the booking photo as evidence that even a man who was once the most powerful person in the land cannot escape the might of the justice system. Some will welcome anything that makes him look even a little bit more criminal as a confirmation that sooner or later he is going to prison. The accused may be presumed innocent until a plea or a jury says otherwise but mugshots can have a way of conveying guilt.
For Trump though, the picture is likely to prove yet another money spinner. Within hours, his campaign fundraising website was advertising T-shirts, bumper stickers and coffee mugs glorifying a martyred Trump with the booking photo above the words “never surrender!”. Sales are likely to be brisk given the enthusiasm with which the former president’s supporters now treat each public humiliation as an accomplishment.
Two impeachments and four sets of indictments, from financial fraud to a slew of charges over the 2020 election, have done little to damage Trump’s standing among the true believers, and have only bolstered his run for the Republican presidential nomination. Such is the strength of that belief that a recent CBS poll showed Trump voters trust him more than their own family members and religious leaders.
Ordinary Americans have already got creative in response to the flood of indictments by mocking up pictures of the former president in an orange jump suit a la Guantánamo prison and in printing T-shirts with Trump in various states of detention with slogans declaring “Trumped up charges”, “Guilty AF”, “Guilty of winning” and “Legend”.
There will be plenty who will challenge Don Jr’s claim that the mugshot has instantly become the most iconic photo in US political history. Pictures of John F Kennedy’s assassination or Martin Luther King Jr leading the march for freedom or a host of other historic moments will surely prove more enduring.
But as with the gangsters and rock stars, Trump’s booking photo may come to define an era – one of unusual political turmoil that has yet to resolve whether his next mugshot is as an inmate.”
What would Trump’s imprisonment mean for the future? As written by Martin Kettle in The Guardian, in an article entitled America on trial: the charges against Trump will decide the fate of a nation; “History teaches us few wider lessons. But there are rare exceptions. One of these is that for a nation to put its former leaders on trial is never straightforward. Although such cases are rare, when they do occur they frequently involve the pushing of pre-existing legal boundaries and the reshaping of constitutional norms and assumptions. The evolution of the doctrine of crimes against humanity after the Nuremberg trials in 1945 is the most significant modern example of this.
Both at the time they occur and subsequently, the arguments that surround trials of this kind are almost inescapably political to a significant degree. That was true of the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, an event that divided England then; and some of those divisions of the 17th century can still be felt today. But it will unquestionably also be true of the trials of the former US president Donald Trump, of which the latest step is due to be taken in Atlanta on Thursday.
It is important to see that this stubborn political reality applies just as much in the Trump cases as in Charles I’s. In part, this is because many will go out of their way to deny it. Trump’s prosecutors – and many of his political critics – will undoubtedly argue that Trump is simply a defendant like any other, and that their cases are designed to show that no one, not even a former president and commander-in-chief, is above the law. They will be adamant that this is not a political trial, and that it is not Joe Biden’s revenge.
In some very fundamental senses, they are right about that. The law is not being altered in order to prosecute Trump. The investigations have followed long-established rules. The verdicts are not foregone conclusions. This is neither a witch-hunt nor a show trial. Yet, however true these points and however honourably such claims are made, they cannot be quite the whole story. The two cases are very different, yet in both 1649 and 2023, the indictments against the king and the president take a stand on behalf of a conception of the nation against a leader set on subverting it.
Four separate cases against Trump are now on course for trial. The first three sets of allegations cover: falsification of business records in the Stormy Daniels hush money case; withholding of classified federal documents in his Florida home; and attempting to prevent the US Congress from validating Biden’s 2020 election. This week’s case alleges that Trump tried to interfere with the counting and validation of Georgia’s vote for Biden. All four cases are due in court in the first half of 2024, before the presidential election in which Trump aims to be a candidate.
All of these cases also contain multiple allegations. Two – the Florida document cases and the US Congress case – will be heard in federal courts. The others have been brought at state level by New York and Georgia. All the charge sheets are extremely detailed. In the documents case, for instance, the indictment now stretches to 60 pages, with Trump facing 40 separate charges. In the 6 January case, the indictment stretches to another 45 pages, and centres on four separate charges.
Like it or not, though, these carefully crafted cases take the US into new legal territory. That is not simply because Trump is the first serving or former American president in the nation’s history to face criminal charges. Nor is it even because, being Trump and still running for office, he will treat the courtroom as a political platform. It is also because a large number of the charges, and the way in which the judges and juries will be asked to test them, relate umbilically to his roles as head of state and upholder of the constitution. These cases are a test of the constitution and, in the broadest sense, of the nation.
All of these points repeatedly echo aspects of cases from the past. The Trump cases are still, in the end, an attempt to hold a past leader to account and judge him for the way he handled his office. That was also what the cases against earlier rulers were ultimately about too. The indictments against Charles I for his “crimes and treasons” or against Louis XVI of France for having “plotted and formed a multitude of conspiracies to establish tyranny in destroying liberty” are maybe not a world away from those against Trump, after all.
Nor is it a world away from the much more recent example of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s trial for treason after the liberation of France in 1945. Pétain was charged with treason for his role as head of the collapsing French government in 1940, when he signed an armistice with Hitler’s invaders, and then as head of the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Germans until the allied victory in 1945. Pétain was tried and convicted in Paris that same summer. His death sentence was immediately commuted to life imprisonment by Charles de Gaulle.
As described in Julian Jackson’s masterly recent book, France on Trial, the Pétain case has many differences from those facing Trump, but also some similarities. Pétain was put on trial after a war, not an election. His was an unashamedly political trial. The jury was stacked against him, and the outcome a foregone conclusion.
But at the same time it was also the trial of a nation, its recent history, its dilemmas and its sense of itself. It was, in the end, a moment of catharsis for postwar France. It was a trial that had to happen, and it was vitally important for the future of France that the former leader in the dock was not acquitted. For all the many differences between the two cases, the exact same applies to the US on the eve of the Trump trials.”
Who is Donald Trump? Glowering, feral, with the dead eyes of a cornered but dangerous animal, his fake blond hair, fake history of success, and fake identity? Traitor Trump has been the cuckoo in our nest, ambush predator and pathological liar, rapist and enemy agent, worshipper of Moloch, Demon of Lies, and disciple of Adolf Hitler.
As I wrote in my post of August 7 2019, Psychopathy and the Nature of Evil: the Parallel Cases of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; How are monsters created, and how does evil arise as a shaping force which grants them the power to change the topography of human souls and the course of history?
While sorting through Trump’s tweets and speeches by keyword looking for answers, I was reminded of another such project, the now-classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which I read enthusiastically the year of its publication while a junior in high school. I had just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, which led me to an interest in the origins and consequences of evil, the route by which I developed a serious interest in psychology and its intersections with history, philosophy, and literature.
The parallels between Hitler and Trump are amazing and instructive, both in terms of the personal and political origins, shaping forces, and consequences of madness and evil.
Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator.
I’ve said it as a joke, but its quite true; how do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Actually, Donald Trump is very easy to understand, because literature provides a ready portrait of him in Frankenstein’s monster, which I have described in my celebration of Mary Shelly and her luminous novel as the figure of an abandoned and tormented child, as a vessel of rage and vengeance, a soulless and empty thing of unlike parts bearing a limitless need with the merciless iron 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.
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights and citizenship, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and narcissistic need for attention into a governance of Nuremburg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and Hitler as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art, appropriated and subverted in service to power from Artaud.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2023, We Celebrate the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets; How do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Take a moment to savour with me the indictment of Trump for the crime of espionage. Ahhh, the bliss.
A commentator on MSN’s Eleventh Hour this night pronounced the magic words which I hope will awaken our nation from the long nightmare of capture by the Fourth Reich; “I think Trump is done.”
It has been a fairytale from which we may learn many kinds of morals, a story which begins in the 1980 capture of the Republican Party by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement as a fundamentalist theocracy and the Presidency of its figurehead Ronald Reagan, and found its true form in the Presidency of a pedophile rapist and Russian agent who for years slept with a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible.
Here in the trial of Traitor Trump is a morality play which is also a Rashomon Gate of our possible futures, for it is more than a legal last stand of the rule of law and the idea of democracy in America against a rigged electoral process which offers capture of the state to its enemies, but also a trial of democracy in America and of our infiltrated and subverted justice system whose court of ultimate appeal is a Supreme Court which is become a whorehouse.
Our Legislative branch of government is little better, under capture by the Party of Treason’s confederacy of theocratic sexual terrorists, white supremacist terrorists, and the nihilistic grifters and carnival sideshow freaks who are its star performers.
What is the meaning of the Trump regime in the story of America and our future possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals?
As I wrote in my post of November 3 2020, One Hundred Years of Racist Vote Suppression and White Supremacist Terror: Anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre; This election has seen attempts at vote suppression unknown in our lifetimes; Trumps mission to subvert democracy includes intimidation by calling for armed white supremacists to deny nonwhite citizens access to the polls, an attack on Biden’s campaign caravan by the Trump Train mobile force, failed assassination attempts against Biden and other political figures, sabotage of the postal system, politization of the Justice department, and his farcical declaration of victory before the vote is counted, among his many treasonous crimes.
Today liberty and tyranny play for the soul of America and the freedom of the world.
I spent some time today at a Trump rally trying to defuse a hate crime in the making. A hey rube went up that a rally staged between our local mosque here in Spokane and a Middle Eastern grocery was becoming a violent mob; while others responded as a protection detail and placed themselves with great courage between potential perpetrators and their victims, I blended into the rally to assess and shape its development as an incubator of violence and work to defuse it through dialog and negotiation.
Today these angry young men chose not to allow fear, rage, and hate to master and dehumanize them, nor provoke them into violence which would be the ruin of their lives; what will all of the other angry young men choose tomorrow?
I’d like to believe this incident is atypical and not being played out a thousand times over across America; but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Tyranny weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear as an instrument of subjugation. This we must resist, but unless we speak directly to those fears we cannot heal the divisions of our society which authority has so skillfully manipulated.
In the words of Sigmund Freud, “Civilization begins when we throw words instead of stones.” Sadly, we humans have often chosen stones when words would serve us better.
In all the madness of this election and of the deranged perversions and assaults upon our liberty, equality, truth, and justice of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump’s kleptocracy of state terror and tyranny, we must not forget that though he exploited the flaws of our society to orchestrate the Fall of America and of democracy throughout the world, he did not originate them.
Trump has revealed, tested, and hammered at our flaws, yet we remain unbroken and unconquered. This we should celebrate; in the main we are voting and not shooting, because our faith in one another and in the ideals on which our society is founded remain intact, though the institutions of our government may need radical and revolutionary change.
Nor is there anything new in the threat to democracy of vote suppression; today is the one hundred year anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre, the most terrible incident of racist vote suppression in the history of our nation since the Civil War. What may give us hope now that failed us then is the emerging consensus of racial equality and the mass coalition for racial justice won for us by the Black Lives Matter movement and the heroic citizens who have seized the streets of our cities in an unparalleled months long mass action.
Regardless of the election results, anyone who wishes to actually govern must do so at the head of these protests and not barricaded against the will of the people. This is the true meaning of this years seizure of power by our citizens, and it is a genie which cannot be returned to the prison of its lamp, for each of us is now a Living Autonomous Zone.
As I wrote in my post of November 5 2020. Trump’s Last Coup Attempt and Subversion of Democracy as His Ship of Fools Sinks in Pathetic Failure; As Trump’s Ship of Fools comes apart at the seams and sinks beneath the waves in pathetic failure, our Clown of Terror collapses in infantile tantrums and tries to take democracy down with him, a final gesture of madness and idiocy in his delusional quest to subvert our values and institutions of liberty and seize tyrannical power.
We must never forget how close we came to a repeat of the 1933 German Federal Election that set Hitler on the path to a tyranny of absolute power; this is clearly the most important electoral event in the history of humankind since then, and the two elections are terrifyingly parallel. Trump tried three times to use the Black Lives Matter protests to create fear and legitimize the federal occupation of America under the pretext of re-establishing law and order in an exact duplication of Hitler’s successful strategy using the Reichstag Fire, and failed.
We have escaped the jaws of the Fourth Reich which have held us fast for four years, since the Stolen Election of 2016, while Trump and his cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and plutocratic robber barons have violated everything about America which is noble and true, plundered the public wealth, dehumanized and divided us, sabotaged and subverted the institutions of our freedom, equality, truth, and justice, betrayed our allies and emboldened our foes, lost the American hegemony of global power and privilege and our position as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us never forget the bottomless depravities, treasons, and amoral predation and greed of Trump’s many enablers and conspirators in the Fall of America as we struggle in the years ahead to reclaim our nation and our souls. We must hold them to account, but we must also reimagine our society and the many systemic and structural flaws by which we came to this broken and lost state.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2022, The Greatest Show on Earth: Presenting the January 6 Committee; Tonight our puppets will dance upon the stage of history and our imaginations, while a chiaroscuro of light as truth and democracy versus darkness as fascist tyranny and falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, conspiracy theories and propaganda play for the kingdom of our souls and the fate of America and the world.
Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a prison planet of masters and slaves?
Now begins a great Reckoning, and we shall see.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2021, Treason, Tyranny, and Terror on Trial: As the Second Impeachment of Traitor Trump Begins, I Submit Charges Before the People’s Tribunal of Crimes Against Humanity for Which Trump and His Collaborators Should Now Be On Trial; Among the many crimes against humanity for which Traitor Trump and his collaborators should be on trial but are not yet include the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Mexican and other nonwhite migrants, the concentration camps at our border, the orphaning and torture of children, and the state tyranny and terror of fascist and racist violence as national policy perpetrated by the ICE and Border Patrol components of Homeland Security, forces of repression which are racist and antidemocratic by their nature and which should be abolished as a top priority of the Restoration of America.
Just as villainous and reprehensible is the parallel program of racist police violence and the carceral state to re-enslave Black American citizens and enforce systemic forms of inequality and injustice through state terror, repression of dissent, the force of a militarized police and the counterinsurgency model of policing which has transformed our security services into an army of occupation with primarily political objectives, and the control of pervasive and endemic surveillance and propaganda, lies, illusions, and subversions of the truth.
Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his circus of fools, degenerates, and barbarians, his enablers and collaborators both within the government and his shadow forces rallying under the Confederate flag to bring violence and insurrection to our nations capital and to the streets of our cities throughout America, are co-conspirators and instigators in the murders of every Black American killed by police shooting or other racist violence since its authorization by Trump in the wake of Charlottesville.
And every missing child kidnapped by the state and disappeared into what abominable slavery or human trafficking designed in the diseased imagination of Trump and his Epstein buddies we know not of, every migrant of the huddled masses yearning to be free who died in the quest to reach the safety of America because the water caches had been intentionally sabotaged by criminals in the uniform of our nation who were “just following orders” like their counterparts in the SS during the Holocaust, every prisoner who died in custody because they were denied water or medical care; the blood of these and countless other victims of Trump’s narcissistic self-aggrandizement and regime of fascist corruption, racism, and patriarchal sexual terror is on the hands of every Republican who voted for him and fails now in this trial to repudiate him publicly and renounce his works as among those of the devils which he serves.
For in his actions Trump has been not only a foreign agent and Putin’s puppet whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America, but also a slave of Moloch the Seducer, Demon of Lies, in that he is not merely a pathological liar but also an idiot madman who cannot distinguish truth from lies, and who has weaponized his delusions and psychopathy as instruments of our falsification and subjugation in his quest for tyrannical power.
The bizarre and lurid dark fairytales of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, like the charges of the Inquisition and the Nazis which othered witches and Jews on which QAnon is constructed, serves as deflection from Trump’s loathsome perversions and sexual terrorism. What terrors did he conceal behind the beauty pageant and modeling syndicate he once controlled?
His Stop the Steal campaign is a similar deflection which shields him from inquiry into the Stolen Election of 2016 and the fact that his Presidency was entirely illegitimate and due to Russian interference; it was also the rhetorical and organizational basis of his final attempted coup on January 6, for which he is now being impeached for the second time.
We must cast out the monsters from among us, the racists and white supremacist terrorists, the Gideonite fundamentalists and patriarchs of Christian Identity fascism and sexual terror, and the amoral forces of repression of those who would enslave us and who enforce hegemonies of elite power and privilege and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness armed with guns and badges and the authority of a government which has been infiltrated by the Fourth Reich, an implacable and relentless enemy which has come just short of seizing us in its jaws.
We must give fascism no second chances.
As I wrote in my post of January 11 2021, Allegories and Symbols of the Fall of America: the January 6 Insurrection as Theatre of Cruelty; Here is an expanded version of my post of January 6 on the Surrealist film Gummo as a satire of the Deplorables who committed treason and armed insurrection against our nation at the command of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump; on Insurrection Day, I offer for your consideration the film Gummo, a sensitive and elegant documentary of the Deplorables from whom the Fourth Reich cadre who staged the assault on Congress were recruited, and an allegory of America.
Bacon? Stapled to the wall, a strip of bacon captures ones attention as a symbol of degeneration and barbarian atavisms of instinct. Werner Herzog signposted it for our attention, and it persists as a symbol of degeneration to an animal state, like a trophy of wealth which is also offal above a bathtub filled with filth as our young protagonist eats spaghetti, his mouth smeared with red like a cannibal; an unforgettable image of the fallen American Dream.
It is the little things which disturb, provoke, and incite us to challenge normality, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, the authorized identities of hegemonic elites and divisions of otherness, and to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden with glorious sins of beatification.
Here as always, all true art defiles and exalts.
We dine in filth on the carrion of others lives and by their labor. This is a Surrealist film intended as an allegory of America and a thematic interrogation of our flaws and dark legacies of injustice, and in large part restates Nietzsche’s critique of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and the idea of the innate depravity of man, an extension of the doctrine of original sin, on which all our law is based, as Nikos Kazantzakis argues in his thesis Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.
So also does the film restate William S. Burroughs’ analysis of capitalism and imperialism as the Algebra of Need, in which drug addiction becomes a metaphor of our addiction to wealth, power, and privilege, an engine of self-destruction, commodification, and dehumanization which feeds on and worsens our most atavistic instincts. Here the flaws of our humanity, fear and rage, vanity and jealousy, the need to dominate and control, become the instruments of our subjugation to hegemonic elites through divisions of exclusionary otherness and to tyrants of force and control and the imperial and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
The film itself is brutally shocking, grotesque, and borders on the obscene; which is why I adore it so. I must warn you that while I like it as an allegory of America’s flaws, and to poke fun at Trump’ s followers, this is brutal and depressing; anyone with suicidal ideation should avoid it. This debut of a heralded wonder of the new age as director was not understood as a critique of state power as a force of dehumanization and regression to an animal state, like that of the Deplorables, and unjustly derailed a promising career; a historical injustice I would like to redeem, because Gummo is a film we need now.
We must see the enemies of Liberty as they truly are, if we are to heal our nation from the primary trauma of fracture they enacted in the January 6 Insurrection.
Both the Insurrection and the film Gummo, like the Trump presidency as a whole, must be interpreted as performances of the Theatre of Cruelty as articulated by Antonin Artaud in his manifesto The Theatre And Its Double. Trump is a figure of the mad emperor from his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist; his performances as a clown of terror, disruption, and sadism were also brilliantly prophesized by Robert Coover in The Public Burning, A Political Fable, written as a satire of Nixon.
Let us see beyond the lies and illusions with which Trump and his Deplorables conceal their subversions of democracy, sabotage of our institutions, and violations of our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s never anything but “just an old humbug.”
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2021, Profiles in Treason and Terror; The dishonorable and the mad, the delusional and the sadistic epicures of brutality and perversions, the feral predators hooting and champing before the gallows and guillotines they have brought to murder members of congress with and their partners in uniform unleashing racist terror and gun violence in the streets, and the amoral and predatory grifters and puppetmasters of fascism who have subjugated and enslaved them and stolen their honor and their souls; these are among the idolators of Traitor Trump who conspired, enabled, and collaborated in his plot to subvert democracy and overthrow America in the January 6 Insurrection which attempted to seize Congress and execute its members, which like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch on which it was modeled was intended to decapitate the government of the people in a single stroke.
As details emerge of the internal operations and massive scale of the plot against America, in terms of its central coordination and logistics under direct operational command of Trump and his cabal of conspirators, we are offered not only the spectacle of his aberrance and monstrosity as a mad idiot Clown of Terror drooling and gloating in bestial depravity at the destruction of our values and institutions, the violation of our ideals and the endless suffering he has caused, but of those of his freakish and degenerate followers as well.
The role of deniable forces of the Fourth Reich such as the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, and other organizations of white supremacist terror, and of their partners and infiltration agents within our police, military, and security services, in the January 6 Insurrection is by now well documented and will become more so as the greatest manhunt in our history exposes and entraps more of its perpetrators.
The images we have been witnessing of their assault on liberty during the Second Impeachment trial will be remembered in the history of the world as the true legacy of an era of fascist tyranny under the figurehead of Trump which nearly ended America as a guarantor of global democracy and universal human rights, and had we fallen as the primary domino and a beacon of hope to the world both democracy and human rights would be lost to humankind for unknown ages; the last time civilization fell it took a thousand years for the idea that government derives its authority from its citizens and not by divine right, the idea that no one of us is better than any other by right of birth, and that freedom, equality, truth, and justice are the foundational values of our society and truths of human being and meaning, to reawaken.
And it took centuries of wars and revolutions to do so; how if this time civilization falls not to hordes of barbarians seeking nothing but pillage and destruction, but to regimes of totalitarian force and control?
This is the great contradiction of the forces of repression and subjugation to authority which overran our capitol on January 6; they have been betrayed by their masters in believing they were acting to restore our traditional values and civilization, when in fact they had been weaponized in service to its destruction. Here is a clear and present danger, but also an opportunity; shared motives can be redirected to heal divisions, for they too want an American Restoration. As yet we just disagree on our definition of terms.
When fear is overwhelming and generalized, it can be shaped through submission to authority by lies, illusions, alternate realities, especially when pervasive and endemic surveillance, big data, and propaganda are available as instruments of state control. Authority achieves submission through falsification and the theft of the soul, but this is also the weakness of control which cannot stand against truth, just as the weakness of force is that it is powerless against resistance, disobedience, and refusal to submit.
The election of Biden and Harris, the failure of Trump’s sixth coup attempt on January 6, and the public exposure and shaming of his co-conspirators, collaborators, and enablers before the stage of the world of the Second Impeachment trial; in these events we have witnessed a turning of the tide from fascism to a restoration of democracy.
Once the Reckoning has been achieved, the Restoration must heal our divisions; and this means we must embrace and transform the fear that lives at the heart of hate, and drives the rage, violence, and need to conquer and dominate others which shadows our historical inequalities and injustices.
Fear, Power, Force; such is the Ring of Power which enslaves us, and which we must abandon if we are to become whole.
Herein I offer a previous version of the role of Trump as Angelo in the savage morality play Measure For Measure, a work luminous with Kafka-esque Absurdism, Freudian horror, and a brilliant interrogation of the dynamics of patriarchy and power asymmetry in gender relations in the brilliant review of the Simon Godwin production, critiqued with marvelous insight by Geoffrey O’Brien in the New York Review of Books; entitled “Shakespeare’s Pornography of Power by Geoffrey O’Brien.
“This is the disgusting, stinking world of medieval Vienna. The darkness of this world is absolutely necessary to the meaning of the play…When this play is prettily staged, it is meaningless—it demands an absolutely convincing roughness and dirt.” Thus Peter Brook, who directed a legendary production in 1950, on his vision of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Simon Godwin’s pathway into the play at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn is by way of a corridor through Mistress Overdone’s brothel, along a narrow basement path lined with discreetly closed cubicles and arrays of lubes, dildos, anal plugs, shackles and handcuffs, multicolored condoms, an inflatable sex doll. It is a space dimly lit but by no means medieval, an ingratiatingly tacky emporium more likely to amuse than repel the New York theatergoers passing through.
Given the perennial relevance of the various injustices it circles around—the sexual exploitation and pious hypocrisy and persecution of whistleblowers—Measure for Measure invites updating. The virginal Isabella, realizing that no one will believe her story of victimization against that of the all-powerful Angelo—who has been named regent of Vienna by its absent duke—cries out: “To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, / Who would believe me?”—language so direct it could be lifted from the latest celebrity harassment trial, especially when spoken with the angry clarity that Cara Ricketts gives the line.
Angelo—the moral disciplinarian with a spotless reputation who, once given power, swiftly succumbs to his most predatory impulses—can be envisioned almost too neatly as the sort of high-minded conservative who from time to time finds himself indicted for sexual malfeasance. There is no problem with Thomas Jay Ryan’s performance: Ryan’s delineation of Angelo’s ethical collapse and his half-hearted efforts to justify himself to himself have the barely controlled panic of a public figure realizing how little he knows himself. The regent lies, and the most unhampered truth-telling comes from sex workers and criminals who make no pretense to any credo beyond their own self-interest, as in the unarguable defense of the tapster Pompey, arrested for procuring: “Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live.”
But it’s in the nature of Measure for Measure that whatever contemporary analogies are invoked cannot quite make sense of what happens. In its early stages the play is centered on the three characters whose destinies collide so violently: Angelo, Isabella, and her brother Claudio, who has been condemned for fornication. The scenes in which they confront each other have the amplitude of the tragedies that were to follow: Isabella pleading for Claudio’s life, Angelo demanding her virginity as the price of her brother’s pardon, Claudio overwhelmed by the terror of death, Isabella (in a moment that challenges any audience’s sympathy) denouncing her brother for his weakness of character when she realizes he is willing to see her give in to Angelo’s demands.
The grandeur of these scenes becomes most fully alive through Cara Ricketts’s Isabella, intensely focused, supremely pointed in her argumentation, but with a hint of an absolute commitment to the ideal that helps account for her harsh dismissal of her condemned brother’s terror of dying; an altogether serious person, too serious for the world she finds herself inhabiting, perhaps too serious for the madcap Duke when he proposed to her at the very end of the play. Her reaction to Angelo’s harassment goes beyond physical repulsion into profound moral contempt—expressing itself in angry laughter—at the triviality of his character. Her ultimate forgiveness of Angelo—at a moment when she still believes her brother to have been executed—is dramatically the most difficult of all, couched as it is in a nice legal argument, but Ricketts brought a somber conviction to it.
An audience that wants to take the play as readily grasped satire cannot evade the puzzlements and reversals of judgment that come in its later scenes—reversals of judgment that do not end even when the play is done. Measure for Measure is a perpetual questioning machine, exquisitely functional, set to a relentless tempo, yet a machine that bristles and crackles in its joints with contradiction and discomfort. Harold Bloom has described it as “a comedy that destroys comedy.” It is a comedy that threatens to destroy or at least wear down its own characters by subjecting them to the only mechanism—a mechanism demanding elaborate subterfuges and unlikely changes of heart—by which they can avoid a tragic fate. By the end we might imagine them as the exhausted, socially viable remnants of those conflicted, passionate beings we saw tearing apart everything including themselves scene after scene, during the first three acts. They are saved, and some of them have saved others, but for what fate we can only wonder.
In Godwin’s production, to emerge from the brothel’s passageway into the main theater is to find the Polonsky transformed into what looks like an oversize banqueting hall, the playing area laid out as an immense table decked with candles and balloons and trays of drinks, a few audience members seated around the edge. Drunken revelers stagger noisily across the tabletop stage, leaving behind a solitary figure sprawled on its surface, shooting up (presumably) heroin and then wrapping himself up in a tangle of sheets. A woman in business attire approaches him, studying him like a corporate assistant confronted by a messy but familiar management problem. He, it quickly emerges, is Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, and she is Escalus, the “ancient Lord” who serves him, transmuted into Escala, a tightly controlled executive who in January LaVoy’s reading sometimes evokes a less murderous version of Tilda Swinton’s scheming pharmaceuticals exec in Michael Clayton.
As the Duke (Jonathan Cake) rouses himself from his nod he delivers the play’s opening speech, in a broken rhythm suggesting that the passage’s roundabout prolixity reflects his faltering attempt to shake himself out of his opiate daze. It is one way to get the play going: pitched forward headlong, off-balance from the start, the unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions piling up before we even know where we are. What manner of being is the Duke really? Why is he leaving Vienna in such haste and putting in his place a temporary regent, the “precise” Angelo, known for his rigorous strictness? Why does he choose to linger, disguised as a friar, to observe what happens in his absence? Having learned that his moralistic stand-in is attempting to blackmail Isabella—a young woman just about to enter a convent—into sex in order to save her brother Claudio (Leland Fowler) from a death sentence, why does he intervene in such needlessly tortuous fashion, subjecting innocents to agonies of misinformation? When in one of the play’s most eloquent speeches he more or less persuades Claudio that life is not especially worth living—“Be absolute for death”—does he speak his own sincerest thoughts or is this merely part of the role he is playing as prison confessor?
To cast the Duke as a junkie is one way of providing him with a motive. His addiction perhaps discourages him from exercising moral authority; perhaps he sees it as a weakness rendering him unfit to enforce Vienna’s laws with the necessary severity; perhaps he even harbors the thought that those laws are unnecessarily severe; perhaps he simply needs to take some time out. In any event his drug habit, as far as I could observe, comes up only once more (a quick glance at the track marks on his arm, lest he forget), and from the moment he dons his disguise he grows steadily more assured, though it is an assurance boosted by waves of antic humor to which Cake at times gives an almost Monty Pythonish edge. A certain hilarity gives him courage to dream up and carry out his preposterous scheme, which more and more comes to resemble a baroque sting operation.
We can hardly expect to find out who the Duke really is in the course of the evening, since Shakespeare’s text leaves that question so hauntingly open. Even if he assures a confederate early on that he has “a purpose / More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends / Of burning youth,” he never articulates what that purpose is. He is more than central to the play—as the narrative advances he becomes its directing force, moving plot elements around like game pieces—while remaining to the end a fascinating cipher. He is memorably termed “the Duke of dark corners”—a secret devotee of hidden vices—by the witty reprobate Lucio, but Lucio is by no means averse to making things up. If nothing else the Duke can be said to behave very much like a playwright working with improvisatory energy on his play’s last act, an act that will feature a succession of agonizingly drawn-out revelations, a string of pardons, and an unlooked-for proposal of marriage.
The lust of the hypocritical Angelo is not triggered by the attractive power of beauty but perversely by the notion of violating purity: the pornography of power, relished by a man for whom execution and torture are primary tools of policy. There is a terror at the heart of everything. The Duke’s exhortation to Claudio to resign himself to death cannot match in dramatic effect Claudio’s subsequent speech—roughly the play’s midpoint—on the horror of dying: “The weariest and most loathed worldly life / That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment / Can lay on nature, is a paradise / To what we fear of death.”
Sometimes the play feels like a series of decentered snapshots of city dwellers shuffling between sex and death. It is the only Shakespeare play concerned with how a city is run, and what that is like for the people who live there. (Romeo and Juliet is also a city play of sorts, but it centers on the operation of clans, not the municipal government that so ineffectively intervenes in their never-ending feud; and that play’s poetry—so unlike the gnarled, combative, often tensely legalistic exchanges of Measure for Measure—constantly evokes spaces beyond the immediate setting.) In Measure for Measure everything is local, in the most oppressive way. We look at things from the top down and from the bottom up, and the judgment is ambivalent, or rather multivalent. Godwin’s staging conveys very well the sense of airless interconnecting interiors, all linked as part of the same system: claustrophobic offices, claustrophobic cells of both prisons and convents, but mostly of prisons. It could almost be called a prison play, a point underlined here by the cell walls constantly rolling in and out of the foreground.
The motives of the three main characters are seen from many angles, by each other and by bystanders and street-corner commentators of all sorts, from the generously inclined Provost of the prison, realized with great feeling by Oberon K.A. Adjepong, to the unavoidable Lucio, amusingly played by Haynes Thigpen as a self-satisfied comedian a little too hip for the room, always there to speak up for ordinary human vice (“a little more lenity to lechery would do no harm”) although contemptuous of the whores he sleeps with, constantly hovering at the edge of what goes on so he can get his digs in and almost managing to avoid getting called on it. The comedy provides not so much relief as an obverse view, consistently deflating and needling, and it is rarely clear where exactly the boundaries are, or who can truly be called central in this world fallen askew.
Consider the late emergence of Barnardine, a murderer who for nine years has been awaiting execution. The Duke determines to substitute his head for that of Claudio, demanded by Angelo in proof that he has been put to death, but when Barnardine—already described as “a man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come”—emerges from his cell, he simply refuses to die—“I have been drinking hard all night, and I will have more time to prepare me… I swear I will not die today for any man’s persuasion”—and staggers back to his cell. It was a disappointment to see this episode treated as a comic interlude, with too much hokum and unneeded verbal additions. (Zachary Fine did much in his other role as the simple-minded constable Elbow.)
It’s the most surprising scene in Measure for Measure and ought to stop the proceedings in their tracks, with its after beat the Duke’s astonishing pardon of the murderer in the last act. I can still recall being taken to see John Houseman’s production of the play at age eight—a memorable outing to the Shakespeare theater in Stratford, Connecticut in 1956—and however dimly I apprehended its stew of bawdry and sexual extortion, there was no mistaking the uproarious force of Barnardine’s unconditional refusal. The actor was Pernell Roberts, of later Bonanza fame, and he must have delivered Barnardine’s few lines with great vigor, since the scene has lingered in memory ever since. In a play of punitive laws, complex masquerades, and tortuous mutually annihilating arguments, it briefly upholds the intoxicating possibility of simply walking away.”
As I wrote in my post of June 15 2022, Act Three of the Greatest Show on Earth: Where Do We Go From Here?; Where do we go from here?
Democracy in America survived its most terrible moment of peril from internal threat in the January 6 Insurrection, yet here we are, witness to the public exposure of the plot and its treasonous conspirators on television as Congress brings a Reckoning to the Fourth Reich.
Like the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 on which it was modeled, it failed; but in doing so also achieved all of its strategic goals, moving our great enemy nearer to victory by staging a Lost Cause which established the fascist counternarrative as iconography that Trump remains our legitimate President. Next time, and there will always be a next time, we may not be so lucky.
Not only do the forces of fascism remain an active threat, through open allegiance to the Lost Cause which echoes horrifically with that of the Confederacy and the KKK whose adherents are among the networks of deniable assets now among us as they were at the Capitol on that fateful day, but the vast resources of wealth and power at their command after seventy years of infiltration of global elites and governments remain undiminished.
But none of this is relevant to the true threat which fascism poses to us all today; for America has been divided against itself, and as we are warned by Abraham Lincoln in 1858 in his House Divided speech in reference to the synoptic Gospels of Luke 11:17, Mark 3:25, and Matthew 12:25; “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.
We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed –
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
As we are taught with the lyrics of the song Where Do We Go From Here?, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7 of season 6, Once More With Feeling, possibly the greatest musical episode of any telenovela yet created;
“Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
The battle’s done,
And we kinda won.
So we sound our victory cheer.
Where do we go from here.
Why is the path unclear,
When we know home is near.
Understand we’ll go hand in hand,
But we’ll walk alone in fear. (Tell me)
Tell me where do we go from here.
When does the end appear,
When do the trumpets cheer.
The curtains close, on a kiss god knows,
We can tell the end is near…
Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
Where do we go
from here?”
Here is an elegy for the Fall of America, a hymn to a dying hope and the lost grandeur of a fallen nation. When in a distant future the artifacts of our civilization begin to puzzle whatever beings arise from our carrion, and they ask who were the Americans, I hope such music as this lamentation remains to guide their questions.
Yet hope remains when all is lost, and whether it becomes a gift or a curse is in our hands. These lyrics speak of the modern pathology of disconnectedness, of the division and fracture of our Solidarity, of subjugation through learned helplessness and the dominion of fear. But this is not the end of the story, nor of ours.
Once More With Feeling ends not with abjection, but with The Kiss, between the Slayer and Spike, one of the monsters she hunts. A very particular kind of monster, who is also the hero of the story in its entire seven year arc; one who is made monstrous by his condition of being and forces beyond his control, against which he struggles for liberation and to recreate and define himself as he chooses, a monster who reclaims his humanity and his soul. This is why we continue to watch the show twenty years after its debut; we are all Spike, locked in titanic struggle for the ownership of ourselves with authorized identities and systemic evils, a revolution of truths written in our flesh against imposed conditions of struggle and orders of human being, meaning, and value.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an allegory of Sartrean freedom in a world without inherent value or meaning, of the joy of total freedom versus the terror of our nothingness, and above all a song of the redemptive power of love to return to us our true selves.
This is how we defeat fascist tyranny in the long game, after we bring a Reckoning for its crimes against humanity and its subversion of democracy; let us answer hate with love, division with solidarity, fear with hope, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
For those who wish to study Our Clown of Terror as an example of the failure of humanity and the subversion of democracy, how monsters are shaped by the depravities and moral collapse of racism and patriarchy as illnesses of power and how our inner and outer worlds inform, motivate, and shape one another, here is my reading list:
Fear: Trump in the White House, Rage, by Bob Woodward
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Siege: Trump Under Fire,
by Michael Wolff
Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen
Fascism: A Warning, by Madeleine K. Albright
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley
Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder
Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers, by John W. Dean, Bob Altemeyer
How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt
What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era,
by Carlos Lozada
Trump Is F*cking Crazy: (this Is Not a Joke), by Keith Olbermann
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L. Trump
Trump on the Couch, Dr Justin Frank
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, by Bandy X. Lee
Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers, Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior, by Jerrold M. Post
The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, by Steven Hassan
Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, by Rick Reilly
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America, by Philip Rucker
All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, by Barry Levine
Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus, by Matt Taibbi
The Mueller Report, by The Washington Post
Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation, by Andrew Weissmann
True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump, by Jeffrey Toobin
A Case for the American People: The United States v. Donald J. Trump, by Norman Eisen
Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America, Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump’s International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy, Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump, by Seth Abramson
The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America,
by Jim Acosta
American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, by Tim Alberta
Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President,
by Michael S. Schmidt
Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, by Peter Bergen
The Best People: Trump’s Cabinet and the Siege on Washington, by Alexander Nazaryan
American Nero: The History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump Is the Worst Offender, by Richard Painter
Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever, by Rick Wilson
We celebrate today an historic victory as women’s right to vote was enacted into law in the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
The struggle for the equality of women is ongoing today, especially in regard to the right of bodily autonomy, without which there is no freedom or idea of personhood and autonomy other than defined by the state, and the right to safety from theocratic-patriarchal sexual terror and dehumanization, without which freedom is meaningless; women’s reproductive rights and right of consent are under constant attack by theocratic Gideonite fundamentalists and the existential threat of the Patriarchy.
Power asymmetries in gender relations and the dynamically unstable struggle between autonomous and free creative play in the performance of identities of sex and gender and their authorization, limitation, and control by hegemonic and patriarchal forces of repression are pervasive and endemic, and this we must resist.
The work of the historical suffragettes, heroic pioneers of liberty whom we honor today, remains unfinished, for the gears of the vast machine of systemic inequality which makes half of humankind slaves of the other half continues to grimly enmesh us in its works, invisible when unexamined, for the beneficiaries of unequal power must question and challenge their own privilege if we are to free ourselves of its malign dehumanizing force. Seizure of power is not enough; we must also abandon power over others to escape the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force.
Patriarchy survives because like all systems and structures of oppression by hegemonic elites it co-opts and assimilates those in whose name it claims to operate. It will vanish when men unite with women to dismantle it as liberation from tyranny, and not before.
Here I speak of parrhesia and what Foucault called truth telling, the exposure of injustice and inequality as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, for nothing can be confronted and changed if it remains unseen. This process of reimagination and transformation of the possibilities of becoming human is neither simple nor easy; for no one gives up power willingly, unless there are greater benefits to be won in so doing, and as we may also say of racism and the legacies of slavery and imperialism it is a terrible thing to awaken to the fact that one is the beneficiary of an ongoing crime of sexual terror.
I am framing this issue in the most repugnant way I can imagine to signpost that abusive systems perpetuate themselves and control their victims by turning some of us into monsters with which to terrorize and exploit the others as internalized oppression, and in the context of Patriarchy it is both men and women who must unite in solidarity and revolutionary struggle to become free.
The destabilization of our ideas of men and women, of idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty, identity, virtue, and performative roles, as transformative change and liberation from authorized identities of sex and gender is crucial to this work of chaotization and liberation. All human beings are both male and female within themselves, at all times, for the psyche is dyadic and also in continual processes of change; moreover identities of sex and gender are not only social constructions of our history as stories and narrative structures, but are also an infinite Moebius Loop wherein we exist everywhere at once as a condition of being, rather than a spectrum with limits and fixed referents like queer or straight, dominant or submissive, male or female.
Let us free ourselves of the historical legacies of inequalities which we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
How do we arrive at a point in our lives where we may throw back the curtain and pronounce with Dorothy; “You’re just an old humbug”?
I once taught a linked pair of classes through the English and History departments of Sonoma Valley High School in Northern California where I was also the debate team coach and Forensics teacher for many years, a Modern American History class entitled A Useful Past: Constructing an American Identity, together with a Modern American Literature class entitled A Woman Reinvents Humankind: Gertrude Stein’s Modern World, in which I presented the organizing idea that who we are today is a consequence of this one woman’s reinvention of the possibilities of language as self construal, and of the literary revolution she ignited.
Today I’m rereading Virginia Woolf’s classic novel Orlando; here is how I describe it in my literary blog; Orlando is an allegory of time, history, identity, and gender, in the form of a fictionalized biography of her great love, Vita Sackville-West. It also inspired and served Gertrude Stein as a model for her great novel, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
With a main character who is an immortal shapeshifting time traveler, with the enviable power to change genders as the occasion requires, Orlando is stunningly modern for a novel of 1925 and parallels Djuna Barnes’ Surrealist masterpiece Nightwood. Astounding, delightful, and strange, as important an influence as Gertrude Stein or James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, as fearless a revolutionary provocation as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar or Albert Camus’ The Stranger, as gloriously transgressive as Anais Nin’s Collages, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, or William S. Burroughs’ magical-Surrealist alternate world trilogy of American history which ends with The Western Lands, and as marvelously written and fun to read as Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry or the Absurdist satires of Kurt Vonnegut, Orlando merits its place among the Great Books I have returned to throughout my life for inspiration.
So for Virginia Woolf’s vision of an archetypal fully realized human being in Orlando, but with much of our world still shadowed by and captive of the legacies of our history as Patriarchal systems of oppression, the question remains; how do we free ourselves and each other? How do we seize our power and dream new possibilities of becoming human?
As I wrote in my post of March 3 2022, Frighten the Horses: Performing Identities of Sex and Gender as Revolutionary Struggle and Guerilla Theatre; On this anniversary of the historic 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade led by Alice Paul, let us frighten the horses, and through our public performance of identities of sex and gender seize ownership of ourselves, reclaim the narratives of liberation from the marginalization and silences of historical authorization of identity, and shift the boundaries of the Forbidden through transgression of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas.
Freaking the normies, we called it in the San Francisco of my youth; enactments of difference and uniqueness as revolutionary struggle and guerilla theatre, in which we seized public spaces as our stage. As in the spectacle of human possibilities of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, strategies of confrontation which valorize totemic figures of transgression act as rituals of liberation, seizures of power, and the transformation and reimagination of authorized identities and of humankind.
Go ahead, frighten the horses; for none of us need stand alone, and if they come for one of us, they must be met with all of us.
Thousands of women paraded through Washington D.C. on this day over one hundred years ago, the first such event on a massive national scale after sixty years of the fight for women’s suffrage.
It was a public declaration of freedom from fear, and of solidarity in the face of horrific repression. One hundred women were hospitalized this day, attacked by mobs unrestrained and enabled by the police, merely one incident in a decades long struggle against violence and control, and against the deniable forces of a government wholly vested in the Patriarchy. And before that, millennia of enslavement, dehumanization, marginalization, and the silencing of women’s voices.
But after that day, the world has never been the same. Women had stood up to the brutal tyranny of force and control in defiance and refusal to submit, and that is a genie which can never be put back in its bottle. This is the secret of power; it is hollow and brittle, for it fails at the point of disobedience. In the words of the great Sylvia Plath; “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
In this time of darkness when atavistic forces of Patriarchy and Gideonite fundamentalism scuttle from beneath their stones to attempt once again the re-enslavement of women through control of reproductive rights and denial of bodily autonomy without which there is no freedom, and which infringes on our universal right to health care as a precondition of the right to life, which together threaten dehumanization and theft of citizenship, let us claim and raise again the suffragette banner bearing the catchphrase of liberation which Alice Paul appropriated from Woodrow Wilson, “The time has come to conquer or submit.”
Here are some reading recommendations on the subject of Feminist thought:
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, by bell hooks is wonderful and engaging, and the first book I would recommend to a high school student or anyone new to the subject.
Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant, erudite, and savagely satirical trilogy is by turns delightful and disturbingly horrific, and a must-read for everyone; Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, Undoing Gender, Senses of the Subject, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Precarious Life, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political, Judith Butler
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, and Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men, Anne Fausto-Sterling.
The Deepening Darkness: Loss, Patriarchy, and Democracy’s Future, and its sequel Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s Resurgence and Feminist Resistance
by Carol Gilligan, David A.J. Richards, together comprise the most relevant ideological framework for understanding and resisting patriarchal repression yet written.
Camille Paglia’s notorious and incendiary Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson remains a glorious and strange theoretical work on the origins of culture in gender inequalities and identities.
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock by Marina Warner together comprise a riveting and brilliant interrogation of femininity and masculinity in our civilization.
Of course everyone should read the work that originated Feminism as a Humanist philosophy and a development of Existentialism in the new translation, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, H.M. Parshley (Translator & Editor), Deirdre Bair (Introduction).
I enjoyed Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison, by A.S. Byatt, Ignes Sodre.
For a sense of the scope and diversity of ideas and the historical development of Feminist theory, A Companion to Feminist Philosophy by Alison M. Jaggar (Editor), is among the finest general introductions, though as with all her works intended for academic scholars.
One may also find reflections which speak to our own truths in the source works of the pioneers who have shaped our civilization since de Beauvoir; Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, and The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone.
On this day a teenage police cadet, who rallied to the call of a local politician to form a vigilante militia to patrol the streets during protests over the police murder of Jacob Blake two days before, perpetrated a hate crime of mass terror and death, then was allowed to go free by police after he tried to surrender. Dead were Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, while Gaige Grosskreutz was wounded.
Within days protests escalated, and on the 28th a thousand troops from the Michigan, Arizona, and Alabama National Guard and two hundred federal agents put Kenosha under military occupation; the next day a thousand citizens seized the streets of Kenosha from them in a mass rally and march.
In a summer of fire, death, and resistance against police and military use of racist violence and white supremacist terror and of deniable forces of terror among fascist and racist groups including the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers to create a pretext for police occupation of cities in revolt in a campaign of arson, looting, and violence under direction of the Fourth Reich Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf, a summer unlike any since 1968, Kenosha is but one of many atrocities of state sanctioned white supremacist terror, one which we must never forget or cease to redress and balance the scales of justice of the inequalities which are its causes.
Let us learn to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.
As I wrote in my post of August 29 2020, Police Collaboration in White Supremacist Terror: the Case of Kenosha; Police have been infiltrated by white supremacist organizations since the Civil War, and were created originally as mercenary slavecatchers. They are also a primary funnel and grooming onramp for terror and racism, a development of prewar slavecatching gangs.
Kenosha is part of a planned, organized campaign of terror in which police and militia of white supremacist forces act together to repress dissent and create violence and destruction so that Trump can send federal troops to occupy Democratic cities. This is more than racist violence; it is a coup.
There can be only one reply to fascism and tyranny; Never Again. We shall resist the Republican subversion of democracy and their cabal of white supremacist terrorists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, foreign puppetmasters, and plutocratic thieves of public wealth unto our liberation from inequalities of race and gender and divisions of exclusionary otherness.
Where there is fear, let there also be hope. This is the true mission of Antifa.
All those who remain loyal to their oaths to our Constitution and to America as a free society of equals, I call on you to stand together once again as a Band of Brothers, Sisters, and Others and resist the Fourth Reich and the Party of Treason. Let us remain unconquered and be free.
God Bless America; we’re going to need it.
As written in the BBC, in an article entitled Kyle Rittenhouse case: Why it so divides the US; “Few US trials in recent years have generated such acrimony. What is it about the Kyle Rittenhouse case that so divides the country?
Inside the courtroom, the 18-year-old was visibly shaking as he heard the jury clear him of all five charges, including intentional homicide.
He killed two men during racial unrest in Wisconsin, but successfully convinced the jury he only used his semi-automatic weapon because he feared for his life.
Meanwhile, outside court cars drove past tooting their horns and cheering. Some leaned from windows to shout “Free Kyle!” and “We love the Second Amendment!”
Some were distraught at the verdict – one man collapsed on the courtroom steps in tears, saying if Mr Rittenhouse had been black and brandishing a weapon like that, he would have been shot dead.
Here’s why the case provoked such deeply held emotions.
Self-defence
Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal hinged on the specific details of Wisconsin’s self-defence laws, taking into account Mr Rittenhouse’s state of mind at the moment of shootings. The first occurred when Joseph Rosenbaum tried to grab Mr Rittenhouse’s gun, the next two after two men – one of whom was armed – confronted Mr Rittenhouse following Rosenbaum’s shooting.
The law considers whether Mr Rittenhouse believed himself to be in imminent threat of harm, but it does not factor in the choices he made in the hours and days beforehand that put him in the middle of a volatile situation, with guns drawn and tempers flaring.
The trial could prompt renewed consideration of self-defence laws across the US and whether they sufficiently weigh the totality of circumstances involving the use lethal force, particularly in a society where restrictions on the possession of firearms have been loosened.
The trend up until now has been to expand the right of self-defence in many states through “castle doctrine” and “stand your ground” laws that give individuals a presumptive right to use force to protect their homes and themselves, rather than to back down from a confrontation.
The divisiveness of the Rittenhouse trial could further fuel the debate over whether those laws go too far – or not far enough.
Race
Race is not central to this case, but for one man it is.
Jacob Blake, who is black, was shot seven times by a white police officer in Kenosha last year.
It was that shooting which sparked the violent protests in the first place. The police officer remains in the force. Mr Blake said in an interview that if Mr Rittenhouse had been of a different ethnicity, “he’d be gone”.
Mr Rittenhouse was not immediately arrested after he shot three white men – two of them fatally – despite surrendering to police.
Black Lives Matter protesters outside the court say it is “white privilege” that has allowed the teenager to even have a fair trial.
Controversially, in closing arguments Mr Rittenhouse’s defence attorney Mark Richards referenced the Blake shooting saying: “Other people in this community have shot people seven times and it’s been found to be OK, and my client did it four times in three-quarters of a second to protect his life.”
It’s renewed this debate over exactly who is allowed to possess guns and then proclaim self-defence when they kill someone.
Guns
The Rittenhouse trial has once again highlighted laws restricting gun possession and use in America that varies widely by state and local jurisdiction. Often the regulations are less than precise, the product of intense legislative debate over the types of firearms covered and under what circumstances the laws apply.
A day before closing arguments in the Rittenhouse trial, Judge Bruce Schroeder ordered that one of the charges – that Mr Rittenhouse violated a state law prohibiting a person under 18 from possessing a “dangerous weapon” – be dropped because the rifle Mr Rittenhouse was carrying wasn’t prohibited to him.
The decision turned on the length of the firearm’s barrel, which would have been prohibited if it were a few inches shorter.
Gun-control activists have cited this as yet another example of the kind of loophole that could be remedied by more uniform national gun laws.
While the 30-year-old Wisconsin law contains a provision to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to go hunting, they view the weapon Mr Rittenhouse was carrying as clearly “dangerous” in the circumstances he used it.
Gun rights activists, on the other hand, have celebrated Mr Rittenhouse’s right to possess such weapons and use them to defend himself.
“If it wasn’t for 17-year-olds with guns,” tweeted Ohio Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel, “we’d still be British subjects.”
The judge
Bruce Schroeder is the longest-serving circuit judge in the Wisconsin state court system. He was appointed by a Democratic governor in 1983 and has won election to his seat seven times since then, each by overwhelming margins.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the judge would become a focus in such a high-profile, nationally televised trial, but the unusual American tradition of electing judges has made a delicate political situation even more fraught.
Over the years, Judge Schroeder has developed idiosyncrasies, such as allowing defendants to conduct the random drawings that select their final jury and quizzing jurors on esoteric trivia. He’s also established a reputation as a pro-defence jurist – one further cemented by his testy exchanges with prosecutors during the Rittenhouse trial.
Given the highly charged political nature of the trial, many of those quirks and choices have been scrutinised for evidence of bias. His rulings to drop the illegal firearm charge and saying the men Mr Rittenhouse shot could not be called “victims” were criticised by many on the left.
Even his choice of mobile phone ringtone, the patriotic anthem God Bless the USA – a staple of Donald Trump rallies in recent years – made headlines as possible evidence of his political proclivities.
Legal analysts have generally concluded that Judge Schroeder’s rulings have been within the norms for such proceedings, but with the impartiality of the entire US criminal system challenged in last year’s protests against institutional racism and police shootings – including the one in Kenosha – those norms are under scrutiny, as well.
Vigilantism
The facts of that night have never been up for debate – Kyle Rittenhouse killed two men and injured a third.
Instead the jury had to work out why he did it. He was being chased by a group of people when he fired the fatal shots. Was he acting in self-defence or was he a dangerous vigilante provoking an already volatile situation in a city he did not belong to?
Many groups who want tighter gun control say it was the latter. They are worried that by being cleared of the charges, Mr Rittenhouse’s case now sets a precedent – that anyone can turn up to angry protests with a gun, but without facing any consequences.”
What can this case teach us about systems of oppression which shape some of us into monsters with which to enforce unequal power and terrorize the rest of us into submission to authority? As written by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, in an article entitled Kyle Rittenhouse, Kenosha, and the Sheepdog Mentality:
Rittenhouse appears to live in a fantasy world where police and car dealerships are more endangered than unarmed Black men, and where he is a warrior; ““I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried out by six.” Most gun owners have heard that nugget of homicidal wisdom, often from the person who sold them their guns. In other words: Better to attend your own trial by jury for killing someone than your own funeral for hesitating and being killed instead.
The final count on Tuesday night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was 12 and 12: a dozen pallbearers for two homicide victims, and 12 yet-to-be-impaneled jurors for Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who allegedly shot them with his AR-15-style rifle. The footage of their killings is grainy and sickening. It shows, amid general mayhem and gunfire, a man who appears to shoot another with a rifle, then say into a cellphone, “I just killed somebody.” Later that same man is pursued by a mob down the center of a street. They catch up with him, he falls to the ground, and one strikes him with a skateboard. From a supine position the gunman shoots two people, one fatally. The other, blasted in the right arm, had been running at the killer with a pistol drawn.
I have seen many videos like this, and not long ago I profiled John Correia, a YouTube gun-world celebrity who has seen more videos of gun violence than perhaps any other human being who has ever lived. On YouTube and other social media, the gun channels are filled with real-life videos of violence—think Cops, with all the boring parts edited out and most of the violent parts unblurred. I could say that these scenes never cease to sicken, but the truth is that one gets used to them after a while. Rittenhouse, who was arrested yesterday, was reportedly a gun enthusiast and active on social media in support of Blue Lives Matter. I don’t know whether Rittenhouse spent his free time watching people pulling guns on one another, but I know from experience that these videos are hugely popular in the gun world that he was part of, and if you watch one, you probably watch hours of them.
The availability of these videos is perhaps the biggest change in gun culture in our lifetimes, and one of the results is mayhem like this. The shift has suddenly made violence against humans (as opposed to animals) imaginable—whereas in the past, most people could live their whole life without witnessing or taking part in a gunfight. The videos emphasize the bad things that can happen to you if your draw time is too slow, or your magazine too small. Now one can watch videos and imagine oneself not stalking a deer but defending others, in improbable heroic scenarios once limited to action movies.
That is the fantasy that seemed to have motivated Rittenhouse’s trip to Kenosha. He was interviewed hours before the shooting by The Daily Caller’s Richie McGinniss. He explained his presence in Kenosha by saying that “people are getting injured, and our job is to protect this business.” He looks preposterously young for this role, not like some ’roid-crazed militiaman but like a kid who has somehow guessed that the code to his father’s gun locker is his own birthday. Rittenhouse has been called a “white supremacist,” but none of his comments during interviews at the scene mention race. (Other comments may surface later, and his social-media accounts reportedly show plenty of sympathy for cops, and none for the protesters.) Instead his comments mention what is by far the most common topic in gun-enthusiast channels, which is what to do to preserve life and property using guns.
Before the advent of these videos, to be a concealed carrier meant entering uncharted cognitive territory. If you have never walked around with a gun in your pocket, you probably have poor intuitions about how it feels—the power; the discomfort of having a hunk of metal or plastic impeding your gait and mobility; most of all, the sense of responsibility. The writer Dan Baum strapped on a .38 in the course of researching a 2013 book on gun culture and described the experience well:
Everything around me appeared brilliantly sharp, the colors extra rich, the contrasts shockingly stark. I could hear footsteps on the pavement two blocks away … It made me more organized. Wearing the gun, I was Mr. Together. There was no room for screwing up when I was equipped to kill.
Baum would avoid trouble, because he didn’t want to be anywhere near a fistfight, unstable people, or anything that might raise the possibility that he would fire his gun. The feeling of empowerment comes with a wearying imperative of caution: You do not seek out danger, and instead you live the most boring life possible, to avoid using the murder machine you have for some reason decided to attach awkwardly to your midsection.
What distinguishes Baum, who crossed the street to avoid violence, from Rittenhouse, who carried openly and crossed state lines to find violence? One is a seersucker-wearing, middle-aged journalist, and the other is an adolescent. The other salient difference, though, is that at 17, Rittenhouse has never known a world where owning a gun did not go along with what is sometimes known as the “sheepdog mentality”—the belief that your gun exists to protect others, and that you should rush in to perform that duty. Many of the gun videos you find online emphasize exactly this, to an audience of men.
The channels are not sinister in themselves. Correia combines old-fashioned moralism—including regular reminders that you are accountable to Jesus and the law for every round you fire, and that acts of brutality toward the vulnerable are among the worst you can commit—with extreme violence. I came away from a day with Correia thinking that the world is probably a safer place because he is packing heat.
But the videos themselves are insidious. Most people in the United States, allowing for wild variation in race, class, and education, are victims of violence only very rarely. Watching the videos, however, invites you to simulate violence at an extraordinary rate, much higher than we are mentally equipped to manage. (Correia himself has seen tens of thousands of them, and he posts a new one to his channel about once or twice a day.) The effect of these videos is to habituate viewers to that violence, to train them to imagine themselves in it. Training yourself to imagine something makes it seem more likely to happen, and primes your instincts to react to it—and, I suspect, initiate that violent reaction and overdo it when circumstances could be resolved more peacefully.
Rittenhouse appears to have been living in a fantasy world where police and car dealerships are more endangered than unarmed Black men in traffic stops, and where he was a warrior and self-defender, rather than a youngster who foolishly enrolled himself in a midwestern version of the Children’s Crusade. I can only imagine his fear when he saw the crowd coming for him—and the crowd’s fear, when it saw that a near-child was wildly firing a rifle better suited to a person with judgment and good training. I do not expect that the jury will be forgiving.”
As written by Peter Sterne in Jacobin, in an article entitled What’s the Difference Between Kyle Rittenhouse and the Police? Rather than asking whether law enforcement and vigilantes like Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse support or oppose one another, we can see them as different groups who are both performing the same function — policing society; “e appreciate you guys, we really do.”
That’s what a law enforcement officer said over a loudspeaker as another officer tossed water bottles to a group of armed white men in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday.
One of the young men was Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen-year-old from Illinois armed with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. Hours later, Rittenhouse shot and killed two protesters, Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, and wounded a third.
This isn’t the first time that white vigilantes have violently attacked protesters. According to Alexander Reid Ross, an academic who researches far-right violence, vigilantes have assaulted protesters at least sixty-four times, driven cars into protesters at least thirty-nine times, and shot at protesters at least nine times — and that’s just counting the violence that occurred since May.
Despite the violence, police have not cracked down on right-wing counterprotesters. To the contrary. As Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic has written, police officers have generally provided encouragement to them.
Why are the police so accommodating? One theory is that individual police officers with far-right sympathies have infiltrated otherwise law-abiding police departments. The Guardian recently reported that a former FBI agent had found evidence of white supremacist groups and militias “infiltrating” police forces in at least fourteen different states. This theory assumes that while individual police officers might support vigilantes, the police as a whole do not.
But what if these forces aren’t just infiltrating the police? What if they are the police? Rather than asking whether the police and vigilantes support or oppose one another, we can see them as different groups who are both performing the same function — policing society.
In many countries around the world in the neoliberal era, the official police department no longer has a monopoly on policing. Ordinary citizens arm themselves and volunteer to patrol their neighborhoods, and many police officers are grateful for the assistance. In some ways, it’s a return to an older, less institutionalized model of policing.
“This idea of ‘the police’ as public law enforcement is actually a new idea in the twentieth century,” Jennifer Carlson, a sociology professor at the University of Arizona, told Jacobin. “Policing was [historically] done by groups that were not formalized that were still serving the function of police. We’ve kind of forgotten that, and so I think in some ways we look at these armed groups and there’s a little bit of shock, but it actually is 100 percent in line with American history.”
Carlson has studied the role of guns in American society for over a decade. For her new book Policing the Second Amendment, which will be published on September 15, she interviewed more than seventy police chiefs in Arizona, California, and Michigan to understand how the police view armed citizens.
“The spoiler alert is that through very clear racial tropes, including whiteness, police are generally very much in favor of at least certain kinds of people being armed and even assisting the police,” she said.
According to Carlson, the police have adopted two different approaches to armed citizens — “gun militarism” and “gun populism.”
Under “gun militarism,” the police view gun owners as potential criminals and “bad guys with guns” who pose a dangerous threat to police officers and must be neutralized. This is, generally speaking, the approach that urban police departments take toward black men who own guns. It’s the logic of “stop-and-frisk” and the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.
But under “gun populism,” police see gun owners as potential “good guys with guns,” who can intervene to stop criminals and protect innocent people. This is generally the approach that police officers take toward white men who carry guns, including armed militia members and vigilantes.
To understand why the police appreciate armed vigilantes, it’s necessary to know what motivates those vigilantes to pick up a gun in the first place. Carlson’s first book Citizen–Protectors, published in 2015, examines the cultural and economic factors that motivate men in Metro Detroit to carry guns.
Carlson found that many of the men saw themselves not just as gun owners but as “citizen-protectors.” They cast gun ownership and gun carrying as part of a larger moral discourse about what it means to be a responsible citizen and community member.
“It’s this ideal of good citizenship, this definition of good citizenship, that is centered on the willingness to use lethal force to protect oneself, one’s family, one’s community even, and so it’s re-centering citizenship around both the capacity and the willingness to use lethal force,” she said.
The key thing to understand is that citizen-protectors don’t just believe that they have the right to carry a gun; they believe that they have a responsibility to do so. They see themselves as “good guys with a gun,” the heroes willing to step in and use lethal force to defend the victimized in their community.
This is not a niche view. The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood recently wrote about the popularity of YouTube channels devoted to gun violence, which promote this ideology and related ideas like the “sheepdog mindset.” It’s a term that Carlson has also encountered again and again during her research.
“One of the things that you hear a lot about in gun culture and also in police culture is this idea of the sheepdog, the wolf, and the sheep,” Carlson said.
Carlson sketched out the fable: the wolf is the “the bad guy” (often racialized as the “other”), the sheep is the “innocent one, but the one who can’t actually do anything to defend themselves,” and the sheepdog is the hero who needs to step in and protect the sheep from the wolf.
“The sheepdog is usually either law enforcement or it’s the armed citizen,” Carlson said. “So that’s where sort of this expanded notion of defense or protection comes in.”
Rittenhouse, the seventeen-year-old white man who shot and killed two protesters in Kenosha, certainly subscribed to this moral ideology. That’s clear from his comments during an interview with the right-wing Daily Caller, conducted hours before the shooting.
“People are getting injured and our job is to protect this business,” he said in the interview. “And my job also is to protect people. If someone is hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle. I’ve got to protect myself, obviously. But I also have my med kit.”
To be sure, the idea of community defense is not inherently conservative. There’s a long tradition on the Left of groups arming themselves to protect their communities from racist and state violence. By some definitions, the Black Panthers could be considered “citizen-protectors.” So could anti-fascist groups that aim to protect protesters from white supremacists.
Generally speaking, though, the citizen-protector ideology is associated with the figure of the white man using lethal force against a racialized other who he views as a threat to his way of life. This is a pattern that shows up throughout American history, from the white settlers who murdered indigenous people who lived near their homesteads to the McCloskeys, the St. Louis couple who brandished guns against Black Lives Matter protesters who dared to enter their gated community.
“It sounds all well and good to be like, ‘I’ll defend myself and my family and my community,’” Carlson said. “But the question is, who’s actually part of that community? How do you actually define it? We know from the scholarship and from these high-profile incidents that how communities are defined is often in racial terms and it’s exclusionary. We don’t have inclusive understandings of community, especially when it comes to crime and law enforcement.”
These understandings of community are shaped in specific cultural and economic contexts. For many of the men who Carlson interviewed in Metro Detroit, the context was one of decline. The shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy had left these men economically and culturally dislocated. The loss of stable, unionized blue-collar jobs precipitated a larger cultural crisis for men who believed their moral worth was tied to their ability to provide for their families. No longer able to be providers, they shifted to a new role as protectors, crafting a new ideal of masculinity focused on using guns to protect one’s community.
“Guns have entered in as one of those tools, as a way to show that you are a good man,” Carlson said. “You are performing a form of what we could call ‘hardened care work.’ You may not be able to provide, or you may not be the sole provider, but you can at least protect your family.”
Specifically, these citizen-protectors want to protect their families and communities from crime, especially urban crime committed by black men. These racialized fears of crime do not just come out of thin air; they are closely linked to the experience of economic decline.
“Economic decline is imagined in terms of, my community is in decline, so there’s going to be more crime,” Carlson explained. “And there were a variety of ways in which that — in my research which focuses on Metro Detroit — intersected with racialized and racist tropes about people coming from Detroit to victimize suburbanites and what have you.”
The nightmare vision isn’t just that black people from the inner city will victimize white suburban homeowners, but that the police will not be able to protect the white people.
“The trope is that the police will just come there to deal with what the aftermath is and write up the paperwork, but that police cannot be there to actually prevent a crime from happening,” Carlson said.
Such fears of state abandonment can take many forms. Perhaps the concern is that declining tax revenues have led to police layoffs, resulting in longer 911 response call times (as was the case in Metro Detroit). Or maybe it’s due to right-wing propaganda about how Democrats have ordered the police not to arrest criminals. Either way, the worry is that police won’t be there when they’re needed.
There’s one important difference between the citizen-protectors that Carlson interviewed in Metro Detroit and many of the armed white vigilantes who have attacked protesters, and that’s geographic scale. The citizen-protectors see themselves as protectors of the neighborhoods that they actually live in. But the vigilantes travel all over the country to “protect” random cities.
Still, both citizen-protectors and vigilantes subscribe to similar ideas about state abandonment. In the aftermath of the Kenosha shooting, right-wing commentators turned to these ideas of state abandonment to justify white vigilantes’ presence in Kenosha. Fox News host Tucker Carlson delivered a particularly reactionary version of this argument during his Wednesday evening broadcast:
Kenosha has devolved into anarchy because the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it. People in charge from the governor of Wisconsin on down refused to enforce the law. They stood back and they watched Kenosha burn. So are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder? How shocked are we that seventeen-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?
Tucker says that the politicians refused to enforce “the law” so Rittenhouse had to maintain “order.” The slippage between law and order isn’t an accident. While citizen-protectors will often say that they are enforcing “the law” or “law and order,” they do not literally mean that they are enforcing specific criminal statutes. They are not consulting their state’s penal codes before shooting people they find suspicious. They’re enforcing a specific social order.
“That’s the key,” she said. “It’s not so much enforcing the law. It could be law to the extent that vision of social order intersects with law. But I think social order is really what’s being enforced, and a moral order. So not just a social order but a moral order about what are the consequences of certain actions in public space? That’s certainly what is going on with the whole apparatus of gun carry.”
The white men who view themselves as citizen-protectors have an intuitive understanding of what “the law” should be. It’s a specific social and moral order rooted in notions of private property and white supremacy. It feels like the law, whether or not it matches what’s actually on the statute books.
It might be tempting to say that this marks a bright line between the citizen-protector and the police. In the liberal imagination, the police is a morally legitimate actor because they swear to enforce the law, which is authored by democratically elected representatives. Vigilantes are morally illegitimate actors, since they are loyal to their own arbitrary moral code rather than the law itself.
However, this is really a false dichotomy. For one thing, the social order that citizen-protectors enforce isn’t really that arbitrary. It’s generally based on the same traditions that undergird American society as a whole. That’s why vigilantes often garner sympathy, because people feel they’re behaving morally even if they are technically violating the law.
More importantly, it is simply not the case that the police merely enforce the law as written. Like citizen-protectors, the police are also committed to the protection of a social order rooted in private property and white supremacy. In many cases, elements of this social order have been enshrined into law, such that the same conduct that the police view as illegitimate and immoral also happens to be criminal. But police officers will routinely violate laws that conflict with this social order, including laws designed to protect the rights of accused criminals and laws designed to protect protesters’ First Amendment rights.
Back in June, the New Republic’s Alex Pareene summed up the police worldview: “Armed white boys don’t code as a threat to them; ‘anarchists’ and angry black people do (even if the protesters are the ones at least attempting to engage in constitutionally protected behavior, while the roving white gangs are flagrantly violating the law).”
Rittenhouse is exactly the kind of armed vigilante who the police would not regard as a threat. He was clearly on their side — an outspoken supporter of the police who frequently posted “Blue Lives Matter” memes on social media and once previously participated in a police cadet program for high schoolers. He didn’t want to upend the social order that police are committed to defending. He wanted to help them defend it.
The upshot is that both citizen-protectors and police officers are engaged in the same project — the use of force to further certain existing social and economic arrangements.
This doesn’t mean that the police and citizen-protectors always cooperate with one another, though they often do. Police officers, militia groups, and individual armed vigilantes may disagree on the precise contours of the social order and the specific penalties that are justified for violating it. As an institution, the police at least nominally answer to democratically elected leaders. When individual vigilantes go “too far” in enforcing the social order, engaging in flagrant acts of violence that even the police cannot justify, they can lose their legitimacy in the eyes of the police and become subject to arrest.
But for structural reasons, citizen-protectors and the police have a natural affinity for one another. Even when the police and the militia are not working together directly, they are each working toward a common purpose — namely, the defense of the social order.
This may help explain how Kenosha’s law enforcement institutions reacted to the presence of white vigilante groups at the protests.
During a press conference after the shooting, Kenosha County sheriff David Beth said that he had been asked to formally deputize militia groups to patrol the Kenosha protests but that he refused to do so.
The sheriff went on to say that the reason he wouldn’t deputize militias was because then they would “fall under my guidance and my supervisors, and they are a liability to me and the county and the state of Wisconsin. The incident that happened last night where two people lost their lives were part of this group that wanted me to deputize them. That would have been . . . one deputy sheriff who killed two people.”
In other words, Beth is concerned about integrating vigilantes into the formal law enforcement apparatus because he does not want to be liable for their actions. That’s a tactical concern, not a moral one.
Kenosha Police Department chief Daniel Miskinis sounded a similar note during the same press conference.
“Across this nation there have been armed civilians who have come out to exercise their constitutional right and to potentially protect property,” he said. “Am I aware that groups exist? Yes, but they weren’t invited to come.”
It’s another instance of the police distancing themselves from vigilantes while still affirming their fundamental moral legitimacy. The police might not want to deputize vigilantes, but they don’t mind if the vigilantes decide of their own accord to come and provide assistance.
Compare that to the way that the police treat anti-fascist protesters. On the same day that Miskinis spoke at that press conference, Kenosha police arrested at gunpoint a group of anti-fascist volunteers at a gas station. The volunteers were part of “Riot Kitchen,” a collective based in Seattle that cooks and delivers food to protesters around the country. Legally speaking, the Riot Kitchen volunteers had just as much right to be in Kenosha as the white vigilantes. But in the moral universe of the police, the Riot Kitchen volunteers are illegitimate while the white vigilantes are legitimate.
Ultimately, police coordination with armed white civilian vigilantes is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
It’s not enough to focus our attention on neo-Nazis who want to start a race war or vigilantes who are motivated purely by racial animus. We have to confront the much larger group of white men, both in the formal police force and in informal militias, who believe in using lethal force to defend the status quo.
“They’re defending something bigger than themselves, which is why it’s so appealing,” Carlson said. “That’s why white supremacy isn’t about ‘bad apples’ or individuals. It’s an ideology. It’s a culture. It’s a movement and a thread in the fabric of American society.”
How Kyle Rittenhouse and Joseph Rosenbaum’s paths crossed in a fatal encounter | Visual Forensics
Kyle Rittenhouse case: Why it so divides the US/ BBC
In Ukraine, to live is to be victorious; Unconquered in the face of horrors and the ruthless brutal conquest by an enemy who does not regard us as fellow human beings and wages a campaign of terror, genocide, and erasure against a whole people.
We celebrate on this day the independence of Ukraine from Russia, but also the liberty and independence of all humankind, and the solidarity of all who stand together to resist oppression.
The glorious defiance and unity of purpose of Ukraine has reminded us all of a great truth; of the precarious, ephemeral, transitory, and fragile nature of our existence as imposed conditions of struggle to become human together.
We are become a precariat of all humankind under threat of nuclear annihilation, and as this theatre of World War Three threatens to engulf the whole of Europe in a total war of destruction and civilizational collapse, any who believed themselves safe must reconsider the human condition and what it means, for only solidarity of the international community and of peoples as a United Humankind, a free society of equals and our universal human rights, can stand against the darkness of the global Fourth Reich which threatens to devour and enslave us.
For a vision of our future and our world should our solidarity and duty of care for others fail us, we need only look to Mariupol.
To quote the lines of Winston Churchill in the magnificent film Darkest Hour, which the historical figure never said; “You can not reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
Why is it important to resist our dehumanization and those who would enslave us, and to reply to the terror of our nothingness with refusal to submit and solidarity with others, regardless of where or when such existential threats arise, who is under threat or any divisions of identitarian politics weaponized by conquerors to isolate their victims from help?
As I wrote in my post of April 20 2022, What is the Meaning of Mariupol? Address to the Volunteers in Warsaw; As we gather and prepare to take the fight to the enemy in direct action against the regime of Russia itself, against Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs and elites who sit at the helm of power and are now complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity both in Ukraine and her province of Crimea in the imperial conquest of a sovereign and independent nation and in Russia in the subjugation of their own citizens, and in the other theatres of this the Third World War, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and in the capture of the American state in the Stolen Election of 2016 which put Putin’s treasonous and dishonorable agent and proxy Donald Trump, Our Clown of Terror, in the White House to oversee the infiltration and subversion of democracy by the Fourth Reich, we are confronted with countless horrific examples of the future that awaits us at the hands of Putin’s regime, and we have chosen Resistance as the only alternative to slavery and death.
As we bring a Reckoning for tyranny, terror, and the horrors of war, in the crimes against humanity by Russia in Ukraine which include executions, torture, organized mass rape and the trafficking of abducted civilians, the capture of civilian hostages and use of forced labor, cannibalism using mobile factories to produce military rations, genocidal attacks, erasure of evidence of war crimes using mobile crematoriums which indicates official planning as part of the campaign of terror and proof that the countless crimes against humanity of this war are not aberrations but by design and at the orders of Putin and his commanders, threats of nuclear annihilation against European nations sending humanitarian aid, and the mass destruction of cities, we are become a court of last appeal in the defense of our universal human rights and of our humanity itself.
The Russian strategy of conquest opens with sustained and relentless bombardment and destruction of hospitals, bomb shelters, stores of food, power systems, water supply, corridors of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of refugees; anything which could help citizens survive a siege. Once nothing is left standing, a campaign of terror as organized mass rape, torture, cannibalism, and looting begins, and any survivors enslaved or executed. This is a war of genocide and erasure, and to fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
In this war which is now upon us, Putin’s goal is to restore the Russian Empire in the conquest of the Ukraine and the Black Sea as a launchpad for the conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; but he has a parallel and far more dangerous purpose in the abrogation of international law and our universal human rights. The true purpose of the Fourth Reich and its puppetmaster Vladimir Putin in this war is to make meaningless the idea of human rights.
This is a war of tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil against democracy and a free society of equals, for the idea that we all of us have meaning and value which is uniquely ours and against enslavement and the theft of our souls.
Within the limits of our form, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, we struggle to achieve the human; ours is a revolution of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase meaning repair of the world which refers to our interdependence and duty of care for each other as equals who share a common humanity.
I’m sure all of us here know what Shlomo Bardin meant when he repurposed the phrase from the Kabbalah of Luria and the Midrash, but what do I mean by this?
There are only two kinds of actions which we human beings are able to perform; those which affirm and exalt us, and those which degrade and dehumanize us.
We live at a crossroads of history which may define the fate of our civilization and the future possibilities of becoming human, in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and between solidarity and division, and we must each of us choose who we wish to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
As you know, my friends and I come to you from the Siege of Mariupol, a battle of flesh against unanswerable force and horror, of solidarity against division, of love against hate, and of hope against fear.
Here, as in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which we celebrated yesterday, the human will to freedom is tested by an enemy who exults in the embrace of the monstrous, whose policies and designs of war as terror gladly and with the open arrogance of power instrumentalize utter destruction and genocide, a war wherein atrocities and depravities are unleashed as tactics of shock and awe with intent of subjugation through learned helplessness and overwhelming and generalized fear.
In Mariupol now as in Warsaw then, we affirm and renew our humanity in refusal to submit or to abandon our duty of care for each other. The Defenders of Mariupol who have sworn to die together and have refused many demands for surrender make their glorious Last Stand not as a gesture of defiance to a conqueror and tyrant, or to hold the port to slow and impede the Russian campaign in the Donbas now ongoing and prevent the seizure of the whole seaboard and control of the Black Sea, though these are pivotal to the liberation of Ukraine, but to protect the hundreds, possibly thousands, of refugees who now shelter in the tunnels of the underground fortress at the Azovstal and Ilyin Steel and Iron Works, especially the many children in makeshift hospitals who cannot be moved.
This is the meaning of Mariupol; we stand together and remain human, regardless of the cost. This is what it means to be human, how it is achieved, and why solidarity is important. Among our values, our duty of care for others is paramount, because it is instrumental to everything else, and all else is contingent on this.
To paraphrase America’s Pledge of Allegiance not as an oath to a nation but as the declaration of a United Humankind; We, the People of Earth, pledge ourselves to each other, as one humankind, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
This brings us to my purpose in speaking to you today, for one of you has asked a question which is central to our mission of the Liberation of Russia and Ukraine, and to the solidarity of the international community in this our cause; how can ordinary people like ourselves hope for victory over the unanswerable force and overwhelming power of tyranny, terror, and war?
There are two parallel and interdependent strategies of Resistance in asymmetrical warfare; the first and most important is to redefine the terms of victory. This is because we are mortal, and the limits of our form impose conditions of struggle; we must be like Jacob wrestling the angel, not to conquer this thing of immense power but to escape being conquered by it. We can be killed, imprisoned, tortured; but we cannot be defeated or conquered if we but refuse to submit.
Power without legitimacy becomes meaningless, and authority crumbles when met with disbelief. This is why journalism and teaching as sacred callings in pursuit of truth are crucial to democracy, and why the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
What of the use of police in brutal repression by carceral states? The social use of force is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disobedience. When the police are an army of Occupation and the repression of dissent, they can be Resisted on those terms; my point here is simply that victory against unanswerable force consists of refusal to submit.
Who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled becomes Unconquered and is free. This is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us.
Second is our strategy for survival against an enemy who does not regard us as human, and will use terror to enforce submission through learned helplessness. By any means necessary, as this principle is expressed in the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X.
In Mariupol I began referring to this in its oldest form, war to the knife. Its meaning for us is simple; those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none.
The question to which I speak today in reply intrigued me, because it was nearly identical to a line which sets up one of the greatest fictional military speeches in literature, Miles Vorkosigan’s speech to the Maurilacans in The Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold.
In this story, Miles has just led a mass prisoner of war escape, from a prison which like all fascist tyrannies is fiendishly designed to produce abjection, as described by Julia Kristeva in her famous essay, in circumstances of horror such as those which my friends here and I have just survived, and in which we now find ourselves like the Marilacans having achieved an army, and about to take the fight to the enemy on his own ground.
One of the volunteers says, ”The defenders of Mariupol had those crazy Cossack warriors, swearing an oath to die rather than surrender, professional mercenaries from everywhere, all of them elite forces and utterly fearless. We just can’t fight on those terms; its been seventy years since we fought a total war of survival, and most of us here are professionals and university intellectuals. Poland is civilized, maybe too civilized for what’s coming our way.”
To this I answer with Miles; “Let me tell you about the defenders of Mariupol. Those who sought a glorious death in battle found it early on. This cleared the chain of command of accumulated fools.
The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win and win and win. And for whom nothing, not comfort nor security, not family nor friends nor their immortal souls, was more important than victory.
They were not supermen or more than human. They sweated in confusion and darkness.
And with not one half the resources Poland possesses, Ukraine remains unconquered. When you’re all that stands between liberty and tyranny, freedom and slavery, life and death, between a people and genocide, when you’re human, there is no mustering out.”
To this wonderful speech of a fictional hero who simply refuses to stay down to the fictional survivors of the very real horror of being held captive and powerless by a tyrant, whether as prisoners of war or citizens of an occupied city, I must add this; how if Poland and Ukraine stand together, with all of Europe and America united in Resistance?
And if you are telling me you could not today fight a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, this I do not believe. Nor would you do so alone, for during this Passover as the Jewish community remembers the story of the Exile, the world also remembers; we watch it in our news every day, enacted once again in Ukraine. This, too, is a Haggadah, in which all of humankind can share, and which yet again teaches us the necessity of our interdependence and solidarity.
As written by Alan Moore in V For Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
Here is a truth to which all of us here today can bear witness.
But there is a thing which tyrants never learn; the use of force and violence obeys the Third Law of Motion, and creates resistance as its own counterforce. And when the brutality and crimes against humanity of that force and violence are performed upon the stage of the world, visible to all and a history which cannot be erased, part of the story of every human being from now until the end of our species, repression finds answer in reckoning as we awaken to our interdependence and the necessity of our solidarity and duty of care for each other.
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet on that fateful day in 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, after we refused to surrender; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
An unusual fellow, but behind the concealment of his literary notoriety he remained the Legionnaire he had once been, and after spying on the Nazis in Berlin in 1939 had returned to Paris to make mischief for her unwelcome guests, and there in 1940 repurposed the oath of the Foreign Legion for what allies he could gather. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole.
My hope is that I have lived and written at the beginning of the story of humankind, and not at its end.
What is the meaning of Mariupol?
Here we may look to its precedents as Last Stands, battles, and sieges; Thermopylae, Malta, Washington crossing the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton, Gallipoli, Stalingrad, and its direct parallel the Siege of Sarajevo. Moments of decision wherein the civilization of humankind hung in the balance, and with it our future possibilities of becoming human.
Who do we want to become, we humans; slaves and tyrants or a free society of equals? And how much of our humanity are we willing to trade for the chance of such futures?
What of ourselves can we not afford to lose, without also losing who we are? How much of our humanity can we claw back from the darkness in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us, and in solidarity with each other?
We must each of us face our own Gate of Fire, as did the Spartans at Thermopylae, and choose.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, plunder, and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
Let us reply with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War and the conflict of dominion which immediately followed it between tyranny and democracy, first against fascism and then between the allies who defeated it as spheres of dominion and systems of economic and political organization but both for different dreams of a free society of equals, in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
Join us.
As President Biden wrote in his 2023 Statement on Ukraine Independence Day; “ Today, the people of Ukraine are once more marking their Independence Day, while suffering the all-out assault of Putin’s craven war for land and power. For eighteen months, Ukrainian families have lived under the daily threat of Russian rockets and the reality of brutal attacks. But the people of Ukraine have refused to break.
On this Independence Day, as they have since Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, brave Ukrainian women and men are defending Ukraine from assaults on fundamental principles essential to every nation on the planet – sovereignty and territorial integrity. They are showing the world once more that freedom is worth fighting for.
Independence means the freedom to choose your own future. It’s precious. Each year on July 4th, Americans celebrate our Independence Day as a time to remember the price we paid for our freedom and all the blessings that flow from it. So today, as Putin continues his brutal war to erase Ukraine’s independence and redraw the map of our world by force, Americans all across the country stand united with the people of Ukraine.
The United States will continue our work, together with partners all around the world, to support Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s aggression, to uphold the foundational principles of the UN Charter, and to help the Ukrainian people build the secure, prosperous, and independent future they deserve.
Our commitment to Ukraine’s independence is unwavering and enduring. That’s why the United States and other G7 nations issued a joint declaration in Lithuania last month pledging to help Ukraine maintain armed forces capable of deterring Russian aggression in years to come, a declaration which over 25 nations have now joined. Together with our partners in Europe, we are supporting Ukraine in their fight for freedom now and we will help them over the long term.
We are also working with nations everywhere to hold Russian forces accountable for the war crimes and other atrocities they have committed in Ukraine. That includes the forcible removal of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia. These children have been stolen from their parents and kept apart from their families. It’s unconscionable. And today, we are announcing new sanctions to hold those responsible for these forced transfers and deportations to account, and to demand that Ukrainian children be returned to their families.
I sincerely hope that next year, Ukrainians will be able to celebrate their Independence Day in peace and safety, knowing how their extraordinary courage inspired the world. May Ukraine’s Independence Day be a reminder that the forces of darkness and dominion will never extinguish the flame of liberty that lives in the heart of free people everywhere.”
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2022, One Hundred Days of the Invasion of Ukraine; For one hundred days now, a great struggle between democracy and tyranny, love and hate, hope and fear has been raging in Ukraine, where the fate of humankind hangs in the balance and our future possibilities of becoming human are being chosen in the great game of chance that is war.
Here, as in far too many times and places, a few unconquerable heroes and those who stand with them in solidarity as a band of brothers against the darkness of barbarian atavisms of brute fear and force and a nihilistic regime wherein only power has meaning and fear is the only means of exchange, die in the forlorn hope of buying with their lives time for civilization to awaken to the threat of fascist tyranny and imperial conquest.
How will we answer the test of our humanity in this moment of existential threat? Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a world of masters and slaves?
For these are the stakes of this game in which we now play, the Third World War; liberty or tyranny.
When those who would enslave us come for us, as they always do, let them find not a people subjugated by learned helplessness nor divided by hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, but a United Humankind unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
Herein is my witness of history and truth telling in this, the First General History of World War Three. As with all things human, it is also fiction except when it is not, myth when it can be, poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and of our limitless future possibilities of becoming human.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Herein I offer apology for my digressive ars poetica; once I sailed on the Lake of Dreams, was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision; and in such visions I fell into a sea of words, images, songs, histories, layered and interconnected with one another like a web of reflections and the echoes of voices lost in time, a wilderness of mirrors which capture and distort and extend ourselves infinitely in all directions.
Here is a shadow self of our histories which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tale, legacies from which we must emerge to create ourselves anew and those which we cannot abandon without losing who we are.
Here my intertexts are manifest, seize and shake me with tumultuous voices and untrustworthy purposes, for where do our histories end and we begin?
We cannot escape each other, my shadows and I.
War transforms the question of our authorship of ourselves with existential primacy; where do we ourselves end, and others begin? How may we negotiate this boundary of the Forbidden and interface with alien realms of human being, meaning, and value, with division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness or with solidarity, diversity, and inclusion, with fear or with love?
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
There are no Ukrainians, no Russians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
As written by Nataliya Gumenyuk in The Guardian, in an article entitled Ukraine’s independence day was always important. Now it is a matter of life and death. In Kyiv, we are marking the day under the constant threat of Russian attack – and facing a watershed in the course of the war; “A year ago on 24 August – the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence – a new generation of pilots were leading the Ukrainian air forces flying over Independence Square in Kyiv. The fighter jet column was headed by Anton Lystopad, who was recognised as one of the country’s best pilots. He was 30 years old, born in the year of independence. Almost a year later, in August 2022, Lystopad received the Order for Courage from the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. A few days after the ceremony, he was killed in combat.
Lystopad’s story may sound almost too symbolic, but Ukrainians have become used to such tragic symbolism. Six months on from the start of the Russian invasion, with its indiscriminate bombardment of peaceful towns, the atrocities and horrors of Bucha and Mariupol, but also the solidarity, resilience and sacrifices we have experienced, everything feels sharper and deeper. The bitterness of losses and the joy of survival.
Even before the full-scale war, for Ukrainians, Independence Day was the most important holiday of the year, the brightest day, when we thought not about the death of tyranny and the Soviet empire, but the rebirth of the state and of freedom. Amid the war, a military parade in the capital is not an option – soldiers and equipment must be on the frontline. A civilian gathering may put people in danger. There are concerns that Vladimir Putin’s airstrikes will punish those celebrating something he wants to destroy. But doing nothing would feel like a defeat. Not letting Russia destroy our usual way of life is a form of protest. The installation of destroyed Russian military equipment along Kyiv’s main street, Khreshchatyk, has been applauded by many. It offers an ironic commentary: on 24 February, Moscow wanted its armoured vehicles trundling into central Kyiv.
After Russia’s defeats in Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy, and later its slow advance in the Donbas, the Kremlin changed its strategy. Instead of battles, Moscow makes random missile strikes on peaceful towns such as Kremenchuk in June, where 21 people were killed in a shopping mall, and Vinnytsia in July, where 27 lost their lives.
Many of us have got used to air-raid sirens; some have even stopped hiding in basements. But this possibility of attack at any place or any moment is cruel. It remains invisible to foreign visitors, who are often surprised by how normal life in Kyiv or Chernihiv has become.
Yet we still hope Independence Day will be a perfect sunny day. The start of a new season, when many return after a summer break. Many Ukrainian women and children will return home from their refuges abroad. For some, the financial means to be out of the country are exhausted, while others just want to go back to their homes. Unless, of course, they are places under occupation such as Mariupol or Severodonetsk.
I used to have my concerns about military parades and public demonstrations of military pride. But not today. I am no longer worried about a burst of militarism. Those on the frontline dream about returning to their families and careers. Their service reminds me more of the duty of firefighters or rescue workers.
Half a year has turned out to be enough to understand the war: to see its ugliness, but also its banality. It is not a force of nature, and it’s not inevitable. Victory depends not just on heroism or might, but on strategy and the capacity to use resources wisely.
Independence Day also feels like a watershed: we need to consider what has happened and what to expect next. Major battles will be impossible in winter, so the next three months will be decisive – a chance to counterattack and liberate as many towns as possible before the stalemate starts.
That’s another reason why these days our thoughts are mainly with those who are on the frontline. There will be other days to mourn the fallen. Myself, I think first of a friend – a former publisher of a glitzy lifestyle magazine, with whom I reported on Kharkiv in March, and who was mobilised this summer. Now he commands a paratroop company. He can’t leave his gun even while asleep on his post in Donbas, for fear of saboteurs.
During a recent phone conversation, I asked how his fellow soldiers felt these days. He said that despite many battles and great exhaustion, their determination was strong. Everybody understood what they were doing there: while they held the line, the invaders wouldn’t enter their home towns. Recent attacks on military targets in Crimea have cheered people up – both in the capital and on the frontline.
I also think of the 8,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war. If the Kremlin can’t hurt Ukrainians at home, PoWs may become a target. My thoughts are with two friends captured this summer in the battles in Ukraine’s east, whose stories can also tell the story of the country. The first – I won’t publicise his name for security reasons – has spent the past eight years in conflict resolution talks in the Donbas, talking to his Russian counterparts and to separatists, genuinely hoping for a breakthrough . In vain. Then, after 24 February, he decided to take up arms.
The second, Maksym Butkevych, is a known anti-fascist, a pacifist who believed in nonviolent resistance, a human rights defender who fought against any kind of discrimination and supported people displaced from the Donbas. For this he was labelled “neo-Nazi’ by Kremlin propaganda, and called a spy – because he worked as a journalist for the BBC and UNHCR. Despite his history of pacifism, he came to believe that fighting was the only remaining way to defend human rights when his country was under attack.
We had not heard from him since June, but he recently appeared in a Russian propaganda video of PoWs captured in Luhansk. He looked disturbed and worried, thin, grey, silent. But still this video was welcome – he’s alive. I want another video of him. Archival footage exists of Maksym in 1990, still a pupil, calling for Ukrainian schools to support the student movement for independence. Back then it sounded like a dream, but our experience from the past 30 years, including eight years fighting in the east and six months resisting an invasion, shows that we reach our goals not because we hope but because we work and fight, exhausted but determined.”
Here follows the complete transcript of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech at Sophia Square Kyiv on the 32nd Ukrainian Independence Day: “Dear Ukrainian people! Dear guests of Ukraine, our friends. Dear Presidents! Dear Prime Minister! Representatives of the diplomatic corps!
Today we are all celebrating the 32nd anniversary of Ukraine’s independence. 32 years of uninterrupted independence, which will endure. Which we will not allow to be torn apart. And which Ukrainians will not lose grip on.
Here, in the very center of our capital, there is a lot of evidence of how old the history of Ukrainian statehood is. Unfortunately, there is no less memory of how Ukrainian statehood was lost.
How Ukrainians had to fight for freedom and independence against invaders. How our people always had enough heroism and courage, but sometimes lacked unity. How Ukrainians had to fight against the invaders. How, unfortunately, sometimes the invaders managed to become occupiers. How they destroyed the lives of entire generations of our people. And how Ukrainians fought for their land and freedom for generations. And how they gained their freedom. How they prevailed. How they preserved themselves. Preserved Ukraine. And managed to make Ukrainian independence uninterrupted.
Dear attendees!
Please observe a moment of silence in memory of Ukrainian heroes of different times who fought for the freedom and independence of Ukraine and gave their lives for it.
Thank you.
Dear people! We will not lose grip on Ukrainian independence. We are all united by this feeling.
We remember what the Ukrainian people went through. We see the threats. We are fighting the enemy. And we know what we are capable of. We are capable of winning! And we will prevail! Ukrainian children in Ukrainian squares and streets will celebrate Ukrainian independence in the same way. Our grandchildren will celebrate. And their grandchildren. Together with the friends of our state. With Ukraine’s allies and partners. The ones Ukraine will choose for itself. Always freely. And there will never be any more pauses in Ukrainian history.
We will give Ukraine the strength it needs to always prevail. And we will be tough on anyone who tries to undermine, trade, or weaken Ukraine’s power from within. And there will be appropriate legislative initiatives. In the near future.
We will cherish our unity. When Russia invaded with a full-scale war, there was not a single day that Ukraine lacked unity. And so Russia had no opportunity to use anything against us, against Ukraine. Everything is only for Ukraine now.
The world hears and supports Ukraine. The world’s majority stands with Ukraine and helps. But no matter what happens in the world, Ukraine must be able to defend itself. Always. For a long time, our country did not have the necessary defense production, and now it does. I thank everyone who is developing them today. And we will create more. For a long time, the bravery of our warriors did not have the experience of using the world’s best weapons, and now our state gives Ukrainian warriors such weaponry. And I thank everyone who helps us with it. For a long time, there were attempts to artificially divide Ukraine into camps to make it impossible for our country to join the right alliance. Ukrainian courage deserves to be in the world’s best alliances only. Ukraine deserves to be among the leaders of the world. And it will be! Our country already guarantees common European security. This security is impossible without your strength, Ukrainian warriors. Without the potential of Ukraine. Without the freedom and labor of our entire country, all our people. Without Ukraine, our common European home can only be an unfinished construction project. And I thank every leader who understands this.
This morning in my address on Independence Day, I thanked everyone who makes Ukrainian independence so strong that it is one of the foundations of European independence. I thanked our warriors. Every citizen of Ukraine – everyone for whom citizenship is not just a passport. Those who work for the sake of Ukraine and our people. I thanked our Ukrainian teachers, medical workers, combat medics, volunteers, rescuers, sappers, firefighters, police, and power engineers. All those who support the morale of Ukrainians. Our talents. Everyone who produces weapons for Ukraine. Who provides transportation for Ukraine. Who prays for Ukrainians. Our farmers. Ukrainian businesses that pay taxes and create jobs. Ukrainian strength always lies in people. In adults and children. In everyone. In everyone who cares about Ukraine. About each other. And about independence. And it is impossible to gather all our people in one square to thank them. But today, here, in this square, there are Ukrainians who deserve personal gratitude. And it is an honor for me to present you with the state awards of Ukraine on the occasion of Independence Day.
Dear attendees!
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen!
Ukraine’s partners are here with us today. Gitanas, Mr. President of Lithuania. A powerful friend of Ukraine. A defender of freedom. Jonas, Mr. Prime Minister of Norway. A leader who deserves to be a role model for other heads of state. Mr. President of Portugal. I thank you, Mr. President, for the truly heartfelt warmth with which the Portuguese people sheltered our people at the beginning of the war. Mr. Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. For the first time in Ukraine, but sincerely with Ukraine. East, north, west and south of Europe. Our common home.
Our Europe is indeed united by many things. But the key thing is respect. Respect for people. Respect for freedom. Respect for bravery. And respect for Ukraine.
Congratulations, Ukraine, on your Independence Day!
Glory to Ukraine!”
And how has Ukraine given form in action for this glorious Independence and unconquerable will to be free? As written by Emma Graham-Harrison in The Guardian, in an article entitled Ukraine celebrates independence day with first raid into Crimea: Troops landed in western tip of territory and raised Ukrainian flag before returning home safely; “Ukrainian forces marked the country’s independence day with a naval raid into occupied Crimea, and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy praised Ukrainians for the defiance and courage that has won them global support in the fight with Russia.
The national holiday celebrates Ukraine’s independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991, but this year it also marks 18 months since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion plunged the country into a war for survival.
Ukrainian troops landed on the western tip of Crimea, near the village of Olenivka, in the early hours of Thursday, defence intelligence said in a statement. They fought Russian troops and raised a Ukrainian flag, before all returned safely home.
It was the first time Ukrainian forces are known to have landed in Crimea since Putin ordered his forces over the border last year. They had to evade Russian defences on a long journey across the Black Sea, and then escape again after a skirmish.
A video mostly captured in blurry night vision showed Ukrainian fighters on boats, then attaching the country’s blue and yellow flag to a wooden building.
Kyiv says its path to victory must go through Crimea, illegally occupied by Russia in 2014, and has previously carried out a series of daring long-range and sabotage attacks on targets there. They have hit Russian warships and an airbase, and the Russian-built Kerch bridge, a prestige project linking Crimea to Russia.
With a counteroffensive against Russian troops occupying southern and eastern Ukraine only creeping forward, Kyiv appears to be looking for other ways to put pressure on Putin and his military.
This week drones destroyed a supersonic bomber jet at an airbase deep inside Russia and twice stopped flights in and out of Moscow, though Ukraine has not directly claimed responsibility for these operations. A Russian helicopter also recently landed in Ukraine, after the pilot was lured to defect.
Russian attacks continued across Ukraine, which was on high alert. At least 10 people were wounded in a missile strike on Dnipro, an important river port, with three hospitalised. Shelling in Kherson city injured a seven-year-old girl, officials said.
To mark independence day, Zelenskiy addressed a small audience in the square outside St Sophia’s cathedral. He also released a video filmed in front of a new mural of a captured soldier whose defiant death made him famous.
In an exchange caught on video and later released online, Oleksandr Matsievsky shouted “Glory to Ukraine” – a popular patriotic slogan – at the Russian soldiers holding him prisoner last year. They immediately gunned him down in response.
Zelenskiy described Ukraine’s resistance, and its successes against Russia as a collective effort to protect Ukrainian territory and its national identity.
“In a big war there are no small deeds, no unnecessary ones,” he said in a 12-minute video that thanked those who had died for Ukraine and their families, those injured in the line of duty, those taken prisoner and those still on the frontline.
He also paid tribute to everyone from farmers and medics to electrical engineers, musicians and sports stars. He included the millions of refugees who have fled the war, thanking refugee families still teaching their children Ukrainian and passing on their Ukrainian identity.
A clip of Matsievsky’s courageous last words ended Zelenskiy’s message: “We have all made it that when one person says ‘glory to Ukraine’, the whole world responds ‘glory to the heroes’.”
Valhalla Calling sung in Ukrainian
2024 Independence Day as Ukraine Invades Russia: Forward to Moscow!
What Ukraine’s incursion into Russia means for the war – video explainer
24 серпня 2024 р. Нездоланна людська воля до свободи: День Незалежності України в тіні війни
Слава Україні!
Тут, у Києві, жити — перемагати; Непереможені перед обличчям жахів і безжального жорстокого завоювання ворогом, який не вважає нас людьми та веде кампанію терору, геноциду та знищення цілого народу.
У цей день ми святкуємо незалежність України від Росії, а також свободу та незалежність усього людства та солідарність усіх, хто разом протистоять гнобленню.
Славна непокора та єдність цілей України нагадали нам усім про велику правду; про ненадійну, ефемерну, швидкоплинну та крихку природу нашого існування як нав’язаних умов боротьби за те, щоб разом стати людьми.
Ми стали прекаріатом усього людства під загрозою ядерного знищення, і оскільки цей театр Третьої світової війни загрожує охопити всю Європу війною повного знищення та цивілізаційного колапсу, кожен, хто вважав себе безпечним, повинен переглянути людський стан і що це означає, адже тільки солідарність міжнародної спільноти та народів як об’єднаного людства, вільного суспільства рівних і наших універсальних прав людини може протистояти темряві глобального Четвертого Рейху, який загрожує пожерти та поневолити нас.
Щоб отримати бачення нашого майбутнього та нашого світу, якщо наша солідарність і обов’язок піклуватися про інших підведуть нас, нам потрібно лише подивитися на Маріуполь.
Процитувати рядки Вінстона Черчилля у чудовому фільмі «Найтемніша година», які історична особа ніколи не вимовляла; «Не можна міркувати з тигром, коли твоя голова в його пащі».
3 червня 2022 Сто днів вторгнення в Україну
Вже сто днів в Україні точиться велика боротьба між демократією і тиранією, любов’ю і ненавистю, надією і страхом, де доля людства висить на волосині і у великій грі обираються наші майбутні можливості стати людьми. випадково це війна.
Тут, як і в надто багато разів і місцях, кілька непереможних героїв і ті, хто солідарно стоять з ними, як група братів, проти темряви варварських атавізмів грубого страху і сили та нігілістичного режиму, в якому тільки влада має сенс і страх. є єдиним засобом обміну, помирають у занедбаній надії купити своїм життям час, щоб цивілізація прокинулася перед загрозою фашистської тиранії та імперського завоювання.
Як ми відповімо на випробування нашої людяності в цей момент екзистенційної загрози? Ким ми хочемо стати, ми людьми? Вільне суспільство рівних чи світ панів і рабів?
Бо це ставки цієї гри, в яку ми зараз граємо, Третьої світової війни; свобода чи тиранія.
Коли ті, хто хоче нас поневолити, приходять за нами, як вони завжди роблять, нехай знайдуть не народ, підкорений вченою безпорадністю, чи розділений ієрархією приналежності та виключаючого інобуття, а об’єднане Людство, непереможне солідарністю і відмовою підкорятися.
Тиранії та фашизму може бути лише одна відповідь; Ніколи знову!
Ось моє свідчення історії та правди в цій першій загальній історії Третьої світової війни. Як і все людське, це також вигадка, за винятком тих випадків, коли це не так, міф, коли це може бути, поетичне бачення і переосмислення і трансформація людського буття, сенсу і цінності та наших безмежних майбутніх можливостей стати людьми.
Хіба ми не ті історії, які розповідаємо про себе, собі та іншим?
Завжди залишається боротьба між масками, які ми робимо для себе, і тими, які роблять для нас інші.
Це перша революція, в якій ми всі повинні боротися; боротьба за володіння собою.
Тут я прошу вибачення за мій відступний ars poetica; одного разу я плив по Озеру Мрій, мене залицяла Краса, але на мене заволоділа Бачення; і в таких видіннях я потрапив у море слів, образів, пісень, історій, шаруватих і взаємопов’язаних один з одним, як мережа відблисків і відлуння втрачених у часі голосів, пустелі дзеркал, які захоплюють, спотворюють і розширюють нас безмежно. у всіх напрямках.
Ось тінь наших історій, яку ми тягнемо за собою, як невидиму рептилійну казку, спадщини, з яких ми повинні вийти, щоб створити себе заново, і ті, які ми не можемо покинути, не втративши того, хто ми є.
Тут проявляються мої інтертексти, захоплюють і стрясають мене бурхливими голосами і ненадійними цілями, бо де закінчуються наші історії і де ми починаємо?
Ми не можемо втекти один від одного, мої тіні і я.
Війна перетворює питання нашого авторства над самими собою на екзистенційну першість; де закінчуються ми самі, а інші починаються? Як ми можемо подолати цю межу Забороненого та зв’язатися з чужорідними сферами людського буття, значення та цінності, з поділом та ієрархією приналежності та виключаючої іншості чи із солідарністю, різноманітністю та включенням, зі страхом чи з любов’ю?
Зрештою, важливо лише те, що ми робимо зі своїм страхом і як використовуємо свою силу.
Немає ні українців, ні росіян; тільки такі люди, як ми самі, і їхній вибір щодо того, як бути разом людьми.
Over hundred years ago this August, the antifascist resistance of Guido Picelli and L’Ardito del Popolo fought a glorious battle for the soul of humankind and the fate of the world against the tide of fascism and Mussolini’s blackshirts in Parma, prelude to the Fascist March on Rome which opened the door to the Holocaust and World War Two, so very like our own January 6 Insurrection which threatens us still with the return of fascism as the Fourth Reich.
Now as then, and in every generation of humankind, we are defined by how we face those who would enslave us and the darkness within ourselves which threatens to consume us, the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world; in solidarity as a band of brothers and a United Humankind, or subjugated through hierarchies and divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, as a free society of equals or with fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
For Antifa and the Resistance the Arditi are an important historical ancestor, but also for all who love Liberty, where ever men hunger to be free.
Here also is a cautionary tale, of the necessity of Solidarity and the dangers of ideological fracture, for the Arditi failed to defeat fascism at its birth for the same reasons Rosa Luxemburg and the Social Democrats of Germany were unable to counter the ascendence of Hitler. This is a lesson we must take to heart and remember in this election as liberty and fascist tyranny play for the soul of America and the fate of the world in the choice between Kamala Harris and Traitor Trump, as factional infighting and ideological fracture threaten to divide and steal the power of the only credible force of resistance to the Fourth Reich and recapture of the state.
There is a time for debate, the reimagination and transformation of policy and our national identity, and for mau-mauing the flak catchers as Tom Wolfe phrased it; now is not that time. Now is the time for All Hands On Deck, Solidarity, and an Indivisible United Front against the fascist capture of the state, because if we do not win this fight, there be no more political debate and change, only the dictatorship of the gun.
This I say to my brothers and sisters in struggle for the liberation of Palestine who may withhold the power of their vote without an official policy statement of the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party making the BDS of Israel, regime change in Israel, support of the US for the trial of Netanyahu and his regime as war criminals, and ending seventy years of arming and funding Israeli terror and imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors part of the question in our election, all policies I support but will not hold a gun to the head of the Restoration of Democracy in America over.
For over forty years I have fought for our universal human rights imperiled in Palestine, and we must win what we can for her people and end our complicity in their genocide, but if America falls we will win neither the liberation of America nor of Palestine from fascist tyranny.
We must first be victorious over the enemy and those who would enslave us, and then use the power we have seized to liberate humankind from fascist tyranny.
When they come for us, as they always have and will, fascists of theocratic state terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and white supremacist terror, let them find not a people divided by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united as guarantors of each other’s humanity as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others; this, this this.
To the instruments of fascist tyranny in the 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.”
Here Endeth the Lesson: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season seven, episode eleven
Italian
23 agosto 2024 Centenario delle Barricate di Parma e della Resistenza Antifascista di Guido Picelli e L’Ardito del Popolo
Oltre cento anni fa, questo agosto, la resistenza antifascista di Guido Picelli e L’Ardito del Popolo ha combattuto una gloriosa battaglia per l’anima dell’umanità e il destino del mondo contro l’ondata del fascismo e delle camicie nere di Mussolini a Parma, preludio della marcia su Roma che ha aperto le porte all’Olocausto e alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale, così molto simile alla nostra insurrezione del 6 gennaio che ci minaccia ancora con il ritorno del fascismo come Quarto Reich.
Ora come allora, e in ogni generazione dell’umanità, siamo definiti da come affrontiamo coloro che ci renderebbero schiavi e l’oscurità dentro di noi che minaccia di consumarci, i difetti della nostra umanità e la fragilità del mondo; solidale come una banda di fratelli e un’Umanità Unita, o soggiogata attraverso gerarchie e divisioni di appartenenza elitaria e alterità escludente, come società libera di uguali o con fascismi di sangue, fede e suolo. Come recita il Giuramento della Resistenza fattomi da Jean Genet a Beirut; “Ci giuriamo reciprocamente lealtà, di resistere e di non cedere, e di non abbandonare i nostri simili”.
Per Antifa e per la Resistenza gli Arditi sono un importante antenato storico, ma anche per tutti coloro che amano la Libertà, dove sempre gli uomini hanno fame di essere liberi.
Ecco anche un ammonimento, della necessità della Solidarietà e dei pericoli della frattura ideologica, poiché gli Arditi non riuscirono a sconfiggere il fascismo alla sua nascita per le stesse ragioni per cui Rosa Luxemburg ei socialdemocratici tedeschi non furono in grado di contrastare l’ascesa di Hitler.
A questa patologia della discontinuità e al terrore del nostro nulla, alla divisione e alla disperazione di fronte alla forza schiacciante, rispondo con Buffy l’ammazzavampiri citando le istruzioni ai sacerdoti nel Book of Common Prayer nell’episodio undici della settima stagione, Showtime , dopo aver attirato un nemico in un’arena da sconfiggere come dimostrazione alle sue reclute; “Non so cosa accadrà dopo. Ma so che sarà proprio così: difficile, doloroso. Ma alla fine, saremo noi. Se tutti faremo le nostre parti, credeteci, saremo quelli rimasti in piedi. Qui finisce la lezione”.
As written in the International Socialism Journal; “In August 1922, just ten weeks before Mussolini seized power, one of the biggest ever confrontations in history took place between fascists and anti-fascists. Led by a Socialist Party MP, Guido Picelli, the local branch of the Arditi del popolo (People’s Shock Troops), a national anti-fascist organisation created in June 1921, had managed to bring together the many different strands of the Italian left.
For six days 20,000 armed blackshirts threw themselves against the working class of the central Italian town of Parma. This was the only city which had so far held out against fascist attacks, primarily due to strong local traditions of unity.
The Arditi del popolo, which had arisen in 1921 due to the initiative of workers from different political backgrounds, in opposition to the wishes of many of the leaders of political and trade union organisations, managed to keep the blackshirts in check for over a year, both in the city and the countryside, through an incessant array of defensive and offensive action.
This movement differed slightly in Parma compared to other areas due to its greater discipline and its technical application of the tactics of armed street fighting. The command structure of the Arditi del popolo had foreseen a huge ‘punitive expedition’ a long time beforehand, and apart from preparing people mentally, also developed a defensive plan and obtained the necessary means to face and repel the enemy. Squad leaders were selected from workers with military experience, and had the task of training other men, while those charged with special services were called upon to keep in contact with soldiers stationed in Parma in order to obtain weapons and ammunition.
The Labour Alliance, created due to the pressure of the masses, called a ‘legalitarian’ national general strike for 31 July 1922. But the central committee of the alliance, under the influence of social democrat leaders, called it off and ordered people back to work as soon as Mussolini threatened reprisals.3 Events then moved very quickly. Overall the Arditi del popolo, without a party which mapped out a political line and revolutionary objectives to be reached, had exhausted its offensive potential in straightforward counter-attacks against the fascists. In Emilia, Veneto, Liguria and Tuscany, where working class resistance had been greatest, a vacuum had been created among workers due to numerous losses. Linking defensive actions became difficult and areas were repeatedly terrorised by the enemy’s armed gangs; the masses were frequently forced to retreat. But fascism’s victory was not yet complete. There was still one place in Emilia that was resisting–Parma.
The first contingents of blackshirts arrived on the night of 1-2 August, in lorries which had come from all over Emilia, Veneto, Tuscany and the Marches. They were armed with brand new rifles, pistols and hand grenades, together with a huge amount of ammunition. They were experienced fighters, tried and tested in the tactics of ‘punitive expeditions’.
They assembled around the station, and the following consuls were at the head of the columns: Arrivabene, Barbiellini, Farinacci, Moschini, Ponzi and Ranieri. The commander-in-chief of the expedition, which quickly rose to a total of 20,000 men, was Italo Balbo.4 Signorile, the police chief of Parma, after having told the local committee of the Labour Alliance that he could do nothing to stop the blackshirts assembling, withdrew his men from the two police stations in the Oltretorrente area, thus giving them a free hand.
As soon as the news spread of the fascists’ arrival, the local leadership of the Arditi del popolo immediately called a meeting with squad leaders and gave them instructions to build barricades, trenches and barbed wire defences using any material available. At dawn, when the order was given to get the guns out and launch the insurrection, working class people took to the streets–as bold as the waters of a river bursting its banks. With their shovels, pickaxes, iron bars, and all sorts of tools, they helped the Arditi del popolo dig up the cobblestones and tram tracks, digging trenches, erecting barricades using carts, benches, timber, iron girders and anything else they could get their hands on. Men and women, old people and young people from all parties and from no party were all there, united in a single iron will–resist and fight.
In just a few hours the working class areas of the city started to look like a major battle zone. This area was divided into four sectors: Nino Bixio and Massimo D’Azeglio in Oltretorrente; Naviglio and Aurelio Saffi in ‘new Parma’. The number of squads in each sector was in direct proportion to its size: 22 in Oltretorrente as a whole, six in Naviglio and four in Aurelio Saffi. Each squad was made up of eight to ten men, and their weaponry was made up of model 1891 rifles, muskets, army pistols, automatic revolvers and SIPE hand grenades. Only half of these men had a rifle or musket. All the entrances to squares, roads and alleyways were blocked by defensive structures, and at spots viewed as being tactically important, positions were reinforced by barbed wire and mines were laid. Church towers were transformed into numbered watchtowers. Throughout these fortified zones power passed into the hands of the Arditi del popolo command, which was made up of a small number of workers which had been elected by the squads earlier. These workers were allocated various responsibilities: defence and organisation, provision of food, and first aid. Shop owners and the middle class sympathised with the rebels, and provided them with food and a variety of other goods.
The fascists opened fire just before 9am. Attacks and counter-attacks continued along the front line throughout the day, without producing any substantial changes in the situation. During the night there was some shooting and minor sorties by enemy detachments, which were identified in the Naviglio through the use of flares.
The following morning Balbo attacked at the head of a detachment of blackshirts from piazzale della Pilota. Crossing Verdi Bridge they attempted to break through the lines of the Arditi del popolo. But as soon as they caught sight of the first barricades they understood the very grave danger they would have faced if they took another step, so they gave up and retreated. Immediately afterwards the fascists opened fire again from the right side of the river; and from open positions tested our lines with angry fusillades in an attempt to break through. But the defenders of the ‘workers’ citadel’, laying on the ground on the left bank and always under some kind of cover, calmly returned fire and took careful aim-frequently managing to hit a very visible enemy.
Simultaneously, in ‘new Parma’ offices of professionals who were known to be socialists were ransacked. But the fiercest attacks took place against the Naviglio area which, due to its shape, was the most difficult to defend. After several hours of fighting this entire sector was almost surrounded–blackshirts advanced in tight formations from via Venti Settembre, determined to score a decisive victory. At that crucial moment only one response was possible–come out and counter-attack. Indeed the Arditi del popolo leapt up from their positions singing Bandiera Rossa, and ran towards the enemy. They were heavily outnumbered and one of them, Giuseppe Mussini, a worker, fell dead.
But they didn’t stop. Their singing grew louder and the bullets flew from the rifles which were burning in their hands. The fascists were shocked to see this handful of heroes, and imagined that there were who knows how many fighters and weapons waiting behind the barricades, in the trenches and inside houses, so they fell back even beyond Barriera Garibaldi.
On the third day things worsened again in the Naviglio area. The fascists blocked all routes through to Oltretorrente, all links were severed. All homing pigeons were quickly used up. Finally, after a lot of difficulty, a female worker managed to get through to the Arditi del popolo command in ‘old Parma’ and deliver a message she had hidden in her hair:
Two more deaths: Ugo Avanzini and Nino Gazzola. Our dispatch rider has been wounded. There is no food, and ammunition is almost exhausted. We urgently need bullets for rifles and revolvers, otherwise we will be forced to retreat to Oltretorrente tonight. We await orders: Sector commander.
The woman returned with as much ammunition as she could carry hidden in her clothes, along with the following reply: ‘Our orders are to hold your ground even if it means dying. We have faith in you. We’ll find a way of gettting you food and ammunition as soon as possible: Workers’ defence command.’
We needed to deny our adversary even the smallest of victories, given that the first symptoms of demoralisation were beginning to show. Orders were obeyed to the letter and we kept our positions. Later on communication was re-established with Naviglio, which received ammunition and wheat taken from the local windmill. Operations also began to improve in the Oltretorrente–the requisition and distribution of food, first aid points, field kitchens, patrols, the relaying of information, and the reinforcement of defensive positions. Women took a very active part in all of this, turning up everywhere to lend a hand and to give encouragement.
In the meantime the authorities had handed power over to the army, which contacted the local committee of the Labour Alliance, ie leaders of the Socialist Party and pro-war and official trade unionists. As these individuals had been unable to openly block the masses’ decision to go to the barricades, so as not to be exposed for what they were, they felt they had been deprived of authority and placed into the background, and therefore agreed to negotiate a compromise, committing themselves to persuade workers to stop their resistance. A socialist lawyer named Pancrazi and police commissioner Di Sero were the link between these individuals and the army commander, General Lodomez.
The outcome of all this manoeuvring emerged on day five when the army, believing that Socialist Party and trade union leaders represented the masses, or at least were able to influence them, sent a battalion of soldiers into Oltretorrente to dismantle the barricades and trenches, and told people that the fascists would withdraw if people disarmed. But here they found a different kind of authority, effectively that of the masses, in the shape of the Arditi del popolo command. Nobody had thought it necessary to speak to them but they couldn’t be ignored.
Here was their reply: ‘The trenches mustn’t be touched, as they are a legitimate means of defence for workers and their communities against 20,000 blackshirts who have come here from all quarters.’
The officers protested, saying that they had their orders, but workers didn’t back down–they had their orders as well! The mood of the soldiers was such that it dissuaded the officers from making a big fuss. After two hours the battalion was withdrawn. Attempts at a compromise had failed, as did this attempt to disarm the workers.
In the early hours of day six we were informed from reliable sources that the fascist leadership had decided to launch a major attack against Oltretorrente at 3pm. Although we were unable to discover their plans in detail, in any event the command believed that the enemy would focus their efforts on a breach to the left of our lines. It was here that we faced the greatest risk of being outflanked–through the park which runs along the built-up area of Oltretorrente, which could be accessed from the ring-road to the north of the city.
One of the general rules of war, and therefore of street fighting, is to never leave the initiative to your enemy. And in a situation in which you discover their intentions and the plan of attack, you must foil them by attacking earlier, forcing them to change their entire strategy through a determined and unexpected action.
Unfortunately we were not able to take the offensive as we did not have enough rifles and ammunition, which had been severely depleted over three days of resistance. It was impossible to get any last minute help from the surrounding countryside, as the fascists had sent patrols into the most notorious areas in order to stop any link-ups with the city.
However, a massive defence plan was agreed using anything available, which would have involved every one of the enemy in all kinds of fighting to the end. After having called a meeting of the squad leaders, the Arditi del popolo command made a rapid inspection of the entire area. The morale of the masses was very high–it almost seemed as if the news of the blackshirts’ imminent attack had fuelled courage and enthusiasm even further. In armed combat, one of the most important elements of success is belief in victory. And it was interesting to observe that everybody had an absolute ‘belief’–no one had the slightest doubt. Bombs were prepared in houses, along with clubs studded with razor blades, knives and nails, as well as acid bombs. A 17 year old girl waved an axe from the windows of her hovel and shouted out to her comrades in the street, ‘If they come I’m ready for them!’ Containers full of petrol were distributed to women because, according to our defence plan, if fascists managed to get into Oltretorrente, fighting would then take place on a house by house, alleyway by alleyway, street by street basis. No quarter would be shown–inflammable material would be thrown at the fascists, and our positions would be burned and totally destroyed.
The Arditi del popolo squads were divided into groups of three or four men and deployed in the following fashion: ten along the river bank covering Caprazuzza, Mezzo and Verdi bridges; twelve along the northern flank–stationed on roofs and attics so as to be able to fire on the park. Every worker who had either a firearm or any kind of offensive weapon was deployed in groups at various points, ready to run to where they were needed. Our lookouts followed all the enemy’s movements very carefully.
The first shots rang out at about 2pm, on the right hand side of the river, and were aimed at Nino Bixio with enfilades at two other areas. A few hours earlier Ulisse Corazza, an artisan and Popular Party councillor (the Catholic party), had presented himself to a squad leader with his own musket, and asked to take part in the fighting alongside the Arditi del popolo. He suffered a serious head wound from a rifle shot, and died a few minutes later. However all of this was intended to deceive the defenders as to the real goals of their plan of attack, as detachments of blackshirts had simultaneously moved on the left of Oltretorrente and had advanced into the park, heading for the city wall. This wasn’t a surprise, as the Arditi del popolo had expected such a move. So fusillades immediately rang out as planned, thus causing the enemy the greatest number of losses possible with the minimum use of ammunition. Although their pressure and aggression were initially very strong, little by little they weakened and a few hours later ceased altogether. The exhortations of their commanders made no difference–it was impossible to advance under the fire of working class snipers. Slowly, using bushes for cover, the blackshirts fell back to their original positions. During the night the fascists limited themselves to a few nuisance shots which had no effect at all.
On the morning of 7 August our observers noticed columns moving from one point of the outskirts to another in a confused and disordered fashion. This was something new; but it wasn’t possible to immediately understand what was about to happen. The following information reached Oltretorrente: ‘The blackshirts are very unhappy about their losses. Orders given by their leaders are not always obeyed. Panic is spreading.’ This disorder began to increase steadily, until it became generalised. The fascists, who were by this stage no longer in military formation, were roaming about in all directions in a great rush–with no command structure–jumping onto trains that were leaving, onto lorries, bicycles, or going on foot. This wasn’t a retreat, but the scattering of large groups of men who clambered aboard any means of transport they found, or who ran through the streets, or into the countryside, as if they were frightened of being chased.
Once the news of the fascists’ departure spread, the working class population on both sides of the river rushed into the streets, some carrying weapons, and improvised huge marches in an indescribable explosion of enthusiasm–red flags were hung from the windows in ‘old Parma’. The news of the working class’s victory spread rapidly in the surrounding area, where terrified local landowners abandoned their houses and ran away towards Cremona, as they had heard that the Arditi del popolo were coming.
The military authorities were worried; they were concerned that as a result of the blackshirts’ defeat the movement could spread out from the city to surrounding areas. This was exactly what the Arditi del popolo command intended, and at that very moment messengers were sent out with an appeal to the working class organisations of Milan and La Spezia. Therefore a state of siege was proclaimed–and the dismantling of trenches and barricades was ordered to be finished by 3pm. The command considered the new situation which the authorities had created, and realised it was materially impossible to stop the army–made up of two local infantry regiments with machine gun and armoured detachments, together with a cavalry regiment and considerable artillery–from gaining control of Oltretorrente, Naviglio and Aurelio Saffi.
At 3.10pm Colonel Simondetti, after firing a blank from one of the two cannons on Mezzo Bridge, advanced with armoured cars, machine guns and soldiers, occupying all the working class areas and ordering his troops to clear the streets.
Balbo’s forces had disintegrated–they were nowhere to be seen. On the fifth day a large-scale ‘punitive expedition’ against the working class of Parma had become a disaster. The blackshirts suffered 39 dead and 150 wounded, while the defenders suffered five dead and several wounded.
Two and a half months later, shortly before the March on Rome, the fascists again discussed the situation in Parma. In his book Diario 1922, published two years ago [1932], Balbo spoke of a meeting which took place in Rome with Mussolini, and of another of the whole Fascist Party leadership:
One of the issues we still need to settle is Parma. This is the last stronghold of anti-national forces, and acts as both a sanctuary and as moral support for Italian subversion. Mussolini agrees with the plan of action I outlined to him… Any action against Parma must precede any move towards an insurrection.
Fascist leaders believed that mobilisation for the March on Rome could have encountered some serious difficulties if working class resistance in a strategic point of Emilia Romagna had not been liquidated beforehand. Yet no second attack against Parma was ever attempted. new developments led to sudden changes–fascism, heavy industry and the monarchy had come to an agreement over the so called March on Rome.5
With hindsight, one can make the following points as regards the events recounted above:
(1) Until this point political and military problems and the theory of civil war had either been undervalued or even totally ignored; yet today we are obliged to treat it as an absolute necessity.
(2) As regards the outcome of this armed revolt, the Italian working class experienced an enormous success with the revolt in Parma–urban fighting won in conditions of great numerical and military inferiority.
(3) Even if the Arditi del popolo had managed to pull the mass of working class people into armed resistance, what was lacking was the preparatory work among soldiers who, given their mood and specific situation, could have been persuaded to show active solidarity with the proletariat. Similarly insufficient and negative were linkages with the surrounding provinces, which broke down in the most difficult moments of the struggle: a co-ordinated peasant movement would have enabled us to have immediately launched an offensive.
(4) The local trade union and social democratic leaders were completely unmasked. Through the use of demagogic language, they hid their real objective of following the needs of the bourgeoisie. While they hypocritically talked about anti-fascism and the masses’ interests, in practice they were betraying these interests by blocking and hampering the spontaneous formation of a united front from below–thus playing into the hands of the fascists. Apart from our technical preparations, the reason behind our success was above all the fact that the working class of Parma had been able to free itself and place its false leaders–the ‘enemy within’ the working class–to one side, thus confronting fascism with its own strongly united forces.
(5) Our party, which was then affected by extremism, failed to understand the nature of the Arditi del popolo and tried to stop our members from individually joining their ranks. In that period the masses were either part of the Arditi del popolo or were their sympathisers. The theories of Bordiga,6 a typical example of a petty bourgeois mentality, had led the party into opportunism and isolation. Through individual communist participation in the Arditi del popolo squads, the party would have been able to influence the whole organisation and to have won the leadership. With detailed preparatory work and membership of reformist trade unions and the army, the party would have been able to direct the movement towards a series of precise objectives, pulling the rest of the masses towards armed insurrection through the Arditi del popolo, stopping the growth of reaction in Italy and changing the course of history.”
As written by Yorgos Mitralias in the website of the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt in an article entitled 100 years ago, in early August 1922, the barricades of Parma repelled Mussolini’s hordes…; “At least during the interwar period, when there was a confrontation between the left and the fascists, it was always the fascists who won. And unfortunately, most of the time without meeting a real resistance. However, there has been one important exception. That of the Italian revolutionary Guido Picelli, who, the first and long before any other, understood what fascism is and what it wants, as well as how it must be fought. This Guido Picelli who beat the fascists when he found them on his way. In Parma of the barricades in 1922. And in the Spain of the civil war in 1937. So, who was and what did he do the man who routed the fascists?…
At the beginning of August 1922, Parma is the only large Italian city that persist in resisting Mussolini’s squadrists, already on their way to power. The general strike proclaimed after the bloody attack of the fascists against the city of Ravenna, ends before it begins, by the union bureaucracies in disarray before the threats of reprisals of the fascists. But the workers and the people of Parma do not obey and go on strike. Mussolini charges his right-hand man Italo Balbo with crushing the rebellious population of this “Proletarian Bastion” that was the city of Parma. At least 10,000-15,000 armed fascists from all over northern and central Italy rushe to the city ready for the final assault and the bloodbath they promise to its defenders.
In Parma, Guido Picelli organizes the defense, assigns precise tasks to each and everyone, and implements a meticulous plan of unprecedented urban guerrilla warfare, with successive rows, trenches, ditches, barricades, barbed wire, electric cables, and even improvised minefields, defended by the population of the working-class neighborhoods and the workers of the city under the direction of the 400 more or less armed Arditi del Popolo, those veterans of World War I, whom Picelli has been preparing for combat for 14 months! Those who had weapons fired bullets or threw grenades. The others, old, young, children and especially women, resist with pickaxes, iron bars, stones, crossbars, bricks, boiling oil and… vitriol.
Taking advantage of the benevolent passivity of the army and the gendarmerie, the fascists attack in successive waves for 5 days, but are always pushed back, leaving dozens of dead and wounded. And while Balbo tries to exorcise the evil by writing in his diary “If Picelli manages to win, the subversives of all Italy will raise their heads again”, the fascists retreat in an indescribable disorder and their leaders decide to put an end to their campaign, accepting their bitter defeat and their humiliation. But, Picelli appeals in vain to the social-democratic, communist and trade union leaders to take advantage of the victory of the antifascists of Parma and to generalize the example of its brave defenders in all Italy. They all turned a deaf ear and turned their backs on him. Three months later, Mussolini became prime minister, fascism came to power for the first time, and began to inspire a host of imitators throughout Europe, including a certain Adolf Hitler. The tragic aftermath is well known…and alas, a century later it has not yet ended!
Picelli assumes, only for one day (!), the command of the “Garibaldi” battalion of Italian antifascist volunteers, and wins the only victory of the antifascists on the front of the defense of Madrid: at the head of his men, he launches a lightning attack, breaks the fascist lines, enters Mirabueno, takes dozens of Franco’s prisoners and liberates a large part of the highway that connects Madrid to Zaragoza. But, three days later, Guido Picelli dies from a bullet… “in the back at heart level”. A bullet fired from a weapon that does not belong to Franco’s fascists.
To Guido Picelli are organized three state funerals, in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona. According to the newspapers of the time, 100,000 people attended the funeral in the capital of Catalonia, including the Soviet consul Barcelona Antonov-Ovseenko, the legendary Bolshevik who led the capture of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution. A year later, the old Bolshevik was shot in Moscow
Picelli and his “Antifascist United Front”
The greatness but also the tragedy of Guido Picelli consist in the fact that, at least at the beginning of the 1920s, he found himself virtually alone to fight against the triumphant fascism. The deep reason for this political solitude was that there was almost no one in Italy, but also everywhere else, able to understand what was, what wanted and what represented the absolute political novelty that was, at that time, Mussolini’s fascism and his movement. Thus, the Italian Socialist Party, showing its legalistic illusions, had the brilliant idea of concluding a Pacification Pact with…Mussolini in 1921(!). As for the young Communist party that had just been born, it preferred to excommunicate the so-called “petty bourgeois” who warned against the fascist danger and fought -often with arms in hand- the squadristi, opting instead for the sectarian isolation and the extreme leftism of its then leader Amadeo Bordiga. The logical outcome of the criminal policies of both the Socialist and the Communist parties was that both of them first distanced themselves from and then denounced the popular anti-fascist militia that the Arditi del Popolo tended to become, which for Picelli was only the embryo of the “Red Revolutionary Army” that he himself wished with all his strength because it corresponded to the needs of the anti-fascist struggle and of the workers’ movement.
The enormous contribution of Guido Picelli to the theory and praxis of antifascism consists, therefore, in the fact that he understood before all the others, what was and what was looking for the Mussolini fascism. That is to say, that fascism had for raison d’etre and also as unique program to destroy -by the most extreme of the violence- all, without the least exception, the organizations of the workers, in order to atomize them so that they cannot resist any more in front of the bosses and the bourgeois State. Here is what he wrote before the “glorious days of Parma”:
“Fascism, although many have believed in it, has neither spiritual content nor program. Mussolini himself, the leader of the bullies, admitted in an article in the”Popolo d’Italia“of March 23, 1921, that fascism”is not a party, it is a movement”. Its only objective is therefore to defend material interests: The well-fed stomachs of the bourgeois, their well-filled wallets and all that they have stolen from the worker, from the poor.
But he has a method: blind, ferocious and barbaric violence. It uses it against the proletarian organizations, against the subversive parties, with the sole aim of subjecting the workers to the will of the bosses, of increasing the working hours and lowering the wages, of destroying the collective contracts and returning to the medieval system of supply and demand, and of transforming once again the peasant into a brute and the worker into a slave”.
Having understood that the hordes of Mussolini’s fascist thugs did not distinguish between the red (communist), white (catholic) and pink (social democratic and republican) political, trade union or cultural organizations of the workers of the cities and the countryside, Picelli drew the only possible political conclusion: Unity of the workers and the victims of fascism, beyond their partisan and other differences! That is, what he himself called “Proletarian United Front”! So, let’s listen to him for one additional reason: because what he says is still relevant today and is not always well assimilated by the left of practically all colors:
“To the united front of the bourgeoisie we must oppose that of the proletariat. Only with unity can we prevail, since it is obvious that we are a force, a force that today does not impose itself only because it is divided into several small groupings in disagreement among themselves.
However, the unity itself is certainly not obtained in the political field, and we cannot pretend that whoever follows a precise line renounces his ideas. No. Let each one remain what he is, faithful to his own principles.
The bourgeoisie does not divide and does not discuss, it kills without mercy. The first commandment of fascism is to kill.
That is why, for the time being, we must leave aside criticism and polemics that do not lead to anything, forget the old rancor, go down to the common ground of defense and act.
Polemics divide us, but the common cause unites us.
Workers of the earth and of the workshops, you who suffer and are pursued, all agree, and unite for the supreme effort!
Unity is strength!
Those who today divide the masses are little men, who want to become someone to have the prestige they do not have. They are egoists and speculators, who put their personal interests above those of the community. They play the game of the adversaries and they are traitors.
The salvation of the proletariat can only be achieved by the development of its own effective forces, by unity.
In private and public meetings, in councils, in congresses, in the media, we must demand unity by all means. Tomorrow it may be too late. Those who occupy positions of responsibility in the organizations and who, because of their harmful and stupid sectarianism, are obstructing the unity of the proletariat, must be replaced. They must retire and return to the ranks as simple militants. We have had enough with personal questions. Reaction is raging, and everywhere people are dying”.
But Guido Picelli was not satisfied with being the first to correctly analyze the nature and characteristics of the fascist “phenomenon”, which was totally unknown until then. He did more than that: as the critical situation did not allow the slightest delay, he hastened to apply his theoretical conclusions. Thus, he gave flesh and blood to his “Proletarian United Front”, appointing as his right-hand man the railway anarchist and vice-commander of the Arditi del Popolo Antonio Cieri, who turned out to be a brilliant strategist both during the “Days of Parma” and 15 years later, in the Spanish Civil War, where he also lost his life.
But Picelli did not only recruit the anarchists. He prepared the ground and made sure that militants of the Socialist, Communist, and Republican parties, and even the Catholics of the Popular Party, the ancestor of the Christian Democracy of the post-war period, would find their place in the front line of his “United Front”! Moreover, many of them died as heroes defending the barricades, as for example the councilman of Parma Ulisse Corraza…
To better understand the enormous importance of Picelli’s implementation of the “United Front”, it is enough to remember an indisputable fact, the harmful consequences of which continue to influence our lives: It is because both the German Socialists and Communists refused to form their own anti-fascist united front, that Hitler was able to take power with the tragic consequences we know: the Second World Butchery, the Shoah, and even the persistent weakness and impotence of the German working class to leave behind its historic defeat of 1933, in order to better defend itself and claim its rights.
In fact, at the time when Picelli realized the “united front” in Parma, there was only one other communist leader who proposed the same thing in his country. It was Rosa Luxembourg’s closest companion and first general secretary of the German Communist Party (KPD) Paul Levi [1]. But, like Picelli, Paul Levi did not have the support of his party, nor even of the Third International, which refused to throw all its (enormous) weight against the Italian and German ultra-sectarians and leftists and in favor of two brilliant but solitary defenders of the “Anti-Fascist United Front”. In the case of Paul Levi, the result was also tragic: consecutive defeats and “lost opportunities” that saw the KPD doing each time what was diametrically opposed to what it should do. That is, insurrections close to putschism when conditions were unfavorable (1921), and refusal to attempt the final assault on power when conditions dictated it (1923)…
It remained for Picelli to draw the final conclusion of his analysis of fascism, that which concerns the practices and means employed to combat the Brown Plague. Given the events that followed and the experiences gained in Germany, Spain and elsewhere to the present day, Picelli’s insight and foresight can only impress even more. Let us listen to him again:
“Fascism can only be fought with direct action and in the streets, because it is only the logical consequence of the class struggle, which, assuming a violent form, turns into a class war.
When fascism appeared, the naïve and those of bad faith told the masses: don’t move, it is a transitory phenomenon, a passing storm. The masses obeyed and remained motionless, and this is how the bourgeoisie was able to continue the armed mobilization of its forces. Fascism declared war and, finding no obstacles, it advanced, occupying and destroying our positions.
The more the proletariat remained motionless, the more it showed itself willing to undergo and bear everything with stoic resignation, the more it bent and the more furious the reaction became. The truncheons and clubs had no scruples. They killed continuously.
Today, we are counting the terrible consequences of the mistakes made by the naïve and those who, in complete bad faith, contributed to creating an unbearable situation in Italy, acting as traitors.
We have always affirmed that fascism, from its birth, must be defeated. Descend into the field of violence, since it was the first to do so, adopt the same methods and fight it until it is rendered harmless.
And instead of that, even those who had been hit were prevented from defending themselves.
When the proletariat, now tired of suffering and seeing itself dispossessed of everything, created that magnificent defense organization, the Arditi del Popolo, the leaders of the Confederations and the leaders of the various reformist political tendencies hastened to disavow what was the spontaneous proletarian movement, determined by the imperious need to save at least one’s life.
What are they waiting for to mobilize everywhere? The Arditi del Popolo, or sons of the people, who form the vanguard patrols of the revolutionary movement, of the red army, are already in contact with the enemy. Now it is up to the bulk of our forces to align themselves and prepare to fight”.
And Guido Picelli concludes his anti-fascist call for resistance and struggle with the following dramatic exhortations:
“Arditi del Popolo, shout your terrible Basta! All of you standing up as one man and ready to rescue! Workers of different political tendencies, stand up all of you against the law of the baton! Long live the United Front! Long live the Proletarian Liberation Army !”
Yet Picelli did not simply issue slogans and exhortations. Nor does he blindly trust the improvisations and spontaneity of the masses, however combative and conscious they may be. He knows very well that all this is not enough to face the well armed and well organized Mussolini’s fascists. That’s why he explains and popularizes the lessons of the victorious fight of Parma, highlighting what he himself calls “proletarian technical-military organization”. Here is what he writes:
“To attack us, the bourgeoisie has not created a party, which would not be sufficient, but an armed organization, its army: fascism. We must do the same. Create our own army in such a way that it allows us to resist and defend ourselves. There is no other way. The haphazard and disjointed defense, done until now, has been useless. To give an example and to prove how only with the support of disciplined forces and concerted actions it is possible to stand up to the adversary, it is enough to think of Parma, which was the only city that was able to repel the fascist troops after five days (…)
But, in Parma, the Arditi del Popolo were formed 14 months ago, militarily organized and disciplined. In Parma there was a whole patient work of moral and material preparation. That’s why, when the fascist army attacked the city, it found itself, for the first time in Italy, facing another organized and directed army, ready to fight in its trenches and behind the barricades.
This is why Parma did not fall in August. This is how it is proved that fascism, when it finds before it a “strong obstacle”, stops and gives way.
Today we are in the middle of a civil war, and this is how the war is fought.
We are a huge but disorganized force. Once organized and disciplined it would become so powerful that it could destroy fascism, not once but a thousand times. That’s what you have to understand.
At the moment, we find ourselves in conditions of inferiority because our front is too divided and narrowed. From the tactical and strategic point of view, we know that the more a front is narrowed, the easier it is for the enemy to concentrate his forces there and to break through. That is why our front must be extended, unified, in order to keep the enemy occupied on a wider line.
We need men with the necessary aptitudes, capable, with an iron will and who, without prejudice of any kind, proceed as quickly as possible, in the big and small cities and in the countryside where possible, to the mentoring of all those who, conscious of the tragic hour and of the historical period that the working class is going through, feel themselves conscious soldiers of the great proletarian cause. Everywhere, according to the possibilities, it is necessary to constitute groups, teams and battalions organically perfect, led by the best elements and in contact with each other by a simple and orderly liaison system.
Only in this way and after the formation of our disciplined and powerful army, we will be able to resist fascism and render it powerless.
Whoever still believes today or wants to make believe that he can find the solution in the simple moral action is either deluding himself or betraying.
Let the Italian proletariat understand the necessity of the red military organization, outside the labor exchanges and the political parties. It is indispensable for the defense and conquest of freedom.
Guido Picelli
L’Ardito del Popolo, Sunday, October 1, 1922
Picelli and the unity of theory and action
What impresses in Guido Picelli’s life is his constant and unwavering search for the Unity of theory and action. And his constant refusal of the fatalism and conservatism that characterizes bureaucracies of all kinds. Undoubtedly, these are the main features of Picelli’s life and action that explain why he has never been mentioned in the last 80 years, why he remains unknown or almost unknown even to those who are very familiar with the history of the workers’ and revolutionary movement of the 20th century. Obviously, bureaucrats know how to take revenge…
Child of the working class districts of Parma and son of a cook, Picelli was destined to become… watchmaker. But he had other projects because from a very young age he loved the arts, and in particular the theater. So he became an actor and traveled around Italy with his itinerant theater companies, when he wasn’t playing in the 2-3 silent films that have come down to us. However, the First World War would radically change his life, as it did the lives of millions of young people in all European countries. Pacifist and anti-militarist as he was, he chose to go to the front as a Red Cross nurse, which did not prevent him from being decorated and promoted to officer.
Having lived through the incredible butchery of this war, Picelli became radicalized like millions of other young people, but he chose to react differently: he entered the military academy to study the art of war and to prepare himself for the coming class confrontations, since he already believed that “Only one war is legitimate and sacred: the war of the exploited against their exploiters”.
At the end of the war, Picelli assumes tasks refused by the organizations of the left, in contrast to the fascists who willingly assume them: first, he organizes the young veterans of war, who are physically and psychically mutilated, prematurely aged at their twenty years, crippled, unemployed, poor and despised. So he created the “Proletarian League of the Crippled, the Disabled, the Veterans, the Orphans and the Widows of War”, which promoted not only mutual aid but also “revolutionary self-defense”. And then, in February 1920, he creates in Parma, his “Red Guards” as an embryo of the “Red Proletarian Army” that he wishes to see the day, supported only by some comrades among which his friend Antonio Gramsci. It is thus with these “ Red Guards ” that Picelli succeeds in blocking in the station of Parma, and after armed confrontations that make wounded, trains full of Italian soldiers leaving for Albania to serve the imperialist and colonial politics of Italy.
Very popular among the people of Parma, Picelli is elected deputy with the Socialist Party but very quickly passes to the Communist Party with which he is again plebiscited. He is 33 years old when he defeats the fascists in Parma, and during the few years that follow until the total prohibition of the parliamentary system by the fascist regime (1926), Picelli escapes-sometimes miraculously- from many assassination attempts, even inside the Parliament! He is arrested and imprisoned several times although he is a deputy of the PCI, he travells all over Italy trying to reorganize the party in difficulty, and continues his efforts to create armed anti-fascist groups. And on May 1, 1924, to protest against the banning of the International Labor Day by Mussolini, Picelli invents another “crazy” action of exemplary resistance: he hoists a huge red flag on the balcony of the Parliament in Rome, provoking a crisis of nerves to the fascists and raising the morale of the antifascists in the whole country. Finally, in October 1926, he is arrested, condemned and deported first to Lampedusa and then to Lipari, and only succeeds in escaping and taking refuge in France, at the beginning of 1932
Between the Stalinist Scylla and the fascist Charybdis!
Picelli travels all over France, multiplies the meetings, organizes the immigrant workers and the Italian political refugees, until he is arrested and expelled. He takes refuge in Belgium where he does the same things and from where he is also expelled. After a brief stay in Berlin, just before Hitler’s seizure of power, Picelli finally takes refuge in the Soviet Union, sure that there he could resume his functions within the exiled party leadership, and enter, as promised, the military academy.
Neither of these things happened. Instead of the military academy Frunze, he is sent to work as an “apprentice” in a bearing factory, and the PCI strongman Palmiro Togliatti ostensibly ignores his calls. Picelli and his wife live in misery, but he does not protest. It is clear that Picelli of the “Anti-Fascist United Front” is, to say the least, “suspicious” in the eyes of the Stalinists who, at that time, implement the criminal policy of “social fascism”. Finally, in 1936, he is fired from his job after the party cell of the factory “tried” him on the far-fetched accusation that during the First World War he had been… “monarchist officer”…
Meanwhile in Spain the civil war has begun and Picelli now wants only one thing: to fight in the front line against Franco’s fascists. For months, he asks in vain to be allowed to leave for Spain. After many ups and downs, he was allowed to go, and with a false passport, Picelli left the USSR and after crossing Nazi Germany, he arrived in Paris where he met up with former comrades from the time of the Parma barricades, who made no secret of their anti-Stalinism.
It is thus thanks to them that Picelli meets Julian Gorkin, founder and leader of the POUM, the very anti-Stalinist “Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification” which fights in the first line in Spain with its armed militias against Franco. A few days later, Picelli arrives in Barcelona and meets the Catalan revolutionary and POUM leader Andreu Nin [2], former leader in Moscow of the “Red Trade Union International” (Profitern) and former collaborator of Trotsky. Nin offers him the command of a POUM battalion and Picelli accepts. But, as expected, the news that the legendary anti-fascist Picelli is about to collaborate with Trotskyists and anti-Stalinists mobilize the Stalinist centers that decide to do everything to prevent it. Picelli’s friends and comrades propose him to take command of a unit of the International Brigades, and he, although aware of the risks after his relationship with the POUM became known, accepts. The Italian antifascists of the Garibaldi Brigade welcome him with enthusiasm, but after an intervention of the Stalinists, Picelli is deprived of the command of the brigade, which is done later and only for one day just for the battle of Mirabueno.
Today, almost 80 years later, the “official” version of Picelli’s death remains that the Italian revolutionary was killed by a bullet fired by the fascists. However, the inconsistencies and contradictions of the so-called “eyewitnesses” of his death have always been eye-opening. If today we finally know the truth, we owe it to the Italian historian and filmmaker Giancarlo Bocchi [3] and the extraordinary and persevering investigation he carried out for years, making the archives of the Soviet secret services in Moscow speak, and also Picelli’s last companions who saw him killed on January 5, 1937, after having received “a bullet in the back at heart level”.
Three, among many others, eloquent “details” that shed light on this assassination: a few days before Picelli’s death, Soviet fighter planes had attacked the Garibaldi Battalion, killing 6 of its militiamen, and the Stalinists had been quick to spread the rumor that the person responsible for this “mistake” was…Picelli. On the other hand, the Moscow archives consulted by Bocchi, showed that the so-called “eyewitnesses” of Picelli’s death, to whom the “official” version of his death is due, were linked to the infamous NKVD. Finally, the same archives revealed that all the proposals of the high ranking officers, even Soviet ones, of the International Brigades to posthumously honor Picelli with the medal of the Order of Lenin, were strongly opposed by the Stalinists, and more specifically, by the one who was not only Togliatti’s right hand man and Picelli’s sworn enemy, but also a collaborator of the NKVD, on behalf of whom he was snitching on the Italian communists who had taken refuge in Moscow. His name was Antonio Roasio and a secret report from him recalled Picelli’s relations with the POUM leaders, before advising against the award of the highest Soviet honorary decoration to him. By “pure coincidence”, this Roasio was political commissar of the Garibaldi Battalion on the day of Picelli’s death!…
Epilogue
Today, when the extreme right and the neo-fascists are raising their heads and making their dangerous presence felt more and more in Europe, in the United States and elsewhere, we believe that there is no one better than Guido Picelli to express pure, revolutionary, and above all, effective and victorious anti-fascism! It is for this reason that the “rediscovery” of Picelli and his work constitutes more than a simple act of justice to a great revolutionary, who remains scandalously forgotten and unknown for 8 decades. Above all, it is an important contribution to the anti-fascist struggle of today and tomorrow, because Picelli has a lot to tell us and teach us about what the Brown Plague is, what it wants and how it should be fought. This year, a whole century after the glorious “Facts of Parma” of August 1922, which could have radically changed the march of contemporary history and also our lives, if the leaderships of the left had followed Picelli’s example in the interwar period, we have a golden opportunity to get to know the “Antifascist United Front” of the people of Parma and to learn from it. Let’s not lose this opportunity for the umpteenth time. This past has surely a future.
Footnotes
[1] Although Lenin declared that Paul Levi was totally right, he did not oppose his exclusion from the party when Levi resigned from the post of General Secretary after finding it impossible to follow the disastrous policy of the great majority of his leadership
[2] Andreu Nin was murdered in 1937 after being brutally tortured by his Stalinist torturers. According to the archives of the KGB in Moscow, opened in 1990, Nin’s murderers acted on the orders of Alexander Orlov, head of the NKVD in Spain, who carried out a personal order from Stalin.”
Four years ago today we fought to liberate Portland from a mass of fascists who had converged from throughout the nation to occupy the city; a force which included organized deniable assets of white supremacist terror like the Proud Boys who are a terror bro group of white male grievance, the Oathkeepers who are an organization of fascist infiltration and subversion agents of highly trained professionals within or allied with police forces and other military and security services, the Gideonite theocratic-fundamentalist Christian Identity cult Patriot Prayer, lunatic QAnon cult adherents, and others which may have included Homeland Security agents in operational command, for several hours throughout the day in front of the courthouse and police station, the Multnomah County Justice Center.
Every time the Fourth Reich and its agents within the Trump regime tried to seize and occupy our cities, we took them back. The people were victorious in this long and terrible struggle for liberty throughout 2020’s Summer of Fire, which played out in over fifty American cities during sustained Black Lives Matter protests, the founding of Autonomous Zones, and direct actions between Antifa and those who would enslave us, a struggle marked by brutal repression of dissent by police including random shootings of Black citizens and other hate crimes, a Homeland Security campaign of provocation using undercover police officers and their deniable assets among white supremacist terrorists to disrupt and delegitimize the protests for racial justice through arson, looting, and violence, and the random abduction and torture of protestors by Homeland Security in attempts at provocation to capture the narrative and manufacture a pretext for the federal occupation of democratic led cities under martial law.
Portland was the principal theatre of war between the people of America and a fascist cabal which had seized our government, but it was a struggle waged throughout our nation to define ourselves and choose between futures of liberty or tyranny; a struggle for the soul of America and the freedom of the world.
In this the Fourth Reich failed, but we came very near to the Fall of America as a free society of equals, and to fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of August 22 2020, Spectacle and Theatre in Portland: Police Sanction Street Fighting Between Fascists and Antifascists; A staged confrontation was enacted today in Portland as spectacle and guerilla theatre when fascists and antifascists, several hundred to each side, fought in the streets for several hours as the police handled the betting of the onlookers, having beforehand declared presence at the event to constitute consent to mutual fight. In Vegas this is the legal form signed by boxers; I now envision a televised series of sporting events wherein gladiatorial combat and duels of vendetta may be displayed. Just imagine the prize purses for the victorious survivors.
How thrilling it was for the citizens of Portland to observe Spartacus command a shield wall against the howling barbarians of the white supremacist terrorists and police collaborators and drive them from our streets like a pack of mad dogs. As in the arena of the Roman Empire, the restoration of balance which occurs when the people witness the triumph of good over evil serves to unite us against threatening others, authorize and reenforce versions of history and identity, and to affirm and elevate the virtue of our community, or so the apologists of imperialism once argued.
Such partisan conflict has a long and interesting history which is recapitulated in the protests for equality and racial justice which have engulfed every major city in America and many foreign ones now for over eighty days; modern political parties emerged during the reign of Justinian from the fandom of the Greens and Blues, rival factions of the chariot races which were the Roman Empire’s pre-eminent sport. Just as the football hooligans of the ancient world became the conservatives and liberals who claim our rulership now, so will those who have seized our cities in the name of fascism and antifascism seize our political parties and one day govern our nations.
Before us now unfolds a vision of our political future, and though I celebrate the victory of Antifa and the people over state and fascist terror this reversion of throwing words to throwing stones bodes ill for the long term future of civilization.
But our choices are defined and limited by the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle.
Spectacle is good for business if your goal is to seize governments and influence public opinion and ideology in order to shape the future. We must market our cause if we are to recruit and promote our ideas, and from my perspective as the founder of Lilac City Antifa and a partisan of international solidarity and direct action we must always confront fascism.
We must resist, beyond hope of victory or even survival, because resistance confers freedom; in resistance we become Unconquered. Each of us who are Unconquered is a Living Autonomous Zone and a seed of change, reimagination, transformation, and rebirth of our democracy, our civilization, and humankind, and thereby we achieve the highest form of human political evolution; a free society of equals wherein the use of force is abandoned and inequalities of power are unknown.
Our duty of care toward others also compels us to confront injustice as a moral imperative; in the words of a proverb derived from John Stuart Mill’s inaugural speech of 1867 to the University of St. Andrews; “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.
Both liberty and equality require us to confront and challenge evil in whatever form it may arise, and to protect and defend our universal human rights and all those who are powerless and vulnerable to predation and the use of force.
Our mission of revolutionary struggle also calls us to question, mock, expose, and confront authority and other inherent evils as acts of transformation and liberation. These four actions, the Primary Duties of a Citizen, are necessary and fundamental to our humanity and to our membership in the community of humankind.
Yet there are no rules of engagement for the strategies of revolution which make confrontation anything other than the choice of last resort, when all meaningful dialog and negotiation have failed. First because our goal is to abandon the use of force in the realization of a nonviolent society; second because force and violence are seductive and corruptive. We are the good guys, on the side of justice, truth, and mercy, you will say; but everyone thinks that, including our enemies.
In the balance with this is another truth; all human societies are constructed through violence, all liberation struggle is seizure of power, and all states are embodied violence.
Remember always the warning of Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who hunts monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the Abyss gazes also into you.” Every time I plan an action, I test its merit against this maxim.
And the consequences of liberty are written in my flesh and in my dreams, for after decades of revolutionary struggle the Abyss has begun to look back at me, and I no longer trust myself to know when I can pull a punch and walk away.
In the case of theatrical performances such as today’s street fight or in any conflict, we must ask ourselves, whose power is served? As a strategy of authoritarian regimes designed to protect the hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege of elites, divide and conquer has a winning streak as old as civilization, and it is very useful to the service of tyranny for the police to give permission to disempowered and angry young men to fight each other rather than join together to seize the power which has been stolen from them by the state.
Conflict is often a symptom of the failure to find common interest. Yet if we are to transform ourselves into a society free of coercion and violence, we must build solidarity and obliterate categories of exclusionary otherness, especially with those with whom we disagree.
To paraphrase Sigmund Freud’s famous quote of 1893; “Civilization begins when we throw words instead of stones.”
And when the imposed conditions of struggle offer no choice but subjugation or resistance, how then do we seize our power?
Here again are the Eight Principles of the Art of War.
The first lesson of the art of war is Diversion and Surprise. This involves a cornucopia of misdirection, illusion, concealment, and the arts of ambush and improvising channels, traps, and arenas to escape pursuit.
The second lesson is to Be Unpredictable, and use your enemy’s routines against him to create windows of opportunity. Change your patterns and routines, your playbook, rules, strategies and tactics. Surprise yourself, and the enemy too will be surprised.
The third lesson is to Seize the Rules; never play someone else’s game, on their terms or by their rules, but on ground and at a time of your choosing. If you become trapped in such a game, change the rules and make it yours.
The fourth lesson is to Seize Initiative and Control through continuous attack and patterns of action; make the enemy react to you and you will tie up his resources in defense which may otherwise be free to threaten and attack you. Plan ahead of the enemy’s moves, and use patterns and expectations to create dilemmas, openings, ambushes, and traps.
The fifth lesson is to Seize the Timing, or wrongfooting the enemy. No one can be everywhere at once with equal force, and one must gather maximum force and strike where least expected and where the enemy is weakest. This means luring the enemy into being where you want him to be, such as massing forces where they are useless while exposing strategic targets.
The sixth lesson is to Seize the Momentum and point of balance when attacked; defend nothing, but neutralize greater force and power through evasion and redirection. The principles of simultaneous counterattack to seize control as momentum, and of continuous attack as conservation of momentum, work together in this as a Doctrine of No Defense or pure counterattack and ambush.
The seventh lesson is to Embrace Your Fear and use your pain. Why defend when you can counterattack and teach the enemy to fear you? As my father said; “Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?”
The eighth lesson is to Seize the Narrative of the conflict, for all conflict is theatre. Who holds the moral high ground wins, as Gandhi taught us when he liberated India through the Salt Tax protest and the newsreels of British soldiers beating an endless column of silent and dignified Indians with sticks which shocked the world and delegitimized colonial authority.
The last lesson is the same as the first; diversion and surprise.
All else is timing.
These Eight Principles of War which I first learned as a boy from my teacher of martial arts whom I called Teacher Dragon, and have tested since the day I was sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by the great Jean Genet in Beirut 1982, I recommend to all of you now, for all time and where ever men hunger to be free.
And remember always, when faced with overwhelming force and impossible odds, Genet’s advice to me on that day which changed the course of my life; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
Allegories of Humanism and Solidarity are performed upon the stage of history and the world in the 2024 Democratic National Convention now ongoing, in part designed to reclaim the idea of America as a beacon of hope to the world and our nation as a guarantor of our universal human rights and our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens in a free society of equals, wherein we are guarantors of each other’s rights, and also as authorization of national identity by the great heroes of our time, Bernie, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bidens, and the team of Harris and Walz who rise on the tides of history they have set in motion.
I hope that this will be an unstoppable Blue Wave of liberty and the dignity of all human beings, that the forces of revolution, adaptation, change, and liberation struggle which they embody will sweep away the old order of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, the tyranny and terror of the police state and the horrors of imperialism and capitalism written in blood in Palestine where our tax dollars buy the deaths of children, and the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege such systems of oppression and division serve.
As written by Antonio Gramsci in 1924, in a moment very much like our own when fascism began to shadow the world; “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘America is ready for a better story’: Barack Obama lauds Kamala Harris in rousing speech; “Amid chants of “Yes, she can!”, Barack Obama returned to the scene of past triumphs on Tuesday to pass the mantle of political history to Kamala Harris – and eviscerate her opponent Donald Trump.
The former US president delivered the closing speech on night two of the Democratic national convention in his home city of Chicago. Obama prompted raucous cheers as he delivered a withering critique of Trump, who succeeded him in the White House in 2017.
“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos,” he told delegates. “We have seen that movie before and we all know that the sequel is usually worse. America is ready for a new chapter. America is ready for a better story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris.”
It was another night crackling with energy in the packed arena as America’s first Black president made the case for the nation to elect the first woman and first woman of colour to the Oval Office.
Obama was speaking 20 years after he first exploded on to the political stage at the Democratic convention in Boston. That summer, Harris helped host a fundraiser for Obama’s run for the US Senate in Illinois. Four years later, she backed him against Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary, a campaign in which he coined the phrase “Yes, we can!”
The same chant greeted Obama when he took the stage in Chicago just after 10pm ET on Thursday and embraced his wife, Michelle. But halfway through his speech, Obama broke from his teleprompter remarks to ad lib: “Yes, she can!” The crowd instinctively chanted, “Yes, she can!” in response.
There was a symbolic echo for Democrats who had come to fear that Obama’s election might be a historic aberration but now sense that it might in fact be Trump who represents the last gasp of a dying order.
In a nod to his debut at the 2004 convention, Obama, now 63, quipped: “I’m feeling hopeful because this convention has always been pretty good to kids with funny names who believe in a country where anything is possible.
“Because we have the chance to elect someone who’s spent her whole life trying to give people the same chances America gave her. Someone who sees you and hears you and will get up every single day and fight for you: the next president of the United States of America, Kamala Harris.”
The crowd roared its approval. Obama went on to pay tribute to outgoing president Joe Biden, who was not present, having delivered a valedictory address on Monday. “History will remember Joe Biden as a president who defended democracy at a moment of great danger,” he said. “I am proud to call him my president, but even prouder to call him my friend.”
The torch has been passed, he continued, but “for all the rallies and the memes”, the race for the White House remains tight. He suggested the people who will decide the election are asking a simple question: who will fight for them.
Obama opined that Trump, the Republican nominee, is not losing sleep over that question and highlighted his successor’s age – a point he might not have made if 81-year-old Biden were still in the contest.
“This is a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago,” he said. “It’s been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that’s actually gotten worse now that he’s afraid of losing to Kamala.
“The childish nicknames and crazy conspiracy theories. This weird obsession with crowd sizes.” The crowd erupted. “It just goes on and on. The other day, I heard someone compare Trump to the neighbour who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day. From a neighbour, that’s exhausting. From a president, it’s just dangerous.”
Trump sees power as nothing more than a means to his ends, Obama said, accusing the former president of wanting another tax cut that would help his rich friends and of killing a bipartisan immigration deal because trying to solve the problem would hurt his campaign.
When delegates began to boo, Obama offered an old refrain: “Do not boo. Vote!”
Obama, whose breakthrough speech in 2004 had argued that there is not a liberal America and conservative America, only a United States of America, then took Trump to task for deliberately trying to turn Americans against one another.
He went on: “Most of all, Donald Trump wants us to think that this country is hopelessly divided between us and them; between the ‘real’ Americans who of course support him and the outsiders who don’t.
“And he wants you to think that you’ll be richer and safer if you will just give him the power to put those ‘other’ people back in their place. It’s one of the oldest tricks in politics – from a guy whose act has gotten pretty stale.”
Notably, Obama did not dwell on a topic that was central to Biden’s candidacy: the notion that Trump poses an existential threat to democracy.
But he did draw a vivid contrast between Trump and Harris, describing her as “ready for the job” and “a person who has spent her life fighting on behalf of people who need a voice and a champion.
“She had to work for what she’s got, and she actually cares about what other people are going through. She’s not the neighbour running the leaf blower – she’s the neighbour rushing over to help when you need a hand.”
He praised her plans to solve America’s housing crisis, limit out of pocket healthcare costs, make college more affordable and look out for essential workers.
Obama also urged Democrats to show empathy to political opponents. “We need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices; and that if we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidate, we need to listen to their concerns – and maybe learn something in the process.”
The former president had been introduced by Michelle, the former first lady who delivered the most famous line of the 2016 convention when she said: “When they go low, we go high.” This time she electrified the hall with a new willingness to go after Trump.
She said: “For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us. See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard working and highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black.”
Michelle also taunted Trump for his reference on the campaign trail to “Black jobs”, which he claims are being taken from Black people by migrants crossing into the US. “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” she asked, sending the crowd wild.
Tuesday night also witnessed a roll call of delegates confirming the nomination of Harris and running mate Tim Walz, both of whom held a rally in Milwaukee in the battleground state of Wisconsin.
In a speech to the convention Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, said he “just fell in love fast” with her, adding that she finds “joy in pursuing justice” and “stands up to bullies”.
Bernie Sanders, an independent senator for Vermont who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2016 and 2020, set out a policy wish list including getting big money out of the political process, guaranteeing healthcare to all as a human right and raising the minimum wage. “I look forward to working with Kamala and Tim to pass this agenda,” he said.”
As written by Emma Brockes in The Guardian, in an article entitled Joe cried, Kamala cried and so did I. Can this be the Democrats putting on a better show than Trump ever did?; “He looks perkier,” said my nine-year-old, passing the screen as I watched footage of Joe Biden speaking on the first day of the Democratic national convention in Chicago. The president did, indeed, look perkier, borne aloft by the gratitude of 23,000 people in the hall and the millions beyond it for the fact he is no longer seeking re-election. By itself, this moment would have lifted the occasion above the norm. But the Democratic convention this year is so uniquely dramatic, so unprecedented in US history, that it rivals and possibly outstrips even President Obama’s nomination in 2008. And Biden’s heart-wrenching appearance was just the beginning.
“When we fight, we win,” said Kamala Harris in her opening speech on Monday and there it was, that strange moment of realisation that what she was saying might actually be true. Strange because it’s the kind of thing Democrats always say and that, in recent years, has been accompanied by a terrible wah-wah downward arpeggio on the trombone. Limp, disorganised, outshone by Donald Trump; that had been the campaign to date. The speed of the turnaround and the sheer force of the narrative that now propels Harris forwards, has unleashed a psychic energy so strong that on stage in Chicago it practically gave off sparks. Democrats have the scent of blood in their nostrils and thank God, they’re finally chasing it.
Watching footage from the first two days, I kept thinking of Joan Didion’s biting piece about the 1988 presidential race, in which she remarked on the emptiness of staged political events. Reporters, she observed, like to cover a presidential campaign because “it has balloons”. You know what she means, which only makes the genuine emotion witnessed in Chicago this week all the more thrilling. So rare is it for balloon-based political events to do anything other than bore or depress, that when one does, it lets loose not only a primary giddiness, but a second-tier hysteria triggered by incredulity at the presence of the first.
And so it was here, in the form of wave after wave of what felt like history. President Biden, smiling, rueful, apparently much more cogent now that the need to perform has been removed, and deeply touching in his ability to do that rarest of things, act for the collective good at his own expense. The alleviation of anxiety in the audience even allowed for the return of some of that old Biden charisma. It was emotional! Friends on the east coast stayed up late watching, and cried. I cried! Harris, in the audience, had tears in her eyes, and Biden himself was emotional as he was led off stage by his daughter. The political obituaries in the US press the next day were elegiac, sentimental, all the things that would’ve been undone had he stayed in the race. Evan Osnos in the New Yorker called Biden “a man whose career describes a half century of American history”, and that was the feeling – a real “thank you for your service” moment.
Biden left it to younger Democrats really to go after Trump, and boy, did they. On the first day, congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of Texas called Trump “a 78-year-old lifelong predator, fraudster and cheat” who “cosies up to his role model, Vladimir Putin”. On the second night, Michelle Obama, after the years-long failure of her mantra “when they go low, we go high”, came up with an absolute corker, referring to Trump as the beneficiary of “the affirmative action of generational wealth”.
She gave high praise to working mothers – the kind of “unglamorous” labour that holds the country together – while her husband got a huge laugh off Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes”. It was a throwback to the good old days of humour and levity in a party long mired in depression and panic. “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” said Michelle and the crowd erupted.
What struck you about all this was the way in which it seized for Democrats a dynamic that has lately been the reserve of Republicans. Trump’s success is a side-effect of his pure entertainment value and the fact he is “disruptive” in a way that, for large numbers of his followers, is simply a fun thing to be part of. Now that same sense of drama and disruption animates the other side. People at the convention chanted “USA!” while Hillary Clinton – for whom this moment must be bittersweet – graciously talked up Harris and generational unity came in via the rallying cries of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Bernie Bros.
No successful production can do without at least a little hokiness, and here it was in the form of Doug Emhoff, in line to be the first “second gentleman”, should his wife win the White House, on stage doing his lovable dork act. Emhoff, with much aw shucks self-mockery, even described the first time he rang Harris to set up a blind date. It felt like a flex: look at this married couple who actually love one another compared with those estranged freaks on the other side.
There were notes of caution and warnings against complacency. The stakes are so much higher now that we know who Trump is, and that, like a squirrel cornered in an attic, his desperation if elected is liable to lead to attack. But there was, this week, also a sense of let us enjoy the sense of glamour, and excitement, and youth, and – yes, hope – of this moment before we get to the terror of the next few months and the actual election.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez full speech at 2024 DNC
Sen. Bernie Sanders full speech at 2024 DNC (Aug. 20, 2024)
2024 DNC: Michelle Obama’s full speech
Former President Barack Obama’s full speech
Hillary Clinton speaks at Democratic National Convention
Day one of the Democratic national convention in Chicago – in pictures
On this day in 1619 over four centuries of slavery and Resistance began in America with the first slave auction, and no human being has been truly free or equal here since, for we are all possessed by the legacies of our history as shared national trauma.
We must bring a Reckoning for this pervasive evil, central to the Original Lie which founded America as a free society of equals on paper while remaining one of masters and slaves in fact, in the reimagination and transformation of humankind through changing the systems of unequal power that have shaped us to things of fear, power, and force, in the centralization of power to authority and to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and patriarchal white privilege through divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and through seizures of power in revolutionary struggle and the solidarity of The Wretched of the Earth from the carceral states of force and control which create and are created by elites as instruments of power.
Let us bring, after four centuries of inequality and the state as embodied violence and systemic white supremacist terror, an American Revolution.
As I wrote in my post of August 31 2021, 401 Years of Slavery and Resistance in America, and Counting; One of the most important reckonings we must have with ourselves and our history is the four hundred and one years of slavery and resistance in America which this August marks.
Both the content and context of this issue and its discussion has and will continue to shift and realign for as long as there are humans to interrogate the meaning and consequences of inequality and racism; I propose merely that we must make this central question of American identity and values a national priority in politics and education, and in the practice of our daily lives.
To quote the ACLU newsletter of last year for August; “Four hundred years ago this month, more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in what was then the British colony of Virginia. To mark the anniversary of the beginning of slavery in America, The New York Times launched a major initiative called The 1619 Project. Through a special issue of the New York Times Magazine, along with a slew of other resources, the project centers slavery in our national narrative, tracking how the legacy of that brutal institution continues to manifest in every aspect of American life.”
As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature for 2020; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As I wrote in my post of June 19 2021, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed, and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
To be a true American patriot is to be a liberator, not a conqueror.
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 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 literature, and remain central to the project of its study. True education in the discipline of history asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, and the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this dialectical interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil combine in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
The Underground Railroad retells slavery’s horrors with a dreamlike twist, review of the Amazon Prime series by CBS News
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times Magazine staff writer, and the driving force behind The 1619 Project — joins At Liberty host Emerson Sykes (@emersonsjsykes) to discuss the initiative.
Nikole Hannah-Jones on the 1619 Project’s reframing of American history (EP. 61) August 22, 2019”
Torch of Liberty 