Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein?
Yet as Prospero said of Caliban, we must also say of Frankenstein’s monster; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
As I have written of Vander Meer’s retelling of Frankenstein in the novel Borne: Mary Shelly’s glorious novel was also about the abandonment of a child who is no longer perfect, among a number of other themes, including the origins of violence.
A major theme of the novel Frankenstein is the monstrosity of God, who like Victor creates and then abandons his child when it is imperfect and no longer a reflection of his, when we become our own free and independent beings. Yes, Victor wants to become a god, which is why the story resonates with everyone, and is an allegory of the failure of science to realize Idealist visions of humanity, the novel being both a codification and critique of Romantic Idealism.
But in his quest to become a god, Victor also desires to be worshipped and obeyed; he wants to free himself from subjugation by authority, but not to liberate others. Instead of changing the nature of power, force, and control in casting down from his throne a tyrant god who bound us to his laws and then abandoned us through the abolition of the Law and of the social use of force and the centralization of power and authority to an elite as would a true revolutionary, Victor’s tragic flaw of pride, like so many heroes of revolutionary struggle, compels him to become the next tyrant and enact the role of his former nemesis.
It is a cycle of substitutive tyranny which as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out in his novel Lolita, a brilliant critique of the failure of Idealism which led to his father’s execution in the Russian Revolution as an aristocrat, has been recapitulated throughout the world in revolutions which become tyrannies, especially under the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous god; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important. The great question which democracy attempts to answer is how to balance such forces encoded as the rights and needs of individuals so that none may infringe upon another’s.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with 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; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; my teenage role model Napoleon, Washington who is central to our family history and coined the motto on our coat of arms in the passcode during the Battle of Trenton, Victory or Death, when the whole Revolution was wagered on a forlorn hope, the tragic drama of fallen heroes like Robert Mugabe, the monstrous tyrants Stalin and Mao, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the American and Napoleonic Empires, the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, nearly all anticolonial revolutions which in the first period of liberty as new nations became dreadful tyrannies, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
All those who hunt monsters must remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
I like the character of Victor, and have used variants of this name as aliases because he is a figure of Milton’s rebel angel, but also I admire the monster, a figure of the Shadow based on Caliban in The Tempest. The story is about their relationship as parent and abandoned and damaged child.
What is important to us now, and for all of humankind, is to recognize that we are all both Frankenstein and his monster, rebel and tyrant, reason and passion, darkness and light in shifting perspectives, and that if we cannot embrace our otherness and become whole we must destroy ourselves.
Frankenstein addresses themes of science versus nature, reason versus passion, and both of these within a Promethean rebellion against God, authority, and universal Law as a form of Idealism; this from the perspective of the monster’s creator.
From the monster’s view, the novel portrays the disfigurement of the soul through abandonment by a parent who also functions as a figure of a creator-god and of Authority, known as the problem of the Deus Absconditus which refers to the god who bound us to his despicable Laws and then ran away before he was caught, and who drives the child to achievement and supremacy as his proxy of success and vindication before the world, a projection of self which is inherently dehumanizing, rather than empowering the child’s own agency to discover and follow a unique bliss and personhood- what the Greeks called Arete or Virtue but also denoting superiority as with the apex predator and ideal of patriarchal masculinity Achilles in the Iliad, one of Mary Shelly’s sources- in a chosen arena but who like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring must renounce love to win supremacy and power, rendering all victory meaningless and hollow, dehumanizing the child and shaping a vessel of rage and vengeance, a tyrant forged in the violence of the struggle to free himself from enslavement, with the iron self discipline and will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others. It is about birthing monsters, and the chaotic plasticity of identity and relationships.
This is how systemic power assimilates rebels as tyrants; Mary Shelly diagnosed the history of colonialism and imperialism as diseases of unequal power long before they were to swallow the world. And this we must resist; authority and systems of unequal power itself, if we are to be liberated.
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
A story which is at once Greek tragedy and Freudian study of the process and relations between the id, ego, and superego, with a third parallel storyline relating a Romantic reimagination of Biblical Genesis like that of Blake, it is both the apotheosis of Romantic Idealism and its first criticism, exegesis and classical myth, dialectic on responsibility and discourse on Aristotle’s categories of being, critique of Rousseau’s natural man and of Nietzsche’s Superman which it also inspired in a recursive loop of influence across the seas of time. Its author was a Pythian visionary whose insight reached centuries into the future, and whose immense scholarship reimagined some of the greatest works of our historical civilization.
Mary Shelly’s influence echoes through time, multiplies, and reshapes the contexts of its polymorphous meanings. One cannot think of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa without thinking of his original, the dual-aspected monster-child created to bind our nature with reason and as the line in the film Van Helsing goes to disprove the existence of God, nor read her sources and references in the prophecies of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost without reevaluating them in terms of Mary Shelly’s novel; her work resonates through past and future, and what touches, it changes.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein?
A nested set of puzzle box themes and contexts, multiple narrative threads which create paradoxes of meaning, role reversals and inversions of identities, and the questioning of the mission of civilization and the morality of progress; Mary Shelly created the modern world with her great book Frankenstein.
So for hierosgamos and our embrace of our monstrosity, of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves. What of its consequences for ourselves and our world?
As I wrote in my post of April 18 2022, Our War Against Nature and Ourselves: Humankind at the Tipping Point Between Extinction and Transformation; The human war on nature is ancient, both a motive and a consequence of our civilization itself; it is also primarily a war against our own animal nature, a titanic struggle against the prison of our flesh and its dark and chaotic syllabus of needs and desires.
We are that monster and its creator, mad god of reason and his degraded figure of vengeance and uncontrollable and free but twisted and destructive passion. Ours is the future modernity she warned us of, a civilization which consumes itself through the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions as has happened twice now in our two World Wars.
When I think of the destructive effects on the environment of our mad quest to control and impose order and human values on nature, I do so in the context of a specific ideological lineage which I share with one of the great public intellectuals of our time, whose works reflect the themes of Mary Shelly.
In her foundational classic Sexual Personnae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Camille Paglia, trickster figure and provocateur, whose many masks include a Guide of the Soul which echoes Ariadne, a chthonic figure of the Queen of the Underworld which recalls Persephone, and a truth teller like the Jester of King Lear, provides us a definition of Beauty as the apotheosis and motive force of human civilization, one which references her major influences among the British Romantic Idealists, Keats and Coleridge; “Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.”
Hers is a vision which extends Nietzsche’s thesis in The Birth of Tragedy that human civilization is an artifact of the struggle between the Dionysian and the Apollonian as oppositional forces which together create human being, meaning, and value. Civilization is thus a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
She refers to Beauty as a cypher of the Infinite, in reference to Keats, as does Umberto Eco in his magisterial On Beauty. Compare her definition to that of Keats, in the phrase which I quote when asked to identify my faith; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”
Her traditional identification of Apollonian rationality and the will to impose order with the animus or masculine side of a whole person and the Dionysian or ecstatic principle as feminine and equal to chaos and nature is found in Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism; “Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.”
Here is the rotten heart of our corruption which consumes this fragile ark of life, this earth, to destruction and humankind to annihilation; our need to control and impose order on a fundamentally irrational universe and the conquest and dominion of nature which flows from it.
Thus far I share with Camille Paglia the three ideological lineages from which this analysis develops; British Romantic Idealism, Nietzsche’s aesthetics of ontological politics, and Jung’s transformational psychology. Where we diverge importantly is her total rejection of postmodern critical theory, which she calls out as Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault; here I am more aligned with Iris Murdoch in balancing classicism with modernity as a complementarity. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces; both T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Flannery O’Connor.
And to complete my image of the cosmos and the place of humankind in it, we must add one thing more; Holism as expressed in Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature: a necessary unity, and explicated in Morris Berman’s The Re-Enchantment of the World. A reimagination of Schiller’s idea of “the disgodding of nature”, Bateson’s work rewired my brain when I encountered it as a graduate student, and for this I shall be eternally grateful. Only Godel’s Theorem and the poetry of Blake and Rumi struck me with the force of lightning as did he.
What does all this mean?
As the earth dies in fire and ice and humankind with it, victims and slaves consumed by the fathomless greed of a handful of oligarchic and plutocratic czars of a global hegemonic elite, we witness the horror of our extinction with helpless submission to our destroyers but are able to describe it with great beauty, a beauty and vision which nonetheless fail to transform our fate.
Unless we act to seize our power and liberate ourselves and the common heritage of our resources from our destroyers.
The New Annotated Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Leslie S. Klinger (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Guillermo del Toro (Introduction), Anne K. Mellor (Afterword)
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a show which questions and explores many of the issues which have defined my life; the origins of evil and the interdependence of good and evil, freedom and authorized identities, the use of social force as tyranny and as revolutionary struggle, the limits of what is human and the uses of our monstrosity in the embrace or denial of our nature, and the consequences of systems and structures of elite power and hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness.
Before all else is Kiernan Shipka herself, magnificent in the role of Sabrina, a character written as a queer metaphor whose primary conflict as a dual natured being requires her to perform as both the White and Black Swans, which only the truly great can do whether on the stage or in life, in a myth of sexual power and identities of sex and gender as a ground of struggle.
A reimagination of the myth of Persephone in the context of that of Milton’s Lucifer and the Jewish creatrix Lilith with a side of Orpheus and Eurydice, and which stirs into the cauldron Dante, Marlowe’s Faust, Hawthorne, Poe, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Lovecraft, and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible among a multitude of references, this show brings the themes of Romantic Idealism into the political context of our current era, that of #metoo, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Green New Deal, and the Restoration of America from tyranny and state terror, from the Patriarchal-white supremacist Fourth Reich, in which cruelty and mercy play for the soul of America and the future of humankind.
In America’s election now and in the glorious liberation struggle of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party against patriarchy and theocratic sexual terror and the enslavement, commodification, and dehumanization of women as systems of oppression, ongoing now for two thousand seven hundred years since the Hanging of the Maids in Homeric poetry, we live as witnesses and every single human now living as combatants in this historic and civilizational moment of Reckoning and change.
Why do I love this show, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, to the extent that I have watched it through entirely five times now, falling asleep to its songs of freedom and seizures of power?
The answer lies in Kiernan Shipka’s slyly subversive smile; it is a brilliant satire which swallows whole and transforms our horrific histories of the witch trials and persecutions of otherness, referencing the bizarre witchhunting manuals the Malleus Maleficarum and the Daemonologie, and alluding to the Holocaust and the legacies of slavery, and transforms its meaning into a call to resistance and an empowerment of autonomy.
A densely layered system of signs appropriated from both high and pop culture, like the films of Andy Warhol which valorize the ordinary and the excluded, in celebration of the beauty of the disfigured and the reviled, and of violations of normality and transgressions of the Forbidden, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a savage and relentless engagement with the forces of Patriarchy and a subversion of heteronormative narratives, which can be equally applied to divisions of race, faith, and nationality.
From the very first, this cinematic interrogation and reimagination of western civilization unfolds its themes with the statement; “The Devil won’t give you both power and freedom. He’s a man.” And from this moment, it had my full and rapt attention.
To put the case plainly; Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is our civilizations greatest artistic response to the rise of global fascism, and America’s most glorious Antifascist film after Inglorious Basterds.
Of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina criticism, Dany Prince’s thesis which discusses the first season remains among the finest and most relevant, which I amplify here:
“#MeToo and the Witching Hour: Contemporary Feminist Discourse on the Representation of Witchcraft in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, by Dany Prince.
In recent years, contemporary cinema, and even graphic novels and comics books, related to witches and the occult have challenged how we view the feminine body, particularly through the rise of movements like #MeToo. For example, in the 2013 season of American Horror Story, the popular show tackles issues surrounding witchcraft and interpersonal female relationships in Coven, and, two years later, director Robert Eggers once again revisits the witch and her bodily autonomy in the art house film, The VVitch. For both narratives, the body of the female witch serves as a vehicle through which femininity and feminine sexuality becomes celebrated through occult forces but demonized patriarchal influences, institutions, and characters. Since the body of the witch resists signification, characters and social institutions that succumb to patriarchal influences cannot understand this celebration of the feminine and feminine sexuality. As compelling as these examples of popular culture’s fascination with witches are as visual narratives, Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, or Sabrina, challenges and creates new discourse on what sort of bodily autonomy a witch, and a teenage witch no less, holds. The entirety of Part 1 of the series revolves around Sabrina’s right to say no and her right to say yes, should the time come.
Since Jack Halberstam’s foundational analysis of the slippery signification of the vampire and other gothic monsters, Gothic scholars have analyzed the figure of the vampire, a “technology of monstrosity” as Halberstam argues, as a metaphor for a wide range of cultural and sociopolitical anxieties. Halberstam writes in their book Skin Shows that “technologies of monstrosity are always also technologies of sex. I want to plug monstrosity and gothicization into Foucault’s ‘great surface network’ of sexuality in which ‘the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances are linked to one another in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power’” (Foucault qtd. in Halberstam 88, 89). The witch also becomes a similar technology of monstrosity and sex through its deep connection to the Earth and representation of hypersexuality in every cinematic representation of the witch in popular culture. Monica Germana’s research on the Gothic figure of the madwoman and the witch in her book suggests that “the madwoman may also, just like the sorceress, become the victimised instrument of [the] conservative agenda, exposed as Shoshana Felman suggests, by the pervasive cultural affiliation of madness and women” (Germana 67). The witch and the culture of madness has become so intrinsically linked with one another that it’s almost impossible to separate the two. The body of the witch is one that inherently resists signification and acts out against political attempts to subjugate and suppress women’s sexuality through the gender binary, patriarchal, and heterosexist restrictions that have historically been imposed upon, not only women’s bodies, but queer bodies as well.
In this thesis, I want to emphasize how The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina works with the body of the witch and the mythological tropes of the Mother, Maiden, and Crone in a sexualized sense. These elements come together in the form of the witch’s body to make her body and the idea of the witch a patriarchal and socio-political nightmare. Throughout Part 1 of Sabrina, the creative team politicizes the witch’s body to reflect the current sociocultural and political anxieties with the after effects of the #MeToo and #BelieveHer movements while challenging perceptions of toxic masculinity with the inclusion of Harvey Winkle and juxtaposing him with imposing patriarchal figures, like the Dark Lord and Father Blackwood.
While most of the criticism surrounding Part 1 of Sabrina remain positive, some critics do have negative impressions of the show. Willa Paskin for Slate.com acknowledges the progressive movements that Sabrina makes by likening the series with CW’s other witch show, Charmed. Both Sabrina and Charmed are remakes of popular 90s television shows, but with different twists. For example, Charmed has three Latina sisters in place of three white sisters and focuses on issues on consent in the first episode and Sabrina focuses on issues of bodily autonomy and consent throughout the entire series. While Paskin acknowledges these progressive perspectives from both CW shows, Paskin does not acknowledge the parts of the show that make it a success, such as its commentary on current socio-political issues like consent and sexual assault. Paskin writes that the show tires “to be the moody, teen-tastic interpretations of [the original Sabrina series]” and that the only thing compelling about the show “to make [Paskin] watch it is . . . a compelling teen romance” (Paskin par. 6 and 7). Paskin argues further that this redeeming part of Sabrina is not so redeemable, that Harvey and Sabrina’s relationship is “incredibly boring, a total narrative dead end” (Paskin, par.7).
Other critics, like Rolling Stone’s critic, Rob Sheffield, acknowledges that “the optimism of the 1970s or 1990s versions [of Sabrina] would look absurd now. This is Resistance Sabrina” (Sheffield, par. 7). For Sheffield, Resistance Sabrina is a “darker show for darker times” (Sheffield, par. 7). While the figures of Hilda and Zelda are feminist figures that raise Sabrina to challenge authority, the ultimate authority is the Dark Lord and Father Blackwood, who throw their weight around and use their endless authority to manipulate the women around them. As a response to these patriarchal figures, Sabrina effectively challenges these deep seated sociopolitical issues that keep arising as contemporary society progresses. Even with the inclusion of Susie Putnam (who is later known as Theo), Sabrina retains this progressive outlook since this is one of the only shows that actively shows a gender non-conforming character who will later become trans. Throughout Sabrina, the show challenges and juxtaposes toxic masculinity with what masculinity ought to be. For example, the characters of the jocks that endlessly tease and bully Susie throughout the first season are perfect examples of how toxic masculinity affects boys at the teenage level, teasing her about being a “dyke,” but then the creators give the audience Harvey Winkle, who takes his time with Sabrina, making sure that everything that they do that is sexually charged comes with her express consent. Witchcraft and Satanism simply become metaphors of oppression and the strategies through which these issues of oppression with a character that challenges everything about these institutionalized systems, like the Church and even the school board.
The first episode, “October Country,” opens with Sabrina and her aunties, Zelda and Hilda, preparing for Sabrina’s dark baptism as per the tradition of the Greendale coven. Throughout the first episode, Sabrina reveals her uncertainties to her aunties, who then arrange a meeting with the series’ primary antagonist, Father Faustus Blackwood, who tells Sabrina that she will retain free will in conjunction with unlimited power and a delayed aging process. The dark baptism is a ritual that every witch in the Church of Night undergoes on their sixteenth birthday. The ritual requires that the witch enters the woods at midnight, the High Priest ritually cutting open their palm, and the witch then signing their name in the Book of the Beast. By signing their name in the Book of the Beast, the witch agrees to “obey without question any order [they] may receive from the Dark Lord or any authority figure He has placed over [them]. In signing his Book, the Book of the Beast, [they] swear to give [their] mind, body, and soul unreservedly to the furtherance of the designs of the Lord Satan” (00:44:53), but in the first episode, Father Blackwood tells Sabrina that she will retain her free will after she signs her name into the Book of the Beast. Since these instructions are a direct contradiction to what Father Blackwood tells Sabrina earlier on in the episode, she shakily flees from her dark baptism where she makes her final stand against the coven and firmly states that her “name is Sabrina Spellman and [she] will not sign it away” (00:47:59).
The first episode of Sabrina emphasizes the Dark Lord’s decision to charge Sabrina with breach of promise. As stated in the series, the concept of a Breach of Promise is a rather antiquated offense. Both in the series and in North American society, Breach of Promise often refers to a woman that is entering a marriage that ends up breaking this promise. If a woman does this, she may be sued by the person that had their promise broken.[1] In Chapter Four of Sabrina, the Dark Lord sues Sabrina Spellman for this exact purpose, which Angie Dahl suggests is a type of victim blaming and slut shaming language that echoes courtroom sexual assault cases (Dahl, par. 7). As more and more sexual assault trials, like Brock Turner, Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K., and so many more come up time and time again, the victim blaming rhetoric is one that gets used all too frequently. Victims of sexual assault are interrogated with questions like “what were you wearing?” or “that punishment was a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action” (as seen in Michele Dauber’s tweet) or statements like “sexual assault victims are lying about their assaults.” These statements are ones that victims hear daily, so when we hear Father Blackwood ridicule Sabrina for “wearing, of all things, a wedding dress” (00:19:70), which becomes an intelligent metaphor. By highlighting the fact that Sabrina was wearing her mother’s wedding dress to the Dark Baptism, Father Blackwood’s statement so clearly echoes the criticisms that victims of sexual assault and abuse endure in a court of law: that their choice of clothing made the victims responsible for the actions of their attacker. Dahl also points out in her online review that this language echoes the language that is used by defendants when their abuser is their husband, their girlfriend, their father, and so forth. Dahl further states that “Blackwood suggests that Sabrina’s dress made a promise on her behalf, and the Dark Lord was merely responding to it; Sabrina led on Satan with her outfit” (Dahl sec. 2, par. 3). Blackwood essentially claims that Sabrina is subject to the punishments of the Unholy Court since her initial, willing plan was to consent to writing her name in the Book of the Beast.
By shaming Sabrina publicly through trial, Father Blackwood attempts to make her subservient to his and the Dark Lord’s wishes. Fortunately for Sabrina, she hires the infamous lawyer, Daniel Webster, to dance with the devil once again and beat him at his own game.[2] Even prior to the beginning of the trial, Father Blackwood meets with Zelda, not even Sabrina herself, and states that “the Dark Lord is not without mercy. But he’ll require total submission from [Sabrina]” (00:10:12). Father Blackwood’s language is imperative because it reiterates the idea that should Sabrina sign her name away, she will not possess free will, no matter what. Dahl states that Father Blackwood’s language here is not only archaic, but it also reinforces the idea that Sabrina’s body, that Sabrina’s free will is something that the Dark Lord is entitled to. This happens again when Blackwood says that “when the accused [Sabrina] is confirmed guilty, not only will she abandon her mortal life immediately, but upon her death, she shall burn for 333 years in the Pit, as his pleasure demands” (00:17:00). Since Father Blackwood likens Sabrina and the Dark Lord to the metaphor of bride and groom, the language of this episode becomes increasingly troubling since it echoes the sentiment that the Dark Lord is entitled to Sabrina’s free will and her body, which is a phrase that becomes all too real for female and queer viewers of the show, but also links back to the gothic idea that a witch, and a teen witch no less, is a feminine body that is “unregulated and unsettling” (Pulliam 147).
Jane Pulliam argues that when young women, like Sabrina, are forced into these subservient spaces and highly restrictive gender roles, they typically will not openly defy authority but instead ‘defrock’ authority and do what they wish to within reason. The example that Pulliam uses are two characters, Grace and Deborah, that are a part of the highly restrictive Puritan communities. For characters like Grace and Deborah, they claim that they are witches since women in these communities are subservient and less intelligent than men and therefore easily manipulated by Satan, but in contrast to these characters, we have Sabrina. The moment that Father Blackwood reveals he has lied to Sabrina about her free will, all that authority and trust she places in him gets stripped away and she openly defies his, and the Dark Lord’s authority. She refuses to be tricked by the Devil.
When Father Blackwood says “as [the Dark Lord’s] pleasure demands,” his belief echoes that of incels, or involuntary celibate, and that Sabrina’s body and existence belongs wholly to the Dark Lord. Incels and incel rhetoric is something is rapidly growing and their mission statement goes back to Elliot Rodger, who posted online what is now called “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution.” Men like Christopher Cleary, Alek Minassian, and Elliot Rodger write phrases like “[we] will slaughter every single spoiled stuck-up blonde slut. You will finally see [who’s] the superior one. The true alpha male” (The Fifth Estate, par. 3 and 19). Even in advertisements from the 1950s that resurface as “memes” or purely aesthetics from an era long past show women crying over burnt dinners or women bent over the laps of men with his hand raised above her backside as punishment for not “store-testing fresher coffee.” The subjugation of women is a longstanding issue and these advertisements, which are not only prevalent in the 1950s but today in some cases as well, perpetuate the idea that men are naturally superior and therefore entitled to women’s bodies, regardless of if they say no or yes. In the patriarchal mindset, women that say no are considered a challenge that needs to be conquered and women that say yes are considered too easy.
For Sabrina, she is thoroughly shamed by, not only Father Blackwood with his inquisition, but by the entirety of the coven that attends her trial. As Sabrina awaits her sentencing, the crowd jeers at her and calls her a “tramp” or “guilty,” effectively furthering the shame that Sabrina endures. While the episode ends with Sabrina winning her case, her freedom comes at the hands of the False God, under whose name she was baptized. Even though she wins her trial, she only wins because the court acknowledges the claim on her life and body by another patriarchal figure. The court still refuses to acknowledge that Sabrina holds the right to say no.
Similarly, we can see this in the costuming choices from Chapter 2, “The Dark Baptism.” For Sabrina’s birthday, Zelda and Hilda dress her up in her mother’s wedding gown, which immediately turns black as the trio enters the grove where the baptism takes place. Sabrina is then stripped of the black dress to her white slip and forcibly restrained as she flees from the forest. As stated earlier, Father Blackwood remarks upon Sabrina’s choice in clothing and suggests that the Dark Lord is entitled to her body because of her wedding dress. Costuming and fashion, particularly in media, are important choices that can denote a character’s mental state or other subtle details to the audience. As Catherine Spooner recounts in her book, “the way in which the eighteenth century Gothic heroine is clothed – or more characteristically, semi-clothed – plays an important part in the construction of her identity and, indeed, the fashioning her body” (Fashioning Gothic Bodies 23). In Sabrina’s case, as she meets the coven in the woods for her Dark Baptism, the choices are all made for her for what she wears. She only wears her mother’s wedding dress at the behest of her aunties and she is only stripped half naked at the hands of the coven. This symbolizes that the decision to sign her name away is not her own, it is a choice that is made for her again and again, and when Father Blackwood condemns Sabrina for wearing a “wedding dress, of all things,” he says, in short, that the choices the coven made for Sabrina, the choices that her aunties made for her, are choices that she ought to be responsible for. “Wearing a veil [or in this case, a wedding dress] can be construed as provoking and incentive to remove it . . . is not only interpretable as sexual invitation but is presented as alarmingly coextensive with sexual invitation” (Fashioning Gothic Bodies 31). Sabrina thus ends up refusing to acknowledge that others’ decisions for her are her express consent and refuses to sign her name away. By refusing to sign, Sabrina makes the court recognize the authority she holds over herself and refuses to back down.
This decision mirrors a range of other events in the series that more broadly link to ancient rituals to contemporary feminist politics; for example, Roz’s efforts to get The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison off the banned books list at Baxter High. While Sabrina faces mistrial, Roz faces the threat of impending blindness as she attempts to devour books before she is totally blind. One of these books that she chooses to read for a school project is The Bluest Eye, which is deemed as inappropriate and Roz’s teacher refuses to let Roz read it. Roz then goes to Principal Hawthorne and asks if she may read it, to which he says no, and then she goes through the Baxter High library to look for a wide range of other ‘inappropriate’ books only to be told that there “has been a soft purge of bad books” since “certain topics and titles have no place in the hands of impressionable youths” (00:05:27). Banning books is a frequent concern in American high schools, a practice that attempts to make youths less aware of current sociopolitical concerns, especially when the text is written by a minority author, like Toni Morrison. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anxieties about literature, particularly Gothic fiction and romances, falling into the hands of women were coded as ‘corrupting’ women, a sentiment that has not disappeared even in the twenty-first century. Books, like The Bluest Eye, are removed from high school and even middle school libraries under the guise of protecting our youth from this corruption. Rock music is coded as ‘Satanic rock music’ and even churches perpetuate the rhetoric of ‘if you play a rock song backwards, you’ll hear the phrase hail Satan’ or other subliminal messages. Banning music or literature is an attempt at subjugating and controlling youths, forcing them to take an adult’s word as law and not questioning it, which does not happen with Roz nor Sabrina in this instance.
This subplot in “The Trial of Sabrina Spellman” effectively juxtaposes Sabrina’s plight with Roz’s since both fight against two very different oppressing patriarchal forces. The series is anachronistic, which we can see from the costuming choices to the music that plays in the background to how various set props pop up throughout the series. The nod towards the original series that aired in the 60s acknowledges the nostalgia that audiences yearned for when the series was initially announced but by combining these 60s elements with current sociopolitical criticisms, Sabrina creates an environment that celebrates gender diversity, rather than demonizing it, which we can see with Roz, Susie/Theo, Sabrina, and even Harvey. In Sabrina, we see the Gothic as a mix of a celebration of negative aesthetics that emerge in the age of reason, but also a mixture of the sublime, as Fred Botting writes. “The sublime was associated with grandeur and magnificence [ . . . but] also evoked excessive emotion. Through its presentations of supernatural, sensational, and terrifying incidents, imagined or not, [the] Gothic produced emotional affects on its readers” (Botting 2-3). However, in Sabrina, the Gothic is not limited to the supernatural events that occur. While elements of the supernatural create the necessary horror that we experience as the audience in Sabrina, the mundane becomes equally, if not more, terrifying because of how closely they relate to our current political climate. Rather than the mundane becoming the only puritanical community, the fantastic community, a community that the mundane often retreats to and seeks solace in, becomes just as puritanical, if not more, than the mundane and highlights itself as a space that both the audience and Sabrina cannot feel safe in.
While Roz is not a witch in the series, she does possess a gift that her grandmother calls “the Cunning.” The women in Roz’s family historically lose their sight by the time they turn sixteen, a curse that causes blindness which is then supplemented by psychic sight. Ironically, as Roz’s eyesight worsens, her Cunning sharpens and she sees things that no one else can, like the Weird Sisters causing the collapse in the mines a few episodes later and that Sabrina is a witch. While Sabrina’s trial deals with the after effects of the #MeToo movement that gained traction in 2017[3], Roz’s plight deals more with sociopolitical issues that run rampant in lower income communities. While Roz’s plight remains a subplot that the creators of Sabrina do not spend a large amount of focus on, highlighting Roz’s struggles with Sabrina’s allows for both characters to sympathize with one another in their fight against injustice, which is what #MeToo is all about: highlighting the struggles of the victims so that other victims may come forward with their own stories.
As Sabrina’s trial progresses, so does the likeness to the contemporary #MeToo movement. The movement was created by a social activist of the name Tarana Burke in 2006 as a response to the sexual abuse that women of colour experience, especially in underprivileged communities. Recently, however, the movement has resurfaced as a way for women, both cisgender and not, to empathize with one another by simply stating that they, too, have experienced sexual assault. From this movement, other hashtags have begun to pop up, like #ChurchToo, #MeTooSTEM, and others involving sexual abuse, assault, and harassment in fields like finance, pornography, politics, and many others. While these offshoots from the overarching #MeToo movement remain relevant, misogynists and rape apologists keep coming back with a hashtag of their own: #HimToo. The hashtag initially began as a tweet from Pieter Hanson’s mother, who tweeted that “this was [HER] son. He graduated #1 in boot camp. He was awarded the USO award. He was #1 in A school. He is a gentleman who respects women. He won’t go on solo dates due to the current climate of false sexual accusations by radical feminists with an axe to grind. I VOTE #HimToo” (“‘This is MY Son’: Navy Vet Horrified As Mom’s Tweet Miscasts Him as #HimToo Poster Boy” par. 3). This original tweet has since been deleted, but several news outlets, including The Washington Post, have chronicled this tweet, immortalizing it in the #MeToo timeline. While the hashtag began as a way for men to divulge their own sexual assaults, it has since been twisted to perpetuate the idea that women are often making up allegations of sexual assault against men.[4]
In a post #MeToo era, cisgender men become preoccupied with the notion of “I don’t want to have an Aziz Ansari moment, I don’t know how to invite a girl up to bed . . . without knowing where the actually is [into it]” (Bell 31). Terena Bell analyzes this difficult question and how several journalism outlets tackle this, for lack of a better word, “serious issue.” Magazines and editorials, like Esquire, AskMen, BroBible, and PlayBoy, have recently run columns like “Non-Masculine Behaviours Women Find the Most Sexy” or “How to Buy Her Flowers” and even changed slogans to be more inclusive and aware of the issues surrounding both sex and rape culture. One of the journalists that Bell interviews, Margaret Nichols, says that “it seems [silly] to stop publishing articles about sex out of some kind of concern that you’re feeding into sexual abuse and sexual exploitation” (Bell 30) since journalists have a duty to present unbiased facts in columns, but what Nichols and Bell fail to acknowledge is that the media has such a strong hand in perpetuating sexual and rape culture.
By seeking to place blame for the reasons as to why consent is such a hot button issue, journalists and society at large do not tend to acknowledge the fact that men seek to victimize themselves by stating that “they don’t know whether this girl doesn’t want to come upstairs with me” when the simple solution lies in two words: ask her. By creating hashtags like #HimToo and calling the #MeToo movement a witch hunt, which also minimizes the trauma that actual witch hunts have done, men place the blame entirely on women and their “false allegations” while ignoring the fact that toxic masculinity and the patriarchy are entirely to blame for sexual assault and abuse in the first place by perpetuating the idea that men are entitled to a woman’s body. Toxic masculinity erases the equality that is necessary for relationships to thrive on their own and effectively places the entire blame of the relationship on the woman.
Such issues in our contemporary moment may not seem Gothic in any political way beyond the actual violent act of sexual assault, but they do have significant Gothic undertones. Sandra M. Gilbert, a Gothic theorist who has written works with Susan Gubar on the trope of the madwoman in the attic, addresses this very same issue in “In the Labyrinth of #MeToo” as well and likens the pursuit of women, especially in Hollywood, to that of the tale of Bluebeard and even the Minotaur. She describes patriarchal culture as “the Male Beast at the center of the labyrinth” while more and more stories come to light with the Harvey Weinstein allegations (Gilbert 14) like Gwenyth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Katherine Kendall, Rose McGowan, and so forth being at the forefront of these horror stories about sexual assault. Gilbert highlights the underlying issue with the toxicity of the patriarchy: that the Minotaur, or Man Beast, can do anything without fear of repercussions, even going so far as to quote the 45th President of the United States when he says “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful – I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything . . . Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything” (qtd. in Gilbert 17). This is what lies at the heart of rape culture and toxic masculinity: the idea that the men, the perpetrators of abuse, are at the heart of these issues and remain immune. Porn stars, sex workers, escorts, prostitutes, and even actresses are commodities to be used and abused as the Minotaur sees fit, especially since sex has become this highly commodified bestial thing, and even when sexual assault happens to sex workers, they’re seen as lesser than because of their occupation. The Minotaur is a hungry beast and preys upon female flesh.
The issue that Gilbert highlights is how problematic this way of thinking becomes: the entire fact that men assume that they are owed sex as payment for a date. Perpetuating this myth is incredibly problematic since toxicity breeds toxicity and patriarchal culture is steeped in toxicity. And women are not immune from the toxicity that seeps out from patriarchal culture. In the case of Sabrina, the Minotaur becomes the Dark Lord and Sabrina immerses herself in the very culture that breeds the opposition that attempts to relegate her into the Bride position. Sabrina adamantly refuses to allow misogynistic men to relegate her into this sphere and only agrees to immerse herself in that culture to beat the Dark Lord at his own game, which highlights the fact that women can be just as bestial a Minotaur as men. Viewing toxic masculinity and the patriarchy as this Othered thing is what renders our entire society as Gothic. The Beast in the Gothic tradition goes head to head with the Minotaur[5], challenging perspectives like colonialism, orientalism, racism, sexism and misogyny.
Sabrina thus explores and examines explicitly the comments on #MeToo and our current society’s rape culture. Gilbert’s argument about the toxicity of our current times is especially compelling because it situates Gothic tropes within the increasingly predatory phenomena of the digital age. Proving yet again the Gothic’s adaptability, Gilbert provides a critical lexicon of monsters to account for the masculine monstrosity at the heart of the #MeToo movement. Sabrina performs a similar gothicization of contemporary political theory through its detailed and carefully planned mise-en-scene of witches, covens, and the contemporary. Writers for Sabrina borrow now standard feminist arguments, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. In Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Beauvoir argues that man is considered the default, which would render woman as the Other, or at least within the scope of the default patriarchal lifestyle that Western society revolves around. In Sabrina, the writers use a similar idea, situating toxic masculinity as the Other with femininity becoming the default, particularly since so many female viewers can relate to the struggles that Sabrina faces. In popular culture, the figure of the woman is rendered as explicitly Bad or explicitly Good, something that de Beauvoir highlights as “the Praying Mantis, the Mandrake, [and] the Demon” and “the Muse, the Goddess Mother, [and] Beatrice” (1266). With de Beauvoir’s terminology, women are set so far apart from the earthly realm that they can only be one thing or the other but never both simultaneously.
Patriarchal influences often serve to dichotomize these feminine tropes, which Gothic literature also utilizes. Sabrina, by far, is not the only Gothic narrative to challenge these distinctions between the only apparent two types of women since toxic patriarchal culture has deemed itself fit to state that there are only these two types of women whether actual living women agree with the notion or not. Even a rudimentary Google search for “types of women” elicits results like “The Five Types of Women,” “Three Types of Women to Toss,” “The Four Types of Women” and so forth as if women can easily be relegated into these different spheres that are be assigned to them. More oft than not, these “types of women” are categories that shame women in one way or another. For example, the femme fatale is a trope often utilized when women are overtly sexualized, attractive, and seductive to bring about ruin to men. In regards to Sabrina, the Weird Sisters take up this role of femme fatale, which we can see when Sabrina and the Weird Sisters lure the homophobic football players deep into the mines and eventually blackmail them to protect Susie. The Weird Sisters here are unapologetically sexual, relishing that they hold all this power over these boys, and utilizing it into manipulating them, both with the magical and the mundane.
The witch is a literary figure that has undergone a pop culture transformation in recent years. The body of the witch is a vehicle that writers use to explore sociopolitical anxieties, much like the Gothic is a genre that creators come back to repeatedly to challenge political ideals and common anxieties that the public experiences. In Sabrina, Sabrina is the main metaphor that the show uses to comment on feminist movements, like #MeToo and #BelieveHer. However, that is not the only approach that the show uses to undermine common misconceptions around witches as well as femininity. By challenging how the public views witchcraft, the body of the witch, and the witch herself, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina shows that not all witches are evil and not all witches are good and that witches are only considered as forces of chaos since they retain control over themselves, their bodies, and actively challenge moments of injustice through of energy and the world around them. Because the witch refuses to be defined and controlled in this box that the rest of the world, whether it be fictional or our material plane of existence, the witch’s body is a sociopolitical nightmare that resists signification and actively challenges our preconceptions surrounding bodily autonomy all the while remaining relatable and easily accessible. Especially with our current political climate, these issues surrounding consent that The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina challenges, the entire series becomes one that, not only millennial women, but zillennial children, both cisgender, transgender, and gender non-conforming, require since this is now the Resistance.
[1] The #MeToo movement was initiated by Tarana Burke, a social activist, in 2006. The movement recently regained traction in light of the Harvey Weinstein allegations and was popularized by Alyssa Milano, who played Phoebe Halliwell in the hit show, Charmed.
[2] Breach of promise is a law tort that originated during the Middle Ages. While many jurisdictions have long since abolished this rite, breach of promise still exists in many North American locations, including the United States. In Canada, Saskatchewan was the last known province to abolish breach of promise laws.
[3] Years prior to the beginning of the series, Daniel Webster was an infamous criminal lawyer that made his career on freeing some of the worst murderers and criminals after he asked the Dark Lord to help him win his cases.
[4] Katty Kay in her article “The Truth About False Rape Accusations” after Brett Kavanaugh’s trial writes that less than 10% of rape accusations are false. She also writes that “official figures suggest the number of rapes and sexual assaults which are never reported or prosecuted far outweighs the number of men convicted of rape because of fake accusations” (Kay par. 8).
[5] The Minotaur is always a metaphor for some oppressing force that is not limited to patriarchy and toxic masculinity. The Beast, however, is something that opposes the Minotaur.
Works Cited
Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Netflix, 2015.
Beauvoir, Simone de. “The Second Sex.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al., Norton, 2010, 1265-1273.
Bell, Terena. “Where Has All the Sex Advice for Men Gone?: In a Post #MeToo Era, Men’s Magazines Are Pulling Sex From Their Pages.” Quill, vol. 106, no. 5, Winter 2018, pp. 28-31.
Botting, Fred. The Gothic. Routledge. 1996.
Conway, D.J. Wicca: The Complete Craft. Ten Speed Press, 2001.
Germana, Monica. Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing. Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Gilbert, Sandra M. “In the Labyrinth of #MeToo” American Scholar, vol. 87, no. 3, Summer 2018, pp. 12-25.
Halbertstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke University Press, 2000.
Lorenzi, Lorenzo. Witches: Exploring the Iconography of the Sorceress and the Enchantress. Centro di della Edifimi srl, 2005.
@MicheleDauber. “#brockturner father: son not ‘violent’ only got ‘20 mins of action’ shouldn’t have to go to prison. @thehuntinground.” Twitter. 4 June 2016, 10:58 p.m., https://twitter.com/mldauber/status/739320585222660096. Accessed 11 April 2019.
This Halloween, as we don our masks and let our monsters out to play, let us remember the transgressive nature of this holiday in the celebration of otherness and the Forbidden, of dances with our fears and the joy of an amok time in which the marginal and the outcast are welcomed; herein we may enact our secret selves as performances in public spaces and a street theatre of unauthorized identities, and no mobs bearing torches come to drag us from our lair.
Such rare and precious freedom, this holiday of the frightening of the horses; people are still being murdered as witches all over the world, wars fought and genocides perpetrated over divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, yet here we are throwing parties and making offerings of treats to the laughing children who stand in for the monsters we honor.
Herein innocence and primordial terrors trade places and are conflated, and the fearsome unknowns that live in the darkness of our closets and under our beds are revealed as our hidden faces, and nothing other than ourselves after all. As the Roman playwright Terrence wrote in Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor), Act I, scene 1, line 25; ” Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto”, or “I am human; nothing human is foreign to me.”
Halloween points the way to a future society of diversity and inclusion, and one in which there is a reckoning for the historical injustices whose legacies remain with us, among them slavery and racism, patriarchy and sexual terror.
In a few days time, America will choose between theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and democracy, between the horrors of our past and the possibilities of our future, between equal and unequal power among human beings defined by or regardless of gender; and when we choose, let us remember what the world of disempowered, commodified, and dehumanized women was truly like, as typified in the witch trials.
And to this theocratic tyranny and terror let us give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of March 1 2021, Anniversary of the Salem Witch Trials: How Patriarchal Religious Authority Subjugated Women Through Charges of Witchcraft; On this day in 1692 the Salem Witch Trials began; and in some ways have never stopped, but expanded to become a pervasive and endemic harm which characterizes our society and the carceral state America has become. Mass hysteria has assaulted truth with the sophisticated propaganda of social media and become a horrific new religion with QAnon, racism and patriarchal religious authoritarianism and intolerance has become Christian Identity fascism, conformism and the use of social force as show trials, torture, and terror have become state tyranny and terror on a vast institutional scale.
Othering those whom we vilify through divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite membership and belonging remains a primary instrument of repression of dissent and the subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement of labor to centralize wealth, power, and privilege. Just as with the historical witch trials, during which my family was driven out of Bavaria in 1586 for the crime of being werewolves, berserkergangr or shapechanging warriors, and witches, Drachenbräute or ‘the brides of the dragon’ as Martin Luther described them, at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions and the start of the savage Cologne War between Catholics and Protestants, a prelude to the Thirty Years War which killed a third of German peoples.
There is no terror like religious terror, and no tyranny like authority which speaks for the unquestionable divine and whose armies and police are authorized as enforcers of divine law.
This is not an issue confined to the remote past as a vestigial legacy of patriarchal sexual terror, but the warning sign of an iceberg of hidden structural and systemic injustices and inequalities which surround us as a pervasive and endemic harm in our daily lives.
Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, which calls out the injustices of the McCarthy anticommunist era in the context of the Massachusetts Bay Colony witch hysteria of 1692–93, remains among the finest interrogations of state tyranny and terror ever written. I make an annual ritual of watching the beautiful 1996 film with the magnificent Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams.
As I wrote in my post of July 29 2020 Weaponized Religion, the Subversion of Democracy, Lunatic Anti-Science Propaganda, and the Legacy of American Imperialism; In the now enormous category of lies and disinformation campaigns against objective truth and scientific rationality, Trump’s recent endorsement of the lunatic claims of a Nigerian doctor now practicing medicine in Texas who is a member of a Pentecostal Church which promulgates religious and medical nonsense that has resulted in an epidemic of children murdered as witches by their parents and a violent pogrom against LGBT people in Nigeria stands near the pinnacle of our Clown of Terror’s crimes against humanity, one which would be hilarious if it were fiction and not horrifically very real and dangerous.
As you may be aware, the years-long wave of children murdered by their parents as witches in Africa was perpetrated by American religious fanatics in a coordinated campaign of colonialist and imperialist destabilization. In Nigeria this has the full collaboration of the government, with the persecution and orchestrated violence against LGBT persons being a dual campaign of mass hysteria and state terror.
It parallels the seizure of Guatemala and El Salvador by Pat Robertson and other Gideonite fundamentalists through his front man Rios Montt and the subsequent Mayan Genocide. The masses of refugees at our border are a direct result of the latter, part of American sponsored political subversion and economic warfare responsible for the collapse of Venezuela, Columbia, Mexico, and Central America.
America has weaponized religion as an instrument of dominion, and it is this same network of Pentecostal and Charismatic organizations which have achieved the capture of the Republican Party and the subversion of democracy here at home. Their brutal campaign against the equality, freedom of bodily autonomy, and reproductive rights of women is the wedge issue the Republicans use to goad the poor into voting against their own interest, but it is only the home front of a global programme of cultural, political, and economic warfare intended to seize and maintain an American hegemony of power and privilege.
God With Us; it is an old motto from the Crusades, and it has a complex and nefarious history. It has been used by the Inquisition against the Jews and Muslims, in the medieval witch hunts to transfer and consolidate patriarchal power as described by Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch and Witch-Hunting and Women. Gott Mitt Uns was the battle cry of the magnificent King Gustav Adolf of Sweden in his epochal victory over the Catholic forces of Imperial Austria at the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631 which liberated Protestant Germany during the horrific Thirty Years War, the monument of which reads ”Freedom of Religion for All Mankind” and is the origin of the doctrine of separation of church and state in America; Gott Mitt Uns was also appropriated by Hitler, who sought to recall the glorious legacy of his namesake.
There is no more dangerous person than one who believes God is on his side, for that belief can justify anything and conceal evil behind a mask of good. We are once again watching it enacted as theocratic terror on both sides of the Hamas-Israel War, and in Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians.
As Agence France-Presse writes in scmp; “A Houston doctor who praised hydroxychloroquine as a miracle coronavirus cure in a viral video retweeted by President Donald Trump blames gynaecological problems on sex with evil spirits and believes the US government is run by “reptilians”.
Stella Immanuel’s viral speech has drawn attention to a little-known group calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” who appear to exist to promote the common antimalarial drug in the fight against Covid-19.”
Immanuel was born in 1965, received her medical degree at the University of Calabar in Nigeria.
“Nobody needs to get sick. This virus has a cure – it is called hydroxychloroquine,” Immanuel exclaimed Monday as she stood on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington at a so-called “White Coat Summit” of like-minded doctors.
Early on in the pandemic, scientists were eager to find out whether hydroxychloroquine’s antiviral properties would make it effective in real-world patients with SARS-CoV-2.
So far though, all the major clinical trials that have reported their findings on this question have found no benefit, and leading national health authorities have moved to restrict its use because of potential cardiac harm.
The clip was shared by Trump and described as a “must watch” by his son Donald Trump Jnr, but has since been deleted by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for promoting misinformation.
Trump also complained about his plummeting approval ratings as compared to those of Dr Anthony Fauci, the top medical adviser on the White House coronavirus task force.
And the curious case of Immanuel and colleagues – first reported in depth by The Daily Beast – underscores just how far the drug’s advocates are willing to go.
The website for “America’s Frontline Doctors” was registered just 11 days ago, a web domain age checker revealed – and the site was taken down by Tuesday afternoon.
“Tea Party Patriots”, a right-wing political group backed by wealthy Republicans, said on its website it was responsible for organising the Washington summit.
Further research on Immanuel’s web page, now accessible only via an archived website viewer, as well as her YouTube account, reveal a long list of bizarre and unscientific beliefs.
These include that “tormenting spirits” routinely have “astral sex” with women, which in turn causes “gynaecological problems, marital distress, miscarriages” and more.
In a 2015 video, Immanuel, who leads a religious group called Fire Power Ministries, said: “There are people ruling this nation that are not even human,” describing them as “reptilian spirits” who are “half human, half ET.”
In the same video she rails against the use of “alien DNA” to treat sick people, which she said had resulted in human beings mixing with demons.
Other targets of her anger include gay marriage, which she said would result in adults marrying children.
As written by Sady Dolye in her essay for In These Times, entitled How Capitalism Turned Women Into Witches; “Sylvia Federici’s new book explains how violence against women was a necessary precondition for capitalism. Federici traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work.
The Italian socialist feminist Silvia Federici is mandatory reading to understand gender politics (today). The opening sentences of her 1975 pamphlet “Wages Against Housework”—“They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work”—will stick in your head and change your whole concept of family. Caliban and the Witch, her titanic 1998 work on witch trials as a tool of early capitalism, will take your head apart and put it back together.
Federici is not just relevant but getting more so every second. Throughout her work, she traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work; she excavates intimacy, uncovering all its toxic layers of lead paint and asbestos, until its exploitative foundations are clear. Her work is essential to decoding the present moment, as capitalism and patriarchy entwine to produce increasingly grotesque offspring: predatory adoption agencies coercing women into giving up their babies; the exorbitant cost of childcare causing single working mothers to go bankrupt; entire industries where the opportunity to abuse women with impunity is a perk for the powerful men up top. And, thank goodness, we seem to know it; half the young leftist women writing today are riffing on Federici’s work.
Federici’s latest, Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, updates and expands the core thesis of Caliban, in which she argued that “witch hunts” were a way to alienate women from the means of reproduction. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Federici argues, there was an intervening revolutionary push toward communalism. Communalist groups often embraced “free love” and sexual egalitarianism—unmarried men and women lived together, and some communes were all-women—and even the Catholic church only punished abortion with a few years’ penance.
For serfs, who tilled the land in exchange for a share of its crops, home was work, and vice versa; men and women grew the potatoes together. But in capitalism, waged laborers have to work outside the home all the time, which means someone else needs to be at home all the time, doing the domestic work. Gender roles, and the subjugation of women, became newly necessary.
Early feudal elites in rural Europe enclosed public land, rendering it private and controllable, and patriarchy enclosed women in “private” marriages, imposing on them the reproductive servitude of bearing men’s children and the emotional labor of caring for men’s every need. Pregnancy and childbirth, once a natural function, became a job that women did for their male husband-bosses—that is to say, childbirth became alienated labor. “Witches,” according to witch-hunting texts like the Malleus Maleficarum, were women who kept childbirth and pregnancy in female hands: midwives, abortionists, herbalists who provided contraception. They were killed to cement patriarchal power and create the subjugated, domestic labor class necessary for capitalism.
“The body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers,” Federici writes in Caliban, “the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance.”
The elegance of this argument, the neat way it knots together public and private, is thrilling. There are moments when Federici makes sense like no one else. In this passage, she explains how sexuality—once demonized “to protect the cohesiveness of the Church as a patriarchal, masculine clan”—became subjugated within capitalism: “Once exorcised, denied its subversive potential through the witch hunt, female sexuality could be recuperated in a matrimonial context and for procreative ends. …In capitalism, sex can exist but only as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male worker and as a means of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence.”
The pleasures of Witches occur in quick little bursts of illumination. Federici dips in and out of her famous argument, expanding it, updating it and finding new angles on it. Some essays work better than others. Her exploration of gossip and its criminalization is a stand-out; she traces a concise and damning history of how “a term commonly indicating a close female friend turned into one signifying idle, backbiting talk,” and how that act of women speaking to each other—often about men, and in a way those men might not like—became punishable by torture and public humiliation, as in the case of the “scold’s bridle.” This torture device, which was used until the early 1800s, was a mask with a bit (sometimes lined with spikes) that kept a woman from moving her tongue. Gossips, like witches, were criminalized for being women. Federici is always timely: Today’s “whisper networks,” in which women share the identities of abusers and harassers to keep each other safe, are gossip too. And, as accused rapist Stephen Elliott’s lawsuit against Moira Donegan and the Shitty Media Men list proves, plenty of men still want gossips hauled into court.
The point of reading Federici is not to agree with her at all times—it’s to let her knock the dust and cobwebs out of your mind, to open up new roads of thought and spark new curiosities. Opening this book at random will always bring you to a sentence that does that, as when Federici explains why witches are commonly old: “Older women [can] no longer provide children or sexual services and, therefore, appear to be a drain on the creation of wealth”; or ties witches to other historical insurrections: “the portrayal of women’s earthly challenges to the power structures as a demonic conspiracy is a phenomenon that has played out over and over in history down to our times” (Witches was published a few weeks before a Catholic exorcist held a special mass to protect accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh from … witches). Each sentence will also open doors into her other work.”
Excerpted from Caliban and the Witch; “The witch hunt rarely appears in the history of the proletariat. To this day, it remains one the most understudied phenomena in European history, or rather, world history, if we consider that the charge of devil worshipping was carried by missionaries and conquistadors to the “New World” as a tool for the subjugation of the local populations.
That the victims, in Europe, were mostly peasant women may account for the historians’ past indifference towards this genocide, an indifference that has bordered on complicity, since the elimination of the witches from the pages of history has contributed to trivializing their physical elimination at the stake, suggesting that it was a phenomenon of minor significance, if not a matter of folklore.
Even those who have studied the witch hunt (in the past almost exclusively men) were often worthy heirs of the sixteenth-century demonologists. While deploring the extermination of the witches, many have insisted on portraying them as wretched fools afflicted by hallucinations, so that their persecution could be explained as a process of “social therapy,” serving to reinforce neighborly cohesion, or could be described in medical terms as a “panic,” a “craze,” an “epidemic,” all characterizations that exculpate the witch hunters and depoliticize their crimes.
Feminists were quick to recognize that hundreds of thousands of women could not have been massacred and subjected to the cruelest tortures unless they posed a challenge to the power structure. They also realized that such a war against women, carried out over a period of at least two centuries, was a turning point in the history of women in Europe, the “original sin” in the process of social degradation that women suffered with the advent of capitalism, and a phenomenon, therefore, to which we must continually return if we are to understand the misogyny that still characterizes institutional practice and male-female relations.
Marxist historians, by contrast, even when studying the “transition to capitalism,” with very few exceptions, have consigned the witch hunt to oblivion, as if it were irrelevant to the history of the class struggle. Yet, the dimensions of the massacre should have raised some suspicions. as hundreds of thousands of women were burned, hanged, and tortured in less than two centuries.
It should also have seemed significant that the witch hunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, the beginning of the slave trade, the enactment of “bloody laws” against vagabonds and beggars and it climaxed in the interregnum between the end of feudalism and the capitalist “take off” when the peasantry in Europe reached the peak of its power but, in time, also consummated its historic defeat. So far, however, this aspect of primitive accumulation has truly remained a secret.
Witch-Burning Times and the State Initiative
What has not been recognized is that the witch hunt was one of the most important events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the modern proletariat. For the unleashing of a campaign of terror against women, unmatched by any other persecution, weakened the resistance of the European peasantry to the assault launched against it by the gentry and the state, at a time when the peasant community was already disintegrating under the combined impact of land privatization, increased taxation, and the extension of state control over every aspect of social life.
The witch hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline, thus redefining the main elements of social reproduction. Contrary to the view propagated by the Enlightenment, the witch hunt was not the last spark of a dying feudal world. Witch-hunting reached its peak between 1580 and 1630, in a period, that is, when feudal relations were already giving way to the economic and political institutions typical of mercantile capitalism. It was in this long “Iron Century” that, almost by a tacit agreement, in countries often at war against each other, the stakes multiplied, and the state started denouncing the existence of witches and taking the initiative of the persecution.
Before neighbor accused neighbor, or entire communities were seized by a “panic,” a steady indoctrination took place, with the authorities publicly expressing anxiety about the spreading of witches, and travelling from village to village in order to teach people how to recognize them, in some cases carrying with them lists with the names of suspected witches and threatening to punish those who hid them or came to their assistance.
But it was the jurists, the magistrates, and the demonologists, often embodied by the same person, who most contributed to the persecution. They were the ones who systematized the arguments, answered the critics, and perfected a legal machine that, by the end of the sixteenth century, gave a standardized, almost bureaucratic format to the trials, accounting for the similarities of the confessions across national boundaries. In their work, the men of the law could count on the cooperation of the most reputed intellectuals of the time, including philosophers and scientists who are still praised as the fathers of modern rationalism.
There can be no doubt, then, that the witch hunt was a major political initiative. The political nature of the witch hunt is further demonstrated by the fact that both Catholic and Protestant nations, at war against each other in every other respect, joined arms and shared arguments to persecute witches. Thus, it is no exaggeration to claim that the witch hunt was the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nation-states, the first example, after the schism brought about by the Reformation, of a European unification.
Devil Beliefs and Changes in the Mode of Production
A first insight into the meaning of the European witch hunt can be found in the thesis proposed by Michael Taussig in his classic work The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), where the author maintains that devil-beliefs arise in those historical periods when one mode of production is being supplanted by another. In such periods not only are the material conditions of life radically transformed, but so are the metaphysical underpinnings of the social order — for instance, the conception of how value is created, what generates life and growth, what is “natural” and what is antagonistic to the established customs and social relations.
Taussig developed his theory by studying the beliefs of Colombian agricultural laborers and Bolivian tin miners at a time when, in both countries, monetary relations were taking root that in peoples’ eyes seemed deadly and even diabolical, compared with the older and still-surviving forms of subsistence-oriented production. Thus, in the cases Taussig studied, it was the poor who suspected the better-off of devil worship. Still, his association between the devil and the commodity form reminds us that also in the background of the witch hunt there was the expansion of rural capitalism, which involved the abolition of customary rights, and the first inflationary wave in modern Europe.
These phenomena only led to the growth of poverty, hunger, and social dislocation, they also transferred power into the hands of a new class of “modernizers” who looked with fear and repulsion at the communal forms of life that had been typical of pre-capitalist Europe. It was by the initiative of this proto-capitalist class that the witch hunt took off, as a weapon by which resistance to social and economic restructuring could be defeated.
That the spread of rural capitalism, with all its consequences (land expropriation, the deepening of social distances, the breakdown of collective relations) was a decisive factor in the background of the witch hunt is also proven by the fact that the majority of those accused were poor peasant women — cottars, wage laborers — while those who accused them were wealthy and prestigious members of the community, often their employers or landlords, that is, individuals who were part of the local power structures and often had close ties with the central state.
In England, the witches were usually old women on public assistance or women who survived by going from house to house begging for bits of food or a pot of wine or milk; if they were married, their husbands were day laborers, but more often they were widows and lived alone. Their poverty stands out in the confessions. It was in times of need that the Devil appeared to them, to assure them that from now on they “should never want,” although the money he would give them on such occasions would soon turn to ashes, a detail perhaps related to the experience of superinflation common at the time.
As for the diabolical crimes of the witches, they appear to us as nothing more than the class struggle played out at the village level: the “evil eye,” the curse of the beggar to whom an aim has been refused, the default on the payment of rent, the demand for public assistance.
Witch-Hunting and Class Revolt
As we can see from these cases, the witch hunt grew in a social environment where the “better sorts” were living in constant fear of the “lower classes,” who could certainly be expected to harbor evil thoughts because in this period they were losing everything they had.
That this fear expressed itself as an attack on popular magic is not surprising. The battle against magic has always accompanied the development of capitalism, to this very day. Magic is premised on the belief that the world is animated, unpredictable, and that there is a force in all things so that every event is interpreted as the expression of an occult power that must be deciphered and bent to one’s will.
Magic was also an obstacle to the rationalization of the work process, and a threat to the establishment of the principle of individual responsibility. Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal of work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to power. The world had to be “disenchanted” in order to be dominated.
By the sixteenth century, the attack against magic was well under way and women were its most likely targets. Even when they were not expert sorcerers/magicians, they were the ones who were called to mark animals when they fell sick, heal their neighbors, help them find lost or stolen objects, give them amulets or love potions, help them forecast the future. Though the witch hunt targeted a broad variety of female practices, it was above all in this capacity — as sorcerers, healers, performers of incantations and divinations — that women were persecuted. For their claim to magical power undermined the power of the authorities and the state, giving confidence to the poor in their ability to manipulate the natural and social environment and possibly subvert the constituted order.
It is doubtful, on the other hand, that the magical arts that women had practiced for generations would have been magnified into a demonic conspiracy had they not occurred against a background of an intense social crisis and struggle. These were the “peasant wars” against land privatization, including the uprisings against the “enclosures” in England (in 1549, 1607, 1628, 1631), when hundreds of men, women and children, armed with pitchforks and spades, set about destroying the fences erected around the commons, proclaiming that “from now on we needn’t work any more.” During these revolts, it was often women who initiated and led the action.
The persecution of witches grew on this terrain. It was class war carried out by other means.
Witch-Hunting, Woman-Hunting, and the Accumulation of Labor
It seems plausible that the witch hunt was, at least in part, an attempt to criminalize birth control and place the female body, the uterus, at the service of population increase and the production and accumulation of labor-power. We can, in fact, imagine what effect it had on women to see their neighbors, friends, and relatives being burned at the stake, and realize that any contraceptive initiative on their side might be construed as the product of a demonic perversion.
From this point of view, there can be no doubt that the witch hunt destroyed the methods that women had used to control procreation, by indicting them as diabolical devices, and institutionalized the state’s control over the female body, the precondition for its subordination to the reproduction of labor-power. The witch hunt, then, was a war against women; it was a concerted attempt to degrade them, dehumanize them, and destroy their social power.
When this task was accomplished — when social discipline was restored, and the ruling class saw its hegemony consolidated — witch trials came to an end. The belief in witchcraft could even become an object of ridicule, decried as a superstition, and soon put out of memory. Just as the state had started the witch hunt, so too, one by one, various governments took the initiative in ending it.
Once the subversive potential of witchcraft was destroyed, the practice of magic could even be allowed to continue. After the witch hunt came to an end, many women continued to support themselves by foretelling the future, selling charms, and practicing other forms of magic. But now the authorities were no longer interested in prosecuting these practices, being inclined, instead, to view witchcraft as a product of ignorance or a disorder of the imagination.
Yet the specter of the witches continued to haunt the imagination of the ruling class. In 1871, the Parisian bourgeoisie instinctively returned to it to demonize the female Communards, accusing them of wanting to set Paris aflame. There can be little doubt, in fact, that the models for the lurid tales and images used by the bourgeois press to create the myth of the petroleuses were drawn from the repertoire of the witch hunt.”
And for reimagined faith as feminine centered seizure of power from the Patriarchy, and as a reconstructed Celtic fairy faith of pre Christian Europe, there are no finer sources than those written by Starhawk, who had the wisdom to honor both the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves:
The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess,
Joy and solidarity tonight held the stage of history and the world as Kamala championed the rights of women, most especially those of bodily autonomy and reproductive healthcare, in Houston Texas, America’s heart of darkness and theocratic-patriarchal sexual terror and the dehumanization and theft of citizenship of women.
A battle cry of freedom and an ultimatum written in blood and fury was hoisted aloft today, bearing the message; Republicans, your white male privilege doesn’t work here anymore.
This night the women of Texas like lionesses roared their defiance of those who would enslave them, and the entire world roared with them.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of June 24 2024, Anniversary of the End of Roe Versus Wade and Women’s Right of Bodily Autonomy; On this day two years ago half our nation’s people were stripped of meaningful citizenship and their bodies declared property of the state by the Supreme Court.
Of this ongoing patriarchal-theocratic horror and crime against humanity I wrote in my summation of that year’s liberation struggle and electoral politics in America in my post of December 28 2022, This Year Was Defined in Politics by Resistance Against the Patriarchy and the Issue of Women’s Rights of Bodily Autonomy; 2022 was defined in politics by resistance against the Patriarchy and the issue of women’s rights of bodily autonomy, both globally in the glorious and spectacular revolution against theocracy and patriarchy originating in Chile and throughout Latin America, and here in America the mass resistance to the end of Roe v Wade which galvanized a historic blue wave in our midterm elections.
While this has always been a wedge issue used by elites and forces of reaction to make women vote against their own interests, freedoms, and equality, and its resistance rode the wave of change of the #metoo movement, something has shifted and become new in this arena, forever transforming the ground of struggle and redefining the terms of debate; it is now an existential crisis central to the survival of democracy itself, and women are responding not with the subjugation of learned helplessness, but with the fury of the oppressed and the solidarity of a dehumanized class.
In 2022, women realized they are enslaved and have begun resistance and revolutionary struggle. Patriarchal authority has lost its legitimacy, and begun its inevitable collapse. Without its fig leaf of theocratic lies and illusions, with the amoral brutality of its systemic and historical forces and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, there is only one way this ends.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Here follows my journal on this Defining Moment for America as it happened :
June 24 2022, The End of Women’s Right of Bodily Autonomy; The Supreme Court has just declared women’s bodies to be property of the state, and mass protests have once again erupted throughout America.
This is an area of ideological fracture and polarization in which few persuadable voters remain on either side, the classic wedge issue by which Patriarchy and sexual terror subjugates and dehumanizes us, and through which our enslavement by hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege legitimize their regimes of weaponized faith.
Electoral politics and legislative change have failed, for in our system a few unelected and corrupt judges, infiltration and subversion agents placed at the apex of social power by hegemonic elites to replace democracy with theocracy, can rule by fiat in total disregard to the will of the people. Our Justice system has lost its legitimacy and become a junta, and this we must resist.
After all our hopes and dreams for Liberty and a free society of equals, we’re back to the Underground Railroad.
As written by Emily Janakiram & Lizzie Chadbourne in Truthout; “As reproductive rights organizers have long anticipated — and as a leaked memo all but confirmed last month — the Supreme Court has ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The decision came in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which involves a Mississippi law prohibiting all abortions after 15 weeks except in the case of medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality. This suit is part of an effort by the right to legally challenge what was previously the constitutionally protected right to abortion in Roe, and the court has sided with the state of Mississippi to repeal that right. This ruling undoes the federal protection of abortion, resulting in the total or near-total ban of abortion in 26 states.
The right has long been organizing for this moment, creating “trigger bans” in expectation of Roe’s overturn, as well as mobilizing to harass and intimidate patients in places where abortion remains legal, like New York and Washington, D.C. Republicans are poised to attempt passing a federal ban on abortion.
Despite Justice Samuel Alito’s claim that the ruling does not affect contraceptive access, the anti-abortion right has also opposed hormonal contraception, the copper IUD and the morning-after pill on the grounds that they are “abortifacients” since from their perspective, human life begins at conception and these methods prevent the fertilized egg from implanting. Last month, Louisiana lawmakers deliberated over a bill which would have criminalized both the IUD and the morning-after pill. The bill ultimately failed, but we can expect to see similar initiatives gaining ground in states hostile to abortion rights.
The anti-abortion right frames the overturn of Roe as an act of democracy, “returning the decision to the states,” and correcting federal overreach. This is misleading at best. The states in which abortion is now illegal are heavily gerrymandered and undemocratic themselves; it is simply not true that abortion bans reflect the will of the people. In fact, a majority of Americans — about 60 percent — believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
The consequences of abortion restrictions in red states prior to this moment have been disastrous as residents have been forced to travel out of state to access care at significant personal cost. Texas’s notorious Senate Bill 8 law resulted in a significant number of patients from Texas with a gestational age past six weeks traveling to Oklahoma for abortion appointments — until Oklahoma passed a total abortion ban, leaving Texans seeking abortions with even fewer options.
We can expect this situation to spread further across the country, with abortion patients forced to travel even longer distances to access abortion. Of course, this will place an undue hardship on patients without the means to travel out of state — whether that be due to the financial burden, lack of access to child care, sick leave, or other reasons.
The right has long been organizing for this moment, creating “trigger bans” in expectation of Roe’s overturn, as well as mobilizing to harass and intimidate patients in places where abortion remains legal.
More grotesquely, abortion patients will not only have to face undue financial and logistical hurdles to access essential health care — but they will also have to brave the police, or in some cases, state-funded vigilantes, in order to do so. Texas’s SB 8 law allows literally anyone to file suit against someone who “aids or abets” in an abortion — though not the abortion patient themselves. Someone who drives a patient to a bus so that they can receive an abortion out of state could be sued, and the plaintiff would be awarded $10,000 in damages. Abortion patients themselves cannot be sued.
While the law has been carefully designed so that there is no criminal penalty — and thus, ironically, protecting it from certain legal challenges — it still invites police violence against abortion patients. Recently, 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera of South Texas was arrested and detained under suspicion of having induced her own abortion after a stillbirth. Even if the states that criminalize abortion only penalize providers and those who “aid and abet” abortion, patients themselves can still be subject to police violence in cases of self-managed abortions, which will become the only recourse available to many patients who cannot travel out of state to a clinic. Although only a handful of states currently criminalize self-managed abortion specifically, in over half the states there have been criminal investigations into pregnancy loss based on suspicion of self-managed abortion. People from communities that experience heightened levels of policing and state surveillance and who choose to self-manage their abortions will be at an increased risk of criminalization.
Even when abortion patients manage to reach less-restricted states, safe and unfettered abortion access in those places is by no means a given either. Many clinics are already functioning at capacity even before the heightened influx of patients from other states, and the anti-abortion movement has set its eyes on cities like New York. Their base has been galvanized to confront “the evil of abortion” at its center — the clinics where abortions happen. When abortion is halted in over half the states, we can expect that campaigns of harassment will expand at clinics in less-restricted states by anti-abortion groups shifting their focus to regions where abortions are still performed legally.
Abortion patients will not only have to face undue financial and logistical hurdles to access essential health care — but they will also have to brave the police, or in some cases, state-funded vigilantes, in order to do so.
In New York City, the Archdiocese leads a campaign of clinic harassment every month in all five boroughs — with the blessing and sanction of the police. The police do not help patients enter the clinic safely but escort the clinic harassers — whom they seem to be on friendly terms with — and threaten and intimidate clinic defenders. It is no secret that the police and the far right are closely allied, in some cases one and the same; we cannot count on them to protect abortion patients. We will need a militant response to counter the right in less restricted states.
Moreover, the criminalization of providing abortion care and aiding and abetting abortion puts pregnant people in grave danger. Some states may make “life of the mother” exemptions. But most United States hospitals are either for-profit or religiously affiliated nonprofits with ideological opposition to abortion. There is seldom a clearly demarcated point at which an abortion becomes absolutely, unambiguously medically necessary. A private health care facility may not risk criminal charges in order to save a patient’s life. Notoriously, Savita Halappanavar died of sepsis in an Irish hospital when doctors refused to perform an abortion because, though her pregnancy was no longer viable, a fetal heartbeat was still detected. As of this writing, an American woman, Andrea Prudente, is set to be airlifted out of Malta, the only country in the European Union with a total abortion ban. Even though her pregnancy is no longer viable, and without an abortion, she risks the same fate, a fetal heartbeat is still detected and doctors refuse to provide an abortion. Of course, the U.S. leads the developed world in mortality during childbirth. With the end of Roe, it will become even more dangerous to give birth in the U.S.
Many reproductive rights organizations advise that pro-choice activists put aside “coat hanger” imagery and refrain from dwelling on history of dangerous back-alley abortions. This is not to erase the history of violence that accompanied abortion bans, but because it unproductively obscures the abortion situation as it exists today. Self-managed abortions are safer than ever, thanks to the advent of the abortion pill and networks that provide access through the mail; and even abortions in the home can be performed safely using aspiration. In fact, they are more safe than home births, belying the right-wing canard that abortion and the abortion pill is more dangerous than childbirth. The right uses this lie to push for the closure of clinics and make obtaining the abortion pill unduly burdensome.
Laws against aiding and abetting abortion — and the ensuing climate of fear, secrecy and isolation — are what kill pregnant people, not self-managed abortions.
However, the secrecy in which abortions have had to happen historically is what made them so dangerous — that people don’t know how such abortions can be performed safely, or even the basic facts of pregnancy (a situation that’s especially dire in red states given a lack of sex education in schools). This secrecy is enforced by the police. Laws against “aiding and abetting abortion” — and the ensuing climate of fear, secrecy, and isolation — are what kill pregnant people, not self-managed abortions.
If we are to resist abortion bans, each one of us must be prepared to aid and abet abortion, whether that’s being trained in administering a self-managed abortion, buying and donating abortion pills, driving someone across state lines to receive an abortion, participating in clinic defense, or donating to an abortion fund. But we cannot lose sight of the ultimate goal: a mass movement to establish free abortion on demand as an inalienable right.”
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Roe v Wade has been overturned. Here’s what this will mean; “Millions of women are now less free than men, in the functioning of their own bodies and in the paths of their own lives.
The story is not about the supreme court. Today, the sword that has long been hanging over American women’s heads finally fell: the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, ending the nationwide right to an abortion. This has long been expected, and long dreaded, by those in the reproductive rights movement, and it has long been denied by those who wished to downplay the court’s extremist lurch. The coming hours will be consumed with finger pointing and recriminations. But the story is not about who was right and who was wrong.
Nor is the story about the US judiciary’s crumbling legitimacy, or the supreme court’s fractious internal politics. In the coming days, our attention will be called to the justices themselves – to their feelings, to their careers, to their safety. We will be distracted by the stench of partisanship and scandal that emanates from the shadowy halls of One First Street; by the justices’ grievance-airing and petty backbiting in public; or by their vengeful paranoid investigation into the leak of a draft of Samuel Alito’s opinion some weeks ago. We will be scolded not to protest outside their houses, and we will be prevented, by high fences and heavy gates and the presence of armed cops, from protesting outside the court itself. But the story is not about the supreme court.
The story is not about the Democratic politicians, whose leadership on abortion rights has been tepid at best, and negligent at worst, since the 1990s. In the coming days, people who have voted to uphold the Hyde Amendment, a provision that has banned federal funding of abortion since 1976 – effectively limiting the constitutional right to an abortion to only those Americans wealthy enough to afford one – will tell us how terrible this is. They will issue statements talking about their outrage; they will make platitude-filled speeches about the worth and dignity of American women. They will not mention their own inaction, persisting for decades in the face of mounting and well-funded rightwing threats to Roe. They will not mention that they did nothing as all that worth and dignity of American women hung in the balance; they will not mention that most of them still, even now, oppose doing the only thing that could possibly restore reproductive freedom: expanding the number of justices on the courts. But the cowardice, hypocrisy, and historic moral failure of national Democrats is not the story. And certainly, the story is nothing so vulgar as what this withdrawal of human rights might mean for that party’s midterm election prospects.
The story is not, even, about the legal chaos that will now follow. It is not about the fact that in 13 states, today’s order has made all abortion immediately illegal, the consummation of sexist ambitions that had long been enshrined in so-called trigger laws, provisions that have been on the books for years and decades that ban abortion upon the court’s reversal of Roe – misogyny lying in wait. Nor is the story about the other 13 states that will almost certainly ban abortion now, too, meaning that the procedure will be illegal in 26 of the nation’s 50 states within weeks.
The story is not about how legislatures, lawyers and judges will handle these laws; it is not about whether they will allow merciful exemptions for rape or incest (they won’t) or impose draconian measures that aim to extend the cruelty of state bans beyond their borders to target abortion doctors, funders, and supporters in blue states (they will).
The story is not about the cop who will charge the first doctor or the first patient with murder – that’s already happening, anyway. The story is not about the anti-choice activists, sneering in their triumph, who will say that they only want the best for women, and that women can’t be trusted to know what’s best for themselves. The story is not about the women who will be imprisoned or committed at the behest of these activists, or the desperate pregnant people, with nowhere to turn, who will be ensnared by them into deceitful crisis pregnancy centers or exploitative “maternity ranches”.
The real story is not about the media who will churn out the think pieces, and the crass, enabling both-sidesism, and the insulting false equivalences and calls for unity. It is not about the pundits who will scold feminists that really, it is the overzealous abortion rights movement that is to blame; that really, women must learn to compromise with the forces that would keep them unequal, bound to lives that are smaller, more brutal, and more desperate. The story is not, even, about those other rights – the rights to parent, and to marry, and to access birth control – that a cruel and emboldened right will come for next.
The real story is the women. The real story is the student whose appointment is scheduled for tomorrow, who will get a call from the clinic sometime in the next hours telling her that no, they are sorry, they cannot give her an abortion after all. The real story is the woman waiting tables, who feels so sick and exhausted these past few weeks that she can barely make it through her shifts, who will soon be calling clinics in other states, hearing that they’re all booked for weeks, and will be asking friends for money to help cover the gas, or the plane, or the time off that she can’t afford. The real story is the abortion provider, already exhausted and heartbroken from years of politicians playing politics with her patients’ rights, who will wonder whether she can keep her clinic open for its other services any more, and conclude that she can’t. The real story is the mom of two, squinting at her phone as she tries to comfort a screaming toddler, trying to figure out what she will have to give up in order to keep living the life she wants, with the family she already has.
The real story is about thousands of these women, not just now but for decades to come – the women , whose lives will be made smaller and less dignified by unplanned and unchosen pregnancies, the women whose health will be endangered by the long and grueling physical process of pregnancy; the women, and others, who will have to forgo dreams, end educations, curtail careers, stretch their finances beyond the breaking point, and subvert their own wills to someone else’s.
The real story is in the counterfactuals – the books that will go unwritten, the trips untaken, the hopes not pursued, and jokes not told, and the friends not met, because the people who could have lived the full, expansive, diverse lives that abortions would allow will instead be forced to live other lives, lives that are lesser precisely because they are not chosen.
The real story is the millions of women, and others, who now know that they are less free than men are – less free in the functioning of their own bodies, less free in the paths of their own lives, less free in the formation of their own families.
The real story is not this order; the real story is these people’s unfreedom – the pain it will inflict and the joy it will steal. The real story is women, and the real story is the impossible question: how can we ever grieve enough for them?”
As I wrote in my post of May 14 2022, The Women’s March for Freedom; Throughout America today women have seized the streets in mass action for the right of bodily autonomy, the first of all rights of property and the defining quality of citizenship, for without ownership of our own bodies there is no freedom, and we are all made property of the state.
Democracy and dehumanization hang in the balance in the issue of women’s reproductive rights; but also life itself, for access to healthcare is a precondition of the right to life and thus among the first of all implied rights guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Without this, no other rights are meaningful.
This is a fight against enslavement and death, and for our equality as human beings and liberty as citizens.
How shall we give answer to our dehumanization and the theft of our citizenship?
Let us say to Gideonite patriarchy and to fascist tyranny with Dylan Thomas;
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
At stake here are issues affecting every American citizen and other persons within the boundaries of our law; freedom versus dehumanization as a means of enslavement, and our universal human right of access to healthcare as a precondition of our right to life.
How can the Gideonite fundamentalists and atavistic forces of Patriarchy deny the right of bodily autonomy, the first of all rights of property, our right to choose our own use of that body which speaks to the definition of being human and to the fundamental rights of a citizen in a democracy as a voting co-owner of our government, on the basis of our right to life which derives both from our citizenship and our humanity as a natural condition, when the right of the mother to life precedes that of her fetus and renders her the sole medical authorizing party in any such matter?
Only a woman’s right to choose her own destiny matters here, and no state or any other authority which operates in the place of a father or husband under the Patriarchal legal fiction of in loco parentis, nor the will or judgement of any other persons especially actual fathers and husbands, has any just role in a free society of equals; all else is slavery.
If one abrogates the separation of church and state and claims Biblical authority as a justification for government policy, surely an act of hubris if not madness, on abortion and for a definition of life, life clearly begins with breath.
As William Tyndale wrote in his beautiful poetic reimagination of traditional sources published as the King James Bible; “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” Genesis 2:7.
This is reinforced elsewhere; “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host” Psalms 33:6. And again; “Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived,” Ezekiel 10. And yet again; “If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust,” Job 34: 14-15.
Plus there’s the abortion method authorized in Numbers 5:11-31, the Ordeal of the Bitter Water, and the penalty for causing an abortion outside of this ritual such as by a violent blow, which is a fine paid to the woman’s husband because it is a crime against property or future economic benefit and not a crime against person as there is no life before breath or natural birth.
Abrahamic faiths regard as human only those who have been ensouled at first breath upon being born; prior to birth we are not human but part of the mother’s body; a fetus has no rights other than hers, and hers is the only legitimate voice regarding one’s own body as the primary right of property from which all others derive. This is because Abrahamic faiths regard the body as an organic machine and not a person until it is animated with a soul.
To argue that abortion is murder is to argue that there is no soul, that we are human prior to the animating breath of the Infinite, and that as mere beasts and organic machines each of our cells are individually sacrosanct and legally persons. Haircuts and manicures are murder in this absurd construction.
Let us not mistake the purpose and intention of those who would seize women’s power of bodily autonomy as both a human being and a citizen; this has nothing to do with faith, and everything to do with power.
As I wrote in my post of May 6 2022, There Is No Freedom Without That of Bodily Autonomy: On the Patriarchal Enslavement and Dehumanization of Women in the State Capture of Liberty and Equality in the Supreme Court’s Revocation of the Right to Abortion; There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
Our Supreme Court just declared half of humankind to be less than human and property of the state, not merely as patriarchal enslavement but also as dehumanization and theft of citizenship. Next will be the right of women to vote, then of all nonwhite persons, then the right to own property and act legally in one’s own name will be restricted to white men as it was at our founding; no matter where it begins with subversion of democracy and the equality of all human beings, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Women’s reproductive rights exhibit dual aspects as both an issue of liberty, our freedom to choose our own identity without coercion by the state, and as a healthcare issue, as universal free access to healthcare is a precondition of our right to life and therefore a Constitutional guarantee upon which none may legally infringe.
This is a direct attack on the idea of citizenship which is central and foundational to democracy, on the personhood and self ownership of all women, and on our values and ideals of freedom and equality.
It is a telling sign of intent that Alioto has cited as precedent the law which legalized witch burning centuries go in his opinion claiming that the right to abortion is unconstitutional, as MSN has pointed out.
Once again, unequal power has been captured and institutionalized by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as a fascism of weaponized faith and systemic Patriarchy.
America’s Supreme Court, now a political bureaucracy of authoritarian power and without legitimacy, and which has delegitimized all law in America and subverted our courts as instruments of repression of dissent and the carceral state, the true goal of the Fourth Reich in the capture of our institutions and systems of Justice, has outlawed the universal right of abortion and given a woman’s power over her own body to the state.
Yes, we all knew this was coming but it is a life disruptive event and a point of fracture in our history. This we must resist with mass action and legislative judo, but the forces of patriarchy and fascism are enormously against us. What happens next, if half of humankind can be dehumanized as property of the state and citizenship with our universal human rights becomes meaningless? In this moment, all is in motion and chaotic change, but this is also a chance of action and a measure of the adaptive range of our system. Patriarchy has made a move which is irredeemable and cannot be walked back, and they are exposed; its our move now.
If we want to keep our system of Justice as a guarantor of our universal human rights and of our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens, and the meaning of citizenship itself, we must reform the Supreme Court. I suggest limiting terms to that of the President who appointed each member, or limiting terms and holding a vote to elect Justices on a one citizen one vote basis so that it is no longer a political appointment.
This must be part of a Restoration of democracy which redesigns our system to guarantee majority rule. We must abolish the electoral college and the parceling of votes by state, and change to a one citizen one vote direct electoral democracy.
The blindfold of Justice has slipped, and we must restore her impartiality to divisions including those of gender and race.
As I wrote in my post of October 3 2021, Women’s March for Reproductive Rights and Freedom of Bodily Autonomy; Institutionalized sexual terror and state tyranny in the legislative assault on women’s reproductive rights and the primary freedom of bodily autonomy were challenged in a mass action yesterday throughout America, organized by the Women’s March and coordinated with the riveting testimony in Congress of three of our representatives who have had abortions, Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal, and Barbara Lee.
There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
We can triumph over this wave of theft of our liberty which seeks to redefine the relationship of individuals to the state and render citizenship meaningless if we act in solidarity with coordinated mass action and legislative process. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me in 1982 in Beirut by Jean Genet goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Anger, fear and desperation: people reflect on two years since fall of Roe
EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton's first interview on the implications of this week's Roe v. Wade news: "It is not just about a woman's right to choose. It is about much more than that."
The Handmaid’s Tale: Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders, by Karen A. Ritzenhoff (Editor, Contributor), Janis L. Goldie (Editor, Contributor)
This Sukkot, American universities attack protests by Jewish peace activists calling for divestiture of investment in war industries complicit in genocide and other crimes against humanity in Palestine and Lebanon.
So it has been with our entire nation for longer than I have been alive, and though I have fought to save something of our humanity since the 1982 Siege of Beirut, all over our dark and brutal world, and won some few victories, on the whole I am failing.
Tens of thousands of American, Israeli, Palestinian, and Lebanese peoples have protested their annihilation, dehumanization, and enslavement by a Zionist state of tyranny and terror, and of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. Yet even our most liberal regime in America, led by Genocide Joe and Kommandant Kamala, refuse to stop funding and arming Israel’s criminal war against humanity.
Trump of course would be far worse and more terrible, should he recapture the state, for he is Netanyahu’s ally and the October 7 2023 attack was planned jointly by Hamas and the Netanyahu regime to divide America and shoehorn Trump back into power where he will fully support Israel’s imperial conquest and dominion of the whole Middle East.
We must stop trump and elect Kamala on November 5, but this does not mean turning a blind eye to our complicity in genocide and state terror, in America or in the Holy Lands.
Resistance begins with truth telling and solidarity of action, and this is the primary ground of struggle now unfolding on our university campuses and in our elections.
We are offered a false dichotomy between Kommandant Kamala and Traitor Trump; we can keep both our democracy and our universal human rights. If we refuse to submit, abandon not our fellows, and find the will to claw our way out of the ruins of our nation and our civilization again, and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
God bless America, and God Bless Us, Every One; we’re going to need it.
As written by Chris Walker in Truthout, in an article entitled Jewish Students Blast Universities for Actions Against Sukkot Demonstrations:
Universities destroyed sukkah shelters and stood by while students were harassed by bigots, Jewish Voice for Peace said; “Multiple Jewish-led organizations on college campuses across the country marked the end of the religious holiday of Sukkot this week by calling for their universities to divest from Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Sukkot commemorates the 40 years the Israelites spent wandering the wilderness, led by Moses, after they were freed from enslavement in Egypt. The holiday is often celebrated by constructing temporary structures called sukkahs, meant to remind the Jewish people of their ancestors’ displacement. This year, Jewish students adorned their sukkahs on campus with messages of solidarity with Palestinians, noting that the tradition has taken on increased resonance as Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign has displaced millions of Palestinian families in Gaza over the past year.
Around 18 college chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) took part in the demonstrations, with other student groups joining them across the country. According to a press release shared with Truthout by JVP, students built Gaza solidarity sukkahs at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Brown, Columbia, the University of Washington, the University of Rochester, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, the University of North Carolina, Swarthmore, UCLA, Bryn Mawr, MIT, Rutgers, UC San Diego, Occidental, and more.
The sukkah demonstrations included teach-ins, prayer services, sacred meals, and other programs intended to foster understanding of the genocide and promote divestment and an arms embargo on Israel.
On many campuses, administrators responded to the demonstrations by ordering the destruction of the structures. Administrators also ignored harassment against Jewish students and their allies by pro-Israel agitators. At Northwestern University, for example, administrators tore down students’ Gaza solidarity sukkah not once, but twice — destroying it a second time after students rebuilt the structure.
Isabelle Butera, a student who took part in the sukkah demonstration at Northwestern, condemned the university’s actions; Northwestern has spent all year claiming to care about the wellbeing of Jewish students, yet they send police to dismantle our sacred Sukkah in the dark of night. This reveals that Northwestern’s claims of caring for Jewish students were really only about punishing any students who speak out for Palestinian freedom. Because we dedicated our Sukkot to the people of Gaza who are currently enduring genocide, Northwestern decided to send in police to harass us.”
JVP also noted actions against students elsewhere.
Seventeen students from Brown University are reportedly set to face disciplinary action for violating a newly enacted rule against sleeping overnight on campus property, a standard that was enacted in response to the pro-Palestinian student encampments across the country earlier this year. The university barred students from being inside their sukkah or even within 20 feet of it from the hours of 2 am and 6 am, an unprecedented action that went against the university’s tolerance of Sukkot observations in the past.
“Every year on this campus Jewish students sleep in sukkahs without incident. We believe we are being treated differently because we…are standing with Palestine,” said Etta Robb, a student taking part in the Gaza solidarity sukkah at Brown.
At UCLA, police in riot gear stood near a sukkah and did nothing while right-wing agitators, many who had just attended an event featuring far right speaker Ben Shapiro, harassed pro-Palestine students. The agitators shouted at the demonstrators, used homophobic slurs, and tore parts of the sukkah apart for around half an hour, forcing students taking part in the sukkah to leave out of fear for their safety.
“The students were ultimately forced to abandon the sukkah and disperse for their safety. Only then did cops issue a dispersal order, but allowed agitators to remain and destroy the walls and decorations in the sukkah,” a press release from students said.
Shortly afterward, maintenance workers from the university destroyed the sukkah.
A spokesperson for JVP decried the universities’ actions against student demonstrators.
“These universities desecrate these student’s Jewish practice because their faith is intertwined with their solidarity with the Palestinian people,” said JVP media coordinator Liv Kunins-Berkowitz. “A university has no right to dictate what types of Jewish practice are legitimate. Anti-Zionist Judaism is a longstanding and rapidly growing expression of being Jewish.”
As written in an article as Sukkot began, also by Chris Walker in Truthout, entitled Jewish Students Mark Sukkot Holiday With Calls to End Israel’s Genocide in Gaza; “Several Jewish-led student groups are marking the holiday of Sukkot on campuses across the country by constructing small, temporary structures called sukkahs and adorning them with messages of solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s genocide.
Sukkot, sometimes known as the Feast of Booths, is a weeklong Jewish holiday commemorating the story of the 40 years that Israelites spent in the wilderness after Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt. Jewish people often celebrate Sukkot by constructing sukkahs, which are reminiscent of the shelters their ancestors lived in during displacement.
Sukkot began at sunset on Wednesday, and will last through this coming Wednesday, October 23.
Jewish students at campuses across the U.S. are using the occasion to call for their institutions to divest from Israel and for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel — with many noting that the holiday has increased resonance this year as millions of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced and now live in tents due to Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign.
Around 18 college chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) have set up sukkahs at colleges and universities across the country. Other Jewish students and groups have also taken part in the demonstrations.
Many of the sukkahs feature both Jewish and Palestinian imagery, including olive trees. The structures are also marked with messages like “Gaza Solidarity Sukkah” and “Stop Arming Israel.” At the sukkahs, students have hosted teach-ins featuring university faculty, JVP said in a press release shared with Truthout.
The construction of sukkahs on university campuses has been met with varying responses from administrators.
At Brown University, for example, the student group Jews for Ceasefire Now (JFCN) received permit approval for the temporary construction of their sukkah, with the Office of Chaplains and Religious Life allowing it to stand during the weeklong holiday.
Still, leaders from JFCN said that university officials must do more to address U.S. complicity in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
“It is important to take up space on this campus and show that the undemocratic Corporation” — the formal name given to the governing body of Brown University — “will not silence the student movement,” Rafi Ash, a member of JFCN, told The Brown Daily Herald. “We want to show the Corporation that as they arrive on campus, they are working against the student body.”
Not all universities were receptive to the construction of sukkahs on their grounds. Northwestern University, for example, ordered employees, accompanied by police, to tear down students’ Gaza solidarity sukkah.
As the religious structure was being torn down, the Northwestern students who had constructed it read a poem out loud, observing the symbolism of the university destroying their sukkah that was calling for Palestinian liberation.
“We asked if we could stay on this lawn, as we are students of this campus and have every right to be here. So we stayed and watched the police tear down the beautiful structure that we built only hours ago,” student Isabelle Butera said.
At the University of California-Berkeley, administrators ordered another sukkah to be torn down. Jewish students condemned the action, with some saying it demonstrated the university-wide sentiment against anti-Zionist Jews on campus.
The students relocated their sukkah to a different location, where a guest lecturer spoke. However, the next morning, the university called the police and again tore the structure down, removing materials from it, including items donated by community farms.
“They don’t see us as real Jews or make claims that we’re self hating Jews because we refuse to support a genocide and the colonization of Indigenous Palestinians,” said Gus, who participated in building the sukkah at Berkeley. “Then, when we try to make our own space on the campus that we pay for, our administration destroys our religious dwelling not once, but twice. Both times accompanied by a swarm of police.”
“At Brown, we are unequivocally in solidarity with Northwestern, Cornell, Columbia, and all other Jewish and non-Jewish organizers who are facing repression for pro-Palestinian activism, whether right now in their sukkahs, on their campuses, or throughout the entirety of the past year,” Eden Fine, a participant in the Sukkot event and a senior at Brown University, said in a statement to Truthout.
A pro-Palestinian sukkah was also torn down by officials at the University of Washington.”
What are the students protesting? As written by Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Abubaker Abed in a newsletter entitled The Murderous Logistics of Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Campaign in Northern Gaza: Eyewitnesses say the IDF is starving residents, targeting hospitals, bombing shelters, and murdering civilians in the streets; “On Monday, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif posted a photograph from northern Gaza capturing the Israeli military’s brutal depopulation campaign. In the photo, hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children crowd together on a bombed-out street, carrying their few belongings in plastic bags. They all face the same direction, as if moving in procession, holding their ID cards up in the air to an Israeli soldier just out of view. The caption reads: “Ethnic Cleansing in Jabaliya 2024.”
For the past 19 days, the Israeli military has waged a concentrated campaign of extermination and ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, according to medical staff and eyewitnesses who have been speaking to Drop Site News. The IDF has besieged the area with troops, blocked roads, and constructed earthen barriers, while cutting off access to food, water, fuel, and medical supplies. From the air, it has targeted homes, shelters, schools and hospitals with relentless airstrikes. Quadcopters are shooting civilians in the streets. Amid shelling and demolitions on the ground, soldiers have rounded up residents, arresting hundreds and forcing tens of thousands to march south. “This is the first time since the beginning of the war that the occupation army has besieged an area and then begun a campaign of bombing, killing and starvation in such a complete way,” Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson for the Civil Defense in Gaza, told the Palestinian press agency Safa.
In one of the deadliest incidents, at least 87 people were killed or have been reported missing following an airstrike on a residential block in Beit Lahia on Saturday. More than 40 people were injured in the strike, including infants, some of whom were taken to Kamal Adwan hospital. Video shared by the ministry of health shows several children barely clinging to life in the hospital’s intensive care unit, including footage of a months-old baby lying dead next to another severely wounded child covered in gauze and hooked up to tubes receiving treatment.
On Monday, at least 10 people were killed and 30 injured in the shelling of an UNRWA school sheltering displaced Palestinians in the Jabaliya camp after the Israeli military ordered them to evacuate. In Beit Lahia on Tuesday, 15 people were killed in an Israeli drone strike, followed by a tank shelling on a school that had become a shelter for the displaced, killing seven.
The Israeli military on Wednesday released aerial footage showing crowds streaming out of a bombed out landscape and extolling the “tens of thousands” of citizens that have been forced to flee Jabaliya. Al Jazeera also posted footage from Israel’s national broadcaster showing IDF trucks carrying dozens of blindfolded Palestinian men reportedly from Jabaliya.
So far, the assault has claimed the lives of over 770 people, a number certain to go up with countless more casualties lying in the streets and under the rubble in areas Israeli troops have barred emergency crews from accessing. “Israeli forces are executing people in the streets, in shelters, everywhere,” Ismail Al-Thwabta, the spokesperson for the Information Ministry in Gaza, told Drop Site News. Over 1,000 others have been injured and more than 200 civilians have been “kidnapped,” according to the Government Media Office in Gaza, with dozens more missing.
The focus of the military campaign is the northernmost governorate in the Gaza Strip, an area known as North Gaza. The stretch, where some 200,000 Palestinians still remain, includes the cities of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabaliya, along with Jabaliya refugee camp, the largest refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
The UN Human Rights Office issued a statement on Sunday voicing its concern that Israeli forces in North Gaza are interfering with humanitarian aid and facilitating the forced expulsion of Palestinians. “The Israeli military has taken measures that make life in north Gaza impossible for Palestinians while repeatedly ordering the displacement of the entire governorate,” the office said. Thousands of homes, shelters and other structures have also been destroyed “causing massive and unprecedented destruction,” the Government Media Office in Gaza said in a statement.
Images and video shared by journalists on the ground show large groups of civilians on the street being rounded up, with Israeli tanks positioned next to them. On Monday, Al Jazeera correspondent Hossam Shabat posted on X that Israeli forces that day had attacked a school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, forcing people out. “Then they lined them up and shot anyone who dared to move. Any male over the age of 16 is being detained, tortured, and investigated,” he wrote. “Many people who are being lined up are sick individuals, such as amputees, cancer patients, and young kids who are being asked to stand in line for hours. The situation is catastrophic.”
As Israeli operations in the north have intensified, its planes are dropping flyers over the area and deploying drones fitted with loudspeakers, warning people that the area will be detonated while they are inside their homes if they do not evacuate immediately. Israeli troops have also bombed and burned down shelters for the displaced.
Amid the carnage, those who have been forced out describe a hellish journey south, made to walk for many kilometers past Israeli tanks and troops.
Fadi Redwan, a 22-year-old resident of Jabaliya refugee camp, was forced to leave his family on October 8 and head to Kamal Adwan hospital for a blood transfusion to treat his thalassemia, a blood disorder that affects hemoglobin levels. “On my way, the streets were a picture of horror and trauma: decomposing bodies gnawed by dogs, children’s skulls here and there, scattered skeletons amid the rubble of homes. I couldn’t do anything as snipers and quadcopters were shooting everyone,” Redwan told Drop Site News. Not long after he reached the hospital, Israeli soldiers encircled and stormed the facility. “They checked my ID, my medical report, and my phone,” Redwan said. “They only gave back my ID and medical report and ordered me and five others like me with thalassemia to head to the south.”
With Apache helicopters overhead, Redwan and several others also seeking care were forced to leave the hospital. “The streets were filled with corpses and piles of rubble and it was difficult to walk straight. Anyone looking left or right was shot dead,” he said. “There were many decomposing bodies and the smell was utterly horrific.” After a 10-hour trek, he reached the Netzarim corridor, a securitized stretch of land established by the Israeli military with bases and checkpoints that divides northern and southern Gaza, where soldiers eventually allowed him to pass through.
Sixteen hours after Redwan was forced out of the hospital, he finally reached Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where more than a million displaced Palestinians are crowded into tents on every street with little sanitation or infrastructure, taking refuge with a friend in a tent. “My family was extremely worried about me. When I finally called them, they broke down in tears as they thought I had been killed. I am now a patient and have nothing with me. I was trembling with cold yesterday as I only have this T-shirt,” Redwan said. “It was the first time I had seen Israeli soldiers—it was the shock of a lifetime. I am now without my family. I dream of having the most basic things, such as clothes to get warm and some food to eat. I don’t know how I’ll endure this, but I hope it’ll end and I’ll be back with my family. I am severely traumatized.”
Key to Israel’s campaign in the north has been the targeting of hospitals, Al-Thwabta told Drop Site News. Following repeated attacks, the three partially functioning hospitals in the area—Kamal Adwan, Indonesian, and al-Awda—are almost out of service. Over 350 patients are trapped inside the three hospitals, including pregnant women and people who recently underwent surgery, according to Médecins Sans Frontières.
“Israeli attacks hit Kamal Adwan Hospital today, which remains under Israel’s constant bombings and with no medical aid or supplies,” Al-Thwabta said. “We’ve been calling out the world to allow safe corridors to provide the north with the basic necessities. However, there’s been no response. Even our request to provide healthcare professionals with food was rejected.”
Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, said the hospital has run out of blood and a number of wounded have died as a result of the severe lack of resources. “We are now implementing a priority treatment system. This is the reality,” he said. Dr. Eid Sabah, the Director of Nursing at Kamal Adwan Hospital said in an audio message shared with Drop Site that Israeli forces have shelled and closed all roads and streets leading to the hospital, preventing ambulances from reaching the facility, effectively isolating it.
At the Indonesian hospital, “the occupation bombs the generators, cutting off electricity, causing patients to die after being disconnected from oxygen devices,” Dr. Munir Al-Borsh, director-general of the ministry of health, said in a statement. “Doctors and medical staff dig graves to bury the martyrs inside the hospital, which is besieged by tanks, as they are unable to leave.”
And at the Al-Awda Hospital, Israeli forces “have completely surrounded the hospital, and we cannot leave or approach the windows,” Dr. Mohammed Salha, the acting director of the hospital, said in a message. “We only eat one meal a day, which is half a loaf of bread or a small plate of rice. Two days ago, occupation forces fired artillery shells at the hospital, destroying two floors of patients’ accommodation and water tanks.”
With Israel continuing to enforce a near-total blockade the humanitarian crisis is becoming catastrophic. On Monday, Israeli forces killed six men in the Jabaliya refugee camp attempting to get drinking water, Al Jazeera reported. Also on Monday, the UN said Israel had, for the fourth consecutive day, denied an urgent request it had made to allow access to the Jabaliya refugee camp to rescue people trapped under the rubble. Israel also denied a separate request by the UN to deliver food, water, and fuel. Farhan Haq, the UN’s deputy spokesman, said Israel also denied 28 UN requests to deliver humanitarian aid to Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahiya between October 6 and 20. Several other requests, he added, “faced impediments.”
On Tuesday, the Israeli military said in a statement that over 230 trucks carrying aid have entered northern Gaza since last week, despite multiple reports from journalists on the ground and humanitarian organizations pushing back on that claim, including the World Health Organization. The group said on Wednesday that when teams were granted access to Kamal Adwan Hospital to evacuate critical patients, their request to bring food, fuel, blood, and medicine was denied.
In a letter addressed to senior Israeli officials dated October 13, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Israel must take steps in the next month to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza or face potential restrictions on military aid. Yet at the same time, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby stressed in a press briefing that the letter was intended not as a threat, but as a way to “reiterate the sense of urgency we feel and the seriousness with which we feel it, about the need for an increase, a dramatic increase in humanitarian assistance.”
Phillippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, posted an urgent message on X on Tuesday:
“Nearly three weeks of non-stop bombardments from the Israeli Forces as the death toll increases.
Our staff report they cannot find food, water or medical care.
The smell of death is everywhere as bodies are left lying on the roads or under the rubble. Missions to clear the bodies or provide humanitarian assistance are denied.
In northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die.
They feel deserted, hopeless and alone. They live from one hour to the next, fearing death at every second.”
And while university systems and other authorities in America perpetrate repression of dissent which echoes and reflects the McCarthy era and the gruesome police brutality unleashed on peace activists during the Vietnam War, our colony and client state of Israel bombs hospitals and schools while our leaders betray us and abandon our ideals of universal human rights as our taxes buy the deaths of children.
But there is nothing new in this museum of Holocausts Israel and America have together made of the Holy Land as imperial conquest and dominion, nor in the complicity of our universities and elites in profiteering from terror.
As I wrote in my post of May 15 2024, Anniversary of Bloody Thursday Berkeley 1969: Love, Magic, and Political Awakening Amid the Most Massive and Terrible Incident of Police Terror in American History; In this time of melting glaciers and dying seas, of drought and scarcity of drinking water, of burning rainforests and species extinctions, of acid rain and clouds of poison gas, of humankind drowning in our own wastes of greed and vanity and taking everything else with us, of fascist tyranny and state terror, of the horrors of imperial conquest and wars of dominion which threaten us with nuclear annihilation, I find myself reflecting not on the inevitability of our failure but instead on the hope of our defiance of those who would sell us into oblivion.
And so I write to offer you a fragment of protective magic from my childhood and family history; but first the truth of the peril and existential crisis we face today.
As I wrote of biodiversity and extinction in my post of May 13 2019; Earth is an Ark hurtling through space, filled with precious life among chasms of emptiness.
How shall we answer this nothingness? Will it be with wisdom in maintaining the balance of life in all its subtle and glorious interconnectedness, diversity, and beauty, a dance of joy and of love?
Or will we be defeated and consumed by our own vanity and greed, surrendering to the dark and to despair and turning all we have or ever will into profit until there is nothing left, not water to drink nor air to breathe, and the last of us die with inarticulate brute cries, bloated in toadlike satiation and trumpeting our splendid dominance and rulership of the world?
We must choose who we are to become, we humans; stewards of our homeworld and of one another, or destroyers. Can we find a path forward in coexistence, or will we allow our appetites and desires to drive us to suicidal ruin? For we have but two choices of futures in this; we will be Lightbringers, or we will annihilate ourselves.
So I wrote among my celebrations of May Day and the coming of spring. I write today not to prophecy apocalypse, but to hold before us hope of redemption. Of Extinction Rebellion and the Green New Deal, of the abolition of police and carceral states, and of solidarity which bridges authorized identities and divisions in seizures of power and revolutionary struggle against those who would enslave us I have written much and will do so again; but I promised magic, and you shall have it.
As recounted in Lions Roar; ‘In 1969, poet Gary Snyder wrote his “Smokey the Bear Sutra,” imagining Smokey as the Great Sun Buddha giving a discourse, in the style of a Buddhist sutra. Fifty years later, the message of the sutra continues to resonate.”
I first heard it, a song of shining truth and the incorruptible redemptive power of love, sung by my mother and the women who joined hands in a circle of protection between the protestors holding signs and flowers and the guns of the riot police during the summer of my Awakening to political awareness.
Gary Snyder had distributed copies of his poem at the February 1969 Sierra Club Wilderness Conference, which were in the hands of the protesters who occupied People’s Park in Berkeley to rally in support of the people of Palestine and demand divestiture of investment in Israeli injustices by the University of California system and our government, just in time for Bloody Thursday on May 15, when his words were the only shield against the shotgun blasts- lethal rounds with multiple shot the size of 38 caliber bullets which had been loaded with intent to kill- fired at random into the crowd by the police.
Of the six thousand protesters at the scene of what has been called the most violent incident of state terror in American history, only 111 of the victims reached the safety of hospitals. There has never been a full accounting of Bloody Thursday.
I remember my mother smiling and reaching out to a policeman offering a handful of flowers, and he pumped and aimed a shotgun at her in reply. Is it truly so threatening, a bouquet of flowers, to our systems of unequal power, to patriarchy, to white supremacy, to capitalism, to the carceral state? I have no explanation for how we survived the next few moments. I’d like to think he hesitated to murder for no reason a beautiful woman, with flaming red hair and skin pale as rice powder, fearless and kind and with imperious hazel eyes and a boy less than ten years old at her side, even that she had been identified and orders issued not to shoot a notable academic, surely the greatest scholar of Coleridge and symbolism in medieval religious art of her time and a psychologist and biologist as well as an author of children’s books. But no; chance intervened in the form of a policeman who at that moment threw a grenade into the crowd. There was a flash of light and thunder, like God’s head being split open with a hammer, and all devolved into chaos and death. Time resumed as the crowd fled and policemen fired at our backs; still we escaped harm.
The moment of my true birth was that in which I stood outside of time, beyond death, and held the universe within me.
The force wave of the detonations cast my consciousness from my body, like the shadows etched on the walls of Hiroshima, momentarily dead and in a vision of our possible alternate futures become a vessel of fate, bearer of a terrible awareness that we live on the cusp of decision of an age of tyranny, six to eight centuries of fascist and theocratic prison-states, wars and genocides, ending with the extinction of humankind.
I returned from death in my mother’s arms, and said; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but Awakening from an illusion.”
This is why I have learned to read our futures in current events as civilizational choices we make, as adaptations to threats and to change, through the methods of literary criticism, history, psychology, and philosophy; because ours is a time of Rashomon Gate Events which can doom or save us, for our actions have consequences globally and for all of us, and if we are to escape the fall of civilization and our extinction we must reimagine and transform ourselves.
What happened next? Governor Ronald Reagan unleashed 2,700 soldiers of the National Guard, who joined the Alameda County Sheriffs, in effect a mercenary force who had donned Halloween masks and discarded their badges, in a two week campaign of repression that included bombing the entire city from helicopters with tear gas. When informed of the elementary school children who were hospitalized as a result, he said; “Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, you must expect things will happen, and that people, being human, will make mistakes on both sides.”
In all of this, I remembered the great spell of love and nonviolence which heralded my Awakening and may have saved the lives of my mother and myself among others.
As to family history and the origins of Smokey the Bear as a protective spirit, my aunt Betty invented Smokey the Bear as a character to represent our duty of stewardship of nature during her career in the U.S. Forest Service, named for an actual bear cub raised by herself among other forest rangers and Native Americans together because its mother had died in a forest fire. As the USFS mascot and spokesman, he became the image of one of most successful marketing campaigns in history and a universal symbol which belongs to us all.
I hope that he will continue to protect all of us and our planet, and to remind us to live in harmony with each other and our fellow beings as companions on a great journey. So, here follows the Smokey the Bear Sutra:
“Once in the Jurassic, about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a great Discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings—even grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, were assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.
“In some future time, there will be a continent called America. It will have great centers of power called such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur, Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon. The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature.”
“The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings of great volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that future American Era I shall enter a new form: to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger; and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it.”
And he showed himself in his true form of
SMOKEY THE BEAR.
A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.
Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;
His left paw in the Mudra of Comradely Display—indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma;
Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but only destroys;
Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the West, symbolic of the forces that guard the Wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharrna and the True Path of man on earth: all true paths lead through mountains—
With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the Kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind;
Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for everyone who loves her and trusts her;
Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs; smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;
Indicating the Task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned food, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.
Wrathful but Calm, Austere but Comic, Smokey the Bear will Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or slander him,
HE WILL PUT THEM OUT.
Thus his great Mantra:
Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana Sphataya hum traka ham mam
“I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND BE THIS RAGING FURY DESTROYED”
And he will protect those who love woods and rivers, Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children;
And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR’S WAR SPELL
DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS
DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS
And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surely appear to put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel,
Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada,
Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick,
Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature,
Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts
Will always have ripe blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine to sit at,
AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT.
thus have we heard.”
A sovereign and independent Palestine, as imagined by its people only, with the UN as guarantor; for this dream I have struggled for fifty five years now since my first death, of moments only from the concussive pressure wave of a police grenade when I was nine as Reagan ordered the police to open fire on the student divestiture from Israel protests, Bloody Thursday May 15 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley; and as my consciousness was hurled out of my body I stood beyond time and lived myriads of possible futures extending through millennia.
I hope that we choose love over fear, power, and force, now in this moment when the fate of humankind balances between liberty and tyranny, and that we are not still merely hoping that solidarity may one day triumph over division fifty years from now, or fifty thousand, but now begin its realization, here in this Holocaust which is Gaza. May peace be upon us all.
Reproduced from the Summer 1970 issue of Wind Bell, where it appeared with the note, “May be reproduced free forever.”
The Murderous Logistics of Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Campaign in Northern Gaza:Eyewitnesses say the IDF is starving residents, targeting hospitals, bombing shelters, and murdering civilians in the streets
A few brief days from now, America must choose between a brilliant Prosecuting Attorney and a Nazi revivalist, rapist, Russian spy, and idiot madman of myriad perversions, whose wealth was built on human trafficking and laundering the dark money of Russian oligarchs and New York crime syndicates, with no ideology other than white male supremacy and no goals other than subversion of our democracy and self-aggrandizement as a theocratic tyrant.
Whose regime can we best survive, Kamala or Traitor Trump?
There are other great and important issues at stake in the November 5 Presidential Election, of which I have often written; the humanitarian crisis at our border and its causes and push forces in our imperialism and destabilization of our neighbors, gun violence and most especially police white supremacist terror as gun violence, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and its flagship cause abortion bans versus the bodily autonomy and equal citizenship of women, vote suppression and election rigging, propaganda and the assault on truth, but before all else the great question of our time is whether or not democracy and liberty are things we still want.
America stands or falls with our choice in this election, and the only question we must answer to make that choice is this; Who do we want to become, masters and slaves under the tyranny of a theocratic fascist white male ethnostate or Americans still and a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beings?
As I wrote in my post of January 24 2024, Now Begins the Last Stand Against Fascism In America: Our 2024 Presidential Election Campaign; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner”; so wrote Shakespeare in Henry V, and for all of us, all who now live or ever will, in America and throughout the world, I hope this is still true.
Next November, we will see.
The test of the New Hampshire Primary has left only Biden and Trump on the field as contenders for the title, and I can vote for neither of them.
Israel has unleashed The Nothing in Gaza, a rain of fire and death paid for with our taxes and enabled by Biden the Baby Killer who has made us all complicit in ethnic cleansing and genocide, and in so doing has abandoned our historic role as a guarantor of universal human rights.
What are we, we Americans, if not a Band of Brothers who are guarantors of each other’s humanity?
As I wrote to Biden in open letter here in October and have performed in organizing Resistance in Palestine and Israel, and in direct action in the counter-blockade of the Red Sea Campaign to break the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Palestine; If you commit genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, I cannot vote for you, and I will fight you.
So for Biden, whom we purged from our election not because he was an imbecile, but because in sending arms to Israel and refusing to bring Netanyahu to trial as a war criminal he made us all complicit in genocide.
But what of Traitor Trump?
As written in my post of October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: Parallel Lives and Reflections; The personal and historical forces which create tyrants and monsters among us have been a lifelong study of mine, aspects of a curiosity regarding the origins and nature of evil born of primary childhood traumas in the Bloody Thursday massacre ordered by Ronald Reagan against a student peace protest in Berkeley 1969 when I was nine and my near execution in Brazil at the age of fourteen defending street children from police bounty hunters, which echoes those of Maurice Blanchot in June 1944 by the Nazis and Dostoevsky’s in 1849 by Czarist police, informed by Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird and focused by the classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, both of which I read during high school. Thus I became fascinated by the intersections of literature, philosophy, history, and psychology, and chose the origins of evil as my lifelong field of study.
As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.
A full psychological and historical study of Trump and al-Baghdadi as figures of fascist terror and madness on a global political scale in the context of civilizational conflicts would require a book of Biblical proportions and thesis-level scholarship such as Waite’s brilliant work on Hitler. Here I note only some of the obvious alignments and congruences; both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women.
Of Trump we have a cornucopia of information; Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch and The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee are excellent resources, 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. Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.
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, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremberg-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, Hitler, and al-Baghdadi, as monsters and tyrants who reflect one another and as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art.
For their performances of leadership as clowns of terror and madness provide mirror opposite images of the reign of the Roman Emperor described with wit and guile by Antonin Artaud in his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, a figure who disrupted norms as an agent of change and chaos to transform an inert and ossified society, whereas Trump and al-Baghdadi have acted as partners in reaction to return us to a pre-democratic civilization.
Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.
As I wrote in my post of August 18 2020, Who Begins By Building Walls Ends With Gas Chambers: Why We Must Defeat Trump’s Re-Election; “Today saw two important events relevant to the 2020 Presidential election campaign other than the Democratic convention; the release of a report confirming Russian espionage in the Stolen Election of 2016 and the failure of Trump’s vote suppression attempt to shut down the United States Postal Service. I had originally planned to write about the latter today, but public revilement and lawsuits have already forced Trump to abandon his vote suppression plans for the post office; I was thinking of this listening to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorse Bernie when I noticed a story which has escaped national attention, and it focused my awareness on what is at stake.
The Stolen Election of 2016 left the KGB’s most successful infiltration, subversion, and influence agent in charge of America, which he has been monkey wrenching since. History will always remember Trump as the traitor and foreign saboteur who is responsible for the end of America’s hegemony of power and privilege and the fall of America as the primary guarantor of democracy in the world.
America has drawn a line in the sand to weaponize disparity of wealth and create masses of exploitable invisible labor, modeled on the Bantustan system of Apartheid in South Africa, and have been using ICE and the Border Patrol to abduct migrant laborers into concentration camps in a campaign of dehumanization and crimes against humanity. Migrant labor is slave labor; and it has become more horrific still with the advent of a new instrument of state terror; gas chambers.
Concentration camps, secret prisons, child abduction, a federal occupation force of secret police, vote suppression, paramilitary units of white supremacist terror, pervasive and endemic surveillance and state disinformation and propaganda, assaults on equality, truth, justice, liberty, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil; Republicans have much to answer for.
And of course, who begins by building walls ends with gas chambers.
As Dave Lindorf writes in Counterpunch; “As the first and hopefully only presidential term of Donald Trump nears its November 3 moment of truth, the accusations of fascist or even Nazi tendencies and actions by him and his administration have multiplied.
But this latest one I’m calling out is particularly horrific: The use of a powerful “for industrial use only” disinfectant called HDQ Neutral on captive immigrants at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, a Trump administration-funded for-profit detention center outside of Los Angeles, CA.
According to a report in the Independent, a UK newspaper, the powerful toxic ammonia-based chemical made by Spartan Chemical Co. is being sprayed in the occupied detention facility despite company warnings on the label that it only be used near people outdoors, not in confined spaces. Worse yet, there are allegations from detainees that the chemical is being sprayed directly on them, though the company’s label warns that exposure to the eyes can cause “permanent eye damage” while inhaling it can cause lung damage , breathing difficulty and asthma.
The Nazi connection? As Charles Vidich, author of a powerful and timely new book due out later this year on the history of quarantines in the US, dating back to the earliest days of the Colonies in the 1600s down to the present (Germs at Bay, Praeger), notes, Zyklon B, the extermination gas of choice of Hitler’s Third Reich for its extermination camps, was actually a powerful cyanide-based insecticide invented during the late 19th Century. It was for decades, well into the early 20th century, used to fumigate ships engaged in international trade in order to kill rats, mice, fleas and other vermin. The Nazis adopted a variant of the product to eliminate Jews, Gypsies, Communists, people with deformities or retardation and other “undesirables” during the war years.
Now we have the administration of Donald Trump, whose own family had a history of Nazi sympathies and who himself has referred to Nazi demonstrators in the US as “good people,” similarly using an insecticide/disinfectant that is highly toxic and life-threatening on detained immigrants awaiting deportation
Investigations by Reuters an organization called the Shut Down Adelanto Coalition and a not-for-profit legal organization called Earthjustice, have learned that immigrants locked indoors in detention at Adelanto have been getting sprayed “as often as every 15-30 minutes,” sometimes directly at them, with a chemical that the company says should only be used outdoors or in well-ventilated areas. They are reporting rashes, nosebleeds, nausea, headaches and breathing difficulties among other symptoms following the spraying.
I must point out that when I first learned about the vicious way African slaves were treated in the colonies and later in the United States by their owners, it struck me, even as a youngster, that it was strangely worse than these white owners treated their own beasts of burden. I wondered at that, only coming to understand later as I got older, that the abuse of slaves — the whippings, the starving, the over-working, etc. — was a control mechanism, a dehumanization process of both owner and slave that wasn’t necessary in dealing with horses or cattle. I recognize that the same analysis applies to the way ICE and its detention center contract employees cruelly abuse their immigrant captives.
HDQ Neutral thankfully isn’t as toxic as the Zyklon B gas used by Nazi death squads at the German extermination camps, but what is being done is still a grotesque chemical assault on America’s “undesirables,” differing from the Nazi efforts against their human victims only in degree. The inhumanity of the overlords administering this toxin to their captive victims is little different from that which was punished, often with death sentences, in the Nuremberg Trials that followed World War II.
One can only hope that when this Trumpian nightmare is over in the US, Donald Trump and his criminal henchmen in the Homeland Security Department will be similarly hauled before a court to face crimes against humanity charges for their abuse of immigrants, including young children, as well as for their other grotesque crimes.”
And what of the world Trump wishes to condemn us all to? As I wrote in my post of September 23 2023, What is Cult of Trumpism? How May We Define This Bizarre Variant of Fascism?
The Cult of Trump exhibits a number of interesting peculiarities, which define its uniqueness and threat to democracy as a Gordian Knot of ideological strangeness.
A politics of rage, fear, and narratives of victimization and loss of white male privilege has captured the Republican Party and metastasized throughout the whole of our nation, driven in part by the consequences of civilizational collapse as terminal stage capitalism attempts to free itself from its host political system, and a cultural schism between the winners and losers of globalization.
Such social divisions have been with us since the conflict between Pompey Magnus and Julius Caesar brought down the Roman Republic and birthed an empire from its ashes. It remains to be seen what dread tyrannies will arise from ours; as I’ve often said I now calculate our chances for the survival of democracy at between eight and two percent, with the overwhelming probability being an age of tyranny and global wars of conquest and imperial dominion of six to eight hundred years, ending with the near certainty of human extinction.
This grim future might still be redeemed with solidarity of action and the emergence of a United Humankind, a free society of equals wherein we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights. But if we are to redeem ourselves we must see the enemy and his motives and intentions clearly.
Three forces of reaction have coalesced under the figurehead of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and the Fourth Reich he represents; white supremacist terror, patriarchal theocratic sexual terror, and the amoral nihilism of plutocratic-oligarchic capitalism.
And this we must resist. 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.
By any means necessary.
Let us give to fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As written by Ronald Aronson in New Lines Magazine, in an article entitled A Deliberate Political Madness? There must be a path back from the derangement, delusion and denial in which millions of Americans have ensconced themselves; “Immediately after the November 2022 U.S. midterm elections, the idea that Americans had “voted for democracy” was being celebrated. The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that it felt good to be brought back to reality after being taken in by the Republicans’ fantasy — and her own dread — about the red wave that was supposedly imminent. Many Republicans blamed former President Donald Trump for the party’s lackluster performance in the midterms; Trump’s star seemed to be fading quickly, and the buzz about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the GOP’s future was ubiquitous.
Fast forward to today. Trump has not vanished and the movement he crystallized is more alive than ever, and moving under its own power. Media pundits and Republican strategists were writing Trump’s political obituary in the aftermath of the midterms, but the fever has not broken. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination and could even return to the presidency in 2025. Not only among MAGA devotees in the U.S. House of Representatives but also in the Ottawa County Commission in rural Michigan, right-wing rage shows no signs of calming down.
But let us be clear: This is a self-consciously minority movement. As Ari Berman, author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” has noted:
In the past decade, the GOP has dropped any pretense of trying to appeal to a majority of Americans. Instead, recognizing that the structure of America’s political institutions diminishes the influence of urban areas, young Americans, and voters of color, it caters to a conservative white minority that is drastically overrepresented in the Electoral College, the Senate, and gerrymandered legislative districts.
Minority rule — their aim is to skew the 2024 vote so as to enact their authoritarian agenda. As Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert made clear in her sermon-like speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022, this is intended to be white Christian rule.
Boebert was speaking for and from a genuine mass movement. Her effusions reflect a base that encourages and supports such fury. The movement is propelled not by economic needs but by a defiant sense of grievance and resentment, indeed by a rage that seems remote from class interests. From the hostile rejection of public health measures to the “Big Lie” about the “theft” of the 2020 election and the openly phantasmagoric cult of QAnon, this is a movement built on derangement, delusion and denial.
Its features begin to make clear what Trumpism is not. For one thing, despite a knee-jerk determination of many on the left to address the supposedly “real,” class-based, economic sources of Trumpism, its rage never focused on America’s runaway inequality or even deindustrialization. Trumpism was not a working-class protest against becoming downwardly mobile or economically insecure. Nor was its origin, despite the reflexive assumption of many journalists and New York Times readers, explained by asking the patronizing question of how many years of college a person attended.
Instead, members of this increasingly emboldened mass, belonging to no single social or economic class, had various reasons for the alienation and anger that motivated them to follow Trump.
What were those reasons? We learn much about Trumpism’s most militant members in the statistical analysis of the Jan. 6 mob by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago, headed by the political scientist Robert A. Pape. Their close study of the several hundred people arrested after the Capitol insurrection reveals the main features and core ideas of the MAGA base. Two essential beliefs motivated the insurrection: that the 2020 election was stolen, and that violence to reverse it is acceptable, even necessary. Equally telling is the demographic analysis of the mob. Roughly 25% of them have college degrees (among the general population 30% have college degrees), and they were neither members of extreme right-wing groups nor especially young. Rather, except for an unusually high proportion of former military and current and former police officers, they belong very much to the mainstream of white America. Among the insurrectionists the researchers found middle-class and, in many cases, middle-aged people without obvious ties to the far right.
The report continued: “They work as CEOs, store owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed.” In other words, these people are neither economically nor socially marginal — but they were motivated to storm the Capitol. Also interesting is that they frequently come not from red states but from Biden-voting counties where the proportion of white people is declining. Ideologically, more than anything they tend to believe the conspiratorial “great replacement theory” that Democrats are bringing in nonwhite immigrants to reduce native-born white people to a minority. Other surveys show a high correlation between racist beliefs and the idea that the 2020 election was stolen.
Pape contends that no fewer than 21 million Americans share the belief that the election was stolen and accept that violence is necessary to undo it. This vast group, he writes, “signals the existence of significant mainstream support in America for a violent insurrection,” especially considering that 63% of them agree that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites” and 54% agree that a “secret group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is ruling the U.S. government” — a key belief of the QAnon movement.
The Big Lie, the great replacement theory, QAnon, denial of the pandemic, fear of Black and Brown domination, the fury about mask mandates: What is behind the delusional character of this movement’s watchwords and issues?
Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah was condemning only one aspect of this right-wing derangement when, after the 2020 election — as a virtually lone voice within the Republican Party — he rejected Trump’s Big Lie as “madness.” But by the 2022 midterms, many journalists and commentators came to decry the “craziness” of the election deniers. When Republican members of Congress hectored President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address this past February, it became abundantly clear that Trumpism’s widespread “craziness” has legitimized behavior and perceptions that have redefined what is considered normal.
The National Institute of Mental Health definition of psychosis speaks of “loss of contact with reality.” That is what is happening. The clinical understanding of these behaviors is less important than their social and political meaning, which should be understood plainly at this fateful historical moment. Masses of people, whether unable or unwilling to recognize reality, are substituting nightmarish fantasies generated within their movements, making these into a political force moving millions. However, as Alex Shephard recently pointed out in The New Republic, while their leaders casually promoted falsehoods and opportunistically sought to benefit from the “post-truth” environment that currently prevails in Republican politics, delusions now take on a life of their own, beyond the control of their original instigators. Millions of Americans have become ensconced — or ensconced themselves — in a self-validating right-wing bubble that seems impervious to contrary evidence, and there is no easy path back.
If they are delusional, it is not because they somehow “lose” contact with reality but because they break it off, intentionally. They have become incapable of recognizing reality because they have made themselves unwilling or unable to do so and choose to organize their reality around something else — loyalty to the leader, the bubble of “us” versus “them.” Factual information doesn’t matter; evidence doesn’t matter. It is a movement of people who are going crazy on purpose.
Trump touched a nerve, or better, he focused a mood of alienation and resentment that had been building for over a generation. The election of Barack Obama as president was a turning point, triggering the Tea Party’s call to “Take America Back!” Trump gave these impulses a specific narrative shape with the “birther” chimera — a (literally) nativist crusade fusing anxieties about foreignness, belonging, religion and race — and then took it to the electoral stage with his 2016 campaign for the Republican nomination.
Trump rallies became community gatherings, entertainment events, love fests between the man and his followers, group hate rituals aimed at political opponents (“Lock her up!”), the media (“enemies of the people”) and all those in the “elite” who criticized or made fun of Trump and his people. Trump rallies also became racially coded warnings against Others who are threatening America: drug dealers, rapists, killers and thieves among would-be Mexican immigrants (“Build the wall!”) and terrorists among Muslim and Central American asylum seekers. These were undisguised assertions of “us” versus “them.”
Early on, Trumpism channeled intense hatreds that went beyond the realm of normal politics (conflicts over economic policies and class interests), framing things as “our” way of life being overwhelmed by “them” — referring not just to Black people, Latin Americans, “shit-hole countries,” Asians and Muslims but, perhaps most angering, those other white people — educated, scientific-minded, progressive in outlook, who are welcoming and going to bat for these minorities and foreigners.
Let’s be clear: This is not simply an economic or political disagreement over, say, dividing up the pie, or health insurance, or labor unions, or regulating business, or taxes. For progressives, the slowly consolidating, multiracial liberal majority does not represent a radical left-wing political rupture. Yet many Americans hate it with a passion, along with the Democratic Party they blame for it.
Who is this “us” that is most perturbed by this perceived threat? While the University of Chicago study indicates that most Jan. 6 rioters belong decisively to the mainstream — disproportionately as Trump voters living in Biden areas where the white population is declining — many MAGA individuals may see themselves as “left behind,” in the language of sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s 2019 study, “The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Small-Town America.” The first meaning of this is geographic: Red America consists of a vast land area, 80% of American counties. With nearly half of the U.S. population, it is strikingly distinguished by being far behind the rest of the country in economic growth — in technology, productivity, educational resources and media. The 20% of U.S. counties that voted for Biden, on the contrary, are responsible for over 70% of the country’s economic activity, according to the Brookings Institution Report on the 2020 election. Deindustrializing factory towns, struggling small cities and declining or shrinking small towns, along with rural America in general, have been losing population to the booming areas keyed into higher education, the latest technologies and the global economy. They lack many of the resources and opportunities needed to keep their young people home and attract new residents. As Wuthnow demonstrates, people in these regions think of the rest of America as leaving them behind.
There is of course a class dimension to some of this. American social values also seem to be skewing away from ordinary working people. Particularly those without higher education find themselves increasingly trapped by what the political philosopher Michael Sandel calls “the tyranny of merit.” As much by Democrats as by Republicans, America is increasingly proclaimed a “meritocracy” where the goal is for everyone to compete on a level playing field with everyone else. But what does the enormous increase in the social, cultural and economic weight given to higher education say to the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees? Labor unions once mattered as a way for workers to assert their social and economic value to themselves and society. But today it feels more like isolated and atomized individuals have only themselves to blame for their social irrelevance. Democrats are seen as having abandoned their commitment to a working class whose social contribution they once espoused, as well as to the New Deal’s social-democratic concern for the average American’s material and social well-being. As Sandel points out, the flawed and disingenuous idea that America is a meritocracy has never been more pervasive. But this is not being confronted because the moral and social resources it would take to combat the myth are shrinking.
A sense of not making it in America inevitably takes on a racial meaning. Although Obama’s success seemed to send the message that Americans could rise according to their ability, most Americans simply can’t. The goal of advancing through ability and hard work imposes a tyranny of self-accusation on all those who don’t. Individual success for racial minorities, so important to proving to many Americans that we are on the right track, may provoke feelings of personal failure among less successful white people or a sense that the system is rigged against them.
But lacking the tools to criticize the fetish of upward mobility or the will to demand policies geared toward everyone’s well-being — that is, constructive political anger or class consciousness that could lead to something like a new New Deal — many who felt left out by the Obama-era meritocracy seem able only to nurture racial resentment. Unable to confront issues like material inequality, factory production moving offshore or the economic system’s indifference to their fate, their “us” versus “them” makes them ripe for mobilization around the belief that others have somehow cheated. Thus the deranged response: Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Or no less racist: Take our country back! Or wearing patriotic costumes and evoking the past. Or even crazier: We’re being discriminated against for being white! Or the explosion of gun culture in the face of one mass shooting after another.
This points to the mood of white people in Louisiana’s bayou country, whose lives the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explored before Trump’s election. Waiting patiently for help from what they used to see as their government, they can only see it giving advantages to assertive Black people over themselves, letting them “cut in line” ahead of them. As she writes in her much-discussed 2016 book “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right”:
They also felt culturally marginalized: their views about abortion, gay marriage, gender roles, race, guns, and the Confederate flag all were held up to ridicule in the national media as backward. And they felt part of a demographic decline. … They’d begun to feel like a besieged minority.
Fifty years earlier, Southern white Democrats who refused to accept Black equality collectively left the party they held responsible for civil rights and voting rights legislation. They became Republicans, demanded tax breaks for whites-only private schools and opposed policies such as cross-district busing and affirmative action. By 2009, in addition to whatever individual meanings it signaled for many white Americans, the presidency of a Black man, Obama, also held a more ominous political significance. Obama was elected by a multiracial majority including many young people. But his support included few (increasingly embattled) white and Christian conservatives.
Demographic trends show white people becoming a minority by the 2040 or 2050 U.S. census. Their children are already a minority in public schools nationally. Outnumbered and left behind, millions have witnessed these demographic, cultural and economic changes. This helps to explain why so many white people, alienated and isolated, found their way to Trump, a man who clearly did not belong to the sophisticated and articulate urban liberal elite, who shared their alienation, “got” them and indeed professed his love for them.
Among the many who have been left behind and have built up resentment about their treatment and the country’s direction is a distinct and coherent group of white Americans always mentioned “by the way” but rarely given appropriate attention: evangelical Christians. In a sense, rather than being “left behind” by forces beyond their control, they took themselves out of the mainstream by design. They have a long history in America, especially in the South, supporting first slavery and then segregation, denying evolution and opposing secularism. They expanded their presence greatly in response to the upheavals of the 1960s. By the 1980s, with mainstream Christianity dwindling and the evangelicals becoming the majority of white Christians, they entered politics. They were determined to reshape the country as its “moral majority,” the mass base of the Republican Party.
Evangelicals were always opposed to the civil rights and the women’s rights movements, to what they saw as the permissiveness of the youth culture, to homosexuality and gay marriage, to modern science — especially the teaching of evolution in schools — and to secular education that they saw as undermining the inerrancy of Scripture. In the 1970s, opposition to abortion congealed as one of their central causes.
All these rejections of the liberal culture of modernity are significant enough, but just living in a secular society is a source of resentment no less deep. As the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, the default authority of scientific reasoning and its role in public health imposes constant demands and humiliations on those who believe otherwise. No one has to be intentionally disrespectful; the facts themselves are disrespectful. They say: Your literal Biblical-based belief is irrelevant during our public health crisis. Thus the various protest signs and slogans about “Freedom” since early 2020. Similarly, the university culture that has become pervasive in modern society, and even more in its meritocracy, allows no authority for biblical literalism or religious dogma.
In 2016, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump. Nearly as many did in 2020. And 83% voted for Republicans in the 2022 midterms. In Georgia, which is demographically split between the Old South and one of America’s most rapidly growing urban areas (Atlanta), one-third of voters in the runoff Senate election in December 2022 were white evangelicals.
Overwhelmingly Republican, 88% of them voted for their party’s choice, who just happened to be Herschel Walker, a Black former football star, and against Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock, a Black Baptist minister. In Georgia and nationally, evangelicals made up over 40% of Trump’s vote in his two presidential runs.
For those who are well off, voting Republican has always been understood as transactional as well as cultural. But what motivates the others? The hatreds and resentments I’ve been discussing, the deep sense of grievance Trump mobilized on Jan. 6, still on display today — these are the defining passions of this chapter in American political history. As I’ve suggested, it’s not what we usually understand as the focused (and rational) anger of workers on strike, or the kind of confident, determined anger we saw among Black South Africans against apartheid. One might imagine that kind of a progressive movement among the millions of Americans who find themselves left behind socially, economically and geographically or who have been sidelined by the “meritocracy” — and many on the left are constantly on the lookout for such a movement. But instead of purpose, righteous indignation or rational demands, the field of opposition has been dominated by hatefulness and violence, rooted in a rage that feels bottomless and misdirected.
At the root of this resentment and sense of grievance, as Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch noted shortly after the 2022 midterm elections, is a feeling of impotence. Never in our lifetime, he wrote, “has the hate speech been so open and so over the top, nor has the threat of political bloodshed felt so palpable.” Why is this?
The antisemitism, the homophobia, the violence … this isn’t the American right flexing its muscles out of strength. Quite the opposite. The forces of 400 years of white supremacy culture are like a wounded bear right now — lashing out, and extremely dangerous because its proponents know they are a seriously endangered species.
Endangered culturally, endangered historically, endangered demographically. The threats continue after Obama, and indeed even after Trump. For racist white people, especially for evangelical Christians rejecting the present, what is the way out?
For those in white Christian America who cannot see themselves becoming a minority and cannot accept being “left behind,” Trump himself showed the way. He acted out two paths — the tried-and-true American one of imposing minority rule, which soon mingles with the second one of increasingly loosening any connection with reality. “Stop the steal” starts with lying, then believing lies, and continues by denying reality, then producing new realities, and then living in those realities. The themes mingle and are manipulated by the leadership of the Republican Party as it seeks a solution to its increasingly minoritarian status. The all-out project of right-wing minority rule is a response to racial minorities and their allies becoming a majority, but in America today it is driven by a refusal to accept larger realities of historical and cultural change. Trumpism and the movement it spawned are that refusal, and can stay alive only by becoming more irrational and more violent.
Thus we see an endless variety of manias stirring the grassroots — not only white Christian nationalists but also 2020 election holdouts; anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers; anti-LGBTQ militants besieging libraries; and the make-believe parallel universe of QAnon. Steeped in these derangements, a whole section of society is going mad.
And we know that the issues are too deep, the racist and reactionary forces are too many, with roots that are too strong to be easily defeated or to simply surrender or go away. As Bunch observes, much of this is tied to the 400-year legacy of white supremacy. The “wounded bear” is a minority nationally, even as it manages to dominate many parts of the country. Given my analysis of the sources of its insanity and rage and the profound trends at work, a many-sided and protracted struggle lies ahead over the meaning and direction of American society.
Amid this daunting complexity, the 2022 midterms point us in at least one clear direction of battle. It turns out that in November 2022, despite the fears expressed by Goldberg, Americans were rescued by an unexpected human barrier to the seemingly unstoppable force of right-wing rage: An effective majority among us voted for majority rule. Despite the system’s built-in weaknesses and unfairnesses, and against blatant efforts to undermine it — including people running for office on the “stolen” 2020 election and hinting of violence to come — the rest of us wound up acting decisively in the small way available to us. With the experiences of 2016 and 2020 very much in mind, a majority voting bloc took shape, self-consciously standing in the way of minority rule. Still, this was no time for celebration. We knew that it was too close for comfort and that the next time it could go the other way.
Given America’s racist history, we are still fighting over the meaning of one-person, one-vote governance. Many on the right increasingly reject democracy and talk about a “republic” that legitimizes minority rule. As the rest of the country responds, there will be battles ahead — over voting rights, voter ID laws, voter suppression, gerrymandering and the undemocratic structure and powers of the Supreme Court along with many of its specific decisions. The democratic majority will have to mobilize against the undemocratic makeup of the Senate and the Electoral College. America’s anti-democratic minority is not going away soon — but neither is the democratic majority.”
The great question of our time is this; are we still the America who liberated the concentration camps and ended the Holocaust, or have we become its perpetrators?
There can be but one reply to fascism, to white supremacist terror, and to theocratic patriarchal sexual terror; Never Again.
Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, by Justin A. Frank
Herein I offer a magic mirror in which our possible futures may be envisioned, a retrospective of the crimes of Traitor Trump from my posts of this year and of the public trauma which we share; no mere figure of madness and idiocy is he, but the figurehead of the Fourth Reich and Nazi revivalism globally which threatens infiltration and subversion of democracy and the capture of the state in America, Hungary, Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Austria, nearly the whole of Europe now shadowed by the legacies of our history.
In the closing days of America’s Last Stand Against Fascism in our Presidential election, a Rashomon Gate Event which will determine the future of humankind and either redefine our institutions and ideals of democracy or abandon them and cast us into an Age of Tyranny, we all of us together must present a united front in solidarity against fascist tyranny, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and the Party of Treason.
Now is the time for solidarity, not protest votes for performative grifters like Jill Stein or boycott of our elections which surrenders the only power a citizen has, nor for any action which subtracts from the victory over Trump and his fascist regime. We must not only win this election, but win with a clear mandate of the people for the Restoration of America.
We must now elect our last, best hope, Kamala Harris, or endure the fall of democracy in America and globally, possibly the fall of civilization in the Age of Tyrants to follow, brutal police states of thought control, propaganda, and repression of dissent in which we have no rights whatever, and centuries of wars of imperial conquest and dominion fought with unimaginable weapons of horror ending with the extinction of humankind.
The time has come to tell the truth about life and the world we have made to live ion; it is full of blood and death and horror, a vast and amoral machine of power into which we are fed as the raw material of the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and those who would enslave us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and the best we can do refuse to submit and go down fighting against the darkness, the legacies of our histories and systems of unequal power and oppression bearing unanswerable and totalizing force.
Unless we stand together, and seize our power.
As I wrote in my post of June 5 2021, Remember Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and His Legacy of Dishonor, Treason, and Fascist Tyranny; Our Clown of Terror; his jests did distract us from his subversion of democracy until almost too late. Idiot madman of monstrous perversions that he was, we must give the devil his due; Trump was the greatest foreign agent to ever attack America, and he nearly brought our democracy down into fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror.
Remember the Clown, and his absurd empire of lies and depravities, his subversions of democracy and violations of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, his kleptocracy of looting the public wealth, his Wall of Hate, his syndicate of Epstein sexual terror and human trafficking, his orchestration of white supremacist terror and treason, his use of racists in disrupting the Black Lives Matter protests in a campaign of violence, arson, vandalism and looting to discredit the mass action for equality and racial justice and provide a pretext for the federal occupation of Democratic cities and the founding of a fascist tyranny, and the pathetic puppet show of Traitor Trump and his master Putin.
Remember him and his era of fascism as the collapse of values which nearly became the Fall of America, for the enemies of democracy never rest, and neither must we.
Thanks for showing us all what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
And remember, you can always discover someone’s secret Republican name whereby they recognize each other; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.
We near a Labyrinth of nested puzzle boxes, each a possible future and universe. The choices we make in our election this November will open gates and let angels through, or devils, and deliver us to heavens or hells. We may never know which we have chosen, but this one true thing I can tell you with absolute certainty; America and humankind will never be the same, for in this Defining Moment we will be forever changed. Who do we want to become, we humans? Masters and slaves divided against each other in an Age of Tyrants and wars our species cannot long survive, or a free society of equals who are guarantors of each others universal human rights in solidarity? May we each of us choose wisely.
January 30 2024 Anniversary of The Return of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Most Successful Russian Agent to Ever Attack America in the Capture of the State With the Stolen Election of 2016 and Figurehead of the Fourth Reich in the Global Subversion of Democracy, As He Began His Presidential Campaign A Year Ago Today on the Anniversary of Hitler’s Seizure of Power as Chancellor
February 23 2024 How It All Began; World War Three, the Capture of America and the Subversion of Democracy by Traitor Trump, the Invasion of Ukraine, and the Fall of Civilization
May 30 2024 Triumph of the Rule of Law, the Fairness of Our Justice System, and the Equality of All Citizens: Traitor Trump Guilty On All 35 Federal Charges of Fraud In the Stolen Election of 2016
June 9 2024 We Celebrate the Anniversary of the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets
June 18 2024 Red Triangle Day: Anniversary of Trump’s Open Declaration of Nazi Allegiance in Using a Symbol of the Holocaust to Launch His 2020 Re-Election Campaign
September 3 2024 Anniversary of the Assassination of Antifascist Comrade Michael Reinoehl: Violence, Responsibility, the Social Use of Force, and Our Duty of Care For Others
September 5 2024 The Question of Patriotism, Loyalty, Honor, Respect For Service, and the Idea of America As A Band of Brothers: Case of The Arlington Incident
September 21 2024 Election Rigging and Vote Suppression in the Case of Georgia: The Party of Treason, White Supremacist Terror, and Theocratic Patriarchal Sexual Terror Pursues Not Victory In A Free and Fair Election But Subversion of Democracy and Capture of the State
Six years ago in October of 2018 I founded my publication Torch of Liberty to create actionable policy guidance and provide intelligence briefings to the constellation of networks of alliance and organizations of liberation struggle globally which include Antifascist action teams, Autonomous Zone collectives, International Brigade volunteer forces, Resistance to Traitor Trump and the capture of the American state by the Fourth Reich, and Democracy movements, and I write now in celebration and reflection of our journey together in the glorious quest of reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, of how we choose to be human together, of our solidarity and role as guarantors of each other’s humanity and universal human rights, and of the limitless possibilities of becoming human which we share.
One thousand seven hundred and more unique articles, something between personal daily journals in which I process our shared public trauma of current events and interpretive and predictive essays in which I parse their meanings and work through the consequences of our histories and possible actions for our lives in this moment and for our future. Herein I sort among futures, using critical tools of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, the instruments of my field of study since my teenage years which is the origins of evil as violence, inequality, and systems of oppression and dehumanization, and sort between tyranny and liberty, degradation and exaltation, to refine the human from the monstrous, the legacies of our history, and systems of unequal power, from falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
This mad Quixotic quest has taken me to places liminal and strange, wherein our possibilities of becoming human are destroyed and recreated beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden in the uncharted places of our maps of human being, meaning, and value; the blank spaces and unknowns marked Here Be Dragons.
Here among the Dragons we may lose ourselves, find ourselves, dream the impossible and make it real; for beyond the limits of authorized identities we are Unconquered and free.
These past six years encompass the whole of the historic Black Lives Matter protests for equality and racial justice which seized fifty American cities and in which we Antifa direct action teams fought both police and Homeland Security forces and their deniable assets, brownshirts, and militias like the Oathkeepers and Proud Boys who were engaged in a destabilization campaign of arson, looting, violence, and the kidnapping, torture, and assassination of protestors as state terror and repression of dissent at the orders of the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf, which ended with the surrender of the United States to its citizens as the Triumvirs declared New York, Portland, and Seattle as Autonomous Zones, and Antifa emerged as the only force to have defeated the federal government of the US on its own ground or within her borders since Little Bighorn.
Grandeur to match the glory of our victories over the tyranny and terror of Trump’s regime and the Fourth Reich was found in our seizure of power in Seattle’s Capital Hill Autonomous Zone, the first of many which I helped to found throughout the world as the originator of the Living Autonomous Zones idea and networks of collective action and revolutionary struggle.
Though I have often failed, as I did in the Last Stands at Mariupol in Ukraine though we survivors of the breakout founded networks of Resistance to take the fight to the enemy within Russia, Panjshir in Afghanistan after the Fall of Kabul, and now in Palestine and Lebanon against the brutal terror and genocide of Israel and her war of imperial conquest and dominion, though in the Red Sea Campaign to counter-blockade the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Palestine we were victorious even despite Biden’s drone attacks and attempts to kill me personally in Yemen, still we were victorious in refusal to submit to force and control and we remain Unconquered and free.
As the Oath of the Resistance given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to Resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
This, friends, this solidarity, this refusal to submit, this will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival, this, this, this.
May we make a better future than we have the past.
As I wrote in my post of February 9 2024, Why Do I Write, and Why Am I Writing To All of You Here, in the Nakedness of my Life, my Voice, and my Truth, as America Begins Her Last Stand Against Fascism in the 2024 Elections; Now and then I poke sleeping dragons with a stick, among them my own normalities; its why I travel when I write about a place and its current events, to disrupt my own expectations and ideas as I act to bring change to systems of oppression.
A maker of mischief, I.
Today’s post in my daily journal Torch of Liberty marks my debut on the writer’s and reader’s community and newsletter platform Substack, an event which calls for the questioning of my ends and means; why do I write, and why am I writing to all you here, in the nakedness of my life, my voice, and my truth, in this moment of tidal change as America begins her Last Stand against fascism in the 2024 elections?
As I re-evaluate my mission of the Restoration of democracy and actions as a guarantor of our universal human rights both in America and globally, and its praxis as Resistance to fascism and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and systems of unequal power, I reflect on the path which brought me here and the Defining Moments of my history.
First among these traumatic events of destruction and recreation which revealed to me my true self and mission, Bloody Thursday 1969 in People’s Park, Berkeley when the police at the order of then-governor Reagan opened fire on student protestors, and I at nine years of age holding my mother’s hand in the front line as I was driven out of my body by the force wave of a police grenade, and in that brief awareness beyond time as I lay dead in her arms beheld our myriad possible futures; overwhelmingly those of centuries of tyranny and wars of imperial dominion ending with the extinction of human beings. I’ve been trying to warn others in hope of changing our future ever since, and I am failing.
Second my near execution by police who were bounty hunting abandoned street children in Sao Paulo Brazil where I was training as a fencer the summer before I began high school in 1974, when I refused to step aside between them and a boy with a twisted leg who could not run. I was rescued by the Matadors, something between vigilantes, revolutionaries, and criminals who brought a Reckoning to the wealthy and powerful beyond the law or who were the law, founded by the great and terrible Pedro Rodrigues Filho the year before, who welcomed me into their ferocious brotherhood with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
Third was the Siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982, when my culinary tour of the Mediterranean before my senior year at university in San Francisco was interrupted by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Israeli soldiers had set fire to two children and were laughing and making bets on how far they could run before collapsing into ruin, and I found myself fighting them as the children screamed in agony and horror burning to death. Others joined me, more joined us, and from that day I was part of the defense of the city.
There was a café on the far side of a sniper alley that served the best strawberry crepes in the world, and my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across it for breakfast. One morning an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and said in French; ”I am told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To this I replied; “Yes; moments stolen from death are all we truly own, and set us free. It’s a poor man who has no joys worth dying for.”
He smiled and said “I agree”; so began our conversations at breakfast, until the day came when Israel overran the barricades. The IDF were asking for surrender, blindfolding the children of those who came out and using them as human shields, and setting fire to the homes of those who refused. When they set fire to our house, and our discovery that our only weapon was the bottle of champagne we had just finished, he asked; Will you surrender?” and I said no.
“Neither will I” he replied, and stood. “As I offer you now, offer others at need; this is the Oath of the Resistance which I invented in Paris 1940 after spending much of the previous year spying on the Nazis in Berlin, reworded from my oath as a Legionnaire in 1918. It’s the finest thing I ever stole. Say with me; We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Thus was I set on my life path by Jean Genet, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of fear and horrors, with the Oath of the Resistance which I now offer all of you.
And he gave me a principle of action that day, by which I have lived now for over forty years, among the unknown spaces on our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, where there are no rules, and now recommend to you; “When there is no hope, one can do impossible things, glorious things.”
What is Torch of Liberty? A voice of democracy and the Resistance, as the banner of my periodical declares, whose intent is to incite, provoke, and disturb.
A journal of my witness of history and current events, and their meaning for strategy, intelligence, and policy for antifascists, revolutionaries, democracy activists, and allies of liberation struggle, wherein I interpret events as they occur using lenses of history, literature, psychology, and philosophy. It’s a method I developed from Robert G.L. Waite’s multidisciplinary study The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, which I read as a high school senior and also motivated me, along with Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, to choose the origins of evil and its actions as war, genocide, violence, and the social use of force as my field of study.
Six years ago I founded Torch of Liberty and Lilac City Antifa together, a network of action and its community publication, to work through ideology and its praxis in the context of real world events and actions, and to reveal the meaning and consequences of current events. Herein I struggle to find answers to two primary existential questions.
Who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
What is to be done, as Lenin and Tolstoy asked with such different answers and results?
If we are to inhabit the perspectives of others and transform boundaries into interfaces, we must be willing to embrace otherness as diversity and inclusion but also as truths written in our flesh, the witness of history, and what Foucault called truthtelling; writing is a sacred calling in pursuit of truth, which frees us from the flags of our skin and from authorized identities as an imposed condition of struggle.
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 the ownership of ourselves.
As Virginia Woolf teaches us, “If we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, we cannot tell the truth about others.”
So for my ars poetica as a praxis of revolutionary struggle. But I do not write to you today as an apologetics for poetic vision as the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, nor for chaos as the adaptive range and change potential of systems, nor to give warning as we pass through Rashomon Gate Events of history under multiple threats of civilizational collapse and the extinction of our species and on its reverse face the limitless possibilities of becoming human, nor of the joy of total freedom which balances the terror of our nothingness.
No, friends and those I hope may become friends, herein I write to you to ask for your help in questioning our truths, that together we may perform the Four Primary Duties of Citizens; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, as seizures of power, allyship, and solidarity in liberation struggle and bringing change to systems of oppression and unequal power, as guarantors of each other’s humanity and universal human rights in refusal to submit to authority and those who would enslave us through commodification, falsification, and dehumanization, in this year of the Last Stand Against Fascism as it unfolds in America’s 2024 elections and throughout the world.
Hope, solidarity, the witness of history, and truthtelling; such are my motives and purposes in writing to you as an open letter to humankind in this pivotal moment and to future generations.
And last but most important of all among my motives and purposes in writing, like Hope hidden in Pandora’s Box once the evils have escaped, herein I write to find healing for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world in sharing our journeys toward becoming human and in the reimagination and transformation of how we choose to be human together.
I hope to have lived, and written, not at the end of the story of humankind, but at its beginning.
And all of this tumultuous and traumatic chaotization and unraveling as human civilization falls from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions and is reborn, either to an Age of Tyranny or a United Humankind as our choices about how to be human together unfold across the next several centuries.
We now face threats of war and imperial conquest and dominion by two colossal empires, Russia and China, the subversion of democracy by theocratic tyranny and fascism in America and throughout the world, and the end of the earth’s capacity to sustain life and our own species extinction as a consequence of our addiction to power and control of nature.
Among the lines of fracture of this large scale transformative process is the Third World War now ongoing in ten theatres of conflict as Russia attempts to re-found her empire; first in the democracy and peace movements within Russia itself to bring regime change, second the Russian capture of the state in America under the puppet regime of Trump who is also the primary figurehead of the Fourth Reich of patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, and theocratic Christian Identity tyranny, third in the Russian conquest of Ukraine and Russian atrocities and crimes against humanity, and in related conflicts, wars, and revolutions in Russian client states Syria, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, and conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya, and throughout Africa.
And since last October as the Gaza War became a regional theatre of World War Three as a theatrical performance in three dimensions; first the seventy years of anticolonial struggle of Palestine versus America and her colony of Israel which has gradually degenerated into a mirror image of the Nazi society it was designed to protect us all from, second the broader conflict between the Arab-American Alliance and the Dominion of Iran including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen which is driven by the historical sectarian Sunni-Shia division, and third its dimensions as World War Three as Iran’s ally Russia attempts to re-found her Empire versus that of Turkey for control of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, in Africa directly opposing France, and in proxy wars with America, and all of this as civilizational collapse and rebirth in the titanic struggle between forces of liberation and imperial state terror and tyranny as a theatre of cruelty.
We also face the coming Chinese Conquest of the Pacific Rim and the Occupation of all cities with a Chinatown under the Overseas Chinese policy of the CCP, which declares all persons of Chinese blood to be their citizens and subject to their laws, though the invasion of Taiwan and the seizure of control of shipping in the South China Sea through the artificial archipelago of island fortresses built on the carcasses of coral reefs are the next steps in Xi Jinping’s grand strategy of dominion. We need only look to the vast laboratory of thought control and ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang or to the repression of dissent and freedom in Hong Kong to see what that future would look like.
Third among our primary existential threats is Nazi revivalism in Europe and the emerging new global order of fascism and totalitarian states of blood, faith, and soil. This includes Orban’s Hungary, the capture of Italy by the original Fascist Party, and the political fronts which have become the opposition parties in France, Spain, and elsewhere, but also fascist states beyond the limits of Nazi ideology arising from similar forces of identity politics and the centralization of power to carceral states of force and control which include Modi’s India, Myanmar, and the Netanyahu regime of Israel.
Let us give to tyranny and fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!
Who am I? By way of introduction, here follows my usual social media profile:
I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.
Chaos autonomizes; Order appropriates, Law serves power, and there is no just Authority.
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.
I am a writer and former counselor, high school debate coach and forensics teacher, and English teacher with a lifelong interest as a scholar in the nexus of literature, psychology, history, and philosophy, my chosen field of study being the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and its consequences as unequal power and systems of oppression and the social use of force as tyranny and terror.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
What is the praxis of my values? My purpose as a democracy activist is to realize a free society of equals in which we are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights, as a revolutionary to bring change to tyrannies of force and control, as an antifascist to bring a Reckoning to elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness and to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and as a human being to place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
In this cluster of causes, democracy, revolution, antifascism, and solidarity with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, I travel and write, speak, teach, and organize liberation struggle.
I practice the Way of believing six impossible things before breakfast, as Lewis Carroll teaches us, but only those I myself have chosen or created.
When you begin to question the boundaries and interfaces between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of no rules, of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery.
Thank you for sharing this journey with me, and may the new truths we create together bring all of us joy.
Michael Sheen performs ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ by Dylan Thomas
Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, by Michel Foucault
As I wrote in my celebration of Lewis Carroll on his birthday, I Sing of Madness, Vision, and Love; I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; but only in those truths which I myself create or claim, and which in turn claim me.
This is possibly a confession of faith, though if asked directly I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation.
Let there be total truth and absolute transparency between us, O my brothers, sisters, and others; for our word must be an inviolate force of nature if we are to mean anything, one which shapes, defines, motivates, and informs not only how we choose to be human together but also our own possibilities of becoming human. Lies dehumanize and falsify; therefore do I pursue a sacred calling to discover and live the truth. Having so defined the ground of struggle in my writing here as in all things, and with an awareness that this self-disclosure and public intimacy is terrifying to others in some cultures and part of my personal myth as it is for Kenzaburo Oe in Japan, what do I mean when I use the word faith?
My intention is not to deceive in this or any regard; its simply that this is a complex, ambiguous, relative, dangerous, and highly fraught issue, one which bears the legacies of both my personal history and that of my family, and of our millennia of civilization.
A full accounting and interrogation of my influences will not be brief and merits its own study; here I am primarily questioning its praxis as vision, described in the film Oz in reference to Thomas Edison as “the ability to look into the future and make it real.”
I am a scholar of Islam and a member of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism, a former Buddhist monk and Dream Navigator of the Kagyu Vajrayana Order in Kathmandu Nepal, and grew up from the age of nine with ten years of formal study in Zen Buddhism.
Often I use the word faith as solidarity of action with others; as loyalty, allyship, and recognition of our interdependence and the universal nature of our humanity which connects us. But I also use this word faith as a sacred calling to pursue the Truth, whatever the source or where it leads, an idea from ibn Arabi and the most radical definition of faith I know of, which makes Islam the most revolutionary of faiths, especially compared to Christianity and its centuries long burning of books in repression to dissent and subjugation to authority claiming to speak for the Infinite. Only six copies of Plato’s books survived the Dark Ages, courtesy of the Islamic scholars who preserved them.
So for myself, faith is a process of questioning, one which is antithetical to its usual use as submission to authority. Any who stand between ourselves and the Infinite serve neither.
Without question and absolutely it is a declaration of allegiance to poetic vision as symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical truth, as reimagination and transformation, as identity and the terms of struggle for its ownership; for after language itself the ideas by which we organize ourselves are our most fundamental ground of being.
Herein my ars poetica uses methods of literary criticism, history, psychology, and philosophy, an extension of the interdisciplinary methods pioneered in The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite which I read in high school during a time when I chose the origins of evil as my field of study, to interpret the meaning and direction of current events as they unfold in real time, and to change the balance of power in the world.
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 the ownership of ourselves.
Poetic vision and imaginal truth allows us to escape the limits of our form and the flags of our skin; to create ourselves anew as a primary human act and the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of January 3 2022, On Creativity and Poetic Vision as Revolution, Transformation, and Liberation; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” Keats
My sister wrote of her recurring vision of the Night Mountain this morning, a vast and enormous city or structure of lights floating in the sky above the desert just before dawn, and it provoked memories of and reflections on my own many visions and encounters with the transcendent, especially those which became Defining Moments and shaped my becoming human; among them the Illumination of Our Beautiful Flaws as I crossed the Thar desert in Rajasthan by camel, the Games of Beauty and Vision as I sailed upon the Lake of Dreams in Srinagar, my Journeys through the Gates of Possibilities as a monk in Kathmandu, the Kiss of the Fallen Star which struck my hand in a meteor shower as I reached for the Impossible among the heavens, the Dream of the Toad transferred to me as a chthonic guardian spirit and guide of the soul by one of my father’s Beatnik friends, William S. Burroughs, in a line of succession from Nietzsche as its avatar, in the strange fairytales he told in the evenings of his visits as the coals of the fire burned low and darkness swallowed us in its endless chasms, and the moment of my Awakening and vision of Possible Futures of Humankind when as a child at my mother’s side during a protest in People’s Park in Berkeley the police fired on the university students in the most terrible incident of state terror in American history, Bloody Thursday May 15 1969, and I escaped my body and had a unitary moment of awareness outside of time.
Like the dreams to which they are akin, such visions can be read as symbols, metaphors, and allegories; they are also stories woven into our lives which connect us with the universe and with other people, and through which we create ourselves. Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
I am looking at the scar on my hand from where a Fallen Star touched me one night during a cosmic event like tonight’s Quadrantid meteor shower, like the hand of a rebel angel bearing the stolen Promethean Fire, decades ago, when I reached up to pull the stars from the heavens and something reached down to enfold my hand in a nimbus of light, and for a moment I was sublimed and exalted in the Kiss of the Fallen Star, riding the light among the spheres, the earth a vanishing orb, then lost among the solar system, a sea of stars, a whirling dance of galaxies, and return to the hill where I stood transfigured by the embrace of Infinite. Stunned not by our smallness next to a universal scale, but by the eternity and timeless immensity of Being in which we share.
This meteor strike was witnessed by Jim Shafer, Jennifer Wendt-Damico, Kimberly Wine, Claud Gipson, and several others who had assembled on top of the old artillery battery overlooking the valley below Cavedale Road in Sonoma California in the 1980’s, with its awesome petroglyph caves hidden behind a waterfall, where a door to the Unknown was opened possibly thousands of years ago, letting beings of strangeness through.
If ever I need to be reminded of our true nature, of the presence of the transcendent and the immanence in nature of truths written in our flesh, of the vast and limitless sea of being and consciousness of which we are part, I need only open my hand to see written there the signature of the Unknown Infinite and the sign of our hope, for from the moment I touched a star I have been without despair, fear, or doubt, a bearer of hope and the fire of liberation.
I have been no stranger to what is strange; it has defined my Otherness and the kinship I feel with those others, however different from myself, who are marginalized, excluded, vilified, and oppressed, those whom Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth, the dispossessed and the powerless, the silenced and the erased; the monsters and the freaks whom I claim as my family and my tribe.
Of all the gifts and wonders life has given me, this I cherish most of all; that with all the numberless and unimaginable horrors to which I have been witness, in Mariupol and Sarajevo and the crimes and atrocities whose names become an endless litany of woes which define the limits of the human as a fragile and ephemeral quality among chasms of darkness, I have emerged from the legacies of our history Unconquered as in Henley’s poem Invictus, with the ability to bond, empathize with, and inhabit the lives of others as the bearer of sacred wounds which open me to the pain of others. I cherish my pain, for like the Abyss which I have embraced and wrestled with it has made me human.
If I can do this, so can we all. This is my faith as solidarity, hope, and love.
This above all else defines what is human; our ability to transcend the limits of our flesh and of our differences, to share and learn from the lives of others, across vast gulfs of time and space, through the civilization we create as partners in a Great Conversation. Much of who we are is stored potential in the form of our most precious resource, the written word, which is created by our historical community and belongs to the commons; this is both its power as a shaping force and its danger as a limitation of our uniqueness and autonomy.
Such are my thoughts on creativity and poetic vision as revolution, transformation, and liberation; but I did not invent the language with which I create them, nor the millennia of historical antiquity which informs my ideas; rather they are instruments with which I create myself. Who then owns the artifacts of my thinking? To this I must answer with a line from the great film Il Postino; “Poetry belongs to those who need it.”
In reverence for the gifts and guidance I have been given I have tried, however poorly and within my limitations, to understand the meaning and significance of such moments of insight, to enact them in my life as a fulcrum of change and to use poetic vision as leverage with which to transform the balance of power in the world.
Regardless of how we name and taxonomize the Source of our reality and the sea of our being in attempts to rationalize and control life, it remains wild, irrational, uncontrollable, and also very real. The wonder and terror of vision and immersion in what Coleridge called the Primary Imagination, Jung the Collective Unconscious, Ibn Arabi the Ālam al-Mithāl, and is termed the Bardo in the Tibetan classic which I translate as The Book of Liberation, in the contexts of four lineages of ideology in which I may claim membership, has inspired some of the greatest achievements of civilization and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and some of the most fearsome terrors of our historical atrocities, madness, and degradation.
The liminal bears creative and destructive forces in equal measure, and not reductive to the interplay of darkness and light, but ambiguous, contingent, and relative. We who are its witnesses and bearers of poetic vision are the arbiters of this power among humankind and of its consequences for the material universe and the order and fate of the cosmos. Who bears the fire of the gods becomes an agent of transformation, insight, and the reshaping of human being, meaning, and value; this is true of all art and of creativity in general.
Revolutions are born of such insight, in sciences and arts of understanding as well as in politics as choices we make about how to be human together, and in our ongoing creation of ourselves. With this inner fire and vision we may forge new truths, and in this mission I offer guidance and warning as you sail into the unknown; transgress boundaries, violate norms, abandon limits, and seize your power to create yourself anew, for nothing is Forbidden and all Authority is illusion and lies; but always know what you are trying to achieve, for force always operates in both directions at once.
Act without fear, and in action be fearless; but with awareness of the consequences of your actions. Life and liberty, as well as good and evil, may depend on the smallest of changes in our lives and our world, both for ourselves and for others.
Best wishes, and may you find joy, freedom, healing, and love in your reimagination of yourself and our possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of January 8 2022, Let Us Bring A Reckoning; Politics is the art of fear as the basis of exchange and the origin of authority and unequal power as systemic evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as balanced with the desire to belong, but it is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Washington did in crossing the Delaware to create America and as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
As I wrote in my post of October 14 2021, On Art as Poetic Vision, Transgression, Seizure of Power, Reimagination, and Transformation: a Manifesto; Why do I write?
I offer here a manifesto of art as poetic vision and transformation in the contexts of the performance of identities and in the guerilla theatre of political action and revolutionary struggle.
Art is transgressive when it challenges and violates our ideas of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, it is a seizure of power and refusal to submit to authorized identities which confers freedom and autonomy through becoming self-created and self-owned, Unconquered and beyond subjugation by force and control, and it is poetic vision as Surrealist reimagination and transformation when it depicts and guides our passage through the labyrinth of time, history, memory, and the falsification of our captured and distorted images in the wilderness of mirrors, lies, and illusions, to enact our rapture and exaltation, our transcendence into realms of dream and of vision wherein rules do not apply and when it seizes us with truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Art is intended to question and transform the rules and substance of human being, meaning, and value; to discover within the boundaries and interfaces, the silent and empty places of change and the limitless adaptive potential of systems, of unknowns, disconnects, misaligned juxtaposition and strange angles of view, new possibilities of becoming human.
I first understood the power of the unknown as a force of liberation as a boy whose bedroom wall was a collage of Bosch figures and images I called my Dream Gates; William S. Burroughs would show up for dinner without warning and tell weird fairytales into the night; he also drew curious figures into the collage of heaven and hell, and here was a definition of art and of its purpose; transformation of the possibilities of becoming human through reimagination and ecstatic poetic vision.
This is why I claim as the purpose of my writing to incite, provoke, and disturb; change and growth originate in discomfort and in the four primary duties of a citizen; to question, mock, expose, and challenge authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in 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.
This free space of play, of the unknown as unclaimed space and the adaptive potential of a system, whose boundaries like the known shores on our maps of becoming human frame the range of choices and act as authorized identities and an intrinsic limit on freedom as future possibilities, remains outside and beyond all limits and systems of knowledge, like Godels Theorem; no matter how much we learn and shift the boundaries of the known universe, the Infinite remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance.
If so the task of becoming human involves chaos, disruption, reimagination, and transformation, as I believe; the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
As I wrote in my post of October 5 2021, Seizure of Power, Self-Creation and Self-Ownership, Authenticity and Autonomy, Self Representation as Construction of Identity, and Ourselves as Living Memiors: the Case of Facebook; Something crucial we ignore about social media; though its pitched as connectedness, its primary function is to construct identity through ordering and prioritizing our experience in time. Our social media publications are a form of memoir, and this is a ground of struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and those which others tell about us.
As with the public negotiations of national identity and conflicted histories in the competing narratives of the 1619 Project and the Mayflower origin story, the first question we must ask of our stories is simple and direct; whose story is this?
This is the great test of disambiguation between falsification and authenticity, and between autonomy and subjugation; not whether a statement is a lie or a truth, though this is also important, but whose truth is it?
As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Kurdistan; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.
Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming its most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.
As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This?; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As written by Helena de Bresis, author of author of Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir, in Aeon; “I wrote a memoir recently, and sometimes I ask myself why on earth I did. It was difficult and time-consuming, it involved some rather unpleasant self-examination, and it raised suspicions of self-involvement, exhibitionism and insufferable earnestness that I’d so far mainly avoided in life. If I publish it, I risk being accused by friends of betrayal, by readers of lying, and by critics of any number of literary flaws. Since selling a memoir is hard, all of that would represent things going well. When I complain to my sister about this, she suggests that ‘maybe’ I should have – ‘I don’t know’ – considered these points two years ago, before embarking on this thing that she would ‘never, like, ever do’.
When asked why they bother, memoirists offer a range of reasons. Saint Teresa did it for the glory of God; Jean-Jacques Rousseau to express his inner self; Vladimir Nabokov to recreate his vanished childhood; Frederick Douglass to advance the cause of abolition. But maybe the deepest reason for writing a memoir, intertwined with all the rest, is the desire to find meaning in one’s past experience. Whatever else they’re up to, memoirists are in the business of locating some form or order in their personal history: setting it down as an intelligible shape, not a hot mess. Finding this form is both a necessary part of memoir and one of its key rewards. That was what I was after, anyway. Life moves so fast. Stuff had gone down. I wanted to slow the passage of events, grasp what the past had meant, before picking up the pace once again.
You can search for form in life through philosophy, science, religion and any kind of art. The memoirist’s distinctive move is to do it via autobiographical narrative: the construction of an organised sequence of personally experienced events, along with an implied evaluative response to them. Life stories have three things going for them when it comes to making experience intelligible. They’re selective, highlighting particular agents, settings and episodes out of the mass of material that life provides. They’re also unifying, drawing connections between their disparate parts and situating them in context. And they’re isomorphic: they share deep structural and thematic features with other stories, which we use as a shortcut when interpreting them. Psychologists report that most autobiographical narratives follow the classical story arc: steady state, complication, rising action, crisis, resolution, then coda. And they involve quests, comings-of-age, fatal errors, comeuppances and returns recognisable from myths, parables and fairy tales. Most, though maybe not all, humans tell such life stories. Memoirists recount them at length, in writing, with literary ambitions. We’re trying to do it, but make it art.
What are memoirists doing exactly, when we claim to ‘find’ this form and meaning in our past experience? Are we genuinely discovering it back there or just making it up? For the past century or so, the wind has been behind the latter interpretation. Many take the existentialist line that seeing your life in narrative terms is a form of mauvaise foi, or bad faith. We urgently want there to be order and meaning in the world, independently of us. But there isn’t, and our attempts to impose coherence and significance where none exist are self-deceiving and absurd. Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938), describes the ‘disgust’ and ‘nausea’ produced by our meaningless universe, alongside its ineffective narrative remedy:
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
What exactly is wrong with construing your past as a story? In his memoir The Words (1963), Sartre suggests that storytelling distorts our understanding of life, by confusing it with literature. We can tell autobiographical narratives if we like but, if so, we should be clear about what we’re doing: producing fiction. This take suggests that memoir, which calls itself nonfiction, is a fundamentally suspect enterprise.
A similar critique of narrative emerged in the philosophy of history in the 1970s. In his book Metahistory (1973), Hayden White argued that historical writing is a constructive process, in which the historian selects a subset of past events, imaginatively fills in the gaps, and orders the lot into a unified story. These historical stories, like the life stories of individuals, take conventional literary forms – tragedy, romance, comedy and satire – and employ poetic devices, including metaphor, synecdoche and irony. All of this is a creative act on the part of the historian, an imposition on the historical record. As a result, different historians can and do provide different narrative interpretations of the same events, none of which can be said to uniquely fit the facts. White concludes that historical writing, despite its scientific pretensions, reduces to fiction.
The philosopher Noël Carroll offered two main lines of response to White that transfer nicely to memoir. The first points to a set of faulty inferences in the argument. White assumes that each of the following features of an interpretation transforms it into fiction: inventiveness, selectivity, multiplicity, conventionality and literary quality. But a quick run-through shows that each can be present without an immediate diagnosis of fictionalising. Photos are invented rather than found, but that doesn’t make them inaccurate representations of the past. My telling you only some things about my spring break doesn’t mean that what I do tell you is made up. The availability of multiple good stories about the Loretta Lynn fan convention doesn’t demonstrate that one or all of them are fiction: each can just highlight a distinct aspect of the same complex course of events. And your description of what you’ve been up to recently might be Homeric, but some weekends genuinely are epic, and nonfigurative, nonliterary language might not be enough to capture the truth about them.
Carroll’s second reply to White questions the assertion that the world isn’t story-shaped. Humans act for reasons, and those actions have consequences, including the imprint of certain patterns on the world. We can describe all this in terms of atoms moving in the void, sure. But there’s an equally legitimate form of explanation that appeals to the values and goals driving the action, and therefore to the purpose and significance that human life genuinely contains. A story that offers such an explanation is picking up on real aspects of the world, not confabulating. Similarly, since humans think and act symbolically, narratives that incorporate metaphor and myth can serve to reflect, rather than distort, reality.
That said, there’s some truth in the claim that narrative is created, not found. Successful nonfictional storytellers both discover and construct. They do the difficult work of pruning and unifying experience into a shape they and others can understand. As the writer Lorrie Moore puts it: ‘Life is a cornfield, but literature is that shot of whiskey that’s been distilled down.’ And when nonfictional storytellers succeed, the shape they create tracks genuine features in the life described.
To defend nonfictional narrative isn’t, of course, to defend all particular life stories. At one early point in writing my memoir, I announced: ‘OMG, I think my life tracks the history of Western philosophy!’ ‘That’s wonderful!’ my long-suffering sister replied, but the angle of her eyebrow effectively consigned that one to the trash. There are also some general narrative conventions we’re better off without. No literary memoirist would be caught dead these days writing a traditional autobiography: a strictly chronological tracing of events, from infancy on, in a tone of untroubled authority. The contemporary memoir zooms in on a specific period or theme, and moves back and forth in time. Modern memoirists tend to be less certain than autobiographers, more alert to the seductions of narrative closure. As a result, their books are more complex, searching, and truer to life.
But we can welcome these salutary effects of 20th-century narrative scepticism while keeping the baby in the bath. Old-fashioned storytelling has real virtues when making sense of the world. (I once lunched with a literary magazine editor after he’d gone through the latest set of submissions. ‘Oh god,’ he exclaimed, like a frustrated police chief, ‘just tell me what happened in order!’) Those virtues are so great that even narrative sceptics make use of them. Joan Didion ends her essay ‘The White Album’ (1968-78) with an admission of defeat: ‘Writing has not yet helped me to see what [experience] means.’ But sometimes the pattern just is chaos, and Didion’s use of personal narrative in this essay deftly captures that truth about 1960s California.
Cynics about narrative often give off an air of expecting more from stories than memoirists themselves do. No memoir can reveal an underlying grand narrative in the universe as a whole, or give its writer anything more than a partial and provisional grip on their personal past. But it can sometimes provide that grip, which is no small thing. When I look at my own memoir, I can clearly see its fictive qualities. The stage is set, the action rises, the protagonist falls apart, then lurches out of the abyss. There’s a coda, written in a tone of battered hope. Sartre would give it one star on Goodreads. That would be mean (I gave his five!), but I’m not too troubled by it. The book reads to me like my life, a life that makes better sense to me now that I’ve written it down.”
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2020, The Transformative Power of Art: a Manifesto; The transformative power of art, its ability to reframe our ideas about self and other, to shift boundaries, reassign values, reclaim history and identity from silence, erasure, marginalization, and the authorization of inequalities of power and divisions of exclusionary otherness; these are among the vital functions which make art a primary human and social activity.
Art as poetic vision precedes and parallels politics as a means of changing our civilization and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; it represents a power held by autonomous individuals and communities against the tyranny of state force and control. Politics is a social art which is primary to our interdependent human nature and processes of becoming human. Through our words, images, and performance we can question, mock, expose, and challenge authority and incite, provoke, and disturb others in bringing transformational change to the systems and structures within which we are embedded.
Art is life, for it involves us personally and directly in processes of adaptive growth and in renegotiation of our social contracts and relationships with others, both personal and political, and informs and motivates the performance of our identities.
If we are caught in a rigged game, we must change the rules and terms of struggle. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, authority delegitimized, traditional systems and structures interrogated, limits transgressed, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities of becoming human discovered.
We must question, expose, mock, subvert, transgress, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. There is no just authority.
Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
Six Impossible Things: Slaying the Jabberwocky
Il Postino film
Faith as poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation; a reading list
A Greeting of the Spirit: Selected Poetry of John Keats with Commentaries,
primary texts of The Labyrinth of the Gates of Dreams
The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo, Padmasambhava, Karma Lingpa, Chögyam Trungpa and Francesca Fremantle translators
We celebrate this week the founding of the #metoo movement by Alyssa Milano with a Twitter post on October 15, 2017, and soon joined by a host of A list celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow, Ashley Judd, Jennifer Lawrence, and Uma Thurman. Suddenly the masses of exploited women who were not global stars had powers of authorization and solidarity, and they responded with the roar of lions escaping their cages.
With aligned liberation struggles in Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion protests and the Black Lives Matter mass movement for social justice, #metoo was one of the three key protest movements to begin to reshape our nation and our civilization as triadic forces of reimagination and transformation.
This tidal change of revolutionary struggle which arose as the Fourth Reich regime of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, rapist and kingpin of a human trafficking empire disguised as a modeling and beauty pageant monopoly, was exposed before the world as an engine of death and totalitarianism with three major parts; patriarchy and Gideonite sexual terror, racism and white supremacist terror, and the dehumanization and commodification of capitalism, strategies of subjugation of the people to elites and the subversion of democracy which aligned all too well with divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite membership, as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Against the overwhelming force and pervasive and endemic tyranny, against systemic and structural predation and the legacies of historical and epigenetic harms and trauma, our most vulnerable populations led the way in resistance; women, Black peoples and racial minorities, and a children’s crusade led by Greta Thunberg.
Let us remember always that change comes from the margins and from outside the system, that it is those whom society vilifies and excludes, the slaves and the outcasts, who have the true power to revision and bring transformational change to our civilization and to our future possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of January 7 2020, Victims Become Hunters: trial of the monster Weinstein begins; We find great satisfaction in the spectacle of a monster dragged into the open and exposed to the people’s justice and wrath by its former victims, and surely no predator wearing the mask of a man deserves condemnation and vengeance more than Harvey Weinstein, who joins his fellows Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Nassar in their special ring of the Inferno.
Let us not forget that it is the Patriarchy and the privileges of male immunity for crimes of sexual terror and dominion which enable the abuse of power and the subjugation and exploitation of half of humanity by the other which must be our real target of change, for hegemonies of power and privilege create and protect the tyrants of their structures, and these layers of inequality must be challenged and exposed. Only then can we achieve social transformation and a free society of equals be realized.
As I wrote in my post of August 11, 2021 The Fall of Patriarchy: the Case of Andrew Cuomo; A monster has been toppled from his throne, and like the tyrannical god who presides over Patriarchy as a cannibal father, Saturn, his fall signals a liminal time in which all things become possible, order is reversed, and chaos returns to us the power which authority has stolen from us.
Let us use this time of freedom wisely.
As I wrote in my post of December 21 2020, A Balance of Conserving and Revolutionary Forces: Portents of the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the Mirror of 1623; Saturn, god of agriculture whose emblem is the Horn of Plenty, also the terrible father of the gods who eats his children until he is tricked into freeing them by his son Jupiter the Liberator. A figure of wealth as rapacious cannibalism versus liberation in an allegory from the dawn of civilization in which tyranny is cast down from its throne in a seizure of power by those he has sacrificed to create the wealth of harvest; a song of revolutionary struggle and the triumph of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
Saturn, whose harvest and midwinter festival has been split in our culture into Thanksgiving and Christmas, a festival of feasts, gifts, merrymaking, and above all the reversal of order and authority under the mad idiot reign of a King of Fools, a role enacted in recent years by our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. To the ancient Greeks and Romans, the origin story of humankind in the rebellion of the gods of light against those of darkness mirrored the emergence of democracy from the tyranny of kings; the rule of laws replacing that of persons and of reason replacing barbarism and atavisms of instinct.
In the Fall of the Kings of New York, Hollywood, and the iconography of idealized feminine beauty and subjugation to male authority which is our national gymnastics system masquerading as a sport, cast down from their thrones of lies by their exposure in the rebellion of those enslaved and victimized through sexual terror, I find echoes and reflections of this primordial seizure of power from figures of Patriarchy, and while we celebrate this national liberation we must also recognize that there can be no end to revolutionary struggle.
For the enemy of our subjugation to unequal power does not live merely in his castle waiting for us to seize and dethrone him, but also within us, in our addiction to power and the use of force, falsification through lies and illusions, and divisions of identitarian exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite belonging. These too we must challenge and defy, expose and cast down, if we are to free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and the terror of Patriarchy.
As I wrote in my post of February 24 2020, Triumph and the Dawn of a New Age: Weinstein Found Guilty; Today we witnessed the overthrow of the Patriarchy, the final casting off of the gag of silence by the victims of sexual terror and the liberation of women from the Scarlett Letter of blaming the victim, as Weinstein is found guilty.
We have waited a long time for this moment, since Odysseus’ Hanging of the Maids at the founding of our civilization some two thousand seven hundred years ago.
With Epstein and Nassar among the three principal monsters dethroned by the #metoo movement, Harvey Weinstein will join them in Hell and in our nightmares throughout history as three bogeymen of secret power, tyrants and madmen who define the limits of what is human.
Such monsters and freaks of horror are extremely useful in defining our boundaries, ideas of otherness, of identities both authorized and possible limned like a chiaroscuro against the negative spaces of the Forbidden. It is far easier to tell what is not human than what is or may be.
Therefore celebrate with me this triumph and seizure of power by the historically silenced and marginalized half of humanity, as the vengeance of the Hanged Maids and the liberation of Hester Prynne from her Scarlet Letter.
A year and a half has passed since the fall of Weinstein, and the revelations which led to the fall of Cuomo have proven that we have not yet become a free society of equals. But in the sphere of relations and identities of sex and gender, real change is underway and the true power base of Patriarchy, the silencing of women’s voices, has already collapsed into nothingness, for now we celebrate truthtellers who like the Jester of King Lear speak truth to power; no longer bearers of a Scarlet Letter, but culture heroes who call out; “Look! The Emperor has no clothes!”
As I wrote in my post of July 21 2020, How Patriarchy Works: Unequal Power, Identities of Sex and Gender, Autonomy Versus Authorization, Complicity and Responsibility, and the Social Use of Force; Here I began thinking about the murder of Vanessa Guillen, toxic masculinity and violence, and the military as an atavism of rape culture and a counter-culture of our own in tidy categories of Hegelian-Marxist history and the dialectics of revolutionary struggle, when I quickly realized that patriarchy is a spectrum disease which corrupts and subverts its victims and its perpetrators alike, and this is its true terror.
At the intersection of power asymmetries and identities of sex and gender lie issues of authorization versus autonomy, with crucial consequences for complicity and responsibility in our legal system which arbitrates the social use of force.
In her now classic work Ring of Power, Jean Shinoda Bolen interprets Wagner’s great opera in terms of patriarchal forces which dehumanize us because they cripple and steal our capacity to love. Of particular interest here is the figure of Brunhild as Daddy’s Avenger and victim of internalized oppression.
So I looked again, but this time not at the primary struggle for power and ownership between male perpetrator and female victim, between masters and slaves, but at two female monsters who are parallel figures as enablers and accomplices of sexual terror, Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Moreover they are characters embedded in fairytale narratives with which we are all familiar; the etiology of their disfigurement and monstrosity lies in the malign effects of inequality as a moral debasement and leprosy of the soul. For the study of such things I return to Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece Cat’s Eye, her novels Interlunar and Life Before Man, to the thematic companion volumes The Handmaid’s Tale and The Edible Woman, and to the foundational critical work by Sharon Rose Wilson, The Fairytale Sexual Politics of Margaret Atwood.
A study of Margaret Atwood is illuminating and instrumental to understanding the elements of patriarchy and the operations of its systems, especially in the context of female on female violence in secondary order power relations. Allow me to elaborate.
Cat’s Eye presents a narrator, Elaine Risley, who is a trapped Rapunzel in a world of ghosts, witches, cruel stepsisters, vanishing princes, and a merciful fairy godmother. The story draws ideas mainly from Anderson’s Snow Queen and Grimm’s Rapunzel, secondarily from Anderson’s Ice Maiden and Grimm’s Girl Without Hands.
Fearful door images echo Grimm’s Fitcher’s Bird; Risley’s dreams and visions are filled with images from medieval art, paintings of the Annunciation, Ascension, and the Virgin. The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of Atwood’s vision; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort.
Of her characters, Cordelia from Shakespeare’s King Lear is among her finest; Mrs. Sneath is a cannibal goddess who resembles Baba Yaga and is linked to the figure of cat-headed Maat in this story.
Thematically Cat’s Eye is an investigation of the Rapunzel Syndrome; the wicked witch who imprisons her, the tower she is trapped in, a rescuer. Margaret Atwood’s driving conflicts are female-female, though her plots foreground sexual power and its political reflections.
Life Before Man offers The Wizard of Oz, The Nutcracker ballet, Anderson’s Snow Queen, a host of tales from Grimm including The Girl Without Hands, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Cap, Fitcher’s Bird, and The Robber Bridegroom. Secondary intertexts include Wilde’s Salome, Dante’s Inferno, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Coleridge’s Kublai Khan, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, and Mother Goose rhymes, mainly Little Miss Muffet. It’s a sort of Grand Tour of our civilization and the history of our private inner space and the disastrous and grotesque ways we collide with each other. Also, wonderful and illuminating reading.
Interlunar reimagines Cocteau’s Orphee, the ballet Giselle, both the Grimm and Anne Sexton version of The White Snake, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Motifs include death, pestilence, filth, eating, power, the journey, healing, hands, blindness and vision. Themes of guilt and shame, love, destruction, sacredness, creation, fertility, and metamorphosis are to be found in this richly imagined novel.
The Edible Woman is a linked text with The Handmaid’s Tale; do read both together. Herein the main embedded stories are Hansel & Gretel, The Gingerbread Boy, Goldilocks, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, and her protagonist Marion plays all of these roles as well as those of Little Red Cap, the Robber Bride, and Fitcher’s bride.
The Handmaid’s Tale gives a voice to Bilhah, the Biblical Handmaid, revisions Little Red Riding Hood as an extension of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, and tells the story of the Christian disempowerment of the Goddess as presented in the great film The Red Shoes.
Margaret Atwood’s parodies of Grimm operate on three levels; thematic, images and motifs, and narrative structure. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we have themes of family and especially female-female conflict, gender and sexual power asymmetries, and the initiation and heroic journey. Motifs and images include dismemberment, cannibalism, fertility, labyrinths and paths, and all manner of disturbing sexual violence. Plot devices include a variety of character foils, doppelgangers, disguises and trickery of stolen and falsified identity.
Among Margaret Atwood’s Great Books, The Handmaid’s Tale is a universally known reference both because it has been taught for over a generation in every high school in America as a standard text and because of the extraordinary television series, arguably the most important series ever filmed. We teach it for the same reasons the show is popular; a visceral and gripping drama with unforgettable characters, a mesmerizing plot, and an immediate and accessible story which empowers and illuminates.
It depicts the brooding evil and vicious misogyny of Christianity and Fascism as two sides of the dynamic malaise of patriarchy and authority, as drawn directly from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, but also from contemporary culture as it contains satires of identifiable public figures, organizations, and events. Serena is based on Phyllis Schlafly, and Gideon is the nation of Pat Robertson and the fundamentalists who seized control of the Republican Party around the time of the novel’s writing; Margaret Atwood’s motive in part was to sound an alarm at the dawn of the Fourth Reich and its threat to global democracy.
It remains to be seen whether the forces of tyranny or of liberty will prevail in the end. Each of our lives is a contest between these forces, our private struggles reflected in the society and human civilization we share.
And this is the great lesson and insight of Margaret Atwood; each of us is both a Handmaid and a Serena, trapped within the skin of the other. She locates the primary conflict within ourselves, and transposes the Jungian conflict between Anima and Animus with that of the Shadow in terms of sex, gender, and power.
So we return to our Brunhilds and twin monsters Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell, who Janus-faced represent corruption and perversion, the dual spheres of action of feminine power turned against itself by the forces of patriarchy and shaped to the uses of predation and misogyny.
Melania’s message on the coat she wore to tour a migrant concentration camp, “I really don’t care. Do U?’ and Ghislaine’s self-description in Vanity Fair, “‘I do it the way Nazis did it with the Jews,” reflect the disease of power in its political and sexual contexts, and as a First Cause of both racist hate crimes and crimes of sexual terror. Unequal power is a precondition of them both.
And these are direct quotes from enablers and accomplices of crimes against humanity which define the limits of the human, and who are not marginal figures whose malign violations of our values and dehumanization of others occurred in a trailer park brothel or secret sweatshop of slave labor but at the pinnacle of our society’s ruling class. Their existence is an indictment of the flaws of our nation and of our civilization, and a measure of the distance we have yet to travel in the realization of a true free society of equals.
As Margaret Atwood said in her 2015 lecture to West Point cadets; “Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say, ‘It can’t happen here.’ Anything can happen anywhere, given the right circumstances.”
The Handmaid’s Tale telenovela series trailer
Torch of Liberty January 17 2024 Thanks For Showing Us All What’s Under Your Masks, Republicans: the Case of E. Jean Carroll Versus Donald Trump
Torch of Liberty 