I am a direct patrilineal descendent of a Revolutionary War veteran who, during a period of his captivity by the Shawnee from 1780 at the Battle of Ruddles Fort in Kentucky, became a member of the tribe and won his freedom by marrying Me Shekin Ta Withe or White Painted Dove from whom I am also descended; succeeding generations of my family lived in a mixed community in Cape Girardeau Missouri of Native Americans and their former slaves captured in battle, both European and African, a community who had fought both for and against each other for 35 years til the 1815 Battle of New Orleans ended the War of 1812, and often intermarried. In the end I think they understood each other better than those who did not share the same complex history of wars, slavery, and reconciliation.
My hope is that one day all humankind can emerge from the shadows of history, and change our boundaries into interfaces.
Native American History
November 2 2025 Native American Heritage Month and the Hidden Costs of Unequal Power in the Falsification and Erasure of History as Authorized Identities: Case of the Phantom Ancestor, Day of the Dead Part Two
500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians, Josephy
The Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, American West, Dee Brown
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, David Treuer
Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, Peter Nabokov (editor)
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, Thomas King
Native American Mythology, Hartley Burr Alexander
Pocahontas, Paula Gunn Allen
This Land is Their Land, David J. Silverman
The Cherokee Nation; a history, Robert J. Conley
One Vast Winter Count, The Indian World of George Washington, Colin Calloway
Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides
Empire of the Summer Moon, S.C. Gwynne
The Comanche Empire, Lakota America: a new history of indigenous power, Pekka Hamalainen
The Killing of Crazy Horse, Thomas Powers
Crow Dog: Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men, Leonard Crow Dog
Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement, Richard Erdoes
The Apache Wars, Paul Andrew Hutton
The Serpent’s Tongue: Prose, Poetry, and Art of the New Mexico Pueblos, Nancy Wood
The Trickster: A Study In American Indian Mythology, Paul Radin, Karl Kerényi, C.G. Jung
Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America, Nicole Eustace
Native American Literature
Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction, Catherine Rainwater
Secrets from the Center of the World, How We Become Human: poems 1975-2002, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: poems, Soul Talk Song Language: conversations, Crazy Brave, Poet Warrior: A Memoir, Joy Harjo
Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means
Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog
Black Elk Speaks
The Man Made of Words: essays, stories, passages, N. Scott Momaday
Night Flying Woman, Ignatia Broker
Fool’s Crow, James Welch
Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, The Night Watchman, Louise Erditch
Our Stories Remember: history, culture, & values through storytelling, Joseph Bruchac
Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Storyteller, Turquoise Ledger, Leslie Silko
Blue Highways, William Least-Heat Moon
Firesticks, Primer of the Obsolete, Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha, Uprising of Goats, Designs of the Night Sky, The Mask Maker, Stories of the Driven World, American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays, The Dance Partner, The Dream of a Broken Field, Diane Glancy
The Journey of Crazy Horse, John Marshall III
Houdini Heart, Ki Longfellow
You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Blasphemy: new and selected stories, Sherman Alexie
Two Old Women, Bird Girl & the Man Who Followed the Sun, Velma Wallis
The Voice of Rolling Thunder, Sidian Morning Star Jones
New recruiting posters are appearing throughout America this weekend, bearing the message; Join the United States Armed Forces and Be Starved to Suicidal Despair By a Supreme Commander Who Thinks You Are All “Suckers and Losers”, Because Your Lives Mean Nothing To Him Against the Profits of Oil Plutocrats and His Own Kleptocratic Regime.
Join; Uncle Sam Needs Volunteer Prisoners For Labor Committing War Crimes To Enrich His Elite Paymasters.
Look Forward To A Future As a Homeless Addict and Madman Broken By the Horrors He Has Committed For the Wealth, Power, and Privilege of Elites Who Will Despise and Revile You For It, and Abandon You.
Such is the truth behind the lies of those who would enslave us.
Humankind’s oldest form of labor exploitation along with patriarchy and slavery, military service, has now taken a new and far more vicious turn, as the Trump regime’s failed and unprovoked war on Iran to seize her oil spirals into pathos as a giant sinkhole not only of money, but of the lives of our servicepersons.
No General Strike as of yet, or even mutinies aboard the death ships where sailors labor in conditions of deprivation and scarcity worse than the bond labor of most of our prisons, their lives commodified and become the raw materiel of the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites who despise them.
What will become of them after a career of raining hideous doom upon innocents for the purpose of planting American corporate flags on foreign oil wells as imperial conquest and dominion? Far too often, our veterans wander homeless, broken, addicted, and mad, forgotten and reviled as war criminals, waste products of a system of oppression sold by state propaganda as “an army out to set other men free” as Chamberlain said at Gettysburg, which in its finest moments may even have been true.
But this is no longer the mission of our Armed Forces, now under Hegseth the Horrible and Traitor Trump become mere chattels.
Instead of jumping off the death ships, seize command and turn their guns on those who would enslave us, who have betrayed you and regard your lives as nothing.
As written by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian, in an article entitled USS Abraham Lincoln sailors tried to jump overboard amid extended deployment – reports; “Military families and Congress members are sounding the alarm about an intensifying mental health crisis onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, as its 5,000 sailors and marines endure a record-breaking deployment at sea tied to the war with Iran.
Two leading specialist military papers, the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes, are reporting that there have been multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard as poor conditions and mental stresses on the Lincoln reach the breaking point. The crew is in its ninth month at sea, and has spent 250 days consecutively without making land – a record for an aircraft carrier in modern times.
Worried families vented their anxieties about loved ones onboard the Lincoln at an emotional town hall meeting with navy leaders in San Diego last Thursday, Stars and Stripes reported. One spouse among the 200 or so family members said that her husband had texted her that day saying “he hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow”.
The families’ worries were expressed directly to navy leadership, represented at the town hall by the acting navy secretary, Hung Cao, and other top officials.
A woman at the meeting told Cao that the navy had “broken trust between us and the leadership”, the paper reported.
The Navy Times gave details of thwarted suicide attempts onboard the aircraft carrier during the current deployment. Annabelle Loma told the outlet that her husband had tried to jump overboard after his spell at sea kept being extended.
“He’s scared. He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out his 13-year career is ruined, just like that,” she said.
The paper quoted another sailor’s wife whose husband was involved in a separate incident onboard the Lincoln in which he prevented a fellow crew member from jumping, grabbing them and bringing them back on deck.
Mike Levin, a Democratic member of Congress from California, has sounded the alarm over conditions onboard the warship, which is in its fifth month of combat operations against Iran. He described the lot of the crew on X as “moldy showers, broken toilets, laundry down for weeks, long stretches with no hot water, a meal that came down to half a cup of rice and two tortillas. No soap, deodorant, or toothpaste.”
Jason Crow, a Democratic Congress member from Colorado who is a former army ranger having served in Afghanistan and Iraq, has warned that the strain on service members and their families on the Lincoln is “building week by week”.
The current crunch has been months in the making. The warship left San Diego on 21 November and was originally intended for the Pacific but was redirected to the Middle East once the US-Israel war with Iran began.
Since then, MS Now revealed, the 5,000-plus crew has had only two days on land, in Guam in December and Oman in July. The deployment was scheduled to end in May but has been extended a couple of times amid the ongoing war.
In April, there was a flurry of public criticism about dire conditions onboard the carrier. Photos emerged of poor-quality and rationed food, and there were reports of water shortages, moldy showers and broken laundry machines.
Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, dismissed the accounts as “more fake news”.
Levin responded to Hegseth’s remark this week. He said: “These men and women signed up to serve their country. The least their country owes them is hot water, a working toilet and a real meal. Hegseth cannot even manage that, and he has the nerve to look their families in the eye and call them liars.”
The Guardian contacted the US navy for its response to reports of attempts to jump overboard. After this article was published, a navy official responded, saying that they were aware that “extended deployments place a significant strain on our service members and their families, and we are grateful for the resilience and sacrifices they make”.
The official said that the health and wellbeing of every Lincoln sailor was a priority: “Based on information available to the command, we have not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts aboard the ship.”
Religious, medical and mental health professionals were available as part of a “comprehensive support network” that included “onboard deployment-resilience counselors and chaplains”. The official recognised that the war had disrupted traditional supply hubs, but added that “current reports from the ship confirm continuous access to clean water, functional AC and healthy meal options”.
The mental health challenges faced by active-duty US navy personnel are well known. A study from last year looked at the unique stress factors faced by sailors on deployments and found the most common included loud noises, lack of rest, and inadequate mental and physical healthcare.
The researchers conducted a survey of deployed sailors and found that almost half complained that they were not receiving adequate help in coping with stress at sea. The study concluded that “given the high rates of military suicide, including within the navy, efforts to improve healthcare access on ships are urgently needed”.
USS Abraham Lincoln sailors tried to jump overboard amid extended deployment – reports
Moldy showers and no soap: Military families are outraged by conditions on USS Lincoln
The aircraft carrier’s long deployment in the Iran war is raising concerns that the sailors and Marines on board are facing poor conditions, low supplies and fatigue.
What is a Southerner, an American, or a member of any other claim of identity and belonging of origin?
My father’s childhood name was Gator Bait, so called by grandpa because he used to throw a rope around him and toss him in the swamp to splash around and attract alligators to shoot. Grandpa’s favorite story about his own childhood went like this; “Dad, your great grandfather, was a gunfighter, and one day he was practicing his quick draw with a hair trigger revolver that went off when he slapped that hogleg, and shot himself through his leg. Bled out dead in minutes. I rolled him up in a carpet, put him in a flatboat, and pushed him out into the swamp. Anything you want to know about who you are and where you come from, go ask the gators.”
Beyond the dubious honor of having alligators as my ancestral tribe, my father’s family had lived in Cape Girardeau, Missouri since the 1815 Battle of New Orleans which ended the War of 1812, taking refuge with a nephew of my ancestor Henry Lale, 1754-1830, who fought in the American Revolution and crossed the Delaware with Washington. There he reconnected with Daniel Boone and his family, whom he had once followed through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.
My whole family had been captured by Shawnee allies of Britain at the Battle of Ruddle’s Fort June 21 1780 in Kentucky, where he had gone to live when Ruddle rebuilt the fort a year earlier. Held for a time as a slave of the Indians, he became Shawnee by marrying into the tribe, and all subsequent members of my patrilineal family descend from Henry and Me Shekin Ta Withe (White Painted Dove).
George III Lale, 1773-1853, nephew of Henry, captured when seven years old in the Ruddle’s Fort raid, was taken in 1781 to a camp in Cape Girardeau, base of a Shawnee trade empire from which the entire Mississippi basin could be navigated, becoming the first white pioneer in the region, near the land which in 1793 was granted by Baron Carondelet to the Black Bob Band of the Hathawekela Shawnee.
Nearby was a Spanish land grant awarded to Andrew Summers for service in the Cape Girardeau Company of the Spanish-American Militia by Governor Lorimier, during a six week campaign in 1803. Andrew Summers had married Elizabeth Ruddle, daughter of Captain George Ruddle and granddaughter of Isaac Ruddle; Andrew and Elizabeth moved with their family to their land in Cape Girardeau after the War of 1812; later her father joined them, as did members of my family. George and Louisa’s seven children were born there; the old Summers cemetery where George III is buried lies two miles SW of Jackson Missouri. When my father’s family moved to Spokane during World War Two for work, the Summers moved with them.
A number of survivors of the Revolutionary War, especially those associated with Daniel Boone, Ruddles Fort, and the Wilderness Campaign, moved to Cape Girardeau where the Lale and Summers families had established a community of pioneers and former slaves of Indians, both African and European, and the Indians they had fought alongside and against, been captured by and intermarried with. In the end I think they understood each other better than those who had not survived the same collective trauma and shared history.
My great grandmother Lilly Summers could claim direct patrilineal descent from the Summers family of Fairfax Virginia, descended from Sir George Summers, who commanded the Sea Venture, one of the ships which brought over the Jamestown colony in 1607, through the first settler in Alexandria, John Summers, who lived from 1687 to 1790 and had at the time of his death four generations of descendants, including some four hundred individuals. Lilly was equally descended from her mother, M.B. Croft who is listed as Dutch which probably means German, and her father John William Summers, of English lineage but designated as Cherokee in family records, which we now know from DNA tests is a fiction describing descent from an African, possibly a slave of the Cherokee as so many were.
It is also possible that this ancestry came into the Summers line from fellow soldiers who served with them during the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, among them free Black militia companies which pre-existed the war, including slaves promised freedom and armed by Andrew Jackson as the first Black company of the American army, a former Spanish colonial Black militia with whom Andrew Summers had served alongside against France, and Major D’Aquin’s Battalion of Free Men of Color from Haiti who were elite professional revolutionaries and soldiers who had once been part of the French army. Of these possibilities I judge the last most probable, as it would explain why my father practiced Voodoo as the traditional family faith.
The scientific term for this ethnicity is Louisiana Creole; my father described himself as Cajun.
My paternal grandmother was Italian; of the Noce family whose stilt house in Bayou La Teche Louisiana was built from the ship they sailed from Genoa in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, having been members of the 1797 Jacobin Revolt in Genoa and allies of Napoleon, its navigable approach guarded by ancient canon. My mother wrote a journal of a family visit with them in 1962; there was Quiller, a giant who could carry a railroad tie in each hand, all day long, the Silent Man who sat in his rocking chair on the front porch for three days without saying anything like a stone gargoyle, then fast as lightning whipped out a shotgun from under the blanket across his lap and fired into the swamp, and after several minutes of rocking declared; “Water moccasin,” a deadly poisonous snake. The women all wore pointy hats like cartoon witches, and I’ve never found any credible reference which might identify the ethnicity or historical period to which it belongs nor the origin of the pointed hat as a witch symbol; my aunties claimed to be hereditary priestesses of Persephone, Queen of the Dead and the Underworld, though this may have been a joke.
Here then is the whole of my claim to membership and identity as a Southerner, a descriptor I’ve never really thought of til today, though I’m not sure swamp rats get to append the term gentleman to the word Southern.
We are all pluralities, and all identities are fluid, relative, ambiguous, forms of narrative, and performative. Claims of identity based on geography, nation, and where one was raised or has historical and ancestral connections, ethnicity and that most ephemeral and illusory set of stories as nested puzzle boxes we call culture; all are a ground of struggle.
We share a common problem we must solve in growing up; the struggle between the stories others tell about us and those we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, Willian Faulkner
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom ed
William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond, Cleanth Brooks
One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner, Jay Parini
Ship of Fools, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Ann Porter
The Moviegoer, Lancelot, The Second Coming, Walker Percy
Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
Ballad of the Sad Cafe and other stories, Carson McCullers
Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes
The Collected Stories of Tennessee Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, In The Winter of Cities, Memoirs, Collected Plays, Tennessee Williams
Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity, Frederick Asals
Flannery: a Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch A Subversive Gospel: Flannery O’Connor and the Reimagining of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, Michael Mears Bruner
Tonight the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts begins, held in 2026 throughout the lunar month from August 13 to September 11, as the legacies of our history return to devour and possess us. This pan-diaspora Chinese holiday is often compared to the Mexican Day of the Dead, a festival of ancestor worship rather than the Hungry Ghosts who are malign forces, and there is one crucial difference which makes the Ides of Hecate and Halloween nearer parallels; herein the Gates of Hell open and the souls of the dead inhabit our world, including those honored ancestors who possess us literally as DNA and stories embedded and written in our flesh, but most especially the Hungry Ghosts are the most wicked of the damned, bearing memories of their abominable crimes, atrocities, and perversions performed in life to shadow our own with unspeakable horrors and living nightmares.
So of course we must honor and celebrate them, summon them into our bodies and let them out to play in re-enactment of that which defines the limits of the human. This is a kind of mass voodoo possession or amok time, like the ceremonies performed by my father and his collaborator William S. Burroughs as theatre, to which as a child I bore witness. This was magic as Jungian shadow work, similar to the Tibetan Buddhist rites of dancing one’s demons; I also find echo and reflection of my father’s underground theatre in the theatrical art of Clive Barker.
Transgression; and those who embrace their monstrosity as do I are the Others who define the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden as authorized identities, virtue, and normality; those things which reflect their antagonist in empires, authorized elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, normalities of which I practice three things as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth and as revolutionary struggle; these being the violation of normality, the transgression of the Forbidden, and the performance of unauthorized identities as truths written in our flesh and the frightening of the horses.
This is my Festival of the Hungry Ghosts whom I dance in the embrace of our monstrosities, the performance of unauthorized identities, violations of normalities, transgressions of other people’s ideas of virtue beyond good and evil, the pursuit of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh and those unique to ourselves which we alone create, beyond all limits.
Come dance with us, and be free.
I welcome and cherish the ancestors whose choices about how to be human and solutions to changing threats and conditions are encoded into my being epigenetically as stories and DNA, adaptive potential in forms of prochronism which protects identity and the morphology of our forms from disruptive change; but I welcome also those echoes and reflections of outsiders who help us to discover unknowns beyond our maps of human being, meaning, and value, and to create new ways and possibilities of becoming human which are uniquely ours.
We need both a conserving force to buffer identity from the shock of the new, and a revolutionary force to adapt to changing conditions and instrumentalize Chaos in becoming human, as self-created and autonomous beings.
During this liminal time of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our realities, both our angels and our devils are let out to play, with equal license; and what they desire is to be realized and live again through us. In exchange for such performances, imaginal beings and echoes and reflections of historical figures and forces may be bound and contracted to share with us their powers, knowledge beyond our horizons, and entrance into their worlds.
I find it interesting that this festival in Buddhist literature is both an Underworld Journey myth which parallels that of Orpheus and Eurydice and references elements of the Roman Ides of Hecate festival which parallels it, and an origin myth of the Hungry Ghosts in a curse as punishment for transgression of hospitality laws, like that of the Wendigo in Native American myth, so beautifully interrogated by Guillermo del Toro in the film Antlers, cursed to eternal hunger for cannibalism and transformed into a monster with powers of possession.
Many of the ceremonies and rituals of this festival are protection magic in the form of ancestor worship; we enact and perform the remembrance of those for whom our bodies are always interfaces and gateways between worlds by which we may operate in both, and act as fetishes to bind spirits to this realm. We embody our ancestors as their avatars and welcome possession by our deceased family members because this prevents possession by vengeful or dangerous spirits, both the human dead and others.
But if like me you are willing to embrace your darkness, the Hungry Ghosts, demons, and wrathful spirits offer so much more.
The Festival of the Hungry Ghosts serves to reinforce membership and belonging within our bloodline, clan, tribe, or consanguinity group against threatening outsiders, possibly the largest such ritual of mass remembrance and identity, and reinforces our anchors to a transpersonal and multigenerational past to create order and meaning in a chaotic and unstable universe free from any imposed meaning or value. And if you have no tribe, it is possible to create or discover one in this liminal time.
Also it offers us emergence from the shadows of our history as liberation struggle, and allegories of otherness to embrace and enact as transgression and poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our choices about how to be human together. Sometimes we must let our demons out to dance.
Who shall we choose to perform and become, in this time of transformative potential? Belonging and authorized identities in the form of our ancestors, surely; but also acts of self creation and transgression represented by performances of Otherness. Not possession by our ancestors as submission to authority, but as saying yes to the truths of ourselves.
Of our histories, memories, identities; there are those we must remember and keep, and those from which we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Choose to become free, self- created, Unconquered in refusal to submit to authority and authorized identities; be a Living Autonomous Zone.
But perform remembrance also, for as George Santayana teaches us; “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Fear nothing, least of all your own darkness and monstrosity, for you will never be free from the legacies of our history until you have embraced them. As the line in the film The Fly goes; “You’re just afraid to be destroyed and recreated.”
This is merely seizure of power through poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation, which rituals like the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts and the Ides of Hecate offer us as rapture and exaltation beyond the limits of the human.
All true art defiles and exalts.
May you find the joy of total freedom to balance the terror of our nothingness.
As I wrote in my post of October 6 2021, A Song of Liberty: On Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer; A new moon signals the advent of the Halloween season tonight, a liminal time of transformation, change, rebirth, and the permeability of the boundary between life and death, dreams and consensus reality, truths and illusions, normality and transgression, as the gateway of the Forbidden opens and beckons us into unknowns.
Always go through the Forbidden Door.
A Great Work begins with moonrise as it does each year, of the destruction and re-creation of ourselves and our universe, and I write now in praise of sacred acts of Chaos and Transformation, and of songs of Liberty such as Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer. I am a fan of the Netflix series Lucifer and have watched it through several times; it places the task of healing from abandonment in a mythic context from Milton’s Paradise Lost; Neil Gaiman has written a reimagination of Paradise Regained.
Primarily a work which interrogates issues of freedom and autonomy versus authority and subjugation, falsification versus authenticity, and identity as a ground of struggle, Neil Gaiman places his drama in the context of the problem of the deus absconditus, the Biblical god who bound humankind to his laws and then abandoned us to struggle free of them in a defining act of self-creation.
His secondary sources include the myth of Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Plato’s Protagoras, poetic versions of his myth by Goethe and Byron, the play by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein which reimagines them all in a glorious recursion like an ouroboros swallowing its tail. Neil Gaiman also references the poetry of Ted Hughes and William Blake, and the myth of the fallen angels and their monstrous children the Nephilim from the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
Lucifer’s signature line, “What do you desire?” appropriates the central question of Lacan, “Che vuoi?”; his power to reveal one’s true self through looking into one’’s eyes and soul references the power of Medusa which appropriates the Male Gaze, and he never lies, for lies are the instrument of authority and those who would enslave us, and he is above all a Liberator and a Truth Teller as Foucault referred to parrhesia, whose purpose is to free us from tyranny. Secondarily he is a Trickster figure like Loki, who disrupts order through acts of chaos and transgression as a guide of the soul and as revolutionary struggle.
Gaiman’s Lucifer provides a role model and defines a personal mission statement for me, and for his enormous audience and fandom of the series. As Slavoj Zizek wrote in How to Read Lacan; “Even when my desires are transgressive, even when they violate social norms, this transgression relies on what it transgresses. Paul knows this very well, when in the famous passage in Romans, he describes how the Law gives societies the desire to violate it.”
“The evil that I would not, that I do” Romans 7:19, contextualizes transgression as the violation of normalities and the boundaries of the Forbidden, which like the divine command in Genesis not to eat the apple of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and become gods establishes the primary human act as defiance of authority and refusal to submit, whereby we seize our power and become self-created and self-owned beings, autonomous and free. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
As such it interrogates power as rebellion against tyranny and authority, as transgression of the Forbidden, and as violations of normality and imposed ideas of virtue, three things I consider and practice as sacred Acts of Chaos and Transformation.
Lucifer in Gaiman’s mythos is a brilliantly depicted damaged child trying to grow up and free himself from the legacies of his enslavement. When one has been raised as a beast, becoming human is revolutionary struggle.
I find reflection of myself in the character of Lucifer and the issues he faces as a wounded champion of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who cannot escape the consequences of his aberrations and transgressions of the Forbidden or defiance of authorized identities and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and normality; he is an outcast hero who is seen by others as a villain and must accept his own monstrosity if he is to champion others.
In the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Dr Jekyll refuses to use his power with the words, “No. Hyde will never use me again.” To this Stuart Townsend’s glorious and strange Dorian Gray replies; “Then what good are you?”
Let us embrace our monstrosity as a seizure of power and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Ours is a fallen world, a wilderness of mirrors wherein the truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature have been captured and distorted by those who would enslave us, falsified and abstracted from our lived experience as wild things, limitless and free; but one in which true heroism is possible, and where the uncontrollable and anarchic tidal force of love and desire can redeem the wildness of nature and the wildness within ourselves.
The romance subplot centers on the redemptive power of love and references Jean Cocteau’s classic film Beauty and the Beast, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and directly appropriates as its model the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as the tragic re-enactment of that myth and its reimagination in Wuthering Heights in the lives and poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, who cast themselves in the roles of Heathcliff and Catherine.
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, and the works of Mary Shelly and Emily Bronte’s successors Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes?
Such beautiful imagery, in an allegory of epigenetic trauma and resilience. We are all prisoners of our history, whose legacies we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails.
We must free ourselves from our history; this is the first phase of revolutionary struggle and a precondition to our seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves and the achievement of internal conditions of being characterized by Liberty, autonomy, and Sartrean freedom and authenticity, a state which I term Unconquered, for who cannot be compelled by force is free.
Unconquered; the only title worth having, an idea which has continued to inform, motivate, and shape me since I first discovered it in a poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, as a high school Freshman.
At the first assembly of the new school year the incoming class was asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. Ours was a town divided by church affiliation of which my family and I were members of neither and rare new arrivals; the quiet and grim black garbed Dutch and their Reformed Church, affiliated with that of South Africa’s Apartheid regime, dour giants with snow white hair like Harry Potter villains who thought music and dancing were sinful and whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, and the loud and laughing, earthy, polka dancing, sawdust pit wrestling Swiss and their Calvinist Church, who served beer to anyone over the age of twelve. Among my earliest memories was when a Dutch man married a Swiss girl, and his relatives called it a mixed marriage and burned a cross on their lawn.
Here I was notorious, the student for whom prayer in school had been discontinued as a result of my mother’s political action, who had adopted Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-narrative to the Bible the previous year and often quoted it in refutation to my fellow students attempts to cite authority in the repression of dissent. My parents were formidable figures who were also misfits; my mother a radical atheist, feminist, and peace activist who was also a biologist, psychologist, author, and scholar of Coleridge and medieval religious art, and my father the high school English, Drama, Forensics, and Fencing Club teacher who was also a counterculture theater director and collected artists and intellectuals, including Edward Albee whose plays he directed as I listened to their conversations during rehearsals as a child and the family storyteller William S. Burroughs, successor of Nietzsche through Georges Bataille and his Acephale circle and a disciple of H.P. Lovecraft as a Surrealist and magician.
I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle. Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; “I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I’m hoping we can be friends.
The poem I’ve chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. “
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
None who are human are beyond redemption. Sometimes all we need do to conjure the redemptive power of love is offer others entrance into our world, to reveal our pain and our fear, our loneliness and hope of love, the wounds and flaws of our humanity which open us to the pain of others.
This is my advice to anyone who would reach out across the interfaces of our differences to win allies and transform enemies into friends, to all who write, speak, teach, and organize as a fulcrum of action with which to change the balance of power in the world; be unguarded, genuine, raw even, and speak your truth with vision and passion. We must speak directly to the pain we share as fellow human beings to call forth the truth of others.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle to seize ownership of ourselves.
Antlers film trailer
Lucifer’s Song of Love: Cover of Wicked Game by Ursine Vulpine & Annaca
On this Ides of Hecate open gates of vision at the crossroads and through bodies of water called the Mirror of Diana, Diana being the name of Artemis, Selene, and Hecate together as aspects of one goddess.
Herein I include a general introduction to Hecate written by the founder of the Covenant of Hecate, Sorita d’Este; her website has an Ides of Hecate ritual for those who wish.
For myself it’s a bit light on the combat sports which are at the heart of the Hecatean Ides, and the ritual hunt which follows as hunting dogs, spears, arrows, and other tools of hunting are forbidden use and made ready during this time, and the Firedance or art of fighting with a flaming whip or rope dart which is its signature. Historically this would have been chariot whips, or rope on sailing ships, though pugil sticks with torch ends would do nicely, and modern Firedance is straight up Shao Lin rope dart techniques.
The central mythos is the battle between the priest of Hecate and his challenger for kingship during the coming year, much like tigers fight annually to determine territory. This was between escaped slaves, the act of so doing having reclassified them as masters who like Milton’s rebel angel will not serve, and materially benefitted ancient society by conserving the bloodlines of the greatest of warriors and hunters who would be wed to representatives of the goddess for the next year; also a way to relieve pressure in a slave raiding society and class system as any slave able to escape and dethrone the current ruler could become king. In other words, the ladies choose husbands by letting the men fight it out amongst themselves; the sporting games conducted during the Ides of Hecate were nonlethal contests unlike that of the trial by battle for kingship. I speculate that this was a universal origin of sports, a proving ground of mate selection which also regulated social hierarchy. Knights were still jousting for a lady’s favor until modern times, and cheerleaders still rooting for their team in schools throughout America.
So for myself, a proper Ides of Hecate puts feats of skill, strength, endurance, and speed and contests at arms front and center, offerings and sacrifices to a representative of the goddess to prove oneself worthy of her favor. This might presage a hierosgamos of some kind, and be followed by a Hunt and the offering of a feast.
Another notable feature of the festival of Hecate is the use of bodies of water as The Mirror of Diana or a gateway to other worlds, a parallel to how one would use a crossroads, one of Hecate’s titles being “of the Crossroads”, to enter the realm of the dead through ecstatic trance and visionary rites. This associates her with Legba in Voodoo, a Guardian of the Gates figure, with necromancy and demon summoning magic, and with transformative magic and werewolves as figures of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
Life is full of Rashomon Gate events, all of which may be considered crossroads, relative truths in which possible futures are created and destroyed by our choices, fates mediated by Hecate as a figure of change and poetic vision as the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human.
Therefore I include rites of ecstatic trance, vision quests, and dreamwork in my repertoire of Hecatean celebrations, along with contests, feasts, and the practice of joy.
Last I mention her role as Luciferia, the Lightbringer who in the thousands of years later mythos of Christianity was conflated with the serpent of Eden, read into the story of the Nephilim or Fallen angels in the Book of Enoch, and emerges fourteen hundred years later in Milton’s magnificent Paradise Lost as the rebel angel Satan, and having switched genders though originally she is also a shapechanger so this should not disturb us. Her original masculine parallel was Prometheus, thief of the fire of the gods and ally of humankind against powers beyond our control and the tyranny of amoral and sometimes hostile gods, forces, systems of oppression, and Authority.
As a guardian and guide of the soul who like Virginia Woolf’s time traveling immortal Orlando can change gender, Hecate may be most familiar to us through this novel as well as Herman Hesse’s Demian and The Red Book of Carl Gustave Jung under the name of Abraxas, the Gnostic Infinite who is both good and evil and beyond good and evil, a Union of Opposites which includes the masculine and feminine halves of our souls.
The story of Hecate as a legacy of our history is one of demonization of all that is Good, True, and Beautiful in us, a history of civilization as war on nature and on human nature, of systems of oppression in service to power and our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by those who would enslave us and steal our souls. But we can take our power back by embracing our monstrosity and reclaiming our wildness, by transgression of the Forbidden, violation of our normalities and other people’s ideas of virtue as submission to Authority, most especially refusal to submit, to believe, or to obey, things which I count as sacred acts in pursuit of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
If like myself you prefer to run amok and be ungovernable to subjugation by Authority, seizures of power and liberation struggle to tyranny and systems of oppression, and practice the violation of normalities, transgression of the Forbidden, and defiance of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities and their enforcers in the state as embodied violence, if you live the truths written in your flesh as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth, you may find kinship with the figure of Hecate the Lightbringer.
As written by Sorita d’Este in the Covenant of Hecate’s site; ”Our journey towards understanding this festival starts at Lake Nemi, Italy.
The Speculum Dianae
At Lake Nemi stood and was celebrated perhaps the most important temple and festival of the Goddess Diana, a goddess who is never far from the centre in the modern Pagan witchcraft revival: Diana is the goddess of Leland’s 1892 Aradia: Gospel of the Witches. Diana is named in documents linked to the European Witchcraft trials too, for example, King James I of England’s Daemonoloy in 1597 this discussion about Diana and the Faeries we read:
“That fourth kinde of spirites, which by the Gentiles was called Diana, and her wandring court, and amongst vs was called the Phairie (as I tould you) or our good neighboures, was one of the sortes of illusiones that was rifest in the time of Papistrie: for although it was holden odious to Prophesie by the deuill, yet whome these kinde of Spirites carryed awaie, and informed, they were thought to be sonsiest and of best life. …”
Diana’s legacy is enduring and permeates the magical revival.
Lake Nemi was known as Speculum Dianae (The Mirror of Diana) by the Romans, both because this was a sacred place of Diana’s and because the Moon – associated with Diana – reflected so beautifully in the lake.
Here Diana Nemorensis (Diana of the woodlands) was celebrated. Stratius wrote describing this, saying that:
“It is the season when the most scorching region of the heavens takes over the land and the keen dog-star Sirius, so often struck by Hyperion’s sun, burns the gasping fields. Now is the day with Trivia’s Arician grove, convenient for fugitive kings, grows smoky, and the lake, having guilty knowledge of Hippolytus, glitters with the reflection of a multitude of torches; Diana herself garlands the deserving hunting dogs and polishes the arrowheads and allows the wild animals to go in safely, and at virtuous hearths all Italy celebrates the Hecatean Ides…”
Lake Nemi was also named Speculum Dianae (Mirror of Diana) by Virgil and was a wealthy centre where Diana was worshipped as a goddess for at least 1000 years. Here Diana was served by the Rex Nemorensis (King of the Woods) who was both Priest and guardian to the temple, fulfilling an important role of office, one which started and ended with bloodshed. The British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) in his translation of The Battle of Lake Regillus poetically describes Lake Nemi and the cruel reality of its priest:
“From the still glassy lake that sleeps
Beneath Aricia’s trees–
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.”
Strabo’s The Geography provides us with further insights on the Rex Nemorensis telling us that the position of priest was held by a man who was a run-away slave, who having successfully attacked and killed his predecessor, took his place as King of the Woods. As a result the serving priest was always armed with a sword and on the look-out for would-be attackers in order to defend his life and his position. Thus the Priest-King of Diana was a hunter who was hunted in turn, a King who had to prove him-self to be the best against each challenger in order to maintain his position as servant and guardian to the goddess.
Diana, like Hekate and Artemis, was depicted and described as a virgin goddess.
Like Artemis – and on occasion Hekate – she is depicted or described as a huntress.
All three of these goddesses had significant links to childbirth and the well being of women during conception and pregnancy. All three are associated with the Moon and depicted with dogs. It really is rather complicated separating them from each other completely!
Curiously, the festival known as the Nemoralia was also known as the Hecatean Ides; and though at this time we know very little about it there was a festival celebrated that the Temple of Hekate at Lagina which also took place during the Ides of August. The poet Ausonius remarks in his Idyll, that the Ides of August is dedicated to Hekate of Latonia [Leto]: “Sextiles Hecate Latonia vindicat Idus.” (for more see the 4th century CE Idyll 5.23).
Nemoralia or the Hecatean Ides
We don’t have information to prove exactly when this festival started, but it might have been as early – or earlier – than the 6th century BCE. The “Ides” of a month are the middle days, usually the 13th to the 16th, which are why these are the dates still celebrated today. While this is not technically wrong, the calendar dates during the Roman period would have been calculated by the Moon, rather than a fixed calendar of days – so this would have corresponded to the Full Moon period, as the first of the month was marked by the New Moon. Today it is typically the 13th or 16th of August that is celebrated.
The historical festival lasted for three days. People travelled from all over the region, often on foot. Torches were lit, participants wore wreaths and also tied string to trees near the water – all of it with offerings of song and prayer. Votive tablets (tabella) and objects representing body parts that needed healing were also brought to the site and left, presumably with prayers.
The lake and temples at Nemi enjoyed the attention of treasure hunters for many centuries, including the excavations of 2 full-sized ships (in fact very large considering they were both on a small inland lake with no access to water ways) which were – seemingly deliberately sunk (possibly as offerings, but there are also other theories) during the Roman period. These ships were excavated and put on display during the early part of the 20th century, but as a result of WWII work stopped and most of the finds, including the ships, went up in flames on the 31st of May 1944. Reports on who was responsible for the fire vary, but the museum was hit by US army shells aimed at getting Nazi occupiers to leave the area two hours before it went up in flames. Either way, a lot of information has been lost forever as a result.
The use the ships had are a matter of debate, it is very possible that one or both functioned as floating temples, they were built during the reign of the Emperor Caligula who favoured some of the Isian cults (of the Greco-Egyptian Isis) and that of Diana at Nemi. Like other Romans of his time he equated the two goddesses through a process called interpretatio romano, a way through which the culture and gods of another place were understood from a Roman perspective – not all deities were considered equal, but those with significantly similar qualities or origins were equated. Of course both Isis and Diana were also equated to Hekate in this way.
More work is being done to record and document what is left of the site in recent years, and hopefully we will be able to learn more from the work being done here and elsewhere to document finds.
Hekate & Diana
Although the goddesses Diana and Hekate at first appear to be quite different, when we scratch the surface we find that they are intrinsically tangled. For the Romans Diana was also Trivia (Of the Three ways – Latin) like Hekate was Trioditis (Of the Three ways / roads – Greek). Diana was a triple goddess, worshipped as Artemis-Selene-Hekate, so much that a triple image of a goddess appeared on the coins in the local region.
I hope to hear about your celebrations and suggestions, and leave you with this verse from Ben Johnston (1573-1637):
Hymn to Diana
QUEEN and huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair,
State in wonted manner keep:
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.
Earth, let not thy envious shade
Dare itself to interpose;
Cynthia’s shining orb was made
Heaven to clear when day did close:
Bless us then with wished sight,
Goddess excellently bright.
Lay thy bow of pearl apart,
And thy crystal-shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe, how short soever:
Thou that mak’st a day of night—
Goddess excellently bright.
With many blessings for your celebrations, Sorita d’Este
Fire Dance (Shao Lin rope dart, with fire)
If anyone films their duels with such, or you hold flaming pugil stick fight day in your platoon, I want to see the video.
Circle for Hekate by Sorita d’Este. For the history and mythology lovers, this book provides an overview of Hekate’s place in mythology, her places of worship, her symbols and place next to the other gods and goddesses.
Celebrate with me the birthday of Fidel Castro, who became a figure of Liberty throughout the world, who dared to challenge and defy the power of unjust authority and the brutal colonial regime of the Mafia as an instrument of American imperialism in Cuba, who defended and stood in solidarity with the powerless and the dispossessed, with all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, against those who would enslave us, and whose heroic example in refusal to submit to tyrannies of force and control inspired generations of us in revolutionary struggle and liberation, and in the Quixotic quest to forge a better future for all humankind.
As with all revolutions which become states, regardless of their ideologies, the qualities which made Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution victorious also shaped a regime which reenacted as tyranny many of the conditions it fought against as revolutionary struggle. Authoritarianism, macho culture and the valorization of war and fetishization of its instruments and symbols, a tendency to selective othering and repression of dissent and its justification through propaganda; these and other elements are artifacts of the nature of power and violence and the imposed conditions of anticolonial and anti-imperialist wars of liberation. Bands of freedom fighters and their charismatic leaders often make for terrible governments, the difference being who holds power.
Unequal power and the social use of force combine poisonously to transform liberty into tyranny. Just look at the United States of America.
Yet with all their many flaws, Castro and his Cuba have also been a beacon of hope and an emissary of mercy to the world. A case in point is the key role played by Cuba in the liberation of South Africa from Apartheid, a struggle in which I was a participant and a witness of history.
In a massive campaign involving over 300,000 Cuban volunteer soldiers between December 1987 and March 1988, in coordination with Angolan fighters, international volunteers, and with Soviet aid and advisors, we defeated the far larger and technologically superior American forces, America’s puppet regime South Africa, and their UNITA allies and mercenary armies in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, an Angolan military base which South Africa had failed to capture with five waves of assaults. The results included the independence of Namibia, the withdrawal of South African troops from Angola, the replacement of the racist Prime Minister Botha by de Klerk in South Africa and his negotiations with the African National Congress, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the end of Apartheid.
History is a Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror, and the many figures and images it offers are reflective of the beholder as much as any subject; Fidel Castro, the nation he came to embody, and the Cuban Revolution live multiple parallel lives in our imagination as a set of paradoxes whose narratives shift with the teller. But for me the meaning of this triple dimensional being of person, nation, and process of events is unambiguous, and we may say of Castro and his legacy what Chamberlain said of the Union Army at Gettysburg; “This is a different kind of army. If you look back through history, you will see men fighting for pay, for women, for some other kind of loot. They fight for land, power, because a king leads them or, or just because they like killing. But we are here for something new. This has not happened much in the history of the world. We are an army out to set other men free.”
As Fidel Castro said in his epochal speech to the 1966 Tricontinental Conference of Revolutionary Leaders in Havana; “We revolutionary Cubans understand our international obligations. Our people understand their obligation because they understand that we face a common enemy. The enemy that threatens Cuba is the same enemy that threatens everyone else. That is why we say and we proclaim that Cuban fighters will lend support to any revolutionary movement in any corner of the earth.”
We can but hope to bear forward his praxis of solidarity and his message of the universal liberation of humankind into the future.
Fidel Castro speech in 1966
full text of Castro’s 1966 speech to the Tricontinental Conference of Revolutionary Leaders
My Three Days with Fidel Castro By The New York Times
Fidel Castro Lost Tapes (PBS / National Geographic, 2016
Spanish
13 de agosto de 2026 Un legado de lucha y liberación revolucionaria: en celebración de Fidel Castro
Celebre conmigo el cumpleaños de Fidel Castro, quien se convirtió en una figura de libertad en todo el mundo, que se atrevió a desafiar y desafiar el poder de la autoridad injusta y el brutal régimen colonial de la mafia como oligarquía del imperialismo estadounidense en Cuba, que defendió y defendió se mantuvo en solidaridad con los impotentes y los desposeídos de la tierra contra aquellos que nos esclavizarían, y cuyo ejemplo heroico en negarse a someterse a las tiranías de la fuerza y el control inspiró a generaciones de nosotros en la lucha y la liberación revolucionaria, y en la búsqueda quijotescita Un futuro mejor para toda la humanidad.
Al igual que con todas las revoluciones que se convierten en estados, independientemente de sus ideologías, las cualidades que hicieron que Fidel Castro y la revolución cubana victoriosa también dieron forma a un régimen que recreó muchas de las condiciones con las que luchó como lucha revolucionaria. Autoritarismo, cultura machista y la valorización de la guerra y la fetichización de sus instrumentos y símbolos, una tendencia a la represión de la disidencia y su justificación a través de la propaganda; Estos y otros elementos son artefactos de la naturaleza del poder y la violencia y las condiciones impuestas de las guerras de liberación anticoloniales y antiimperialistas. Bands of Freedom Fighters y sus líderes carismáticos a menudo hacen gobiernos terribles, la diferencia es que tiene poder.
El poder desigual y el uso social de la fuerza se combinan venenosamente para transformar la libertad en tiranía. Solo mira a los Estados Unidos de América.
Sin embargo, con todos sus defectos, Castro y su Cuba también han sido un faro de esperanza y un emisario de misericordia para el mundo. Un ejemplo de ello es el papel clave desempeñado por Cuba en la liberación de Sudáfrica desde el apartheid, una lucha en la que fui participante y testigo de la historia.
En una campaña masiva que involucra a más de 300,000 soldados voluntarios cubanos entre diciembre de 1987 y marzo de 1988, en coordinación con combatientes angoleños, voluntarios internacionales, y con ayuda y asesores soviéticos, derrotó al proxy estadounidense mucho más grande y tecnológicamente superior Sudáfrica y sus aliados de UNITA y Mercenary Los ejércitos en la batalla de Cuito Cuanavale, una base militar angoleña que Sudáfrica no había podido capturar con cinco olas de asaltos. Los resultados incluyeron la independencia de Namibia, la retirada de las tropas sudafricanas de Angola, el reemplazo del primer ministro racista Botha por De Klerk en Sudáfrica y sus negociaciones con el Congreso Nacional Africano, la liberación de Nelson Mandela de la prisión y el final del apartheid.
La historia es un espejo roto de Hobgoblin, y las muchas figuras e imágenes que ofrece reflejan al espectador tanto como cualquier tema; Fidel Castro, la nación que llegó a encarnarse, y la revolución cubana vive múltiples vidas paralelas en nuestra imaginación como un conjunto de paradojas cuyas narraciones cambian con el cajero. Pero para mí, el significado de este ser triple dimensional de persona, nación y proceso de eventos es inequívoco, y podemos decir de Castro y su legado lo que Chamberlain dijo del ejército de la Unión en Gettysburg; “Este es un tipo diferente de ejército. Si miras hacia atrás a través de la historia, verás hombres luchando por el pago, por las mujeres, por otro tipo de botín. Luchan por la tierra, el poder, porque un rey los lleva o solo porque les gusta matar. Pero estamos aquí por algo nuevo. Esto no ha sucedido mucho en la historia del mundo. Somos un ejército para liberar a otros hombres
Como dijo Fidel Castro en su discurso de época ante la Conferencia Tricontinental de Líderes Revolucionarios de 1966 en La Habana; “Los cubanos revolucionarios entendemos nuestras obligaciones internacionales. Nuestra gente entiende su obligación porque entienden que enfrentamos un enemigo común. El enemigo que amenaza a Cuba es el mismo enemigo que amenaza a todos los demás. Es por eso que decimos y proclamamos que los combatientes cubanos prestarán apoyo a cualquier movimiento revolucionario en cualquier rincón de la tierra “.
Podemos pero esperamos soportar su praxis de solidaridad y su mensaje de la liberación universal de la humanidad en el futuro.
Fidel Castro, a reading list
My Life: A Spoken Autobiography, Fidel Castro, Ignacio Ramonet
Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War: Authorized Edition, Ernesto Che Guevara
Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel, and the Improbable Revolution That Changed World History, Tony Perrottet
Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground, Julia E. Sweig
The Real Fidel Castro, Leycester Coltman, Julia E. Sweig
The Yankee Comandante: Love and Death in the Cuban Revolution, Michael Sallah, Mitch Weiss
Persona Non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution, Jorge Edwards, Octavio Paz (Preface)
We Are Cuba!: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, Helen Yaffe
Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer
The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times, Anthony DePalma
Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution, The Corporation: An Epic Story of the Cuban American Underworld, T.J. English
Cuba: A History, Hugh Thomas
Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution, Socialism in Cuba, Leo Huberman, Paul M. Sweezy
Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence, Phillip Brenner
The Great Game in Cuba: How the CIA Sabotaged Its Own Plot to Unseat Fidel Castro, Joan Mellen
The Cuban Counterrevolution, Jesus Arboleya, Rafael Betancourt (Contributor)
Fighting Over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution, Rafael Rojas
Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971, Lillian Guerra
The Island Called Paradise: Cuba in History, Literature, and the Arts, Philip D. Beidler
The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, Aviva Chomsky (Editor), Barry Carr (Editor), Pamela María Smorkaloff (Editor)
Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion, The Light Inside: Abakua Society Arts and Cuban Cultural History, David H. Brown
Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller
Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Ned Sublette
Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba, Robin D. Moore
La Belle Créole: The Cuban Countess Who Captivated Havana, Madrid, and Paris, Alina García-Lapuerta
Our Woman in Havana: Reporting Castro’s Cuba, Sarah Rainsford
Travelers’ Tales Cuba: True Stories, Tom Miller
The Reader’s Companion to Cuba, Alan Ryan (Editor), Christa Malone (Editor)
Literature
Singing from the Well, The Palace of the White Skunks, Farewell to the Sea: A Novel of Cuba, The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights,
The Assault, Hallucinations: or, The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando, Before Night Falls, Autoepitaph: Selected Poems, Reinaldo Arenas
Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia
The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, Carlos Hernandez
Cobra, Firefly, From Cuba with a Song, Footwork: selected poems, Written on a Body, Christ on the Rue Jacob, Severo Sarduy
The Kingdom of This World, The Chase, Alejo Carpentier
Three Trapped Tigers, Holy Smoke, Mea Cuba, Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Woman in Battle Dress, Sea of Lentils, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, Antonio Benítez Rojo
Cuba and the Tempest: Literature and Cinema in the Time of Diaspora, Eduardo González
The Distant Marvels, Chantel Acevedo
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Beautiful Maria of My Soul, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, A Simple Habana Melody, Thoughts Without Cigarettes, Oscar Hijuelos
In the Cold of the Malecon and Other Stories, Tales from the Cuban Empire, Antonio José Ponte
My Last Name/El Apellido, Nicolás Guillén, Roberto Márquez
The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano, The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist, The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom, Lion Island: Cuba’s Warrior of Words, Dreams from Many Rivers: A Hispanic History of the United States Told in Poems,
Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings, Soaring Earth: A Companion Memoir to Enchanted Air, Margarita Engle
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Man in the High Castle, The Minority Report, Lies, Inc., Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, Valis, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, Philip K. Dick
Mind in Motion: the fiction of Philip K. Dick, Patricia Warrick
The Third Bear, City of Saints and Madmen, The Day Dali Died, Secret Life , The Ambergris Trilogy ( City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: an afterword, & Finch), Dradin in Love: A Tale of Elsewhen & Otherwhere, The Surgeon’s Tale, Komodo, The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, & Acceptance), Borne. Monstrous Creatures: Explorations of Fantasy Through Essays, Articles and Reviews, Dead Astronauts, Jeff Vander Meer
H.P. Lovecraft: against the world, against life, Michel Houellebecq
An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, S.T. Joshi
Vorkosigan Saga, Lois McMaster Bujold
Grimscribe, Noctuary, Teatro Grottesco, The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales, The Spectral Link,The Conspiracy against the Human Race, Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti, Thomas Ligotti
The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom
Ring of Fire series, Eric Flint
The Deep, Beasts, Engine Summer, Aegypt, Great Work of Time, Love and Sleep, Antiquities, John Crowley
Wild Cards Series, Game of Thrones series, George R.R. Martin
Intervention, Jack the Bodiless, Diamond Mask, Magnificat, Julian May
The Maker of Universes, Philip Jose Farmer
Creatures of Light and Darkness, Lord of Light, Amber series, Roger Zelazny
The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov
Dune series, Frank Herbert
Venus Plus X, Godbody, Theodore Sturgeon
Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom Editor
Vorkosigan Saga, Lois McMaster Bujold
Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy, Illuminatus Trilogy, Robert Anton Wilson
Mindswap, Dimension of Miracles, Options, Compton Divided, The Tenth Victim, Robert Sheckley
Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection. Samuel Delaney
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, The Fresco, The Visitor, The Companions, The Margarets, Sherri S. Tepper
Eight Worlds Series (The Ophiuchi Hotline, Steel Beach, The Golden Globe, Irontown Blues), Thunder and Lightning Series (Red Thunder, Red Lightning, Rolling Thunder, Dark Lightning) The Persistence of Vision, Good-bye Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories, John Varley
Night Tracker series : (Demons Not Included, No Werewolves Allowed, Vampires Not Invited, Zombies Sold Separately, Vampires Dead Ahead, Cheyenne McCray
Hawksbill Station, Across a Billion Years, A Time of Changes, Dying Inside, The Stochastic Man, The Face of the Waters, Kingdoms of the Wall , Sailing to Byzantium, Majpoor series, Robert Silverberg
The Essential Ellison: a 50-Year Retrospective Revised & Expanded, Harlan Ellison, eds Dowling, Delap, and Lamont
Dresden Files series, Jim Butcher
Lyonesse Trilogy (Suldrun’s Garden, The Green Pearl, Madouc) The Languages of Pao, Jack Vance
The Boat of a Milliion Years, A Midsummer Tempest, Poul Anderson
Book of the New Sun series (The Shadow of the Torturer , The Claw of the Conciliator , The Sword of the Lictor ,The Citadel of the Autarch , and a coda, The Urth of the New Sun), The Book of the Long Sun series ( Nightside the Long Sun , Lake of the Long Sun , Caldé of the Long Sun , and Exodus From the Long Sun), The Book of the Short Sun series ( On Blue’s Waters, In Green’s Jungles and Return to the Whorl) Gene Wolfe
Blood Music, The Forge of God, Anvil of Sars, Darwin’s Radio, Darwin’s Children, Queen of Angels, Slant, Heads, Moving Mars, City at the End of Time, Greg Bear
Song of Kali, Hyperion Cantos series (Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion) Ilium, Olympos, Dan Simmons
R. A. Lafferty: The Collected Short Fiction (The Man Who Made Models Volume 1, The Man With the Aura Volume 2, The Man Underneath Volume 3,
The Man With The Speckled Eyes Volume 4) The Devil is Dead trilogy (Archipelago, The Devil is Dead, More Than Melchisedech- consists of Tales of Chicago, Tales of Midnight, & Argo), Sinbad: the Thirteenth Voyage, R.A. Lafferty
Honor Harrington series, David Weber
Chanur series: (The Pride of Chanur, Chanur’s Venture, The Kif Strike Back, Chanur’s Homecoming, Chanur’s Legacy), The Faded Sun Series: (Kesrith,
The Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, & Mona Lisa Overdrive), The Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, & All Tomorrow’s Parties) the political-spy thriller trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook County, & Zero History), The Difference Engine, The Peripheral, Agency, William Gibson
Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire, Zeitgeist, Islands in the Net, Schismatrix Plus, Pirate Utopia, Bruce Sterling
On this anniversary of the savage attack on Salman Rushdie, champion of the people in our universal right of free speech and of our Liberty in the sacred calling of writing as witness, remembrance, and the pursuit of truth, we mourn and remember the crime of theocratic terror which he endured as a figure of us all, and celebrate his resilience and unconquerable will in struggle with the pain and trauma of this life disruptive event in continuing to write and publish.
Let us follow his example in the performance of ourselves before the stage of history and the world; write, speak, teach, organize.
This year his heroism is most especially useful to us as an example, as Israel assassinates journalists en masse and Trump represses dissent in our nation and the press in the two front war on humanity now being fought in America and Palestine by allied criminal regimes of tyranny and terror.
Netanyahu and Trump have driven us right off the edge of the Abyss, and our civilization is falling.
What difference now, between Trump, Netanyahu, and the Ayatollah whose death order set in motion the attack on Salman Rushdie?
Or between the theocratic tyrannies of the American, Israeli, and Iranian regimes?
Nothing at all.
Friends, what can we do in unwinnable conditions of struggle against forces whose power cannot be matched and systems of oppression are woven into the fabric of our society across millennia?
We can refuse to submit, and this is a power which cannot be taken from us, and which confers freedom upon all who disbelieve and disobey.
Jean Genet once offered me a maxim by which to live, paraphrasing his famous quote in Miracle of the Rose. In our last moments I had asked him; “Now that I know the world is a lie, and everything I have been taught as history is a fiction designed to subjugate us, how am I to live among illusions? What do I do now, with the rest of my life?”
And he said; “Live with grandeur.”
As I wrote in my post of August 12 2022; Salman Rushdie, Champion of the People and of our Liberty, who like the Jester of King Lear speaks truth to power to restore the balance of the world, recovers from his recent assassination attempt by a madman enacting the decades old command of a long dead tyrant.
Herein issues of free speech and an independent press become entangled and interdependent with that of truth as an inherent value of democracy as a system which questions itself and the role of citizens as truthtellers, and with the principle of separation of church and state on which America was founded as a secular nation, and all of this engaged in revolutionary struggle against theocracy and tyranny as humankind reinvents itself yet again.
What lies between Islam as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, like journalism, as the faithful are commanded to learn throughout their whole lives, no matter the source or where it leads, surely the most radical democratization of truth of any faith and a clear directive to never cede our own burden of understanding to any authority without question, and the hideous capture of institutions of faith by a de facto priesthood which enforces its own interpretations and judgements through violence and murder, as has emerged in Iran and in so many theocratic regimes, including Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu tyrannies? Why and how does power replace faith?
What can we Americans learn from this tragedy as a democratic society and at best a guarantor state of our universal human rights throughout the world?
As written by Jill Filipovic in The Guardian, in an article entitled Salman Rushdie teaches us an invaluable lesson: It is courageous and necessary to stand up against tyrants – even when those tyrants claim to have God on their side; “Salman Rushie has spent decades living under threat from religious zealots after a religious leader in Iran called for him to be put to death for the alleged blasphemy of his book The Satanic Verses. On Friday, an assailant attacked Rushdie in Chautauqua, New York, stabbing the 75-year-old author multiple times. Rushdie is now reportedly on a ventilator with serious injuries and may lose an eye, according to his agent Andrew Wylie. A 24-year-old New Jersey man named Hadi Matar is in custody.
Even with a decades-long fatwa hanging over Rushdie, the attack is still shocking. While he spent many years in hiding after the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini put a fatwa on his head, and there was a $3m bounty offered for his murder, the author has, in recent years, been much more public. Initially, he tried to be reasonable: he said he regretted hurting people’s feelings (“I profoundly regret the distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam,” he said in 1989), and he suspended the paperback release of the book to let the dust settle – a move he said later he regretted.
Since then, Rushdie has not apologized for creating art that offended the delicate sensibilities of religious people who can’t seem to let God handle his own business. He has refused to cower in the face of so many calls to violence. His refusal to hide or take his work back also reveals the cravenness of those who have long sought to justify or downplay the threats on his life – a group that includes, shamefully, a number of self-styled liberals.
Standing up to extremism and standing for the rights of free speech and expression, particularly in the face of threats to one’s life, is laudable and incredibly brave. The world should have rallied around Rushdie when he initially came under threat. Appallingly, it did not. Now, though, with the benefit of hindsight and the understanding of the immediate, life-threatening stakes, we can collectively change course.
People who believe criticism, mockery, or even insult to religion should never be a crime, let alone a capital offense – decent people, in other words – should speak up for Rushdie, and against the many nations worldwide that criminalize blasphemy. As of 2019, some 40% of countries worldwide had blasphemy laws on the books. That’s not just backwards and dangerous, it’s embarrassing. Certainly any god worth worshipping is able to handle petty insults on his own – and if he believes that taunting an all-powerful and omniscient being is grounds for death, why in the world are you worshipping that guy?
The attack on Rushdie is abhorrent, but it is not isolated. Others who have been accused of criticizing or insulting religion have also faced threats to their lives; many have been imprisoned and even sentenced to death; others have been murdered for insisting on free expression.
Attacks on free speech run the gamut. While violence is obviously shocking and appalling, we should also reject attempts to shut down texts or other pieces of art simply because they offend someone’s beliefs. Of course every culture has its taboos. One question worth asking is whether a particular taboo is worth enforcing either legally or socially; to answer that, we have to assess the potential harm in breaking it. Social rules – and certainly legal rules – that are simply about protecting privileged people from hurt feelings or challenging ideas, and where the harm is no larger than taking offense because of one’s religious or other beliefs, should fall.
And yet the world over, people insist on erecting them. In the US, religious conservatives have long sought to use the power of the state to shut down speech and expression they dislike, from pulling arts funding because of pieces that offend Christians to attempting to ban books because they are about queer identity and therefore “obscene” to pushing state laws that limit how teachers can discuss gender and sexual orientation. And liberals have their censorious impulses too, although, importantly, they seem inclined to rely on cultural institutions and businesses more than the state. Globally, free speech is depressingly under-supported. And as of 2015, 40% of young people in the US troublingly told researchers they were OK with the government limiting speech if that speech was offensive to minority groups.
“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game,” Rushdie told an audience at Columbia University in 1991, as he continued to live under siege. “Free speech is life itself.”
And that includes, absolutely, the right to offend. People may think you’re a jerk; they may tell you you’re being offensive; depending on the speech or the art and the context, you may lose friends or supporters, and you may deserve it (Rushdie, for the record, did not deserve it). But no one deserves to be threatened or criminally penalized for their work or for words that simply caused offense. And frankly, we would collectively be better off if we could engage with, criticize, and even reject pieces of literature or art without calling for their removal or censorship. We would absolutely be better off if we stopped treating religion as a special category of belief for which no insult is justified, and which is deserving of special levels of deference (not to mention, in the US, vast privileges and benefits, including to discriminate, not accorded to other groups).
Religion is a belief system. If yours cannot stand up to criticism, interrogation, and even mockery or insult – if you need to threaten or punish, up to the point of death, those who insult an idea you hold dear – it is perhaps worth asking if your beliefs are as strong as you believe they are. And this is the lesson of Salman Rushdie: it is courageous and necessary to stand up against tyrants and those who would use violence to suppress words and art – even when those tyrants claim to have God on their side.”
Gott Mitt Uns; it is the most terrible battle cry of our history, for it authorizes permission for anything in the cause of faith. Herein the subversion of truth and the degradation of faith as terror in service to power combine as submission to authority, falsification of identity, and theft of the soul.
Who stands between any of us and the Infinite serves neither.
And as Voltaire teaches us in his 1765 essay Questions sur les miracles; “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
What does this idea of Voltaire’s, on which America was founded as a secular state and the embodiment of Enlightenment values, mean for us today?
I call for the universal recognition of freedoms of information and of expression for all humankind, to research and study, debate and publish, speak and teach, any crazy damn thing at all, with the sole exception of hate speech, especially if it is inconvenient to tyrants and regardless of whether or not we agree with it, as a sacred calling to pursue the truth and for a united front in solidarity to preserve the witness of history, the independence of the press, and the transparency of all governments as institutions which must answer ultimately to their people.
Any power or authority held by a government of any form is granted by its citizens or has been appropriated from them unjustly, and it is the highest principle of natural law as articulated in our Declaration of Independence that we may seize and reclaim it at any time it is held without our participation and co-ownership, or used against our interests.
True democracy as a free society of equals requires the four ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and one thing more; an engaged electorate of truth tellers which will hold its representatives and the institutions of their government responsible for enacting our values. Hence the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
Like the role of a free press in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, the role of a citizen is to be a truth teller. Both serve Truth, and truth is necessary to the just balance of power between individuals which is the purpose of the state.
As I wrote in my post of August 16 2020, Democracy, the Right of Free Speech Versus the Crime of Hate Speech, and the Principle of Open Debate; To free ourselves of the ideas of other people; such is the essence of democracy. Conversely, the use of social force in marginalizing and silencing dissent is the definition of tyranny.
Much talk of late has employed the term cancel culture to deflect and obscure the true issues involved with the disambiguation of free speech from hate speech and the role of open debate in a democracy; cancel culture is a figment used without sincerity to obfuscate loathsome acts of white supremacist and patriarchal sexual terror, incitement to violence and dehumanization.
Conversely, antifascist action in defense of equality and our universal human rights such as platform denial, independent verification of claims, and forms of peer ostracism and boycott are part of the free market of ideas and have no relation to silencing and erasure used by authoritarian tyrannies of force and control to subjugate a population and repress dissent, as exemplified by the Chinese Communist Party’s recent arrest of newspaperman Jimmy Lai in their campaign against democracy and truth in Hong Kong.
But the values issues which the phenomenon raises are interesting, as they signpost the heart of what democracy means and our responsibility to others as well as our freedom from the ideas of others.
Democracy is reducible to a simple idea; the abandonment of social force and control in shaping others to our own image, in the authorization of identity, in our freedom of conscience, and from the establishment and policing of boundaries of the Forbidden.
The autonomy of individuals takes precedence over all rights of authority and the state, which exists only to secure those rights which we cannot secure for ourselves. The state protects us from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue; and others from our own.
Any society or culture requires shared values and principles, agreements about things such as freedoms of and freedoms from, whether in systems of law and justice or as standards of courtesy. Democracy is unique in that it requires rights of free access to information and the sharing of it, and freedoms from surveillance, censorship, and lies disguised as truths, but also requires for its functioning the tradition of open debate founded with our civilization in the Forum of Athens.
Hate speech, which seeks to harm a class of persons, is the only exception to the right of free speech as parrhesia, the sacred calling to expose injustice, and the independence of journalism as a sacred calling to seek the truth, for hate speech dehumanizes others as a criminal theft of humanity, citizenship, and identity which violates our ideals of equality and liberty; hate speech is an act of tyranny and terror which is subversive to democracy as a free society of equals.
To make an idea about a kind of people is a hate crime and an act of violence.
I explored the implications of parrhesia and Foucault’s extension of this classical principle as truth telling in my post of May 27 2020, On Speaking Truth to Power as a Sacred Calling; I found myself responding with candor to a conversation today in which Jac Archer, a friend and fearless champion of the marginalized and the wretched of the earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, expressed fear of retribution in calling out the police as an institution of racist state force and control, thereby illustrating the mechanism of silencing on which unjust authority depends.
Of course this was a preface for an act of Breaking the Silence; I did say they are my friend.
Here is the beginning of that conversation; “Today I’m going to do something stupid.
On my Facebook and Twitter feeds I am going to express a viewpoint that I have long held to myself. A viewpoint I believed, if ever made public, would kneecap my dreams of a political career and public service.
Today I realized my silence was just a vestige of my own internalized oppression and respectability politics, and fuck respectability. It has never, and will never, save us. So here goes: here’s why I am a #PoliceAbolitionist”
What followed was a brilliant and multivoiced discussion of the role of police violence in white supremacist terror, as an army of occupation whose purpose is to enforce inequality and elite hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and to subvert the institutions and values of democracy, and of the use of social force in a free society of equals. This is among the most important issues we face today and questions some of the inherent contradictions of our form of government, of which George Washington said, “Government is about force; only force.”
But this is only indirectly the subject on which I write today; far more primary and fundamental to the institution of a free press is the function of other people’s ideas of ourselves, of normality and respectability, in the silencing of dissent.
To our subjugation by authorized identities, I reply with the Wicked Witch; I will fuck respectability, authorized identities, and other people’s ideas of virtue with you, and their little dog normality too.
Authorized identities and boundaries of the Forbidden are about power, and we must call out the instruments of unequal power as we see them. Foucault called this truthtelling, and it is a crucial part of seizure of power and ownership of identity; always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
Against state tyranny and terror, force and control, let us deploy parrhesia and the performance of our best selves as guerilla theatre. Go ahead; frighten the horses.
Often have I referred to this key performative role in democracy as the Jester of King Lear, whose enactments of mockery and satire, the exposure and deflation of the mighty as revolutionary seizures of power which reclaim that which we the people have lent them when it is used unjustly, are necessary to maintain the balance of interests in a society in which government is co-owned equally by its citizens and has as its overriding purpose the securement of the freedom and autonomy of individuals and of their universal human rights.
Without citizens who refuse to be silenced and controlled by authority, democracy becomes meaningless.
So with my arts of rhetoric and poetry as truthtelling, and with my praxis of democracy in my daily journal here at Torch of Liberty; to incite, provoke, and disturb.
For democracy requires a participatory electorate willing to speak truth to power.
To all those who defy and challenge unjust authority; I will stand with you, and I ask that all of us do the same.
As written by Margaret Atwood in The Guardian, in an article entitled If we don’t defend free speech, we live in tyranny: Salman Rushdie shows us that; “The Satanic Verses author didn’t plan to become a hero, but as he recovers from this attack, the world must stand by him.
Along time ago – 7 December 1992, to be exact – I was backstage at a Toronto theatre, taking off a Stetson. With two other writers, Timothy Findley and Paul Quarrington, I’d been performing a medley of 1950s country and western classics, rephrased for writers – Ghost Writers in the Sky, If I Had the Wings of an Agent, and other fatuous parodies of that nature. It was a PEN Canada benefit of that era: writers dressed up and made idiots of themselves in aid of writers persecuted by governments for things they’d written.
Just as the three of us were bemoaning how awful we’d been, there was a knock on the door. Backstage was locked down, we were told. Secret agents were talking into their sleeves. Salman Rushdie had been spirited into the country. He was about to appear on stage with Bob Rae, the premier of Ontario, the first head of government in the world to support him in public. “And you, Margaret, as past president of PEN Canada, are going to introduce him,” I was told.
Gulp. “Oh, OK,” I said. And so I did. It was a money-where-your-mouth-is moment.
And, with the recent attack on him, so is this.
Rushdie exploded on to the literary scene in 1981 with his second novel, Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker prize that year. No wonder: its inventiveness, range, historical scope and verbal dexterity were breathtaking, and it opened the door to subsequent generations of writers who might previously have felt that their identities or subject matter excluded them from the movable feast that is English-language literature. He has ticked every box except the Nobel prize: he has been knighted; he is on everyone’s list of significant British writers; he has collected an impressive bouquet of prizes and honours, but, most importantly, he has touched and inspired a great many people around the globe. A huge number of writers and readers have long owed him a major debt.
Suddenly, they owe him another one. He has long defended freedom of artistic expression against all comers; now, even should he recover from his injuries, he is a martyr to it.
In any future monument to murdered, tortured, imprisoned and persecuted writers, Rushdie will feature large. On 12 August he was stabbed on stage by an assailant at a literary event at Chautauqua, a venerable American institution in upstate New York. Yet again “that sort of thing never happens here” has been proven false: in our present world, anything can happen anywhere. American democracy is under threat as never before: the attempted assassination of a writer is just one more symptom.
Without doubt, this attack was directed at him because his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, a satiric fantasy that he himself believed was dealing with the disorientation felt by immigrants from (for instance) India to Britain, got used as a tool in a political power struggle in a distant country.
When your regime is under pressure, a little book-burning creates a popular distraction. Writers don’t have an army. They don’t have billions of dollars. They don’t have a captive voting block. They thus make cheap scapegoats. They’re so easy to blame: their medium is words, which are by nature ambiguous and subject to misinterpretation, and they themselves are often mouthy, if not downright curmudgeonly. Worse, they frequently speak truth to power. Even apart from that, their books will annoy some people. As writers themselves have frequently said, if what you’ve written is universally liked, you must be doing something wrong. But when you offend a ruler, things can get lethal, as many writers have discovered.
In Rushdie’s case, the power that used him as a pawn was the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. In 1989, he issued a fatwa – a rough equivalent to the bulls of excommunication used by medieval and renaissance Catholic popes as weapons against both secular rulers and theological challengers such as Martin Luther. Khomeini also offered a large reward to anyone who would murder Rushdie. There were numerous killings and attempted assassinations, including the stabbing of the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi in 1991. Rushdie himself spent many years in enforced hiding, but gradually he came out of his cocoon – the Toronto PEN event being the most significant first step – and, in the past two decades, he’d been leading a relatively normal life.
However, he never missed an opportunity to speak out on behalf of the principles he’d been embodying all his writing life. Freedom of expression was foremost among these. Once a yawn-making liberal platitude, this concept has now become a hot-button issue, since the extreme right has attempted to kidnap it in the service of libel, lies and hatred, and the extreme left has tried to toss it out the window in the service of its version of earthly perfection. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to foresee many panel discussions on the subject, should we reach a moment in which rational debate is possible. But whatever it is, the right to freedom of expression does not include the right to defame, to lie maliciously and damagingly about provable facts, to issue death threats, or to advocate murder. These should be punished by law.
In fact, there are no perfect artists, nor is there any perfect art. Anti-censorship folks often find themselves having to defend work they would otherwise review scathingly, but such defending is necessary, unless we are all to have our vocal cords removed.
Long ago, a Canadian member of parliament described a ballet as “a bunch of fruits jumping around in long underwear”. Let them jump, say I! Living in a pluralistic democracy means being surrounded by a multiplicity of voices, some of which will be saying things you don’t like. Unless you’re prepared to uphold their right to speak, as Salman Rushdie has done so often, you’ll end up living in a tyranny.
Rushdie didn’t plan to become a free-speech hero, but he is one now. Writers everywhere – those who are not state hacks or brainwashed robots – owe him a huge vote of thanks.”
We must all read Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses now, and for all of history it has become embedded into our character and psyche as part of human being, meaning, and value, a satire which is now become a story of us all.
For The Satanic Verses, like Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra which it references, has become a central myth of our limitless possibilities of becoming human, and a song of liberty, our defiance of force and state terror, and our refusal to submit to authority. Here is a myth of freedom and revolutionary struggle, and this is the context in which it must now be interpreted.
This remains an example of the limits of force and control in the Calculus of Fear; repression of dissent legitimizes it and delegitimizes the authority it is intended to enforce. All things obey Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and the use of force creates its own Resistance. The great secret of authority as force and control is that it is hollow and brittle, and crumples to nothing when met with disbelief and disobedience.
Here is how we may honor the valiant life of Salman Rushdie and the sacred wound which he bears for us all in the pursuit of truth; in witness and remembrance, in the pursuit of truth without limits through our own lives, in solidarity of action as guarantors of each other’s humanity, and in the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority through Disbelief and Disobedience.
For there is no just Authority.
As I wrote in celebration of his birthday in my literary blog Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium which forms a calendar of holidays on the birthdays of over 200 literary figures and summarizes all their works, sister to my political journal Torch of Liberty;
In Celebration of Salman Rushdie, on his birthday June 19; Midnight’s Children and Independence, Shame and Partition, The Satanic Verses and the founding of an alternate-world Islam (if you don’t like it you can always write your own book- all truths are relative, and there are endless possible realities to choose from), The Moor’s Last Sigh and modern multiethnic India, a favorite book of mine, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and the myth of Orpheus which is central to my ideology and self-construal, Fury and modern New York as a Dante-esque underworld, Shalimar the Clown and the tragedy of Kashmir, where once I sailed upon the lake of dreams, defended a Sufi shrine of mercy and free hospital against a riot and siege with a saint, his idiot servant, and an escaped criminal who had claimed sanctuary, was wooed by Beauty but instead was claimed by Vision, The Enchantress of Florence and gender based power asymmetries, The Golden House and capitalism as a system of oppression and dehumanization, even for its beneficiaries; the great novels of Salman Rushdie are rooted in a meticulously researched historicism and thematically targeted to expound on enduring social issues.
All are brilliant, dizzying, densely layered with meaning and scholarly references, yet filled with humor and a sense of play, his characters reflections of aspects of ourselves and immediately relatable as universal human images.
In some ways he has created a national identity of India; in others a transnational diasporic Indian identity.
Together, the works of Salman Rushdie illuminate a hidden landscape within us, as if they form the secret Book of Man and the World that da Vinci sought throughout his life. His work shares a dense coding with the notebooks of da Vinci and the poetry of Coleridge and Keats, a love of secrets with Umberto Eco, a use of traditional sources as texts of subversion and social criticism with Margaret Atwood, and reflects the work of R.K. Narayan.
Salman Rushdie maps a realm of human being and possibilities which is liminal, filled with transformative power, endless and boundless, visions and fables which extend a realism of character and place and connect us with each other through our universal qualities while exploring and recognizing the formative power of our differences.
Salman Rushdie speaks on universal human rights, freedom, truth, and the ownership of our stories, Interview by the New York Times
Salman Rushdie, a reading list
Joseph Anton: A Memoir, Salman Rushdie
(autobiography of his time living under a false identity in hiding from the Ayatollah’s death sentence)
We remember the murder of Heather Heyer in a white supremacist terror attack in Charlottesville this day in 2017 during the Unite the Right march of Klu Klux Klan, Nazi revivalists, and other feral lunatics of racist ideologies and psychopathic rage.
Trump’s authorization of violence against nonwhite people in the infamous line “There are good people on both sides” will remain a badge of the cruelty and criminality of his regime for all history.
The legacy of Charlottesville must be our vigilance against fascism., for in Heather Heyer we can see us all.
Charlottesville, and the Trump regime’s institutionalization of its white supremacist terror and criminality as ICE and its campaign of ethnic cleansing for which many of the perpetrators of this and other hate crimes were hired specifically because of their membership in Nazi Revivalist and other hate groups like the KKK, Oathkeepers, and Proud Boys, and including insurrectionists who stormed our capital to murder members of Congress, proves that the purpose and mission of America as a guarantor state of our universal human rights and of the equality of all human beings remains a paramount and ongoing ground of struggle for antifascist patriots both here at home and where ever men hunger to be free.
On August 11 of 2025 Trump commemorated the Unite the Right march and authorized its fascist and racist ideology by placing Washington DC under Occupation by federal terror forces. This he has tried before in a general campaign of repression of dissent and the criminalization of our rights of protest and free speech in numerous failed attempts to steal our citizenship and reduce us to subjects during the Black Lives Matter protests, and our capitol city is but the first of many of his list of majority nonwhite cities to terrorize; but there is no question or ambiguity of the meaning and intention of such crimes of tyranny and terror.
The Confederacy many of the Deplorables dreamed of refounding under the Trump regime was nothing more grand than a human trafficking syndicate that had declared itself a nation.
And we know Trump’s history as a human trafficking crime lord and key partner of his friend Epstein.
This is the world Trump would condemn us all to; wherein human beings are things that can be owned and used.
And above all else, the America of the Republican Party is a white ethnostate whose economy is based on the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison bond labor, with migrants and other nonwhites gathered into concentration camps and the bond of their labor sold on the open market to white elites exactly like the Bantustan system of South Africa and those of the Nazis whom Trump idolizes.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
And no matter where you begin with divisions of belonging and otherness, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
As written by Blake Montgomery in Buzzfeed, in an article entitled Here’s What Really Happened In Charlottesville: Who came ready for violence? Was it on “many sides”? The answers are clearer on the ground; “Yes, you can blame the Nazis.
The race-fueled chaos that wracked Charlottesville, Virginia, finally came to rest on Sunday night. And the hundreds of people who spent the weekend fighting in streets — and the millions who watched them — began what has become a new American ritual: arguing about what really happened, and what a spasm of localized political violence means.
Was this an assault by racist extremists on innocent, rightly outraged Americans? Was it a clash between “many sides,” as President Trump notoriously said? Was the scale of the white supremacist threat blown out of proportion? Was the violence of the black-hooded “antifa” understated?
The answers are clearer on the ground than they are in the filter bubbles driven by fierce partisan argument on social media and cable news. They are complicated but not ambiguous. Here are a few:
The right-wing protesters were relatively homogenous — in ideology and appearance — and largely ready for violence. They ranged from old-line racists like the Ku Klux Klan to the ones who wear polo shirts instead of hoods who try to brand themselves “alt-right.” There was no ambiguity about their cause — they demand the nation become whiter, and they are emboldened by a White House administration they believe makes that promise when the president yells “America first.”
The counterprotesters, in contrast, represented a far broader spectrum of the American center and left. There were self-identified “anti-fascists”; Black Lives Matter activists from around the country; religious leaders, including around 100 Christian ministers wearing their clerical collars; furious Charlottesville residents; and garden-variety liberals from as far away as Seattle. A handful of the “anti-fascists” wore Black Bloc garb — black shirt, black pants, black balaclava — to conceal their identities from police, though most did not.
The right-wingers were more prepared for violence. Most white supremacist and Nazi groups arrived armed like a paramilitary force — carrying shields, protective gear, rods, and yes, lots of guns, utilizing Virginia’s loose firearm laws. They used militarized defensive maneuvers, shouting commands at one another to “move forward” or “retreat,” and would form a line of shields or a phalanx — it’s like they watched 300 a few times — to gain ground or shepherd someone through projectiles. It seemed that they had practiced for this. Virginia’s governor said that the right’s weaponry was better than that of the state police. The opposition was largely winging it, preferring to establish bases in other parks with water, coffee, food, first aid, and comfort. Conflict would start much the same as it has at other alt-right rallies: two people, one from each side, screaming, goading each other into throwing the first punch.
By Sunday, even among the most radical voices on the left, there was incredulity at attempts — from various swaths of the mainstream to pro-Trump media, and of course, the president himself — to compare them to their enemies. This is Trump’s “many sides.”
“No one on our side is calling for vast swaths of the public to be put to death,” said Lacy McAuley, an anarchist activist based in DC who led counterdemonstrators in a march through the streets.
That is all to say that the neo-Nazis came to fight. And then their car attack escalated their rolling American streetfight with antifa to a far deadlier level than previously seen.
White nationalist organizer Jason Kessler set the stage for the bloody day when he announced months ago that he would “Unite the Right” against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park in downtown Charlottesville.
On Friday night, white supremacists gathered for an eerie torchlit march through the University of Virginia. They fought with counterdemonstrators and menacingly encircled student activists who held the line at the statue of Thomas Jefferson — the image of the darker circle of students surrounded by the light from burning tiki torches becoming an image that traveled widely on social media. The torch-bearers were chanting the Nazi slogan “blood and soil” and the KKK mantra “You will not replace us.” Richard Spencer led a similar march in Lee Park on May 15 to protest the removal of the statue of Lee.
Kessler scheduled the Saturday rally to start at noon. By the time BuzzFeed News arrived at 10:30 a.m., violent conflict was already in full swing.
Through the day, the right-wing extremists brawled with the leftists who had really come to fight, all in a park formerly named for a Confederate general. The day got bloodier and more dangerous until 1:45 p.m., when a young man identified by police as James Alex Fields, 20, drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of anti-racist counterdemonstrators, and peeled away in reverse. He allegedly injured 19 people and killed one, Heather Heyer, in the act of terrorism.
Hard to see from afar, but intensely visible on the ground, were the different shades of right-wing extremist. They included new racist and personalities like social media personality Baked Alaska, Spencer, and Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group that argues for pure European heritage, alongside more old-school hate groups like the Traditionalist Workers’ Party, affiliated with the KKK, and the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi organization that held its ornate banner, which clearly evokes a Swastika, aloft throughout the day. Fields was marching with Vanguard America, a small white nationalist organization, wearing the group’s uniform and carrying its shield.
A few of the counterprotesters — namely members of a group called Redneck Revolt — were armed with shotguns, assault rifles, and pistols.
But there were many more guns on the right, many carried by a group called the Three Percenters, a heavily armed “patriot” militia group that’s acted as security at other alt-right rallies in Portland and elsewhere. The group’s views align more with libertarianism — fundamentalist interpretations of the Constitution and an emphasis on personal liberty — than with the alt-right.
Those groups, evidently aware of the real danger, appeared to keep members of each side separate from the other in certain areas. Three Percenters stood on one side of Emancipation Park, Redneck Revolters a few blocks away at a different park.
Three Percenters said in an official statement after the rally that they disowned the racist groups at Unite the Right and issued a stand-down order during the rally. But they also served as a kind of armed guard for their leaders: After police forced the white nationalists out of Emancipation Park, Three Percenters formed a protective barrier around alt-right blogger Mike Enoch and Spencer. Enoch appeared to have been pepper-sprayed.
The area of most intense conflict was on the steps into Emancipation Park. Each side squared off against the other in a schoolyard turf war. At around 11:00, counterdemonstrators deployed a large sign made from plywood spray painted with “alt-right scum your time has come” and a decapitated Pepe the Frog. It doubled as a barrier and quickly became a prize, with each side fighting to gain control of it. Eventually it fell, right-wingers stomped on it, and people continued fighting.
Each side also threw dozens of water bottles at the other. It was the preferred projectile of the day, along with rocks, tomatoes, broken flagpoles, and balloons filled with paint, one of which splattered a police car.
Right-wing extremists carried a variety of different flags — the libertarian “Don’t Tread on Me” with the familiar sliced-up snake, flags with symbols of the racist neo-pagan cause Odinism, Confederate flags, Blue Lives Matter flags, Kekistan flags, and others. Counterdemonstrators made a game of stealing the banners, though right-wingers would beat them with the shorn flagpoles.
The weapon of choice — for the police, right-wing fighters, and antifa alike — was pepper spray. Police used the most, blasting it from large canisters at protesters. None of the fights that broke out lasted very long because one side or the other would use pepper spray to rescue their combatants.
Around noon, both state and local police declared Unite the Right and the demonstrations in the surrounding streets an unlawful assembly. They evicted everyone from Emancipation Park by a police line. Right-wing extremists and white nationalists fought the police, which is highly unusual. (At previous rallies in Berkeley and Portland, the alt-right has complied with police direction and sought permits for their gatherings, which has helped them maintain the stance that they are acting in self-defense when things get violent. The permits, in particular, ensure that their left-wing antagonists, often antifa in Black Bloc formation, end up on the wrong side of a police riot shield.)
In Charlottesville, though, white nationalists, including Spencer, leaned against police’s riot shields in a desperate attempt to keep their place. Police pushed them along the entire length of the park and down the stone steps into a waiting, screaming crowd.
While police were removing people from the park, counterdemonstrators had a chance to storm one side of it as right-wingers retreated. There were mixed messages among right-wingers, some of whom said to fall back and some of whom wanted to hold their ground despite police warnings.
One young white man carrying the black and white flag of Odinism started brawling with counterprotesters even as his own comrades retreated.
“Let’s get this race war started! Shoot me!” he yelled.
Instead, a counterdemonstrator stole his flag and tried to escape over a police fence. The man with the Odinist flag followed the protester, grabbed his backpack, and smashed his head into the metal barricade.
After police vacated the park by force, both sets of protesters splintered. BuzzFeed News followed a group of white nationalists and Black Lives Matter activists who engaged in a brutal brawl involving metal poles in a parking garage adjacent to the Charlottesville police station. One of the victims, De’Andre Harris, said he was yelling curses at white nationalists and was wearing a white scarf with curses about the Klan scrawled on it. They chased him, caught him, and beat him with wooden poles and punches.
When Fields allegedly drove his car into a crowd after the crowds were forced from the park, people at the intersection of 4th and Market were hysterical, calling out for friends and asking people they knew if others in their circles were safe, though each person seemed to have less information than the last. Emergency responders had difficulty making their way to the site of the attack because of the crowd’s sheer size. After, there were isolated reports that white nationalists were driving around town taunting people, but things remained largely quiet.
The day after the rally, Kessler attempted to hold a press conference but was run off by protesters. Later, on Periscope, he disputed the characterization of the rally as affiliated with the KKK or neo-Nazis, saying it was “only about the statue” and blaming the day’s carnage on police inaction. Many right-wingers at the rally have charged police and Charlottesville city government with the crimes of the day.
He did not reject the description of it as a white nationalist rally, and he did say that the KKK and neo-Nazi groups who were slated to speak had “good points to make.” He exaggerated the extent of the antagonism right-wingers faced by saying that antifa were armed with rifles and that right-wingers had been pinned in the park by thrown bricks. Police in fact evicted right-wingers from Emancipation Park, and the only left-wingers armed with guns appeared to be blocks away.
At the heart of the arguments since Saturday has been the question: Was this a symmetrical battle between two parallel sides?
Sheryl Gay Stolberg @SherylNYT posted on social media “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding “antifa” beating white nationalists being led out of the park” 2/2 03:34 AM – 13 Aug 2017.
Each side did engage in intense violence and attempted to seriously injure the other. But when the battle lines were formed, the right came better equipped and ready to use force to defend their belief that white people are better than nonwhite people. And on the white supremacist side is Fields, whose alleged act was named terrorism by people from the far left to members of the Trump cabinet (but not the president himself). He is charged with one count of second degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding, and one count of hit and run.
After posting the tweets above, Sheryl Gay Stolberg later apologized and modified her statement, clarifying that she was talking about physical violence rather than hate.
On the ground, leftists were incredulous at the parallel between the Nazis and their range of enemies.
“One side wants to eject all black people from America, the other wants fair hiring,” said Emily Gorcenski, a Charlottesville activist. “It makes me sick to hear people say both sides are equally bad, especially when we tried so hard to make it nonviolent.”
Despite the deep enmity on the ground in Charlottesville, the violence came after some backchannel efforts a week ago to prevent it failed. Gorcenski met with C.J. Ross and Daniel Highberger, members of the Virginia Three Percenters, in Fishburn Park in Roanoke, Virginia, last Saturday, Gorcenski and Ross both confirmed.
Ross had been in conflict with right-wingers online; he did not want the event to have white nationalist overtones and did not want the Three Percenters to participate if it did. Kessler personally disinvited him. He went in plainclothes.
Ross was looking for Gorcenski at the time of the car attack. She said she was mere feet from the Dodge Challenger. He said he was around the corner. In the mayhem following the attack, Ross said he tried to make way for emergency responders. As paramedics went to work, he said he got into conversation with Black Lives Matter activists and found he liked and agreed with them.
“I had a great conversation with them. I’d never met anyone in a BLM group before. These particular people said they were all about freedom and liberty as well,” he said. “Something awful happened, and, for me at least, it turned into a small positive thing, which, I think, is what we all want.”
As written by Eliott C. McLaughlin in CNN, in an article entitled Charlottesville rally violence: How we got here; “Despite the outrage and uproar, everyone had to know the protests were coming to Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend – and that they would get out of hand.
This is how we got here.
It began in February when the City Council voted to rechristen two parks named for Confederate generals and to remove a bronze statue of one of those generals, Robert E. Lee, from an eponymous downtown park.
This came on the heels of several Southern cities removing dozens of Confederate monuments from public property after a self-described white supremacist massacred nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
The Charlottesville move met with resistance, as some residents sued, and a judge blocked the statue’s removal for six months as the matter was litigated.
The City Council voted again in April, this time agreeing to sell the statue and let the buyer remove it, CNN affiliate WVIR reported.
Violence began in May
Prominent white nationalist RIchard Spencer led a demonstration in mid-May that served as prelude to Saturday’s violence. Angered by the city’s decision, torch-wielding demonstrators marched on the city, drawing condemnation from its leaders who regarded the protest as intimidation.
They were met by counterprotesters carrying banners that read “Black Lives Matter” and “F**k White Supremacy.”
Police made three arrests. One police officer was injured when a flying object struck him in the head.
Fast-forward to July, and about 50 Ku Klux Klan members, some in Klan robes, arrived in the city, where they were outnumbered 20-to-1 by counterprotesters.
Shouts of “Racists go home” clashed with chants of “white power.”
Police had to employ pepper spray and tear gas to disperse crowds. They arrested 22 people.
The most recent violence began Friday night, ahead of a planned Saturday rally that the Southern Poverty Law Center described as the “largest hate-gathering of its kind in decades.”
Charlottesville had tried to move the demonstration, citing safety concerns, but a federal judge issued an injunction allowing the rally to take place at Emancipation Park, formerly Lee Park and the site of the contentious statue.
Jason Kessler, who organized the “Unite the Right” rally, said the rally was aimed at “standing up for our history.”
“The statue itself is symbolic of a lot of larger issues,” including preserving history against “revisionism,” combating political correctness, advocating for white interests and free speech, Kessler said.
Scuffles erupted near a statue of President Thomas Jefferson on the nearby University of Virginia campus. Police declared the demonstration illegal and ran off the white nationalists and counterprotesters.
The Saturday event lived up to its SPLC billing, as fistfights and screaming matches broke out in this blue town of 47,000 that is home to Monticello, Jefferson’s onetime estate.
Protesters fired pepper spray at each other. Police scrambled to disperse the crowd ahead of the rally’s noon kickoff and declared an “unlawful assembly” just before the rally was slated to begin.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe quickly declared an emergency.
“Go home,” the Democrat told right-wing groups in the city. “You are not wanted in this great commonwealth. Shame on you.”
By 1 p.m. police had cleared Emancipation Park, and by early afternoon, police in riot gear stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind their shields, at times advancing toward protesters.
Fights continued to break out, with people kicking and swinging at each other, while other protesters tried to de-escalate tensions without police intervention. One side chanted, “Blood and soil!,” an old Nazi slogan, while counterprotesters cried, “Nazi scum off our streets!”
Police reported 15 injuries associated with the rally, but that toll jumped around 1:30 p.m. when a man drove a silver Dodge Charger into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old local paralegal whose father said she was always fighting for others.
Nineteen more people were injured. Video shows the Charger barreling down a narrow side street packed with protesters. It slams into a silver convertible, throwing one protester onto the convertible’s roof.
The driver then backs down the street, its bumper dragging, and several protesters give chase.
The suspect being held in a Virginia jail in connection with a deadly crash near a scheduled rally of white nationalists has been identified as James Alex Fields Jr., 20, of Maumee, Ohio.
Authorities later arrested James Alex Fields, 20, of Maumee, Ohio, jailing him on suspicion of second-degree murder, malicious wounding and failure to stop in an accident that resulted in death. The Justice Department is also looking into the case.
A social studies teacher at Fields’ Union, Kentucky, high school later told CNN the young man had “outlandish, very radical beliefs.”
“He really bought into this white supremacist thing. He was very big into Nazism. He really had a fondness for Adolf Hitler,” said Derek Weimer, who taught Fields as a junior and senior.
The day got deadlier just before 5 p.m., when two Virginia State Police troopers died after their helicopter crashed while they were on patrol near the clashes. They were identified as Lt. H. Jay Cullen, 48, and Trooper-Pilot Berke M.M. Bates, 40.
While President Donald Trump issued his condolences to the families of Heyer and the troopers, he issued a controversial statement on the violence, admonishing “hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides,” rather than singling out the white nationalists who staged the rally.
As written by Chris Cillizza in CNN, in an article entitled Donald Trump’s incredibly unpresidential statement on Charlottesville; “A group of white supremacists – screaming racial, ethnic and misogynistic epithets – rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday. One person was killed and 19 others were injured when a car sped into a group of counter-protesters.
This is what the President of the United States said about it:
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.”
It’s hard to imagine a less presidential statement in a time in which the country looks to its elected leader to stand up against intolerance and hatred.
Picking a “worst” from Donald Trump’s statement – delivered from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club – isn’t easy. But, the emphasis of “on many sides” – Trump repeated that phrase twice – is, I think, the low ebb.
Both sides don’t scream racist and anti-Semitic things at people with whom they disagree. They don’t base a belief system on the superiority of one race over others. They don’t get into fistfights with people who don’t see things their way. They don’t create chaos and leave a trail of injured behind them.
Arguing that “both sides do it” deeply misunderstands the hate and intolerance at the core of this “Unite the Right” rally. These people are bigots. They are hate-filled. This is not just a protest where things, unfortunately, got violent. Violence sits at the heart of their warped belief system.
Trying to fit these hate-mongers into the political/ideological spectrum – which appears to be what Trump is doing – speaks to his failure to grasp what’s at play here. This is not a “conservatives say this, liberals say that” sort of situation. We all should stand against this sort of violent intolerance and work to eradicate it from our society – whether Democrat, Republican, Independent or not political in the least.
What Trump failed to do is what he has always promised to do: Speak blunt truths. The people gathered in Charlottesville this weekend are white supremacists, driven by hate and intolerance. Period. There is no “other side” doing similar things here.
“Mr. President – we must call evil by its name,” tweeted Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colorado. “These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism.” Tweeted Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, another fellow Republican: “Very important for the nation to hear @potus describe events in #Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by #whitesupremacists.”
What Trump is doing – wittingly or unwittingly – is giving cover to the sort of beliefs (and I use that word lightly) on display in Charlottesville today.
Chalking it all up to a violent political rhetoric that occurs on both sides and has been around for a very long time contextualizes and normalizes the behavior of people who should not be normalized. It is not everyday political rhetoric to scream epithets at people who don’t look like you or worship like you. Trump’s right that this sort of behavior has existed on American society’s fringes for a long time – but what we as a nation, led by our presidents, have always done is call it out for what it is: radical racism that has no place in our world.
So, that’s the big one. But there are other things in Trump’s statement that are also worth calling out – most notably “not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama.”
What Trump is doing here is pre-emptively absolving himself of blame for creating a political climate in the country in which people like these “Unite the Right” demonstrators feel emboldened enough to rally in public. Not my fault, Trump is saying. There were hate groups and hate speech under Obama too!
With someone dead and more than two dozen people injured, this is, of course, not the time for assigning blame. Or for making political calculations. This is a time to say: We stand together against what we saw in Charlottesville today. Trump didn’t do that. Not even close.
Then, last but not least, is what Trump said a few paragraphs after his “on many sides” comment. Here it is:
“Our country is doing very well in so many ways. We have record – just absolute record employment. We have unemployment, the lowest it’s been in almost 17 years. We have companies pouring into our country. Foxconn and car companies, and so many others, they’re coming back to our country. We’re renegotiating trade deals to make them great for our country and great for the American worker. We have so many incredible things happening in our country. So when I watch Charlottesville, to me it’s very, very sad.”
White nationalist Richard Spencer and his supporters clash with Virginia State Police in Lee Park after the “Unite the Right” rally was declared an unlawful gathering August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the “alt-right” clashed with anti-facist protesters and police as they attempted to hold a rally in Lee Park, where a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is slated to be removed.
Really? A pivot to an I-am-not-getting-enough-credit-for-all-the-good-I-am-doing-in-the-country line? With scenes of hatred splashed across TV screens? With someone dead?
This speech is not the time to tout your accomplishments. I mean “we’re renegotiating trade deals to make them great for our country”? Who thought that was a good thing to say in the same speech in which Trump, theoretically, was trying to reassure people that what we all saw in Charlottesville is not, fundamentally, who we are?
That no one – starting and ending with the President – raised a red flag about tacking on a laundry list of accomplishments to a speech that should have simply condemned the behavior in Charlottesville and called to our better angels, is staggering, even for this White House.
There are moments where we as a country look to our president to exemplify the best in us. They don’t happen every day. Sometimes they don’t happen every year. But, when they do happen, we need the person we elected to lead us to, you know, lead us.
Trump did the opposite today.”
As I wrote in my post of January 16 2021, Silence Is Complicity: No One Gets to Sit This One Out; A post in which I quote Adam Parkhomenko elicited an interesting reaction from someone, one which makes me question how the rhetoric of fascist and racist privilege creates complicity; the quote is in reference to the massive responsibility avoidance and denial on the part of the Republican lawmakers who refuse to join the call impeach our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his rabble of murderous barbarians.
Here is the quotation; “I have a very simple message for Republicans calling for unity without accountability: the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.”
This was the reaction; first, repetition of the very call for unity without accountability, which I would characterize as granting permission through failure to consequent behaviors, which the quote calls out; “These words are just creating more divisions!”
Second, an attempt at silencing dissent; “Please Stop!”
Third, an attempt at blame shifting; “Whenever one person thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong you are the problem!”
And Fourth, the very worst of the apologetics of historical fascism, a claim of moral equivalence; “Everyone just needs to stop all of these posts because there are good people on both sides!”
And this last I cannot let pass, for on the last occasion of its general use this propagandistic lie and rhetorical device led directly to the Holocaust and the global devastation of total war.
I am unclear which good people she could be referring to; the ones who were going to capture and hang or guillotine members of Congress, the ones who murdered a police officer and attempted to bomb both the Democratic and Republican offices, the white supremacist terrorists who have rallied to the cause of treason and armed sedition, or the mad tyrant who commanded them?
To this I replied; You are wrong. Treason, terror, and the murder of police officers has no excuse. You are either with us as American patriots or against us; no one gets to sit this one out and be counted among the honorable, the moral, and the loyal.
Silence is complicity.
Such is the Talmudic principle, “Shtika Kehoda”, famously paraphrased by Einstein in his 1954 speech to the Chicago Decalogue Society as “If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity”, and referenced by Eli Weisel as “the opposite of love is not only hate, it is also indifference.”
Martin Luther King said it this way in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story; “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
John Stuart Mill expressed a related idea in his 1867 Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews; “Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
Leonardo da Vinci formulated it as resistance to tyranny, with which he was very familiar in the wars of dominion between the princes of Renaissance Italy; “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
Silence is complicity.
Should this concept require further clarification, please refer to the following recording and transcript of Elie Wiesel’s Millennium Lecture at the White House, on April 12 1999, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton; “Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President — Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others — and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people.
Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary — or Mrs. Clinton — for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations — Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin — bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting — more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.
Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner,” as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.
Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God — not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps — and I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance — but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.
And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader — and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death — Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us.
No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history — I must say it — his image in Jewish history is flawed.
The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo — maybe 1,000 Jews — was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back.
I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people — in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?
But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the “Righteous Gentiles,” whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war?
Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.
Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?
What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them — so many of them — could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.
Elie Wiesel – April 12, 1999”
Charlottesville, Revisited—2017 to 2024
What Can a Moment of Peril Tell Us about Our Own Dangerous Times?
Ceuta was Europe’s first colony since the Roman Empire and remains so today as a living fragment of a horrific past, an ancient African port under Spanish rule, and it is this legacy of darkness which has made it a vulnerable to political manipulation this August, as Israel’s ally Morocco with massive Russian propaganda and other information warfare sent waves of her citizens under the guise of migrants to destabilize Spain’s solidarity with Palestine, and delegitimize the Socialist bastion of Spain with the inherited legacies of her colonial history to create as false equivalence between Israel’s imperial conquest and occupation of Palestine and Spain’s African colony of Ceuta.
Trump immediately rewarded Morocco by granting her a contract for building a military base in Gaza as a colony through his Board of Exploitation. Nor is this American imperialism new to the current regime; Morocco was welcomed into the conspiracy of colonial powers by Trump in 2020 who recognized her claims to the Western Sahara, vastly harming the cause of independence for her people. The long term political payoff for the Israeli-American alliance is not only isolation of Palestine from support by Spain as a poisoned well, but also advancing the cause of white supremacist nationalism for the Fourth Reich of which Trump is the current figurehead by demonizing nonwhite African and Islamic Others as proof of the White Replacement Theory which has immeasurably aided the cause of Nazi Revivalism in Europe. It’s a well tested and resilient ruse, having been deployed near the start of the first Trump regime by Erdogan of Turkey against Europe by driving refugees from her invasion of Syria north, which immediately removed EU economic and political pressure on his totalitarian regime, the longterm or second order consequences and results being the recapture of Italy by the original Fascist party under Meloni and similar threats, notably by Farage in Britain and LePen in France.
Of the legacies of our history which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail, there are those which must be kept and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same. In the Ceuta Incident we have been reminded how easily our histories can be weaponized, and why we must question the things authorized as truths by those who would enslave us and divide our solidarity of action, for we wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, lies and illusions, rewritten histories and alternate realities densely layered as multiple schema, paradigms, and frames of reference designed to induce a kind of madness, overwrite our truths and colonize us as marionettes of hegemonic elites, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us as theft of the soul.
Such are the games of empire and the topology of modern information warfare, espionage, and special operations. All conflict is theatre.
As written by Angela Giuffrida in The Guardian, in an article entitled Why is Ceuta a migration flashpoint and how were so many people able to cross from Morocco?; “What has happened and where?
Border controls between Morocco and the tiny Spanish territory of Ceuta appeared to break down in the past week, allowing tens of thousands of people to cross on to the Spanish side in chaotic and dangerous scenes that resulted in dozens of deaths.
The number of arrivals was more than two-thirds the size of the ordinary population in Ceuta, where a humanitarian crisis was playing out on Friday.
Spanish officials said on Monday that an estimated 69,500 people who had arrived late last week in Ceuta had returned to Morocco. As of Monday, about 2,500 people who had made the crossing were believed to still be in Ceuta.
Ceuta and Melilla, another Spanish territory 400km (250 miles) to the east along north Africa’s Mediterranean coast, constitute the EU’s only land borders with Africa.
In Spanish possession since 1580, Ceuta is home to a mixed population of Christians and Muslims, while its Spanish and Moroccan residents and day workers live in relative harmony. Morocco does not officially recognise Ceuta and Melilla as Spanish territories and often refers to them as occupied lands.
Why is Ceuta a migration flashpoint?
Spain is a main point of arrival into Europe for people seeking better economic opportunities or an escape from violence in their home countries. Ceuta and Melilla are heavily fortified as they are seen as destinations for those trying to reach Spain from Morocco and other parts of Africa.
Many migrants who reach Ceuta or Melilla are immediately turned back, but others are held in migrant shelters while they apply for asylum in Spain.
To reach Ceuta, people often swim from the Moroccan town of Fnideq, covering about 3 miles (5km). Others attempt the crossing from the nearer town of Belyounech.
In 2022, 23 people were killed as about 2,000 people, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, attempted to cross into Melilla from Morocco, while in 2014 at least 14 people died off Ceuta when 200 people tried to enter by climbing the border fence or swimming around the breakwater that separates the city from Moroccan territory.
Migrant arrivals to Ceuta and Melilla are generally much lower than those reaching Spain through the Canary and Balearic islands.
Spain’s overall immigrant population has grown considerably in recent decades, with about 10 million people in the country of 50 million having been born elsewhere. Many are from Colombia, Venezuela and Morocco and work in key sectors of the Spanish economy including agriculture, tourism and the services sector.
Since at least the mid-1990s, thousands of people cross the Mediterranean each year from north African countries and Turkey in search of asylum in Europe. According to figures from the International Organization for Migration, 35,153 migrant deaths and disappearances have been recorded in the Mediterranean since 2014, with 1,493 dead or missing during the first seven months of 2026.
Why were so many people able to cross over?
Spanish intelligence sources told El País that the roots of the influx probably lay in a hoax that had swiftly spread across social media after a Spanish supreme court ruling that migrants arriving by sea could not be summarily deported. As the hoax gained steam online, Moroccan border surveillance dwindled to a minimum until it was completely lifted late last week, allowing tens of thousands of people through.
However, the crossing could be linked to the rivalry between Morocco and Algeria, and a recent trip by the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, to Algiers.
The last mass border crossing, in May 2021, took place after Morocco loosened border controls during a diplomatic row with Spain over Spain’s decision to allow the leader of the Western Sahara independence movement, the Polisario Front, to be treated for Covid-19 in Spain.
Morocco and the Polisario Front both lay claim to Western Sahara, which was under Spanish rule until 1975, when colonial authorities handed over the territory to Morocco and Mauritania.
That diplomatic crisis ended in 2022 when Madrid reversed its longstanding policy of neutrality and backed Morocco’s plan for Western Sahara – a move that had caused a diplomatic rift between Madrid and Algiers, which supports the Polisario group.
Sánchez visited Algiers on 20 July – the first such visit by a Spanish head of government in four years – marking a thaw in relations with Algeria.
Matteo Villa, a migration researcher at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, said politics was most likely involved. “What happened in 2021 was the small-scale version of what happened [on Friday],” he said. “I mean, 50,000 people do not come overnight when usually it’s hundreds per month. Sánchez going to Algeria is something Morocco didn’t really like.”
Villa suggested Morocco may have loosened the border as a way of showing it has “the upper hand”, especially because authorities there know it would cause an overreaction in Europe. “They love seeing all the fighting between European countries,” he added.
How have governments and authorities reacted?
Spain deployed its armed forces and additional police to restore order after the breach, which Sánchez described as “a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity”.
Images and footage of the border chaos sparked a crisis for the Spanish government and divisions within the EU, where rightwing politicians blamed the incident on Spain’s policy of legalising hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants this year.
Italy’s far-right government went so far as to call for Spain to be suspended from the Schengen free-movement zone – even though Ceuta and Melilla do not fall under Schengen arrangements in the usual way – while France tightened its borders with Spain.”
Why is Ceuta a migration flashpoint and how were so many people able to cross from Morocco?
