Long ago and worlds away, far from my cottage where I sit writing this, my friend from the 1982 Siege of Beirut who set me on my life’s path in swearing me to the Oath of the Resistance he had devised in Paris 1940, Jean Genet once wrote in Miracle of the Rose; “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”
We have dreamed long, we Americans, we humankind, of becoming better and more civilized in how we choose to become human together, of harmony and a United Humankind, diversity and inclusion, a free society of equals in which we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and the parallel and interdependent rights of citizens; of the redemptive power of love which can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and the state as embodied violence, hope and our faith in each other as solidarity of action, and of the figments of liberty, equality, truth, and justice which we may yet make real.
With the Stolen Election of 2016 and the capture of the state by the Fourth Reich, America, global democracy, and human civilization began a long slow Fall into nightmares of tyranny and terror in an Age of Tyrants from whose wars of imperial conquest and dominion, six to eight centuries of wars fought with weapons of unimaginable horror by totalitarian states of brutal repression and inescapable surveillance and thought control characterized by systems of oppression such as falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, an age of tyranny and terror at the mercies of our governments we humans are unlikely to survive.
We now find ourselves swallowed whole like Jonah by the Leviathan, and cast into fathomless chasms of darkness. The design and purpose of the second Trump regime about to take power is the subversion and dismantling of the institutions and ideals of the American state and of democracy throughout the world, and the fracture and chaotization of the world order and the law of nations represented by the EU, NATO, and the United Nations as an emergent United Humankind and as guarantors of our universal human rights.
But we are not yet at the end of us, for chaos may be terrible but is also a measure of the adaptive range of a system wherein change may be brought, and the liberation of Syria proves that tyranny and terror and be defeated regardless of unequal power or the asymmetry of force. We have shattered the illusion of Russian invincibility in battle and stolen the keystone of Putin’s plans for an Empire in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, contested rigged elections in Georgia and brought the Russian reconquest of Eastern Europe into question, and may one day liberate Moscow as we did Damascus and bring the terrible war in Ukraine to an end.
The great secret of power is that without legitimacy it is fragile and brittle, and finds its limit in Disbelief and Disobedience.
To refuse to submit is to become Unconquered and free; this is our victory condition, and it is a power which cannot be taken from us and like the Magic Ruby Slippers can bring us home.
As I wrote of a traumatic event of fracture like that of the 2024 election of Trump in my post of August 6 2024, The Wagnerian Ring of Fear, Power, and Force, and What Plato Got Wrong About Rule By Elites: the Case of Hiroshima;
Today is the anniversary of possibly the most terrible war crime ever perpetrated in the history of man’s inhumanity to man and a bitter monument to the collapse of values under the pressure of fear; Hiroshima.
Though the litany of such atrocities would roll on endlessly like a song of despair and horror, there is nothing like America’s use of a weapon which cast men’s souls from their bodies and left their shadows etched upon the walls.
As with all Defining Moments of humankind which have become negotiated truths and a ground of struggle for ownership of the stories of ourselves, memory, history, and identity as a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we have adapted to change over vast epochs of time, there are really two stories here, which swallow each other like the Ouroboros of Time; the story of events themselves as lived and the Rashomon Gate of stories about these Defining Moments as witnesses of history and what Foucault called truthtelling or the sacred calling to pursue the truth. Stories, and the stories about the stories; and which has ahold of us at any given moment we cannot know.
Hiroshima is such a Defining Moment and Rashomon Gate event, in which humankind is forever changed by our new capacity to annihilate ourselves. As Oppenheimer described it, quoting the Bhagavad-Gita; “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
How will we use such dread power, and how will the mere fact of its existence shape us and our future possibilities of becoming human?
Is this the greatest war crime in history, and the measure of America as the furthest depths of human evil? There are many candidates for that title, however, as humans are cruel and our governments are monuments of force and control. Historically I would say the Mongol origination of biowarfare in catapulting the bodies of plague victims over the walls of the cities they wanted to conquer was also very wicked, and resulted in the population of Europe losing one in every four persons, possibly one in three, during the three hundred year terror of the Black Death. But if Hiroshima is the most terrible of crimes against humanity, it is because it is ours.
The evils of which we are beneficiaries are always the most terrible, if only to us. Sadly, such evils are manifold and numberless; the Conquest and genocide of indigenous peoples of the Americas, slavery, Patriarchy, imperialism, and the culture of violence, militarism, toxic masculinity, and the fetishization of guns which sustains them.
And we have neither renounced nor abandoned the use of such weapons. Indeed, we are making more, and more terrible. In this the true meaning of America to the rest of the world is undeniable and clear; we are a nation whose objective is imperial conquest and whose mission is the annihilation of the human soul.
We can change this path we are on toward destruction and the subjugation of others simply and at any time; abandon the use of social force. A good beginning might be mothballing our nuclear arsenal and all weapons of mass destruction and terror, and disarming the police and other forces of tyranny, repression, and control.
Which brings us to my theme today; unequal power is also violence. For the key to our bewildering transformation from an egalitarian democracy wherein universal rights and the autonomy of individuals is paramount to an authoritarian tyranny of force and control is that militarism and the fetishization of instruments of violence is enormously profitable and necessary to imperialism and a global hegemony of power and privilege. This requires an elite, which both profits from and creates the conditions of inequality in a recursive process.
The fragmentation and class stratification of our free society of equals by hierarchies of exclusionary otherness into a vast precariat inclusive of prison labor as a national policy of the re-enslavement of Black people and theft of citizenship, and an elite hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege constructed on white supremacy and Gideonite patriarchy, is no flaw but a central and inherent design of our society, whereby authority centralizes power unto itself as a tyrannical subversion of Liberty.
The horrific spectacles of open violations of our values and ideals, the perversions and aberrant performances of atavistic barbarism, and the arrogance of impunity of power of the years of the Fourth Reich’s capture of America and the regime of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, are direct consequences of this process of undemocratization, which began with the demonstration of federal power in the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, in the global interventions of Manifest Destiny and the paramount dominion of our empire won by our victories in the World Wars, the disastrous co-optation of the Nazi elite in service to the projects of anticommunist imperialism and their capture of the Republican Party in 1980 in alliance with Gideonite fundamentalists, white supremacists, and plutocrats, and the failed attempt to shake off the host political system of the January 6 Insurrection.
As proofs of this theory I offer here two examples; the emergence of a technocratic elite in the creation of a nuclear arsenal and of a medical elite whose purpose is to ensure the dominance of its own class and of social order, and which acts as an arbiter of what is real and what is mad, in the creation of a carceral regime of torture and thought control at Guantanamo and in secret prisons as a test laboratory for America and the world, in part a result of the inevitable imperial phase of America after 911 but which originates with the torturers whose escape from justice we abetted after the Second World War.
In one of the founding documents of our civilization, The Republic, Plato argues that the achievement of virtue is only possible when society is mediated by an elite, philosopher-kings who are beholden to no one and independent of financial interest or influence, experts who may govern by reason. It’s an attractive idea, and one with a long reach; America charged Aaron Burr with treason over corruption, nepotism and bribery, results of an idea of the role of gentlemen in government embedded in the traditions of the British aristocracy.
As Gramsci famously said, “Between force and consent lies corruption”. At the heart of this ancient debate about equality and the nature of the Good lies a simple and easily demonstrable truth; the rule of elites is always against the interests of its subjects, as it concentrates power rather than distributing agency among its citizens as co-owners of their government.
If you wish to see what lies on the opposite side of democracy, just look at Hiroshima and Guantanamo, Wounded Knee and the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, or beyond America’s sphere of dominion and responsibility at political atrocities like the Holocaust, Gaza, the Siege of Mariupol, Srebrenica, Xinjiang, or at any of the authoritarian regimes throughout the world today which sadly control most of humankind and scheme endlessly to conquer and enslave the rest; Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Modi’s India, and far too many others.
Or to the collapse of the utopia Plato attempted to found by reimagination of the Empire of Syracuse, first by reconstructing the tyrant Dionysius the Second as a Philosopher-King and then by revolutionary seizure of power through his uncle Dion, both his students. This was the first Republic, whose failures and collapse Plato interrogates and fictionalizes in The Republic, the ur-source and founding document of democracy, wherein the sharing and use of social power is envisioned as a ground of struggle between liberty and tyranny.
Why is this important to us now, this origin story of our civilization as a free society of equals born in the Forum of Athens?
Because we today are witnesses to a parallel civilizational collapse from the mechanical failures of our systems’ internal contradictions and the legacies of our histories, caught in the gears of the great machine we serve like Charlie Chaplin in The Factory.
Ours is a machine which runs on the recursive processes of fear, power, and force, forever defined by Hiroshima as its terminal limit. The psychopathy of power and the nihilism of force may be shadows which devour our ideals of the good as freedom, equality, truth, and justice as their originals, our forms and realities from which they are cast, but they are also the products of political decisions and historical processes and not natural and inherent conditions of our humanity. Nor is civilizational collapse an inevitable consequence of democracy.
There are two obvious escapes from this dilemma; the redemptive power of love triumphs over fear and hate as motive forces and systemic harms, and seizures of unequal power restore balance in reply to structural harms. Plato tried them both, and both times failed; but he never tried both together as interdependent and parallel processes of change, as I propose herein.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
As I wrote in my post of last year on this day, December 30 2023 The Year in Review; Reading again my debrief of 2021’s issues, actions, and opportunities, I find our situation largely unchanged, at least for the better.
Only the Gaza War is truly new, though the imperial conquest and dominion of Palestine and the subjugation of the Palestinians as a colonial slave caste is older than myself, Israel’s war of ethnic cleansing and America’s complicity in her war crimes, in the abandonment of the idea of universal human rights and of our historic role as a guarantor nation of democracy and the Rights of Man, have made the tragic and horrific atrocities and acts of Israeli-American state terror since October 7 a unique kind of disruptive event as values inversion and civilizational collapse.
Much has become infinitely worse, including Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine as the most visible theatre of World War Three which now engulfs us all and threatens the fall of civilization and the extinction of humankind, after hundreds of years of tyranny and war which now may be inevitable.
We face in this moment possibilities in which only two in every one hundred futures unfold with the survival of humankind through the coming millennium; in the other 98 nothing remains of our species in a thousand years, and all that we have ever been and dreamed comes to nothing. If we wish some being like ourselves to look upon our ruins and wonder who we were, we must reimagine, transform, and bring change to our fate.
Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine and Israel’s in Gaza define the limits of the human, but not the limits of our possibilities of becoming human. Though we are now destroying ourselves, we are also free to recreate ourselves.
I hope to have lived, and written, not at the end of the human story, but at its beginning.
To all those who have taken this journey with me, thank you for your friendship and for making me feel heard.
Often have I translated the final principle of the Revolution, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, as Solidarity in reference to the Polish union and to labor unions in general as models of a just society and the praxis of our values, and if we are to free ourselves and each other from the systems of oppression and unequal power in which we are embedded, we must reimagine and transform not just our political institutions, but society and ourselves personally as well.
What is friendship, and how does Solidarity function as a cohesive force in personal friendships and as community?
I think now of solidarity and our interdependence in terms of something I wrote in reference to the Netflix series Wednesday, in the context of a discussion regarding the nature of the relationship between the two main characters, relevant to the general conditions of being human and of liberation struggle, and to love and friendship as the basis of a just society as it was for Cicero when he wrote of my ancestor in his essay Laelius de Amicitia; How if love and friendship are not compartmented, but a continuum? One which reaches beyond the level of individuals to encompass whole societies as the primary ties that bind us together? Nuanced and ambiguous, wherein the flaws of our humanity make us beautiful?
In the relationship of Wednesday and Enid we have an allegory of becoming human and questions about how we choose to be human together, questions of human being, meaning, and value born of Rashomon Gate Events and existential crises of civilization whose lines of fracture, disruptions and collapses of order and transforms of meaning and value, we have witnessed as the January 6 Insurrection, the Stolen Election of 2016 and the whole treasonous and dishonorable Trump era of the Fourth Reich, the crimes against humanity of the Ukraine Invasion and Putin’s mad gambles of imperial conquest and dominion and their echoes in Israel’s imperial dominion of the Palestinians.
Like humankind in this definitive moment of change and crisis of identity, Wednesday and Enid must expose, entrap, and bring a Reckoning to a predator who hunts them and their fellows from the shadows, with concealment and the impunity of enablers among authority. Like the Hyde, fascism is a monster of cruelty, amoral ruthlessness, and the madness of power.
How do Wednesday and Enid become victorious over such an enemy? Here is an epic of revolutionary struggle, in which the key to victory in Resistance is obscured by reactions to a fundamentally ambiguous relationship which may be one of amici, eros, or amore; friendship, desire, or love in a shifting Mobius Loop and/or all at once. Discussions of the show have exploded with divisive messaging which attempts to define and taxonomize the relationship of Enid and Wednesday; are they a queer couple, and Enid’s claws a Pride flag? I do relish and find exquisite the idea of a Pride With Claws, especially in its resonance with the secondary meaning of Pride as a chosen community like a wolf pack. It is also a question useful to the interests of power and authorized identities, because it sows division and misdirects us from the true question, the seizure of power and its functions.
Enid risks death to save Wednesday in the final battle with the Hyde; this and only this truly matters, not desire, not identities of sex and gender nor the divisions of identity politics, not faith nor race nor nationality except as our stories because we own them and our membership and belonging with those whom we claim and who in turn claim us so long as nothing human is exclusionary, marginalized, dehumanized, or vilified as otherness because to make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence and a hate crime, not who we are except when we have so chosen as a primary act of freedom and self-creation, but solidarity in liberation struggle beyond hope of victory or even survival. This, this, this.
In the words of the Oath of the Resistance created in Paris 1940 by Jean Genet, to which he swore me in Beirut 1982; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
Whatever the future may hold, we are responsible not for our imposed conditions of struggle, but for our actions.
As to that and the praxis of liberty I have many plans and continuing actions, in many places; the most massive manhunt in American history is still ongoing, to bring to justice the participants, funders, propagandists, leaders and enablers of the January 6 Insurrection and the depravities and violations of the Fourth Reich and the criminal regime of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump.
We must also liberate Russia from the regime of its tyrant and war criminal Putin and bring a Reckoning to its perpetrators and enablers, and liberate Ukraine, gate of Europe and the Black Sea from which the whole of the Mediterranean may be conquered, and the other theatres of the Third World War from the imperial dominion of Russia; Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the African Sahel and Chad region.
Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet remain to be liberated as sovereign and independent nations from the conquest and dominion of the Chinese Communist Party and its megalomaniac tyrant Xi Jinping, whose plans to conquer and occupy the Pacific Rim must be stopped before we are fighting in the streets of San Francisco, and the Chinese people liberated as a democracy.
Throughout the Iranian Dominion inclusive of its client states and puppet regimes Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, a glorious democracy revolution against theocracy and patriarchy has destabilized its regime and spread to Afghanistan and other Islamic states, possibly reigniting the movements of the Arab Spring. The regime of the mullahs in Iran will one day fall, and with it any legitimacy of theocratic Islamic states; Iraq and Lebanon are now contested grounds of struggle, and Kurdistan functionally independent, but when this liberation will happen is a wild card which depends primarily on whether this wave of democracy and feminism can overcome the historical divisions of the Shia-Sunni conflict to engulf Arabia and other states to the furthest shores of the Islamic diaspora in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Sultanate of Sulawesi.
This year has seen the triumph of Lula in Brazil, but also setbacks and ominous signs of warning; the failed monarchist plot of the Nazi revivalists in Germany, the election of the first fascist government in Italy since Mussolini, the recapture of Israel by Netanyahu and his coming Final Solution of the Palestinians, and the American proxy coup against Peru’s last, best hope.
And on top of all of this we have a golden turd of absurd vileness; the British Empire now has a King, named for a monster the people of England beheaded in 1649; good luck with that.
This year of 2022 I have fought in Ukraine and Russia, Iran and Iraq, Hong Kong and China, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, waged antifascist resistance in Italy and anticolonial revolution in Belfast. A maker of mischief, I.
My test for the use of social force is simple; who holds power? During my many years as a debate coach and high school Forensics teacher, I began each year with a demonstration I call Becoming a Fulcrum; placing an object on my desk I would say, “This is a fulcrum”. Across it I would place another, saying “It balances a lever. When your parents ask you what you are learning in Forensics class, tell them you are learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.”
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
As I wrote in my post of December 30 2021, The Year in Review; In these last days of 2021, my thoughts turn to the year in review; to Defining Moments, both for myself as a witness of history and for the world as informing, motivating, and shaping forces of human being, meaning, and value and of memory, history, and identity, the stories of which we are made, and to the causes I have championed and the threats to our future possibilities of becoming human which remain.
Herein I write as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and in the role Foucault described as a truth teller in reference to parrhesia and the four primary duties of a citizen; to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty proclaims, my intent is to provoke, incite, and disturb, and I hope that you have found my daily journal useful as a resource for international antifascist action and resistance, revolutionary struggle, liberation and democracy movements, forging networks of allyship and solidarity, founding autonomous zones, and seizures of power both personal and sociopolitical.
During my years as a Forensics teacher and debate coach, I began the first day of each new year with a demonstration of purpose. On my desk I would place a solid base with the words; “This is a fulcrum”. Across it I would set a teeter totter saying; “It balances a lever.” And finally; “When your parents ask you what you’re learning in Forensics, tell them you’re learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.” Such is my hope now for us all.
Truth telling as an ars poetica is about the regenerative and transformational power of truth in the sense that Keats used when he spoke of beauty, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”
But truth telling is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky. On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
As I wrote in my post of December 11 2021, Biden’s Summit For Democracy: Who Do We Want to Become, and What Are We Willing to Do to Free Ourselves From Those Who Would Enslave Us?; Biden’s Summit For Democracy opens as a watershed moment in the emergence of a united global humankind with the question; Can a quasi-democracy in the process of a Restoration from capture by the Fourth Reich and a period as a failed state infiltrated and subverted by authoritarian interests allied in a cabal of white supremacist terror, Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror, and plutocratic-oligarchic class war against the poor, can such an America as we live in now lead the world toward freedom and equality? If others lead, can we even follow?
Will our President’s noble aims in salvaging democracy and our civilization from the consequences of its mechanical failures and internal contradictions, and from the hostile intrusive forces of barbarian atavisms of fear and force and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, succeed in reclaiming America’s historic role as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world?
A cursory glance at the annual reports of the Freedom House, V-Dem, and The Economist Intelligence Democracy Index reveals a world where democracy has been in regression now for two decades; an age of tyranny looms as fragile democracies begin to die like floating candles set adrift on vast seas of darkness with a wish and a prayer, and nothing suggests we will find the political will to reverse the trend.
We must answer two questions as we choose how we will face the future, we human beings; who do we want to become, and what are we willing to do to free ourselves of those who would enslave us?
Democracy is not the only vital measure of our wellbeing; equally important is security from threats of war and terror, especially the state terror of repression and control of dissent; the use of police, prisons, and brutal repression, and of surveillance and propaganda in control.
As I wrote in my post of September 12 2021, Global and National Threats to Peace and Freedom; A thorough and balanced precis and interpretation of the threats we face today both globally and as a nation is offered in a New America article of last year, Terrorism in America 19 Years After 9/11, by David Sterman, Peter Bergen, and Melissa Salyk-Virk. Its publication coincided with the DHS official annual report on terrorism, and is an important codicil to it, independently researched. Both are more than simple threat analyses, and represent attempts to place the tragic events of Nine One One in historical context.
Its authors ignore America’s police violence, state terror, and the network of white supremacist terror groups which are operating in coordination with infiltration agents within police and other security services, and the logistical support structure which enables and directs their operations linking public figures and government officials to hate crimes, but other than this misdirection is a fair and balanced report.
What are the greatest threats to national and global peace and freedom we face today?
America is the greatest threat to peace and democracy in the world today, though our government has been seized by the people from the Fourth Reich in Biden’s Restoration of America and we have begun the generations long process of purging our nation of its fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and of our systems and institutions of racist and sexual terror and their historical legacies, but we have also as a consequence of the Trump Fourth Reich era reversed our historic role as the primary guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and become the major perpetrator of global tyranny and terror in our support of authoritarian and criminal regimes.
One example is Trump’s miracle of imperialism in the breaking of Arab unity with Palestine using Iran as a boogeyman, a reversal of historic alliances which has won security and legitimacy before the international community for our proxy Israel, sanctioned the humanitarian disaster of the Saudi-UAE proxy war in Yemen, and secured our hegemonic control of oil as a strategic resource, albeit one which is responsible for the disasters of global climate change and possibly the extinction of humankind.
In refusing to sanction Saudi Arabia for the state murder of Khashoggi we have also authorized the killing of inconvenient truth tellers by other brutal regimes. In this America is consistent with the silencing of whistleblowers like Snowden and Assange. In effect, there is no freedom of the press, of speech, or of information in America, and we have exported this theft of our sacred rights to the world.
America also continues to threaten Maduro’s Venezuela, and is the primary cause of economic collapse and a descent into rule by criminal oligarchies in Latin America, resulting in a vast humanitarian crisis of refugees at our border.
Our shifting alliances and imperialist ambitions in the Middle East have also resulted in destabilization in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, where we contend for influence with Iran.
On the Domestic front our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, his stooges and thugs William Barr and Chad Wolf, and everyone who has abetted and enabled his fascist criminal conspiracy and subversion of democracy is also a public enemy who has thus far escaped being held responsible for the subversion and monkeywrenching of democracy, including all Republicans who have not disavowed their membership in the Party of Treason, White Supremacist Terror, and Gideonite Sexual Terror; our nation has thereby implicitly authorized and conferred immunity for future acts of treason and terror in service to fascism, racism, and patriarchy.
Every teacher and parent knows the First Rule of Leadership; to establish a rule and grant permission, fail to consequent a behavior you do not wish to authorize and be repeated. We have now done this as a nation in failing to bring a reckoning to the leaders, organizers, and bankrollers of the January 6 Insurrection, beginning with Traitor Trump. Each and every person guilty of treason and armed insurrection against our nation should have their citizenship revoked, all assets seized, and be exiled forever. We cannot move forward until we have purged those who would enslave us from our nation.
Who are the other major threats to world peace and freedom?
Russia under Putin, because they were Trump’s puppetmasters and still actively seek our destruction, the only foreign enemy to openly disrupt our elections and seize our government, and because of the epic contest for dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean between Russia and Turkey which has plunged Syria and Libya into destructive Great Powers wars and created humanitarian disasters. And now, Putin’s support of tyranny in Belarus and threat of the invasion of Ukraine.
Communist China under Xi Jinping, because of the horrific genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Muslims of Xinjiang, and because of the colonialist conquest of Hong Kong in violation of international law and the inherent right of sovereignty and independence of all humankind. Also because of the archipelago of island fortresses they have constructed as the launching point for their conquest of the Pacific Rim and occupation of the world’s port cities with Chinatowns, as under the Overseas Chinese Policy they claim all ethnic Chinese as their citizens regardless of consent, where they were born, or now live. The CCP is the only major power which plans to enact world conquest and domination, and ultimately the eradication of all religions and the assimilation or genocide of all non ethnic Chinese peoples. They represent the greatest long term threat the world has ever seen.
While there are many other threats to world civilization, these three empires, America, Russia, and the Chinese Communist Party, could not only destroy us utterly, but could do so accidently.
India under Modi is waging a war of conquest in Kashmir and are playing a game of nuclear chicken with both Pakistan and China, and a campaign of ethnic cleansing internally.
Hungary under Orban has become a Nazi stronghold and launching pad for fascist revivalism throughout Europe.
Israel remains an imperialist military state tyranny of Jewish tribalism and faith and an ongoing threat to Palestine, Lebanon, and other neighboring states. Israel learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis, and now imposes on others what it once survived.
Syria under Assad has become a regional destabilization factor which invites the imperial ambitions of Russia, Turkey, Iran, America, and just about anyone who can throw a rock far enough to reach Damascus. That Assad’s brutal regime is virtually unparalleled in its crimes against humanity since Sarajevo is just the beginning of the disaster, whose refugees were driven by Erdogan to the gates of Europe and moved Europe nearer fascism as a result.
Turkey under Erdogan, whose dreams of retaking the lands of the former Ottoman Empire are challenged by Russia in Syria and Libya, and who has relentlessly pursued the genocide of the Kurds.
Iran and the Arab-American Alliance are equal partners in a humanitarian disaster and struggle for dominion throughout the Middle East. Iran now controls the governments of Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, where it is contested by the Arab-American Alliance, and shares influence in Syria with Russia; the alliance of Russia and Iran may one day become the failure point which triggers the fall of civilization.
Pakistan’s seizure of Afghanistan through her proxy the Taliban has been dramatic in realigning the balances of power in the region, power captured from the American empire they have now overthrown. Why Afghanistan? How does Pakistan plan to use their new sister state, and control of the world heroin market, which they have invested in creating for over thirty years? Harken and awake, for a new global power emerges.
Brazil under Bolsonaro is a major source of ecological disaster and the looming extinction of humankind, and has waged both racist and class war against the mass poor of African slave descent and the indigenous peoples of the Amazon.
Local tyrannies and atrocities which may destabilize entire regions include Myanmar under the junta and her sister state of Sri Lanka who are ruled together by a Buddhist ethno-nationalist shadow state and relentlessly pursue the ethnic cleansing of their minorities the Rohingya and Tamils, Zimbabwe under Mnangagwa, Belarus under Lukashenko, and Eqypt under al-Sisi.
The Ethiopia-Tigray Civil War threatens regional destabilization and ethnic conflict which involves the Sudan, Oromo, and Somali border areas. This potential for regional conflagration is also true of the incipient civil war always simmering and now near boiling over in South Africa, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan which is both a civil war and a Great Powers Proxy War, the parallel socialist Revolution and Islamic Insurgency in Mozambique and Tanzania centered in Cabo Delgado, a similar Islamic Insurgency in the Sahel involving Mali, Niger, and Chad, the Venezuela-Columbia zone of conflict, the independence struggle of the Saharawi Republic against conquest and occupation by Morocco, and the reset of the Revolution in Haiti, as always the best nightmare on earth.
Wikipedia classifies among ongoing conflicts four major wars including Afghanistan, Yemen, Tigray, and the narcoterrorist crime syndicate war in the failed state of Mexico, sixteen conflicts resulting in under ten thousand direct deaths in battle, 27 conflicts in which fewer than a thousand of us have died, and thirteen in which fewer than one hundred lives were lost. That totals sixty wars ongoing today, in which human beings will die at the hands of others tomorrow. Must this remain true for all of our tomorrows?
This year I have fought in the Third Intifada in al Quds, where I was shot, bayoneted, blown up, and set on fire, having avoided any serious mishaps, buried a friend assassinated by Israel in Gaza, brought the Chaos and made mischief for tyrants in Barcelona, Yangon, Belfast, Kolkata, Hong Kong, Port au Prince, and Durban, and have spent recent weeks on horseback in remote tribal areas of Afghanistan west of the Khyber Pass, fighting in the Last Stand of Panjshir. I have seen the best and the worst of human possibilities, and have lived this way for nearly forty years, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and the limits of what is human.
This I can tell you without question; none of us are beyond the redemptive power of love, or without hope. Our future possibilities of becoming human are yet unwritten, and limitless.
We have no shortage of tyrants who threaten global stability, or issues which could engulf whole regions in a general bonfire of the vanities. We are in short supply of compassion, vision, and solidarity among humankind in the face of existential threats to our survival and to our liberty.
It’s time to begin thinking in new ways about our differences and our common needs and resources; we can be tribes no longer, warring for diminishing shares of the earth’s plenty, but a single United Humankind, responsible for one another, for our common resources and the sustainability of life on earth, and for our future possibilities of becoming human.
Because we must have light to balance the darkness, and because a Revolution which cannot dance with the joy of total freedom is not worth its price, here is Jenna Ortega as Wednesday and her iconic dance scene
Miracle of the Rose, Jean Genet
The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, Antonio Gramsci,
Eric J. Hobsbawm (Introduction), David Forgacs (Editor)
Laelius de Amicitia: Edited with Introduction and Notes, by Cicero, John K. Lord editor
Plato’s Republic, a reading list
Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic,
by Jacob Howland
Plato’s Republic, by Alain Badiou
The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, by Iris Murdoch
The Sovereignty of Good, by Iris Murdoch
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11232.The_Sovereignty_of_Good
The Open Society and Its Enemies – Volume One: The Spell of Plato, by Karl Popper
Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic,
by D.C. Schindler
The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates’ Conversations and Plato’s Writings, by Eva Brann
Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s Republic, by Seth Benardete
Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic, by C.D.C. Reeve
The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle, by Ernest Barker
Torch of Liberty 