Degenerate buffoons of Trumpian idiocies goggle in stupefaction at the terrible proof of climate change as nature’s fury hammers Florida in storms of doom.
All that humankind has built, all we have dreamed, will be destroyed by our greed, our vanity, and our addiction to wealth and power in the war against nature and the nature of ourselves we call civilization.
And that day is coming sooner than anyone has guessed. In Florida it is happening now.
None of this is inevitable, but a result of political choices we have made about how to be human together which have captured and enmeshed us all in systems of oppression and commodification in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
It is happening now because the systems and mechanical failures and collapse of civilization from its internal contradictions is linked to the terminal phase of capitalism which centralizes all wealth and power to authoritarian elites, and if we are to survive as a species we must free ourselves from those who would enslave us.
I have called this fearsome double hurricane a divine punishment because of the irony that it threatens to annihilate the bastion of Republican science denial, white supremacist terror, and theocratic-patriarchal sexual terror that is Florida, den of a fossilized gerontocracy under the spell of the Fourth Reich Fuhrer Trump from the Southern White House at Mar a Lago, and at the end of his ridiculous election campaign.
My hope is that this storms and the many like it and more terrible still to come, like the fires and floods which devastate us in other seasons and places, will serve as a kiss which awakens us from our poisoned sleep to realization of the existential threats we now face as consequences of systems of unequal power.
Wishful thinking has me imagining the hurricane homing in on Mar a Lago, but of course it is the poor who suffer most in any disaster, for the wealthy export the true costs of production to the slave classes as a strategy of responsibility avoidance.
For the good people of Florida and throughout the world, I wish only the very best of fates and escape from systems of oppression through seizures of power.
But for those who do not renounce their complicity in tyranny and terror and the extinction of humankind, in America all who in remaining members of the Republican Party authorize the lies and perversions, the cruelties and the amoral degeneracy of Trump and the Party of Treason, and therefore sign the warrant of their complicity in the subversion of democracy and the extinction of humankind, on these I invoke the doom and the total destruction of their lives, their wealth, and their power to harm us.
May the Nothing eat their hearts.
As written by Damian Carrington in The Guardian, in an article entitled Earth’s ‘vital signs’ show humanity’s future in balance, say climate experts; “Many of Earth’s “vital signs” have hit record extremes, indicating that “the future of humanity hangs in the balance”, a group of the world’s most senior climate experts have said.
More and more scientists are now looking into the possibility of societal collapse, says the report, which assessed 35 vital signs in 2023 and found that 25 were worse than ever recorded, including carbon dioxide levels and human population. This indicates a “critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis”, it says.
The temperature of Earth’s surface and oceans hit an all-time high, driven by record burning of fossil fuels, the report found. Human population is increasing at a rate of approximately 200,000 people a day and the number of cattle and sheep by 170,000 a day, all adding to record greenhouse gas emissions.
The scientists identified 28 feedback loops, including increasing emissions from melting permafrost, which could help trigger multiple tipping points, such as the collapse of the massive Greenland icecap.
Global heating is driving increasingly deadly extreme weather across the world, they said, including hurricanes in the US and 50C heatwaves in India, with billions of people now exposed to extreme heat.
The scientists said their goal was “to provide clear, evidence-based insights that inspire informed and bold responses from citizens to researchers and world leaders – we just want to act truthfully and tell it like it is.” Decisive, fast action was imperative to limit human suffering, they said, including reducing fossil fuel burning and methane emissions, cutting overconsumption and waste by the rich, and encouraging a switch towards plant-based foods.
“We’re already in the midst of abrupt climate upheaval, which jeopardises life on Earth like nothing humans have ever seen,” said Prof William Ripple, of Oregon State University (OSU), who co-led the group. “Ecological overshoot – taking more than the Earth can safely give – has pushed the planet into climatic conditions more threatening than anything witnessed even by our prehistoric relatives.
“Climate change has already displaced millions of people, with the potential to displace hundreds of millions or even billions. That would likely lead to greater geopolitical instability, possibly even partial societal collapse.”
The assessment, published in the journal Bioscience, says the concentrations of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere are at record levels. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, 80 times more powerful than CO2 over 20 years, and is emitted by fossil fuel operations, waste dumps, cattle and rice fields.
“The growth rate of methane emissions has been accelerating, which is extremely troubling,” said Dr Christopher Wolf, formerly of OSU, who co-led the team.
While wind and solar energy grew by 15% in 2023, the researchers said, coal, oil and gas still dominated. They said there was “stiff resistance from those benefiting financially from the current fossil-fuel based system”.
The report includes the results of a Guardian survey of hundreds of senior climate experts in May, which found that only 6% believed that the internationally agreed limit of 1.5C of warming would be adhered to. “The fact is that avoiding every tenth of a degree of warming is critically important,” the researchers said. “Each tenth places an extra 100 million people into unprecedented hot average temperatures.”
The researchers said global heating was part of a wider crisis that included pollution, the destruction of nature and rising economic inequality. “Climate change is a glaring symptom of a deeper systemic issue: ecological overshoot, [which] is an inherently unstable state that cannot persist indefinitely. As the risk of Earth’s climate system switching to a catastrophic state rises, more and more scientists have begun to research the possibility of societal collapse. Even in the absence of global collapse, climate change could cause many millions of additional deaths by 2050. We need bold, transformative change.”
Among the policies the scientists recommend for rapid adoption are gradually reducing the human population through empowering education and rights for girls and women; protecting, restoring or rewilding ecosystems; and integrating climate change education into global curriculums to boost awareness and action.
The assessment concludes: “Only through decisive action can we safeguard the natural world, avert profound human suffering and ensure that future generations inherit the livable world they deserve. The future of humanity hangs in the balance.”
The world’s nations will meet at the UN’s Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in November. Ripple said: “It’s imperative that huge progress is made.”
As written by Dharna Noor in The Guardian, in an article entitled Double punch of hurricanes could become common due to climate crisis; “Less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene lashed the Florida coastline, an even more powerful hurricane is hurtling toward the state.
It’s the kind of double hit becoming more common as the climate crisis persists, further complicating hurricane preparation, experts say.
Hurricane Milton strengthened into a dangerous category 5 hurricane on Monday, according to the National Weather Service, and is forecast to batter Florida’s Gulf coast midweek. It’s the third most powerful hurricane in US history, federal officials told reporters on Monday.
The storm could drop 15in of rain on some parts of Florida, with life-threatening storm surges of up to 12ft expected in the city of Tampa. Helene killed a dozen people in the Tampa area.
Millions of Floridians are preparing to evacuate, with mandatory evacuation orders in place across several counties on Monday, including Tampa’s Hillsborough county, and voluntary evacuation orders in place elsewhere.
Swaths of Florida are still lined with piles of broken appliances, smashed furniture and other detritus from Hurricane Helene. Emergency managers are scrambling to deal with the debris before Milton’s strong winds turn it into projectiles and are asking residents to help.
“We’re going to do our best to pick it up. If you do feel that it is going to become a projectile, you can secure that pile. Put it up against a tree, put it behind a fence,” Tim Devin, the Clay county emergency management director, told WJXT television station in Jacksonville.
Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, has asked the state’s emergency management and transit divisions to help remove the piles, and some 4,000 national guard troops are also helping with the efforts. The state’s emergency management department is establishing a base camp at Tropicana Field in St Petersburg to support those debris operations.
Back-to-back hurricanes could also strain the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which has sent over 1,500 personnel to the south-east to help with Helene relief.
In response to swirling misinformation that Fema has drained its budget, the agency has said it has enough funding to address the immediate needs of Helene’s victims, noting Congress recently replenished its disaster recovery fund. Helene could cost upwards of $34bn, according to economic analysis firm Moody’s Analytics.
“We want to assure everyone we have the resources to respond to both Helene and Milton,” Keith Turi, Fema’s acting associate administrator for response and recovery, told reporters on Monday.
Yet the agency’s funding for long-term disaster recovery efforts is running low, federal officials are warning, and Milton could compound that challenge.
Congress is on recess until after election day to place the focus on presidential campaigns, but Joe Biden on Friday warned that he may reconvene lawmakers to approve additional funding.
Storms in quick sequence can also put pressure on personnel levels, whether from local government groups or mutual aid groups, charities and other private aid organizations.
“You’ve got a limited number of people in any one place who can pick up trash, who can fix utilities, who can fix roofs and plumbing,” said Sarah Labowitz, disaster expert and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “You can deploy people from around the region to help in the recovery, especially if they are not affected as badly. But when you layer on top of that a second storm, the number of people who are out of their homes or without power or childcare goes up.”
Another challenge: managing insurance costs. Estimates show Hurricane Helene caused up to $47.5bn in losses for property owners, and some Florida residents could face additional damage due to Milton.
“Insurance markets already under siege from climate-related disasters are likely to buckle further under the weight of claims from these back-to-back storms,” said Rachel Cleetus, climate and energy policy director at the environmental non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists.
Repeat disasters can also put huge strain on local economies, healthcare systems and social networks. Hurricanes can result in thousands of additional deaths over the coming years, an analysis published in the journal Nature on Wednesday suggests.
As the planet continues to warm, primarily due to emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, back-to-back hurricanes are expected to become more common.
In some areas, including the Gulf coast, such one-two punches could occur as often as once every three years, according to a 2023 article from researchers at Princeton University.
Some regions have already seen multiple disasters in quick succession. In 2008, parts of Louisiana faced Hurricanes Ike and Gustav, and in 2005, many Louisianans were hit by Hurricane Rita shortly after the historically destructive Katrina.
A resident of Houston, Texas, Labowitz has seen these challenges firsthand. This July, Hurricane Beryl pounded the area, just weeks after a powerful derecho. Many as a result endured two power outages in two months, and the psychological toll was also “major”, said Labowitz.
“That kind of back-to-back disaster, it just compounds every aspect of recovery,” she said. “It puts a strain on local resources and equipment and technology and the power grid … and it also puts a real strain on people and communities.”
In preparation for more repeat disasters in the coming years, lawmakers should increase disaster preparedness efforts and invest in improved forecasting, said Cleetus. And boosting climate resilience funding “to keep communities safe ahead of time is also paramount”, she said.
Right now, the primary goal is to “minimize any potential loss of life”, Turi said on Monday’s press call.
“We can rebuild, we can repair, we can deal with the aftermath,” he said. “If we can’t keep people safe in these few days, there’s nothing we can do about it after that.”
As written by Bill McKibben in The Guardian, in an article entitled Our dystopian climate isn’t just about fires and floods. It’s about society fracturing; “Even as the good people of Florida’s west coast pulled the soggy mattresses from Helene out to the curb, Milton appeared on the horizon this week – a double blast of destruction from the Gulf of Mexico that’s a reminder that physics takes no time off, not even in the weeks before a crucial election. My sense is that those storms will help turn the voting on 5 November into a climate election of sorts, even if – as is likely – neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump spend much time in the next 25 days talking about CO2 or solar power.
That’s because these storms show not only the power of global heating (Helene’s record rains, and Milton’s almost unprecedented intensification, were reminders of what it means to have extremely hot ocean temperatures). More, they show what we’re going to need to survive the now inevitable train of such disasters. Which is solidarity. Which is something only one ticket offers.
I confess that I’ve been all in to beat Trump for any number of reasons – Third Act, the group I founded to organize Americans over age 60 for action on climate and democracy, has been flooding the swing states with hundreds of thousands of postcards, and our silver wave door-knocking tour hits Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada in the days ahead But if there was one way to sum up what this election means to me, it would be: solidarity. In the 40 years since Ronald Reagan’s election, we’ve gone a long way down the path of hyper-individual, everyone for themselves. Joe Biden has tried to wrench the wheel back towards the FDR America-as-group-project model with tools like the spending in the Inflation Reduction Act, but it’s a work in progress. The climate crisis, above all, requires the return of that solidarity.
That’s because there’s no way to keep it from getting worse without joint public action: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us we have five years left to cut emissions in half, which means it will not be accomplished one Tesla at a time; it requires aggressive public action of the kind the current White House is coordinating, as it sets up battery factories and shepherds new transmission lines through various regulatory fences.
But there’s also no way to survive it, even in its current form, without intense cooperation. To give one example: Florida’s insurance system is clearly breaking down, as one storm after another drives private insurers out of the state.
As the Tampa newspaper put it in June: “As the crisis escalates, state leaders are desperately trying to convince insurance companies to stick around. States are offering them more flexibility to raise premiums or drop certain homes from coverage, fast-tracking rate revisions and making it harder for residents to sue their insurance company.” But as that seawall begins to fail, “a flood of new policyholders are joining state-backed insurance ‘plans of last resort’, leaving states to assume more of the risk on behalf of residents who can’t find coverage in the private sector.”
Indeed, so many people are swamping the “state-backed insurance plans” they’re becoming overloaded with risk. Ten months ago, the Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse and his budget committee colleagues wrote to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, to ask for proof that Florida’s public Citizens Insurance could survive disasters like the one now bearing down on Tampa. DeSantis may have given his most eloquent response in May, when he signed a bill essentially outlawing the phrase “climate change” in Florida statutes. “I’m not a global warming person,” he explained.
Meanwhile, across the upland terrain drenched by Helene, rightwing forces have been relentlessly spreading rumors: most prominently, that the Federal Emergency Management Administration (Fema) spent all its money on migrants and has none left for Americans. This is not true. (Indeed, its closest approach to truth came during the Trump years when Fema did divert relief funds to “tighten the border”.) But it’s one more way to divide people, to use their very real trauma for political gain.
The dystopian future is not just about the endless fires and floods; it’s also about a society that pulls apart in their face, where people can’t work together because they’ve been so divided by disinformation and hate. It feels like Harris and Tim Walz are offering, above all, one last chance at an America where people actually work together on things, a United States. They even imagine a world where the world keeps working together, imagine that – one where we have, say, effective climate negotiations. That these things seem farfetched to us now is probably the strongest proof of how much they’re needed.”
As written by Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian, in an article entitled Hurricane Helene is a humanitarian crisis – and a climate disaster: Behind the violence of extreme weather is that of the fossil fuel industry, and Americans are suffering for it; “The weather we used to have shaped the behavior of the water we used to have – how much and when it rained, how dry it got, when and how slowly the snow in the heights melted, what fell as rain and fell as snow. Climate chaos is changing all that, breaking the patterns, delivering water in torrents unprecedented in recorded history or withholding it to create epic droughts, while heat-and-drought-parched soil, grasslands and forests create ideal conditions for mega-wildfires.
Water in the right time and quantity is a blessing; in the wrong ones it’s a scourge and a destroying force, as we’ve seen recently with floods around the world. In the vice-presidential debate, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, noted that his state’s farmers “know climate change is real. They’ve seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods, back to back.” Farmers around the world are dealing with flood, drought and unseasonable weather that impacts their ability to produce food and protect soil.
The rainfall from Hurricane Helene turned into a torrent on the Nolichucky River in east Tennessee that at its height was almost twice the normal flow of Niagara Falls. The water in that river and others overtopped dams and triggered fears that they might break. In western North Carolina, the French Broad River, which runs through Asheville, crested at an unprecedented level, thanks to dozens of inches of rain in the surrounding mountains draining fast into its tributaries.
Water became a violent force tearing apart buildings, streets and neighborhoods, and drowning humans and animals, while winds toppled trees across the region, the grip of their roots weakened by the rain-saturated soil. Roads, bridges, transmission lines and crucial infrastructure were swept away or smashed. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimate that “climate change may have caused as much as 50% more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. Furthermore, we estimate that the observed rainfall was made up to 20 times more likely in these areas because of global warming.”
The sheer amount of water Helene dumped across its 500-mile path is staggering: 40tn gallons, one scientist calculated, the equivalent of pouring the entire contents of Lake Tahoe over the region, enough water to cover the entire state of North Carolina in water 3.5ft deep. “Water is life” became a key slogan at the Dakota Access pipeline protests in 2016, but it can also be a deadly force. One of the ironies of the current situation in Asheville, North Carolina, and other hurricane-and-flood-impacted towns is that water is everywhere – muddy, contaminated water – but with broken water mains, power outages and contaminated sources, water to drink and wash with is scarce.
Floods are not new, but the intensity and frequency of catastrophic flooding is. The climate crisis is a water crisis
There have been deluges in the region before, but this was a climate disaster. Around the world, catastrophic flooding is wrecking whole regions – perhaps the worst of all were the 2022 floods that covered a third of Pakistan, but the April-May floods in southern Brazil were a catastrophe that “displaced more than 80,000 people, led to over 150,000 being injured and, on the 29th of May, to 169 fatalities with 44 people still missing” as of June.
Repeated floods in New England and the Houston region are among the US’s climate disasters, while the UK and continental Europe, Japan and several African nations, including Mozambique and Kenya this year, have been hit hard by flooding.
Only last month, according to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, “In Chad, where an estimated 1.5 million people have been affected, initial assessments point to the destruction of over 164,000 homes, with all 23 provinces of the country involved, and Tandjile, Mayo-Kebbi Est, Logone and Lac among the most afflicted provinces. Over 259,000 hectares of croplands have been wiped out, heightening the risk of food shortages in a country already grappling with chronic food insecurity.” Floods are not new, but the intensity and frequency of catastrophic flooding is. The climate crisis is a water crisis.
We now live on a more violent planet than the one we left behind a few decades ago, the one we will look back on as peaceful, gentle, predictable. More violent, more unpredictable, more chaotic, more destructive, more dangerous. Some of that danger is heat itself, but water is proving to be a major part of climate crisis. The basic equation cited by climate scientists is that warmer air holds more water. “For every degree celsius that Earth’s atmospheric temperature rises, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere can increase by about 7%, according to the laws of thermodynamics,” says Nasa.
Which means more warming will create more rainfall – but the climate crisis also shifts wind and ocean currents, making how and where that rainfall arrives unpredictable. The old terminology of “hundred-” and “thousand-year” events no longer makes sense, now that they are happening so often.
Behind the violence of climate-driven extreme weather is the violence of the fossil fuel industry, whose scientists clearly recognized climate change’s coming impact and whose leaders decided to go for it. Their signature is on these storms, on the smashed homes and smashed lives, the miles of mud, the pools of filthy water, the broken power stations and broken forests.
We now understand climate change, both causes and impacts, with precision, and we know what the solutions are, and we also know the obstacles to those solutions. None is greater than the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who serve it.”
Earth’s ‘vital signs’ show humanity’s future in balance, say climate experts
Record emissions, temperatures and population mean more scientists are looking into possibility of societal collapse, report says
Israel unleashes the Nothing to consume us all in tides of nihilistic savagery, atrocities, terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, fiendishly designed by Hitler and Franco as the doctrine of Total War and tested at Guernica to subjugate us through abjection, despair, and learned helplessness, for Israel is an empire of dehumanization and theft of the soul.
All of this I defy.
In Palestine and Lebanon, and throughout a world shadowed by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and imprisoned, Occupied, or in the path of imperial conquest and dominion by carceral states of force and control, enemies of humankind and our universal human rights sow division, weaponizing ideas of faith, race, and national identity in service to power.
This we must resist.
When they come for us, as those who would enslave us always have and will, let them find not a humankind which has abandoned hope and each other, but a United Humankind and a band of brothers, sisters, and others who are unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit. Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
This let us defend.
“When there is no hope, one can do impossible things, glorious things”; so said Jean Genet to me in Beirut 1982, as we refused to surrender to IDF and were about to be burned alive as they had set fire to our cafe. I have lived by this principle for forty two years of liberation struggle, as the nations of Lebanon and Palestine do now, and I with them once again and always.
This I advise as a principle of action, with one thing more; Solidarity. If we abandon not our fellows, and refuse to submit, we become Unconquered and free. And we will one day seize power from those who would enslave us. For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of October 17 2023, Chaos Is the Great Hope of the Powerless: Case of the Hamas-Israel War; A wise friend has questioned my valorization of Chaos as a principle of change in the context of Black Saturday, a term which describes the Hamas attack on Israel and the immense forces of terror, death, destruction, fracture, grief, rage, and revenge it unleashed, becoming a single tide of darkness.
Thank you once again for your kindness and your wisdom.
In this moment of tragedy I am thinking of Chaos as a disruptive force of fracture and change which has stripped us bare of our ideologies to reveal the fragile humanity beneath, and may be leveraged for liberty or tyranny by how we respond as a species and global civilization. As Guillermo del Toro writes in Carnival Row, Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.
What do I hope for now, for the peoples of Israel and Palestine? That both may unite to free each other, but first we will need universal humanitarian aid to any one on either side of these lines of division, and a Reckoning for the war crimes of both Hamas and Israel. For Israel took the bait, and gave Hamas the victory; they are now equal as war criminals without legitimacy.
Israel took the bait, and the world is calling them out for war crimes; this may be end of the Netanyahu alt right regime and the dawn of a new Middle East. I was absolutely expecting Biden and allies to enable Israel’s Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem; in this I rejoice to be wrong about human nature. Maybe the idea of human rights is not dead. As my mother used to sing to students who asked her to make authorizing statements about anything, artifact of a Shakespeare in Thirty Minutes theatrical show that toured nationally with some of her students in it, bouncing her open hands left and right; Maybe, maybe not, Maybe, maybe not.
No one seems to have noticed publicly that this means Israeli intelligence has been infiltrated. It is also possible that unknown puppetmasters have infiltrated and seized control of both Hamas and Israel, for purposes which are unclear and antithetical to the interests and well being of either. We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, friends.
What Reckoning, for crimes against humanity by an organization of terror which has long been a vanguard of anticolonial revolutionary struggle under the imposed conditions of Occupation, slavery, and a genocidal Blockade?
Not the totalization of the general population of Palestinians in a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing as Netanyahu wishes and Hamas intends as a strategy of delegitimation of the Israel state in the moral equivalence of terror, for if Israel, her patron America, and the international community accept the terms of struggle offered by Hamas they too become organizations of terror, and Hamas wins.
This is a decolonial revolution, and victory goes to the side who can establish the legitimacy and moral supremacy of their story. As my father taught me, Never play someone else’s game.
Hamas also wishes in this provocation to weld the peoples of Gaza to them; this is a primary strategy of fascism and tyranny, to make the people in whose name you claim to act complicit in unforgiveable crimes. Always beware those who claim to speak and act in your name as a strategy of your subjugation.
A third layer of meaning here is the ambiguity of the geopolitical and world-historical forces beyond the Holy Land; Russia, her ally Iran and the Iranian Dominion of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, especially the Assad regime of Syria which has sent forces into Israel as a client state of Russia and Iran, and Hezbollah, which offers many of the social services of a government and may be in the process of emergence as an independent state, or a true empire in the transnational sense like the Holy Roman Empire. The great question here is; has Russia opened a new front of her plan of global conquest and made this a theatre of World War Three?
How does one answer all of this? How bring a Reckoning for the terror of Hamas without authorizing and becoming complicit in the greater terror of Israel’s looming genocide of the Palestinians?
The forms that might take give me pause, for they will determine our future, and though I know what I myself must do, I do not like it, and am calling out here in my journals, where I work through the consequences of my decisions before acting on them, for unknown possibilities I myself cannot envision.
Yes, my friend, Chaos has profoundly destructive forms; death among them, ruin and civilizational collapse, the negation of all we have claimed as our identity, but all are also measures of the adaptive range of systems, and can give birth to new forms from this liberated energy. And as you point out, all forces operate in opposite directions at once, creating their own opposition. These are not moral forces in balance, but ambivalent forces which contain each other in recursion.
So, while our nations try to shatter each other’s truths with overwhelming force and mass terror, I must find a path of least force to salvage what I can of our humanity, and I hope I will not fail as I did at Mariupol and Panjshir.
This may be all we have as humans lost in chasms of darkness and a Wilderness of Mirrors, this refusal to abandon each other to dehumanization, but like our refusal to submit to authority it is a power which cannot be taken from us, even in imposed conditions of struggle designed to produce abjection and learned helplessness, or rage and tribalization as identity politics and the manufacture of consent to be fed into engines of death for the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and tyrannies.
Such ephemeral and insubstantial things, like whispered prayers to abyssal unknowns, figments of love, hope, faith, which belong to the shadows, the delusions of grandeur of beasts harnessed to systems of oppression by others who yet dream that we might become more.
Dream with me.
Embrace our absurdity as flawed things wrestling with immense forces of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization in a mad quest to become human, under imposed conditions of struggle typified by atrocities designed to produce abjection, learned helplessness, and despair, as we are consumed by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege whose primary weapon is division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as identity politics and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Against all of this we have only our solidarity with each other, the redemptive power of love, our refusal to submit or to believe and trust authority which frees us as Unconquered and self created beings and Living Autonomous Zones, and our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves. Powers which cannot be taken from us, and which can seize the power of those who would enslave us.
This is why I practice the art of believing impossible things, but only those I myself have chosen or created. And crucially, act to make them real. And in this case we must bring a Reckoning to the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity regardless of who they may be or in the name of what cause they act, and silence the drums of war.
Dream with me, but act in solidarity to make it real.
As the Mad Hatter says to Alice; “That is an excellent practice, but right now you might want to focus on the Jabberwock.”
Just so.
Confronting the Jabberwock
Arabic
6 أكتوبر 2024 حول حرب إسرائيل ضد الإنسانية
تطلق إسرائيل العنان للعدم لتلتهمنا جميعًا في موجات من الوحشية العدمية والفظائع والإرهاب والتطهير العرقي والإبادة الجماعية، التي صممها هتلر وفرانكو بوحشية باعتبارها مبدأ الحرب الشاملة واختبرتها في جيرنيكا لإخضاعنا من خلال الذل واليأس والعجز المكتسب، لأن إسرائيل إمبراطورية نزع الإنسانية وسرقة الروح.
أتحدى كل هذا.
في فلسطين ولبنان، وفي جميع أنحاء العالم الذي تخيم عليه فاشيات الدم والإيمان والأرض والسجن والاحتلال، أو في طريق الغزو الإمبراطوري والهيمنة من قبل دول السجن والقوة والسيطرة، يزرع أعداء البشرية وحقوق الإنسان العالمية الانقسام، ويسلحون أفكار الإيمان والعرق والهوية الوطنية في خدمة السلطة.
هذا يجب أن نقاومه.
عندما يأتون إلينا، كما فعل أولئك الذين يريدون استعبادنا دائمًا وسيفعلون، فلن يجدوا بشرًا تخلوا عن الأمل وعن بعضهم البعض، بل بشرًا متحدين ومجموعة من الإخوة والأخوات وغيرهم ممن لا يمكن قهرهم في التضامن ورفض الاستسلام. لماذا يجب أن نكون سجانين لبعضنا البعض، وليس محررين لبعضنا البعض؟
دعونا ندافع عن هذا.
Hebrew
6 באוקטובר 2024 על מלחמת ישראל מול האנושות
ישראל משחררת את הכלום כדי לצרוך את כולנו בגאות של פראות ניהיליסטית, זוועות, טרור, טיהור אתני ורצח עם, שתוכנן באכזריות על ידי היטלר ופרנקו כדוקטרינת המלחמה הטוטאלית ונבדקה בגרניקה כדי להכניע אותנו באמצעות חוסר אונים, ייאוש וחוסר אונים נלמד. , כי ישראל היא אימפריה של דה-הומניזציה וגניבת נפש.
את כל זה אני מתריס.
בפלסטין ולבנון, וברחבי העולם המוצל על ידי פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה וכלואים, כבושים, או בדרך של כיבוש ושליטה אימפריאלית על ידי מדינות קרסראליות של כוח ושליטה, אויבי המין האנושי וזכויות האדם האוניברסאליות שלנו זורעים. חלוקה, מימוש רעיונות של אמונה, גזע וזהות לאומית בשירות לשלטון.
לזה עלינו להתנגד.
כשהם באים בשבילנו, כפי שתמיד עשו וירצו מי שיעבדו אותנו, הבה ימצאו לא מין אנושי שנטש את התקווה וזה את זה, אלא המין האנושי המאוחד וחבורת אחים, אחיות ואחרים שאי אפשר לכבוש בסולידריות. וסירוב להגיש. מדוע עלינו להיות כלואים זה של זה, ולא המשחררים זה של זה?
זה נותן לנו להגן.
Progressive Democrats bring resolution calling for ceasefire in Israel-Hamas war
In Palestine and Lebanon, our taxes buy the deaths of children. And their mothers, among other civilian noncombatants.
Among all of the negation of our truths which Israel’s War Against Humanity has wrought, here are two truths which emerge from the legacies of our unfolding history we will never again be able to unsee or to avoid confrontation with; there is no right of defense against a people you are Occupying, and no moral equivalence between the violence used by a slavemaster and the violence used by a slave to break his chains.
In the face of mass protests throughout America and the world, met with repression of dissent and propaganda by the state and both our political parties in a Great Wall of Silence, we persist in refusing to de escalate the conflict using the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of Israel to end a genocide in which we are complicit.
America has abandoned our principles of universal rights and our duty of care for others, and any pretense to morality or legitimacy as a democracy; this was among the many goals of Black Saturday, and both Israel and America took the bait.
Where the Party of Treason and Tyranny is an enthusiastic sponsor of autocracies and state terror globally including Israel, the Democratic Party has maintained a strategic silence regarding our complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity, refusing to acknowledge it as a historical fact or the peace movement which drove Genocide Joe out of the election but replaced him with an overseer of the carceral state who wishes to rain doom upon the helpless migrants at our border and on the Palestinians whose nation is a Bantustan of slave labor and a concentration camp Occupied by an enemy to whom only their fellow Jews are truly human.
I’m calling her Kommandant Kamala, unless of course the salvation of both the Israelis and the Palestinians as equals and fellow human beings becomes the center of her campaign, rather than enforcement of our dominion at our border and in our colony of Israel.
Of course this is due to the nature and dynamics of power, and the recursive forces of fear, power, and force which act to centralize power to authority and subjugate slave castes through fear, thought control, and violence. All states are embodied violence, and in this democracies are no better than tyrannies.
We have changed so little since the Pharaohs and priest-kings of the first city-states set themselves above all others as interpreters and spokesmen of the gods, and hired brutal thugs with aristocratic titles to keep the slaves at their work. I was hoping we were better than that.
Civilization falls with the derelict antiquity of Palestine and Lebanon, as our capacity for empathy withers under forces of degradation and dehumanization. Soon we too will become nothing, like the children we murder from a sanitized remove, for whom we feel no pity, mercy, or compassion, as they not white and therefore beyond the circle of belonging and otherness on which our elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege are constructed.
The enemies of liberty wish to enslave us through divisions of ethnicity, faith, and historical national identity, and through strategies of commodification, falsification, and dehumanization, to hollow out the values of democracy through subversion and capture of our ownership of ourselves and of human being, meaning, and value. This too we must Resist.
This has been a terrible year as our humanity becomes a Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror; that which unites us as human beings has been shattered, and we are captive in the strange reflected images of its discontiguous surfaces. But we need not let this stand.
Among the first questions which confront us in bringing a Reckoning to any systems of oppression, tyranny and carceral states of force and control, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, subjugation to hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege, and violations of our universal human rights is that of just cause or casus belli; who is responsible for these crimes against humanity?
Within days of Black Saturday I was at the scene hunting the perpetrators, and what I found was a nest of vipers. What happened was a set of recursive and interdependent causes allied in a primary event of fracture and disruption which remain occluded still; including a coup within Hamas against its leadership, especially those targeted for assassination later by Israel on a false claim of having ordered the attack, by a Hamas faction opposed to peace in conspiracy with Netanyahu’s regime perpetrated this tragedy, but not alone. Several other groups, at least two who are nominally enemies, a criminal syndicate with no political ideology whatever, plus a IDF Recon team, Sayaret Shaked or a successor force, which specializes in committing atrocities against Islamic groups while disguised as Arabs to sow division, were in the lead elements of the attack force, and joined quickly by opportunists of various kinds. Within days the special operations forces of several nations were in the mix, including allies of Palestine from the Iranian Dominion of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq as well as Russian intelligence and special operations forces, possibly with some of their African allies. This means Hamas cannot free all the hostages, because some are held by groups beyond their control.
But there is more, much more; an unknown third party infiltrated both Israeli and Palestinian organizations to play them off against each other for purposes I cannot guess but are obviously inimical to both, and to global peace and security. This is a long game, and our opponent as yet remains in the shadows.
Who has both the skill and the motive to do this? Cui bono?
Netanyahu benefits, because this keeps him in power and gives him a causus belli for the imperial conquest and dominion of the Middle East and the Final Solution of the Palestinians; and his key ally Trump benefits in our election by staining the armour of Biden and Harris with cruelty and complicity in genocide, though both are trapped by decades old policies and alliances and kept in check by the vast wealth and political power of AIPAC, and both Trump and Netanyahu benefit by making the idea of human rights meaningless.
But the legitimacy of Israel and America are a cost no one in either nations governments or intelligence and special operations communities would trade for these wins, and though the Fourth Reich, by which I mean a network of descendants of actual Nazis who have infiltrated the American state and others for seventy years, of which Trump is a figurehead and the de facto Fuhrer, clearly has the Long Game plans, the resources, and the genius, evil though it may be, to do this, no Nazi would ever help the Zionist state of Israel become an empire. This leaves the Russian FSB and other intelligence agencies and Spetznaz forces, also with both the patience or vision, resources, and skill to do this, which may have been developing for decades; but Russia is committed to advancing her ally Iran’s dominion of the Middle East, which makes her the primary enemy of Israel and the Arab-American Alliance, and we have fought savage proxy wars in Syria and elsewhere to prove it.
No, our nemesis and the true perpetrator of Black Saturday is not Russia or Iran, nor the Fourth Reich, and only partially and directly Trump and Netanyahu equally with the jihadist faction of Hamas which I believe to originate with its blood enemy and rival for control of Gaza Al Qaeda; we face an unknown enemy willing to engineer a genocide to advance its mysterious goals, and all I can tell you about them is that they are far from done with us.
We live in interesting times.
Let us return to First Principles with a simple question; Who is suffering and in need of mercy? It is a similar question to the one I ask to determine when and how to use force and violence, Who holds power?, but with a very different direction as to the unfolding of our future.
Here in a Holy Land divided by the sectarian particulars of how to be human together in accord with the will of the Infinite as universal brotherhood and love, crimes which define the limits of the human are perpetrated against our most innocent, utterly powerless, and incapable of threatening anyone; children. Children whom the enemy of our humanity, the state of Israel and its sponsors including America, either brutalize and kill with glee in the hysteria of power or refuse to see and recognize in complicity. And our history surfaces one figure to represent all of the children sacrificed to power and hate, and doomed by the complicity of silence.
I ask you now, all of humankind, to abandon the path of our dehumanization and renounce genocide, ethnic cleansing, wars of conquest and dominion, and crimes against humanity.
I ask, I beg, I demand; I ask you in the name of Anne Frank.
As I wrote in my post of October 10 2024, Black Saturday: A Nation Divided Against Itself In Service To Power By Weaponized History, Faith, Race, and National Identity; Palestine Versus Israel, Liberation Struggle Versus Imperial Colonial Occupation, Round Ad Nauseum In An Endless Litany of Woes, Atrocities, and Horrors;
Forward: to my comrades in the Palestinian Resistance:
Hello everyone;
I have some thoughts on the recent events in Gaza, Gaza where I have fought and lost someone I loved, and actions by Hamas whom I have fought alongside and count as my brothers in revolutionary struggle; actions of October 7 or Black Saturday which include the taking of hostages and murder of families, war crimes which have made peace impossible in the near future and have delegitimized the cause of liberation of Palestine by making it ambiguous with dehumanization and atrocities. Such is the nature of power, and of fear weaponized in service to power.
This now is my Resistance in the cause of the peoples of Palestine and Israel, a people divided by history and sectarian theocratic terror. I question the origins and motives of such actions, which trade a tactical goal of demonstrating that Netanyahu’s alt-right monsters cannot deliver the security by which they subjugate Israel, for a strategic one of legitimacy, and will not only weld American support to the tyrant but grant him permission and immunity for the Final Solution of the Palestinian problem he has long dreamed of.
How can we salvage something of our humanity from this?
Herein I invite question, and dreams of a better future than we have the past.
Thank you for hearing me.
Hamas has brought the Chaos to the American Empire and disrupted the legitimation of Israel by the Arab American Alliance versus the Imperial Dominion of Iran, and in reaction to the relentless genocide of the Palestinians by the state of Israel now captured by Netanyahu and his alt right band of thieves.
Here now is the fulcrum of change and reckoning for seventy years of Israeli state terror and imperial conquest in an amoral and loathsome apartheid regime which inverts the values of its founding by becoming the death camps its citizens escaped, and betrays the hope and ideal of a refuge from hate and sectarian division as a reflection of the nazis from whom they have internalized oppression as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Hamas has shattered all of this, potentially, with the myth of state surveillance and control as useful and effective means of subjugation of the slave castes of any state, and the myth of the invincibility and supremacy of Israeli intelligence and military hegemony of which it is a figure of the might of carceral states, tyrannies, and empires, and the calculated reprisals by Israel which will follow are designed by Hamas in this provocation to delegitimize Israel and fracture the solidarity of her allies and collaborators in terror, of which America remains the principal sponsor and villain.
So many of the reactions to this tragedy both here among my friends and in the news media seem baffled, caught in the forks of a classic dilemma in which our heroes and our villains trade places, for in this stunning slave rebellion wherein the victims of genocide and erasure have attacked their masters, the Wretched of the Earth with whom we might normally empathize have violated two of our most cherished moral values and rules of conduct; they are not defending but attacking, which makes justifications for war and the use of social force irrelevant though this ahistorical interpretation of events ignores seventy years of oppression and authorizes the conqueror by classifying the liberation struggle of their victims as terrorism, an argument we can therefore nullify as pro Israeli misdirection and the apologetics of power, and a second and far more serious point; Hamas has taken hostages and killed civilians including children, war crimes which violate our universal human rights and place the perpetrators beyond all laws and all limits.
A friend has written an apology for statements born of compassion which might be confused with support of Israel as a state rather than as a people, a distinction which makes all the difference; and to this I have written the following reply:
There are no good guys in this story, just a people divided by history brutalizing each other with a savagery that threatens our humanity itself. I have fought in Gaza and lost someone there, and from my witness of history I say there is only one kind of truth which does not become a Rashomon Gate when faith is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, and this is true of both sides in this or any war; Who is bleeding? Who is suffering? Who requires acts of grace and mercy?
Not who merits compassion, for often there are no innocent, and as Shaw teaches us in Pygmalion with the iconic speech of Alfred Doolittle this places a moral burden on victims which is unjust; merely who is suffering and needs our help, in this moment, always the only time we have.
Solidarity of action, resistance, and liberation struggle all come after this; Tikkun Olam, a Jewish concept of reparative justice and praxis or the action of values, which I often describe as healing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
You have nothing to apologize for; states work very hard to confuse and conflate legitimation of the state with defense of those in whose name it claims to act, using narratives of victimization, for who wears the white hat is a hero and beyond question. All states do this, for it is the nature of power to become centralized to authority as force and control. Among the true horrors of identity politics is awakening to realize that one is the beneficiary of a genocide, of slavery, of patriarchy, of unequal power in any form.
So we are lost in Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, rewritten histories, falsification. But it is my fate to question all things, and many of them do not bear the test of unbelief.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
In this case I question the origins and motives of a blitzkreig which demonstrates the vulnerability of Israel, a tactical objective, at the cost of strategic goals; the immediate results include unifying global support of Israel and dividing the crucial solidarity between the anti-Netanyahu democracy and peace movements within Israel from the liberation struggle of their slave caste, the Palestinians, which was until this disruptive event in the process of becoming one united nation.
Cui Bono? Neither Palestinians nor Israelis, though in the imperial totalitarian state of Israel and its fascisms of blood, faith, and soil they share a common enemy. Netanyahu and his regime benefit, though his promise of security for the people of Israel has been proven illusory and the feared Israeli intelligence and military a paper tiger as Hamas intended; whether this weakens or strengthens his hand is yet to be seen.
Security is an illusion, one convenient for tyrants in the manufacture of consent to be subjugated. In this area of liberation struggle the victory of Hamas in breaching the Wall has been an unambiguous good.
Bring down the Wall, all the walls. Not only the walls of our borders and prisons, but the walls of ideas between peoples most of all. In the long run, only this will bring us peace and a United Humankind.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
No matter where you begin with divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Why, O Israel, reproduce the conditions of your historic trauma as the prison guards, with others cast in your former role? Why, when we could be guarantors of each other’s universal human rights in a free society of equals?
Let us emerge from the legacies of our history, and create ourselves anew.
What happens next?
Disruptive and polarizing events often confront us with a choice; who is your white hat and who your black hat in this story? Whose play will you back when they enter the arena at high noon? We will begin to become human when we free ourselves of this tyranny of good and evil, so vulnerable to the lies and misdirection of those who would enslave us and who claim to speak and act in our name, especially in theocracies. For as Voltaire wrote; “Those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities”. Gott Mitt Uns; it is the most terrible battlecry, for it authorizes anything.
Today the empire begins to strike back, as Biden declares that America will stand with Israel, with the state in exacting revenge through conquest and not her people in freeing the hostages mind you, in the abominable reprisals Netanyahu promises, having been handed by his enemies immunity and sanction for the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem he has so long dreamed of. Both this immediate trigger event of Total War as a doctrine created by Hitler and Franco and tested at Guernica and the conditions which created it are consequences of American complicity, for we as a nation have failed to enact the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction policies against Israeli state terror and tyranny which might have prevented it, and if we are to be liberators and not conquerors we must at minimum now pressure Israel to lift the Blockade of Gaza and recognize Hamas as its legitimate government. Let us send humanitarian aid, not armies.
If we send warships to help Israel conquer Palestine, and not humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, America loses and our enemies win.
Netanyahu and Biden have declared intentions to answer force and fear with greater force and fear, as Israel accepts the offer of the moral equivalence of terror by her partner in this dance, Hamas. This will bring not lesser but greater terror, not democracy and a free society of equals but the centralization of power to totalitarian states of force and control. From the perspective of Israel and America or of any state, this is the true purpose of external threats.
As my father once said; “Politics is the art of fear, and fear is the basis of human exchange. Fear is an untrustworthy servant and a terrible master; so, whose instrument will it be?”
Of the recursive forces of fear, power, and force which are the true origin of evil and of its forms as violence, war, and police states, I say to you this one true thing; fear and force cannot answer fear and force. Only love can do this, and the redemptive power of love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of Power, from falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Why are we each others jailors, and not each others liberators?
Here is the memorial I wrote for my friend, assassinated in Gaza by an Israeli sniper during the fighting in 2021; June 21 2022, We Balance the Terror of Our Nothingness With the Joy of Total Freedom, the Flaws of Our Humanity With the Redemptive Power of Love, and the Brokenness of the World With Our Absurd Hope For the Limitless Possibilities of Becoming Human; Death is the ultimate life disruptive event, the mirror image of Chaos as creative force and the adaptive potential of a system.
This day I have re-enacted the stages of grief process as I relive an event of a year ago, caught in the labyrinth of its story, and as always with such complexes of memory, history, and identity I emerge through its passage with changed perspective.
Some stories can shatter our lives, but also free us from the legacies of history and the limits of our former selves.
This is a story which has become interwoven with my annual reading of Sartre’s works in celebration of his birthday, a juxtaposition which I find wholly appropriate, illuminating, and strangely hopeful.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
We choose our friends and lovers from among those reflections which embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves or fully integrate into our consciousness and personality; and it is the interface between these two bounded realms, the Ideal and the Real, which I am driven to interrogate today.
Here is where the art of questioning lives, at the intersection of Socratic method and classical rhetoric, the dialectics of history, and the problematization of our motives, feelings, and processes of ideation through the methods of psychotherapy.
We speak of the juxtaposition of imaginal and actual realms of being as a form of Dadaist collage as pioneered by Tristan Tzara and instrumentalized as methodology by William S. Burroughs which creates the universe of our experience, of the discontiguous, relative, ambiguous, and ephemeral nature of truth described by Akutagawa in Rashomon Gate and the methods of fiction exemplified by Raymond Queneau as applied to identity and self construal, and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty as dyadic forces of the psyche which work themselves out through our relationships with ourselves and with others. These three parallel and interdependent processes shape who we become, and how we instrumentalize others in our self creation.
We must first own the fact that dealing with our memories of someone is not the same as the lived experience of our history; it is all one sided and has been moved into an interior space of performance, and in which reimagination and transformation is ongoing. The map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski teaches us, nor is our idea of a person equal to the actual person themselves.
What parts of myself do I embody as a figural space into which to grow in the character whom I have thought of as Cleopatra, with all of the ambivalence, power, legacies of cultural history, and liminality such an identification implies, how do I imagine her now, and what kind of story have I cast us in?
I think of her now in terms of Rachel McAdams’ wily, sophisticated, and transgressive Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, as she became throughout the twelve years of our work in liberation struggle for the independence of Palestine, with elements of Millie Bobby Brown’s fearless, brilliant, and utterly without boundaries Enola Holmes as she began, bearing onward the colours of a beloved and presumed martyred family member in the course of investigating his disappearance. I am reasonably certain that this is not how she saw herself.
For illumination as to how a Palestinian woman might imagine herself, the characters she may choose to play as role models and the stories she may embody as ritual enactments, even a highly unusual one such as she, we may look to the wonderfully rich culture of Palestine’s female film directors and authors; of auteurs Annemarie Jacir, Maysaloun Hamoud, Mai Masri, and Farah Nabulsi, and of novelists Susan Abulhawa, Liana Badr, Ghada Karmi, Sahar Khalifeh, Hala Alyan, and Sahar Mustafah.
Bearing in mind that all such reading lists are nothing less than a set of authorized identities. As Margaret Atwood so splendidly demonstrates in her works, our intertexts are primary in the construction of our identities, including those of sex and gender, as mimesis and as dialectical processes of history.
And this is where it never ceases to be fascinating, the study of human being, meaning, and value and the limitless possibilities of becoming human. For in the sphere of our relationships with others, parallel and interdependent with our relationships between the masculine and feminine halves of our psyche, each co-evolves with the other in recursive processes of growth and adaptation to change in the construction of identity.
I say again; we interpret the actions of others and form relationships on the basis of our self-construal and ideas of ourselves, and we use our relations with real people to shape who we wish to become.
How does this work out in real life? As a personal example of the discontiguous gaps of meaning in the interfaces between bounded realms of masculine and feminine personae, a free space of creative play, I offer the artifacts of memory of a figure which may or may not align with the martyr I know only by her Code Name: Cleopatra.
Of the Last Stand in which we met and forged an alliance, betrayed and caught in a trap which we turned against our enemies who had trapped themselves in with us, which I think of as the final battle scene in the film Mr & Mrs Smith, this operatic quest was set in motion by the conflict of dominion between Hamas and al Qaeda in Gaza during August of 2009, during which the forces of light prevailed over those of darkness in the victory of Hamas, with Israel playing each against the other through infiltration agents, spies, deniable assets, and use of a special Recon team masquerading as various Arab factions to commit atrocities against presumed rival Arab groups in a classic policy of divide and conquer. This space of play was complicated by clan vendettas such as hers, and the usual political and religious fragmentation, crime syndicates, mercenary forces, tribalism, corruption, and the shadow wars of foreign states.
Our paths crossed several times over the next twelve years, always in memorable circumstances, sometimes as allies and others as rivals, often as both. Which of these is the real and true version of her, or of myself? Such iterations of our images are without number, like the captured and distorted selves in funhouse mirrors aligned to reflect into infinity.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I contrast with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, evil genius of the C.I.A.’s Counterintelligence Service on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
The Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat uses the phrase, in a story about the creation of a fictitious officer bearing documents designed to trick the Nazis into preparing for the invasion of Europe somewhere other than Sicily, a series I watched with rapt attention because each of us is created by our stories exactly like this false identity attached to the body of a derelict. Within each of us, a team of authors, archetypes and transpersonal figures like the anima which concerns us here, create our personae through stories, a network of memories, histories, and identity; and they do so for their own purposes, which we do not always understand.
As T. S. Eliot has written in Gerontin, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities”
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as Shakespeare teaches us in Act IV, Scene 1 of The Tempest, a line spoken by Ariel. For if we are ephemeral and insubstantial beings, constructions of our stories, this also means that the ontological nature of human being is a ground of struggle which can be claimed by seizures of power.
The first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
As I wrote in my post of June 21 2021, The Hope of Humankind: On Becoming Autonomous Zones as Agents of Chaos and Transformative Change; A friend has written in despair of our significance and hope for the liberation of humankind, of the impactfulness of our lives and our struggles which balance the flaws of our humanity against the monstrous and vast forces of a system of dehumanization, falsification, and commodification; for to be human is to live in a state of existential crisis and struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Today is the birthday of Jean Paul Sartre, and so this event finds me reading once again his magnificent reimagination of Jean Genet in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr; Genet who set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982.
Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.
We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said “Fix bayonets?”
And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty nine years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the first of many Last Stands.
This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell with its iconic crack, I am broken open to the suffering of others and the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.
This morning I awoke to a call to identify the body of a friend missing and believed killed in Gaza by Israeli terrorists in the savage street fighting which followed the rocket attacks of last week, which I was unable to do; I searched for my friend in this sad and ruined form, like the skin of a wild thing which has sung itself utterly away, and could recognize nothing.
Where is my friend, agile, lithe, mercurial, fearless, insightful and quick witted, who always had four scenarios running and three escape routes, who survived against impossible odds through improvisation and leveraging chaos, whose vision could discern true motives within the secret chambers of the human heart and play them like an instrument as songs of rapture and terror, who chameleon-like and protean could shift identities as needed and behind their masks move among her enemies unseen?
I never knew her true name; perhaps she no longer had one, as is true for so many of us who play the Great Game of futures and the possibilities of becoming human, a term popularized by Rudyard Kipling in the novel Kim. My own names are numberless as the stars, like those of an actor who has played multitudes of roles in films and theatres of many kinds.
She first entered my orbit during the victorious struggle of Hamas against al Qaeda for dominion of Gaza in August of 2009 in Rafah, an Egyptian Palestinian drawn into the maelstrom of war like countless others by family duty and vendetta.
Yet she said no to Israeli authority at great peril when she could have said yes and become a slave, stood in solidarity with others when she could have run; this was a choice, one which confers agency, autonomy, and self-ownership as a seizure of power in a limited and deterministic context. Refusal to submit is the primary human act, one which cannot be taken from us, wherein we become Unconquered and free, and able to liberate others.
So it is that we may escape the wilderness of mirrors in which we wander, a realm of lies and illusions, captured and distorted images, falsification and the theft of the soul. For the authentic self, the image which we seize and claim as our own, flies free of its mad circus of seductions and traps. Hence we achieve our true selves and form, in rapture and exaltation as beings of our own uniqueness.
Impossible that such grandeur could be reduced to its material form, like the abandoned shell of a fantastic sea creature which has grown beyond its limits and moved on, to realms unknown.
The lines spoken by Hamlet while holding the skull of his friend Yorick came unbidden to my thoughts; “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?”
For twelve years you danced with death, and danced away laughing, until today.
Farewell, my friend; I’ll see you in the eyes of the defiant ones, who bear your fire onward into the unknown, and with it I hope your laughter. Our successors will need both fire and laughter, if the future we win for them is to be equal to its price, and worth living in.
Our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus from which warriors arise; from each, multitudes. For we live on as echoes and reflections in the lives of others, in the consequences and effects of our actions, in the good we can do for others which gathers force over time, and in the meaning, value, and possibilities we create.
How can choosing death and freedom be better than submission to authority and its weaponization of fear and force?
My experience of accepting death in confronting force and violence finds parallels in the mock executions of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maurice Blanchot, and I’m not done challenging state terror and tyranny and forces of repression. I’m going to stand between people with guns and their victims in future, as I have many times in past, and here I find resilience among my motivating and informing sources; Sartre’s total freedom won by refusal to submit, and Camus’ rebellion against authority which renders force meaningless when met by disobedience, give me the ability to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
And all who are mortal share these burdens with me. In this all who resist subjugation by authority are alike as Living Autonomous Zones, bearing seeds of change; we can say with the figure of Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
We are all Nikolai Gogol’s hero in Diary of a Madman, caught in the wheels of a great machine he services, like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. But we know that we are trapped and enslaved, and we know how and why; we know the secrets of our condition which our masters would keep silent, and in refusing to be silent we can free ourselves and our fellows. This Michel Foucault called truth telling; a poetic vision of reimagination and sacred calling to pursue the truth which bears transformative power.
So here I offer all of you words of hope for moments of despair, the horror of meaninglessness, the grief of loss, and the guilt of survivorship.
Your voice has defied our nothingness, and resounds throughout the chasms of a hostile and dehumanizing world; gathering force and transformative power as it finds a thousand echoes, and begins to awaken refusal to submit to authority and to heal the pathology of our falsification and disconnectedness.
The voice of even one human being who bears a wound of humanity which opens him to the pain of others and who places his life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who in resistance to tyranny and terror, force and control, becomes unconquered and free, such a voice of liberation is unstoppable as the tides, an agent of reimagination and transformation which seizes the gates of our prisons and frees the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Despair not and be joyful, for we who are living Autonomous Zones help others break the chains of their enslavement simply by condition of being as well as action; for we violate norms, transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, expose the lies and illusions of authority, and render the forces of repression powerless to compel obedience.
This is the primary revolutionary struggle which precedes and underlies all else; the seizure of ownership of ourselves from those who would enslave us.
Such is the hope of humankind.
Diary of Anne Frank full movie 2009
The Wilderness of Mirrors; why are we each others jailors, and not each others liberators?
“The White House has released a statement from the US president, Joe Biden, on the anniversary of the Hamas-led 7 October attacks on southern Israel.
Biden said:
On this day last year, the sun rose on what was supposed to be a joyous Jewish holiday. By sunset, October 7 had become the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Today marks one year of mourning for the more than 1,200 innocent people of all ages, including 46 Americans, massacred in southern Israel by the terrorist group Hamas. One year since Hamas committed horrific acts of sexual violence.
One year since more than 250 innocents were taken hostage, including 12 Americans. One year for the survivors carrying wounds, seen and unseen, who will never be the same. And one year of a devastating war. On this solemn anniversary, let us bear witness to the unspeakable brutality of the October 7th attacks but also to the beauty of the lives that were stolen that day…
I believe that history will also remember October 7th as a dark day for the Palestinian people because of the conflict that Hamas unleashed that day. Far too many civilians have suffered far too much during this year of conflict — and tens of thousands have been killed, a human toll made far worse by terrorists hiding and operating among innocent people.
We will not stop working to achieve a ceasefire deal in Gaza that brings the hostages home, allows for a surge in humanitarian aid to ease the suffering on the ground, assures Israel’s security, and ends this war. Israelis and Palestinians alike deserve to live in security, dignity, and peace.”
Statement by Vice President Harris Marking One Year Since the October 7th Attack
“I will never forget the horror of October 7, 2023. 1,200 innocent people, including 46 Americans, were massacred by Hamas terrorists. Women raped on the side of the road. 250 people kidnapped. It was the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. What Hamas did that day was pure evil – it was brutal and sickening. And it has rekindled a deep fear among the Jewish people not just in Israel, but in the United States and around the world.
The long, extraordinary arc of Jewish history is full of pogroms and prejudice, slaughter and separation. And now, in our own generation, there is another moment that the world must never forget.
I am devastated by the loss and pain of the Israeli people as a result of the heinous October 7 attack. Doug and I pray for the families of the victims and hope they find solace in remembering the lives their loved ones lived.
We also pray for the safety of Jewish people all around the world. We all must ensure nothing like the horrors of October 7 ever happen again. I will do everything in my power to ensure that the threat Hamas poses is eliminated, that it is never again able to govern Gaza, that it fails in its mission to annihilate Israel, and that the people of Gaza are free from the grip of Hamas. I will never stop fighting for the release of all the hostages, including the seven American citizens, living and deceased, still held: Omer, Edan, Sagui, Keith, Judy, Gad, and Itay. I will never stop fighting for justice for those who murdered Hersh Goldberg-Polin and other Americans. And I will always ensure Israel has what it needs to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists like Hamas. My commitment to the security of Israel is unwavering.
Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7 launched a war in Gaza. I am heartbroken over the scale of death and destruction in Gaza over the past year—tens of thousands of lives lost, children fleeing for safety over and over again, mothers and fathers struggling to obtain food, water, and medicine. It is far past time for a hostage and ceasefire deal to end the suffering of innocent people. And I will always fight for the Palestinian people to be able to realize their right to dignity, freedom, security, and self-determination. We also continue to believe that a diplomatic solution across the Israel-Lebanon border region is the only path to restore lasting calm and allow residents on both sides to return safely to their homes.
Today, as we mourn the lives lost on October 7, I know many Jews will be reciting and reflecting on the Jewish prayer for mourning – the Kaddish. The words of the Kaddish, however, are not about death. The prayer is about still believing in God and still having faith. I know that is difficult amidst so much trauma and pain. But it is with that spirit that I commemorate this solemn day. We will not forget, and we will not lose faith. And in honor of all those souls we lost on October 7, we must never lose sight of the dream of peace, dignity, and security for all.”
World leaders mark first anniversary of 7 October attack on Israel
في فلسطين ولبنان، تشتري ضرائبنا موت الأطفال. وأمهاتهم، من بين المدنيين غير المقاتلين الآخرين.
من بين كل إنكار حقائقنا الذي أحدثته حرب إسرائيل ضد الإنسانية، هناك حقيقتان تنبثقان من إرث تاريخنا المتكشف لن نتمكن أبدًا من تجاهلهما أو تجنب المواجهة معهما؛ لا يوجد حق للدفاع ضد شعب تحتله، ولا يوجد تكافؤ أخلاقي بين العنف الذي يستخدمه سيد العبيد والعنف الذي يستخدمه العبد لكسر سلاسله.
في مواجهة الاحتجاجات الجماهيرية في جميع أنحاء أمريكا والعالم، والتي قوبلت بقمع المعارضة والدعاية من قبل الدولة وكلا حزبينا السياسيين في جدار الصمت العظيم، نستمر في رفض تصعيد الصراع باستخدام مقاطعة وسحب الاستثمارات وفرض العقوبات على إسرائيل لإنهاء الإبادة الجماعية التي نحن متواطئون فيها.
لقد تخلت أمريكا عن مبادئنا المتعلقة بالحقوق العالمية وواجبنا في رعاية الآخرين، وأي تظاهر بالأخلاق أو الشرعية كديمقراطية؛ وكان هذا من بين الأهداف العديدة للسبت الأسود، وقد ابتلعت كل من إسرائيل وأمريكا الطُعم.
حيث يعتبر حزب الخيانة والاستبداد راعيًا متحمسًا للأنظمة الاستبدادية والإرهاب الدولي على مستوى العالم بما في ذلك إسرائيل، فقد حافظ الحزب الديمقراطي على صمت استراتيجي فيما يتعلق بتواطؤنا في الإبادة الجماعية والجرائم ضد الإنسانية، رافضًا الاعتراف بها كحقيقة تاريخية أو حركة السلام التي طردت جو من الانتخابات ولكنها استبدلته بمشرف على الدولة السجنية التي ترغب في إنزال الدمار على المهاجرين العاجزين على حدودنا وعلى الفلسطينيين الذين تعتبر دولتهم بانتوستانًا للعمل القسري ومعسكر اعتقال يحتلها عدو لا يعتبره سوى إخوانهم اليهود بشرًا حقيقيين.
إنني أطلق عليها لقب القائدة كامالا، ما لم يكن خلاص الإسرائيليين والفلسطينيين باعتبارهم متساوين وبشراً مثلها يصبح محور حملتها، بدلاً من فرض هيمنتنا على حدودنا وفي مستعمرتنا إسرائيل.
وبالطبع يرجع هذا إلى طبيعة القوة وديناميكياتها، والقوى المتكررة للخوف والقوة والعنف التي تعمل على تركيز القوة في يد السلطة وإخضاع طبقات العبيد من خلال الخوف والسيطرة على الفكر والعنف. إن كل الدول تجسد العنف، وفي هذا لا تختلف الديمقراطيات عن الطغيان.
لقد تغيرنا قليلاً منذ وضع الفراعنة والملوك الكهنة في دول المدن الأولى أنفسهم فوق كل الآخرين كمترجمين ومتحدثين باسم الآلهة، واستأجروا بلطجية وحشيين يحملون ألقاباً أرستقراطية لإبقاء العبيد في عملهم. كنت أتمنى أن نكون أفضل من ذلك.
إن الحضارة تنهار مع سقوط فلسطين ولبنان، حيث تذبل قدرتنا على التعاطف تحت قوى الإهانة والنزعة الإنسانية. وسرعان ما نصبح نحن أيضاً لا شيء، مثل الأطفال الذين نقتلهم من مكان معقم، والذين لا نشعر تجاههم بالشفقة أو الرحمة أو التعاطف، لأنهم ليسوا من ذوي البشرة البيضاء وبالتالي خارج دائرة الانتماء والاختلاف التي بنيت عليها هيمنتنا النخبوية على الثروة والسلطة والامتياز.
إن أعداء الحرية يرغبون في استعبادنا من خلال الانقسامات العرقية والإيمانية والهوية الوطنية التاريخية، ومن خلال استراتيجيات التسليع والتزوير والنزعة الإنسانية، لتفريغ قيم الديمقراطية من خلال التخريب والاستيلاء على ملكيتنا لأنفسنا وللوجود البشري والمعنى والقيمة. وهذا أيضاً يجب أن نقاومه.
لقد كان هذا عاماً رهيباً حيث أصبحت إنسانيتنا مرآة مكسورة؛ لقد تحطم ما يوحدنا كبشر، وأصبحنا أسرى للصور المنعكسة الغريبة لأسطحه المتفرقة. ولكن لا ينبغي لنا أن ندع هذا الأمر قائماً.
من بين الأسئلة الأولى التي تواجهنا في محاسبة أي أنظمة قمع واستبداد ودول سجنية تعتمد على القوة والسيطرة، وفاشية الدم والإيمان والأرض، والخضوع للنخب المهيمنة القائمة على الثروة والسلطة والامتياز، وانتهاكات حقوق الإنسان العالمية، هو السؤال عن السبب العادل أو ذريعة الحرب؛ من المسؤول عن هذه الجرائم ضد الإنسانية؟
بعد أيام من السبت الأسود، كنت في مكان الحادث أطارد الجناة، وما وجدته كان عشًا من الأفاعي. ما حدث كان مجموعة من الأسباب المتكررة والمترابطة المتحالفة في حدث أساسي من الانقسام والاضطراب الذي لا يزال مخفيًا حتى الآن؛ بما في ذلك الانقلاب داخل حماس ضد قياداتها، وخاصة أولئك المستهدفين بالاغتيال لاحقًا من قبل إسرائيل بناءً على ادعاء كاذب بأنهم أمروا بالهجوم، من قبل فصيل حماس المعارض للسلام بالتآمر مع نظام نتنياهو الذي ارتكب هذه المأساة، ولكن ليس وحده. هناك العديد من المجموعات الأخرى، اثنتان منها على الأقل أعداء ظاهريًا، وعصابة إجرامية ليس لها أيديولوجية سياسية على الإطلاق، بالإضافة إلى فريق استطلاع تابع لجيش الدفاع الإسرائيلي، أو فرقة شاكيد أو قوة خليفة، والتي تتخصص في ارتكاب الفظائع ضد الجماعات الإسلامية بينما تتخفى في هيئة عرب لزرع الانقسام.
ولكن هناك المزيد، المزيد والمزيد؛ فقد تسلل طرف ثالث غير معروف إلى كل من المنظمات الإسرائيلية والفلسطينية لتأليبهما ضد بعضهما البعض لأغراض لا أستطيع تخمينها ولكنها معادية لكليهما وللسلام والأمن العالميين. هذه لعبة طويلة، ولا يزال خصمنا في الظل حتى الآن.
من لديه المهارة والدافع للقيام بذلك؟ من المستفيد؟
نتنياهو يستفيد، لأن هذا يبقيه في السلطة ويعطيه سببًا للحرب من أجل الغزو الإمبراطوري والسيطرة على الشرق الأوسط والحل النهائي للفلسطينيين؛ ويستفيد حليفه الرئيسي ترامب في انتخاباتنا من تلطيخ درع بايدن وهاريس بالقسوة والتواطؤ في الإبادة الجماعية، على الرغم من أن كلاهما محاصر بسياسات وتحالفات عمرها عقود من الزمان ويخضع لسيطرة الثروة الهائلة والقوة السياسية للجنة الشؤون العامة الأمريكية الإسرائيلية، ويستفيد كل من ترامب ونتنياهو من جعل فكرة حقوق الإنسان بلا معنى.
لكن شرعية إسرائيل وأمريكا هي تكلفة لا يمكن لأحد في حكومات الدول أو مجتمعات الاستخبارات والعمليات الخاصة أن يتاجر بها من أجل هذه الانتصارات، وعلى الرغم من أن الرايخ الرابع، الذي أعني به شبكة من أحفاد النازيين الفعليين الذين تسللوا إلى الدولة الأمريكية وغيرها لمدة سبعين عامًا، والتي يعد ترامب زعيمها والزعيم الفعلي لها، لديه بوضوح خطط طويلة المدى والموارد والعبقرية، مهما كانت شريرة، للقيام بذلك، فلن يساعد أي نازي دولة إسرائيل الصهيونية على أن تصبح إمبراطورية. وهذا يترك جهاز الأمن الفيدرالي الروسي ووكالات الاستخبارات الأخرى وقوات سبيتزناز، أيضًا مع الصبر أو الرؤية والموارد والمهارة للقيام بذلك، والتي ربما كانت تتطور لعقود من الزمن؛ ولكن روسيا ملتزمة بتعزيز هيمنة حليفتها إيران على الشرق الأوسط، وهو ما يجعلها العدو الأول لإسرائيل والتحالف العربي الأميركي، وقد خاضنا حروباً بالوكالة وحشية في سوريا وأماكن أخرى لإثبات ذلك.
لا، إن عدونا الحقيقي والجاني الحقيقي لأحداث السبت الأسود ليس روسيا أو إيران، ولا الرايخ الرابع، بل ترامب ونتنياهو بشكل جزئي ومباشر على قدم المساواة مع الفصيل الجهادي حماس الذي أعتقد أنه نشأ مع عدوها اللدود ومنافسها على السيطرة على غزة القاعدة؛ نحن نواجه عدواً مجهولاً على استعداد للهندسة لإبادة جماعية لتعزيز أهدافه الغامضة، وكل ما يمكنني أن أخبرك به عنهم هو أنهم بعيدون كل البعد عن الانتهاء منا.
نحن نعيش في أوقات مثيرة للاهتمام.
دعونا نعود إلى المبادئ الأولى بسؤال بسيط؛ من يعاني ويحتاج إلى الرحمة؟ إنه سؤال مشابه للسؤال الذي أطرحه لتحديد متى وكيف نستخدم القوة والعنف، من يملك السلطة؟، ولكن باتجاه مختلف تمامًا فيما يتعلق بتطور مستقبلنا.
هنا في أرض مقدسة مقسمة حسب التفاصيل الطائفية لكيفية أن نكون بشرًا معًا وفقًا لإرادة اللانهائي كأخوة وحب عالميين، تُرتكب جرائم تحدد حدود الإنسان ضد أبريائنا، وعجزنا التام، وغير قادرين على تهديد أي شخص؛ الأطفال. أطفال يعذبهم ويقتلهم عدو إنسانيتنا، دولة إسرائيل ورعاتها بما في ذلك أمريكا، بسرور في هستيريا القوة أو يرفضون رؤيتهم والتعرف عليهم بالتواطؤ. ويبرز تاريخنا شخصية واحدة تمثل كل الأطفال الذين ضحوا بالسلطة والكراهية، وحُكم عليهم بالموت بتواطؤ الصمت.
أطلب منكم الآن، كل البشرية، التخلي عن مسار نزع الإنسانية عنا والتخلي عن الإبادة الجماعية والتطهير العرقي وحروب الفتح والسيطرة والجرائم ضد الإنسانية.
أطلب، وأتوسل، وأطالب؛ أطلب منكم باسم آن فرانك.
Hebrew
באוקטובר 2024 אנחנו הופכים למראה השבורה
בפלסטין ובלבנון, המיסים שלנו קונים מוות של ילדים. והאמהות שלהם, בין אזרחים אחרים שאינם לוחמים.
בין כל שלילת האמיתות שלנו שחוללה מלחמת ישראל נגד האנושות, הנה שתי אמיתות שעולות מתוך מורשת ההיסטוריה המתגלגלת שלנו, שלעולם לא נוכל שוב להתעלם או להימנע מעימות איתן; אין זכות הגנה נגד עם שאתה כובש, ואין שוויון ערך מוסרי בין האלימות שמשתמש באדון עבדים לבין האלימות שמשתמש עבד כדי לשבור את שלשלאותיו.
לנוכח הפגנות המוניות ברחבי אמריקה והעולם, שנתקלו בדיכוי של התנגדות ותעמולה על ידי המדינה ושתי המפלגות הפוליטיות שלנו בחומה גדולה של שתיקה, אנו ממשיכים לסרב להסלים את הסכסוך באמצעות החרם, ההסרה וההסרה. סנקציה של ישראל לסיום רצח עם שאנו שותפים בו.
אמריקה נטשה את עקרונות הזכויות האוניברסליות שלנו וחובתנו לדאוג לאחרים, וכל יומרה למוסר או לגיטימציה כדמוקרטיה; זה היה בין השערים הרבים של השבת השחורה, וגם ישראל וגם אמריקה לקחו את הפיתיון.
כאשר מפלגת הבגידה והעריצות היא נותנת חסות נלהבת לאוטוקרטיות וטרור מדינות ברחבי העולם כולל ישראל, המפלגה הדמוקרטית שמרה על שתיקה אסטרטגית בנוגע לשותפותנו ברצח עם ופשעים נגד האנושות, ומסרבת להכיר בכך כעובדה היסטורית או כתנועת השלום. מה שהוציא את רצח העם ג’ו מהבחירות אך החליף אותו במשגיח על המדינה הגופנית שרוצה להמטיר אבדון על המהגרים חסרי האונים בגבולנו ועל הפלסטינים שאומתם היא בנטוסטן של עבודת עבדות ומחנה ריכוז שנכבש על ידי אויב שרק אחיהם היהודים הם בני אדם באמת.
אני קורא לה קומנדנט קמאלה, אלא אם כן, כמובן, הגאולה של הישראלים והפלסטינים כבני-אדם שווים ועמיתים תהפוך למרכז הקמפיין שלה, ולא אכיפת השליטה שלנו בגבולנו ובמושבה שלנו ישראל.
כמובן שהדבר נובע מהטבע והדינמיקה של הכוח, והכוחות הרקורסיבים של פחד, כוח וכוח הפועלים לריכוז כוח לסמכות ולהכפיף את קסטות העבדים באמצעות פחד, שליטה במחשבות ואלימות. כל המדינות מגולמות באלימות, ובכך דמוקרטיות אינן טובות יותר מעריצות.
השתנינו מעט מאז שהפרעונים והכוהנים-מלכים של הערים הראשונות הציבו את עצמם מעל כולם כמתורגמנים ודוברי האלים, ושכרו בריונים אכזריים בעלי תארים אצולה כדי לשמור על העבדים בעבודתם. קיוויתי שאנחנו יותר טובים מזה.
הציוויליזציה נופלת עם העת העתיקה הנטושה של פלסטין ולבנון, כאשר יכולת האמפתיה שלנו קמלה תחת כוחות של השפלה ודה-הומניזציה. בקרוב גם אנחנו נהיה כלום, כמו הילדים שאנו רוצחים ממקום מחוטא, שאין אנו חשים כלפיהם רחמים, רחמים או חמלה, מכיוון שהם לא לבנים ולכן מעבר למעגל השייכות והאחרות שעליו ההגמוניות האליטה שלנו של העושר, נבנים כוח וזכות.
אויבי החירות מבקשים לשעבד אותנו באמצעות חלוקות של אתניות, אמונה וזהות לאומית היסטורית, ובאמצעות אסטרטגיות של סחורה, זיוף ודה-הומניזציה, לחלול את ערכי הדמוקרטיה באמצעות חתרנות ותפיסת הבעלות שלנו על עצמנו ועל האדם. הוויה, משמעות וערך. גם לזה עלינו להתנגד.
זו הייתה שנה נוראית כשהאנושות שלנו הופכת למראה השבורה של הובגובלין; מה שמאחד אותנו כבני אדם התנפץ, ואנו שבויים בתמונות המשתקפות המוזרות של משטחיו הבלתי רציפים. אבל אנחנו לא צריכים לתת לזה לעמוד.
בין השאלות הראשונות העומדות בפנינו בהבאת חשבון נפש לכל מערכות של דיכוי, עריצות ומצבים קרסראליים של כוח ושליטה, פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה, הכנעה לאליטות ההגמוניות של עושר, כוח וזכות, והפרות של זכויות האדם האוניברסאליות שלנו הן של סיבה צודקת או קאזוס באלי; מי אחראי לפשעים האלה נגד האנושות?
בתוך ימים של שבת השחורה הייתי במקום לצוד את העבריינים, ומה שמצאתי היה קן של צפעים. מה שקרה היה קבוצה של סיבות רקורסיביות ותלויות הדדיות הקשורות באירוע ראשוני של שבר והפרעה, שנותרו עדיין חסומות; לרבות הפיכה בתוך חמאס נגד הנהגתו, במיוחד אלו שנועדו להתנקשות מאוחר יותר על ידי ישראל בטענה שקרית שהזמינה את התקיפה, על ידי פלג חמאס המתנגד לשלום בקנוניה עם משטרו של נתניהו שביצע את הטרגדיה הזו, אך לא לבד. כמה קבוצות אחרות, לפחות שניים אויבים למיניהם, סינדיקט פלילי ללא אידיאולוגיה פוליטית כלשהי, פלוס צוות סיור של צה”ל, סיירת שקד או כוח יורש, המתמחה בביצוע זוועות נגד קבוצות איסלאמיות בעודם מחופשים לערבים כדי לזרוע חילוקי דעות.
יון, היו בגורמים המובילים של כוח התקיפה, והצטרפו אליהם במהירות אופורטוניסטים מסוגים שונים. תוך ימים ספורים היו כוחות המבצעים המיוחדים של כמה מדינות מעורבות, כולל בעלות בריתה של פלסטין מהדומיניון האיראני של לבנון, תימן, סוריה ועיראק וכן כוחות מודיעין ומבצעים מיוחדים הרוסיים, אולי עם כמה מבעלי בריתם האפריקאים. המשמעות היא שחמאס לא יכול לשחרר את כל החטופים, מכיוון שחלקם מוחזקים על ידי קבוצות שאינן בשליטתם.
אבל יש עוד, הרבה יותר; צד שלישי לא ידוע חדר לארגונים ישראליים ופלסטינים כאחד כדי לשחק אותם זה מול זה למטרות שאינני יכול לנחש אך הן ללא ספק עוינות לשניהם, ולשלום ולביטחון העולמיים. זה משחק ארוך, והיריב שלנו עדיין נשאר בצל.
למי יש גם את המיומנות וגם את המניע לעשות זאת? קוי בונו?
נתניהו מרוויח, כי זה מחזיק אותו בשלטון ונותן לו סיבת באלי לכיבוש האימפריאלי והשליטה במזרח התיכון ולפתרון הסופי של הפלסטינים; ובן בריתו המרכזי טראמפ מרוויח בבחירות שלנו בכך שהוא מכתים את השריון של ביידן והאריס באכזריות ושותפות ברצח עם, אם כי שניהם לכודים במדיניות ובריתות בנות עשרות שנים ונשמרות על ידי העושר העצום והכוח הפוליטי של אייפא”ק, ושניהם. טראמפ ונתניהו מרוויחים בכך שהם הופכים את רעיון זכויות האדם לחסר משמעות.
אבל הלגיטימיות של ישראל ואמריקה היא עלות שאף אחד בממשלות או בקהילות מודיעין ומבצעים מיוחדים לא יסחר תמורת הזכיות הללו, ולמרות הרייך הרביעי, שבאמצעותו אני מתכוון לרשת של צאצאים של נאצים אמיתיים שחדרו לאמריקאים. מדינה ואחרות במשך שבעים שנה, שטראמפ הוא דמות דמות שלהן ולפיהרר דה פקטו, יש בבירור את תוכניות המשחק הארוך, המשאבים והגאונות, גם אם היא רעה, לעשות זאת, אף נאצי לעולם לא יעזור לציוני. מדינת ישראל הפכה לאימפריה. זה משאיר את ה-FSB הרוסי וסוכנויות מודיעין אחרות וכוחות ספצנאז, גם עם הסבלנות או החזון, המשאבים והמיומנות לעשות זאת, שאולי התפתחו במשך עשרות שנים; אבל רוסיה מחויבת לקדם את השליטה האיראנית של איראן במזרח התיכון, מה שהופך אותה לאויבת העיקרית של ישראל והברית הערבית-אמריקאית, ונלחמנו במלחמות פרוקסי פראיות בסוריה ובמקומות אחרים כדי להוכיח זאת.
לא, הנמסיס שלנו והמבצע האמיתי של השבת השחורה הוא לא רוסיה או איראן, ולא הרייך הרביעי, ורק באופן חלקי ומישיר טראמפ ונתניהו באותה מידה עם הפלג הג’יהאדיסטי של חמאס, שלדעתי מקורו באויב הדם שלו ויריבו לשליטה של אל-קאעידה בעזה; אנו עומדים בפני אויב לא ידוע שמוכן להנדס רצח עם כדי לקדם את מטרותיו המסתוריות, וכל מה שאני יכול לומר לך עליהם הוא שהם רחוקים מלהסתיים איתנו.
אנחנו חיים בזמנים מעניינים.
הבה נחזור לעקרונות הראשונים בשאלה פשוטה; מי סובל וזקוק לרחמים? זו שאלה דומה לשאלה שאני שואל כדי לקבוע מתי וכיצד להשתמש בכוח ובאלימות, מי מחזיק בכוח?, אבל עם כיוון שונה מאוד לגבי התפתחות העתיד שלנו.
כאן בארץ קדושה מחולקת לפי הפרטים העדתיים של איך להיות אנושיים יחד בהתאם לרצון האינסופי כאחווה ואהבה אוניברסליים, פשעים המגדירים את גבולות האדם מבוצעים נגד התמימים ביותר שלנו, חסרי הכוח וחסרי היכולת שלנו. של איומים על מישהו; יְלָדִים. ילדים שהאויב של האנושות שלנו, מדינת ישראל ונותני החסות שלה כולל אמריקה, או מתאכזרים והורגים בשמחה בהיסטריה של הכוח או מסרבים לראות ולהכיר בשותפות. וההיסטוריה שלנו מעלה דמות אחת שמייצגת את כל הילדים שהוקרבו לכוח ולשנאה, ונידונו בשל שותפות השתיקה.
אני מבקש מכם כעת, כל המין האנושי, לנטוש את נתיב הדה-הומניזציה שלנו ולוותר על רצח עם, טיהור אתני, מלחמות כיבוש ושליטה ופשעים נגד האנושות.
אני שואל, אני מתחנן, אני דורש; אני שואל אותך בשם אנה פרנק.
Negotiating the Interface Between Bounded Realms, a Study in Film and Literature: the Anima or Inner Woman of my Platonic Ideal Versus the Ghosts of Memory of a Lost Friend
How I remember our meeting, betrayed and standing together against the world: Mr & Mrs Smith final gunfight scene
How I imagine her now:
Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes Montage to Britney Spears’ version of Bobby Brown’s My Perogative
Enola Holmes Montage to Fifth Harmony’s That’s My Girl
Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
We celebrate the beginning of the Halloween season, wherein we let our demons out to play, a time of masquerades, the performance of secret identities, violations of normality and transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, reversals of order, the embrace of our monstrosity, of the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, and the pursuit of new truths through ecstatic trance and poetic vision, with our new national holiday of amok time, Mad Hatter Day.
The Mad Hatter acts as a psychopomp or guide of the soul in Alice in Wonderland, and Alice is a Holy Fool like Parsifal, but he and Alice are also figures of a single whole person and the story one of hierosgamos or heavenly marriage; like Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, a myth into which Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes cast themselves so disastrously.
Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast interrogates this myth of idealizations of authorized masculinity and femininity as Freudian horror and Sadeian transgression. But it is also a primary myth of reimagination and transformation which signposts the inherent fluidity of identities of sex and gender.
What does love do? Love sublimes us into a unitary being, erases our limits as individuals defined by our form and liberates us from the event horizon of our flesh.
Love also reveals to us our true selves; a lover has the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves. To love is to transform others by the power of our vision to see who they truly are and set them free.
A lover is both a Pythian seer of truths who like Michelangelo can free us as images captive within the stone of our bodies and our material and social context, who in naming us like Adam naming the beasts defines our truth, and an inverted figure of Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze and transforms it into the power to see others true selves and release them to be free, and to mutually assimilate the qualities of the other and transform them both.
Love is a divine madness which defiles and exalts, reveals truths and confers authenticity, and the redemptive power of love can make glorious and beautiful the flaws of our humanity and bring healing to the brokenness of the world and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
As I wrote in my celebration of Lewis Carroll, I Sing of Madness, Vision, and Love: Lewis Carroll, on his birthday January 27; I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; this is my faith, though if asked directly I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation.
To Lewis Carroll, Surrealist and philosopher of poetic vision, we are indebted for this primary insight which reconciles the transcendent truth of Keats and Romantic Idealism as developments of the western mystery tradition from Plato with the immanent truths written in our flesh.
His great book Alice in Wonderland, like Mozart’s Magic Flute, encodes the mystery tradition, for which his primary sources are Plato, the Biblical Book of John the Evangelist which forges a faith of the Logos, and Coleridge’s Primary Imagination; but he also attempted to write a Summa Theologiae which can unfold itself within the mind of its readers as transformation and transcendence.
Dense with word games of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety and mathematical-philosophical puzzles which are satirical metacommentary on the great thinkers of his time, Alice in Wonderland is intended to transmit the whole of a classical education, but is also a Socratic dialog which questions the premises of our civilization. Few such total reimaginations have ever been attempted.
I discovered Wonderland through the brilliant work of the mathematician Martin Gardner, which has been updated as The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, when as a sophomore in high school I joined a reading group at the local university, carried along in the wake of my best friend, four years older than myself and a former Forensics student of my father, Doc (given name Brad) Hannink.
This occurred during my teenage James Joyce-Ludwig Wittgenstein fandom and immersion in medieval magic, both related to a love of languages, logic, and math as hidden systems of meaning. These enthusiasms of my youth foundered by my senior year on my failure to teach myself to read Kabbalah, as I discovered it is written not in Hebrew but in languages I could find no one to converse with or learn from, Aramaic and Andalusi Romance.
But as a fifteen year old steeped in the iconography of Surrealist film and the esotericism of Finnegan’s Wake and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, I loved that Alice always questioned authority and regarded her as an anarchist hero and a figure of Socrates, and this remains the primary meaning of the work for me. Alice enacts parrhesia, what Foucault called truth telling, and I saw in her someone I wished to become.
As I wrote in my post of January 8 2022, Let Us Bring A Reckoning; Politics is the art of fear as the basis of exchange and the origin of authority and unequal power as systemic evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as balanced with the desire to belong, but it is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Washington did in crossing the Delaware to create America and as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky. Herein the inherent human power of reimagination is deployed as a strategy of revolution against overwhelming force and tyranny.
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.
Kobo Abe takes tea at the Mad Hatter’s of an afternoon; Gogol has set his words on fire and is made of a holy light which is used in place of a chandelier, Kafka elicits squeals of delight from Alice with his hideous Gregor Samsa form, Klimt’s giant apelike Typhoeus and his daughters Desire, Madness, and Death run amok in ecstatic Bacchic dance while Lovecraft tries to put something with tentacles back in its box.
There is always an empty chair for you.
Here follows some things I have written for Mad Hatter Day, which I celebrate as a three day Orphic vision quest which begins the month of Halloween, this year for the first time on this day and on two following Sundays the 13th and 20th, as actions, resistance, and liberation struggle in Lebanon, Palestine, and throughout the Middle East claim my attention.
This is my special madness, this loyalty to and solidarity with my fellow human beings in revolutionary struggle against systems of oppression and tyranny, of commodification, falsification, and dehumanization; but the world is also mad, and my path is to place my life in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.
I write to you from a hell of nightmares, death, atrocities, and terror dreamed by an Israel which defines the limits of the human and has become in reproducing the conditions her people once escaped a museum of private Holocausts.
No matter where you begin with divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, with fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, with the subversion of our equality and the abandonment of our principle of universal human rights, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
There are no Israelis, no Palestinians; only people like ourselves, and the choices we make about how to be human together.
In the end, all that matters is what you do with your fear, and how you use your power; do something beautiful with yours.
As I wrote in my post of July 18 2021, Of Love and Desire as Forces of Autonomy and Liberation; In my previous journal entry of yesterday I provided a brief outline of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test as a tool of discovery and description of the processes of masculinity and femininity as interdependent aspects of a whole personality, in the context of gender identity and performance.
So we come to the final category of our interest here, sexual orientation. The most important thing to know about human sexuality as a dimension of experience is that it involves the whole person. Whereas a personality test can tell you who you are, and who others are or wish to represent themselves as, it cannot tell you who or what you desire. Desire remains ambiguous, and that is its great power as a force of liberation and autonomy.
The second is that desire is uncontrollable as the tides, an inherently anarchic and chaotic force of nature which is nonvolitional and for which we cannot be held responsible, unlike our actions toward others.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must claim our truths and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won and both purchased with horror, pain, grief, life, and far too often that of others and not my own, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As I wrote in my post of March 13 2021, A Year of Quarantine in Retrospect;
The quality of our humanity is not fixed, but always in motion, like the turbulent systems da Vinci studied in his fountain and which later with new mathematics came to be described as chaos theory. Identity is a process which is fluid, and our emotions are instruments with which it creates itself.
We create ourselves over time, through our history of defining moments; human being is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation. What we call our self or our soul is no different in kind from the exoskeleton of an insect or the shell of a sea creature.
And we create ourselves through our interdependence with others, our relationships, friends, families, communities, and the systems of signs thereof.
Human being has in this scheme three orders of relationships; persona, history, and interdependence, and all of it is in motion, dynamic and inherently unstable.
Impermanence is the defining quality of nature and the material universe; so also is the controlling metaphor and condition of human nature, being, and identity our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’ fragmented mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, reveals endless possibilities of becoming human; the inward and outward halves of the cosmos also create and define each other in mutual coevolution, like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
Humans are naturally polyamorous and are enculturated to be otherwise; we are shaped by sociohistorical forces in the sphere of gender identity and sexual orientation to deny our true nature. It is normality which is deviant, and from which misogyny, the system of Patriarchy, and other destructive illnesses of the spirit arise; fear weaponized in service to power, fear of otherness but also of nature and ourselves. Here is the true origin of evil as the social use of force and violence in self-hatred.
As Goethe wrote in Faust; “Let us extend our lives through our bodies in all directions possible”.
For me the origin of human evil is in unequal relationships and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, pathologies of violence and dominion which as with the figure of Alberich the dwarf require the renunciation of love as their price; not in the Violation of Normality and its taboos, the Transgression of the Forbidden, or the Defiance of Authority, three things I count as sacred acts in pursuit of the truth of ourselves, but in the systemic and structural injustices and inequalities of hegemonic elites, their lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls, and the state tyranny and terror of brutal force and control which we must resist and refuse to submit to, that we may become autonomous and free as self- created and self-owned beings; for power and force are meaningless when met with disobedience, and in the moment of our refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free.
I say again; human sexual orientation is not a spectrum with endpoint limits, but a Moebius Loop of infinite possibilities, and we are born and exist by nature everywhere along it at once. All else is limitation and control imposed artificially as dominion, captivity, and falsification by authorized identities, or a seizure of power and self-ownership in revolutionary struggle against such narratives, hierarchies, and divisions.
Writing of love in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka gives us this witness; “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your door in Vienna, and say, Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.
Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
Here is the true origin of Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return as a test and praxis of Authenticity, and it recalls to me something I once said to Jean Genet. He had sat down at my table after my friends and I made our morning race against death, crossing a sniper alley to reach a cafe in Beirut that had the best strawberry crepes in the world.
“I’m told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To which I replied, “It’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said,” I agree”; this was the beginning of our conversations at breakfast in the days of the terrible siege, which would reset the path of my life. He saw me, Genet did, and set me free to create and discover my true self.
My wish for all of us is that we may find such friends who can reveal to us our true selves and offer figural spaces into which to grow; such is my functional definition of love.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
Herein I cite a marvelous article by Babette Babich, professor of philosophy at Fordham University in New York City. Of her exploration of the kinds of love, she writes in The Philosophical Salon of the Los Angeles Review of Books; “I was trying to go beyond the four in question, to xenia, the rights of a guest, a key notion for a political theorist. It refers to the love of the stranger, which is crucial today in an age of migrant crises and which entails the hospitality we owe the guest. The principle of hospitality is important in the Bible, where Abraham hosts strangers who turn out to be Jehovah and his angels. It is also related in Greek myth, where an old couple, Philémon und Baucis, sacrifice all they have to host two vagabonds, offering kindness to gods in disguise: Zeus and Hermes, the god who mediates all encounters between the mortal and the divine.
The classical list, as C.S. Lewis and others detail it, is: storgē, love of the home or the family; philia or friendship, which we hear in philosophy as love of wisdom; eros which is what we’re most interested in — taking us back to the #metoo movement, including questions of men and women in love. (One of the reasons we continue to find Alan Rickman’s betrayal of Emma Thompson in the 2003 Love, Actually so disquieting is that this is a compound betrayal of storgē/philia/eros.) — And then there is agapē, a pure, specifically selfless love, in contrast to eros, which is anything but selfless. Agapē is anticlimactic, and even St. Augustine, praying for grace, prayed to be perfect but, as he famously wrote, not yet.
The hierarchy of kinds of love mirrors — to tell a fanciful, proto-evolutionary story — the story of our lives. We’re born into storgē, family love, the love of home and hearth. That can be conflicted to be sure, as Robert Frost reminds us: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’
Thus, we’ve just gone through the holiday season dedicated to storgē, as also reflected in Love, Actually and the 1946, It’s a Wonderful Life. Philia, friendship, is included in marriage, as well as at school. Then, there is the theme of love matters at university, and eros—hence, the connection to St. Valentine’s day. Finally, some of us reach agapē, pure love, love for its own sake, love of god especially.
I emphasized, as Plato and Augustine do, that we all want love, and it is love that draws us upward as Goethe notes, improving everything about the world and about ourselves. I also pointed to the sharper, darker sides of love: that it can break us, or bend us down, to use Hölderlin’s language for love’s near and future danger to us.
Falling in erotic love is like falling into a maelstrom of intoxication, and there are always low points: the Greek poet, Anacreon compares it to being knocked flat by a blacksmith’s hammer, as Anne Carson cites him in her book, Eros, the Bittersweet. ‘Sweetbitter’ is the Greek glukúpikron in Sappho’s poem to Eros: a word order inverting our English convention and so much truer to life: glukú sweet, pikron, bitter. Thus, the Greeks emphasized the negativity or visceral disaster that is the impact of love. As Archilochus writes: it rips your lungs out. Actually.
And we’re all for it: we long for it, we want it. Eros undoes us, and the same lyric where we encountered the word, glukúpikron, we find lusimélēs, limbs dissolved, mingling one into another. The song originally recorded by the Big Bopper, Chantilly Lace in 1958, and featured in several films, including the 1973, American Graffiti, rhymes the intoxication effected by Chantilly, her walk, her laugh — the Greeks have the same enthusiasms — and the results that ‘make the world go round,’ transforming the singer, unhinging him, lusimélēs, the modern poet’s phrase make me feel real loose, indeed, make me act so funny, make me spend my money, punctuated. And that is the point of it: that’s what I like.
Eros is dangerous, Plato tells us. He is the oldest god, he is the youngest god, and everything about him is dyadic, despite, or more accurately, because of the dangers. Michel Foucault wrote about dietetics and strategies that might enhance the positive and reduce the negative, but, in the end, Cupid’s arrow is an engine of death, and talking of that takes us to Freud.
I looked to philia to highlight what love actually does, and I spoke of Nietzsche on love as a hermeneutic tactic along with one of Fordham’s teachers from a few decades before my time, Dietrich von Hildebrand, because, in addition to ideals closer to agapē, he spoke of intentio benevolentiae to highlight the generosity Nietzsche emphasized. This is the generosity we can bring to everything we want to understand whether books, events, or people.
When we love, we give the other the benefit of the doubt, cut them all kinds of breaks. When we fail to love, we lack generosity and what is more, we are prone to resentment, disdain, anger. Love is about generosity. It is about not minding faults, and the love of wisdom, philosophy, is or can be, beyond analytic anger, hermeneutically generous in the same way: faults and all.”
This October we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, in which students challenged and triumphed over the gatekeepers of authorized identities and access to power in our society, the hierarchs of the university system. Today marks the first mass protests at Sproul Hall; but the struggle for freedoms of speech and of the press, the right to expose and protest injustice and of freedom of information, the right to test, witness, and tell truths, neither begins nor ends with the courage of the people in mass action throughout that pivotal fall semester on a university campus, but belongs to all of us, everywhere and at all times, as a common legacy of humankind.
Among the transformations of meaning and value won for us by the students who risked their futures to win a better future for all of us is the championing and valorization of our rights of free speech and of protest which informed and enervated all subsequent movements for social justice as a liberating force, a reclaiming of education as a Platonic Ideal and democratizing force which derives from the Greek educatus, meaning to bring forth rather than to stuff in facts, the seizure of power by students as the owners of their own public institutions, structures, systems, processes, and outcomes and products of education from hegemonic forms of elite membership and power in the academic sphere as the key means of producing citizens needed for democracy and a public life of co-ownership of our government, and finally the revisioning of education as both truthtelling and witness as a sacred calling to pursue the truth.
There is a demonstration I performed every year on the first day of Forensics class at Sonoma Valley High School which I call Becoming a Fulcrum, and which you may find relevant to our work in electoral process and revolutionary struggle; “This is a fulcrum” I would say, placing an object on my desk, and placing an oblong object across it, “it balances a lever. When your parents ask you what you are learning in Forensics, tell them you are learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.”
For the best explication of why democracy matters, why the idea of a free society of equals lies at the heart of our liberty and of human being, meaning, and value, why it is the one thing we must never abandon or lose hope of making real, read I.F. Stone’s magisterial The Trial of Socrates. For each of us stands in the shadow of Socrates and must face with him the choice between submission to authority and freedom, regardless of its cost.
As described by the co leader of the Free Speech Movement in his book Hal Draper’s Berkeley: The Student Revolt, with an introduction by Mario Savio; “In a dynamic conflict, there is not merely a majority and a minority: the opposition is not a homogeneous whole. A section may be neutralized, dropping opposition altogether, without coming over to the active side. Another section, while remaining in opposition, may be so infected by uncertainty — so tacitly impressed by the appeal of the position which it formally opposes — that its opposition is enervated in practice. Just as a given force exercises a leverage proportional to its distance from the fulcrum, so a fighting force exercises a leverage in conflict which is proportional not simply to its numbers but also to the strength of its convictions and the firmness of its followers.”
In the immortal words of Mario Savio that began a generational reimagination and transformation of America and our civilization; “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
Mario Savio’s Put Your Bodies Upon the Gears speech
Charlie Chaplin’s The Factory
50th Anniversary Free Speech Movement UC Berkeley, film by Diane Sharp
Austria’s election of its original Nazi party formed in the wake of the Second World War by members of the SS and other Nazi loyalists this weekend seizes me with a special kind of terror and revulsion called the Uncanny Valley effect produced by that which is utterly alien yet resembles ourselves, echoes of ancient nameless terrors of our history and the abyssal chasms of darkness which surround us, for our civilization is nothing but an ephemeral illusion masking hideous truths.
It is like the moulds of wolf and other tracks used in shapechanging magic; filled with water they become mirrors one can drink, and become its image and reflection. And we must be very careful, lest such images capture and possess us.
As my father once told me; “Politics is the Art of Fear. Fear is an unreliable servant and a terrible master. Fear precedes power. So, whose servant will it be?”
Of an evening my partner Dolly and I take walks of a few miles through the wilderness around our hill, alpine forest among valleys and hills with around a two thousand foot elevation difference, very dark and gorgeous after moonrise, as has been our habit for over twenty years now, and usually I wear the Tyrolean Loden or boiled wool hunting hat my mother brought me from Austria long ago.
She was searching for the origin place of my great grandmother, a place which no longer exists and has been erased from history. In the line of descent from my mother’s father we came from Austria between the First and Second World Wars, so this is uncomplicated and bears no weight of historical evil in regard to the Nazis. Grandpa tried to enlist in the US Armed Forces every month during the war, but was asthmatic and no one would take him. So he made a deal with the government to provide free room and board for returning veterans who had no where else to go; among my mother’s childhood memories were the trainloads of soldiers disembarking at the station, nearly all of them with missing parts or badly wounded.
On the other side, however, was a story of survival repeated far too often during the war, though from an earlier time. Here I tell Apollonia’s story as told to me by my mother of how Jewish people saved our family, when no one else would, and without whom none of us would have ever lived.
Upon the docks of America arrived a nine year old girl, alone and without a penny to her name or a word of English. A Stranger in the Biblical sense of the word, with no one waiting to meet her, no family, no friends, nothing. My maternal great grandmother Apollonia this was, with flaming red hair like my mother’s, whose family had put her on a ship to escape from Austria as their home burned, the sole survivor of her whole family and town so far as we now know.
She wandered the port of Seattle asking for help, in her five languages and in descending likelihood of recognition; French, Austrian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, and finally, in despair and fear that the reaction would be far worse than being abandoned to starve and freeze to death lost and alone among strangers, Yiddish.
This like a magic spell summoned a crowd, by happy chance not one armed with torches and axes. So a Stranger was taken in and raised by Jewish people, a family of whom I know nothing, and thus our family’s survival is owed to the entire Jewish community and people.
This happened in 1873, year of the glorious Vienna World’s Fair but also the stock market crash in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War which began a twenty year Depression in Europe and the Jewish persecutions as they were blamed for it; also conflicts between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in their borderlands.
She it was who owned her own rifles and horses by the age of sixteen when she began her career as a hunting guide, and died in the saddle at the age of 95, rifle in her hand, having shot the bear that attacked her horses and killed her. The Indians buried her like the Huns buried Attila, on her horse and with her rifle, like a warrior princess.
I was born within days of her death, and as with all ancestors I bear her onward, literally as DNA and the stories which possess us as the ghosts of other lives; incarnated truths written in our flesh. As a child I claimed to be her reincarnation, until around sixth grade or age twelve I realized how absurd this idea was.
Historical context and the fact that my ancestor in the maternal line knew Yiddish makes it possible that under Jewish law we are Jews, and she was raised as a Jew and a member of the Jewish community, though my mother never claimed such identity and moreover was a radical atheist who raised us with no religious traditions at all. In so doing the family faith she liberated herself from was Catholicism, an artifact of her Austrian paternal line who were exiles of the 1919 fall of the Hapsburg Empire after 600 years.
My mother’s speech was permeated with Yiddish words and phrases, a legacy of my maternal great grandmother; my maternal grandfather was the source of the family German, actually Wienerisch or the Viennese dialect of Austro-Bavarian, combined with the French-influenced Schönbrunner Deutsch of the imperial court. This was the home language of my mother’s family, though grandpa knew Latin, taught himself English, and to various degrees knew other languages of the Austrian Empire including Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, the Romance language Venetian and its Triestino dialect, and could speak Russian and Polish well enough to do business in their communities here in America.
As a teenager immersed in Holocaust literature while working through the trauma of a near death experience in Brazil the summer before high school, my execution by a police death squad while rescuing abandoned street children they were bounty hunting having been prevented by the Matadors, and conversations with my mother as she wrote her study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet medical records and childhood therapy journal of Jerzy Kosinski which he fictionalized as The Painted Bird, I once asked her directly, Are we Jews?
To this she replied; “Everyone is a Jew. Everyone is someone’s Jew, someone’s scapegoat, someone’s Other. The great task of becoming human is to embrace our uniqueness as we overcome our fear of otherness.”
As written by Julia Ebner in The Guardian, in an article entitled How did the far right win in Austria? To understand, look to its global networks: The Freedom party hasn’t only harnessed discontent at home – it is drawing on once-fringe ideas that have spread around the world; ““We will kick upwards and clamp down on those who don’t mean well for us”, said Herbert Kickl in May 2023. Under Kickl’s leadership, the Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ) has scored its biggest election victory since it was founded in 1956 by Anton Reinthaller, an Austrian Nazi who had served as a lieutenant general in the SS. Not only is the FPÖ now more popular than ever, it is also at the height of its radicalism.
The FPÖ’s victory in Sunday’s national elections is being celebrated by far-right movements and influencers across Europe. No wonder: it demonstrates how successful they have been at normalising and internationalising their extreme ideologies, conspiracy myths and policy proposals.
Many of the FPÖ’s ideas have been inspired by Generation Identity, a pan-European white nativist movement that has its roots in France and is particularly strong in Austria. In a post-election livestream to his followers, the movement’s Austrian leader, Martin Sellner, celebrated the FPÖ win as “a dream result” . He has been one of the most influential proponents of the term “remigration” (the policy of mass deportation of people with a migration background), which had its first spike on social media following a 2014 extreme-right meet-up in France.
Ten years later, the FPÖ is far from the only far-right political party that has embraced the concept. Germany’s AfD party used “remigration” as part of its campaigns for regional elections in Saxony and Thuringia on 1 September, and Donald Trump recently called for “remigration” in a post about “illegal migrants” on X. Even though Sellner communicated with and received a donation from the Christchurch shooter who later killed 51 people in two consecutive mosque attacks in New Zealand in 2019, Kickl has since described the identitarian movement as “a project worthy of support”, which should be viewed as an “NGO from the right”.
A year before the Christchurch attack, Sellner wrote to me in a direct message on Twitter: “I don’t think that my videos and speeches incite violence. The anger is there in any case and I think it has its material basis.”
Immigration is only one of the FPÖ’s controversial campaign topics. Covid conspiracy myths, climate change denial, anti-feminism and anti-LGBTQ+ discourse are other features of the party’s branding. The FPÖ member of parliament Michael Gruber recently shared an election campaign video on Instagram that showed him throwing a rainbow flag in a bin with the tagline “Cleaning up for Austria”.
With Kickl using dogwhistles such as “climate communism” and “WHO dictatorship”, the FPÖ has been able to expand its support base among conspiracy theorists and Covid deniers. What does Kickl mean by kicking upwards, for example? He promised to become an FPÖ chancellor “who won’t bow down to the EU, Nato and the WHO”. In a new year’s speech he spoke of his long “wanted list”, which includes centrist politicians whom he refers to as “politicians of the system” (Systempolitiker) and whom he accuses of “treason against the people” (Volksverrat) – two terms known for their use by Adolf Hitler.
A key to FPÖ’s success has been the growing landscape of alternative, hyper-biased and conspiratorial news outlets that have formed around the party and its sympathisers. In the run-up to the election, a series of false claims spread in a chain reaction across these alternative media websites and social media channels such as Telegram. Reports, for example, were circulated claiming that the “deep state” wanted to steal the FPÖ’s victory or that centrist parties were planning to reintroduce mandatory vaccinations after the elections. AUF1, a particularly influential new rightwing channel, has aired ideas of “vaccine mass extermination” and a “deadly transhumanist agenda”. The channel was the first outlet to feature an appearance by Kickl on Sunday night after the election victory.
The FPÖ’s historic victory not only poses a risk to Austria’s minorities, independent media outlets, scientific community and democratic institutions, it also has the potential to significantly strengthen the far right in Europe and internationally. Alice Weidel of the German AfD, Marine Le Pen of the French National Rally and Geert Wilders of the Dutch Freedom party all enthusiastically congratulated the FPÖ. “The Netherlands, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, France, Spain, Czech Republic and today Austria! We are winning! Times are changing,” commented Wilders on X.
Despite the far-right populists’ focus on ultra-nationalism, their own networks are remarkably transnational. This global anti-globalism is not the only inconsistency in the far right’s ideology. If the stakes weren’t so high, it would be amusing that FPÖ is criticising the “corrupt mainstream media” while they were the ones who were caught wanting to sell Austria’s largest newspaper Kronen Zeitung to a Russian investor to push pro-FPÖ messaging in 2017. In addition, while Kickl publicly described the Covid vaccinations as “a genetic engineering experiment”, he was rumoured to have been secretly vaccinated against Covid (which he still denies). For a party that ordered a raid of the country’s intelligence agency BVT in 2018 and advocates policies that fundamentally contradict the pillars of the Austrian constitution, it also requires a lot of audacity to describe all other parties as anti-democratic.
As I argued in the Guardian last year, extremism has leaked into mainstream politics. With the global rise of an increasingly emboldened far right, it is more important than ever that other parties show that they are honest with their voters and can reliably translate words into action. We need a new generation of boundary-crossing leaders who can offer effective, but non-hateful solutions to the various sources of anger in previously underrepresented population groups. They must be capable of reversing the cumulative radicalisation that is threatening to break our democracies.”
As written by Jon Henley in The Guardian, in an article entitled Victory in Austria is another step in far right’s march across Europe; “ It had been expected for months – the party had been leading the polls since 2022. Nor was it exactly a crushing victory: far from an absolute majority, and just two points more than its previous highest score. It may not even end up in government.
But the first place finish in Austria’s parliamentary elections by the far-right, anti-immigration, Russia-friendly Eurosceptic Freedom party (FPÖ) nonetheless marks another significant step in the radical right’s onward march across Europe.
The FPÖ, founded by former Nazis, has been in power before, as the junior partner in short-lived coalition governments with the centre-right Austrian People’s party (ÖVP) in 2000 and 2017, but it has never before finished first in a national election.
Its performance on Sunday, with a score of 29%, represents a remarkable comeback after it looked close to collapse barely five years ago, when the cash-for-influence Ibiza scandal forced its then leader to resign and brought down the government.
It rounds off 12 months of elections in which illiberal parties have won the most seats in parliaments across Europe. This time last year, populist, autocratic, Brussels-baiting Robert Fico topped the ballot in Slovakia and formed a government soon after.
Less than two months later, the Freedom party (PVV) of the anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders finished first in Dutch elections, eventually assembling a cabinet that has promised the country’s toughest-ever policies on immigration and law and order.
In May, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) achieved its best ever result in European parliament elections in France, inflicting a humiliating defeat on President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist forces and prompting him to dissolve parliament.
In the ensuing vote, the RN went on to record its highest ever score in the first round. In the second it took an even higher share of the vote and, despite unprecedented tactical voting against it, wound up as the largest single party in the assembly.
This month in Germany, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) secured a historic victory in regional elections in Thuringia, the first time the far-right party had topped a state ballot, and finished a close second in two more, Saxony and Brandenburg.
Looking ahead, the nation-first, populist ANO party of the former prime minister Andrej Babiš could sweep parliamentary elections due in the Czech Republic by October after topping the EU ballot and, this month, dominating regional and senate votes.
Next September, the AfD – now polling ahead of all three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fractured and ailing coalition, and trailing only the opposition centre-right Christian Democrats – will have high hopes for federal elections due in Germany.
And if, as seems distinctly possible, the right-leaning government cobbled together in France this month fails to survive for long, fresh elections could in principle be held anytime after next July – and a bet against the RN finishing first would be a brave one.
The FPÖ is not certain to be part of Austria’s next government. As kingmaker, the ÖVP may seek an alliance with the third-placed, centre-left SPÖ and the liberals. It has repeatedly said it will not rule with the FPÖ’s inflammatory leader, Herbert Kickl.
But if Kickl can be persuaded to abandon his prime ministerial ambitions for a less controversial FPÖ figure, and the ÖVP can overcome its concerns about a third – likely tempestuous – alliance with the far-right party, an FPÖ-ÖVP coalition is possible.
For the EU, that holds the unappetising prospect of Austria becoming part of a putative Moscow-friendly, anti-Brussels, autocratic bloc that, by this time next year, could include Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Fico’s Slovakia and Babiš’s Czech Republic.
That could have significant consequences, for example for EU policies towards – and support for – Ukraine. Far-right parties already in government or pushing at the gates are already resulting in dramatically tougher policies on immigration across the bloc.
Parties classed as far right or national conservative are in ruling coalitions in seven EU states: Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia. In Sweden, a far-right party is propping up a minority government.
In France, Le Pen’s RN holds the fate of the new government in its hands, its survival dependent on whether and when her far-right party decides to back any future vote of no confidence tabled by the leftwing New Popular Front (NPF) bloc.
Alarmingly, the FPÖ’s success on Sunday suggests that – similarly to the AfD and Wilders’ PVV, but unlike the RN and Brothers of Italy – Europe’s far-right parties may now no longer feel a pressing need to “sanitise” their image.
Austria’s far-right party is regularly accused of using antisemitic and fascist tropes, which it denies. Kickl, who has spread Covid and climate conspiracy theories, says he wants to be Volkskanzler, or “people’s chancellor” – a term used by Adolf Hitler.
Almost 25 years ago, when the FPÖ under its then leader, Jörg Haider, won just under 27% of the vote and entered government, it caused such a profound shock around the EU that diplomatic visits were cancelled and punitive measures imposed.
Today’s Europe is very different.”
As I wrote in my post of June 10 2024, Fascism Begins the Capture of Europe in Her Elections; Terrible and strange is our undiscovered country; both of myriad possible futures and of our imaginal nations, and all a ground of struggle and a Wilderness of Mirrors, lies, illusions, falsification and rewritten histories, silence and erasure, alternate realities and Rashomon Gate Events.
All of our creations of human being, meaning, and value, and we along with them, ephemeral and in constant processes of change. And under existential threats by systems of oppression and unequal power, which include fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness.
To make an idea about kinds of people is an act of violence.
No matter where you begin with ideas of authorized national identity, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
When those who would enslave us come for us, as they always do, let them find not a people subjugated by learned helplessness nor divided by hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, but a United Humankind unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of January 21 2024, In Germany And Throughout Europe, the Return of Fascism Creates Its Own Resistance As Polarization Begins the Fracture of the State; An ancient terror emerges from the shadows to consume us all once again, as Nazi revivalists in Italy, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and elsewhere join their American counterparts in a vast and ambiguous multifront war against democracy, human rights, and western civilization.
But the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance, as we have witnessed this past week in the mass actions against the Alternative für Deutschland fascist party in Germany, and a hero has risen to defend our humanity, the magnificent Carola Rackete.
This we celebrate, but must also give caution of the dangers of ideological fracture and the polarization of the state which makes a wishbone of nations by their most extreme elements. We can study its effects and consequences in real time as they unfold before us in America, and in elections globally.
It is also recapitulating the ideological fracture and division of the Social Democratic Party of Germany which removed the only blocking force for the rise of fascism; this process also destroyed the Students For A Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and other organizations of liberation struggle in America, under constant assault from the F.B.I. and other institutions of state terror and counter-revolution which used assassinations and infiltration and subversion to remove leadership and set group members against each other with false rumors of disloyalty.
Such counter-revolution waged against the liberty of the people as theft of citizenship is a predictable phase of revolutionary struggle, and there is but one reply to this strategy of marginalization, division, silencing and erasure, dehumanization and the repression of dissent; solidarity.
Let us stand with those who stand with us, and with those who share our interests in allyship. Come what may.
Because we are now waging the Last Stand Against Fascism, among all humankind and throughout the world, and the price of our failure is too terrible to contemplate.
Let us give to fascism and tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of December 11 2022, Bring On the Clowns; A Plot to Seize the German State Fails. This time; An absurd conspiracy of clowns has been defeated in a spoiling raid by police which just barely avoided the mass terror and destruction of a plot to seize the German state and replace it with a fascist monarchy, an idea worthy of the villainous mad toon in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
So would many have said of the chances of a failed artist to become tyrant of Germany and nearly conqueror of the world, and we ignore such threats at our peril.
Others would have said the same of a real estate moghul and reality tv star to become President of the United States, or of Traitor Trump’s chances of decapitating the state and overthrowing democracy in the January 6 Insurrection, a near run thing for which we still have not brought a Reckoning, a sad fact which exposes the lie of justice in America, for here none are truly equal, and justice means only how much justice you can enforce or buy.
America and the whole of humankind creates many such figures and symptoms of systems failures and the threat of civilizational collapse from the mechanical failures of our internal contradictions.
We may face such futures with the twin strategies of Resistance and Reimagination.
To fascism and tyranny let us give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
And let us bring change to the systems which have seduced, entrapped, and betrayed us.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
Nor is this polarization and fracture of democracies and their infiltration, subversion, and transformation into fascist tyrannies exclusive to any state or electorate of citizens, for it results from universal systems of unequal power and the centralization of power by authority.
As I wrote in my post of September 27 2022, A Rising Tide of Fascism in Europe; With the electoral victory of the original fascist alt-right in Italy, a rising tide of fascism now threatens all of Europe; Nazi revivalism has a staging ground and launchpad for the reconquest of Europe in Orban’s Hungary, LePen’s Nationalists in France and Vox in Spain are the unquestionable opposition to their governments, Sweden just elected a similar party of Nazi origins, and the new government of England has at best turned back the clock to the ideology and policies of the Thatcher era and at worst displays alarming cues of fascist dog-whistles which portend far worse horrors and depravities to come.
Such are the times we live in, wherein an enemy we have fought for a century returns to seize its birthplace at the centennial of Mussolini’s March on Rome, as European political and social systems and institutions destabilize and begin transformational change from both the mechanical failures of their internal contradictions as terminal stage capitalism consumes the worlds resources and centralizes wealth and power to hegemonic elites, oligarchs which have become a quasi-aristocracy, and the carceral states of force and control which they create. Civilization itself is falling, but will such change be catastrophic or a rebirth of humankind as a free society of equals wherein democracy and our universal human rights are victorious; comes now an age of tyranny or Liberty?
Where do we go from here?
As I wrote in my post of September 23 2021, When Things Fall Apart and the Center Cannot Hold, Embrace Change; Transformative change and the forces of Chaos lie at the heart of our universe, a reality and medium of being characterized by illusion and impermanence, as its central motive principal.
Chaos is a forge of creation which endlessly generates contradictions and paradoxes as the forking points of universes, of multiplicities and relative truths, a wellspring of life and the realization of unknowns but also of our darkness born of attachment to externalities and that which is by its nature ephemeral and transitory, and moreover a world filled with falsifications of ourselves, echoes and reflections like the distorted images in funhouse mirrors which multiply into infinity as a theft of our uniqueness and our souls.
The trauma of death and of life disruptive change, and our immersion in a sea of grief, despair, and terror; when the anchorages and truths we cling to have shifted and cast us adrift into topologies of the unknown, when we dare to look behind the curtain and the figures of our faith are revealed to be lies and instruments of our subjugation, when these existential threats and crises of hope, trust, and faith combine as they have this past year with the loneliness of our modern pathology of disconnectedness, how shall we answer our nothingness?
To this I say, how can we not embrace Chaos and transformative change, when it is endless and ongoing, and challenges us to live in the eternal now? Why fix and react wholly to its negative aspects as death and destruction, when it offers us equally possibilities of liberation from order and authority, self-creation, autonomy, and unknowns to explore, and a space of free creative play?
Here is Yeats great and visionary poem The Second Coming, written in the wake of three successive mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
As I wrote in my post of July 19 2022, Where Do We Go From Here?; There is a saying attributed as a Chinese curse but coined by the father of British Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong, “May you live in interesting times.”
We are now living in interesting times; whether we make of our time a curse or an opportunity to enact systemic and institutional change rests with us, for the gifts of Chaos as destabilization, fracture, disruption, and systemic collapse from the mechanical failures of our civilization’s internal contradictions include opportunities for reversals of order, seizures of power, the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and the reinvention of our civilization and ourselves among the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, episode seven The World to Come, has a scene in which two young successors to leadership of traditionally rival factions find themselves in love and in need of allies in a subplot which reimages Romeo and Juliet; the rebellious hellion Jonah Breakspear asks his Machiavellian lover Sophie Longerbane, “Who is chaos good for?” To which she replies, “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
Let the forces of fascism find not an America abject in learned helplessness and submission to authority, crippled and dehumanized by the legacies of historical inequalities and injustices and divided by hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, but united in solidarity and refusal to submit to force and control; for in resistance we become unconquerable and free.
As we are taught with the lyrics of the song Where Do We Go From Here?, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7 of season 6, Once More With Feeling, possibly the greatest musical episode of any telenovela yet created;
“Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
The battle’s done,
And we kinda won.
So we sound our victory cheer.
Where do we go from here.
Why is the path unclear,
When we know home is near.
Understand we’ll go hand in hand,
But we’ll walk alone in fear. (Tell me)
Tell me where do we go from here.
When does the end appear,
When do the trumpets cheer.
The curtains close, on a kiss god knows,
We can tell the end is near…
Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
Where do we go
from here?”
Here is an elegy for the Fall of America, a hymn to a dying hope and the lost grandeur of a nation and an idea of humankind as a free society of equals. When in a distant future the artifacts of our civilization begin to puzzle whatever beings arise from our carrion, and they ask who were the Americans, I hope such music as this lamentation remains to guide their questions.
Yet hope remains when all is lost, and whether it becomes a gift or a curse is in our hands. These lyrics speak of the modern pathology of disconnectedness, of the division and fracture of our Solidarity, of subjugation through learned helplessness and the dominion of fear. But this is not the end of the story, nor of ours.
Once More With Feeling ends not with abjection, but with The Kiss, between the Slayer and Spike, one of the monsters she hunts. A very particular kind of monster, who is also the hero of the story in its entire seven year arc; one who is made monstrous by his condition of being and forces beyond his control, against which he struggles for liberation and to recreate and define himself as he chooses, a monster who reclaims his humanity and his soul. This is why we continue to watch the show twenty years after its debut; we are all Spike, locked in titanic struggle for the ownership of ourselves with authorized identities and systemic evils, a revolution of truths written in our flesh against imposed conditions of struggle and orders of human being, meaning, and value.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an allegory of Sartrean freedom in a world without inherent value or meaning, of the joy of total freedom versus the terror of our nothingness, and above all a song of the redemptive power of love to return to us our true selves.
This is how we defeat fascist tyranny in the long game, after we bring a Reckoning for its crimes against humanity and its subversion of democracy; let us answer hate with love, division with solidarity, fear with hope, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Luke McGee in CNN, in an article entitled The conditions are perfect for a populist resurgence in Europe; “Giorgia Meloni is set to become Italy’s first female prime minister, exit polls suggested on Sunday evening following the country’s parliamentary elections.
IF confirmed, her victory will be historic not just because of her gender, but because she leads a party that is further to the right than any mainstream political movement Italy has seen since the days of its former fascist leader, Benito Mussolini.
Her policy platform will be familiar to those who have followed far-right rhetoric in recent years: She’s openly questioned LGBTQ+ and abortion rights, aims to curb immigration, and appears obsessed with the idea that traditional values and ways of life are under attack because of everything from globalization to same sex marriage.
It should be of little surprise to learn that one of her biggest fans is Steve Bannon, the man who largely created the political ideology of former US President Donald Trump and is credited with giving birth to the American alt-right movement.
Her likely victory comes off the back of recent triumphs for the far right elsewhere in Europe.
Despite Marine Le Pen losing the French presidential election to Emmanuel Macron, her supporters across the continent were heartened both at her share of the popular vote and that she shifted France’s political center dramatically to the right.
In Sweden, the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats are expected to play a major role in the new government after winning the second largest share of seats at a general election earlier this month. The party, now mainstream, initially had roots in neo-Nazism.
Europe’s conservative right certainly feels like it’s enjoying a revival after a few quiet years.
“Something is definitely happening. From France and Italy, major European powers, to Sweden … it feels as though a rejection of the manifestly failing pan-European orthodoxy is taking hold among our citizens,” says Gunnar Beck, a Member of the European Parliament representing Alternative for Germany (AfD).
AfD is a far-right party that became the first to be placed under surveillance by the German government since the Nazi era. At the time, the Central Council of Jews in Germany welcomed the decision, saying: “The AfD’s destructive politics undermine our democratic institutions and discredit democracy among citizens.”
The AfD sent shockwaves through Europe in 2017 after securing over 12% of the vote in Germany’s federal elections, making it the third largest party and official opposition.
Where is this momentum coming from?
“The cost-of-living crisis is undermining governments and European institutions. Of course the war in Ukraine has made things worse, but things like the European Green Deal and monetary policy from the European Central Bank were pushing up inflation before the war. The erosion of living standards means people are naturally becoming dissatisfied with their governments and the political establishment,” Beck adds.
Crisis always creates opportunities for parties in opposition, whatever their political ideology. But the politics of fear in the context of crisis does tend to lend itself more readily to right-wing populists.
“In the case of Meloni and her party, she was able to criticize both the establishment figure of Mario Draghi, an unelected technocrat installed as Prime Minister, and the populists that had propped up his coalition government,” says Marianna Griffini, lecturer in the Department of European and International Studies at King’s College London.
Griffini says that Italy’s recent woes have made it particularly susceptible to anti-establishments ideas. “We suffered as a country very badly in the pandemic, especially very early on. Lots of people died, lots of businesses shut down. We had a difficult time getting support from the rest of the EU. Ever since, the establishment and governments of both Conte and Draghi have been easy targets to throw rocks at.”
Why does crisis create such a unique opportunity for right-wing populists?
“Most research shows that conservative voters have a greater need for certainty and stability. When our society changes, conservatives are psychologically tuned to see this as a threat. So it’s far easier to unite those people against real changes or perceived threats, like energy crisis, inflation, food shortage, or immigrants,” says Alice Stollmeyer, executive director of Defend Democracy.
And there are plenty of perceived threats for the populists to point fingers at right now.
“Rising food and fuel prices, falling trust in democratic institutions, growing inequality, declining class mobility, and concerns over migration have created a sense of desperation that unscrupulous leaders can easily exploit,” says Nic Cheeseman, professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham, in central England.
He believes the current combination of crisis is a “perfect storm for liberal democracy – and it will take far greater efforts from those who believe in inclusion, responsible government and human rights to weather it.”
The fact that we are talking about this most recent wave of populism means that, by definition, we have seen right-wing populists reach power before and we have seen them defeated. Why, then, is the prospect of another wave so alarming to those who oppose it?
“The paradox of populism is that it often identifies real problems but seeks to replace them with something worse,” says Federico Finchelstein, a leading expert in populism and author of the book “From Fascism to Populism in History.”
“The failures of political elites an institutions, they seek to replace with powerful, cult-like leadership. Trump was a natural at it and he encouraged others like Erdogan, Bolsonaro and even Orban to go even further,” Finchelstein adds, referring to the authoritarian leaders of Turkey, Brazil and Hungary, where democratic norms have been seriously undermined in recent years.
He also points out that populists are “on the whole very bad at running governments, as we saw with Trump and others during the pandemic.”
That, in a nutshell is the potential danger of this populist wave. At a time of severe crisis, those claiming to have solutions might make everything a lot worse for the citizens they end up serving. And if things get worse, more crises are inevitable, which means more fear is inevitable, along with further opportunities for the populists.
In Italy, it’s worth nothing that Meloni is just the latest – if the most extreme – in a long list of successful populist politicians. Those who succeeded before her and entered government became her targets in opposition.
If Europe’s crisis cycle continues, then it’s plausible that in a few years from now we will be discussing the rise of another extreme populist exploiting the fears of citizens. And anyone who follows European politics closely knows only too well that hundreds of such people are waiting in the wings, emboldened and encouraged each time one of their tribe takes on the establishment and wins.”
What does this mean for our future?
As I wrote in my post of November 26 2023, Like the Spreading Tracks of Leprosy, the Netherlands Choose Fascism; Like the spreading tracks of leprosy, fascism metastasizes across Europe with fear of loss of white supremacy before a dark tide of immigration like a zombie apocalypse which has always been a shorthand for white replacement.
This electoral moral collapse and disruption of democracy was celebrated across Europe by Fourth Reich leaders who hailed the legitimation of white supremacist terror and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil; Matteo Salvini in Italy, Santiago Abascal in Spain, Alice Weidel in Germany, Tom Van Grieken in Belgium, Marine Le Pen in France, and Viktor Orban in Hungary have all personally welcomed Geert Wilders to the new hegemony and dominion of the Fourth Reich.
As written by Jon Henley in The Guardian, in an article entitled Geert Wilders’ victory confirms upward trajectory of far right in Europe; “Geert Wilders’ shock victory in the Dutch general election confirms the upward trajectory of Europe’s populist and far-right parties, which – with the occasional setback – are continuing their steady march into the mainstream.
There is no guarantee that Wilders, whose anti-Islam Party for Freedom (PVV) won 37 seats in Wednesday’s ballot – more than twice its 2021 total – will be able to form a government with a majority in the Netherlands’ 150-seat parliament.
Even if he can, the coalition process of endless compromise and concession by three, four or more parties means the most extreme parts of his manifesto, from banning the Qur’an to holding a Nexit referendum, are not about to become government policy.
But there is now a fair chance that a party shunned by the mainstream for more than a decade because of its radically nativist views could, some time next year, join the ranks of the far-right parties advancing across much of Europe.
From Helsinki to Rome and Berlin to Brussels, far-right parties are climbing steadily up the polls, shaping the policies of the mainstream right to reflect their nativist and populist platforms, and occupying select ministerial roles in coalition governments.
Giorgia Meloni, whose party has neofascist roots, heads Italy’s farthest-right government since the second world war. The far right is part of the ruling coalition in Finland and, in exchange for key policy concessions, propping up another in Sweden.
In Austria, the FPÖ is well ahead in the polls less than a year from the next election, while in Germany, the far-right AfD has surged from 10% to more than 21%, trailing only the centre-right CDU, and this year won its first district council elections.
If presidential elections were held today in France, polls suggest Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally – who scored a record 41.46% last time around – would win. Far-right Flemish nationalists are set to make big gains in the Belgian elections in June.
Little wonder that the continent’s far-right leaders, from Le Pen to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, the AfD’s Alice Weidel and Vlaams Belang’s Tom Van Grieken, rushed on Wednesday night to proffer Wilders their congratulations.
The far right has suffered some setbacks this year: in Spain’s parliamentary election in July, Vox saw its vote share drop from the 15% it won in 2019 to 12%, slashing the number of seats it holds in parliament from 52 to 33.
In Poland, the ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party finished first in October elections but – while it is trying to form a majority – has no viable path to government after a three-way opposition alliance led by Donald Tusk won an overall majority.
But in Slovakia, Robert Fico – if not far right, certainly populist, and an avowed Orbán admirer – won September’s election, fulfilled his campaign promise to halt military aid to Ukraine, and has raised rule-of-law concerns with attacks on the press.
Continental analysts also cite Britain’s Conservatives as being under populist, far-right influence, noting the extreme nationalist sloganeering of the Brexit campaign and the government’s ferocious rhetoric on immigration and the “war on woke”.
Analysts note that every far-right party is different, as are the cultures and political systems in which they operate. But across the continent, populist and far-right parties have been rising steadily – with the odd interruption – for several decades.
A range of factors is driving their advance. For a long time, opposition to immigration, Islam and the EU were the far right’s core causes. More recently, culture wars, minority rights, and the climate crisis and the sacrifice needed to combat it have joined the list.
Their appeal has been further enhanced by a deep cost of living crisis flowing from pandemic recovery and Russia’s war on Ukraine, by rapid and confusing social and digital change, and – everywhere – by mounting mistrust of mainstream politicians.
Gradually, far-right parties have become normalised in a two-way process: as the centre right has adopted nativist talking points and been willing to cut coalition deals, far-right parties are moderating some of their more voter-repellent views.
Much of Europe’s centre right, for example, is now as hardline on immigration as the far right – while far-right parties are busy projecting economic discipline, dialing back on Euroscepticism and downplaying their past support for Russia.
Wilders, who surfed a wave of anti-immigration sentiment and frustration with successive mainstream coalitions to his victory, has himself softened his more hardline anti-Islam language, apparently in hopes of entering a coalition.
Whether or not he leads the Netherlands’ next government, his performance on Wednesday night is a reminder that, as the Guardian revealed in September, almost a third of Europeans now vote for populist, far-right or far-left parties.
Wide support for anti-establishment politics is continuing to surge across the continent – and, increasingly, challenging the mainstream.”
As I wrote in my post of May 21 2022, The World the Fourth Reich Wants to Condemn Us To: Orban’s Hungary; This week’s gathering of global fascist leadership in Hungary holds up a mirror to the world the Fourth Reich and their front organization the American Republican Party wants to condemn us to.
This includes the use of faith and race in divide and conquer strategies of authoritarian state tyranny and terror and the institutionalization of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and Gideonite Christian fundamentalist identity politics, as well as the total control of all information and history by the state as propaganda.
Remember always the names of the fascists attending CPAC, among the most notorious Fourth Reich organizations of global tyranny and terror which in the arrogance of power does not conceal itself and its members, unlike myriads of other such cabals which conceal secret power and agendas of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which wait as ambush predators to pounce on us from the shadows. Remember, and bring a Reckoning.
First we must establish clearly that CPAC is a Nazi revivalist institution, beyond its public identification with White Replacement Conspiracy Theory whose origin is in Nazi antisemitic propaganda.
As I wrote in my post of February 28 2021, Nazi Terror and Tyranny: SS Black Magic and Madness at the CPAC Anti-Democracy White Supremacist Rally; When I write of exposure as hunting and outing Nazis, I don’t mean people I disagree with; I mean actual Nazis, members of a network of hate crime organizations committed to our destruction, and only those active threats of hate crime who by mission of action intend death, mass destruction, and harm to others they consider subhuman. This week’s Conservative Political Action Caucus was designed and attended by Nazis as well as ideological fascists, among them the descendants of war criminals our government collected to use against Communists and others they deemed subversive during the Red Scare of the 1950’s McCarthy Era.
They form a global network which I refer to as the Fourth Reich, a secret society whose membership is exclusive to families of the original Nazi loyalists and their allies and minions, thousands and possibly tens of thousands who have had seventy years in which to infiltrate the world’s governments and elites. I say this not as speculation or as a conspiracy theory, but as a simple fact, one which remains a threat to our liberty.
Someone knew enough about black magic as it was practiced by the SS to design the CPAC stage as a Nazi symbol, soul-stealing magic aimed at transferring the life force of the audience to the speaker for the purpose of submission to the leader’s will, exactly as it was used at the Nuremberg Rallies. It is a masterpiece of propaganda, a dog whistle hidden in plain sight which would have gone entirely unnoticed by outsiders but for the many vigilant Norse pagan antifascists who monitor social media.
Among them is my sister Erin, an antifascist and prominent Norse pagan and gythia or priestess, author of Asatru A Beginners Guide to the Heathen Path and manager of the Asatru facebook forum, literate in Old Norse and medieval forms of Gaelic and German among other languages, and practitioner of the traditional arts of galdur or poetic vision, seidr or sacred trance, and berserkergangr or martial arts, and like myself an admirer of Loki the Trickster.
Here is her post on Witches and Pagans entitled The Nazi Symbol That Is the CPAC Stage; “There are photos circulating on social media of the stage of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Caucus. One is included in this blog post. The stage is an odd and awkward looking design that could not have arisen purely from functionality, it looks like “the Odal Rune,” and it appears that the speakers at CPAC will be standing on a Nazi platform.
Let’s talk about Othala as distinct from “The Odal Rune.” The symbol you see in the photo is “The Odal Rune” which is 100% a Nazi symbol. The upturned feet on the ends of the legs appear only on the Nazi version, Odal, not on any version of Othala, the historical rune used in historical heathen alphabets.
A curious thing, though. Modern rune magic has adopted the “symbol upside down = opposite” thing that is common to Tarot cards, aka regular or reversed, and of course the dichotomy between the regular cross and the upside down cross. From the perspective of speakers backstage, the symbol is right side up in this photo, but from the perspective of the audience it’s upside down. Regular Othala in rune readings basically means real estate or psychic inheritance, but the “Odal Rune” is usually said to mean “heritage.” So, whose “heritage” is being protected and encouraged in this photo? Not the audience’s. If whoever designed this stage actually understands magic, the intent is to concentrate power in the hands of the speakers, away from the general public. Magically, it would take heritage energy from the audience and allow the people standing on the platform to vampirize that energy for their own use.
If the intent behind the choice of the shape was not magical, though, it’s probably meant to be a dog-whistle to neonazis. Experts on neonazis are mostly being more cautious about calling this out. American Iron Front tweeted the picture and called it “probably a coincidence.” I’m glad that the anti-fascist community is being careful not to stomp on heathens and pagans when they aren’t sure what symbol they’re looking at. But I’m an expert on heathen symbols and I know this isn’t one. There is no possible way an actual Asatruar drew the footed or winged version on a design program thinking it was a nice historical heathen rune. It’s unlikely the stage designer is heathen, anyway. That is not Othala, the heathen rune, it’s Odal, the Nazi symbol.
You can read about more symbols in my article Heathen Vs. Hate in the latest issue of Witches & Pagans Magazine.”
And why should an American political organization which designates itself as “conservative” find a safe haven for Nazi revivalism, allyship, kinship, and an aspirational figure of the America and global humankind they want to shape as our common future in Viktor Orban’s Hungary?
Because here Nazis are celebrated as national heroes, officially and openly in holidays, parades, and monuments. This is unique among nations in all the world, though fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are now the world’s dominant ideology and tyranny has eclipsed democracy as the system by which we have chosen to be human together.
Hungary in the jaws of Viktor Orban models how fear can be weaponized in service to power and identity politics leveraged to manufacture consent and centralize authority. Of this I say; beware of those to claim to speak and act in your name, for they are trying to subjugate you to their will and uses.
And this we must resist. To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of March 15 2020, Hungary: in the Shadows of Nazi Revivalism and Dominion; As Viktor Orban elevates Hungary’s Nazi past to a national mythology, Budapest has become a center and staging area for Nazi revivalism throughout Europe and the world. This has occurred in concert with the weaponization of Christian faith and the use of the Syrian and Libyan refugees from the Turkish-Russian conflict of dominion as a fear factor in the seizure of political power by European fascists.
Fascism requires others who define the limits of membership and belonging; to make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence and a crime of hate.
The Fourth Reich has met varying degrees of success in its attempts to reawaken global fascism; there are now many tyrannies and autocracies throughout the world, including the United States of America under Traitor Trump’s Republican alliance of white supremacist terrorists and Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Narendra Modi’s India, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, and other fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but only in Viktor Orban’s Hungary are actual Nazis celebrated as heroes and zealously sheltered by the power and authority of a government. In Hungary the Fourth Reich has an incubator and launchpad for the reconquest of Europe.
The twilight of democracy looms over the world, and with it comes an age of fascism and of darkness.
To which we may reply with Shakespeare; “”If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
As I wrote in my post of September 25 2022, Italy Chooses a Future Under the Shadows of Fascist Terror and Tyranny; On this election day, one hundred years after Mussolini’s March on Rome, Italy chooses a future under the shadows of fascist terror and tyranny and the legacies of a history for which there has never been a national reckoning.
If democracy in Italy falls today, no one in Europe is safe. Regressive political parties which weaponize national identities of race and faith and capitalize on fear of otherness are now everywhere, but the one about to capture the government of Italy originates in the ur-source of modern fascism as led by Benito Mussolini, and nothing suggests it has disavowed its history.
As in the Nazi revivalist state of Orban’s Hungary, launchpad for the reconquest of Europe, in Italy we may soon face an unreconstructed fascist state. Together with Vox in Spain and Le Pen’s Nationalists in France, a grim image of our future emerges as they share resources to leverage ideologies and policies in Europe.
Yet every force creates its own counterforce, and in Italy as throughout Europe histories of Resistance balance those of fascism. Here we must look for alliances and models to answer fear with hope and division with solidarity.
As I wrote in my post of July 22 2022, Now Is the Time of Monsters; Hope and Despair: Italy on the Cusp of Change; The government of Italy has collapsed, an act of sabotage by fascist revivalists who have abandoned the political coalition which has thus far prevented it from tumbling off the edge of a precipice into the abyss, an existential threat to the survival of her peoples and the basic services of any state which include healthcare.
But if the abyss holds terrors of a precariat held hostage by death and the material needs of survival, the abyss is also where hope lies, for here the balance of power may be changed in revolutionary struggle.
In this liminal time of the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human, of seizures of power and the performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen, Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, let us look to our glorious past in the Resistance which was victorious in the Liberation of Italy on April 25 and the hanging of Mussolini on April 28 1945.
As Slavoj Zizek’s favorite saying goes, a French mistranslation or paraphrase of Antonio Gramsci’s line in his Prison Notebooks “La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati”, literally “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”, as “Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”, which introduces the idea of monstrosity, referential to the historical development of the idea in Michel de Montaigne, Michel Foucault, and Georges Canguilhem’s work The Normal and the Pathological, a dialectical process of mimesis which results in the form of the principle as; “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
Meanings shift, adapt, and change as they transgress boundaries, inhabit public and private spaces, and unfold over vast gulfs of time, and so must we.
As I wrote in my post of March 14 2024, In Portugal’s Election, Darkness Gathers; In Portugal’s election, darkness gathers.
Like the leprous tracks of an unseen plague, fascism reaches out as the legacies of our history, like hungry ghosts who seek to possess us with madness and degradation of our humanity.
Portugal is a shining example of how we can reimagine and transform ourselves and our choices about how to be human together, a global colonial empire which liberated herself and her colonies in the 1974 Carnation Revolution.
A wave of fascist subversions of democracy and electoral captures of power throughout Europe now threatens to falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us and steal our souls, in coordinated actions by a Nazi revivalist Fourth Reich, exactly as we here in America have long endured in Traitor Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty.
Let us give to fascist tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!
Yes, but how? Herein I signpost that as we are all being attacked together, we may find greater power in international solidarity and a united front in Resistance.
When they come for us, let those who would enslave us find not a humankind defeated by learned helplessness and division, but a United Humankind in which we are all guarantors of each other’s liberty, equality, and universal human rights.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of July 17 2023, The World is Mad. And It is On Fire; The world is mad. And it is on fire.
These existential threats are interdependent faces of a single problem, albeit a Gordian Knot of complex, nuanced, relative and shifting truths, meanings, and values; unequal power.
And both sets of causes and effects which chase each other round in recursion, like the iconic Gahan Wilson cartoon of gleeful devils in pursuit of each other entitled One Damn Thing After Another, are not symptoms of natural processes of change but consequences of political decisions we have made about how to be human with each other.
Extinction and the destruction of earth’s ecosystems and ability to support life is parallel and interdependent with the global subversion of democracy and the dawn of an age of tyrants and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
We cannot work toward solutions to extinction and fascist tyranny separately; they must be taken together as a whole.
I write now in reference to an article by Robin McKie in The Guardian entitled, “World experiences hottest week ever recorded and more is forecast to come: There is a good chance that the month of July will see the highest global temperatures for (the past) 120,000 years.“
Yes, but not for the millennium to follow; it just becomes unsurvivable from here. What creatures in some distant future will sift the dead sands of our world for clues to what doomed it, and why?
It will never be this good again, and one day humankind will become nothing and unremembered.
Because we have failed to purge our destroyers from among us, to seize power and control of our destiny from those who would enslave us and steal our future; elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege now locked in a death spiral of terminal stage capitalism as war on nature and subjugation and commodification of our labor which creates benefits for the few who can buy our time at the cost of dehumanization of the many and the extinction of us all.
We must abandon our addiction to power and its ephemeral, transitory, ultimately meaningless and destructive material signs and vanities, and our reliance on fossil fuels as a strategic resource of dominion and hegemony which is consuming us like a poison or cancer, and the whole twisted project and inverted values of civilization not as a conversation and questioning of ourselves and our universe but as systems of oppression and control of nature; and instead embrace the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
What happened last time: The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski
Institutionalized sexual terror and state tyranny in the legislative assault on women’s reproductive rights and the primary freedom of bodily autonomy were challenged in a mass action on October Second of 2021 throughout America, organized by the Women’s March and coordinated with the riveting testimony in Congress of three of our representatives who have had abortions, Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal, and Barbara Lee.
There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
This election year the Women’s March on Washington D.C. and throughout the nation will be held on November 2; join us.
We can triumph over this wave of theft of our liberty which seeks to redefine the relationship of individuals to the state and render citizenship meaningless if we act in solidarity with coordinated mass action and legislative process. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me in 1982 in Beirut by Jean Genet goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As reported by CNN; “Abortion rights activists are gathering at more than 600 marches across the US, holding placards and banners that read, “My mind, my body, my choice” and “Legal abortion for health and life,” as they demand reproductive freedoms.
The “Rally for Abortion Justice” marches follow the anti-abortion bill in Texas that bans abortions after six weeks — before many women know they have conceived — with no exceptions for rape or incest.
The Supreme Court, which returns Monday, denied a request to block the Texas measure, and activists now fear it will empower other states to follow suit.
“Simply put: We are witnessing the most dire threat to abortion access in our lifetime,” the Women’s March website reads.
The Women’s March is organizing the rallies in partnership with more than 90 groups, including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a nonprofit that provides reproductive health care, and the Center for American Progress, a progressive public policy research and advocacy organization.”
As written by Candice Norwood in The 19th; “Beyond Texas’ abortion law, state lawmakers have introduced hundreds of restrictive bills over the last several years. In December, the Supreme Court will hear a case out of Mississippi that directly targets Roe v. Wade. During the committee hearing on Thursday, Rep. Judy Chu spoke about her bill, the Women’s Health Protection Act, that would codify the right to abortion access.
“I’m so proud that last week the House took the historic step of passing the legislation,” Chu said. “In fact, it was the first affirmative abortion rights bill in nearly 25 years, and it shows the American people that we will not abandon them.”
As written by Emma Specter in Vogue; “Democratic representatives Cori Bush (Mo.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), and Barbara Lee (Calif.) about their own abortions.
“In the summer of 1994, I was raped, I became pregnant, and I chose to have an abortion,” said Bush, explaining that she lived through an experience of sexual assault while on a church trip at age 17. “To all the Black women and girls who have had abortions and will have abortions, we have nothing to be ashamed of.” Jayapal noted that she sought out her own abortion when she was a young mother of a sick child attempting to deal with postpartum depression; her doctor told her that carrying a second child to term would be risky for both her and the baby. “I very much wanted to have more children, but I simply could not imagine going through that again,” Jayapal told the panel. Lee’s pregnancy occurred before abortion was even legal in the U.S., so her mother sent her to a friend in Texas who arranged for a “back alley” procedure at a clinic in Mexico. “A lot of girls and women in my generation didn’t make it—they died from unsafe abortions,” she said. “In the 1960s, unsafe septic abortions were the primary killer of African American women.”
Hopefully, as Democrats seek to codify Roe v. Wade, the rest of this country’s predominantly male lawmakers can be as courageous in protecting women’s reproductive rights as Bush, Jayapal, and Lee were in discussing their own extremely personal experiences with abortion.”
As I wrote in my post of September 5 2021, State Theft of Freedom as Bodily Autonomy: Case of the Texas Abortion Ban; Texas has outlawed all abortion, the Supreme Court has failed to overrule Texas and uphold freedom as our right of bodily autonomy, and patriarchs of Gideonite fundamentalist organizations of sexual terror and subversion of religious freedom are mobilized to enforce it.
This in parallel with Texas’ theft of voting rights and citizenship from nonwhite persons as institutionalized white supremacist terror.
Texas is our Heart of Darkness. We must liberate the peoples of Texas from the grip of Patriarchy and white supremacy and a legislature of subversion of democracy and of fascist state tyranny and terror.
And the most horrific thing in all of this is that Texas is not an abnormality in American politics, merely the most extreme and clearly evil example of a general condition, our dehumanization and subjugation by elites through the weaponization of fear and the infiltration and subversion of democracy by the Fourth Reich.
I call for the abolition of the Republican Party as an organization of treason and racist and sexual terror, the proscription of its members from holding or running for any public office, the nationalization of its assets, and the revocation of citizenship and exile of its members and representatives on the grounds that there are no conditions in which the rest of us will be safe if those who would enslave us are not purged from the herd.
Perhaps Afghanistan will welcome them as refugees; Republican ideas about women and racial tribalism would fit right in with that of the Taliban, one ethnic theocratic group among many. Actually, I wonder if they are really the same people as the Taliban whom they resemble, and just trade their cowboy hats for wool Pakol berets when they fly back and forth.
Let them go elsewhere and enslave each other, but we must not allow them to enslave us.
As I wrote in my post of July 22 2021, Systemic Failures of Unequal Power: the Case of Abortion; To an article in the Washington Post calling out the Texas abortion ban as a canary in the coal mine for legislating away our freedoms, I commented; “There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.”
I received a reply; “There is no freedom without personal responsibility.” This claim was supported by references to abortion as demonic child sacrifice, somewhat beyond the scope of reasonable argument.
Here is my refutation to ideas of personal responsibility:
I do not believe in the idea of the innate depravity of man on which our legal system is based as an extension of the doctrine of original sin, or its formulation by Freud as a polymorphosly perverse human nature which must be controlled rather than celebrated and explored, all versions of the Talmudic concept of the yetzer hara, the evil impulse; humans without the restraining force of law do not devolve to atavisms of ruthless barbarism and become dehumanized, but instead become prosocial and mutually interdependent so long as power is not the only thing which has meaning nor fear and its children force and control the only means of exchange.
Nor do I believe in law and order; law serves power and order appropriates; chaos autonomizes.
There is no just authority.
I believe in history, and in justice as revolutionary struggle.
I find the origins of evil not in an evil impulse to be controlled, but in the systems and structures of unequal power; hence responsibility is not personal but social and belongs to us all.
Fear is a co-equal origin of evil, for it is overwhelming and generalized fear coupled with submission to authority which allows fear to be weaponized in service to power, through divisions of exclusionary otherness and elite membership and belonging. Hence arise fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and the centralization of power and the immunity of authority in a totalitarian carceral state of force and control.
There is no basis for trying anyone for a crime, when we should be seeking to redress the interdependent, relational, recursive, and holistically distributed causes of our failure which produced it.
Crime is a symptom of the failure of social systems, not of the unfitness or degeneracy of individuals whose choices are the products of forces they are the victims of; clearly perpetrators share in the responsibility for their actions, though not exclusively. They are simply the last domino to fall in a cascade failure of unequal and unjust initial conditions, and we must change those conditions to restore the balance.
Crime is an illness of unequal power. Perpetrators are also victims; this does not imply moral equivalence between victims and their abusers. We must heal the flaws of our humanity, rather than punish transgression which centralizes power to an authoritarian carceral state of prisons and police.
It is not the perpetrator who must answer to us, but we who must answer for them.
If the purpose of government is to secure those rights which we cannot secure for ourselves, then justice negotiates and guarantees that no person’s liberty infringes on that of any other.
What are the realistic alternatives to the social use of force? Processes of healing and restorative justice provide models and solutions; therapy not punishment, schools and hospitals not prisons. We all bear sacred wounds which can open us to the pain of others, and it is how we respond to the brokenness of the world and to the flaws, wounds, and pain of others which defines us. We humans are beautiful not in spite of our flaws, but because of them. If a tribe comes together to meet the challenges of its members actions and consequences for the lives of others when they are signs of trauma and crisis or harmful to others, to engage in healing process and restore the balance of power, we become a social organism which can heal itself, without the social use of force or vilification.
And we can bring the redemptive power of love as healing and revisioning to bear on the issues we face in the world which are more terrible still, and which will require a united front of diverse and unlike persons to find answers. Let us discover our best selves in our kindness to others.
The question we must ask is not if a thing is good or evil, but why it exists.
Abortion is a symptom of our failure to confront and dismantle patriarchy; it is a fracture point of a flawed system which acts to relieve pressure, avoid change, and maintain unequal and unjust elite hegemonic power. Change the balance of power, giving women full control of their sexuality, and equality of social agency in general, and much of the nonmedical need for abortion vanishes; a solution I much prefer to the tyranny and state terror of enforcing other people’s ideas of virtue.
Patriarchy is a special form of faith weaponized in service to power, and male dominion and control over women looks to Abrahamic faith for an apologetics of tyranny.
As I wrote in my post of March 4 2020, Supreme Court Hears Access to Abortion Case; A Louisiana law which requires a doctor to have admitting privileges in a hospital within 30 miles has been used to deny access to abortions, one of a whirlwind of such laws designed to transfer the rights of self-governance and bodily autonomy from women to the state and the Patriarchy.
At stake here are issues affecting every American citizen and other persons within the boundaries of our law; freedom and dehumanization as a means of enslavement, and our universal human right of access to healthcare as a precondition of our right to life.
How can the Gideonite fundamentalists and atavistic forces of Patriarchy deny the right of bodily autonomy, the first of all rights of property, our right to choose our own use of that body which speaks to the definition of being human and to the fundamental rights of a citizen in a democracy as a voting co-owner of our government, on the basis of our right to life which derives both from our citizenship and our humanity as a natural condition, when the right of the mother to life precedes that of her fetus and renders her the sole medical authorizing party in any such matter?
Only a woman’s right to choose her own destiny matters here, and no state or any other authority which operates in the place of a father or husband under the Patriarchal legal fiction of in loco parentis, nor the will or judgement of any other persons especially actual fathers and husbands, has any just role in a free society of equals; all else is slavery.
If one abrogates the separation of church and state and claims Biblical authority as a justification for government policy, surely an act of hubris if not madness, on abortion and for a definition of life, life clearly begins with breath.
As William Tyndale wrote in his beautiful poetic reimagination of traditional sources published as the King James Bible; “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” Genesis 2:7.
This is reinforced elsewhere; “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host” Psalms 33:6. And again; “Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived,” Ezekiel 10. And yet again; “If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust,” Job 34: 14-15.
Plus there’s the abortion method authorized in Numbers 5:11-31, the Ordeal of the Bitter Water, and the penalty for causing an abortion outside of this ritual such as by a violent blow, which is a fine paid to the woman’s husband because it is a crime against property or future economic benefit and not a crime against person as there is no life before breath or natural birth. Abrahamic faiths regard as human only those who have been ensouled at first breath upon being born; prior to birth we are not human but part of the mother’s body; a fetus has no rights other than hers. This is because Abrahamic faiths regard the body as an organic machine and not a person until it is animated with a soul.
To argue that abortion is murder is to argue that there is no soul, that we are human prior to the animating breath of the Infinite, and that as mere beasts and organic machines each of our cells are individually sacrosanct and legally persons. Haircuts are murder in this absurd construction.
Let us not mistake the purpose and intention of those who would seize women’s power of bodily autonomy as both a human being and a citizen; this has nothing to do with faith, and everything to do with power.
A new moon signals the advent of the Halloween lunar month 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 the trauma of life disruptive events and the pathology of our disconnectedness and division as 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 ownership of identity as a ground of struggle, Neil Gaiman places his drama in the context of the problem of the deus absconditus, the Biblical tyrant 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.
Interdependent with this is a love story which references Beauty and the Beast, its great retelling by Emily Bronte as Wuthering Heights, classical myths of Orpheus and Persephone, and Jewish myths of the double aspected divine feminine; the Shekinah, goddess of wisdom as transcendence, ecstatic vision, and poetic truth who once had her own altar beside that of her masculine half in Jewish temples, and Lillith, mother of the Thousands of Myriads and bearer of wisdom immanent in nature and written in our flesh as her children.
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, whose purpose is to free us from tyranny. Secondarily he is a Trickster figure, who disrupts order through acts of Chaos and Transgression as a guide of the soul and as revolutionary struggle.
Here is desire as an unstoppable tidal force of anarchy and liberation, transgression and the violation of norms as sacred acts in pursuit of truth parallel with the witness of history and the calling of journalism as Foucault’s truth telling, linked to the redemptive and creative powers of love to set us free by seeing the truth of each other; how could I not identify with Lucifer, who embodies self-creation as seizures of power?
Gaiman’s Lucifer provides a role model and defines a personal mission statement for me, as I suspect he does 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, a mission statement of becoming human 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 also 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 like Baudrillard’s simulacra 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 as my father took a job teaching high school there; the quiet and black garbed Dutch and their Reformed Church, affiliated with that of South Africa’s Apartheid regime, grim 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, both white Protestants speaking forms of German, 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 at the insistence of my mother who was a member of the Peace and Freedom Party because of their platform statement to take In God We Trust off our money as it is a claim by the state to Biblical authority, and personally I 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 the Bible as authority in the repression of dissent. My parents were formidable figures who were also misfits; my mother a radical atheist, feminist, and peace activist, 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 and my quasi-uncle William S. Burroughs who were formative personal influences of my childhood.
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.
Let us embrace the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.
Throughout the Festival of the Rebel Angel, this year the whole lunar month from today until the first of November, let us bring the Chaos, run amok, and be Ungovernable.
Lucifer’s Song of Love: Cover of Wicked Game by Ursine Vulpine & Annaca
The New Annotated Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Leslie S. Klinger (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Guillermo del Toro (Introduction), Anne K. Mellor (Afterword)
Six years ago today the state of Saudi Arabia, its head of state Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his criminal conspirators Saud al-Qahtani and Ahmed al-Assiri, assassinated the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi to silence his sacred calling to pursue the truth and to give witness, a crime against humanity for which the show trial of his killers ended with implicit exoneration of its masterminds and the sacrifice of their pawns to avoid sanction for this horrific crime of state terror and tyranny.
It is a crime in which America is complicit as a conspirator after the fact, though Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his minions and collaborators may well have known beforehand and abetted the murder of a journalist by their principal ally in the region, key to our global empire and hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege through partnership with Saudi Arabia in control of oil as a strategic resource and in the war in Yemen to counter the Iranian conquest of the Arabian Peninsula and dominion of the Middle East.
My first thought upon hearing of this assassination was that if I were an Iranian agent, I could think of nothing which might drive a wedge between America and Saudi Arabia more effectively than this; the violation of one of our last ideals combined with the political assassination of a man under our protection, living in America and working for our finest and most iconic institution of truth, The Washington Post.
Though the geopolitics of this are interesting in terms of regional conflicts and the great game of empires between Iran and the Arab-American Alliance, what concerns me is more primary; the foundational necessity of a free press, free speech, and freedoms of information to the project of democracy as a free society of equals, and as a balance to the falsification and theft of the soul of propaganda and tyranny.
Our world is a wilderness of mirrors, distorted funhouse images, rewritten histories, filled with surfaces which capture and reflect, in which the witness of history and the sacred calling to pursue the truth must be beyond the power of the state, the elite, or of anyone to silence and erase, or we become forgeries of ourselves and shadow puppets of authority. Our authenticity and uniqueness, our ownership of ourselves, is put at risk and in question by propaganda and thought control, repression of dissent, dehumanization, and subjugation.
We need what Foucault called truth tellers, not merely as guarantors of our liberty, but also of our humanity and the inviolability of our souls.
Of the silencing of dissent in service to the authority of the state and of the tyranny of force and control I have written often, for it touches upon the origins of evil and the centrality of fear, power, and force as an engine of violence, inhumanity, dehumanization, and the theft of the soul.
Herein I find another purpose in defining the nature of truth, and of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth. And this provides us with a yardstick against which to measure the legitimacy of the state; the test of a government is its transparency, its tolerance of dissent as a feature of democratic process, the degree to which it upholds freedom of speech and of access to information, and its reverence for objective and testable truth as a keystone of freedom.
As I wrote in my post of September 8 2020, A War of Truth and Lies for the Dominion of Humankind: the Khashoggi Murder Trial Ends, and With It the Legitimacy of the Saudi Dynasty; A farcical show trial attempts to obscure the brutality and arrogance of unjust power of the Saudi monarchy as its proxies destroy Yemen to deny Iran a fortress on the Arabian Peninsula and a port with which to interdict oil shipping to the West. That the beneficiaries of American imperialism have given tacit approval for the Saudi murder of Khashoggi is entirely due to the purpose of the Arab-American Alliance in protecting our hegemony of world power through control of oil as a strategic resource, without which any nation ceases to function. The same mutual interests of wealth and power now protect the Saudi regime of feudal aristocratic privilege, its head of state Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his criminal conspirators Saud al-Qahtani and Ahmed al-Assiri.
In this one gruesome crime of murder and dismemberment to silence the sacred calling to discover truth the Saudi regime has revealed the lie at its heart; it serves its own wealth and power, and exploits and dehumanizes those who fall within its dominion rather than protecting them. As the protection of pilgrims as seekers of truth is the justification for its existence and hegemony of power over access to sacred sites, this reveals the falseness of its legitimacy and exposes their true nature as an aristocracy of state terror and crimes against humanity.
They have lied; not to forge peace, nor as a ruse of war, nor to safeguard the amity of relations between husband and wife, the three canonical exceptions in Islam to the injunction to give truthful witness in all things, but to protect personal wealth and power and to escape responsibility for a horrific crime.
There are possible interpretations and constructions of the idea of the state under Islamic law and in a culture built on verbal contracts, in which a trial wherein the agents of unjust power, state terror, and murder are held responsible for the crimes of those who commanded them while the mighty escape justice is without force of law and abrogates the authority of the government and its leadership to act as the nation’s Head of Islam. This voids all treaties, subverts all authority to make laws and especially to operate courts, and frees all citizens from obligation to abide by its pronouncements and decrees.
In Hadith 54, Truthfulness, as written by Al-Bukhaari (6094) and Muslim (2607), Abdullah ibn Mas’ud (may Allāh be pleased with him) gave this witness; “The Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam (peace and blessings of Allāh be upon him) said, “Truthfulness leads to righteousness and righteousness leads to Paradise. A man will keep speaking the truth and striving to speak the truth until he will be recorded with Allāh as a siddeeq (speaker of the truth).”
What interests me in this today is the ideology of Islam as the path of becoming a Speaker of the Truth; I think of its parallels with Socratic method on which democracy is founded as a means of questioning authority which reveals and discovers hidden truths through reason, of Foucault’s truthtelling as a development of parrhesia, and of the idea of journalism as a sacred calling in pursuit and witness of truth. To be a journalist, a whistleblower, or a citizen protesting and calling out injustice is to be a pilgrim, and all such pursuit and witness of truth is an absolute right and a sacred duty.
In choosing the path of tyranny and evil perpetrated for personal gain rather than the path of mercy and compassion for others, the Saudi monarchy has sacrificed its purity of purpose and become an instrument of the evil impulse in the struggle between good and evil within and for the soul of humankind.
As I wrote in my post of October 2 2019 Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Jamal Khashoggi, Champion of Truth and Freedom; The House of Saud claims the throne of Arabia on the basis of its historical protection of the Pilgrimage and its holy places; ask then, how have they respected the house of the Infinite, our bodies, in this? How does the silencing of dissent fulfill the commandment to the faithful to learn throughout one’s entire life, no matter the source or where it leads? Or honor the sacred contract of one’s words? How can we trust the words of those who would keep the words of others from us? In the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the royalty of Saudi Arabia has discredited itself and its reign.
In the words of his fiancée Hatice Cengiz writing in Time; “I can see that the day Jamal was killed was not simply the murder of a journalist. It was also the murder of fundamental values: human rights, the international rule of law, the norms of diplomacy.”
As I wrote in my post of July 16 2022, America Chooses Power Over Principle: Biden’s Fist Bump With Tyranny; Or, Toadying to Tyrants: a Song of America; What is this human rights and democracy? Balanced against our hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege, our systemic patriarchy and white supremacy, our global imperial dominion?
Nothing, it seems, only the lies and illusions of those who would enslave us.
What does this mean? First, that Biden may have handed the next election to Trump, or rendered the differences between them meaningless. Second, that in sacrificing the moral high ground for the wealth required to maintain the state, the man we chose as our President and entrusted with the Restoration of America may have just signaled its incipient fall and robbed our democracy of its meaning and value.
Odd, that; normally it’s the enemies of the state who stage performances of its delegitimation and subversion, as I have many times as a maker of mischief for tyrants. Perhaps we should reconsider Biden’s true motives, purposes, and role in the Fourth Reich’s plans to enslave us all to a tyrannical carceral state which embodies violence, repression of dissent, and authorized version of the truth, of our history, and of ourselves.
As the line spoken by the antifascist hero Lt Aldo Raine goes in Inglorious Basterds, “I can’t abide it. Can you abide it?”
As written by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled What was Joe Biden thinking when he fist-bumped the Saudi Crown prince?; “Biden came to office determined to take a firmer line with the strongmen and autocrats beloved by Donald Trump. He had a particular enmity towards Prince Mohammed, the ambitious 36-year-old who deposed his uncle to become next in line as king, waged a ruinous war in Yemen, and locked up or killed his critics.
On the campaign trail, in the aftermath of the gruesome murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Biden vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah state”. He has since refused to speak to the crown prince directly, liaising instead with his ailing father, King Salman. Shortly after arriving in the White House, Biden released US intelligence findings – suppressed by Trump – which concluded that Prince Mohammed approved the operation targeting the Washington Post journalist at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
When the US president brought up Khashoggi with the de facto Saudi ruler on Friday, the prince reportedly hit back, accusing Washington of hypocrisy by not investigating the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh, and for allowing the abuse of inmates at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
Yet Riyadh has been one of Washington’s closest strategic partners for decades for a reason that no US president can ignore. Biden has heard the siren song of the kingdom’s vast oil reserves: the war in Ukraine has unleashed chaos in global oil markets, and he can no longer refuse the call.”
For myself; this is far more simple and direct, for we are captives now of an allegory from the dawn of history, in Genesis 25:29-34, wherein our universal human rights as a birthright inherent to our humanity have been sold for us by our betrayer, as did Esau for a mess of pottage.
America has abdicated its role as a guarantor of our universal human rights, which leaves the United Nations as a court of final appeal. Here follows the PEN America letter to the United Nations which you may sign in the link below
Dear Secretary-General Guterres,
As writers, journalists, artists, and Members of PEN America and the Authors Guild, we write to express our grave concern about the apparent horrific murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist, Washington Post contributor, and U.S. resident who disappeared in Istanbul on October 2 after entering the Saudi Arabian consulate. If true, the murder of a journalist inside a diplomatic facility would constitute nothing less than an act of state terror intended to intimidate journalists, dissidents, and exiled critics the world over. The United Nations has rightly recognized the importance of ensuring the safety of journalists and fighting impunity for those who attack them with the publication of the UN Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity, endorsed in 2012. In the spirit of that initiative, we respectfully call on you to immediately authorize an independent, international investigation into Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance and apparent murder.
Since his disappearance, Turkish authorities have claimed to have evidence suggesting that Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered and dismembered inside the consulate, and that the operation was likely carried out by a team including individuals very close to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, making it look extremely likely that the Crown Prince was behind Khashoggi’s assassination. After weeks of denying any involvement in his disappearance, on October 19 Saudi Arabia admitted that Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate, claiming his death was the result of a “fight” during attempts to detain him. Global leaders have responded to the details of this admission with significant skepticism. More recently, Saudi authorities have said the murder was “premeditated,” though the details and culpability remain unclear.
The violent murder of a prominent journalist and commentator on foreign soil is a grave violation of human rights and a disturbing escalation of the crackdown on dissent in Saudi Arabia, whose government in recent years has jailed numerous writers, journalists, human rights advocates, and lawyers in a sweeping assault on free expression and association. It is also yet another data point in a global trend that has seen an increasing number of journalists imprisoned and murdered for their work. As writers and journalists ourselves, we fear the potential chilling effect of this trend, at a moment when the work of all those who would speak and expose the truth has never been more important.
The UN Plan of Action states: “The safety of journalists and the struggle against impunity for their killers are essential to preserve the fundamental right to freedom of expression, guaranteed by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” and goes on to say that attacks on journalists “[deprive] society as a whole of their journalistic contribution and [result] in a wider impact on press freedom where a climate of intimidation and violence leads to self censorship.” It is imperative that the United Nations send a clear, unquestionable message that a human rights violation of this gravity will not go without consequence.
We therefore respectfully call on you to immediately authorize an independent, international investigation into the murder of Jamal Khashoggi that would lay the groundwork for identifying and holding accountable the perpetrators of this grievous crime.”
Arabic
2 أكتوبر 2024 الذكرى الرابعة لاغتيال خاشقجي ، الشهيد في الدعوة المقدسة للسعي إلى الحقيقة
قبل أربع سنوات ، اغتالت اليوم دولة السعودية ، رئيسها ولي العهد الأمير محمد بن سلمان ومتآمريه المجرمين سعود القحطاني وأحمد العسيري ، صحفي الواشنطن بوست جمال خاشقجي لإسكات دعوته المقدسة لمتابعة الحقيقة و للإدلاء بالشهادة ، وهي جريمة ضد الإنسانية انتهت من أجلها المحاكمة الصورية لقتله بتبرئة ضمنية من مدبريها والتضحية ببيادقهم لتجنب العقاب على هذه الجريمة المروعة المتمثلة في إرهاب الدولة واستبدادها.
إنها جريمة تتواطأ فيها أمريكا كمتآمر بعد وقوعها ، على الرغم من أن مهرج الإرهاب ، الخائن ترامب وأتباعه والمتعاونين معه ربما يكونون قد عرفوا مسبقًا وحرضوا على قتل صحفي على يد حليفهم الرئيسي في المنطقة ، مفتاح إمبراطوريتنا العالمية وهيمنة الثروة والسلطة والامتياز من خلال الشراكة مع المملكة العربية السعودية في السيطرة على النفط كمورد استراتيجي وفي الحرب في اليمن لمواجهة الغزو الإيراني لشبه الجزيرة العربية والهيمنة على الشرق الأوسط.
أول ما خطر في بالي عندما سمعت بهذا الاغتيال هو أنني لو كنت عميلاً إيرانياً، فلن أستطيع التفكير في أي شيء قد يدق إسفيناً بين أمريكا والمملكة العربية السعودية بشكل أكثر فعالية من هذا؛ انتهاك أحد مُثُلنا الأخيرة جنبًا إلى جنب مع الاغتيال السياسي لرجل تحت حمايتنا، يعيش في أمريكا ويعمل في أرقى مؤسسات الحقيقة وأكثرها شهرة، واشنطن بوست.
على الرغم من أن الجغرافيا السياسية لهذا الأمر مثيرة للاهتمام من حيث الصراعات الإقليمية واللعبة الكبرى للإمبراطوريات بين إيران والتحالف العربي الأمريكي ، فإن ما يقلقني هو أكثر أهمية ؛ الضرورة الأساسية للصحافة الحرة وحرية التعبير وحرية الإعلام لمشروع الديمقراطية كمجتمع حر متساوٍ ، وكتوازن لتزوير وسرقة روح الدعاية والاستبداد.
عالمنا عبارة عن برية من المرايا ، وصور مسرحية مشوهة ، وتاريخ مُعاد كتابته ، مليء بالأسطح التي تلتقط وتعكس ، حيث يجب أن تكون شهادة التاريخ والدعوة المقدسة للسعي وراء الحقيقة خارجة عن سلطة الدولة ، أو النخبة ، أو من أي شخص أن يصمت ويمحو ، أو نصبح مزيفين لأنفسنا ودمى في الظل للسلطة. إن أصالتنا وتفردنا ، وملكيتنا لأنفسنا ، معرضة للخطر والتساؤل عن طريق الدعاية والتحكم في الفكر ، وقمع المعارضة ، ونزع الصفة الإنسانية ، والقهر.
نحن بحاجة إلى ما أسماه فوكو بقول الحقيقة ، ليس فقط كضامنين لحريتنا ، ولكن أيضًا لإنسانيتنا وحرمة أرواحنا.
عن إسكات المعارضة في خدمة سلطة الدولة واستبداد القوة والسيطرة الذي كتبته كثيرًا ، لأنه يمس أصول الشر ومركزية الخوف والسلطة والقوة كمحرك للعنف ، اللاإنسانية ونزع الصفة الإنسانية وسرقة الروح.
هنا أجد هدفًا آخر في تعريف طبيعة الحقيقة ، والصحافة على أنها دعوة مقدسة للسعي وراء الحقيقة. وهذا يوفر لنا معيارًا نقيس على أساسه شرعية الدولة ؛ إن اختبار الحكومة هو شفافيتها ، وتسامحها مع المعارضة كميزة للعملية الديمقراطية ، ودرجة دعمها لحرية التعبير والوصول إلى المعلومات ، وتقديسها للحقيقة الموضوعية والقابلة للاختبار باعتبارها حجر الأساس للحرية.
كما كتبت في مقالتي بتاريخ 8 سبتمبر 2020 ، حرب الحقيقة والأكاذيب للسيطرة على البشرية: انتهاء محاكمة خاشقجي ، ومعها تنتهي شرعية الأسرة السعودية ؛ تحاول محاكمة استعراضية هزلية التعتيم على وحشية وغطرسة السلطة الظالمة للمملكة السعودية ، حيث يقوم وكلائها بتدمير اليمن لحرمان إيران من حصن في شبه الجزيرة العربية وميناء لمنع شحن النفط إلى الغرب. إن منح المستفيدين من الإمبريالية الأمريكية موافقة ضمنية على مقتل خاشقجي السعودي يعود بالكامل إلى هدف التحالف العربي الأمريكي في حماية هيمنتنا على القوة العالمية من خلال السيطرة على النفط كمورد استراتيجي ، والذي بدونه تتوقف أي دولة عن القيام بذلك. وظيفة. نفس المصالح المتبادلة للثروة والسلطة الآن تحمي النظام السعودي ذي الامتياز الأرستقراطي الإقطاعي ، ورئيس الدولة ولي العهد الأمير محمد بن سلمان ومتآمريه المجرمين سعود القحطاني وأحمد العسيري.
في جريمة القتل البشعة هذه وتقطيع الأوصال لإسكات الدعوة المقدسة لاكتشاف الحقيقة ، كشف النظام السعودي الكذب في قلبه. إنها تخدم ثروتها وسلطتها ، وتستغل وتجرد من يقعون في نطاق سيطرتها وتجردهم من الإنسانية بدلاً من حمايتهم. بما أن حماية الحجاج كباحثين عن الحقيقة هي تبرير لوجودها وهيمنتها على الوصول إلى الأماكن المقدسة ، فإن هذا يكشف زيف شرعيتها ويكشف طبيعتها الحقيقية كأرستقراطية لإرهاب الدولة والجرائم ضد الإنسانية.
لقد كذبوا. عدم إقامة السلام ، ولا كخدعة للحرب ، ولا للحفاظ على صداقة العلاقات بين الزوج والزوجة ، والاستثناءات الكنسية الثلاثة في الإسلام للأمر بإعطاء شهادة صادقة في كل شيء ، ولكن لحماية الثروة الشخصية والسلطة و الهروب من المسؤولية عن جريمة مروعة.
هناك تفسيرات وإنشاءات محتملة لـ i بعد وقت قصير من وصوله إلى البيت الأبيض ، أصدر بايدن نتائج المخابرات الأمريكية – التي قمعها ترامب – والتي خلصت إلى أن الأمير محمد وافق على العملية التي تستهدف صحفي واشنطن بوست في القنصلية السعودية في اسطنبول.
عندما أثار الرئيس الأمريكي خاشقجي مع الحاكم السعودي الفعلي يوم الجمعة ، ورد أن الأمير رد ، متهما واشنطن بالنفاق بعدم التحقيق في مقتل الصحفية الفلسطينية الأمريكية شيرين أبو عقله ، والسماح بإساءة معاملة النزلاء في سجن أبو عقل. سجن غريب.
مع ذلك ، كانت الرياض من أقرب الشركاء الاستراتيجيين لواشنطن منذ عقود لسبب لا يمكن لأي رئيس أمريكي تجاهله. سمع بايدن نغمة الإنذار لاحتياطيات النفط الهائلة في المملكة: لقد أطلقت الحرب في أوكرانيا العنان للفوضى في أسواق النفط العالمية ، ولم يعد بإمكانه رفض المكالمة “.
لنفسي هذا أكثر بساطة ومباشرة ، لأننا الآن أسرى قصة رمزية منذ فجر التاريخ ، في تكوين 25: 29-34 ، حيث تم بيع حقوق الإنسان العالمية لدينا باعتبارها حقًا موروثًا متأصلًا في إنسانيتنا من قبل خائننا. ، كما فعل عيسو في فوضى الطهي.
The Dissident film trailer
No accountability 5 years after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder
قبل ثلاث سنوات ، اغتالت اليوم المملكة العربية السعودية ، رئيس دولتها ولي العهد الأمير محمد بن سلمان ومتآمريه المجرمين سعود القحطاني وأحمد العسيري ، صحفي الواشنطن بوست جمال خاشقجي لإسكات دعوته المقدسة لمتابعة الحقيقة و للإدلاء بالشهادة ، وهي جريمة ضد الإنسانية انتهت من أجلها المحاكمة الصورية لقتله بتبرئة ضمنية من مدبريها والتضحية ببيادقهم لتجنب العقاب على هذه الجريمة المروعة المتمثلة في إرهاب الدولة واستبدادها.
إنها جريمة تتواطأ فيها أمريكا كمتآمر بعد وقوعها ، على الرغم من أن مهرجنا من الإرهاب ، الخائن ترامب ، وأتباعه والمتعاونين معه ربما يكونون قد عرفوا مسبقًا وحرضوا على قتل صحفي على يد حليفهم الرئيسي في المنطقة ، مفتاح إمبراطوريتنا العالمية وهيمنة الثروة والسلطة والامتياز من خلال الشراكة مع المملكة العربية السعودية في السيطرة على النفط كمورد استراتيجي وفي الحرب في اليمن لمواجهة الغزو الإيراني لشبه الجزيرة العربية والهيمنة على الشرق الأوسط.
على الرغم من أن الجغرافيا السياسية لهذا الأمر مثيرة للاهتمام من حيث الصراعات الإقليمية ولعبة الإمبراطوريات الكبرى بين إيران والتحالف العربي الأمريكي ، فإن ما يقلقني هو أكثر أهمية ؛ الضرورة الأساسية للصحافة الحرة وحرية التعبير وحرية الإعلام لمشروع الديمقراطية كمجتمع حر متساوٍ ، وكتوازن لتزوير وسرقة روح الدعاية والاستبداد.
عالمنا عبارة عن برية من المرايا ، وصور مسرحية مشوهة ، وتاريخ معاد كتابته ، مليء بالأسطح التي تلتقطها وتعكسها ، حيث يجب أن تكون شهادة التاريخ والدعوة المقدسة لمتابعة الحقيقة خارجة عن سلطة الدولة ، أو النخبة ، أو من أي شخص أن يصمت ويمحو ، أو نصبح مزيفين لأنفسنا ودمى في الظل للسلطة. إن أصالتنا وتفردنا ، وملكيتنا لأنفسنا ، معرضة للخطر والتساؤل عن طريق الدعاية والتحكم في الفكر ، وقمع المعارضة ، ونزع الصفة الإنسانية ، والقهر.
نحن بحاجة إلى ما أسماه فوكو بقول الحقيقة ، ليس فقط كضامنين لحريتنا ، ولكن أيضًا لإنسانيتنا وحرمة أرواحنا.
As the season of Halloween is signaled tomorrow by the new moon, it opens and coincides with the annual solar eclipse of October 2 and the Ritual of the Black Sun as symbolized despair, abjection, grief, and fear, illuminated with great beauty and horror in Stanton Marlin’s study of the alchemical works of Jung in The Black Sun: the alchemy and art of darkness, William Blake’s Book of Urizen, and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, my three primary references on this subject.
And this ritual of transformative rebirth occurs in the wake of the war crimes and atrocities of the Hamas terror attack on Israel on Black Saturday on October 7 of last year and of the now year long Israeli terror, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide against the civilian population of Palestine and of the seventy years of imperial conquest and colonial Occupation by Israel which preceded it and created the conditions for Black Saturday as liberation struggle, Israeli crimes against humanity in which America and others are complicit as our taxes buy the deaths and mutilations of children, we have never since the liberation of Auschwitz needed more the purgative and redemptive powers of the Ritual of the Black Sun as the embrace of our darkness, our terror, and our rage.
To hunt our monsters we must embrace our monstrosity, and this is an origin of the cyclical nature of atrocities such as Black Saturday and the Genocide of the Palestinians, and why we must abandon the tyranny of the Good with its hierarchies of belonging and otherness, authorized identities, narratives of victimization, legacies of history, demonization of enemies, and the horrible seductiveness of sending armies to enforce virtue.
No matter where you begin with such recursive forces of destruction and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz. We are there still, all humankind, part of our souls captive in its dark mirror.
There are two possible replies to an event of this kind, which disrupts and fractures systems of order on the positive side and violates our humanity as degradation and dehumanization on the negative like a Janus coin of mirror reversals; with fear and its mad children rage and violence, or with love and its praxis as compassion and mercy.
To bring harm or healing, enforcement of virtue and the tyranny and terror of wars of imperial dominion and conquest and the centralization of power to authority and carceral states of force and control, or solidarity as guarantors of each others universal human rights and democracy as co owners of the state in a free society of equals.
As I wrote in my post of October 13 2023, If we choose war in this moment, and America continues to send military aid to Israel as a sponsor and collaborator in the genocide of the Palestinians in retribution for this vast war crime and atrocity perpetrated by Hamas to fasten their political control of the people of Gaza, the Age of Tyrants has begun.
If we choose peace and send humanitarian aid both to the people of Israel and of Gaza in the war of annihilation which is coming as Netanyahu gathers his forces to invade, we may yet have a chance for a future democracy to emerge in the region and globally as a United Humankind.
Our best chance to heal the legacies of our history and reunite the peoples of Israel and Palestine is if they turn their backs on those who claim to act in their name, both Netanyahu’s regime and that of Hamas, and refuse to kill each other in service to the power of those who would enslave us.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Sahar Vardi in The Times of Israel, in an article entitled Dual loyalty: It’s so hard to have humanity here. It’s exhausting, and it feels like time after time the world is just asking you to let go; “We on the left are often accused of dual loyalty. And on days like this, I really feel it. Even if loyal isn’t exactly the right word here, as I’ll explain, the sentiment is right.
In Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market this morning, a street musician sang “Am Yisrael Chai” in a mournful register. The market itself was nearly empty and a woman was talking to her friend about her regular vegetable seller who was not allowed to come and open shop today. All stalls owned by Arabs are closed.
On a street in the Rehavia neighborhood, families get out of two cars. Most of them were already crying, the rest with an indescribable sadness in their eyes, as they knock softly on the door of one of the houses. Family of someone who died? Of someone kidnapped?
You open a video of a sanitation worker who was beaten in the city center because he is Arab and try not to avert your gaze.
“Dual loyalty” is seeing both this and that with tears in your eyes.
It’s that moment when you talk to a friend who doesn’t know whether their relatives are dead or kidnapped and what they should even hope for, and to see the helplessness, the fear, the deep pain. And a moment later, it’s talking to a friend from Gaza who can only say that every night is now the scariest night of his life; that he calculates his chances, and those of his daughters, of waking up alive the next morning.
“Dual loyalty” is feeling the heartbreak of this and also of that.
It is to hold this moment between the heartbreak and pain and shock over the total destruction of Nir Oz and to think about all the people there, and at the same time, to feel the horror over the impending total destruction of Shuja’iyya and to think about all the people there.
It’s feeling the urge to donate blood and organize food packages for the south, and also to be in the West Bank village of Susia when settlers shoot any shepherd who dares to leave the village.
Loyalty may not be the right word. It’s dual pain, dual heartbreak, care, love. It is to hold everyone’s humanity. And it’s hard. It’s so hard to have humanity here. It’s exhausting, and it feels like time after time the world is just asking you to let go. It’s so much easier to “choose a side” – it almost doesn’t matter which side, just choose, and stick to it, and at least reduce the amount of pain you hold. At least feel part of a group and less alone in all this.
As if that’s really an option. As if we don’t understand that our pains are intertwined. That there is no solution only for the pain of Ofakim without a solution for the pain of Khan Yunis. And we know it and recite it, and feel the pain of it all over and over again.”
As written by Mordecai Martin in Anti Racism Daily, in an article entitled How do I both condemn Hamas and support Israeli and Palestinian people?; “I started paying attention in earnest to Israel/Palestine politics when I went to study Hebrew on an Israeli kibbutz in 2005 before conducting religious study in Jerusalem for two years. I know deeply that Israel and Palestine are real places with real people, not a religious fantasy, political football, or exotic destination. I am sharing this response to hopefully get us closer to a world without violence in the Holy Land, where my fellow Jews are safely and happily living wherever they like, including in Palestine, and where the Palestinian people are doing likewise. It is an ambitious goal. I don’t really know if I believe my writing will have that outcome.
But I will not begin with certain common cliches.
I do not think it is necessary (or true) to say that I believe that the state of Israel, a state consisting primarily of Jews organized under the principles of Zionism, has any right to exist in the Holy Land. I don’t think that’s necessary to say because the Zionist state of Israel EXISTS regardless of my beliefs.
I do not have to assert Jews’ right to self-determination. That right was exercised with the creation of the state of Israel. As an anti-Zionist Jew, I believe that the creation of a Zionist state that legally dispossesses Palestinian people was disastrous morally, culturally, and religiously. I spend my time in the Jewish community urging divestment from such a state.
I do not think I have to condemn the murder of civilians by Hamas militants before considering condemnation of the murder of civilians by the colonial Israeli army. The universal condemnation of civilian deaths, regardless of the victims’ nationality, should be a given for us all, as it is for international law. International law is also clear that decolonization, including by armed struggle, is legitimate and that apartheid systems are not.
There are also things I find necessary to say very clearly.
We must take away the ability to kill civilians from any and all military actors, including Hamas and the Israeli army.
I believe in the safety and well-being of all Jews, even those I disagree with. Because of my political beliefs, I am often accused in bad faith of not desiring safety for Jews.
It’s necessary to say, “Free Palestine.” Palestinians, the people who have lived on the Holy Land from time immemorial, were forcibly removed from their homes for Jewish settlement. Palestinians are not free. They can not move about their country thanks to restrictions enforced by the Israeli army. They are dying the shocking deaths of those who live under apartheid. I demand their freedom and sovereignty in their land. Who do I demand it from? The only entity that currently claims political power, claims to represent my Jewishness, and receives the carte-blanche support of the United States government: the Israeli state.
Many, many people hold space for both the victims of attacks by Hamas militants and the suffering civilians of Gaza. No one worth listening to says the human heart can only mourn for some but not others, that it’s only sad when Jews die, or only sad when Palestinians die. What we are really having a conversation about is the future of the Holy Land, whether it will grant democratic rights to all its residents, and what to do about the ongoing violence between the various parties that hope to benefit financially, politically, ideologically, from their “side” coming out on top.”
Yet hope remains for transformative change, the fall of theocratic regimes and the emergence of secular democracy free from the legacies of our history, a history which in the bifurcated and fragmented states and national identities of the region divides one people into Israelis and Palestinians through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in service to the power of tyrants and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, systems of oppression which are our true enemies.
A massive people’s protest movement has erupted both locally and globally, and this gives me hope that we may yet escape the Age of Tyrants, which I predict will unfold as six to eight centuries of totalitarian empires and wars of dominion ending with the extinction of humankind; with 92 to 98 percent probability.
But the chance to salvage something of our humanity and our civilization of democracy and universal human rights does exist, however fragile and unlikely, if we can unite and act in solidarity as each other’s liberators and guarantors of a free society of equals.
As written by Alex Lantier in the World Socialist Web Site of the Fourth International, in an article entitled Mass protests erupt internationally against Israeli war on Gaza; “A week after Palestinians initiated an armed uprising against Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, protests are erupting internationally against Israel’s war on Gaza.
The fascistic regime of Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered 1.1 million Palestinians to flee Gaza City and go south, along roads bombed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Israel—which has now cut off Gaza’s water, fuel and electricity, and whose leaders call the Palestinians “human animals”—is targeting the Palestinians for genocide.
As the scale of the crimes committed by the Israeli regime and its NATO allies has become clear, protests have erupted around the world in bold disobedience of media denunciations of Palestinians, police intimidation and protest bans.
The most significant demonstration Friday took place in New York City, where thousands rallied to oppose the onslaught against Palestine, in open defiance of the unrelenting pro-Israel propaganda of the entire American political establishment and corporate media. In the center of world imperialism, home to the largest Jewish population of any American city, masses of people—including over 1,000 Jews—expressed their revulsion with the unfolding crimes in Gaza.
Other protests on Friday involving hundreds of people were held in Pittsburgh, Portland and Washington D.C., with larger demonstrations planned across the US this weekend. Despite the efforts of the media and politicians to demonize all protests against Israel’s policies as “antisemitic” and to isolate those feeling sympathy for the Palestinians, opposition is building among workers and youth of all backgrounds. A 2021 poll found that one-quarter of American Jews consider Israel to be an “apartheid state” hostile to the Palestinians, a figure that will only continue to grow.
Thousands also took to the streets in London once again on Friday, defying similar propaganda and threats from the British media and political establishment.
A series of larger demonstrations also swept across the Middle East, involving hundreds of thousands of people. In Jordan, mass protests in Amman demanded the opening of Jordan’s border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Protesting crowds marched on the border with Israel, only to be turned back by Jordanian police.
Large protests took place in Sanaa and Tehran. In Cairo, tens of thousands rallied outside the Al Azhar Mosque, chanting “Free Palestine.” Thousands defied a state ban to march in support of Gaza in Tunis. In Iraq, a country that has lost over one million lives after decades of US-led sanctions, war and occupation since the 1991 Gulf War, hundreds of thousands marched in Baghdad.
Protesters in the Middle East are effectively opposing not only the Israeli regime, but also their own governments, which have betrayed the Palestinians for decades. The Arab bourgeoisie’s role is exemplified by the treachery of the Egyptian military dictatorship. Having signed a treaty with Israel in 1978, Egypt has now closed its borders to Palestinians trying to flee Gaza.
In Israel itself, despite the ultra-reactionary political atmosphere fostered by Netanyahu’s government, which has now been joined by the official opposition, there is explosive discontent. Millions joined protests earlier this year against Netanyahu’s attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary. The attack on the judiciary, as a letter titled “Elephant in the Room” from 3,000 predominantly Jewish intellectuals made clear, is intimately tied up with the conditions that led to the Hamas uprising.
The letter states:
(There is a) direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity. …
There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.
All the major imperialist powers stand exposed by their support for Netanyahu and his war on the Palestinians. On Sunday, October 8, the heads of state of France, Italy, Germany, Britain and the United States pledged “steadfast and united support to the State of Israel,” and an “unequivocal condemnation of Hamas.” At a press conference in Qatar on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken doubled down in condoning Israeli crimes.
Asked by a reporter if Israel is “retaliating in a fury” and whether the US supports this, Blinken replied with total hypocrisy and double-talk: “What Israel is doing is not retaliation. What Israel is doing is defending the lives of its people. … I think any country faced with what Israel has suffered would likely do the same thing.”
What message are the NATO powers sending? They aim to create on a global scale a new era of imperialist colonial rule. They brook no resistance to the Israeli state’s illegal, 16-year blockade of Gaza, its denial of food and medicine to the impoverished enclave, and its targeted assassinations of Gaza residents. If this united front of imperialist gangsters were to sum up its policy toward the Palestinian people in one phrase, it would be: “Slaves you were, and slaves you remain.”
In a video released Friday, which has gone almost entirely unreported in the Western media, Hamas official Basim Naim summarized the background of Israeli oppression, which led to the October 7 rebellion.
He said:
We are speaking about a 75-year-old occupation that neglected and ignored all political and legal means to settle the conflict, where the Israeli enemy continued their policy of denial of the Palestinian people’s existence and their national rights. We have repeatedly warned during the past few months and years that the situation on the ground was not sustainable and that the explosion was only a matter of time.
We have warned repeatedly about the Israeli continued violations in Al-Aqsa Mosque and their attempt to change its status quo in an apparent plan to divide the holy mosque spatially and temporally. We have also warned about the state terrorism implemented by the fascist settlers across the occupied West Bank. We have warned about the forceful expulsion of our people from Jerusalem. We have also warned about the systematic crimes against our prisoners, including women and children, in Israeli jails.
And lastly, we have warned about the Israeli siege on Gaza for more than 17 years, which is a war crime that turned Gaza into the biggest open-air prison on earth, where a whole generation has lost all kind of hopes. But unfortunately, no one listened to these warnings, and the international community, especially the Western countries, continue to give Israel the cover at all levels to continue committing its crimes.
In prosecuting their war against Gaza, the Israeli government and Western imperialist powers aim to obliterate this historical background and numb the population with wall-to-wall atrocity propaganda.
While the deaths of Israeli civilians are undoubtedly tragic, the violence that took place occurred in the context of a massively oppressed people rebelling against a heavily armed oppressor. Even if one were to accept all the accounts of Palestinian violence, it only raises the question—what could lead to such violence?
History judges differently the violence of a population rising up against oppression and the calculated resort to mass murder by capitalist state machines armed with vast military and financial resources. The imperialists have always claimed that the resistance of the oppressed to colonialism justifies their savage retribution. In exacting this retribution, they have always portrayed the oppressed as savages and murderers.
In 1899, the Boxers revolted against the division of China into imperialist spheres of influence. Citing the Boxers’ killings of Christian missionaries and their seizure of foreign property, eight imperialist powers sent armies to sack Beijing and massacre the Boxers. Mounting conflicts between these powers over the division of the spoils in China led ultimately to the bloody Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s, which cost nearly 20 million lives, provoking the 1949 revolution that ended colonial rule over China.
In 1904, the Herero people in Namibia rose up against German colonial rule, killing more than 100 German settlers. The German army responded by carrying out the first genocide of the 20th century against the Herero, forcing them into deserts where they died of thirst, or imprisoning them in death camps prefiguring the extermination camps of the Nazi regime. In 2015, German officials formally acknowledged the genocide and offered a state apology.
Netanyahu’s regime and its imperialist allies are resorting to similar methods against Gaza. However, the great anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century that broke out after the Russian revolutions of 1905 and October 1917 did not take place in vain. Among masses of workers and youth internationally, Netanyahu’s barbaric methods provoke outrage. This opposition will grow as the monumental scale of the crimes being planned and committed against Gaza become evident to ever broader layers of workers and youth throughout the world.
The NATO powers’ other justification for backing Netanyahu’s crimes—that they are defending Jews and opposing antisemitism—is collapsing. In reality, they are supporting Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in a close alliance with political descendants of the forces that carried out the Holocaust.
As the capitalist ruling elites plunge into barbarism, a mass movement is emerging in the international working class. Protests against imperialism and Zionism are erupting amid mounting global struggles of the working class. Strikes against exploitation, austerity, inflation and police violence shook all the major imperialist powers this year and will intensify in the weeks and months ahead.
The liberation of Palestine is only possible in the context of the growth of a powerful socialist movement of the international working class, including within Israel itself. This will create the conditions for the overthrow of Zionist chauvinism and the unity of Palestinian and Israeli workers. The struggle against the war in Gaza must acquire a clear, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist character, mobilizing the working class in a struggle for socialism across Palestine and the Middle East and internationally.”
In juxtaposition with this internationalist and revolutionary lens of vision are forces of reaction born of fear and trauma weaponized in service to power, the siren call of armed might and retribution as a form of security, but security is an illusion, and only love can reconcile these conflicted identities of Israeli and Palestinian and heal the systems of division and unequal power which are at the heart of this war which threatens to swallow us all.
As written by Yuval Noah Harari in The Guardian, in an article entitled Israelis and Palestinians are facing their moment of greatest danger since 1948: There is still a slim chance of peace if wiser counsels prevail and other major powers intervene in a coalition of the willing; “Israel has just experienced the worst day in its history. More Israeli civilians have been slaughtered in a single day than all the civilians and soldiers Israel lost in the 1956 Sinai war, the 1967 six-day war and the 2006 second Lebanon war combined. The stories and images coming out of the area occupied by Hamas are horrific. Many of my own friends and family members have suffered unspeakable atrocities. This means the Palestinians, too, are now facing immense danger. The most powerful country in the Middle East is livid with pain, fear and anger. I do not have either the knowledge or moral authority to speak about how things look from the Palestinian perspective. But in the moment of Israel’s greatest pain, I would like to issue a warning about how things look from the Israeli side of the fence.
Politics often works like a scientific experiment, conducted on millions of people with few ethical limitations. You try something – whether increasing the welfare budget, electing a populist president or making a peace offer – witness the results, and decide whether to proceed further down that particular path; or you reverse course and try something else. This is how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has unfolded for decades: by trial and error.
During the 1990s Oslo peace process, Israel gave peace a chance. I know that from the viewpoint of Palestinians and some outside observers, Israeli peace offers were insufficient and arrogant, but it was still the most generous offer Israel has ever made. During that peace process, Israel handed partial control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority. The outcome for Israelis was the worst terror campaign they had experienced until then. Israelis are still haunted by memories of daily life in the early 2000s, with buses and restaurants bombed every day. That terror campaign killed not only hundreds of Israeli civilians, but also the peace process and the Israeli left. Maybe Israel’s peace offer wasn’t generous enough. But was terrorism the only possible response?
After the failure of the peace process, Israel’s next experiment in Gaza was disengagement. In the mid-2000s, Israel unilaterally retreated from the entire Gaza Strip, dismantled all settlements there and returned to the internationally recognised pre-1967 border. True, it continued to impose a partial blockade on the Gaza Strip and to occupy the West Bank. But the withdrawal from Gaza was still a very significant Israeli step, and Israelis waited anxiously to see what the result of that experiment would be. The remnants of the Israeli left hoped that the Palestinians would make an honest attempt to turn Gaza into a prosperous and peaceful city state, a Middle Eastern Singapore, showing to the world and to the Israeli right what the Palestinians could do when given the opportunity to govern themselves.
Sure, it is difficult to build a Singapore under a partial blockade. But an honest attempt could still have been made, in which case there would have been greater pressure on the Israeli government from both foreign powers and the Israeli public to remove the blockade from Gaza and to reach an honourable deal about the West Bank as well. Instead, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and turned it into a terrorist base from which repeated attacks were launched on Israeli civilians. Another experiment ended in failure.
This completely discredited the remnants of the Israeli left, and brought to power Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish governments. Netanyahu pioneered another experiment. Since peaceful coexistence had failed, he adopted a policy of violent coexistence. Israel and Hamas traded blows on a weekly basis and almost every year there was a major military operation, but for a decade and a half, Israeli civilians could go on living within a few hundred metres from Hamas bases on the other side of the fence. Even Israel’s messianic zealots showed little zeal to reconquer the Gaza Strip, and even rightwingers hoped that the responsibilities involved in ruling more than 2 million people would gradually moderate Hamas.
Indeed, many on the Israeli right saw Hamas as a better partner than the Palestinian Authority. This was because Israeli hawks wanted to go on controlling the West Bank, and feared a peace deal. Hamas seemed to offer the Israeli right the best of all worlds: relieving Israel of the need to govern the Gaza Strip, without making any peace offers that might dislocate Israeli control of the West Bank. The day of horror Israel has just experienced signals the end of the Netanyahu experiment in violent coexistence.
So what comes next? No one knows for sure, but some voices in Israel are veering towards reconquering the Gaza Strip or bombing it to rubble. The result of such policy could be the worst humanitarian crisis the region has experienced since 1948. Especially if Hezbollah and Palestinian forces in the West Bank join the fray, the death toll could reach many thousands, with millions more driven from their homes. On both sides of the fence, there are religious fanatics fixated on divine promises and the 1948 war. Palestinians dream of reversing the outcome of that war. Jewish zealots like the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich have warned even Arab citizens of Israel that “you are here by mistake because Ben-Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister] didn’t finish the job in ’48 and didn’t kick you out”; 2023 could enable fanatics on both sides to pursue their religious fantasies, and re-stage the 1948 war with a vengeance.
Even if things don’t go to such extremes, the current conflict is likely to put the last nail in the coffin of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The kibbutzim along the Gaza border have been socialist communes and some of the most tenacious bastions of the Israeli left. I know people from those kibbutzim who, after years of almost daily rocket attacks from Gaza, still clung to the hope of peace, as if to a religious cult. These kibbutzim have just been obliterated, and some of the last peaceniks are either murdered, burying their loved ones, or held hostage in Gaza. For example, Vivian Silver, a peace activist from Kibbutz Be’eri who for years has been transporting ailing Gazans to Israeli hospitals, is missing and likely held hostage in Gaza.
What has already happened cannot be undone. The dead cannot be brought back to life, and the personal traumas will never completely heal. But we must prevent further escalation. Many of the forces in the region are currently led by irresponsible religious fanatics. External forces must therefore intervene to deescalate the conflict. Anyone who wishes for peace must unequivocally condemn the Hamas atrocities, put pressure on Hamas to immediately and unconditionally release all the hostages , and help deter Hezbollah and Iran from intervening. This would give Israelis a bit of breathing space and a tiny ray of hope.
Second, a coalition of the willing – ranging from the US and the EU to Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority – should take responsibility for the Gaza Strip away from Hamas, rebuild Gaza and simultaneously completely disarm Hamas and demilitarise the Gaza Strip.
There are only slim chances that these steps will be realised. But after the recent horrors, most Israelis don’t think they can live with anything less.”
Here I must amend a codicil to the brilliant scholar Yuval Noah Harari’s panopticon of envisioned futures, for a demilitarized and independent sovereign state of Gaza administered temporarily by the United Nations jointly with the people of Palestine as a transition government to a democracy is a just cause; but Israel must also be demilitarized and become a democracy, which as an imperial theocracy and fascist state comparable to Imperial Japan during the Second World War may also require international supervision and a transformational MacArthur Plan government.
Let us become each other’s liberators, and not each other’s jailors.
There are no Israelis, no Palestinians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
ISRAEL RESPONDS TO HAMAS CRIMES BY ORDERING MASS WAR CRIMES IN GAZA: Years of impunity for Israeli crimes against civilians have bred a culture of disregard for international law./ The Intercept
1 באוקטובר 2024 העולם שלנו נהרס ונברא מחדש בטקס זה של השמש השחורה שבו האנושות שלנו מואפלת על ידי מורשת ההיסטוריה שלנו
כאשר עונת ליל כל הקדושים מאותתת מחר על ידי הירח החדש, היא נפתחת עם ליקוי החמה השנתי וטקס השמש השחורה כמסמלים ייאוש, צער, צער ופחד, המוארים ביופי ובאימה רב במחקרו של סטנטון מרלין על יצירות אלכימיות של יונג בשמש השחורה:
האלכימיה ואמנות החושך, ספר אוריזן של ויליאם בלייק והשמש השחורה של ג’וליה קריסטבה: דיכאון ומלנכוליה, שלושת ההתייחסויות העיקריות שלי בנושא זה.
וטקס זה של לידה מחדש טרנספורמטיבית מתרחש בעקבות פשעי המלחמה והזוועות של מתקפת הטרור של חמאס על ישראל בשבת השחורה ושל הטרור הישראלי, פשעי מלחמה, טיהור אתני ורצח עם נגד האוכלוסייה האזרחית של פלסטין. משבעים שנות הכיבוש האימפריאלי והכיבוש הקולוניאלי על ידי ישראל שקדמו לו ויצרו את התנאים לשבת השחורה כמאבק שחרור, פשעים ישראלים נגד האנושות בהם אמריקה ואחרות שותפות להם כשהמיסים שלנו קונים את מותם והשחתותיהם של ילדים, יש לנו מאז שחרור אושוויץ מעולם לא נזקק יותר לכוחות הטיהור והגאולה של טקס השמש השחורה כחיבוק החושך שלנו, האימה והזעם שלנו.
כדי לצוד את המפלצות שלנו עלינו לאמץ את המפלצתיות שלנו, וזהו מקור לאופי המחזורי של זוועות כמו השבת השחורה ורצח העם של הפלסטינים, ומדוע עלינו לנטוש את עריצות הטוב עם ההיררכיות שלו של שייכות ואחרות, זהויות מורשות, נרטיבים של קורבנות, מורשת היסטוריה, דמוניזציה של אויבים, והפיתוי הנורא של שליחת צבאות לאכוף מידות טובות.
לא משנה היכן תתחילו עם כוחות הרס רקורסיביים כאלה וטבעת הפחד, הכוח והכוח הוגנרית, תמיד תגיעו בשערי אושוויץ. אנחנו עדיין שם, כל המין האנושי, חלק מהנשמה שלנו שבויה במראה האפלה שלה.
ישנן שתי תשובות אפשריות לאירוע מסוג זה, המשבש ושבר מערכות סדר בצד החיובי ומפר את האנושיות שלנו כהשפלה ודה-הומניזציה על השלילי כמו מטבע יאנוס של היפוכי מראה; עם הפחד והילדים המטורפים שלו זעם ואלימות, או עם אהבה ומעשיה כחמלה ורחמים.
להביא נזק או ריפוי, אכיפת מידות טובות ועריצות ואימת מלחמות של שליטה וכיבוש אימפריאלית וריכוז הכוח לסמכות ולמדינות קרסראליות של כוח ושליטה, או סולידריות כערבים זה לזה זכויות אדם אוניברסליות ודמוקרטיה כשיתוף פעולה. בעלי המדינה בחברה חופשית של שווים.
כפי שכתבתי בפוסט שלי מ-13 באוקטובר 2023, אם נבחר במלחמה ברגע זה, ואמריקה ממשיכה לשלוח סיוע צבאי לישראל כנותנת חסות ומשתפת פעולה ברצח העם של הפלסטינים כנקמה על פשע המלחמה והזוועה העצום הזה שבוצעו על ידי חמאס כדי להדק את שליטתם הפוליטית בתושבי עזה, עידן הרודנים החל.
אם נבחר בשלום ונשלח סיוע הומניטארי הן לעם ישראל והן לעזה במלחמת ההשמדה המתקרבת כשנתניהו אוסף את כוחותיו לפלישה, אולי עוד תהיה לנו סיכוי לדמוקרטיה עתידית שתקום באזור ובעולם. כמין אנושי מאוחד.
הסיכוי הטוב ביותר שלנו לרפא את מורשת ההיסטוריה שלנו ולאחד מחדש את עמי ישראל ופלסטין הוא אם יפנו עורף לאלה הטוענים לפעול בשמם, גם משטרו של נתניהו וגם זה של חמאס, ומסרבים להרוג זה את זה בשירות. לכוחם של אלה שישעבדו אותנו.
אל לנו לשלוח צבאות לאכוף מידות טובות, ולהביא רפואה לפגמי האנושיות שלנו ולשברון העולם.
כאן אני חייב לתקן קודציל לפאנופטיקון העתידים החזוי של המלומד המבריק יובל נח הררי, למדינה ריבונית מפורזת ועצמאית של עזה המנוהלת זמנית על ידי האו”ם במשותף עם העם הפלסטיני כממשלת מעבר לדמוקרטיה היא סיבה צודקת. ; אבל גם ישראל חייבת להיות מפורזת ולהפוך לדמוקרטיה.
הבה נהפוך למשחררים זה של זה, ולא לכלואים זה של זה.
אין ישראלים, אין פלסטינים; רק אנשים כמו עצמנו, והבחירות שהם עושים לגבי איך להיות בני אדם ביחד.
Arabic
1 أكتوبر 2024 عالمنا مدمر ومعاد خلقه في هذه الطقوس للشمس السوداء حيث تطغى على إنسانيتنا تراثات تاريخنا
مع اقتراب موسم الهالوين غدًا بالقمر الجديد، يبدأ الموسم بالكسوف الشمسي السنوي وطقوس الشمس السوداء التي ترمز إلى اليأس والذل والحزن والخوف، والتي تضاء بجمال ورعب عظيمين في دراسة ستانتون مارلين للأعمال الخيميائية ليونغ في كتاب الشمس السوداء:
الكيمياء وفن الظلام، وكتاب أوريزين لويليام بليك، والشمس السوداء: الاكتئاب والكآبة لجوليا كريستيفا، وهي المراجع الثلاثة الأساسية التي أستخدمها في هذا الموضوع.
وتأتي هذه الطقوس المتمثلة في إعادة الميلاد التحويلي في أعقاب جرائم الحرب والفظائع التي ارتكبتها حماس في هجومها الإرهابي على إسرائيل يوم السبت الأسود، والإرهاب الإسرائيلي المستمر منذ عام، وجرائم الحرب، والتطهير العرقي، والإبادة الجماعية ضد السكان المدنيين في فلسطين، والسبعين عامًا من الغزو الإمبراطوري والاحتلال الاستعماري من قبل إسرائيل الذي سبقه وخلق الظروف التي أدت إلى السبت الأسود باعتباره نضالًا من أجل التحرير، والجرائم الإسرائيلية ضد الإنسانية التي تتواطأ فيها أمريكا وغيرها، حيث تشتري ضرائبنا موت الأطفال وتشويههم، لم نكن في حاجة منذ تحرير أوشفيتز إلى القوى المطهرة والفداء لطقوس الشمس السوداء أكثر من أي وقت مضى باعتبارها احتضانًا لظلامنا وإرهابنا وغضبنا.
ولكي نطارد وحوشنا، يتعين علينا أن نحتضن وحشيتنا، وهذا هو أصل الطبيعة الدورية للفظائع مثل السبت الأسود والإبادة الجماعية للفلسطينيين، ولماذا يتعين علينا التخلي عن طغيان الخير مع تسلسلاته الهرمية من الانتماء والاختلاف، والهويات المصرح بها، وروايات الضحايا، وإرث التاريخ، وشيطانية الأعداء، والإغراء الرهيب المتمثل في إرسال الجيوش لفرض الفضيلة.
بغض النظر عن المكان الذي تبدأ منه مع مثل هذه القوى المتكررة للتدمير وخاتم فاغنر من الخوف والقوة والعنف، فإنك تنتهي دائمًا عند أبواب أوشفيتز. ما زلنا هناك، كل البشرية، جزءًا من أرواحنا أسرى مرآتها المظلمة.
هناك استجابتان محتملتان لحدث من هذا النوع، والذي يعطل ويكسر أنظمة النظام على الجانب الإيجابي وينتهك إنسانيتنا باعتباره إهانة وإزالة للطبيعة البشرية على الجانب السلبي مثل عملة جانوس من عكس المرآة؛ بالخوف وأطفاله المجانين والغضب والعنف، أو بالحب وممارساته كالشفقة والرحمة.
لإحداث الأذى أو الشفاء، وفرض الفضيلة والاستبداد والإرهاب في حروب السيادة الإمبريالية والغزو ومركزية السلطة للسلطة والدول السجنية للقوة والسيطرة، أو التضامن كضامنين لحقوق الإنسان العالمية والديمقراطية لكل منهما كملاك مشاركين للدولة في مجتمع حر من المتساوين.
كما كتبت في منشوري بتاريخ 13 أكتوبر 2023، إذا اخترنا الحرب في هذه اللحظة، واستمرت أمريكا في إرسال المساعدات العسكرية إلى إسرائيل كراعٍ ومتعاون في الإبادة الجماعية للفلسطينيين انتقامًا لهذه الجريمة الحربية الهائلة والفظائع التي ارتكبتها حماس لتشديد سيطرتها السياسية على شعب غزة، فقد بدأ عصر الطغاة.
إذا اخترنا السلام وأرسلنا المساعدات الإنسانية إلى شعب إسرائيل وشعب غزة في حرب الإبادة القادمة مع قيام نتنياهو بحشد قواته للغزو، فقد تكون لدينا فرصة لظهور ديمقراطية مستقبلية في المنطقة والعالم كبشرية موحدة.
إن أفضل فرصة لنا لعلاج إرث تاريخنا وإعادة توحيد شعبي إسرائيل وفلسطين هي إذا أداروا ظهورهم لأولئك الذين يدعون أنهم يتصرفون باسمهم، سواء نظام نتنياهو أو نظام حماس، ورفضوا قتل بعضهم البعض في خدمة قوة أولئك الذين يريدون استعبادنا.
لا ينبغي لنا أن نرسل جيوشًا لفرض الفضيلة، وأن نجلب الشفاء لعيوب إنسانيتنا وكسر العالم.
وهنا لابد أن أضيف إضافة إلى تصور الباحث اللامع يوفال نوح هراري للمستقبل المتصور، ذلك أن دولة غزة المستقلة ذات السيادة منزوعة السلاح والتي تديرها الأمم المتحدة مؤقتاً بالاشتراك مع شعب فلسطين كحكومة انتقالية إلى الديمقراطية تشكل قضية عادلة؛ ولكن لابد أيضاً من نزع سلاح إسرائيل وأن تصبح ديمقراطية.
فلنصبح محررين لبعضنا البعض، وليس سجانين لبعضنا البعض.
لا يوجد إسرائيليون ولا فلسطينيون؛ بل هناك أناس مثلنا، والاختيارات التي يتخذونها بشأن كيفية أن يكونوا بشراً معاً.
Torch of Liberty 