September 11 2024 Anniversary of the Twin Towers Terror Attack and the Dawn of the Third Imperial Age of American History As Tyranny Under the Patriot Act Combines With the Theocratic Capture of the Republican Party Into the Fourth Reich

     On this day of tragedy and woe, the anniversary of the Twin Towers terror attack and the deaths of thousands who worked in them and of the heroic emergency services responders, our police, fire, and medical personnel who risked themselves to save others, a national day of mourning, rage, and remembrance, and of the dawn of the Third Imperial period of American history after the early colonialism of Manifest Destiny which founded our global empire in the genocidal conquest of the Native Americans and seizure of the remnants of the Spanish Empire under Teddy Roosevelt, the second in the Red Scare begun by McCarthy and Nixon and ending with the Fall of the Soviet Union, and the third which transformed the theocratic seizure of the Republican Party in 1980 and the terror of the Reagan regime into a Fourth Reich of totalitarian state terror and tyranny which emerged in the wake of 9-11 with the Patriot Act, the Counter-Insurgency Model of policing and militarization of police, the globalization of our secret political prisons, pervasive surveillance, and the kleptocratic imperial conquest and dominion of Iraq to seize control of oil as a strategic resource which confers global supremacy and of Afghanistan to seize the limitless wealth of her opium fields. 

     I find it terribly convenient for our elites to have a national trauma and disruptive event to seize upon for the purpose of transforming America from a democracy to a carceral state of force and control through the interdependence of military foreign imperialism and the domestic tyranny with the counterinsurgency model of policing which harnessed and instrumentalized a racist justice system designed to enforce white supremacist and patriarchal wealth, power, and privilege.

     This has created the preconditions of weaponized fear, learned helplessness, despair, dehumanization, and submission to absolute state authority for the Fall of America as a primary guarantor of liberty and a beacon of hope to the world, and with the Trump regime delivered us into the tyranny and madness of the Fourth Reich and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

     That Trump and his Republican conspirators in treason were for four terrible years able to use our government as an instrument of white supremacist terror and Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchal sexual terror is due entirely to the collapse of American values of freedom, equality, truth, and justice in the wake of Nine Eleven, manipulation and subversion by our enemies, and the capture of the narrative of our response by what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex, abetted by plutocratic interest in oil as a strategic resource of the American Imperial hegemony of power and privilege.

      But before all else is the precondition of unequal power and divisions of exclusionary otherness.

      The Imperial era of American history in the wake of 9-11 saw the invasion of Iraq, planned at Haliburton and not the Pentagon with the purpose of seizing her oil as a strategic asset under President Bush, whose family fortune was made by a grandfather who was the exclusive New York banker for Thyssen-Krupp and personally handed Hitler the cash to fund his coup in Germany, and the conquest and twenty years of colonial occupation of Afghanistan, whose purpose was to control the opium fields and global heroin market, but equally the seizure of our democracy by a carceral state of prisons, concentration camps at our borders, pervasive surveillance, and the use of Fox News as an organization of fascist propaganda; the subversion and subjugation of America.

     Our withdrawal from Afghanistan is now long final; their future belongs to the Afghans to choose. So also with the collapse of any meaningful American influence as a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights globally, most especially the rights of women, courtesy of the Party of Treason and the Trump regime. This I mourn, though not the end of American imperial dominion; what the Fourth Reich capture of the Republican Party and their capture of the state means in Hegelian world-historical terms is that the enemy of a free and equal society has derailed the normal processes of change to link the fall of our empire from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions to the fall of democracy and human rights for all humankind as capital frees itself from its host political system. So the Age of Tyrants begins.

     How will such an age end? As I have said from the age of nine when I was cast out of my body by the force wave of a police grenade on Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley and for a moment stood outside of time and beheld myriads of possible futures, we face six to eight hundred years of tyranny and wars ending with the extinction of our species. I now calculate this probability at between 92 and 98 futures out of every one hundred, unless we act as a United Humankind to change our fate. Here I wish to signpost that I capitalize the phrase United Humankind because it remains a real possibility as a future civilization very like the one Ray Bradbury envisioned in Star Trek.

     Where do we go from here? Liberty or tyranny; this is the choice we must decide in our upcoming Presidential election, and nothing less.

      Let us now repeal the Patriot Act and abandon the failed counterinsurgency model of policing as an instrument of white supremacist terror, disarm and demilitarize the police and purge our security services of the white supremacist terrorists who now dominate and control them, and restore America to its citizens.

     As written by Michael Moore in an article entitled In The End, Bin Laden Won; “ I decided to go and meet the Taliban in the spring of 1999, two years before the 9/11 attacks. Most of us, including me, didn’t know much about the Taliban back then, nor did we want to. A decade earlier, the CIA funded and trained Muslim rebels to kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan after ten years of occupation. That made America happy — the Soviet Union defeated! Humiliated! Our pundits called it “their Vietnam!“ like we had actually learned a single damn lesson from Vietnam. As for what was left of Afghanistan, well, who friggin’ cared?

     So in 1999, the Taliban landed on my radar. They had banned kite flying and made it illegal to watch TV, two of my favorite pastimes. What was wrong with these people? I decided to go and ask them.

     I couldn’t figure out how to get over there without four plane changes and a couple of rented mules, so I settled for a meeting with one of their top leaders, Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, their ambassador to the United Nations.

     At that time, the UN hadn’t officially recognized the Taliban-led government of Afghanistan, so Ambassador Mujahid couldn’t take his seat in the UN Assembly.

     Undeterred, the ambassador and the Taliban set up their own UN consulate — in Queens. Next to a nail salon and an endoscopy clinic. So I headed out to the borough that gave us Donald Trump and Archie Bunker to hold a one-on-one meeting with the Taliban leader.

     When I walked into their consulate, Ambassador Mujahid and his staff of all male secretaries were overjoyed to see me. My first thought: I think I am the first American to stop by and pay them a visit. I was their one-man Welcome Wagon, but without the banana bread. I did, though, bring other gifts: a parakeet, a kite, some Queens swag, a Mets t-shirt, a terminal map of LaGuardia and JFK (if you tell a joke before the tragedy occurs, is that too too soon?), and a portable television set. He accepted it all in good humor (though he wouldn’t touch the TV).

     We sat down to discuss U.S.-Afghan relations. He was grateful for American weapons used back in the liberation of Afghanistan from the Soviets, and he mentioned that a Taliban delegation had visited Texas at the invitation of Governor George W. Bush’s oil baron buddies to discuss energy and a “pipeline deal.” They also served me some tasty almonds and a very, very sweet cup of tea. To their credit, they allowed me to film our historic meeting for my TV series, “The Awful Truth”.  (You can watch the 7-minute Taliban segment below).

     My diplomatic mission with the Taliban ultimately failed. Afghanistan would soon turn on us by giving safe haven to the multimillionaire son of one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia, a man by the name of Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden. From Afghanistan he would build his al-Qaeda movement and plan (with his Saudi cohorts) his attacks on the United States. Attacks? Yes, attacks, because bin Laden knew one attack would not be enough to wake up the American infidels. So he blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But that killed mostly Kenyans and Tanzanians (224 dead, 4,500 injured) — so, like, no biggie. (If you think I’m being flip, tell me how many people died two and a half weeks ago in Hurricane Grace. Don’t sweat it if you don’t know. They were only Mexicans. All 14 of them.)

     A couple years later, bin Laden tried to get our attention again with a kamikaze attack on the USS Cole — but that too would not be enough. Bin Laden knew he was dealing with a country that was clueless about the outside world and slow AF to respond. Ultimately he figured out that only a grand, cinematic Hollywood gesture would grab us by our tub of popcorn and make us spill our Goobers everywhere. His idea was simple, symbolic and deadly: Just take aim at the two things Americans and their leaders lusted for the most — money and military power — and then send your flying bombs at high speed right into them. Blow up their Pentagon and their Wall Street, watch their towers of power come crashing to the ground, watch Humpty Dumpty take a great fall.

     It worked. But why? Why did he do it? We were told it was for religious reasons. We were told it was revenge for something. We were told he wanted our Army bases off Saudi and Muslim lands. 

     Here’s what I think. I think it was a guy thing. Men. Angry men. He and the other rebels had already done the impossible by bringing one of the world’s two superpowers to its knees — the Soviet Union. It was a fatal blow to the Ruskies, and just nine months later, the Berlin Wall came down and that was that for the Kremlin. Bin Laden was so pumped, so inspired — so why not be the ultimate baller and totally extinguish the remaining superpower — the U.S. of A.!

     This is not to say he didn’t have a bonkers fundamentalist belief system with a well-designed political strategy. It was just a strategy we weren’t used to. It didn’t involve invading other countries the normal way. There was no plan to plunder and steal our natural resources. He simply sought to bankrupt us — financially, politically, spiritually. And to kill more of us. And get us to wipe out our American Dream.

     He also wanted to neuter our military and show the world that we could be defeated by men in caves who possessed nary a single fighter jet, or a Blackhawk helicopter or a can of napalm to their name. He knew it would be easy to make us impotent, that we were all hat, all “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow ya all down!”

     He knew that unlike his own deep religious beliefs, ours were all talk, all show. He knew that our sect of Christianity is often just a big con — “love your neighbor” as long as they’re white like you; “the last in line (40 million in poverty)” shall be “first” and the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs “will be last.“ Ha! Never. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” as long they‘re not Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden; “feed the hungry” (no raise in food stamps from 1962 until last week. Last week!).

     The majority of Americans no longer attend church. So, score one for us. We do have our own fundamentalists and true believers, but no one here any longer is going to bow down and wash the feet of the bishop or blow Pastor Maloney. It was different for bin Laden—he wasn’t faking it. He knew the strength of his fundamentalism and knew that he could find some schmucks to sign up to fly planes into buildings in exchange for the promise of eternal glory. Bin Laden understood the way we used our Good Book — to ban abortion or police homosexuality — because bin Laden was doing the same thing, only even more capably and at an even more destructive scale.

     Bin Laden and his gang were mad geniuses. He knew that those towers would collapse, in part because he was an architectural and civil engineer. And in part because he knew those buildings were probably built like crap — I mean, OBL was a friggin’ contractor! His family were the biggest builders of big buildings in the Middle East. And eight of his hijackers on 9/11 all had engineering degrees! The pilots, I’m guessing, had at one time flown for the Saudi Air Force. They didn’t learn to do what they did with such precision on a video game simulator in Arizona in between stops at the strip club. (President Biden has just announced he’s releasing the classified Saudi documents. We’ll see.)

     But here’s the real tell of bin Laden’s prescience: How did he know we would start and stay in a 20-year war, offering up our young sons and daughters to him on the altar of our military-industrial complex?

    Bush used to say dumbshit stuff like “better to fight ‘em over there than over here!” It turned out to be the other way around — bin Laden suckered us into fighting over there  — so he could kill us over there.

    How did he know we’d spend trillions fighting a frail man on dialysis who had split from Afghanistan before the bulk of our troops got there? A terrorist threat so large that it did not exist! BOO!

     How did he know we’d pass legislation giving up our sacred constitutional rights — and call it a Patriot Act? How did he know we’d put a spy camera on every corner from Butte, Montana to Fort Myers, Florida — but not one on the main drag in Abbottabad, Pakistan where he lived “in hiding?”

     How did he know we’d burn trillions on something we ironically called “Homeland Security” — the “Homeland,” where a half-million were homeless, and millions more with homes foreclosed on, their families evicted; and “Security,” where the majority of Americans lived from paycheck to paycheck, 40% of them with not more than $400 to their name.

     Bin Laden wanted to blow up the idea of America, not the Mall of America. He did not have visions of empire. He never thought of invading the United States and taking over our NFL stadiums or burning down our Piggly Wigglys or outlawing the Girl Scouts. He hates women and girls, but I’ll bet he’d love those Thin Mints. 

     How did he know we would be so obsessed with him — to such an extent where we would massively, cruelly neglect the needs of our own people, denying them help like free health care — and instead, take their homes from them to pay off the hospital bills.

     Was it really about the 3,000 dead that made us occupy Afghanistan for 20 years? I mean, c’mon, we’ve lost 3,000 on many days during this pandemic and no one is going to read their names every year at some memorial. And, no, we’re not invading the bat market in Wuhan. Hopefully not.

     No, my friends, it’s something else. Bin Laden had our number. Killing him, disbanding al-Qaeda, may have made it look like we won. But in death, he is able to see the fruits of his labor. We, his mortal enemy, are in disarray, seriously at war with ourselves. Violence looms with us every day. Men, angry men, violent men, have now won the right to force the majority gender into giving birth against their will — birth slaves, who will now have no say of their own. SHUT UP AND PUSH! PUSH!! And speaking of slaves, the owners of America are freaking out because they don’t have enough slave laborers in 2021 because workers are refusing to come back to work for shitty wages and in Covid conditions that might get them killed. The end game? The eventual forcing of essential workers to show up and do their goddamned job — or else. So much for that parade we gave them. Yay heroes!

     Osama, are you happy now? We were never “great” as the MAGA hats proclaimed, but we were good, we were, at least, most of us, trying. Of course the Black and Brown people know that’s not entirely true. They know that they may just have to save themselves and deal with us in the way we’ve dealt with them. Don’t worry white people — we’ve got 340 million+ guns in our homes! That’ll hold us for a while.

     The sad truth is that we never bothered to fight our two true terrorist threats — 1) Capitalism, an economic system that is built on greed and thievery and kills people who must live in flooded basement apartments, and 2) what we call “climate” — but the window to reverse that has now closed, and our only chance to stop the climate catastrophe, an historic extermination event, from getting worse is now the decision we face. It is the first time that a species has decided to eliminate itself. That’s real terrorism, and while we may not be able to turn back now, we can at least get a grip on ourselves, halt the deluge, stop the greed, close the income inequality gap, reduce our glutinous consumption and eliminate the profit motive.

     If we do that, bin Laden will have lost. And we may then learn to love and share the wealth and live in peace with each other. That would be the best way to commemorate 9/11.

     Blessings to all whom we’ve lost.”

     Thus the great Michael Moore; only one area of his analysis do I question, for I question whether responsibility for the terror of 9 11 lies only with the CIA’s former agent bin Laden and the organization he created in al Qaeda to return us to a Dark Age in a rebellion against modern Humanist civilization and its forms as democracy and human rights, and their network within Saudi Arabia, or if the Fourth Reich whose figurehead remains Traitor Trump, with his Russian puppetmasters and an infiltrated Arab-American Alliance, designed this as a disruptive event in the subversion of democracy.

    We may never know the true motives and causes of 9 11; but we may infer them from the results and consequences we do know. Like a missing piece of a puzzle, it is defined by the shapes of the pieces we have, and how they fit together.

     As we are taught by John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in literature and history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.

     Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

Michael Moore Visits the Taliban

https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/bin-laden-won?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMjQyNzM1MSwicG9zdF9pZCI6NDA5NzU1NzksIl8iOiJmNEtDOSIsImlhdCI6MTYzMTIwMzQ2NCwiZXhwIjoxNjMxMjA3MDY0LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMzIwOTc0Iiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.uHD6ygORQ2TFwFTxVvDA9X6Rp58rra9yKZzPtfw1P8w

             9-11, a reading list

In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17001.In_the_Shadow_of_No_Towers

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4588.Extremely_Loud_Incredibly_Close

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/110890.The_Looming_Tower

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, Steve Coll

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71984.Ghost_Wars?ref=rae_9

Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016, Steve Coll

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35623545-directorate-s

Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, Jeremy Scahill

https://goodreads.com/book/show/15814204.Dirty_Wars_The_World_is_a_Battlefield

Osama Bin Laden, Michael Scheuer

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9459494-osama-bin-laden?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=bR94UVMl8I&rank=2

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, Steve Coll

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2211931.The_Bin_Ladens

The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda,

Ali H. Soufan, Daniel Freedman (Primary Contributor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10954987-the-black-banners?ref=rae_2

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq, Steve Coll

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/174156150-the-achilles-trap?ref=rae_6

                References

Noam Chomsky: The US-Led “War on Terror” Has Devastated Much of the World
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/sept-11-froze-america-s-counterterrorism-thinking-place-n1278959?cid=eml_mda_20210911&user_email=a82a03084b0b46dc8d217933f1080ceceb9578a50c7b8275d1eb070d41bd041c
View at Medium.com

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/11/opinions/terrorism-extremism-9-11-pandith-ware/index.html

TRANSCRIPT: EPISODE 209: It’s Time For “Sublime Madness” (with Chris Hedges)

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/afghanistan/2021-08-13/osama-bin-ladens-911-catastrophic-success?fa_anthology=1127819

The Long-Lasting Consequences of the War on Terror
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0?ui=2&ik=f81c21d83c&attid=0.1&permmsgid=msg-a:r2142417164232910017&view=att&disp=safe&realattid=f_ktdg405p0

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/09/9-11-september-attacks-us-political-landscape-bin-laden-bush-obama-trump-immigration-national-security/?fbclid=IwAR3Ey0f3UjY5F1Cdy-HhYAPYRJwYKtyQzx2tZi7cpRb8BhkNX_HP7sHB8yo

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/09/mainstream-press-war-on-terror-media-september-11-attacks

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/war-on-terror-displacement-refugees-us-imperialism

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/fbi-domestic-war-on-terror-authoritarianism-gretchen-whitmer-civil-liberties

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/09/us-military-foreign-policy-war-on-terror-institute-for-policy-studies-report

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/09/september-11-anniversary-war-terror-bin-laden

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/09/war-on-terror-afghanistan-institute-for-policy-studies-9-11-militarization

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/10/20-years-biden-afghanistan-withdrawal-ended-9-11-era?utm_term=2b9849860f64195b8c92fe3e49eae509&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=GTUS_email
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September 10 2024 Kamala Victorious Over the Dumpster Fire

How do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.

     And remember, you can always tell a Republican’s secret name; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.

     Kamala with wit and guile has prosecuted the most grotesque and terrible criminal of our time before the stage of the nation, the world, and history tonight, and emerged victorious.

    She baited and mocked the Dumpster Fire who apes Hitler, is led by Putin through his vanity and greed like a performing monkey, worships Moloch the Demon of Lies, a traitor to America whose mission as a Russian agent is the fall of democracy both here and throughout the world and the dawn of a Fourth Reich and Age of Tyranny, white supremacist terror, and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, rapist and conspirator in the deaths of police officers during the January 6 Insurrection, and countless other acts of terror, tyranny, treason, corruption, and perversion.

     Tonight’s performance was marked by an incident which typifies the idiocy and schizoid break with reality of the entire Trump show since the Stolen Election of 2016; the claim that migrants are eating our pets, which Trump apparently believes because he saw it on television, underscoring his fragile relationship with both reality and truth. The world is laughing about it, and laughing at him, because it is one of the few of his countless lies which are not truly terrifying; but we must also remember its origins and recognize its toxicity. This version of the Blood Libel used by the Nazis and the Inquisition has been deployed against Asians historically, but now is generalized to all nonwhite Others. Here the enemy reveals his true motives and goals; ethnic cleansing in America.

     A vote for Trump is a vote to give America over to the fascists, and bring to every city in our nation the torches of the Unite the Right white supremacist march which united Nazis and the Klu Klux Klan in Charlottesville, an event in which Trump infamously granted permission for racist murder and terror with the words; “There are good people on both sides”.

     Thus for Traitor Trump, Our Clown of Terror to give him his due title as performer of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty as written in Heliogabalus, the Crowned Anarchist. Charlie Chaplain’s version of Hitler in The Great Dictator  was so much better than Trump’s; he’s just not a very good clown, and I hope this is the last we ever hear of him.

    As written in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Eating the pets’, crime and abortion: fact-checking the presidential debate; “Donald Trump has repeatedly made false and misleading claims about immigrants “eating the pets”, his connection to Project 2025, the Central Park Five, among other topics, during his debate with Kamala Harris on Tuesday in Philadelphia.

     At the first debate of this presidential election cycle in June – when Joe Biden was still the Democratic party’s nominee – moderators took a completely hands-off approach to factchecking. The light moderation meant that lies and half-truths, most frequently from Trump, went unchallenged during the primetime debate.

     Here are the facts on some of the false claims offered during Tuesday’s debate.

     Donald Trump claimed that crime is way up in the US.

     The facts: Trump is wrong: crime is actually down. Data from the FBI found that violent crime decreased during the Trump administration, spiking in 2020 during the pandemic, and continuing to trend downward afterwards.

     Preliminary data from the FBI found that violent crime was down 6% in 2023, and 15% in the first quarter of 2024.

     Violent crime decreased throughout most of Trump’s presidency, according to FBI data that uses information provided by law enforcement agencies. However, it spiked in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It has trended downward since 2020 across the US, nearing pre-pandemic levels in 2022. Preliminary FBI data for 2023 shows that violent crime overall was down another 6% that year.

     Though the data is preliminary, it includes numbers from 80% of the law enforcement agencies in the country.

    Trump repeated one of his usual falsehoods: that abortions are taking place in the ninth month of pregnancy.

     The facts: Fewer than 1% of abortions are performed past 21 weeks of pregnancy; when these abortions do take place, they often occur in medical emergencies or cases of fetal anomalies.

     Trump also suggested, at multiple points, that abortions take place after birth. That would be infanticide, and it is illegal in all 50 states.

     Trump makes false claims about immigration

     Donald Trump has spouted off a number of false claims about immigration. Among other allegations, he said immigrants are “taking over the towns … They’re going in violently.”

     The facts: That’s false. Although some US cities have seen an influx of immigrants, most have arrived legally, with work permits or with authorization to stay while their cases are worked out in the courts.

     There has been no widespread violence in these cities and overall, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the US-born according to multiple, extensive studies, including from the conservative Cato Institute.

     Trump repeated an unsubstantiated claim that immigrants are eating pets in an Ohio town, forcing the moderator to tell him that there is no proof of that.

     “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats … they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame,” the former president said.

     The story of migrants allegedly eating pets has circulated in rightwing media in recent days and been repeated by Trump’s running mate JD Vance.

     The facts: These are false and unsubstantiated claims.

     “You bring up Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” moderator David Muir told Trump.

     The Springfield News-Sun reported on Monday that police have “received no reports related to pets being stolen and eaten”.

     Trump and Harris argue over the ‘best’ or ‘worst’ economy

Trump boasted that the US experienced its “best” economy under his administration, while Harris noted that he left the US with “the worst unemployment since the Great Depression”.

     The facts: They’re both wrong – Trump by a lot, and Harris by a shade.

     Though unemployment spiked to its worst levels since the Great Depression in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, it dipped back by the time Trump left office.

     Meanwhile, Trump’s “best economy” line has been the bane of fact checkers since he was in office. Best is a very vague term – but by several measures, including GDP, unemployment, the trade deficit – the economy was far from its peak.

     Here are some final numbers from his term, compiled by FactCheck.org:

     The economy lost 2.7m jobs. The unemployment rate increased by 1.7 percentage points to 6.4%.

     Paychecks grew faster than inflation. Average weekly earnings for all workers were up 8.4% after inflation.

     After-tax corporate profits went up and the stock market set new records. The S&P 500 index rose 67.8%.

     The international trade deficit Trump promised to reduce went up. The US trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was the highest since 2008 and increased 36.3% from 2016.

     The number of people lacking health insurance rose by 3 million.

     The federal debt held by the public went up, from $14.4tn to $21.6 tn.

     Home prices rose 27.5%, and the homeownership rate increased 2.1 percentage points to 65.8%.

     Trump doubles down on claims about the exonerated Central Park Five

Donald Trump doubled down on his claims that the exonerated Central Park Five – Black teenagers who were arrested in connection with the rape and assault of a white female jogger in 1989 and convicted based on police-coerced confessions.

     Back then, Trump called for the execution of the five children. When Kamala Harris brought up Trump’s stance, he dug in: “They pled [sic] guilty … They badly hurt a person, they killed a person, ultimately.”

     The facts: All of them were exonerated after a convicted murderer confessed to the crime in 2002. In 2014, they were awarded a $41m settlement.

     In 1989, before any of the boys had faced trial, Trump paid a reported $85,000 to take out advertising space in four of the city’s newspapers, including the New York Times, calling for their execution. The headline read: “Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!” and above his signature, Trump wrote: “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”

     Trump denied knowledge of Project 2025, a 900-page plan for the aggressive rightwing overhaul of nearly every aspect of the federal government.

     Project 2025 suggests ridding the federal ranks of many appointed roles and stacking agencies instead with more political appointees aligned with, and more beholden, to Trump’s policy prescriptions.

     The facts: Though Trump has tried repeatedly to distance himself from the platform, which seeks to strip away reproductive, LGBTQ+ and voting rights, his policies align heavily with Project 2025.

     As the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang reported: “Trump well knows the Heritage Foundation and has spoken at their events, and [Kevin] Roberts, Heritage’s leader, has previously said he and Trump have talked several times. Project 2025’s authors and supporters contain a ton of former Trump administration officials.”

     As written by Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian, in an article entitled Kamala Harris, unlike Donald Trump, was well prepared for this debate – and won; “The Trump-Harris debate was the most unsurprising thing that ever happened, except maybe for the part when, unlike previous debates, the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, pressed Trump to actually answer the question or noted that what he said was extremely not true at all.

     The former prosecutor and current vice-president Kamala Harris got on stage and spoke in lucid paragraphs that were clearly the result of careful preparation. She shared the stage with the adjudicated rapist who spoke in loose phrases that flapped and looped and circled around and usually reverted to some version of “millions of immigrants who are criminals and terrorists are why this country is in terrible shape worse than anyone thought possible and we are going to have world war three”, a litany of fear and rage and vagueness we’ve heard for eight years.

     Harris is widely said to have won the debate, by being herself, and being herself included a recurring facial expression of amused incredulity as the convicted felon on stage with her said yet another thing that was extravagantly untrue. One notable aspect of her rhetoric is how centrist it sounds – a bland but presumably strategic affirmation of support for a strong military, more healthcare, the usual Democratic party shout-outs to the middle class and support for Israel but also a two-state solution. She also expertly riled up Trump and let him go, and he went raging and free-associating throughout the 90 minutes. He is said to have lost the debate, also by being himself.

     His face crumpled into a resentful sulk when his mouth was closed, and it was more than closed at those times – it was clamped shut. But when he opened it, lurid, loopy stuff came out. He actually repeated onstage the grotesquely fearmongering racist untruth that JD Vance and Ted Cruz and other far-right Republicans had been spreading online, declaring: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” It’s an internet rumor as preposterous as offensive as untrue – one of the moderators actually interjected that it was untrue – but it was also classic Maga stuff, an incendiary distraction from actual policy and anything else that matters.

     Trump wasn’t quite as incoherent as in some of his recent public soliloquies, but he did say some very odd stuff, such as when he declared of Biden: “We have a president who doesn’t know he’s alive.” His most interesting slip-up came when the moderators asked him if there was anything he regretted about the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress he instigated. He inveighed and he waffled and he wove around and denied responsibility and tried to shift the conversation to Black Lives Matter protests and came back to blame Nancy Pelosi for what happened. But in one telling moment he said “we” of the insurrectionists and then shifted to say: “this group of people that has been treated so bad”.

     In other words, Trump was Trump and Harris was Harris, but the debate moderators were far, far better than Dana Bash and Jake Tapper of CNN during the disastrous 27 June debate. They and Harris went after Trump when he said, as he’s been saying since at least 2019 in defense of the anti-abortion position, that mothers and doctors are killing babies at or after birth – in other words that abortion rights are the same thing as infanticide (which, yes, is extremely illegal). “They have abortion in the ninth month,” he claimed. “The baby will be born and we will decide what to do with it, in other words they will execute the baby.” It’s the first time to my knowledge that he’s been told to his face that that’s extremely untrue.

     But still the questions came from within the bubble of assumptions and priorities that drive mainstream American media right now and drive media critics crazy. For example, a question about Harris’s position on fracking was an attempt to have a gotcha moment and portray her as a flip-flopper, and it came long before the final question, which was an afterthought of a throwaway question about climate.

     Harris’s answer was disappointingly all over the place – “I am proud that as vice-president over the last four years, we have invested $1tn in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” Trump didn’t answer the climate question at all, and that was that. The fate of the earth for the next 10,000 years or so was brushed aside, but on the other hand the world’s biggest pop star did choose this evening to endorse Harris, signing herself off as “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady”.”

     As written by Robert Reich in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s dour negativity contrasted with Harris’s optimism about America; “To say that Kamala Harris nailed it in Tuesday night’s debate is an understatement. She knocked it out of the park. She combined civility with firmness. She made Donald Trump look and sound like the blubbering idiot he is.

     This was Harris’s first presidential debate. It was Trump’s eighth – including his debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. But Trump was worse than he has ever been. All he did was attack. His only weapon was fear. His only means were lies.

     Trump claimed that the American economy under him was better than the economy under Biden and Harris, and that under Harris the economy would be ruined. In fact, under Trump, America lost almost 3m jobs. And Trump’s unforgivable failure to contain Covid as well as other advanced countries required massive government expenditures that fueled inflation.

     Biden and Harris, by contrast, have presided over an explosion of job growth while inflation has been tamed.

     On the issue of abortion, Trump claimed Democrats want to kill babies after they are born. When questioned about January 6, he charged that Biden and Harris were responsible for the investigations and indictments that targeted him.

     Harris, compared to Trump, answered the questions asked of her – clearly, cogently, powerfully.

     It wasn’t so much Trump’s shambolic responses that gave Harris the big win. It was her manner, in sharp contrast to his.

     She set the tone by walking over to Trump at the start of the debate to shake his hand and introduce herself. He seemed flummoxed.

     Throughout the next 90 minutes, she stayed in control. She was the adult in the room. She smiled at his brazen lies, and then scolded him about them. She was in command of her facts and arguments and refused to stoop to Trump’s belligerence or become rattled by it.

     Trump interrupted, even though his mic was supposed to be muted – which is how he managed to get nine more minutes of talk than Harris. Regardless of how much time he had, he filled it with shouts, harangues and repeatedly bogus claims.

     Harris’s most important challenge was to introduce herself to the American public as tough and competent. She did that superbly.

     She also understood that the only way to deal with Trump’s attacks was to hit him back harder. In doing so, she showed a combination of ferocity and discipline.

     Despite a month of favorable coverage, 28% of voters in the recent New York Times/Siena College poll said they still needed to learn more about Harris, compared with only 9% who said they needed to know more about Trump.

     On Tuesday night they saw a leader.

     Her second challenge was to separate herself from Biden while also taking appropriate credit for the Biden-Harris administration’s achievements. An overwhelming majority of voters say they want the next president to bring “major change”.

     Harris did that. She showed herself as the agent of change. She spoke of her plans for helping small business and families. She talked about how she would stand up for a woman’s reproductive freedom. She was tough on foreign policy and explained the importance of Nato. She was clear and forceful about strengthening American democracy and the rule of law.

     Harris spoke of a “new beginning” for America. What does this new beginning consist of? She didn’t have to talk about her youth, gender or ethnicity, because these attributes were obvious. It was her positive energy – in contrast to Trump’s overwhelming negativism – that drove home the point.

     The “new beginning” is a new generation of leadership.

     Trump tried to paint Harris as the candidate of the status quo. He didn’t come close, not just because he’s an ageing, cantankerous white man. He failed because he came off as a mess of a human being.

     When she said Americans were ready to turn the page on the politics of the past and strive together for a better future, she didn’t need to do more than make the slightest gesture toward the ageing, raging fount of grievance standing on the other side of the stage.

     Her third challenge was to goad Trump into exposing his out-of-control self. In this she also succeeded.

     She rattled Trump to the point where he couldn’t contain his nastiness. He called her a “Marxist”, and accused her father of being one, too. “She’s been so bad,” he sneered. He claimed Joe Biden “hates her”. He charged that Harris “hates Israel”, and she also “hates the Arab population”. He called her “the worst vice-president in the history of the country”.

     On and on Trump went, into the dark depths of his personal malignancy – accusing her and Biden of everything Trump himself has done (such as take money from foreign governments) and everything he aims to do (such as bring down American democracy).

     Harris’s closing statement didn’t even mention Trump. She didn’t have to. By then the choice was clear – either Trump’s bottomless negativism, pessimism, lies and anger, or Harris’s affirmative view of America and its endless possibilities.

     Trump’s closing statement (he won the coin toss to close last) was even darker. We would become a failed nation if she were elected president, he predicted. We already are on the way to becoming one, he said.

     Harris won hands down, but what matters most is whether the few voters who before the debate were uncertain about how to vote now decide to support Harris over Trump. Most pundits thought Clinton had won her three debates with Trump.

     With election day just eight weeks away and early voting beginning within days, what Americans tell one another about tonight’s debate will be determinative.

     At least one voter named Taylor Swift decided on the basis of tonight’s debate to go with Harris. In an Instagram post to her more than 283m followers, Swift said: “I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”

     Swift signed her post “Childless Cat Lady” and included a photo of herself holding her cat, Benjamin Button, who has appeared on the cover of Time magazine with her.”

     What must be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such different results, the founding of nonviolent resistance as realized by Gandhi and Martin Luther King is liberation struggle on the one hand and on the other the Russian Revolution?

     I can tell you the one thing we must never do, any of us, along with the abandonment of our Solidarity with each other; silence in the face of evil, for silence is complicity.

     As I wrote in my post of January 16 2021, Silence Is Complicity: No One Gets to Sit This One Out; A post in which I quote Adam Parkhomenko elicited an interesting reaction from someone, one which makes me question how the rhetoric of fascist and racist privilege creates complicity; the quote is in reference to the massive responsibility avoidance and denial on the part of the Republican lawmakers who refuse to join the call impeach our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his rabble of murderous barbarians.

     Here is the quotation; “I have a very simple message for Republicans calling for unity without accountability: the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.”

     This was the reaction; first, repetition of the very call for unity without accountability, which I would characterize as granting permission through failure to consequent behaviors, which the quote calls out; “These words are just creating more divisions!”

     Second, an attempt at silencing dissent; “Please Stop!” 

     Third, an attempt at blame shifting; “Whenever one person thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong you are the problem!”

    And Fourth, the very worst of the apologetics of historical fascism, a claim of moral equivalence; “Everyone just needs to stop all of these posts because there are good people on both sides!”

     And this last I cannot let pass, for on the last occasion of its general use this propagandistic lie and rhetorical device led directly to the Holocaust and the global devastation of total war.

     I am unclear which good people she could be referring to; the ones who were going to capture and hang or guillotine members of Congress, the ones who murdered a police officer and attempted to bomb both the Democratic and Republican offices, the white supremacist terrorists who have rallied to the cause of treason and armed sedition, or the mad tyrant who commanded them?

     To this I replied; You are wrong. Treason, terror, and the murder of police officers has no excuse. You are either with us as American patriots or against us; no one gets to sit this one out and be counted among the honorable, the moral, and the loyal.

     Silence is complicity.

     Such is the Talmudic principle, “Shtika Kehoda”, famously paraphrased by Einstein in his 1954 speech to the Chicago Decalogue Society as “If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity”, and referenced by Eli Weisel as “the opposite of love is not only hate, it is also indifference.”

     Martin Luther King said it this way in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story; “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

     John Stuart Mill expressed a related idea in his 1867 Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews; “Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”

     Leonardo da Vinci formulated it as resistance to tyranny, with which he was very familiar in the wars of dominion between the princes of Renaissance Italy; “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”

     Silence is complicity.

      Should this concept require further clarification, please refer to the following recording and transcript of Elie Wiesel’s Millennium Lecture at the White House, on April 12 1999, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/ct-evr-column-silence-complicity-tl-0114-20210111-veij55eprzgufbm2v4idk6mn5y-story.html

‘She Spanked That Ass’: Ex-RNC Chair Says Kamala Harris Hit Trump In His ‘Manhood’

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/michael-steele-trump-manhood_n_66e11419e4b0f6ea72e30140?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

Debate Disaster: Trump’s Seething, Unhinged, Incoherent Onstage Meltdown

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-angry-harris-debate_n_66e0dbe6e4b0278730823b56?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

Kamala Harris Succeeds In Baiting Donald Trump On Everything You’d Expect

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kamala-harris-baits-donald-trump_n_66e0fcdde4b0f6ea72e2fb98?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

Harris targets Trump for falsehoods on abortion and immigration in fiery debate

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/11/trump-harris-presidential-debate?CMP=share_btn_url

Rally sizes, abortion and eating cats: the Trump and Harris debate – podcast

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/audio/2024/sep/11/rally-sizes-abortion-and-eating-cats-the-trump-and-harris-debate-podcast?CMP=share_btn_link

Donald Trump and the Central Park Five: the racially charged rise of a demagogue

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/17/central-park-five-donald-trump-jogger-rape-case-new-york

Who won Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s first-ever debate? Our panel reacts

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/11/who-won-harris-trump-debate?CMP=share_btn_url

Harris’s powerful abortion stance and Trump’s fact-checks: key takeaways from the debate

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/11/harris-trump-debate-takeaways?CMP=share_btn_url

Kamala Harris Put Trump On His Back Foot, And 6 Other Takeaways From Their First Debate

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/first-harris-trump-debate-takeaways_n_66e11c6be4b0f6ea72e30451?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

Kamala Harris, unlike Donald Trump, was well prepared for this debate – and won | Rebecca Solnit

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/11/kamala-harris-debate?CMP=share_btn_url

Trump’s dour negativity contrasted with Harris’s optimism about America | Robert Reich

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/11/trump-harris-debate-negativity-optimism?CMP=share_btn_url

January 16 2021 Silence Is Complicity: No One Gets to Sit This One Out

January 16 2021 Silence Is Complicity: No One Gets to Sit This One Out

Benjamin Button, with a friend.

     One important endorsement came out of this debate; arguably by the most powerful or influential person in the world.

     Even grumpy cats deserve love; so we are taught by the Great Souled One.

Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris for president in post signed ‘childless cat lady’

In an Instagram post published minutes after the US presidential debate ended, Swift said ‘the simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth’

https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/sep/11/taylor-swift-endorses-kamala-harris-president-us-debate-cat-lady?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawFOjQRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHd5noUOQLIjOCME1Gm6vzdNjluYC4sp9_5OQRj3mHeHTtl0kkHlfVqpCow_aem_Isz03RHzaNlJ

Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, Antonin Artaud, Alexis Lykiard

 (Translator)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75887.Heliogabalus_or_the_Crowned_Anarchist?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=2x5LxQ9XgG&rank=1

June 2 2020 The Great Dictator: Trump’s Reboot of the Chaplin Classic

June 2 2020 The Great Dictator: Trump’s Reboot of the Chaplin Classic

The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplain

Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, by Martin Luther King Jr.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/950321.Stride_Toward_Freedom?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=DSrMBxNb08&rank=1
0

September 9 2024 An Iconic Defiance of Unjust Authority: Anniversary of the 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion

     On this day fifty three years ago the prisoners of Attica rebelled against the dehumanizing and horrific conditions in which they were held, and against the authority of the carceral state to subjugate its citizens as an instrument of white supremacist terror.

     The Rebellion was swiftly and with great brutality repressed by the government, but it will never be forgotten nor its spirit erased by the people of America for whom it remains a glorious symbol of liberty and the unconquered will to resist tyranny and terror.

     What has changed in over fifty years of resistance to the systems and structures of racism and unequal power, our police and prisons? Only this; the methods of surveillance and thought control are now pervasive and endemic, and have achieved a level of sophistication which obviates the need for lynching and arson to enforce hegemonic monopolies of wealth, power, and privilege held by racial and patriarchal elites.

     The Attica Rebellion was an iconic moment of triumph over tyranny, and recalls its historical parallels in the three principal Jewish revolts in death camps during the Second World War; the Sonderkommando Revolt of 7 October 1944 at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Sobibor Revolt of 14 October 1943, and the Treblinka Revolt of 2 August 1943; but Attica was not an affirmation of our universal humanity and those rights which proceed from it by prisoners of war or genocide held by a monstrous enemy, but by our fellow citizens held by the unjust authority of our own government. The true historical parallels of Attica  are the 250 American slave revolts including Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1836, the 1811 Revolt led by Charles Deslondes, the Amistad Rebellion, and Gabriel Prosser’s Rebellion of 1800. In terms of causes, scale, and the brutality of repression and number of deaths the American parallel among prison revolts is the New Mexico State Penitentiary Revolt of February 2 1980.

      Prison revolts are slave revolts.

      The Attica Rebellion exposes the lie at the heart of our Justice system and America; the claim to equality and impartial justice blind to race, gender, and other divisions and categories of exclusionary otherness. It is a system which originates in the collapse of Reconstruction and the political subversion of Abolitionist values as a strategy of racist and capitalist elites to re-enslave Black people as prison bond labor and has instrumentalized the American state as a machine for turning people into a resource for the profit of others; an engine of capitalist and racist dehumanization and commodification.

     And today the carceral state reaches its apotheosis of depravity as a tyranny of totalitarian force and control, as absolute as any historical monarchy, empire, or dictatorship, having transformed itself through alignment and interdependence with the imperial militarism and counterinsurgency model of policing which seized America in its talons in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, a national trauma and disruptive event which has challenged all our values.

     The carceral state enforces an unjust system, and we are all its captives.

     We have learned the wrong lessons from our enemies, from the Confederacy which was a human trafficking syndicate that declared itself a nation and from the Nazis whose atrocities define the limits of the human.

     America has embraced policies of force and control which have shaped us to the purposes of terror and achieved for our enemies in the ambiguity of our victories the goals and objectives they have no power to force us to; the Fall of America as the primary guarantor of universal human rights and democracy, and a beacon of hope to the world. 

     The Torch of Liberty is shadowed by the fascist tyranny which seized us in the Stolen Election of 2016 and now threatens to do so again under the figurehead of Traitor Trump, and we must resist the darkness and its atavisms of fear and hate, rekindle and propagate the wildfires of freedom, and carry onward into the future our hope for a better humankind.     

     Shawn Gude offers a precis of the Attica Rebellion in Jacobin; “On the eve of what would become the US’s most famous prison uprising, the inmates of Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York endured deplorable conditions. Their infections went untreated, their teeth fell out due to negligible dental care — they even lacked adequate access to soap and toilet paper.

     On September 9, 1971, these pent-up grievances simmered over when roughly 1,300 inmates took over the prison. For four days they were effectively in charge. They made demands on the state (better medical care, fewer limits on their freedom of expression, immunity from prosecution for rebelling), negotiated with mediators brought in at their behest (including, briefly, Black Panther leader Bobby Seale), and generally asserted their worth as human beings.

     But whatever the prisoners gained in those few days was quickly pulverized by the brute force of the state. Seeking dignity, they instead unleashed the wrath of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.

     On the morning of September 13, state law enforcement streamed into the prison by the hundreds, and killed by the dozens. When they were finished, thirty-nine men (twenty-nine prisoners and ten state employees) lay dead. And for the inmates who survived (especially rebellion leaders like Frank “Big Black” Smith), ghastly torture and severe intimidation soon followed.

     Top officials never faced legal reprisals for the atrocities at Attica. They shielded themselves from prosecution, and did their best to squirrel away evidence about what happened on that autumn morning.

     Yet Attica lives. It’s still on the lips of anti-prison activists and striking inmates, still in the panicked nightmares of law-and-order types. The American carceral state, built up feverishly in the rebellion’s wake, rests in its shadow.”

    The retaking of the prison ordered by New York Governor Rockefeller is described by University of Michigan historian Heather Ann Thompson in her interview; “So he unleashes nearly six hundred men, troopers and corrections officers who are armed to the teeth with their own personal weapons, and weapons that are being passed out at the supply truck without regard for serial numbers or identification of the specific officers. Then these guys rip off their identification badges, so that they can do whatever they want once they get inside.

     And it is one of the most horrific assaults in US history. The doctors that go in later liken it to My Lai, to a Civil War painting, to Vietnam writ large, because it is nothing but carnage. And, by the way, this is after they had already doused the yard in CS gas (which is a powder that clings to your nasal passages). People were sick, they were retching, they were already disabled when the shooting began.”

Attica Prison Uprising Aftermath/ Richard Kaplan CBS & The History Channel

The Tragedy At Attica: Prison Riot/ CBS 1991 special report

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/attica-prison-anniversary-blood-in-the-water-thompson?fbclid=IwAR08a4qg153OcM_ZLJk9PPUO6lt9umC7Rqq2MCcIydYmMfkGzneq_3ISAKc

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy,

Heather Ann Thompson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28007898-blood-in-the-water?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=DY73bKwio3&rank=1

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, Orisanmi Burton

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123838971-tip-of-the-spear?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=8JZxjShSDd&rank=7

American Negro Slave Revolts, Herbert Aptheker

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/183540.American_Negro_Slave_Revolts?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=hoOn60wyDw&rank=4

A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt, Tom Wicker

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119804.A_Time_to_Die?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=8JZxjShSDd&rank=1

Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire, Angela Y. Davis

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/221705.Abolition_Democracy?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ziCyUQmBnI&rank=4

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/80369.Discipline_and_Punish?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=vPsD5xtFNh&rank=3
0

September 8 2024 International Literacy Day: What is a Library For?

     In our current moment of book burnings and bans, rewritten histories and authorized identities, silencing and erasure of the witness of history and the repression of dissent, thought control and the electoral infiltration, subversion, and capture of public institutions crucial to the mission of democracy and the manufacture of an informed electorate able to question authority as co-owners of the state, our interdependent public schools and libraries have become a frontline in the struggle between tyranny and liberty.

     What is a library for?

     Libraries share with public schools the purpose of creating citizens, of education in its original Greek meaning to bring out the truth of ourselves, together with two other primary and crucial functions in a democracy; to provide free access to learning as both rights of information and a free press, which also parallel equality as annihilation of class and access to opportunity as a seizure of power, and to provide inclusive and diverse representations of self as revolutionary struggle against authorized identities, divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of race, gender, faith, and nationality.

     At the heart of this process of identity construction lies the curation of reading lists and a personal library which represents and defines us in ways we have chosen for ourselves.

     Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?

      Memory, history, identity; the selves we choose among the limitless possibilities of becoming human. Here is a central problem of both libraries and the construction of ourselves as assemblages of stories; how shall we taxonomize, structure, and assign relative value to the texts we gather, in our personae and in our libraries as memory palaces? And in a realm of ideas and their consequences which is chaotic, shifting, ephemeral, impermanent, and full of dyadic opposites, relative truths, mutual interdependence and change?

     Before all else, who decides? Public libraries and schools confront us with all of the issues about how to be human together which create, inform, motivate, and shape human societies, and democracies most especially as negotiated meaning and value.

     This is why the curation of personal libraries and unauthorized reading lists  are revolutionary acts, and a praxis of the values of democracy.

     In aid of this process of decolonization and becoming autonomous I share with you now some ideas from writing in Aeon on How to Nurture and Grow a Personal Library, and a link to the wonderful community of librarians at LibraryThing.

     As I wrote in preface to my reading lists, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?

       I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.

     We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others. Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.

     Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?

     Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?

     America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.

     Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.

     We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.

     Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.

     Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?

          As I wrote in my post of May 28 2022, On Libraries and Identity as a Ground of Struggle; “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” So Heinrich Heine has taught us, in his lyric drama of 1823, Almansor: A Tragedy. As described by Professor Shlomo Avineri in a lecture at CEU; “Almansor” is a tragic love story between an Arab man and Donna Clara, a Moroccan woman who’s forced to convert from Islam to Christianity. Taking place in Granada in 1492, the tragedy depicts the burning of the Qu’ran, the act that prompts the sentence now engraved in the ground of Berlin’s Opernplatz commemorating the horrifying book burning of 1933.

     Heine’s lyrical poetry was well-loved in Germany, his most famous poem “Lorelei” even appeared in a collection of German folk songs, although the poet’s name was given as Anonymous. His books, together with the works of Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kastner, Karl Marx, Heinrich Mann and many other “un-German” authors, were also burned on May 10, 1933.”

     Why was this early work of German Romanticism silenced and erased from the canon of literature for over a century? As a wiki article describes; “The performance turned into a fiasco and had to be canceled after tumultuous scenes in the auditorium. Since there are no immediate newspaper reports of the event, the trigger is not entirely clear and leaves room for speculation ranging from personal intrigue to anti-Semitism. According to Manfred Windfuhr, editor of the Düsseldorf Heine edition, the most likely explanation is the anecdote that the actor of Almansor Eduard Schütz later reported. According to this, a viewer asked about the author of the play during the last transformation towards the end of the performance and was whispered “Der Jude Heine” in response. In the erroneous assumption that an Israelite money changer of the same name from Braunschweig wrote the tragedy, he then exclaimed: “What? shall we listen to the silly Jew’s nonsense? We don’t want to tolerate that any longer! Let’s knock out the piece! ”And thus triggered the protests. simple confusion of names.”

    Heine’s personal friends and influences included Goethe, Schlegel, Dumas, Hegel, and Marx, and his direct models were the world’s first historical novel Las Guerras de Granada by Ginés Pérez de Hita, which awaits translation into English, The Magic Ring by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, and the beautiful Arabic and Persian romance Layla and Majnoun which has been reimagined in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by the Afghan author Khaled Hosseini.

      In Almansor, Heine writes in reference to the book burning of 1499 by the future Grand Inquisitor in the wake of the fall of Al-Andalus and the betrayal by the Catholic monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragón of the treaty which guaranteed freedom of religion for all, during which thousands of books were destroyed, including the Qu’ran and other works of Islamic, Jewish, and classical Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, history, and science, excepting only medical works from the flames. It seems they weren’t quite as crazy as our own science deniers and anti-vaccine Luddites, but nearly so, and the parallels do not end there.

     And so, we come to this; the Republican Party, in public declaration of their origins and traditions in the Inquisition and the Nazis, have chosen to launch a national campaign of book burnings and bans and are waging a combined electoral and media campaign to monopolize public school and library boards to authorize identities and repress dissent. And only our public solidarity and will to resist subjugation stands between us and the year 2022 being remembered in history with those of 1499 and 1933.

     As I wrote in my post of December 14 2021, Subversion of Democracy: Case of the Texas Book Ban;

Remaining on the Texas Public School Required Reading List:

Lynchings and Other Family Gatherings: the Joy of Community

Keep Your Pimp Hand Strong: Negotiating Gender Roles

Only Our Kind Are Truly Human: Why Values and Morals Only Apply To Us

     Texas bans books from public schools and libraries in subversion of democracy and our values of freedom and equality of all humankind in an attempt to enforce imperiled hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege historically and systemically constructed along divisions of race and gender and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

     The multifront assault on freedom of information and expression is about patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror under the fig leaves of Gideonite fundamentalist Christian Identity sectarianism and jingoistic nationalism, as it has always been.

     The last time the state had the right to control its slave populations through access to learning civilization collapsed and was lost for a thousand years while the Church burned books which threated elite power, and we must be vigilant lest we give those who would enslave us the right and power to do so yet again, and cast the world into a Dark Age from which we may never recover.

    As written by Ryan Cooper in The Week, in an article entitled The forgotten history of Republican book banning; “A conservative stock character is making a comeback: the book banner. For the past few years, Republicans have pretended they’re defending free speech and free inquiry in schools against censorious liberals with their safe spaces and trigger warnings. In reality, conservatives have a mile-long history of trying to suppress the teaching of books they find uncomfortable.

     That record has resurfaced in the Virginia gubernatorial race, where Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin recently ran an ad in which a woman named Laura Murphy complained about not being able to dictate what was taught at her local high school. Murphy describes the issue as explicit material being shown to children without parental sign-off, but there’s much more to the story than the ad let on: Back in 2013, Murphy told The Washington Post that her son Blake (now an associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee) had night terrors after being required to read Toni Morrison’s book Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Beloved.

     Murphy isn’t the only Republican with this censorious impulse. The American Library Association maintains an incomplete list of attempted book-banning events in recent history, and in the large majority of cases for which a motivation is explained, it is conservative: Right-wing parents in Columbus, Ohio, tried to ban Catcher in the Rye in schools in 1963 because it was “anti-white.” Other parents challenged The Grapes of Wrath in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1991 because it invoked God and Jesus in a “vain and profane manner.” Slaughterhouse-Five was suppressed in Oakland County, Michigan, in 1972, in a case in which a circuit judge called the book “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” Those are just three of dozens of examples.

     Now, liberals have done the same thing on occasion, typically targeting books which contain racial slurs, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But the bulk of book banning incidents — parents complaining about sexual content, violence, skepticism of Christianity, cursing, or the history of racism and slavery — are straight out of the Moral Majority politics of the 1980s and 1990s. That habit seemed to vanish for awhile when Republicans nominated a thrice-divorced, credibly accused rapist for president. Now it’s coming back.

     In recent months, Republican legislatures have passed de facto prohibitions of teaching the history of racism across the country. As a result, a Tennessee teacher was fired for assigning Ta-Nehisi Coates, while a Texas school board recently apologized for instructing teachers to present “opposing” views on the Holocaust while trying to obey a Republican law on curriculum content. Don’t let the brief reprieve fool you: They were always like this.”

    As written by Amy Brady in Lithub, The History (and Present) of Banning Books in America: On the Ongoing Fight Against the Censorship of Ideas; “Like small pox and vinyl records, book banning is something many Americans like to think of as history. But according to the American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE), the practice persists. ABFE, which from its headquarters in White Plains fights book banning across the country, keeps a list of books challenged each year by American public libraries and schools. In 2016, that list includes Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Emily M. Danworth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Most of the titles are by LGBTQ authors and authors of color who write about life beyond white, straight, middle-class America.

     One way ABFE fights book banning is to partner with other organizations in the publishing industry (including their parent organization, the American Booksellers Association) to host Banned Books Week, a seven-day celebration that takes place in bookstores and libraries all over the United States. This year, the event runs from September 25th to October 1st with a focus on “diversity,” a factor behind many book challenges. “There were over 300 book challenges in 2015,” said Chris Finan, Director of ABFE, in an interview. “And themes of race, ethnicity, and sexual preference have been a large part of why those books got challenged.”

     On its website, ABFE acknowledges that diversity is difficult to define. One definition that has informed their thinking comes from the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom: Diversity includes “non-white main and/or secondary characters; LGBT main and/or secondary characters; disabled main and/or secondary characters; issues about race or racism; LGBT issues; issues about religion, which encompass in this situation the Holocaust and terrorism; issues about disability and/or mental illness; non-Western settings, in which the West is North America and Europe.”

      Historically, other reasons for banning books include: sexual imagery, violence, and any content considered obscene. Indeed, arguments over obscenity—how its defined and how that definition relates to the First Amendment—have been at the heart of banned-book controversies throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

     Many historians point to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the first book in the United States to experience a ban on a national scale. The Confederacy barred the book from stores not only for its pro-abolitionist agenda, but because it aroused heated debates about slavery (some historians argue that the book catalyzed the Civil War).

     A decade after the war, a carping moralist government official named Anthony Comstock convinced the United States Congress to pass a law prohibiting the mailing of “pornographic” materials. His definition of the term was murky at best. Anatomy textbooks, doctors’ pamphlets about reproduction, anything by Oscar Wilde, and even The Canterbury Tales were deemed too sexy to send through the mail.

     These bans, or “comstockery,” as the practice became known, continued into the new century. But by the 1920s, shifts in politics and social mores led booksellers to see themselves as advocates for people’s right to read whatever they wanted. Then, in 1933, an influential court case—The United States v. One Book Called Ulysses—helped usher in a new era of legal interpretation of the First Amendment.

     In that court case, Judge John M. Woolsey overturned a federal ban of James Joyce’s Ulysses—the ban had been in effect since 1922, and court transcripts reveal that the judge who banned the book also remarked that it was “the work of a disordered mind.” Woolsey, who admitted to not liking the novel, found legal cause to challenge the previous judge’s definition of pornography—and by extension, his definition of art. He ultimately ruled that the depiction of sex, even if unpleasant, should be allowed in serious literature. His final edict is at once hilarious and evident of a mind capable of separating legal philosophy from personal preference: “[W]hilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”

     The case set an important precedent. However, Comstock Law remained on the books until 1957, when the Supreme Court tried Roth vs. The United States. The plaintiff was Samuel Roth, a writer and bookseller convicted for mailing pornographic magazines to subscribers. His trial forced the American legal system to once again reconsider its definition of obscenity. The Court’s final decision was bad for Roth: his conviction was upheld, and he remained in prison until 1961. But it was great for lovers of books: the definition was narrowed to apply to only that which is “utterly without redeeming social importance.” That narrowing made room for books depicting sex and violence. Even Judge Woolsey had found Ulysses to have social importance.

     In the decades that followed, public officials would continue to challenge the Court’s 1957 definition of obscenity, including Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, whose personal definition famously began and ended with the declaration “I know it when I see it.” But in general, the 1960s and 70s witnessed a simultaneous drop in instances of book bans and rise in more explicit art. Artists and authors felt freer than ever to experiment. Consumers were more willing than ever to un-clutch their pearls and engage with racy material. Sex was mainstream in the novels of John Updike and Erica Jong. Then America elected Ronald Reagan.

     “Reagan didn’t run on a campaign of anti-pornography,” Finan clarifies. “But he nevertheless ran an election that depowered those who fought for First Amendment freedoms. [His] election encouraged challenges by people who were unhappy with books in schools and libraries that were increasingly realistic in their depiction of life.” The number of challenges to books made by school boards and libraries rose dramatically: “Suddenly we were facing 700-800 challenges a year,” says Finan. In 1982, the ALA responded to this renewed culture of censorship with Banned Books Week. “The point of the event was to get people to understand that these books weren’t pornographic or excessively violent, but simply depicting the real world…and that many were classics of American literature,” Finan says. “Banned Books Week was the first real [American] celebration of the freedom to read.”

     In those early days, Banned Books Week consisted almost entirely of libraries and bookstores hanging posters and displaying banned books. “Those displays were enormously effective communication tools,” says Finan, “because people would wander over and find out that the books they love had been challenged. Suddenly they understood that censorship isn’t just about fringe literature.” Today, those displays remain a centerpiece of Banned Books Week, but partnering sponsors are also seeking to involve readers in other ways. The Washington, DC Public Library, for example, hosts a city-wide scavenger hunt of banned books that began on September 1st and will continue until the end of the month. The books, which have been wrapped in black paper printed with words like “SMUT” or “FILTHY,” have been hidden on shelves in libraries and bookstores all over DC.

     The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), another sponsor of Banned Books Week, has published a handbook that lists which comic books have been censored and outlines what readers can do to fight censorship. “Since 2011, at least one graphic novel has been included on ALA’s annual list of the ten most frequently challenged books,” said Betsy Gomez, Editorial Director of CBLDF, in an interview. “In 2015, CBLDF fought more than 24 attempts to ban books, including the comics Drama, This One Summer, The Sandman, Fun Home, Persepolis, Palomar. So far, in 2016, CBLDF has defended a dozen books.” The handbook includes programming ideas for educators and libraries to engage their communities in discussions about banned books throughout the year.

     Organizations with no official connection to Banned Books Week are also getting involved. Wordier Than Thou, an open mic storytelling group in Pinellas Park, Florida, began presenting last year an annual burlesque show inspired by selected banned books. “[The show] definitely gets people talking about literature,” wrote Tiffany Razzano, founder of Wordier Than Thou, in an email. “[Last year], throughout the night people would come up to me and tell me about their favorite banned book.” The show, which features area burlesque favorite Mayven Missbehavin’, makes thematic sense: “It’s supposedly offensive material [interpreted by] scantily clad women performing classic burlesque stripteases,” she writes. For the sake of surprise, Razzano wouldn’t disclose which books would be featured this year. But last year’s performance included Gone with the Wind, 1984, and The Scarlet Letter.

     It’s rare today for a book banning case to make it to the federal courts, but many challenges to books are still taking place on the state and local levels. At the time of this writing, ABFE has joined a protest against the Chesterfield County Public Schools in Virginia, which seeks to remove Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park and other titles from students’ voluntary summer reading lists. The proposed removal is “particularly outrageous,” says Finan, because the books aren’t a part of the school’s required curriculum.

     If school administrators are attempting to limit even elective reading, what does the future hold for students who want access to all books, classic and contemporary—books that might broaden their understanding of the world? “The problem of book banning hasn’t gone away, and it probably won’t,” Finan laments. “There are always going to be struggles over the proper limits to free speech.”

Fahrenheit 451 1966 Trailer | Oskar Werner

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-life-and-style/attack-books-600-authors-publishers-groups-condemn-book-bans-rcna7910

https://theweek.com/talking-points/1006493/the-forgotten-history-of-republican-book-banning

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/school-librarians-speak-out-against-recent-upsurge-in-attempts-to-ban-books

https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics

https://time.com/6117685/book-bans-school-libraries/

All 850 Books Texas Lawmaker Matt Krause Wants to Ban: An Analysis
The History (and Present) of Banning Books in America

Click to access krausebooklist.pdf

Bannings and Burnings in History
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/tell-congress-stop-the-largest-book-ban-in-america
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/168894.The_Poem_That_Changed_America?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=aiUZqoQe91&rank=1

Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones

Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones

               References on how to build your personal library

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-nurture-and-grow-a-personal-library-of-books?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=5492a510c0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_09_14_04_00&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_76a303a90a-5492a510c0-71612960
How 11 Writers Organize Their Personal Libraries

          Libraries and Books, a reading list

Fahrenheit 451 60th Anniversary Edition, by Ray Bradbury

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13079982-fahrenheit-451?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=BMELCwRXYz&rank=4

Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge,

by Richard Ovenden

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51342996-burning-the-books

Library: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316550-library?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=UwBOBFV2Co&rank=1

A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53085.A_History_of_Reading?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=J46lmJ6cQq&rank=2

The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2452483.The_Library_at_Night?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=J46lmJ6cQq&rank=1

Books as History: The Importance of Books Beyond Their Texts, David Pearson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5177580-books-as-history?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=1ove706yQa&rank=13

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books,

Nicholas A. Basbanes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/791098.A_Gentle_Madness

Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the 21st Century, Nicholas A. Basbanes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/856281.Among_the_Gently_Mad

A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World,

Nicholas A. Basbanes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12181.A_Splendor_of_Letters

Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World,

Nicholas A. Basbanes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12180.Every_Book_Its_Reader

The Library: An Illustrated History, Stuart A.P. Murray, Nicholas A. Basbanes

 (Foreword) Donald G. Davis (Introduction)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54156965-the-library

On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History, Nicholas A. Basbanes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17262099-on-paper

         Heinrich Heine and his sources, a reading list

Songs of Love and Grief: A Bilingual Anthology in the Verse Forms of the Originals, by Heinrich Heine, Jeffrey L. Sammons (Foreword by)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28628.Songs_of_Love_and_Grief?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=4y0Pj6oXpD&rank=21

Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution, by George Prochnik

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52642120-heinrich-heine?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=4y0Pj6oXpD&rank=4

The Magic Ring, by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8554345-the-magic-ring?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=P0GbAZHJ8F&rank=32

A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128029.A_Thousand_Splendid_Suns?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=cCMHwMQfzg&rank=9

The Complete Majnun: Poems of Qays Ibn Al-Mulawwah and Nizami’s Layla & Majnun, by Qays ibn al-Mullawah, Nizami Ganjavi, Paul Smith (Translator)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37844651-the-complete-majnun

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September 7 2024 Remembering The Fall of Panjshir, Part Two

      As I wrote in my post of September 8 2021, With the Lions of Panjshir: a Notebook of Resistance; I greet you from a place of great darkness and beauty, beyond all limits of the human and boundaries of the Forbidden, among the unknowns marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value. Here ancient truths are tested, and new truths are forged with the limitless possibilities of becoming human. Of these truths I speak to you as a witness of history; of wonderful things, terrible things.

      It is a place wherein the flaws of our humanity are reflected in the brokenness of the world, but one in which true heroism is possible and the sacred wounds we bear can open us to the pain of others, where the redemptive power of love reveals the truth of ourselves and our interdependence as our brothers keepers. Is this not the beauty of humankind?

     The best and most accurate summation of the Battle for Panjshir thus far is written by Santosh Chaubey for Reuters, Resistance is Futile: Why Panjshir Falling to the Taliban is Inevitable; “Panjshir valley of northern Afghanistan, the last province to resist the Taliban’s complete control of Afghanistan, has fallen as per the claims made by the Islamist force. But if we see the genesis of the Taliban’s emergence this time, we find that the Panjshir valley resistance is already a lost battle with no international support coming to the rescue and sustain it against the combined strength of the fundamentalist outfit and Pakistan.

     Ahmad Massoud, the Panjshir leader and head of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRFA), and Amrullah Saleh, the caretaker President of the previous Afghan government, are both appealing to get some international support for the challengers. But with major powers like the US, Russia, China, Germany and Britain and the United Nations willing to give the Taliban a chance if they mend their ways, the NRFA, it seems, is going to be just a minor resistance group localised to a limited area if it continues with its efforts.

     The United Nations Security Council recently adopted a resolution on Afghanistan. While Russia and China abstained in the vote on the resolution sponsored by the US, UK and France, the message was very clear that the international community had no problem with a Taliban-led government if the Islamist outfit ensured that Afghanistan would not become a terror hub again, like it was under the 1990s Taliban government regime: naturally with additional norms like upholding human rights concerns of women, children and minorities.

      (Here I append my own commentary: Norms which like the eradication of Islamist terror are likely unenforceable; fig leaves of legitimacy.)

     Clearly, the international community is looking towards a peaceful political settlement this time in the country that has seen civil wars for over 40 years and is willing to give the Taliban a chance with their rapid takeover after the withdrawal of the US and other international troops that showed the powerlessness of the previous Afghan government and inoperability of the security mechanism developed by America across the country since 2001.

     Afghanistan has been a graveyard for many countries. The USSR invaded it in December 1979 but faced a humiliating loss after a decade of war much in the same way as the US and other international forces have seen in the last 20 years. While the Soviet Union’s withdrawal led to a bitter tribal war between different Mujahideen commanders with no alternative arrangement set in place and saw the emergence of the Taliban, this time the international community is much more concerned with terror becoming the biggest global threat and its deep correlation with Afghanistan in the past.

     To sum it up, the international community is not going to encourage another movement in Afghanistan this time like it did for the anti-Taliban resistance Northern Alliance in the 1990s – until the Taliban fail and go back to the ways of the 1990s to become a radical, fundamentalist insurgent group again that harbours terrorists and threatens global security.

     Though the Taliban have denied this, emboldened by Pakistan’s direct support, they now claim to have completely captured the landlocked valley. As confirmed by Ahmad Massoud, Pakistan bombed the valley to give the Taliban an upper hand over the NRFA fighters who were bravely taking on the Taliban forces for the last three weeks.

     With direct air support through drone bombing, Pakistan also air-dropped its special forces to fight alongside the Taliban. And though the Taliban have assured the international community that they will not allow Afghanistan to become a terror hub again and will not allow terrorists to use the nation’s soil to plan and perpetrate terror attacks in other countries, the Taliban force at Panjshir valley also includes al-Qaeda fighters.

     The correlation between ISI chief Hamid Faiz’s landing in Kabul on September 4 and the Taliban’s claim of complete capture of Panjshir province on September 6 can’t be ignored.

     Though the NRFA says the Taliban claim is false, releasing a tweet this morning that says the “Taliban’s claim of occupying Panjshir is false and NRFA forces are present in all strategic positions across the valley to continue the fight, assuring the people of Afghanistan that the struggle against the Taliban and their partners will continue until justice and freedom prevails”, the fact is the NRFA lost its main voice and spokesperson Fahim Dashti in the battle on Sunday while Amrullah Saleh is missing and is reportedly in Tajikistan and Ahmad Massoud has fled.

     Panjshir valley resisted the Soviet invasion in the 1980s and the Taliban takeover between 1996 and 2001. But the difference between then and now is the sweeping capture of Afghanistan by the Taliban all across the country, in 33 of the 34 provinces. Just Panjshir was left, but with claims made by the Taliban releasing video clips showing their fighters raising the Taliban flag on Bazarak, Panjshir’s capital city, and capturing Ahmad Massoud’s house and patrolling the valley’s streets, this province too has largely fallen.

     The Taliban were not able to capture the northern areas of the country so effectively the last time, in the 1990s, as the Northern Alliance and many ethnic minorities inhabiting these areas fought well with international support. But by co-opting ethnic minorities like the Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmens and even Hazaras of this area this time by including commanders of these tribes, the Taliban have swept the entire northern Afghanistan area, including the border posts.

     The local leadership of Panjshir previously had access to the supply routes to get essential items and arms and ammunition even during the war phase. But this time, these supply routes are under Taliban control, and while controlling the narrow entrance to the valley, they have blocked the roads and have ensured that food, medical and other emergency services supplied to the valley are entirely cut off.”

     There are some claims in this article clearly written by someone who is here in Panjshir which I would amend; most importantly, the Taliban have occupied government offices and other parts of the capital of both symbolic and tactical value, but this is not the same as control when the NRF remains armed and can strike at will throughout the province.

     Both the government of Afghanistan in exile and Massoud himself remain secure and defiant, having escaped to Tajikistan while we fought diversionary and rearguard actions as well as the main battle on Sunday in which Fahim Dashti was killed, and the fighters of the NRF themselves are like lions with an arena full of prey to hunt; nothing frightens them, not even aerial bombardment, and though they can be killed they cannot be defeated.

     As the Taliban have come to their home, the defenders of Panjshir will return the courtesy and come to theirs in Kabul. No program of pacification can entirely crush resistance in this mazelike series of over twenty valleys and goatpaths over towering cliffs in which perhaps a quarter million people live; and it is an hour’s drive from Kabul, where the NRF and other allied sleeper cells, rollover suicide teams, local reaction forces, and infiltration agents within the Taliban and other groups, await their moment of retribution. No conflict in these conditions can be final.

    Nor can any victory here be described as total; Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires for many reasons, among them the shifting and multiple loyalties of its people, not merely a checkerboard of traditional ethnic divisions and independent warlords but also an operational environment wherein an entire military culture of armed and trained fighters follow whoever best serves their interests and from antiquity pursue war as a profession, change the ideologies and goals of their factions or join others opportunistically, and many competing organizations share members or have infiltrated each other so thoroughly it has become impossible to tell the wolves from the sheep.

     The Taliban has seized Afghanistan; but the Taliban, cohesive through its origins in the fifty students of Mullah Mohammad Omar who founded it in 1994 in Kandahar to restore sharia law, is today united by only four things; first and foremost resistance to American imperialism and colonial dominion and the Deobandi ideology which recasts Islamic faith as anticolonial liberation struggle as it was developed in Delhi in resistance to the British Empire and instrumentalized by Pakistan through its mosques and madrasas; secondly the historical narratives of victimization and blood debt of a decades long anticolonial war of independence which have forged a national identity represented by the Taliban, third the personal charisma, authority, and lines of patronage of its leaders and the direct loyalties of their forces, who are often also clan and tribal leaders with the authority of kings, and fourth unifying institutions and authority such as the Quetta Shura command in Pakistan and the Haqqani Network de facto intelligence service. Having a secure base of operations across an open border with its patron Pakistan has been crucial to its success, but the Taliban is both a proxy of Pakistan, who has recreated Afghanistan as a Sunni buffer state and key ally between herself and Iran, and a genuine independence movement.

    These are its strengths; the weaknesses of the Taliban are its ethnic balkanization and chaotic factional multiplicity which make exercising direct control of its own forces problematic. The Taliban remains a theocracy and unifying institution, but with a feudal army, where a nobleman commands his own sworn fighters and obeys his own direct lord but that lord cannot command his soldiers personally, not a modern one with a unifying chain of command. When the situation begins with three major competing organizations of Sunni fundamentalism, Taliban, Islamic State, and al Qaeda, locked in a titanic and ferocious life or death struggle for dominion whose fighters are often members of more than one group, and becomes complex with dozens or possibly hundreds of factions, to claim that anyone is in control or can rule here in Afghanistan is absurd. And here lies the great opportunity which Chaos offers us; to seize our power from any authority who would subjugate us. 

     The call of Chaos is simply one which I cannot resist, though I am here in Panjshir specifically because of a debt of honor I owe to the father of its current warlord Ahmad Massoud, the legendary warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud. So as the Pineapple Express run off the books by special operations forces to smuggle their former partners out of the country during the debacle of the Kabul airlift neared completion, I was organizing an expedition across the Khyber Pass from Peshawar, the heart of the Taliban’s government in exile and bastion of its Pakistani Intelligence handlers and advisors as well as the gateway to the world’s largest arms black market and its tribal borderlands.

     Panjshir is lost, and with it the immediate hope of independence from Taliban theocratic tyranny in Afghanistan as well as the American colonial imperialism the Tasliban has freed the nation from. This is a predictable phase of anticolonial liberation struggle and a form of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes, as we are sadly familiar with in the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mugabe, and so many other revolutions which become tyrannies, though there are special and unique conditions here in Afghanistan and limits to the comparison of theocracy to any form of liberation struggle arising from secular Humanism as embodied in the American and French Revolutions on the one hand and the Russian and other communist revolutions on the other.

     What must be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such very different results? For now we must work to bring change and restore democracy and our universal human rights to a sovereign and independent Afghanistan, and move from throwing stones to throwing words. Before all else is this; the people must be co-owners of the state who have chosen to be human together in ways which it embodies, and not its slaves.

     I will fight on, for the liberty and humanity of the peoples of Afghanistan and  the world, wherever men hunger to be free.

      On September 5 2021 I wrote; Confusion during fighting in Panjshir; the Taliban have been lured into a trap in the valley and cannot escape while the resistance control the passes. Taliban mountaineers have been captured attempting to climb the cliffs and seize gun positions. But the road north leads not to resupply or transshipment, but to Taliban held areas, and communications are sporadic. Panjshir is isolated from support, no help is coming from the international community, and the fight now rests with mobile teams behind Taliban lines; significant forces await a route to bring aid. Meanwhile the Taliban in the valley, including elite units and the Red Faction shock troops, are fighting ferociously for survival, as are the people of Panjshir. This is a battle of mutual annihilation, glorious and terrible; it remains to be seen whether it is also futile.

    In a post of September 6 2021, I wrote; Taliban has captured the capital of Panjshir using Pakistani drone bombing and airdropped elite Pakistani units, and Massoud and the government in exile have fled to Tajikistan. Now the game has become one of Occupation and Resistance.

     To a friend’s post bidding good riddance to Massoud on the basis of his father’s personal moral failings as a CIA allied warlord implicated in sex trafficking, slave labor, and the heroin trade, I replied; No one anticipated Pakistani drone bombardment and direct support with airlifted special forces units, nor do I wish to fight Pakistan as they helped us win the independence of Kashmir from the 1990-1993 invasion and brigandage by India, an independence which lasted until 2019, and allied with me personally in circumstances of horror and desperation; I have met among the enemy a number of those I originally met as allies in Kashmir thirty years ago and other places since, including Pakistan Intelligence Services operatives now advising Taliban commanders they have cultivated and worked with as key assets since the mujahideen period of the Soviet invasion, and their descendants. I spent an evening at a campfire dining with some of them and am not mistaken; they certainly knew me.

      Of course you are right that local constructions of values including ideas of gender equality and freedom do not align or share much common ground with ours, and opium is the currency here; America’s soldiers were de facto enforcers of our client warlords control of the heroin market and guards of the opium fields. I do not mean to suggest that there are good and bad sides to heckle or cheer on; we are all bad guys here.

      Why am I here? Maybe I just like lost causes, to quote a despicable villain and monstrous perpetrator of sexual and racist terror from Gone With The Wind, a character who nonetheless had some great lines. This world we humans have built for ourselves shapes us to the service of power and its authoritarian systems and structures of inequality and elite hegemonies of weaIth, power, and privilege, offers few innocents to champion, and as George Bernard Shaw suggests in Pygmalion with the magnificent character of Eliza’s father; the requirement of virtue to merit help, whether it be charity or solidarity of action, is a false dichotomy which serves to perpetuate unequal power and maintain hegemonic elites.

      I have found but one general principle as a guide to disambiguate when we must resist by any means necessary and when we must forebear the social use of force, and it is not in defense of the innocent as this places a moral burden of judgement on victims of unjust authority, and often there are no innocent.

      No, my test for the use of force is simply this; who holds the power?

      When is it good to be bad?

     In Nietzsche’s formulation, how do we hunt monsters without becoming monsters ourselves?

     To these questions I give a hunter’s reply; I am not a good man, who forebears to challenge unjust authority, nor do other people’s ideas of virtue interest me if they take away our power to resist evil. I am far more useful to you than that, if you are among those who engage in struggle against unequal power, theocracy and imperial dominion, tyranny, state terror, carceral states of force and control, fascism of all kinds, violations of our universal human rights and of our ideals as a free society of equals which include a secular state, liberty, equality, truth, and justice.

      I am a bad man who is on your side.

      For myself, the only thing you need to merit help is to need help, and the test of the use of force and violence is a simple question; who holds power? I am a revolutionary for whom the seizure of power is about autonomy and the restoration of balance. I am on the side of those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth where ever they may be, and I place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.

     I celebrate the victory of the people of Afghanistan over the American Empire even if that takes the form of the Taliban for now, and have argued for our recognition of them as a legitimate independence movement and the government of Afghanistan. But I cannot support the genocidal conquest and assimilation of one ethnic group by another, nor the violation of the sovereignty and independence of any state claimed by another. There is but one legitimacy which any state may claim; the will of its people.

     No one may with justice or natural right speak or act in another’s name without their consent; thus Rousseau teaches us, and it is this principle of Natural Law which founded America in the Declaration of Independence.

     How shall we answer those who would enslave us?

     This we must ever resist, beyond hope of victory or even survival. And in resistance and refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free, for nothing can take from us our refusal of consent to be governed, mastered, and enslaved.

      Let us run amok and be ungovernable; let us bring the Chaos, and be free.

Panjshir: Resistance fighters vow to defend Afghanistan’s final anti-Taliban holdout | AFP

August 16 2024 Anniversary of the Fall of Kabul and Afghanistan

August 16 2024 Anniversary of the Fall of Kabul and Afghanistan

September 6 2024 Remembering Afghanistan and the Last Stand At Panjshir

September 6 2024 Remembering Afghanistan and the Last Stand At Panjshir

The Afghan Resistance I ARTE.tv Documentary

What was the Taliban’s method for capturing Panjshir valley? A timeline story

In The Name of My Father, Ahmad Massoud

https://www.republicbookpublishers.com/product/in-the-name-of-my-father/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0BMAABHX-2uRoYDB0M0PFnpTU_Eq_HH9upfk7OaHzVUOf6CQt-QSsvVv2rgiZrmw_aem_mSe_yHf-JK2KivUEzIQgxw&utm_medium=paid&utm_source=fb&utm_id=120211569056390186&utm_content=120211569056410186&utm_term=120211569056400186&utm_campaign=120211569056390186&sfnsn=mo

Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud, Sandy Gall, Rory Stewart

 (Foreword)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57332128-afghan-napoleon?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=QKjnrrV0aA&rank=14

Afghanistan: Inside the Taliban’s Emirate • FRANCE 24 English

Life in the Taliban’s Afghanistan

The Fall of Kandahar

Taliban Country PBS

Why Panjshir Is Falling to the Taliban

https://www.news18.com/news/opinion/resistance-is-futile-why-panjshir-falling-to-the-taliban-is-inevitable-4172375.html?fbclid=IwAR18mwdQVvN_1odwzv9_Jb5vrUJyv-Ce1Nas4mzi6pzmfgYRgQKAcuXgl3U

Has Panjshir Fallen to Taliban? Ahmed Massoud Denies Reports Of Heavy Clashes And Taliban Victory

 Fall of Panjshir: Drowning of the last hope of the Afghans                  

Fall of Panjshir: Drowning of the last hope of the Afghans.

The Fall of Panjshir September 8 2021

https://countercurrents.org/2021/09/the-fall-of-panjshir/

A Journey Along Pakistan’s Historic Khyber Pass (2000)

Peshawar Smugglers’ Market

     Counting the Costs: A Reading List for Understanding Afghanistan and America’s Longest War

      Afghan Voices: History and Literature By Afghan Authors:

The Essential Rumi, Rumi: the Big Red Book, Coleman Barks translator

Games Without Rules: history of the Afghans, Destiny Disrupted: a history of the world through Islamic eyes, Tamim Ansary

The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini

A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, The Patience Stone, Earth and Ashes, A Curse on Dostoevsky, Atiq Rahim

A Woman Among Warlords, Malalai Joya

The Storyteller’s Daughter: One Woman’s Return to Her Lost Homeland, Saira Shah

Kara Kush, The Sufis, The Way of the Sufi, Tales of the Dervishes: Teaching Stories of the Sufi Masters Over the Past Thousand Years, Caravan of Dreams, The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin, The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin, Idries Shah

     General Histories of the American- Afghanistan Wars:

The American War in Afghanistan: A History, Carter Malkasian

Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Michael Griffin

In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan, Seth G. Jones

The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014, Carlotta Gall

Swimming With Warlords: A Dozen-Year Journey Across the Afghan War, Kevin Sites

       A History of America’s War in Afghanistan by People Who Fought It:

Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan, Doug Stanton

Not A Good Day To Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda, Sean Naylor

Outlaw Platoon: Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan, Sean Parnell & John R. Bruning

Lions of Kandahar: The Story of a Fight Against All Odds, Rusty Bradley & Kevin Maurer

The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, Jake Tapper

Roberts Ridge: A Story of Courage and Sacrifice on Takur Ghar Mountain, Afghanistan, Malcolm MacPherson

The Chosen Few: A Company of Paratroopers and Its Heroic Struggle to Survive in the Mountains of Afghanistan, Gregg Zoroy

The Hooligans of Kandahar: Not All War Stories are Heroic, Joseph J. Kassabian

American Spartan: The Promise, the Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant, Ann Scott Tyson

     And in fiction, there is nothing like William T. Vollman’s Surreal novel of his fight as a volunteer with the mujahideen against the Soviet invasion, You Bright and Risen Angels, referential to the triumvirate of Great Books written about the Second World War, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and John Hawkes’ The Cannibal.

                    My Kit For Hope:

The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91950.The_Myth_of_Sisyphus?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=6ISWbpEs5r&rank=2

The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2165.The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=iTaMbSyDEH&rank=1

The Trial of Socrates, by I.F. Stone

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51330.The_Trial_of_Socrates?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=QivgRzbt57&rank=2

Invictus, by William Ernest Henley

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9465133-invictus?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=JE5kLoFGEX&rank=2

Dari

            همانطور که در پست خود از سپتامبر 8 2021 نوشتم, با شیرها از Panjshir: نوت بوک مقاومت; من شما را از یک محل تاریکی بزرگ و زیبایی استقبال, فراتر از تمام محدودیت های انسان و مرزهای ممنوع, در میان ناشناخته مشخص شده در اینجا اژدها بر روی نقشه های ما از انسان, معنی, و ارزش.          

            در اینجا حقایق باستانی آزمایش می شوند، و حقایق جدید با امکانات بی حد و حصر تبدیل شدن به انسان است. از این حقایق من به شما به عنوان شاهد تاریخ صحبت می کنند; از چیزهای شگفت انگیز، چیزهای وحشتناک.

                 جایی است که در آن عیب های بشریت ما در شکسته شدن جهان منعکس شده است، اما جایی که در آن قهرمان واقعی امکان پذیر است و زخم های مقدسی که ما تحمل می کنیم می تواند ما را به درد دیگران باز کند، جایی که قدرت رستگاری عشق حقیقت خود و استقلال ما را به عنوان برادران حافظ ما آشکار می کند. آیا این زیبایی نوع بشر نیست؟

       طالبان دفاتر دولتی و دیگر بخش های پایتخت را هم با ارزش نمادین و هم با ارزش تاکتیکی اشغال کرده اند، اما این همان کنترول زمانی نیست که ان آر اف مسلح باقی بماند و بتواند به خواست خود در سراسر این ولایت حمله کند.         

       هم دولت افغانستان در تبعید و هم خود مسود همچنان امن و سرپیچی می کنند و جنگجویان خود ان آر اف مانند شیرهایی هستند که عرصه ای پر از شکار دارند؛ هیچ چیز آنها را نمی ترسد، حتی بمباران هوایی، و هر چند آنها را می توان کشته آنها را نمی توان شکست داد.   

      با آمدن طالبان به خانه شان، مدافعان پانجشیر حسن نیت را پس خواهند داد و به خانه های شان در کابل خواهند آمد. هیچ برنامه ای از اقیانوس آرام به طور کامل می تواند مقاومت در این سری پیچ و خم بیش از بیست دره و بز کوهی بیش از صخره های قوی که در آن شاید یک چهارم میلیون نفر زندگی می کنند خرد;

     و این یک ساعت رانندگی از کابل است، جایی که سلول های خواب NRF و تیم های انتحاری رولور، و ماموران نفوذ در درون طالبان و دیگر گروه ها، در انتظار لحظه قصاص خود هستند. هیچ درگیری در این شرایط نمی تواند نهایی باشد.

       و نه می توان هر پیروزی در اینجا به عنوان کل توصیف; افغانستان به دلایل زیادی قبرستان امپراتوری ها نامیده می شود که در میان آنها تغییر مکان و وفاداری های متعدد مردمش، نه صرفا یک شطرنجی از تفرقه های قومی سنتی و جنگ سالاران مستقل

      اما همچنین یک محیط عملیاتی که در آن کل فرهنگ نظامی از مبارزان مسلح و آموزش دیده به دنبال هر کس که به بهترین وجه در خدمت منافع خود و به دنبال جنگ به عنوان یک حرفه، تغییر نام جناح های خود و یا پیوستن به دیگران فرصت طلبانه، و بسیاری از سازمان های رقیب به اشتراک گذاری اعضای و یا به یکدیگر نفوذ کرده اند تا به طور کامل آن را تبدیل به غیر ممکن است به گرگ ها از گوسفند بگویید.

           طالبان افغانستان را تصرف کرده اند؛ اما طالبان، هر چند در ریشه های آن پنجاه دانش آموز ملا محمد عمر که آن را در سال 1994 در قندهار تاسیس شده برای بازگرداندن شریعت، امروز تنها با چهار چیز متحد است؛

      اول و مهمتر از همه ایدئولوژی دیوبندی که ایمان اسلامی را به عنوان مبارزه آزادی بخش ضداستعدایی باز می کند، همان طور که در دهلی در مقاومت در برابر امپراتوری بریتانیا توسعه یافته و توسط پاکستان از طریق مسجدها و دانشکده های آن ابزاری شده است؛

    دوم روایت های تاریخی قربانی شدن و بدهی خون یک جنگ طولانی ضد استعماری استقلال که هویت ملی را به وجود آورد، سوم کاریزما شخصی، اقتدار، و خطوط حمایت از رهبران آن و وفاداری مستقیم نیروهای خود،

     و چهارمین نهاد متحد کننده و اقتدار فرماندهی کویتی در پاکستان و شبکه حقانی در واقع سرویس اطلاعاتی. داشتن یک پایگاه امن عملیات در آن سوی مرز باز با پاکستان حامی اش برای موفقیت آن بسیار مهم بوده است، اما طالبان هم یک طرفدار پاکستان و هم یک جنبش استقلال واقعی است.

        این نقاط قوت آن است; ضعف های طالبان بالکانیزاسیون قومی و چندگانگی جناحی آشفته آن است که اعمال کنترل مستقیم نیروهای خود را مشکل ساز می کند. وقتی وضعیت با سه سازمان بزرگ رقیب بنیاد گرایی سنی، طالبان، دولت اسلامی و القاعده آغاز می شود

      ، در یک زندگی تایتانیک و وحشی و یا مبارزه مرگ برای سلطه که مبارزان اغلب اعضای بیش از یک گروه قفل شده است ، و پیچیده می شود با ده ها یا احتمالا صدها جناح ، ادعا می کنند که هر کسی در کنترل است و یا می تواند در اینجا در افغانستان حکومت پوچ است. و در اینجا نهفته است فرصت بزرگ که هرج و مرج به ما ارائه می دهد; تا قدرت ما را از هر قدرتی که ما را تسلیم کند، به دست آورد. 

     من پاسخ دادم که به پست یکی از دوستانش که بر اساس شکست های اخلاقی شخصی پدرش به عنوان یک جنگ سالار همدست سیا که در قاچاق جنسی، کار برده و تجارت هروئین دست داشته است، رهایی خوبی به ماساژور داده است

   هیچ کس پیش بینی بمباران هواپیماهای بدون سرنشین پاکستانی و حمایت مستقیم با واحدهای نیروهای ویژه هوایی؛ من در میان دشمن با تعدادی از کسانی که در اصل سی سال پیش به عنوان متحد در کشمیر ملاقات کردم و جاهای دیگر از آن زمان ملاقات کرده ام، از جمله عوامل سرویس های اطلاعاتی پاکستان اکنون به فرماندهان طالبان توصیه می کنند که آنها به عنوان دارایی های کلیدی از زمان حمله به شوروی، و نوادگان آنها کشت کرده اند.

  من یک شب را در یک آتش سوزی صرف غذاخوری با برخی از آنها و اشتباه نیست; آنها قطعا من را می شناختند.

      البته شما درست است که ساخت و ساز محلی از ارزش ها از جمله ایده های عدالت جنسیتی و آزادی را هم تراز نیست و یا به اشتراک گذاری زمینه های مشترک زیادی با ما، و مواد مخدر ارز در اینجا است؛ من به این معنی نیست که نشان می دهد که طرف خوب و بد به heckle یا تشویق در وجود دارد. ما همه آدم بدها اينجا هستيم

چرا من اينجا هستم؟ شاید من فقط می خواهم علل از دست رفته، به نقل از یک شرور نفرت انگیز و عامل هیولا از ترور جنسی و نژادپرستانه از رفته با باد، یک شخصیت که با این وجود به حال برخی از خطوط بزرگ است.

این دنیایی که ما انسان ها برای خودمان ساخته ایم، ما را به خدمت قدرت و سیستم ها و ساختارهای استبدادی نابرابری و هژمونی های نخبه ای از وزن، قدرت و امتیاز شکل می دهد، بی گناهان کمی را به قهرمان شدن ارائه می دهد،

و همانطور که جورج برنارد شاو در پیگمالیون با شخصیت باشکوه پدر الیزا پیشنهاد می کند، نیاز به فضیلت برای کمک شایستگی، چه خیریه باشد و چه همبستگی عمل، یک دوگانگی کاذب است که در خدمت دائمی کردن قدرت نابرابر و حفظ نخبگان هژمونی است.

      من یک اصل کلی را به عنوان راهنمای ابهامات در زمانی که ما باید به هر وسیله ای که لازم است مقاومت کنیم و زمانی که ما باید استفاده اجتماعی از زور را تحمل کنیم، پیدا کرده اند و آن را در دفاع از بی گناهان نیست چرا که این مکان بار اخلاقی قضاوت بر قربانیان اقتدار ناعادلانه است، و اغلب بی گناه وجود ندارد.

             نه, آزمون من برای استفاده از زور است که به سادگی این; چه کسی قدرت را در دست دارد؟

      کي خوب است که بد باشي؟

     در فرمول نیچه، چگونه می توانیم هیولاها را شکار کنیم بدون اینکه خودمان هیولا باشیم؟

          به این سوالات من پاسخ شکارچی را; من مرد خوبی نیستم، که برای به چالش کشیدن اقتدار ناعادلانه پیشی می گیرم، و نه ایده های مردم دیگر که فضیلت دارند، اگر قدرت ما را برای مقاومت در برابر شر از بین ببرند، به من علاقه مند است. من برای شما بسیار مفید تر از آن هستم،    

       ، اگر شما در میان کسانی که در مبارزه با قدرت نابرابر درگیر هستند، نقض حقوق بشر جهانی ما و آرمان های ما به عنوان یک جامعه آزاد برابر که شامل یک دولت سکولار، آزادی، برابری، حقیقت، و عدالت، مذهبی و سلطه امپراطوری، زورگویی، ترور دولتی، دولت های کارسرال زور و کنترل، و فاشیستی از همه نوع است.

             من مرد بدی هستم که طرف تو هستم

      برای خودم، تنها چیزی که شما نیاز به کمک شایستگی این است که نیاز به کمک، و آزمون استفاده از زور و خشونت یک سوال ساده است؛ چه کسی قدرت را در دست دارد؟ 

          من انقلابی هستم که به دست گرفتن قدرت برای او درباره خودمختاری و بازگرداندن تعادل است. من در کنار کسانی هستم که فرانتز فانون آنها را هر جا که باشد، بدچاره زمین می نامید، و من زندگی ام را در تعادل با کسانی که از ناتوانان و ناتوانان، خاموشان و پاک شدگان هستند، قرار می دهدم.

                من پیروزی مردم افغانستان را بر امپراطوری امریکا جشن می گیرم حتی اگر این امر در حال حاضر شکل طالبان را بگیرد، و برای به رسمیت شناختن آنها به عنوان یک جنبش استقلال طلبانه مشروع و دولت افغانستان استدلال کرده ام. 

         اما من نمی توانم از فتح نسل کشی و تحریک یک گروه قومی توسط گروه دیگر حمایت کنم و نه نقض حاکمیت و استقلال هیچ دولتی که مورد ادعای دیگری باشد. اما یک مشروعیت است که هر دولت ممکن است ادعا وجود دارد; از مردم آن خواهد شد.    

             هیچ کس ممکن است با عدالت و یا حق طبیعی صحبت می کنند و یا عمل به نام دیگری بدون رضایت آنها; بنابراین روسو به ما می آموزد، و این اصل قانون طبیعی است که آمریکا را در اعلامیه استقلال تاسیس کرد.

     چگونه باید به کسانی که ما را به برنده می کنند پاسخ داد؟

                 این ما همیشه باید مقاومت کنیم، فراتر از امید به پیروزی یا حتی بقا. و در مقاومت و امتناع از تسلیم شدن به اقتدار ما فتح نشده و آزاد می شوند، برای هیچ چیز نمی تواند از ما امتناع ما را از رضایت به حکومت، استاد، و به بر بردگی.

      اجازه دهید ما را اجرا amok و غیر قابل اداره می شود; اجازه دهید ما را هرج و مرج، و آزاد باشد.

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September 6 2024 Remembering Afghanistan and the Last Stand At Panjshir

      Our memories and histories inhabit us like ghosts, ephemeral but casting long shadows in which we live, and a ground of struggle as identity and mimesis. For our memories are never identical with their original, even in the most transparent and authentic witness of history, but structures of reproduction shaped by myriads of others, and how we have interpreted them over time as beings of change and impermanence.

    Baudrillard’s simulacra, Sartre’s nausea of inauthentic being, Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, phantasms, falsifications. How do we enter the imaginal worlds of our own self and past, when all becomes a Rashomon Gate Event of transformation, relative truths, shifting and ambiguous meanings? How shall we practice the arts of remembering and the pursuit of truth when all that we are is subject to the Observer Effect and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and what does this mean for our ars poetica?

    Schrödinger’s Cat is laughing at me.

    So also for my thoughts now during this the week of the Fall of Panjshir, last battle of the recapture of Afghanistan by the Taliban, though we who answered the call of the great warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud’s son for help from the international community in defense of Liberty and the sovereignty and independence of all human souls are fighting still, in the bastion of the Taliban’s power in Kabul as well as in Panjshir and elsewhere.

     For three years later the meaning of these events has changed for me, and its lessons for the future of liberation struggle in Afghanistan against the theocracy of the Taliban which instrumentalized and co-opted the liberation struggle of the Afghan peoples from American imperial dominion and colonial exploitation, have become more clear.

      As my stated purpose herein is to memorialize a glorious and tragic failure to redeem our future from the shadows of our past, and a chain of events begun with mistakes in America’s 1979-1989 proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the 1989-1992 Afghan Civil War which directly led to the resurgence of religious wars waged by al Qaeda and ISIS against democracy including 9-11 and the capture of Afghanistan by a theocracy as well as horrific wars in Syria and Yemen, I offer here my writing from the time as I traveled through the Khyber Pass to Panjshir during the Kabul Airlift.

    Of our future I say this; Afghanistan under the Taliban is a mirror in which we may see our common fate, if we cannot unite in solidarity to seize democracy from the jaws of theocratic tyranny.

    To this pathology of disconnectedness and the terror of our nothingness, to division, abjection, learned helplessness, and despair in the face of overwhelming force, I make reply with Buffy the Vampire Slayer quoting the instructions to priests in the Book of Common Prayer in episode eleven of season seven, Showtime, after luring an enemy into an arena to defeat as a demonstration to her recruits; “I don’t know what’s coming next. But I do know it’s gonna be just like this – hard, painful. But in the end, it’s gonna be us. If we all do our parts, believe it, we’ll be the one’s left standing. Here endeth the lesson.”

     As I wrote in my post of August 24 2021, Why Am I showing the film Inglorious Basterds in a Cave in Afghanistan?; Chaos beckons me with its siren call, like unto like, and as with Ulysses I cannot resist the call of the Unknown to discover what lies beyond our boundaries of the Forbidden. Here I am conjured into desolate and broken canyonlands and endless stars, shattered ruins of an ancient geological cataclysm and the ghosts of empires; a land of tragic beauty.

      Trade is flowing across the Khyber Pass and the open border of Afghanistan and Pakistan regardless of the refugee crisis in Kabul, and I go with it, one insignificant bit of flotsam lost in a tide of opportunity for those who capitalize on chaos or like myself use it as a lever of change in a space of adaptive potential. Like a hunting spider I have left my lair in Peshawar, near the heart of the Taliban high command and the mosque from which its directives are propagated, as the great powers of the world meet in the G7 conference to decide the fate of Afghanistan and Taliban forces prepare to invade the defiant and unconquerable Panjshir province where the son of the legendary warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud has been joined in resistance by a government in exile led by Acting President of Afghanistan Amrullah Saleh.

     I am on horseback touring remote villages as a traveling theatre with a projector, generator, screen, and a number of films, an industry still thriving here as in many places with little outside contact, a way of life brilliantly depicted in The Cinema Travellers by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya, celebrated in the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. I tell people I am a wandering seller of dreams; rather than try to go unnoticed where strangers rarely travel, I set up a show and gather an audience, and no one questions who I am or why I am here.

    When you cannot blend in, stand out; it’s a trick I learned from my partner Dolly’s Uncle Bob through our fathers who grew up together in the shadow of the McKay Carnivals he founded during the Depression to carry out the work of Socialism and the Industrial Workers of the World begun by her grandfather John F. McKay and his comrade Eugene V. Debbs, and from Bluey and his circus in Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall. How do you hide a large number of highly unusual people with special skills and their support, always on the move? As a show. Let the strangers be truly strange, and sell tickets.

     Why am I showing the film Inglorious Basterds in a cave in Afghanistan?

     Inglorious Basterds is a great film of the stunning cruelty of force and power and the triumph of the unconquered human spirit, a dance of terror and beauty like the lives of ordinary people here in a place beyond all human law and throughout so much of our world wherein privation and the needs of survival are paramount, and overwhelming and generalized fear is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us. Also it is a film whose episodic and interlayered narrative structure is confusing to those unfamiliar with its intertexts and references; The Secret of Santa Vittoria, The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare, The Guns of Navarone, Zulu Dawn, The Seven Samurai; but the glorious nature of lost causes and forlorn hopes, of defiance and resistance in the face of certain death, is all too familiar to the audience of my traveling theatre.

     Resistance is always victorious, for in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free.

     Such is my definition of freedom and of victory in liberation struggle, and like Dorothy’s Magic Ruby Slippers it is a power and liberty which cannot be taken from us, and bears the power to take us home to our true selves.

     Its an idea that translates well into Deobandi theological rhetoric, a parallel of Catholic Liberation Theology which originated the Indian revolution against the British Raj and the Taliban’s liberation struggle against American colonialism.

     Homer wrote in episodes too, as do I here in my daily journals and publication Torch of Liberty; Inglorious Basterds is a heroic quest to change the balance of power in the world, of revolutionary struggle by those whom Frantz Fanon called the “Wretched of the Earth”, in this case the historically marginalized and othered Jews, and those who place their lives in the balance with them; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.

      Antifascist action is revolutionary struggle and class war; it engages unequal power in the forms of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and often of Patriarchy as well, which is interdependent with fascism as theocracy, and far more ancient, but central to its project of subjugation to hegemonic elites. The origins of evil are in systemic and structural inequalities, the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and as Wagner teaches us the price of power is renouncement of love. From this pathology of disconnectedness, nihilism, abjection, and dehumanization arises authority and the tyranny of the carceral state; police, prisons, borders, and the force and control of a society organized to dehumanize and falsify us in service to power through hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and authorized identities.

      This we must resist, and in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free. The magnificent Lt Aldo Raine is an antifascist hero whose story models liberation struggle and teaches us how to engage those who would enslave us. It is a story of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but only as cases of a universal condition.

      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 for self- ownership, autonomy, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

Inglorious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night

      This is my theme song for Last Stands, by the magnificent David Bowie, which I only post when I am about to do something from which no return is possible, so far as I can foresee. It is a farewell to those I have loved and a wish for a better future than we have made of our past, we humans. It is also a declaration of no quarter and war to the knife to my enemies, to set the terms of our struggle; enter my arena, and anything goes, for those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none, and there are no rules in my games of resistance to fascism and tyranny.

     My victory conditions do not include personal survival, only acts of resistance, which makes my goal in imposed conditions of struggle against overwhelming force to take the enemy down with me. And to such refusal to submit as absolute commitment tyranny can make no reply; there is no profit in it.

    I have done this now more times than I can number or easily remember; yet here I remain to bear witness to the hollowness and fragile nature of power and authority, Unconquered. Here is proof of the unknowability of our limits, of the redemptive power of love as solidarity in liberation struggle, of our inherently autonomous nature and the unconquerable human will to become, and of my Principles of Revolution that force finds its limit in disobedience and that freedom is won by refusal to submit to force as described by Thoreau and by disbelief in authority as described by Voltaire. Here is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us.  

     As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”

Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night

Here Endeth the Lesson: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season seven, episode eleven

References

The Cinema Travelers by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya, film trailer

Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW

by Peter Cole (Editor), David Struthers (Editor), Kenyon Zimmer (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34447927-wobblies-of-the-world?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=gqCXYvA8aj&rank=1

The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre  (Preface)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66933.The_Wretched_of_the_Earth?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=A1TEFbZS4k&rank=1

Ring of Power: Symbols and Themes Love Vs. Power in Wagner’s Ring Cycle and in Us : A Jungian-Feminist Perspective, Jean Shinoda Bolen

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/451808.Ring_of_Power?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=410fbU916k&rank=14

Walden & Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau, W.S. Merwin  (Introduction)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/116020.Walden_Civil_Disobedience?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=81bNjhy3o7&rank=2

Voltaire’s Revolution: Writings from His Campaign to Free Laws from Religion,

G.K. Noyer  (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23395791-voltaire-s-revolution?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=S0vaBhG88X&rank=32

Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents, by David C. Martin

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/575784.Wilderness_of_Mirrors?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=muVIs14i2W&rank=1

Simulacra and Simulation, by Jean Baudrillard

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22613.Simulacra_and_Simulation?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=P5XVx1Arj9&rank=1

Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, by Michel Foucault

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18631427-discourse-and-truth?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=7AgnsNM6UM&rank=3

Kurosawa’s Rashomon

https://archive.org/details/Rashomon1950_201905

Patient X: The Case-Book of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, by David Peace

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36998790-patient-x?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=4jWBbXYSvc&rank=1

Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies

by Blair Davis (Editor), Robert Anderson (Editor), Jan Walls (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28894216-rashomon-effects?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=3gfiLlyjcE&rank=1

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/the-guardian-view-on-the-g7-afghanistan-talks-desperate-damage-limitation

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/23/afghanistan-what-does-each-nation-hope-to-get-out-of-the-g7-meeting

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/18/panjshir-stands-strong-afghanistans-last-holdout-against-the-taliban

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/panjshir-valley-afghanistans-last-holdout-against-the-taliban/ar-AANDfL9

Dari

۱۵ سنبله ۱۳۰۲ به یاد افغانستان و سقوط شهر پنجشیر

خاطرات و تاریخ ما ما را مانند ارواح ساکن, زودگذر اما ریخته گری سایه های طولانی که در آن زندگی می کنیم, و زمینه مبارزه به عنوان هویت و تقلید. برای خاطرات ما هرگز با اصلی خود یکسان نیست، حتی در شفاف ترین و معتبرترین شاهد تاریخ، بلکه ساختارهای تولید مثل که توسط تعداد بی شمار دیگران شکل گرفته است، و اینکه چگونه ما آنها را در طول زمان به عنوان وجود تغییر و ناهمانی تفسیر کرده ایم.

سیمولاکرای بودریلارد، تهوع سارتر از وجود غیرممکن، بیابان آینه های اترتون؛ دروغ، توهم، هذیان، دروغ، دروغ. چگونه وارد جهان های خیالی خود و گذشته خودمان می شود، وقتی همه به یک رویداد تحول دروازه راشمون، حقایق نسبی، تغییر و معناهای مبهم تبدیل می شوند؟

چگونه می توانیم هنرهای به یاد آوردن و پیگیری حقیقت را تمرین کنیم وقتی که همه آنچه هستیم تابع اثر ناظر و اصل عدم اطمینان هایسنبرگ است و این برای شاعر آرس ما چه معنایی دارد؟

    گربه شرودینگر به من می خندد.

 بنابراین برای افکار من در حال حاضر در طول این هفته از سقوط پانجشیر، آخرین نبرد از بازپس گیری افغانستان توسط طالبان، هر چند ما که پاسخ به فراخوان پسر جنگجو بزرگ احمد شاه مسود برای کمک از جامعه بین المللی در دفاع از آزادی و حاکمیت و استقلال تمام روح انسان هنوز هم مبارزه،  در بند قدرت طالبان در کابل و همچنان در پنجشیر و جاهای دیگر.

 دو سال بعد معنای این رویدادها برای من تغییر کرده است و درس های آن برای آینده مبارزه آزادی بخش در افغانستان علیه حکومت سالاری طالبان که مبارزه آزادی بخش مردم افغانستان را از سلطه امپراطوری آمریکا و استثمار استعماری ابزاری و مشترک می کردند، روشن تر شده است.

 همانطور که هدف اعلام شده من در اینجا این است که یادبود شکست با شکوه و غم انگیز به آینده ما را از سایه های گذشته ما، و زنجیره ای از وقایع با اشتباهات در جنگ پراکسی آمریکا در سال های 1979-1989 علیه اتحاد جماهیر شوروی در افغانستان و 1989-1992 افغان آغاز شده است جنگ داخلی که به طور مستقیم منجر به تجدید حیات جنگ های مذهبی توسط القاعده و داعش علیه دموکراسی از جمله 9-11 و تصرف افغانستان توسط یک حکومت مذهبی شد و همچنین جنگ های وحشتناک در سوریه و یمن،

 من اينجا نوشته خود را از زمان سفر از طريق پاس خيبر به پنجشیر در جريان پرواز کابل پيشنهاد ميکنم.

    از آینده ما من می گویم این; افغانستان در زمان طالبان آینه ای است که در آن ممکن است سرنوشت مشترک خود را ببینیم، اگر نتوانیم در همبستگی متحد شود تا دموکراسی را از فک های طوطی تئوکراتیک به دست آورد.

 به این آسیب شناسی قطع ارتباط و وحشت از پوچی ما، به تقسیم، انتزاع، درماندهی آموخته، و ناامیدی در مقابل نیروی قریب به اتفاق قربانیان، من پاسخ با بافی قتل خون آشام به نقل از دستورالعمل به کشیش ها در کتاب نماز مشترک در قسمت یازدهم فصل هفت، Showtime، پس از luring دشمن را به عرصه شکست به عنوان یک تظاهرات به استخدام خود را؛

 “من نمی دانم چه آینده است. اما من نمی دانم که این درست مثل این خواهد بود – سخت، دردناک. اما در آخر، ما خواهیم بود. اگر همه ما قطعات خود را انجام دهیم، باور کنید، ما کسی خواهیم بود که ایستاده باقی مانده است. در اینجا پایان درس است.”

همانطور که در پست خود در 24 آگست 2021 نوشتم، چرا من فیلم باستردز اینگلوریوس را در غاری در افغانستان نشان می دهم؟؛ هرج و مرج به من اشاره می کند با تماس آژیر آن، مانند آن، و به عنوان با اوریس من می توانم تماس ناشناخته ها برای کشف آنچه

 نهفته است فراتر از مرزهای ما از ممنوع مقاومت در برابر. در اینجا من را به دره های ویرانه و شکسته و ستاره های بی پایان، ویرانه های شکسته از فاجعه زمین شناسی باستانی و ارواح امپراتوری conjured؛ سرزمین زیبایی غم انگیز.

تجارت در سراسر مسیر خبر و مرز باز افغانستان و پاکستان بدون در نظر گرفتن بحران پناهندگان در کابل جریان دارد، و من با آن می رویم، یک بیت ناچیز از فلوتسام در یک جریان فرصت برای کسانی که در هرج و مرج سرمایه گذاری می کنند یا مانند خودم از آن به عنوان اهرم تغییر در فضای پتانسیل سازگار استفاده می کنند، از دست رفته است.

مانند عنکبوت شکاری من در پشاور، نزدیک قلب فرماندهی عالی طالبان و مسجدی که دستورالعمل های آن از آن منتشر می شود، به جا گذاشته ام، زیرا قدرت های بزرگ جهان در کنفرانس گروه 7 برای تصمیم گیری در مورد سرنوشت افغانستان با هم دیدار می کنند

و نیروهای طالبان آماده می شوند تا به ولایت نافرمانی و تسخیر ناپذیری که در آن پسر جنگجوی افسانه ای احمد شاه اسد توسط یک دولت در تبعید به رهبری امرالله صالح سرپرست ریاست جمهوری افغانستان به مقاومت پیوسته است، حمله کنند.

مقاومت همیشه پیروز است، برای امتناع از ارائه ما تبدیل به فتح نشده و آزاد است.

     چنین است تعریف من از آزادی و پیروزی در مبارزه آزادی بخش، و مانند دمپایی روبی سحر و جادو دوروتی آن را یک قدرت و آزادی است که می تواند از ما گرفته نمی شود، و خرس قدرت ما را به خانه به خود واقعی ما است.

      این ایده که ترجمه خوبی به شعارهای الهیاتی Deobandi، موازی از الهیات آزادی کاتولیک که انقلاب هند در برابر راج بریتانیا و مبارزه آزادی بخش طالبان علیه استعمار آمریکا نشات گرفته است.

     اقدام ضد فاشیستی مبارزه انقلابی و جنگ طبقاتی است؛ این درگیر قدرت نابرابر در اشکال فاشیست های خون، ایمان، و روح، و اغلب از مردسالاری نیز، که به هم نزدیک با فاشیستی به عنوان خداپرستی، و به مراتب بیشتر باستانی، اما مرکزی برای پروژه خود را از انحنا به نخبگان هژمونی.

      ریشه های شر در نابرابری های سیستمی و ساختاری، حلقه ترس، قدرت و زور واگنر است و همانطور که واگنر به ما می آموزد قیمت قدرت دست از عشق است.

     . از این آسیب شناسی قطع ارتباط، پوچ گرایی، آبجک شدن و غیرانسانی شدن، اقتدار و استبداد دولت کارسرال را به وجود می آورد؛ پلیس، زندان ها، مرزها و نیرو و کنترل جامعه ای که برای غیر انسانی کردن و ساختگی کردن ما در خدمت به قدرت از طریق سلسله مراتبی از دیگر بودن انحصاری و هویت های مجاز سازماندهی شده است

           این ما باید مقاومت در برابر, و در امتناع از ارائه ما تبدیل به فتح نشده و آزاد.

                  همیشه مبارزه بین ماسک که دیگران را برای ما و کسانی که ما برای خودمان را باقی می ماند وجود دارد; این اولین انقلابی است که همه ما باید در آن بجنگیم، مبارزه برای مالکیت خود، خودمختاری، و امکانات بی حد و حصر انسان شدن.

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September 5 2024 The Question of Patriotism, Loyalty, Honor, Respect For Service, and the Idea of America As A Band of Brothers: Case of The Arlington Incident

       I remember when I first realized that Trump is actually a treasonous and dishonorable foreign agent whose mission is the subversion and fall of democracy in America and not merely an apex predator of systems of oppression which include patriarchal-theocratic sexual terror and white supremacist terror; watching him take the sacred and ancient Oath of Office while Russian bombs fell on the American servicemen he had abandoned to their deaths in Syria.

      The Stolen Election of 2016 and the whole illegitimate and criminal Trump Presidency which ought to be nullified and erased in its acts and appointments was nothing but a sidelining operation to clear America from the board of play for the invasion of Ukraine by his puppetmaster and handler from the end of the Soviet era, when KGB Colonel Putin ran the black market in East Berlin and used Trump to hide the wealth of crime syndicates and oligarchs, and later to move Russian agents globally through Trump’s sex trafficking ring within the Miss Universe beauty pageant and modeling organizations he owned between 1995 and 2015.

       There was never anything more grand to Traitor Trump and his despicable regime than this, the filthy and perverse sexual terror and nihilistic amoral greed of a crime boss in the service of the KGB and Russian syndicates, and he betrayed America every single day of his life as a foreign spy since his first visit to Moscow in 1987.

       Can Trumps despisal and mockery of our veterans, inability to comprehend the value of a life of service to one’s nation, and disrespect for the military come as a surprise from a man without loyalty, and whose word means nothing?

       How can I know with reasonable probability though not beyond doubt that Trump was a KGB asset before the Soviet Union became an oligarchy and crime syndicate in 1991, and Putin’s star agent in America thereafter?

     In the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, my friends and I made mischief throughout Europe, across and behind the Iron Curtain as a specialty. These were the Crows, led by the famous Irish gypsy Bluey, clown and Ringmaster of a circus which provided cover for his true enterprises. He made an art of finding what one wants or needs and offering it as a gift or favor to be redeemed later; a laughing trickster, who built an outlaw empire from winning trust, trading favors and secrets, and making things happen for powerful people, and a Great Game of outwitting these same authorities, destabilizing tyrannies, championing the powerless, and subverting systems and regimes of force and control.

      I learned much from him.

     Bluey once described the Great Game to me like this: “To be Romani is determined by three truths not of our making; First, no one stands with us, so we must stand with each other in everything and trust no outsiders. Second, we will be killed or driven out if discovered, so we must live within identities of disguise. Third, we are powerless and few, so we must live in the margins and in the shadows; its why they call us crows, scavengers. This is how we have survived more than a thousand years, by these three rules.”

     This was my entrée into the world of the Romani, which I might have married into had events unfolded differently, ourselves being trapped on opposite sides of the Wall during a firefight, and the reason my languages include Vlax Romani, the major Romani language and that of its heartland in Transylvania and Eastern Europe, and its origin or relative Vlachs or Aromanian, a Romance language created by the historical migrations and transformations of cultures in the borderlands between the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Venetian Empires, and influenced more by Greek than Slavic as a disambiguating characteristic from modern Romanian, a related language also originating in the Latin of the Roman Empire and its long centuries of disintegration and change. Many Romani whom I knew spoke Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, and Hungarian interchangeably as code switching, and also spoke Hochdeutsch which is the second language of Hungary and the official language of Germany and Austria as Standard German. Of course we could all speak some Russian as well, and I was reasonably fluent having worked with Soviet Special Forces and KGB advisors against Apartheid forces in South Africa and Angola among other places, and among the hundreds of Crows were languages from all over Europe and beyond.

     As he grew up in Ireland and when ten years old went alone to live in the streets of London, Bluey spoke English laden with Cockney rhyming slang, 16th century Thieves Cant, and the hybrid Irish Gaelic-Traveller cryptolanguage Shelta, a complex patois he and his crew, who were from everywhere, used as a secret language.

      So while I cannot claim to have known Trump personally or to possess incriminating proof of his relationship with Putin during the Soviet era, I know the operational environment, the methods of the KGB, and how Putin did business as its kingpin very well indeed.

       Enough to call him Traitor Trump, and apply to him the dictum that everything the enemy says is a lie.

      The very first time I heard of Trump during the 2016 election campaign was in the context of remarks he had made about veterans. At the time I said to my partner Theresa; “Disrespects veterans? That’s it; that’s all I need to know about a man. I’m voting for Hillary.”

      My hope now is that all of us, and most especially every serving or former member of the US Armed Forces and their families, will say the same and vote for Harris and Walz.

      As written by Kevin Carroll in The Guardian, in an article entitled The Trump campaign’s conduct at Arlington is shocking but not surprising; “The tranquil majesty of Arlington national cemetery tends to bring forth civic virtues in Americans and eloquence in their leaders. Speaking there in 1985 above the graves of the fallen, Ronald Reagan observed that while we may imagine the deceased as old men, most “were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives – the one they were living and the one they would have lived … they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers … They gave up everything for our country, for us. And all we can do is remember.”

     Nowhere in that vast cemetery is Reagan’s point driven home as poignantly as in section 60, which embraces those men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice at painfully young ages since 9/11. Here the dates on the simple headstones are within memory, the grief of loved ones is raw and visitors may witness acts of tenderness in response.

     Good manners, Jane Austen observed, hold a society together. George Washington copied longhand in boyhood and preserved into adulthood a list of 110 “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior”. Another general turned president, Dwight Eisenhower, cautioned in his Guildhall address after VE Day that “humility must always be the portion” of any man who receives acclaim earned by others’ sacrifices.

     Donald Trump and his staff knew – and were reminded of – federal regulations specifically prohibiting the misconduct their campaign engaged in at Arlington’s section 60 this week. But the law aside, only a gross lack of manners, decency and humility could incline a person to film a fundraising appeal over the resting places of dead men and women who cannot decline to participate in the coarse spectacle. The photo of a grinning Trump giving a jaunty thumbs-up over these patriots’ graves is an indelible image of narcissism risen to the point of sociopathy.

     Worse is the allegation that two Trump staff members assaulted a small, middle-aged female Department of the Army employee who attempted to enforce the regulation and preserve the cemetery’s dignity. The victim reportedly refrained from filing charges due to a reasonable fear of violence or harassment from Trump’s supporters. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign defamed this woman as mentally ill. His running mate, JD Vance, said Kamala Harris could “go to hell” for her campaign’s suggestion that the unauthorized footage was intended for use as political footage – just before Trump used it for exactly that.

     This ugly incident would have derailed the candidacy of any presidential nominee before Trump’s crude emergence on the American political scene in 2016. In 2024 it is already, probably intentionally on Trump’s part, being replaced in the news by reaction to his social media posts making lewd innuendos about Harris, and QAnon threats to imprison Democratic party leaders. But it is part of a pattern of disrespect for and misuse of the United States military that bears upon Trump’s fitness to serve again as president.

     Trump infamously described America’s dead from the first world war as “suckers” and “losers”. Trump also asked my former boss, White House chief of staff John Kelly – on Memorial Day and over the section 60 grave of his Marine son killed in Afghanistan – “What was in it for them?” I walked up to a visibly shocked Kelly moments after that exchange, the details of which he later confirmed.

     Trump demanded military equipment parades in Washington of the kind Soviet leaders held on May Day in Moscow’s Red Square, but disdained appearing with wounded service members. He called America’s service chiefs “dopes and babies” and needled them about their public sector pay – God only knows what he thinks of enlisted troops who make a fraction of a general’s salary.

     Trump began his run for the presidency in 2016 by mocking the late senator John McCain for being a prisoner of war; he followed this by feuding with the bereaved parents of Muslim American and African American soldiers; recently, he belittled Medal of Honor recipients shot during the brave actions that led to their awards.

     More serious than Trump’s words are his actions and plans regarding the armed forces. In 2018 Trump discussed having troops shoot civilian migrants, including women and children, as they tried to cross America’s south-west border – a patently illegal order. In 2020 he unlawfully used national guardsmen to clear protesters from Lafayette Park for yet another campaign photo opportunity. In 2021 Trump and his advisors planned to invoke the Insurrection Act to misuse the military to put down protests anticipated if Mike Pence and Congress refused to certify Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. Trump’s Project 2025 envisions using the national guard for internal immigration investigations, a vast and ill-advised expansion of the American military’s limited role in domestic law enforcement.

     Trump sees the armed services as yet another entity to be misused for his personal benefit, damaged and then discarded just as he has with his bankrupt businesses, the evangelical Christian churches and the Republican party. Beyond that, his boorish statements and bad behavior regarding the military almost certainly come from a place of self-loathing. Trump dodged the Vietnam war draft by claiming – probably falsely – to suffer from bone spurs. A gnawingly insecure man, Trump is self-conscious of his lack of the virtues towards which the military strives: as the US army puts it, loyalty to the constitution, dutiful fulfillment of responsibilities, respect for others, selfless service to both the country and subordinates, honor, integrity and personal courage.

     His poor form at Arlington this week therefore shocks but does not surprise, as the idea of serving others, much less giving one’s life for others, is anathema to Trump. This attitude would be a sad commentary about any man, but ought to disqualify someone seeking to serve as commander-in-chief.”

      Like everything else Trump does in this election, it seems to have backfired on him. And it is absolutely emblematic of his narcissism and inability to understand why anyone would lay down their life for their countrymen. In Trump’s world, it’s every man for himself, and devil take the hindmost. I propose for your consideration that this is not an admirable summum bonum in a national leader or a man of any kind, for it is not only a mask of cowardice bearing the image of amoral greed, but a disloyalty and treason which breaks the bonds of brotherhood from which any nation is made.

     As written by Robert Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled Democrats seize on Trump cemetery photo op ‘disgrace’ as election issue: Politicians and veterans say episode was on par with ex-president’s history of disrespecting service in armed forces; “Democrats are trying to turn Donald Trump’s clash with staff at Arlington National Cemetery, the hallowed final resting place of America’s war dead, into a broader election issue by highlighting it as an example of his history of disrespecting military veterans.

     Congressional Democrats with military records and liberal-leaning veterans groups say the episode is consistent with past instances of the Republican presidential nominee flagrantly denigrating service in the armed forces.

     They also see it as an opportunity to turn the tables on Republican efforts to undermine the record of Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, who has come under fire for a series of supposedly misleading statements about aspects of his 24 years of military service in the national guard.

     The US army rebuked Trump’s campaign this week after members of the former president’s entourage “abruptly pushed aside” a female cemetery staff member who was trying to prevent them taking pictures of Trump at a wreath-laying ceremony at the grave of a soldier who was killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

     The cemetery worker was acting in line with the facility’s rules, which prohibits pictures or film being shot in section 60, the burial area for personnel killed serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

     Pictures later appeared of Trump posing alongside members of the soldier’s family smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign – a gesture denounced by some as inappropriate and crass.

     Trump’s campaign also posted video footage on TikTok with the former president claiming – falsely – that “we didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then [the Biden administration] took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.” In fact, 11 US soldiers were killed in Trump’s last year in Afghanistan.

     Trump was invited to Arlington by several of the families of those killed to mark the third anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal – the botched handling of which stands as one of the most damaging episodes of Joe Biden’s presidency.

     Now Democrats are accusing him of exploiting a revered site for narrow campaign purposes, in breach of the cemetery’s regulations. The former president did not attend the previous two anniversaries marking the withdrawal.

     “Arlington National Cemetery isn’t a place for campaign photo-ops. It’s a sacred resting place for American patriots,” Mikie Sherrill, a Democratic House member from New Jersey and former navy helicopter pilot, posted on X. “But for Donald Trump, disrespecting military veterans is just par for the course. It’s an absolute disgrace.”

     Gerry Connolly, a congressman from Virginia, demanded the release of footage and paperwork from the incident. He said it was “sad but all too expected that Donald Trump would desecrate this hallowed ground and put campaign politics ahead of honouring our heroes”.

     Jared Golden, a Democratic Congress member from Maine and an ex-marine, called Arlington “sacred ground and all visitors should take the time to learn the rules of decorum that ensure the proper respect is given to the fallen and their families”.

     Although surveys have shown that roughly six in 10 retired service members voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election, some left-leaning veterans groups have added their voice to the criticism.

     Jon Stoltz, a former army officer and co-founder of VoteVets, a veterans group that is supporting Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, accused Trump of using the cemetery “for a political ceremony” and predicted that it could turn previously sympathetic ex-servicemen against him.

     “They don’t have a right to do that with other veterans who are there,” Stoltz told the Associated Press. “I know there’s veterans who support Trump. He’s just motivated people against him.”

     In a statement, Allison Jaslow, chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, added to the condemnation, saying: “There are plenty of places appropriate for politics – Arlington is not one of them. Any aspiring elected official, especially one who hopes to be Commander in Chief, should not be confused about that fact.”

     The cemetery’s rules state: “Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honoured dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.”

     Trump’s attitude to military service has come under scrutiny because of a track record of dismissive statements, both public and private. This month, he appeared to disparage the Congressional Medal of Honor – saying it was inferior to the medal of freedom, which he bestowed as president – because most of its recipients had “been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead”.

     According to his former White House chief of staff John Kelly, he refused to visit a first world war cemetery during a 2018 visit to France, calling the American servicemen buried there “suckers” and “losers” for getting killed.

     He also ridiculed the late Republican senator John McCain, saying he was only considered a war hero because he had been captured. According to separate reports, Trump voiced objections to having disabled veterans at a military ceremony which ultimately never occurred, saying “it doesn’t look good for me”.

     As I wrote in my post of September 5 2020 All the Kings Horses and All the Kings Men: Trump’s Base Begins to Shatter As His Contempt For Our Military Is Revealed

     It seems Trump may have finally violated a taboo our society still cares about; his base begins to shatter as his contempt for our military is revealed.

     As reported by Time; ‘Trump’s Support Among Military Voters Is Tanking.

At this point four years ago, then-candidate Donald Trump held a massive lead of 20 points over Hillary Clinton among military voters. This time around, he’s struggling to keep up. A new Military Times poll revealed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads Trump by about four percentage points among active-duty troops.

     And that was before today’s bombshell report published in the Atlantic. The article outlines a number of instances when President Donald Trump derided U.S. service members, even describing the country’s war dead as “losers” and “suckers.”

     Trump and several top aides have rushed to deny the allegations. Trump told reporters late Thursday that he “would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes. There is nobody that respects them more.”

     That hasn’t dampened a backlash on social media among military veterans. Retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, a frequent Trump critic, urged Twitter followers to vote against the president, posting a widely shared video in which he relayed a story about how his father was shot down over Vietnam. “I am stunned that anybody in the United States military would consider you anything but a loser or a sucker,” Eaton said. “You’re no patriot.”

     Other veterans posted similar statements in response to the article, which described how Trump cancelled a scheduled visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 because he didn’t see a reason why he should honor people who managed to get themselves killed, nor did he want to get rained upon in front of TV cameras. “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” the report quoted Trump as saying.

     Biden, whose late son, Beau Biden, served in Iraq, issued a statement after the Atlantic article was published Thursday that said the comments were yet another sign Trump is unfit for the presidency. If the quotes are true, he said, it’s “another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the president of the United States.”

     The anonymous allegations in the Atlantic article would hardly be the first time the president, who received five military deferments for bone spurs in his heels that kept him out of the Vietnam War, has disparaged the records of military members. As a candidate in 2015, the president said he was no supporter of Sen John McCain, who was held captive in Vietnam for nearly six years after his airplane was shot down over Hanoi. “He was a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people who weren’t captured.”

     Trump’s interactions with military families have also come under scrutiny, particularly the question of how he has expressed sympathy for those who have lost loved ones in the line of duty. Individual parents and partners have come forward to say whether or not the President contacted them directly.

     Eleven Gold Star families, those who lost loved ones serving the country’s military, wrote a joint letter in 2016 to the then-Republican presidential nominee, accusing him of “cheapening the sacrifice” of their deceased relatives in the way he responded to the parents of Captain Humayun S.M. Khan, who died in Iraq in 2004. Trump criticized his father and mother after they spoke out against him at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

     In total, there are 1.4 million active duty service members, or less than one half of one percent of the U.S. population. But as a barometer of Trump’s base, and an indicator of his ability to drive turnout to counter mobilized Democrats across the country, Trump’s tanking numbers with the military are a bad sign for his campaign.”

      As written by Jeffrey Goldburg in The Atlantic, in an article entitled Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’. The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic; “When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

     Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

     Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.

     Trump’s understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and sacrifice has interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president. “I like people who weren’t captured.”

     There was no precedent in American politics for the expression of this sort of contempt, but the performatively patriotic Trump did no damage to his candidacy by attacking McCain in this manner. Nor did he set his campaign back by attacking the parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

     Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination. When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides. Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral. (These sources, and others quoted in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. The White House did not return earlier calls for comment, but Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, emailed me this statement shortly after this story was posted: “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard. He’s demonstrated his commitment to them at every turn: delivering on his promise to give our troops a much needed pay raise, increasing military spending, signing critical veterans reforms, and supporting military spouses. This has no basis in fact.”)

     Trump’s understanding of heroism has not evolved since he became president. According to sources with knowledge of the president’s views, he seems to genuinely not understand why Americans treat former prisoners of war with respect. Nor does he understand why pilots who are shot down in combat are honored by the military. On at least two occasions since becoming president, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his views, Trump referred to former President George H. W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II. (Bush escaped capture, but eight other men shot down during the same mission were caught, tortured, and executed by Japanese soldiers.)

     When lashing out at critics, Trump often reaches for illogical and corrosive insults, and members of the Bush family have publicly opposed him. But his cynicism about service and heroism extends even to the World War I dead buried outside Paris—people who were killed more than a quarter century before he was born. Trump finds the notion of military service difficult to understand, and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible. (The president did not serve in the military; he received a medical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War because of the alleged presence of bone spurs in his feet. In the 1990s, Trump said his efforts to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases constituted his “personal Vietnam.”)

     On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, and who would, a short time later, be named the White House chief of staff. The two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.

     “He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told me. “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.” Kelly’s friend went on to say, “Trump can’t imagine anyone else’s pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a fallen marine on Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.”

     I’ve asked numerous general officers over the past year for their analysis of Trump’s seeming contempt for military service. They offer a number of explanations. Some of his cynicism is rooted in frustration, they say. Trump, unlike previous presidents, tends to believe that the military, like other departments of the federal government, is beholden only to him, and not the Constitution. Many senior officers have expressed worry about Trump’s understanding of the rules governing the use of the armed forces. This issue came to a head in early June, during demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in response to police killings of Black people. James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former secretary of defense, lambasted Trump at the time for ordering law-enforcement officers to forcibly clear protesters from Lafayette Square, and for using soldiers as props: “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” Mattis wrote. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

     Another explanation is more quotidian, and aligns with a broader understanding of Trump’s material-focused worldview. The president believes that nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.” (According to eyewitnesses, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, Trump turned to aides and said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?”)

     Yet another, related, explanation concerns what appears to be Trump’s pathological fear of appearing to look like a “sucker” himself. His capacious definition of sucker includes those who lose their lives in service to their country, as well as those who are taken prisoner, or are wounded in battle. “He has a lot of fear,” one officer with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s views said. “He doesn’t see the heroism in fighting.” Several observers told me that Trump is deeply anxious about dying or being disfigured, and this worry manifests itself as disgust for those who have suffered. Trump recently claimed that he has received the bodies of slain service members “many, many” times, but in fact he has traveled to Dover Air Force Base, the transfer point for the remains of fallen service members, only four times since becoming president. In another incident, Trump falsely claimed that he had called “virtually all” of the families of service members who had died during his term, then began rush-shipping condolence letters when families said the president was not telling the truth.

     Trump has been, for the duration of his presidency, fixated on staging military parades, but only of a certain sort. In a 2018 White House planning meeting for such an event, Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.”

Zero respect’: Trump’s Arlington visit puts his attitude about the military back in the spotlight/ MSN

Donald Trump can’t comprehend what it means to sacrifice. He’s un-American.

Serving the nation is the epitome of American honor.

Film by The Lincoln Project

‘What the hell is wrong with these people?’: Velshi slams Trump’s Arlington video scandal/ MSN

https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/-what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-these-people-velshi-slams-trump-s-arlington-video-scandal-218288709867?fbclid=IwY2xjawFEbbdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHeNpsTgAF_HSFF_lL197PltBU-mXHCfd5phlcthXj0bAKyYh6MfKELDxrg_aem_ig2Q9d4VFMglA33sipWsiQ

Arlington official feared ‘retaliation’ after altercation with Trump campaign

Donald Trump’s Dishonorable Campaign Stunt

The Trump campaign’s conduct at Arlington is shocking but not surprising

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/30/trump-campaign-behavior-military-arlington-virginia

Democrats seize on Trump cemetery photo op ‘disgrace’ as election issue:

Politicians and veterans say episode was on par with ex-president’s history of disrespecting service in armed forces

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/30/trump-veterans-groups-arlington-democrats-election?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawFEZddleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHeJ7MMcEv8oBgXtGjCjHGvUH0va7Yojq_n42__NlWLofyJw2FWGp_FzpBw_aem_p1ES-NenDGqm5iYkNH_P7Q

US army confirms Arlington cemetery worker ‘pushed aside’ by Trump staff

Strongest official criticism yet over altercation with ex-president’s staff during photo op at military cemetery

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/29/arlington-cemetery-altercation-trump-visit?fbclid=IwY2xjawFEbjdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHUPUj77sTJ4GCQbCt9DV6lSZuKfd1cLkHNtw1bNavkQ9UofhSO8QKI2Oig_aem_C3oMn47IrvqsvprsNkubzA

“Suckers and Losers” The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/

The Hidden History of Trump’s First Trip to Moscow

In 1987, a young real estate developer traveled to the Soviet Union. The KGB almost certainly made the trip happen.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/trump-first-moscow-trip-215842/

When a Young Trump Went to Russia

In 1987, the real estate tycoon visited the country to explore a hotel deal. Is that when he became compromised by Russian security services?

https://newrepublic.com/article/150646/young-trump-went-russia

Trump-Russia-Ukraine Interactive Timeline

Trump-Russia-Ukraine Interactive Timeline

Trump Associates Still Interacted With Russians More Than 100 Times

https://time.com/5572821/donald-trump-russia-contacts/

Timeline of Russia Investigation

Key moments in the FBI probe of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election

Timeline of Russia Investigation

American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery, Craig Unger

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55655068-american-kompromat?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=uNSNiX5fV1&rank=1

Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, Michael Isikoff, David Corn

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36222733-russian-roulette?ref=rae_14

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September 4 2024 Invented Homelands: Language, Identity, and the Legacy of Chile’s Heroic Salvador Allende

      Two important anniversaries in the history of Chile and socialism occur in September; the September fourth advent of the golden age of Allende and the tragedy of the September eleventh coup which deposed him. These two events will continue to define Chile for all of human history, for it will always remain a nation shaped by the legacy of Salvador Allende as interpreted by his cousin Isabel.

     No nation has a finer historian of its secret heart and inner life than Isabel Allende, who rendered it in terms of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy in her classic works of world literature The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna, in which she joins the triumvirate of Magical Realism with Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Do read her luminous interrogation of immigrant experience and the negotiations of ideas of homeland and new frontier as conflicted and juxtapositional constructions and source identities, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile.

     Isabel Allende’s reimagination of the role of culture in becoming human as an autonomous free being and the special function of language in that process, so like that of Amy Tan, recalls to me Haruki Murakami’s origin story as a writer, the discovery of his voice and authentic self through deliberately composing in English, a second language with which he was not wholly conversant. It is important to understanding their glorious and beautiful novels, but also illuminating as a universal human process of individuation wherein language is our primary identity as reflected in the special issues of migrants as transnational explorers of unknowns.

     We are all Strangers who claim membership in multiple cultures and societies, who live on both sides of the boundaries we transgress like the images of the Hobgoblin’s broken mirror, who must create ourselves anew and become free. This strangeness is at once the greatest gift of our time and the greatest threat, for how a nation deals with otherness is as central to its identity and mission as it is to our performance of self.

    We are our thoughts, and language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have. I have practiced the arts of writing and of languages as disciplines of self-creation since my freshman year of high school when I discovered Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, who tried to reimagine and transform humankind through creating a new universal language in Finnegan’s Wake, because through rewriting ourselves and thinking in different ways we can seize direct control of our own evolution and consciousness.

     Languages are a hobby of mine; I grew up with three voices, English, Chinese, and French, each with its own identity, by which I mean our personae or the masks we wear in the performances of ourselves as derived from the classical Greek theatrical mask, and the legacies of our history or prochronism, self construal as a history expressed in our form of how we humans have made adaptive choices to changing conditions over vast epochs of time.  

    From the age of nine I learned the spoken Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong and the Wu dialect of Shanghai with written Traditional Chinese and inkbrush calligraphy, with some Japanese as I studied Chan or Zen Buddhism for ten years interdependent with my studies of languages and martial arts. From seventh grade through high school I attended French rather than English classes; interdependent with my immersion in Surrealist film and literature.

      I learned some conversational Portuguese in eighth grade for my summer trip before high school to Brazil, a language branded into my soul regardless of little formal study by the trauma of my near execution by a police bounty hunting team whose campaign to kill the abandoned street children I had disrupted. There in the streets of Sao Paulo I first realized the praxis of learning languages not only as a means of connection with others, but also a lever of change, seizure of power, and revolutionary struggle. As the Matadors, founded by the great and terrible Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who rescued and welcomed me into their ferocious brotherhood said; “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”

     During high school I was an enthusiast of Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, under which influence I attempted the only project of language learning I have ever abandoned; to read the Kabbalah, which is written not in Hebrew but in a coded scholar’s Aramaic and Andalusi Romance, languages of which I could find no living speakers.

    During summer breaks at university I continued to travel; I loved the poetry of Basho so much that one such summer I once walked part of his route across Japan to see where he had written them. And then there was the fateful trip between my junior and senior years, on a culinary tour of the Mediterranean as cooking had by then become a hobby of mine, which involved first contacts with Italian, Spanish, and Greek as well as a masterclass in French, wherein I was stranded in Beirut under siege and a chance encounter with the great Jean Genet set me on my life’s path when he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance. This also marks the beginning of my studies of Arabic, both classical Quranic Arabic and conversational Levantine Arabic. 

      A full accounting of my languages now would be near impossible; those I need shift and change with where I am, and I have lived among many peoples. For example, there was a time over thirty years ago when my attentions were divided between a war of independence in Kashmir and revolutionary struggle against the monarchy in Nepal, with expeditions into Sarajevo under the Siege and other places; and for these theatres of action I needed three kinds of  languages; that of the people, Koshur in Srinagar and Newari in Katmandu, of officialdom and bureaucracy which is Gorkhali in Nepal and Urdu in Pakistan as well as Kashmir and near identical with Hindi but written with a Perso-Arabic script and influenced by Classical Persian, and the languages of literary scholarship in which I was engaged, Classical Tibetan as a member of the Kagyu Vajrayana order of Buddhism in Katmandu and in Srinagar Classical Quranic Arabic which I had been learning since Beirut along with spoken Levantine Arabic which has become a fourth natural language for me with English, Chinese, and French, and also Classical Persian and Ottoman Turkish as a scholar of the Naqsbandi Sufi order of Islam. In the Balkans I learned some Croatian written in Latin script, mutually comprehensible with Bosnian as they evolve from the same source.

     Since the Invasion of Ukraine I have found myself speaking and writing in Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish more than I wish were necessary; I do love the languages and the peoples, though as so often the conditions in which we meet are those of tragedy as museums of private holocausts, as well as the hope of our glorious and beautiful Resistance.

     With every new language I choose a new name in that speech like every other student, but I also create new identities as roles to play. By now I’ve lived many lives within the scope of my own, and keep multiple possible selves in reserve as a spectrum of adaptive choices. We are all pluralities, but the student of languages enacts selfhood as a theatrical game.

     Thinking in other languages shapes thoughts differently, frees us and opens the doors of possibility to new ways of being human, relating to our experience, and organizing ideas about the world. This is why the study of languages is necessary to balanced development for young people; learning languages provides many of the cognitive and emotional growth benefits of living in other cultures, though I regard travel and living elsewhere as critical formative rites of passage to a future self which is created and chosen with intent as opposed to one merely issued as a default identity by our circumstances.

     Languages forge connections and immerse us in the worlds of others, interrogating our boundaries as parallel universes of human possibilities and allowing us to change otherness from a threat to a growth opportunity, reinforcing diversity as an adaptive value and also insulating us from modern man’s pathology of disconnectedness.

     Writing is a way to structure and improve ones thinking and oneself, because how we write is how we think and we can operate on ourselves, edit and restructure our thought processes, and seize ownership and control of our own evolution and adaptation to change through writing. When we think and write in languages other than our primary home language, we liberate ourselves from the normality in which we are embedded. Haruki Murakami’s use of writing in English, a language he was not truly conversant in when he chose it as an instrument with which to escape the limits of his normalities, is an excellent example of the use of this tactic to shift perspectives and liberate ones experience from the prisons and legacies of our history, and as Picasso declared “to see in a new way”. 

     In this respect language is primary to all other forms of identity, because it organizes all other systems of relating to self and other. As Rene Descartes wrote in his Discourse on the Method; ”je pense, donc je suis.”

     I believe in learning languages and ways of being human other than those of one’s home as a path of autonomy or freedom from the ideas of others as an imposed condition of struggle, of empathy and our duty of care for others in a diverse and inclusive society, and of seizures of power from authorized identities, especially those of nationality which instrumentalize division in service to tyranny.

     So also with the selves we inhabit in our imaginal homelands and the brave new worlds we find ourselves in with the unfolding, pluralization, and transformation of ourselves through history.

            A History of Chile in Three Acts

CIA, Chile & Allende

Neoliberalism and Privatization as American Imperialism, and State Terror and Tyranny in the CIA’s Pinochet Regime,

What are the roots of Chile’s economic inequality?

               Chile, a study of national identity in three parts

                     Isabel Allende’s Chile, a reading list

House of the Spirits film

https://ok.ru/video/1559795862063

My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, Isabel Allende

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16528.My_Invented_Country?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=HT6wrbom9z&rank=1

The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9328.The_House_of_the_Spirits?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=nzFiwENj77&rank=1

Isabel Allende: A Literary Companion, Mary Ellen Snodgrass

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17605439-isabel-allende?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=nzFiwENj77&rank=82

                          Salvador Allende, a reading list

Salvador Allende Reader: Chile’s Voice of Democracy, Salvador Allende, Jane Carolina Canning, James D. Cockcroft (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16560.Salvador_Allende_Reader_?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jlnsvrgnuD&rank=3

Story of a Death Foretold: The Coup Against Salvador Allende, September 11, 1973, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17286750-story-of-a-death-foretold?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jlnsvrgnuD&rank=5

                     Pablo Neruda, a reading list

The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5931.The_Essential_Neruda

References

Socrates Meets Descartes: The Father of Philosophy Analyzes the Father of Modern Philosophy’s Discourse on Method, Peter Kreeft

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1929792.Socrates_Meets_Descartes?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=waVMiPEiTQ&rank=22

The Moment I Became a Novelist At a Baseball Game in 1978, The Writer Who Almost Wasn’t, by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami: The Moment I Became a Novelist

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12075.Tractatus_Logico_Philosophicus?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=bKZMBBRH2f&rank=4

Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11013.Finnegans_Wake?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_8

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/salvador-allende-chile-coup-pinochet

https://jacobinmag.com/2016/09/chile-coup-santiago-allende-social-democracy-september-11-2

https://jacobinmag.com/2016/09/patricio-guzman-battle-of-chile-allende-popular-unity

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September 3 2024 Anniversary of the Assassination of Antifascist Comrade Michael Reinoehl: Violence, Responsibility, the Social Use of Force, and Our Duty of Care For Others

     On this terrible day we mourn the extrajudicial and political assassination by police, ultimately under the command of the Fourth Reich Triumvirate of the President of the United States Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad, four years ago of a committed fellow antifascist and brother in the great struggle against white supremacist terror and the carceral state of the Fourth Reich, Michael Reinoehl, who has in a live broadcast interview publicly claimed responsibility for killing in self defense a member of a violent racist terror organization on August 29 2020 in Portland.

     To whom does responsibility in such a tragedy belong? First responders are immune from prosecution for trying to save lives because of the doctrine of our duty of care for others; does this not also apply as a general humanitarian principle to intervention to prevent our own death and that of others? Who perpetrates the threat or use of deadly force, displays or fires guns at others to intimidate or kill them, is responsible for the harm their actions cause; so also with organizations of terror which arm, train, fund, and provide communications and logistics support for them, regardless of whether they are a deniable asset of state terror such as the Patriot Prayer group which fielded the perpetrator, police who hide behind the immunity and authority of their badges to enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and authorize others in the commission of acts of terror, or those who provide ideology and authorization, logistics and communication, and other organizational infrastructure for them as a conspiracy of white supremacist terror, even if it originates from the White House.

     I now wish to clarify publicly and irrevocably that I neither endorse violence nor the avoidance of responsibility for our actions; anyone who reads my writing will realize that I believe violence is a result of unequal power and of fear, and this informs and motivates everything else. We have a right to defend ourselves and others from harm, but not to compel virtue by force. My abhorrence of the social use of force is the basis for my opposition to law and order, prisons, police, surveillance, tyranny, state force and control, normality and the ideas of other people, state authorization of identities, and violations of our rights of conscience and of bodily autonomy. I envision a society free of the use of social force and without violence.

     As to public confrontations as theatre; I understand the value of public image and presence and of protest in raising awareness of a cause, and especially in the four primary duties of a citizen in the face of unjust authority to question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, and the inviolable principle of solidarity which means that if they come for the marginalized and the oppressed we come for them, and in my world you stand with those who stand with you, but this does not imply an endorsement of ridiculous macho posturing, the fetishization of guns and other male jewelry, or the valorization of warlike displays of toxic masculinity which may become preconditions and incitements to violence. This is especially true where guns are involved; their power is seductive and malign. The fetishization of instruments of violence normalizes and precedes violence.

     Who bears arms bears death, has chosen to bear death among us and has degraded every human relationship and interaction to a kill or no kill decision.

     Choose life.

      But never let this stay your hand in defense of the lives and liberty of yourself or of others; for who respects no laws and no limits can hide behind none. To fascism I give the only reply it merits; Never Again! And to tyranny I say; Sic Semper Tyrannis.

     I am a monster and a hunter of monsters, and mine is a hunter’s morality; I have no use for anything which limits our ability to confront and destroy threats such as fascist terror and tyranny, which must be met on its own ground, beyond all laws and all limits.

      War to the knife; and we must be very cautious that our actions serve the cause of liberty and not tyranny, and bring hope.

     What is the great lesson of Michael Reinoehl, murdered by police assassins for the murder of a fascist terrorist?

      Let us remember always that the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce, and remember the warning of Nietzsche; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”

      Here endeth the lesson; or maybe not. For I have used a word throughout my witness of history and eulogy for a comrade which is itself a ground of struggle; antifascist. A word that cuts slices, polarizes, incites, damns or grants permission, identifies friend or foe, confers nobility of purpose, and engulfs the world in the fires of transformation and rebirth symbolized in the stolen fire of the gods of our Torch of Liberty. 

     As I wrote in my post of July 31 2020, A Useful Past: What is Antifa?; What do we mean when we say we are Antifascists? What do our enemies mean when they use the term? These mirror reverse meanings face us Janus-like in dialectical contradiction as negative spaces of each other like Escher’s Drawing Hands, and while factions struggle to control the narrative in the media I don’t see much direction provided by anyone speaking as an Antifa-identified voice. I’m changing that, for I speak to you today as the founder of Lilac City Antifa.

     In calling Antifa a terrorist group, Trump has inverted its values and libeled every American serviceman, from those who fought in World War II to our entire military services today, for they have been the primary force against fascism and tyranny throughout the world. I am an American patriot and an Antifascist; and if our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us.

     The Second World War has been much studied, filmed, and written about; but of course what we mean when we speak of Antifa today proceeds from the history of those whose public service of vigilance in exposing and confronting fascism developed from the partisans of that conflict and from the Allied military and intelligence services sent to assist them in the liberation of Europe, from the Resistance and from those who hunted escaped Nazis after the war.

    To begin with, both the OSS which became the CIA and the Jedburgh teams which became the Green Berets or US Special Forces originate as antifascist forces, and this is true generally of the European intelligence and special operations forces and community born and forged in the war against fascism.

     One may discover strange and unlikely allies in the Antifascist community because of this history; and we may say the same of enemies. Both our allies and our enemies are partners in a dance, wherein we choose our futures and how to be human together.

     A very specific historical context and tradition informs and motivates those who, like myself, use the term Antifascist as a descriptor of identity; I have appended some articles on this useful past, but Antifa is a personal choice to work against fascism and may sometimes be a component of an ideology or belief system but is not an organization. No one calling themselves Antifa speaks for or answers to anyone else; it is a nonhierarchical and mutualistic network of alliances. This is intentional, as it makes our network of alliances impossible to infiltrate, and though we contain members of many nations security and military services, no one can give orders to anyone else. There is no special tie nor fraternal handshake; membership is by declaration.

     To claim you are Antifa is to be Antifa. This means whatever we intend when we say it.

     For myself, to be an antifascist is to belong to a tradition of resistance which originates in the Second World War, a war that has never ended but went underground. I look also to the American Revolution against imperial tyranny and colonial inequality and to the Second American Revolution and the great crusade of Abolition against slavery that was the Civil War, to the Paris Commune and the Garde Militaire which survives it, and to our direct origins in the Italian Arditi del Popolo, the Antifaschistische Aktion direct action forces of the German Democratic Socialists from whom we inherit our name, the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, and the Resistance, for antecedents and inspiration. For the principles which I feel are consistent with Anti-fascism, see my repost below of the original proclamation with which I founded Lilac City Antifa.

      Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa: Resistance Against Fascism and Tyranny

     We, the People of Lilac City and of America, being of all imaginable varieties of historical origin, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual personae, faith and the lack thereof, class and status, and all other informing and motivating sources of becoming human and frames of identity as yet undiscovered, declare our independence from fear and from authorized identities, boundaries of the Forbidden, images and narratives of ourselves made for us by others as instruments of subjugation, the tyranny of false divisions and categories of belonging and exclusionary otherness among us.

    To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.

     We stand united as human beings whose universal rights depend on no government but on the inherent nature of our humanity, and as American citizens and co-owners of our government in a free society of equals, inclusive of all who so claim and declare as heirs of the legacy and idea of Liberty and of America as an historical expression and manifest form of its ideals and values, among these being freedom and the autonomy of individuals, equality as an absolute structural principle in law and ideal in social relations, truth and its objectivity and testable nature and our right to seek and verify and to communicate it which includes freedom of the press and the right of access to information and from surveillance and all forms of thought control, justice and its impartiality, and a secular state in which freedom of conscience is absolute and there can be no compulsion in matters of faith.

     We are a web of human lives which connect us with one another and anchor us to our Liberty, to our history and to our future, and we are resolved to our common defense as human beings and as Americans, and to the mutual safety and freedom of ourselves and of others from fascist violence and intimidation, coercion and the social use of force, in the performance of our identities and in our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

    We are American patriots and heirs to the glorious tradition of resistance by those who stood for Liberty at the balance points of history, at Saratoga and Yorktown, Gettysburg, Normandy, and many others, against the three primary threats of tyranny, inequalities of race and gender and slavery in all its forms, and fascism which combines and expands them, as we must always do against the atavistic forces of barbarism and the nightmares of totalitarian force and control which threaten our nation and our civilization, against what madness and evil may together do.

     We must unite together as free citizens who will not be broken by fear, but instead embrace our differences as a strength and a heritage purchased for us all by the blood of our sacred dead in countless wars throughout our history.

    To all those who have offered their lives in our service, members and veterans of the military and other security services: join us. If our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us. For America is a Band of Brothers, sworn to one another and to the defense of our union, with liberty and justice for all.

     To all enemies of America and a free society of equals: We are many, we are watching, and we are the future.

     Join us in resistance, who answer fascism and tyranny with equality and liberty.

      I am an American patriot and an Antifascist. Pledge thus with me:

     I swear zero tolerance for racism or the supremacy of any persons by categories of identity, racist violence and white supremacist terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, hate and its symbols and speech, for all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for all inequalities and divisions of exclusionary otherness and victimization of the dispossessed and the powerless.

      I will make no compromise with evil.

      As you have sworn to challenge and confront fascism, therefore I offer you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut in 1982 by Jean Genet; here is the story of how it happened, and of my true origin.

     During the summer before my undergraduate senior year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Feral bands of soldiers were roaming the streets, committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent.  I found myself fighting them; others joined me, and more joined us. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.

     A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”

     To which I replied, “We have nothing but moments stolen from death; these alone belong to us, and set us free. It’s a poor man who has no pleasures worth dying for.”

    He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before his capture, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path of struggle for liberty against tyranny and autocracies of state force and control, for equality against racist violence and injustice, and against the fascism which combines both state tyranny and racist terror.

     He introduced himself as a former Legionnaire by the name of Jean, was mischievous, wise, immensely learned in classical scholarship and possibly had once been educated as a priest, and filled with wild stories about the luminaries of modern European culture. I was stunned when I discovered days later that my strange new friend was one of the greatest literary figures of the century. I had quoted The Thief’s Journal in refutation of something he said, which he found hilarious, while we were discussing Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as compared to that of Georges Bataille, a conversation which remained unfinished as he couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually he sputtered, “I myself am Jean Genet.” To me he remains a Trickster figure and part of my historical identity and personal mythology.

     There came a day when the barricades were overrun and our neighborhood along with it, one of our last days together. With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers running amok in a sack of murder, arson, and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, our house set on fire and about to be burned alive as the soldiers called for us to come out and surrender, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with a very Gallic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”

     We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all.

     Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’

     To which I replied, “No.”

    “Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”

     And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”

     To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.

     We escaped capture that day because we were led through the checkpoints of the encirclement by an unlikely ally, a figure who materialized out of the background at the far end of the alley and walked over to us grinning. This was the sniper whom my friends and I had been playing our games with for two weeks, who had been utterly invisible and had outwitted every attempt to track, trap, ambush, or identify him, and who had in fact besieged the city from within. He held out his hand to me and I shook it as he said, “Well played, sir. I’ve tried to kill you every day for fourteen days now, but the Israelis have occupied the city, and this changes everything. We have a common enemy, and they don’t know that, so I’m in a position to help you. But I can’t fight them alone. Want a partner?”

     So began a great adventure and friendship, which I share with you now in the context of the nature of antifascist resistance because it illustrates something which can never be forgotten by anyone who does this kind of work; human beings are not monsters, are deserving of human doubt, and are never beyond redemption.

     The struggle between good and evil in the human heart often pivots and balances on the differences between the purpose of the use of force; to punish transgression when inflicted by authority as an act of subjugation and repression against the powerless, or to seize power and to protect the powerless as a duty of care. Be very sure you know which cause your actions serve.

     The end goal of Antifascism, and of revolutionary struggle and liberation, is to achieve a democratic society of true equality, diversity, and inclusion in which we can abandon the social use of force.

     Such a day will not be easily won, nor quickly, even with seizures of power, for the systems of oppression in which we are embedded also inhabit our flesh as living stories, and we must escape the legacies of our history if we are to create ourselves anew in a free society of equals. Of our histories, memories, identities let us remember always this; there are those we must escape and those we must keep and remember, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/antifascist-movements-hitler-nazis-kpd-spd-germany-cold-war

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/43-group-daniel-sonabend-we-fight-fascists?fbclid=IwAR2tEUg6JfLjrCpzN-HjtEdX4cNSqaYlGvSYgFCmsTCulW4y8EPzc9OgRmQ

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/04/us/portland-protest-suspected-killer/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0BBK26_rwai1Wu5x634CyWtNtS-0hhWAyDLgrpEZcYa4hS2Hv7xOrUk38

                Antifa: a reading list

Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, by Mark Bray

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35280441-antifa?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ipyQEzTp0E&rank=1

The Antifa Comic Book: 100 Years of Fascism and Antifa Movements

by Gord Hill

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38402045-the-antifa-comic-book?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=CC3MaioPym&rank=3

Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy

by Devin Zane Shaw

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52603442-philosophy-of-antifascism?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=CC3MaioPym&rank=70

Transatlantic Antifascisms: From the Spanish Civil War to the End of World War II, by Michael Seidman

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35464758-transatlantic-antifascisms?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=CC3MaioPym&rank=161

Writers’ Block: The Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935, by Jacob Boas

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33591069-writers-block?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=CC3MaioPym&rank=220

Rethinking Antifascism: History, Memory and Politics, 1922 to the Present

by Hugo García Fernández (Editor), Mercedes Yusta Rodrigo (Editor), Xavier Tabet (Editor), Cristina Clímaco (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33387559-rethinking-antifascism?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=CC3MaioPym&rank=154
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September 2 2024 Labor Day and the Battle of Blue Mountain: A Heritage of Solidarity and Resistance

      Today we celebrate Labor Day and all the victories of solidarity and resistance to brutal repression of the labor union movement that followed in the wake of the great Pullman Strike which founded it.

      In this moment of heroic resistance to commodification in the resurgence of labor unions with the Restoration of America and the Harris-Walz campaign to free us from subjugation to the Fourth Reich and the Party of Treason under Traitor Trump and other forms of solidarity, mass action, and seizures of power by workers in an increasingly exploitative society as capitalism and with it our civilization begins to fragment and collapse from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, we may ask; why unions?

     Why are labor unions crucial to any defense of our humanity and our universal rights, and to democracy? Here I look to the origins of Labor Day, and its place in the glorious history of liberation struggle.

      On Labor Day in 1921 the Battle of Blair Mountain ended the largest armed revolt since the Civil War, and branded the meaning of Labor Day and unions forever into the soul of America.

      A union, like a democracy, is nothing more or less than a band of brothers who refuse to submit to enslavement and labor exploitation, or to abandon their fellows. Here is the essence and instrument of a free society of equals; liberty, equality, fraternity.

     Our labor unions are a national treasure and a firewall of democracy which must be defended and celebrated.

    Today we remember, and rejoice.

    As written by Samuel Fleischman in The Nation; “Heading east from here, County Road 17 snakes up and down craggy hills for several miles before crossing an unremarkable intersection. A deserted church sits on one corner. On the other, a small bronze plaque recounts the Battle of Blair Mountain, a labor dispute that saw almost 10,000 miners face off against a union-busting sheriff, several thousand deputized locals, and the US military. It was the largest armed uprising in the country since the Civil War. This year marks the 100th anniversary, yet hardly a soul today remembers it.

     The origins of the battle can be traced to the Matewan Massacre, when gun thugs working for Baldwin-Felts—an infamous strike-breaking “detective” agency—got into a shootout with a group of miners and Sheriff Sid Hatfield. After Baldwin-Felts agents murdered Hatfield in revenge the following year—on the steps of the county courthouse—his death became a martyrdom that roused miners to battle.

     Coal life was already hard enough. Dangerous conditions (the Monongah Disaster alone killed upwards of 400 people, not to mention the long-term effects of breathing in coal dust), low wages (mine owners had been convicted of war profiteering during World War I), and exploitative credit systems were par for the course.

     The situation only escalated in the summer of 1921 after hundreds of striking workers were arrested and held indefinitely. Hatfield’s death was the final straw. By August, thousands of miners were marching toward Matewan, intent on freeing their comrades and bringing their guerilla version of class warfare into action.

     When the bombs started falling on the slopes of Blair Mountain—on Labor Day, 1921–many realized the gravity of their situation. For almost a week, miners numbering in the thousands had been battling machine-gun nests commanded by Don Chafin, sheriff of Logan County. They had already refused the pleas of President Harding, who feared their struggle might inspire the nearly 2 million unemployed Americans across the country to launch a full-scale class revolution. Thousands of leaflets bearing Harding’s message calling on the miners to disperse, were dropped by plane—and summarily ignored.

     By nightfall, after the rumble of machine-gun fire and whir of biplane engines had dissipated, the miners must have looked around from where they were perched in trees or stretched out in hastily dug trenches and seen the numbers missing from their ranks. Still, they fought on.

     Their fight was the culmination of a decades-long struggle. After coal companies rejected every effort by the UMWA to win representation, armed struggle took hold. By the end of the week somewhere between 50 and 100 miners, among them Appalachians, Italian immigrants, and African Americans, were dead.”

      To all those whose struggles have won for us the freedoms we now enjoy, and whose continuing resistance to unjust authority, dehumanization, and exploitation by those who would enslave us holds our hope for the future of humankind in which the bold claim of our Declaration of Independence, wherein Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776, “all men are created equal,” may at long last be made real, I salute you.

       The origins of Labor Day are recounted by Tim Goulet in Jacobin; “On September 5, 1882, socialists, the Knights of Labor, and various left organizations associated with the Central Labor Union (CLU) organized a march calling for shorter hours, higher pay, safer working conditions — and a labor holiday.”

     “Ten thousand workers took an unpaid day off and marched from City Hall through Union Square to Forty-Second Street.

     This event would soon become annual, spreading to other cities, states, and municipalities as the movement for a labor day grew. In 1885 and 1886, various American cities declared the first Monday in September to be a workers’ holiday, and on February 21, 1887, Oregon became the first state to recognize Labor Day. Massachusetts, Colorado, New York, and New Jersey followed later that year.”

      “But it wasn’t until 1894 that Grover Cleveland, a conservative Democrat, declared Labor Day a federal holiday. Not coincidentally, his announcement came at the close of a mass strike.

     In June of that year, workers who built Pullman railroad cars had joined Eugene Debs’s American Railway Union (ARU). They were angry that their steep pay cuts were not matched by rent reductions in their company town. As a result, 125,000 railroad workers refused to move any trains that had a Pullman car attached to it.

     Cleveland called out the National Guard to police the railways but could not convince the strikers to resume work. Claiming that it was interfering with the postal service, Richard Olney, former attorney general, forced the courts to issue the first federal injunction against a strike.

     When Debs refused to call the work stoppage off, he was jailed for six months. At least thirty workers were killed during the government’s violent suppression of the strike. This violence was openly condemned by New York’s Central Labor Union, who stood in full solidarity with the ARU.

     Six days after it ended, Cleveland made Labor Day a national holiday, hoping it would defuse class anger and deflect attention away from the more militant May Day. But the president had other concerns too. It was a midterm election year, and Cleveland — serving his second nonconsecutive term — did not want to appear an enemy of organized labor. Yet he miscalculated: legalizing Labor Day could not make up for smashing the Pullman Strike and jailing Debs. He lost his reelection campaign, and the labor movement didn’t stay quiet for long.

     Cleveland did not simply invent Labor Day, as we are often led to believe. The holiday represents a partial victory that reflects the labor movement’s strength, which pressed its weight on the scales of politics and forced a federal reform.

     Like most reforms, it had a dual character: on the one hand, it absorbed and nullified some worker militancy; on the other, it ceded ground to the unions and put them in a better position to win future demands. Seeing it merely as a weapon instituted from the top down obscures the class struggle that led directly to its adoption.”

     Heather Cox Richarson recounts the history of Labor Day this way ” Almost one hundred and forty-two years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.

     Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored.

     Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity. But for all that the war had seemed to be about defending men against the rise of an oligarchy that intended to reduce all men to a life of either enslavement or wage labor, the war and its aftermath had pushed workers’ rights backward.  

     The drain of men to the battlefields and the western mines during the war resulted in a shortage of workers that kept unemployment low and wages high. Even when they weren’t, the intense nationalism of the war years tended to silence the voices of labor organizers. “It having been resolved to enlist with Uncle Sam for the war,” one organization declared when the war broke out, “this union stands adjourned until either the Union is safe, or we are whipped.”

     Another factor working against the establishment of labor unions during the war was the tendency of employers to claim that striking workers were deliberately undercutting the war effort. They turned to the government to protect production, and in industries like Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal fields, government leaders sent soldiers to break budding unions and defend war production.

     During the war, government contracting favored those companies that could produce big orders of the mule shoes, rifles, rain slickers, coffee, and all the other products that kept the troops supplied. The owners of the growing factories grew wealthy on government contracts, even as conditions in the busy factories deteriorated. While wages were high during the war, they were often paid in greenbacks, which were backed only by the government’s promise to pay.

     While farmers and some entrepreneurs thrived during the war, urban workers and miners had reason to believe that employers had taken advantage of the war to make money off them. After the war, they began to strike for better wages and safer conditions. In August 1866, 60,000 people met as the National Labor Union in Baltimore, Maryland, where they called for an eight-hour workday. Most of those workers calling for organization simply wanted a chance to rise to comfort, but the resolutions developed by the group’s leaders after the convention declared that workers must join unions to reform the abuses of the industrial system.

     To many of those who thought the war would create a country where hard work would mean success, the resolutions seemed to fly in the face of that harmony, echoing the southern enslavers by dividing the world into people of wealth and workers, and asking for government intervention, this time on the side of workers. Republicans began to redefine their older, broad concept of workers to mean urban unskilled or semi-skilled wage laborers specifically.

     Then in 1867, a misstep by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio made the party step back from workers. Wade had been a cattle drover and worked on the Erie Canal before studying law and entering politics, and he was a leader among those who saw class activism as the next step in the party’s commitment to free labor. His fiery oratory lifted him to prominence, and in March 1867 the Senate chose him its president pro tempore, in effect making him the nation’s acting vice president in those days before there was a process for replacing a vice president who had stepped into the presidency.

     Wade joined a number of senators on a trip to the West, and in Lawrence, Kansas, newspapers reported—possibly incorrectly—that Wade predicted a fight in America between labor and capital. “Property is not equally divided,” the reporter claimed Wade said, “and a more equal distribution of capital must be worked out.” Congress, which Wade now led, had done much for ex-slaves and must now address “the terrible distinction between the man that labors and him that does not.”

     Republican newspapers were apoplectic. The New York Times claimed that Wade was a demagogue. Every hard worker could succeed in America, it wrote. “Laborers here can make themselves sharers in the property of the country,—can become capitalists themselves,—just as nine in ten of all the capitalists in the country have done so before them,—by industry, frugality, and intelligent enterprise.” Trying to get rich by force of law would undermine society.

     Congress established an eight-hour day for federal employees in June 1868, but in that year’s election, voters turned Wade, and others like him, out of office. In 1869, Republican president Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation saying that the eight-hour workday of “laborers, workmen, and mechanics” would not mean cuts in wages.

     Then, in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. The transatlantic cable had gone into operation in 1866, and American newspapers had featured stories of the European war. Now, hungry for dramatic stories, they plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by crazed women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows.

     The Communards were a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who planned to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to associations of workmen, American newspapers wrote. In their telling, the Paris Commune brought to life the chaotic world the elite enslavers foresaw when they said it was imperative to keep workers from politics.

     Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.” Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace looked at the rising numbers of industrial workers and the conditions of city life, and warned Americans, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”

     At the same time, it was also clear that wealthy industrialists were gaining more and more control over both state and local governments. In 1872 the Credit Mobilier scandal broke. This was a complicated affair, and what had actually happened was almost certainly misrepresented, but it seemed to show congressmen taking bribes from railroad barons, and Americans were ready to believe that they were doing so. Then, in July 1877, after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages 20 percent and strikers shut down most of the nation’s railroads, President Rutherford B. Hayes sent U.S. soldiers to the cities immobilized by the strikes. It seemed industrialists had the Army at their beck and call.

     By 1882, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government so far toward men of capital that it seemed there was more room for workingmen to demand their rights. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.”

     The workers marching in New York City in the first Labor Day celebration in 1882 carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.”

     Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

     In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….”

     Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”

     As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).

     They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday. Each year, the first Monday in September would honor the country’s workers. 

     In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.”

     Happy Labor Day. “

      Here is the Labor Day speech of Eugene V. Debbs, published on September 5, 1903 in the Social Democratic Herald and republished for the first time in Jacobin magazine; “The first Monday in September has by statutory enactment and general consent been set apart as Labor Day in the United States; and its celebration this year will be more general than ever before.

     It is a day not only for rest and recreation, but for counsel and meditation. It affords an excellent opportunity to take a backward look, examine the present situation, take an inventory of resources and prepare for the greater work yet to be done before Labor Day can be celebrated by the hosts of freedom.

     Labor Day must be regarded not as a privilege to be thankful for, but as a right to be enjoyed.

     We never hear of Capital Day, not because Capital has no day, but because every day is Capital Day.

     The struggle in which we are now engaged will end only when every day is Labor Day.

     Upon every hand we see the signs of preparation.

     The working class are mustering their mighty forces for political and economic conquest.

     While the capitalists are capitalizing, the industrial conditions are revolutionizing, the working class are organizing, the Socialist sentiment is crystallizing and in due time the cooperative commonwealth will be materializing.

     The liberation of the toilers of earth from the bonds of wage slavery is a mission worthy of the great international movement historically commissioned to render that inestimable service to humanity.

     Courage is needed and intelligence, and both will be furnished in abundance by the working class itself.

     Organization, based upon the mutual economic interests of the working class, is the demand of the day.

        All workers, men, women and children, of all races and countries are included in the call to action.

     The only line that is drawn is between the working class and their exploiters and that must be drawn straight and reach around the globe.

     Workingmen, this is the day for you to realize that your interests are the same, that divided you are helpless, that united you can and will conquer the earth!

     United political action will place the working class in control of government, and the abolition of capitalism will inevitably follow.

     To work for wages, no matter how high, or how short the work-day, is to acknowledge a master and be at his mercy.

     The full-grown workingman of the future will be free with his fellow workers to employ themselves, be their own masters and enjoy all the fruit of their labors.

     Let every intelligent workingman resolve this day to do his share to abolish the wage system and emancipate the sons and daughters of toil.

     The Socialist Party is the party of the working class, the party that stands for economic equality and industrial freedom, the party of progress and civilization.

     This is the day to hold aloft its banner and proclaim its principles.

     The struggle is as righteous as ever prompted men to do and dare on field of battle.

     A few men are great now because the great mass are small.

     Socialism means the exaltation of the whole and not the aggrandizement of individuals.

     It is the greatest movement in all history.

     It is the challenge of the twentieth century to the tyranny and oppression of the ages.

     The ultimate triumph is inevitable.

     The future is for socialism and humanity.”

“The Wobblies” (1979) IWW Labor Union Documentary Revolutionary Anticapitalist Industrial Unionism

The Revolutionist: Eugene V. Debbs  PBS

https://www.pbs.org/video/the-revolutionist-eugene-v-debs-odnxgt/

Eugene V. Debs: In a Just Society, Every Day Would Be Labor Day/ Jacobin

https://jacobin.com/2022/09/eugene-v-debs-labor-day-1903/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFCvOVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHT8EReR5R0eE9YGooMPPmychxWWQ00QYFbhXMGpY5bK8niY4PXOpxJxmXQ_aem_q0YovLLvYI6JVWv45anLUw&sfnsn=mo

Letters From An American, Heather Cox Richardson on Labor Day

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/september-1-2024?r=7ed07&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America’s Largest Labor Uprising,

Robert Shogan

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/399179.The_Battle_of_Blair_Mountain?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=6z0uaNipg1&rank=1

When Labor Day Meant Something, by Chad Broughton/ The Atlantic

     “Labor Day began not as a national holiday but in the streets, when, on September 5, 1882, thousands of bricklayers, printers, blacksmiths, railroad men, cigar makers, and others took a day off and marched in New York City.”

https://theatln.tc/zhQjyvzw

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/blair-mountain-coal-union-anniversary

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/06/working-class-revolt-competition-capitalism-exploitation

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/freedom-from-the-boss

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/anwar-shaikh-interview-capitalism-competition-conflict-crises

           Unions and How To Build Them, a reading list

Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, Kim Kelly

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58438592-fight-like-hell?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=1awXkY178Q&rank=1

There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America,

Philip Dray

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8501350-there-is-power-in-a-union?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=e8PBT1wifW&rank=35

A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy,

Jane F. McAlevey

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44890068-a-collective-bargain?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=e8PBT1wifW&rank=14

Secrets of a Successful Organizer, Alexandra Bradbury, Mark Brenner, Jane Slaughter

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29926394-secrets-of-a-successful-organizer

Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, Saul D. Alinsky

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102748.Rules_for_Radicals?ref=rae_3

Class Struggle Unionism, Joe Burns

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60417739-class-struggle-unionism

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